Curse

Upcoming Feral Changes, Part II

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

This is an update to my previous post on Feral armor changes.

ARMOR
As previously announced, we are changing the way bear armor works so that bonus armor on items does not receive the bear armor multiplier. Specifically this means that weapons, trinkets, rings, necks and cloaks with bonus armor will not be multiplied by the bear bonus. Only cloth and leather will benefit from the Bear and Dire Bear multiplier.

We are compensating Ferals for this armor loss by improving the Survival of the Fittest talent. In addition to its current effects (stats and crit prevention), it will now also increase armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 22/33/66%. That should be very close to your current armor bonus. This makes Survival of the Fittest rather over-budget by talent standards, but we figured it was one talent we can be pretty certain most tank-oriented druids will have (and to be honest nearly all Ferals).

FERAL ATTACK POWER
We are no longer going to have weapons in the game which improve feral attack power. Instead, your attack power will scale based on the dps of the item. Practically speaking this means almost no change for any gear you currently use -- you should not see your dps change. What it does mean is that we can create the occasional dps staff that could be used by druids or hunters (or very undergeared warriors), and that Ferals may occasionaly use two-handed dps maces. We are going to convert all existing Feral staves over to this new system (but again, you should not notice any change to your dps). We are also adjusting the UI so that when druids look at these weapons, you will see what the improvement will be to your damage in forms. This does not mean we are no longer going to create bear and cat weapons, just that those weapons will be slightly less niche than they are now.

These changes will be in place in the next patch. This patch will ship sometime before the 3.1 major content patch featuring the Ulduar raid.

Blue Posts

Ghostcrawler on why all classes don't scale equally (Source)

Our general philosophy is that we don't want relationships to be too predictable. Much of the fun of improving your character is seeing the effects that different kinds of gear have on different rotations. To use an extreme case, if every piece of armor just said "improves stats by 1%" getting loot would be a lot less fun.

Similarly, we don't want classes to be too similar. It's interesting and fun when you switch classes from say a warrior to a rogue and see how different stats affect you differently.

Scaling is very important to us in the sense that we don't want certain classes or specs to completely fall down at certain gear levels. This has happened in the past. But what those levels are is very important. If mages dramatically overtake warlocks when everyone has 20,000 spellpower, then I just couldn't care less except possibly as an item of trivia. If and when WoW ever reaches numbers of that level, the class mechanics will have changed so much in those years that its just not worth worrying about at this time.

Tank Classes (Source)

The goal is roughly equivalent. The goal is not identical. Identical would mean making all abilities identical, down to things like Divine Shield and Innervate. I also want to caution you all that there are plenty of players who are concerned about the degree of homogenization we’ve done to get the tank classes as close as they are. It’s cool for everyone to have their different visions for what the game should be, just make sure not to impose your vision on everyone else. There are eleven million people playing WoW….

As far as the other arguments are concerned…

-- You can argue that our design is for warriors to be the best tanks. But I can debunk that right here. It's not. They will probably be superior in some cases and inferior in others, but never to the extent that you bench the warrior and bring in another class for a certain fight.
-- You can argue that some classes need to tank worse than others to compensate for their other abilities or degree of hybrid-ness. But that is not our design.
-- You can argue that some classes end up being better tanks for some reason or another. This is a totally legit concern. I don’t think we have any evidence that this is really happening yet, but it is something we pay a lot of attention to.

-- In Classic WoW there was really only one tank, the warrior.
-- In Burning Crusade, we added two other tanks, but the design was that they were typically used in an OT role. There were exceptions of course.
-- The design for Lich King is four tanking classes. You should be able to raid in Lich King without a warrior tank, or without a warrior period. You can replace “warrior” in that sentence with 9 other classes. One of the reasons we spent so much time on the warrior Prot tree is we wanted to compensate them for removing them from the “best tank” pedestal, or at least making room up there for druids, paladins and DKs as well.

Hunter (Talents / Skills / Glyphs)

PvE DPS (Source)

Hunter pve dps is definitely something we're keeping an eye on. It's high and perhaps too high, but we need to see some more players raiding first.

PvP weakness should not mean buffs for PvE (Source)

We definitely don't think it's a good design to inflate a whole class in PvE if they are weak in PvP or vice versa. If hunters are weak in PvP, as many of the hunters suspect, then we want to handle that as a separate issue. A Steady Shot nerf for example, would have less impact on PvP than reducing dps across the board, and we would certainly be prepared to compensate hunters in other ways for PvP.

Again, we have not announced any changes. There is no hotfix incoming. We don't think this is a hotfix worthy issue. Standard caveats to all that apply.

Priest (Talents / Skills / Glyphs)

Lightwell (Source)

Q u o t e:
@Lightwell (LW):
- Being literally killable just by anyone.
- Deselects the player's current target if he/she clicks on the LW.

These are by design. You generally need to select things to work on them, not just click them. We designed Lightwell to be very fragile since it now heals so well. We didn't want it to be used primarily as a tank-healing tool because it would be too powerful.

Guardian Spirit (Source)

Q u o t e:
@Guardian Spirit (GS):
- GCD is now triggered when used after last beta patch.
- If used on a priest that has Spirit of Redemption, Spirit of Redemption will cancel out GS's effect upon death.

The spirit bug is known. I'll have to investigate what the design is on the GCD.

Penance (Source)

Q u o t e:
@Penance: Still requires facing target to be casted (Healing purpose-wise, of course)

I think it was just too hard to get Penance to work correctly with facing for damage but not healing, so we just changed it to not have a directional component for the next patch.

Holy Priest Spec (Source)

On the issue of the Holy priest, I know it's easy to interpret "flexible" as "jack of all trades and master of none." I don't think that is a fair description of Holy though. While healers may still retain more of a niche than dps or tank specs, there is still a lot of overlap. Holy priests can single target heal, top people off, dispel and do different things. Mass Dispel is a great example of an ability that isn't just a carbon copy of another class's ability. If Holy priests were inferior to shamans, druids and paladins at their respective roles, then I don't think you would see as many of them brought along.

On the issue of utility, yes our design is that nobody has an ability so awesome or critical that they are gauranteed a raid spot. In truth you can get all of the important buff and debuffs with a relatively small number of players (especially in a 25 raid) so you should be able to bring who you want after that. If some classes bring versions of a buff that are obviously and significantly superior to another's then that is the sort of thing we'll get fixed.

Shaman (Talents / Skills / Glyphs)

Orc Racial "Command" not affecting spirit wolves (Source)

Q u o t e:
So why is it that Shaman are left out of this racial trait? Shaman were one of the staples of the Orc race, and yet Shaman don't gain the benefits of one of their racial abilities which seems very odd.

Just an oversight I'm sure. We have no problem doing this.

Elemental Scaling Improvements (Source)

I have said we are addressing this issue. We hope to be able to have an announcement soon. In the meantime, I'm glad you're enjoying Lava Burst. It's a fun spell.

Future Totem Changes (Source)

They are a really cool idea on paper that has never quite lived up to that concept in reality. We do have some ideas on things we'd like to try with them, but it will require some experimentation and isn't the kind of thing we can just hotfix in. There have been many suggestions from the community on totems already, but feel free to add more. Just know that our vision is not to turn totems into the same kinds of buffs that other classes have. They have to be, you know, totems.

WOWDB Update

We pushed another WOWDB update live this morning.  Today's update includes a fix for adding Armory-based characters to take advantage of Wish Lists and the Tooltip Comparison features, as well as some new features related to WOWDB Character Profiles.

• Worn By - This new tab on the Item Details page that allows you to see the characters on WOWDB that are currently wearing this item.
• Recently Acquired By - This new tab on the Item Details page that allows you to see the characters on WOWDB that have recently acquired the item.
• Crafted By - This new tab on the Item Details page allows you to see all characters on WOWDB that can craft this item, assuming it is a craftable item.

Check out the Titansteel Destroyer for an example of the new tabs: Worn By, Recently Acquired By, Crafted By

Note: The new tab features, "Worn By," "Recently Acquired By," and "Crafted By" require your character be on WOWDB if you'd like to be included in the lists.  You can add your character by installing the Curse Client.