Curse

This is the April 9th edition of Blue Watch, covering posts by Blizzard employees in the General, Professions, Raids & Dungeons, and Shaman forums.

Additionally, there is a Blue Watch Wiki page, with a Table of Contents for easy-access to the topics that interest you, as well as a "Go to thread" link to go directly to the post on the official forums.

You can also view everything involved in the Blue Watch, including Blue Watch Archives, by clicking on the Blue Watch link on the menu to the left.

General Forum Information

In this thread, Block provides an update on ways to keep your account secure, so that you can avoid the risk of losing gold or items, or even having your characters deleted.

In this thread, Tseric responds with information on when the item will be available for purchase.

These items will be available through the vendor when the upcoming content patch is implemented.

In this thread, Drysc comments on upcoming changes to some of the raid trash mobs in TBC.

We're going to be making some changes to trash in Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, to make them a bit easier, slower to respawn, and provide some greater incentive to killing them. We'll be continuing to tune and re-tune dungeons and encounters, but currently these are the two we're most concerned with and will be focusing on.

In this thread, Tseric explains the direction the designers are going in terms of item sets.

We've moved away from the complete 8-piece armor sets, such as Tiers 1 through 3, in favor of smaller sets which can be intermingled with other sets. Generally, the class sets will fill out conventional slots, while other sets may take a combination of boots, gloves, rings or what have you, to fill out other slots.

We feel it adds a little more variety to gear combinations and set bonuses and players don't have to make such a complete and total commitment to one set of gear.

In this thread, Tseric eludes to this being a possibility, when item drops were changed in Scholomance some time ago.

Loot tables were adjusted a while back to increase the number of rare item drops, but I do believe Dark Runes may have been reduced some to compensate for the increase of other loot when the player cap was set to 5 players.

In this thread, Nethaera gives her opinion on instant travel in World of Warcraft.

The world is a big place. It should feel big. We continue to do what we can to minimize the "pain" of travel by adding flightpoints when we feel they are needed, shortening flight paths, creating more direct flight paths, permanent portals in Shattrath to every major city, adding the summoning ability to meeting stones, and then there are the other "usual" methods such as mage portals and warlock summons.

Instantaneous travel ,while a convenient way to trim off the time it takes to travel, would take away the feel of being in a world that takes a bit of thought to travel through. Sometimes the journey is just as important as the destination and slowing down a little now and then to enjoy that journey isn't such a bad idea. I even pause now and then to look at something in game and think how much I've taken those details for granted after all these years. Travel gives people the chance to do that, or as others have said, run for a bio, grab a drink, acknowledge the other co-habitants in your domicile, grab a bite to eat and whatever else.

In this thread, Tseric explains that the bugs regarding items granting mana per 5 sec is being fixed soon.

A number of specific fixes for this general issue are going into the next major content patch. They are not implemented, yet.

In this thread, Tseric explains the reason for shield enchants only working on shields, and not caster offhands as well.

Off-hand is a pretty broad category. Adding enchantments to such items doesn't seem to lend the same focus as other categories might. Enchantments tend to have certain restrictions by slot. Boot enchants might be speed-oriented, which doesn't make sense for a chest slot. Chest slots might have additional armor which doesn't make sense for gloves. Gloves might have an agility bonus which doesn't make sense for a helmet. And so on.

Off-hand is composed of shields, weapons, and items both frivolous and advantageous. To start tossing out additional stats into such a category could get sloppy easily. A shield enchant isn't going to be worth anything on a caster off-hand, so you have the potential of needing to generate a multitude of enchants for all these little distinctions, while adding little to the bottom-line. In the space it takes five enchants to be useful for different slots, you could very well need just as many enchants for a single slot. This could become bloated and full of clutter.

Just something to consider.

In this thread, Tseric explains the reasoning behind 2v2 and 3v3 yielding fewer points than 5v5.

In a fashion, this is correct. The devs are wary of 2v2 super-combos which might occur in arenas.

While the possibility exists for clear-cut advantage of group combos in a 2v2 setting, allowing a 2v2 team to generate the same, or possibly more, arena points than a 5v5 group is a fast path to the rewards. This then encourages teams to go 2v2, as fielding a larger team confers nothing extra.

In this thread, Tseric explains why there's a limit to the number of instances that can be entered within a certain time period.

The limit is four new instances per hour. This is to limit excessive restarting and farming or "flipping" of an instance, primarily by gold sellers.

Seeing as Ramparts can generally be completed in a fairly short period, you might run into this more with that particular dungeon.

In this thread, Drysc responds to the comments about the change to the auto-unstuck feature.

The auto-unstuck feature actually is clearly listed as a support feature, and clearly describes what it's to be used for. The intended hearth mechanic, the hearth stone, has a one hour cooldown, and so it could also be easily extrapolated that we only intend that function to be used once per hour.

If you really didn't know it wasn't intended to be used like that, then I don't think you were putting enough thought into it. It bordered on exploitative use.

It's quite easy to plan around your hearth cooldown.

Profession Forum Information

In this thread, Nethaera put together a list of upcoming changes to the various Professions in World of Warcraft.

Raids & Dungeons Forum Information

In this thread, Eyonix announces a hotfix to the Shade of Aran encounter.

Beneficial immunity effects from abilities such as Ice Block and Divine Shield will no longer cause the Shade of Aran's explosion effect from Flame Wreath to proc when the duration has faded.

Shaman Forum Information

In this thread, Nethaera shares information about an upcoming bug fix for rogue poisons being too hard to remove.

Here is a little bit of information about the poison bug that people are experiencing:

There is a bug where items of very low level with poisons applied to them can be dispelled nearly every attempt, while items of very high level with poisons applied to them are nearly impossible to dispel.

This is slated to be fixed in patch 2.1.0 . The difficulty of dispelling the rogue's poison will be based on the level of the player instead of the level of the weapon the poison is applied to.