Curse

Death Knight Tanking Changes

This is of particular interest to me, as my main is now a Death Knight.  There are some tanking changes coming for the class, but specifics haven't been announced yet.  I'll let Ghostcrawler say the rest.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We’ve had a lot of questions about death knights recently. This is a new class, and while we’re thrilled overall with how it's been received, we always expected to have to make more changes to death knights than the classes that have had their talents under the microscope for many years.

We’re not prepared to announce specific changes to DKs yet, but here are some general areas we are tinkering with. Most of these changes apply predominantly to tanking death knights, so I avoided cross-posting this thread, but there are probably items of interest to dps specs as well.

1) Death knights seem to tank well when they have cooldowns available and take too much damage otherwise. The change here seems obvious – boost Frost presence’s mitigation while reducing the mitigation of some other abilities, especially Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield.

2) One idea we have for Icebound Fortitude is to scale the mitigation based on defense skill. This lets the ability be less of a paladin bubble in PvP for dps knights, while still letting it act more like Shield Wall for tanks. It also has the side effect of making defense slightly more attractive to death knights. (Let me add before it’s asked that yes we understand Ferals have this problem too and we are working on it.)

3) Unholy is a very popular tanking spec, largely on the strength of Bone Shield. Expect to see some buffs to tanking talents in the Blood tree especially.

4) Rune Strike was intended to be a reactive tanking tool, not a rogue killer. We will probably chill its weapon damage and increase its threat.

5) We don’t like the behavior where DKs feel like they are supposed to drop Death and Decay to generate runic power before a pull. It just looks goofy. We will probably lower the runic power costs of Unholy Blight and Horn of Winter, which seem to be the primary reasons to generate RP. Horn of Winter will probably be something like no cost, 30 sec cooldown, generates 10 rp.

EDIT: I am refering to using DnD outside of combat just for the runic power (kind of like Bloodrage for warriors). It's totally legit and intended to use it to start a fight to gain threat and hurt the bad guys.

6) There are some odd situations caused by Shadow of Death that we would like to fix. The talent isn’t designed to let you escape durability damage or rez by zoning into an instance.

7) There are some annoying parts of the non-pet ghoul. We want to lower the aggro range (for less accidental pulls) and spawn the ghoul in quicker when dismounting. The ghoul, at least Unholy’s version, could also use some AE avoidance like other pets.

8) We are probably going to add a new spell to let you raise fallen allies so that you don't have to make the decision between bringing back another player (which was just supposed to be a fun bonus) and bringing back your ghoul, which can be pretty crticial for some specs.

This isn't everything we're talking about of course, just a little preview.

Sigils (Source)

There are some DK sigils missing from the game. At least one of these is tanking oriented. We plan on getting them back in soon (like the same patch with these other changes).

Death Knights and Defense (Source)

We are aware that DKs may be struggling more to get defense. They lack tanking weapons, shields and guns, all of which can provide defense to warriors. It's something we're working on.

Blood AE Capability (Source)

We're also working on Blood AE.

[Glyph of Horn of Winter] (Source)

We would change the Horn of Winter glyph (to something like duration).

Two-handed Tanking Weapons (Source)

I would not expect full itemization for two-handed tanking weapons. We wanted DKs to tank with dps two-handers (and have their mitigation benefit somewhat from the dps stats). We might add a craftable weapon or something down the road, but only if that felt like an option for the DK, not a mandatory piece of gear. You can also dual-wield tanking weapons if you want, but again, it isn't the intent that is the only way to play. (Please don't turn the rest of this thread into a discussion of whether or not DKs should be able to dual-wield.)

Rune Strike (Source)

Rune Strike is a tanking ability. It was designed to let DKs make up for the fact that their threat suffers so much from hits that fail to land. It does suffer from a confusing tooltip (which we have since fixed) but it is the DK who must avoid the attack to get Rune Strike to light up.

Death Knight is the "Active Abilities" Tank (Source)

We still like DKs as the "active abilities" tank. We just think it might be a little too extreme right now. Icebound Fortitude was intended to be something you use when a big, predictable damage spike is coming, but DK tanks seem to want to keep them up 100% of the time for fear that they will die without them.

 

Blue Posts

Can I mail Account Bound items to the opposite faction? (Source)

Unfortunately not. The usual mail restrictions still apply.

No Legendary = Not competitive on DPS meters? (Source)

There was an orange bow and orange blades in BC. Did that mean that hunters and rogues lacking those weapons were uncompetitive? Not really. Did that mean the trend was to keep dropping better and better hunter and rogue gear compared to other characters? Not really. It is a useful tool to imagine gear that is several tiers higher than current itemization and estimate what characters will look like then -- we use it ourself. But remember that gear is not real gear. If resto druids fall behind when everyone has 10,000 spellpower, then we're not really going to lose sleep over it, because the game will have changed so much by the time that gear becomes reality. If they fall behind when everyone has 3000 spellpower, then maybe it's a problem (though we don't think it is the case that they do).

 

Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Nourish (Source)

I have to admit that after my reference to Nourish yesterday I was contacted by several very good raiding druids who told me I was out of my mind and that's it's a really good spell. When I asked them why so many druids don't like it, their response was that it's Flash Heal, and they want it to be something else.

So there you go. When I have healed as Resto, I didn't use Nourish much, but I should give it another look.

This is antecdotal data, and it's just as easy for anyone to say that they talked to a druid who said they can heal everything with Rejuv so Rejuv is OP. That is why we tend to be persuaded more by numbers (and even more by in-game numbers), but I do place a lot of value on the opinions of skilled players too.

Druids and Stats (Source)

On the topic of number of stats, as I said, you can play that card both ways. If you only need say spellpower, then it's relatively easy to just stack spellpower (warlocks were in this situation in much of BC). If you need lots of stats, it can sometimes be hard to fit the jigsaw puzzle to get them all (Prot warriors were in this situation in much of BC). As I said, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. We disagree that classes or specs who need fewer stats are at a competitive disadvantage or we would stop designing classes that way.

 

Mage (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Arcane Blast (Source)

We're working on Arcane Blast, but we need to test it some more before we have any announcements.

The Darkmoon Faire Decks of Northrend

We've put together a new page in the World of Raids Guides section that has details on all of the Darkmoon Faire decks you can obtain in Northrend.  As of now, the only way to access these cards is either creating them yourself with Darkmoon Card of the North -- a recipe you can train with an Inscription skill of 375 -- or from other scribes.  Expect to pay a premium for these cards due to how expensive they are to make material-wise (especially right now).

Chinese MMO Steals Art from WoW, Ragnarok Online, Maple Story, and more

The Chinese MMO Aurora Blade has been accused of ripping off art designs from various MMOs, including World of Warcraft.  In the past, when people said "this game looks like X!" it was usually just opinion, but this is extremely questionable... no... factual, of any accusations brought forth.  ShackNews has put together some images of the likenesses (*cough* rip-offs *cough*) and its host in the West -- IGG -- has released a statement on the Aurora Blade forums.

“We would like to explain that SkyUnion(IGG) is not responsible for the developing of the game, that is any character, artwork and graphic is developed by another company and this game is HOSTED by IGG.”  They've also cross-posted this statement on the Ragnarok Online forums, and even gone as far as threatening bans from the forums for anyone who posts about the similarities.