Random dungeon 15
minute vote kick limit gone in 3.3.3
It's not mentioned in the
notes, but the Vote Kick option no longer has a 15-minute cooldown.
Enjoy.
Vote kick reason in 3.3.3
This
might not answer your question -- which may or may not have been
rhetorical anyway -- but we did find that a lot people were clicking
"Yes" on the Vote Kick alert, then later asking, "why did we kick that
guy?" The idea is to make the person who wants to kick someone from the
group give everyone else a reason. If the reason is silly or defamatory,
a surprising number of people could very well reject it.
While
many people are quick to take into account all of the worst possible
scenarios with any presented changes to the game, we find that those
cases are typically the minor fringe cases once the changes are put in
action. The patch notes are out and the speculation is brimming, but
let's see how things turn out before clenching our crystal balls, shall
we?
Seasonal bosses only
accessible through the Dungeon Finder in 3.3.3
Yes, the Dungeon
Finder must be used. The interface will have a separate selection for
special World Event bosses in dungeons. If players zone into the dungeon
without using the Dungeon Finder, the bosses will not be there.
On-Proc Talents changed to
Auras in 3.3.3
We made those changes for a few reasons.
Basically,
they are balanced around more-or-less 100% uptime now. We think talents
of the variety when X crits, now you can do Y are cool, but these auras
really weren't in that category anymore. They were just cute ways of
getting a passive buff up. Nobody tended to think Leader of the Pack was
boring because it was just on all the time.
Removing the
constant application and removal of these buffs (through both the
passive aura and the range increase) might improve performance a tiny
bit, will clean out your combat logs (which actually improves
performance too), and reduce the UI and in some cases spell effect spam,
which might make combat a little more easier to understand.
There
are some auras where location on the battlefield is supposed to matter,
such as totems, the imp, shouts, and paladin auras. Those didn't
change.
Why not naturally scale
DoTs with Haste/Crit?
Having everything benefit from haste or
crit is a good goal and ultimately necessary to keep stats that are
going to appear on your gear anyway attractive. We don't want to do that
for every single ability yet because in some cases those specs don't
need that kind of buff and we'd just have to take the damage away from
somewhere else.
Haste is a mixed bag for dots or hots because it
makes you cast them more often, using up GCDs.
Death Knight
Icy Touch
threat bonus in 3.3.3
We wanted Icy Touch to feel a little like
Shield Slam -- the big hit you could launch when you need a lot of
threat to say grab a recently spawned add. I don't think most DKs will
mind having a little more single target threat overall, but we don't
want to turn them into a rotation of all Icy Touch. If that happens, we
might have to notch the threat down a little more.
Will of the Necropolis
Cooldown Removal
I think
attributing so much power to Will of the Necropolis is one of those
consequences of trying to covert everything into effective health. In
fact, the reason we took the cooldown off is because we don't think it
will be that noticeable.
In the theoretical case where the DK is
ping-ponging between 40% and 20% health, it's crazy good (as is Ardent
Defender), but those situations don't happen often. (They might happen
more in Cataclysm, where it would be nice to see tanks at 50% health for
more than a fraction of a second.) Most of the time, Will of the
Necropolis is just extra health, which was the case before we removed
the cooldown.
We added the cooldown during PTR testing in which
we had a Patchwerk who kept stacking his own damage. When he was hitting
for 110% of the tank's entire bar, the DK with Will of the Necropolis
could survive, and nobody else could. Duh. In retrospect we probably
overreacted, since we don't actually make boss encounters like that. You
have say Steelbreaker Fusion Punch, but those hits aren't so often that
the 15 sec cooldown is the issue.
[...] Seriously though, the
only thing that changed on Will of the Necropolis was the cooldown. The
health savings were always there. Tanks typically are at full health,
avoid every other attack, get hit, and then get topped off. We typically
don't hit tanks more often than 15 sec with really big attacks. It will
perform as it always has against periodic attacks, including Soul
Reaper (which is a 30 sec cooldown IIRC). If the pure melee hits from
the Lich King allow DKs to literally take 15% less damage from him at
all times, then we might put a 5 sec cooldown on it instead or make it
work like Ardent Defender (which only reduces the damage that took you
over the threshold). Against most bosses I'd be surprised if you even
noticed the cooldown was gone.
Remember, you're looking at
current content with current gear and we are forecasting slightly into
the future with changes like this.
[...] But like I said, if it
looks like it's going to be a problem, we'll add a small cooldown or
something back on. I think it's too premature to do that yet.
3.3.3 Will of the
Necropolis in the Lich King Encounter
We talked over the WotN
change with Daelo and the guys who made Soul Reaper. They're not
convinced it will be a problem. When someone trivializes the encounter
with an undergeared DK, then we'll start worrying about it.
Frost potential changes
We
realize there are still some things that need to be fixed in the tree.
The Icy Talons chain of talents feels pretty expensive. Killing Machine
can be hard to use. Stuff like that. I can't promise we'll get all of
that taken care of quickly, but we'll get it taken care of eventually.
I
don't recall us buffing the Gylph of Obliterate from 20% to 25% as has
been reported. It's possible I just forgot or there may be something
else going on. I will investigate more next week.
Glyph of Chains of Ice
One
change we have made in the interim is to make Chains of Ice apply Frost
Fever baseline, and keep the current (live) Glyph of Chains of Ice as
is (causing damage). If you don't change your PvP spec at all (and
assuming you have a pretty cookie-cutter PvP spec), then you should see
extra damage from the Strength in Endless Winter and a Scourge Strike
that hits harder on undiseased targets.
Druid
Balance burst
damage
The patch notes are not done. While, frankly,
Tranquility is not something we're going to mess with, we do want to add
more burst to Balance for PvP purposes. If some of that spills over
into PvE for more damage overall, I don't think many druids would
complain.
Eclipse
As I've said
before, the goal isn't merely to get you to use Starfire and Wrath. The
goal is to have a rotation that is more than just 12121212 or even
111222111222. RNG is something we actually want. The best players should
be the ones who can pay attention and react to situations, not the ones
who can mash their keys the fastest (or download the most recent
macros).
The biggest problems with Eclipse are:
1) It's
too much of a damage increase. Here we see the problem with overbudgeted
talents. The RNG wouldn't be an issue if the magnitude of those random
rolls wasn't so huge.
2) It suffers too much from movement.
Losing an Eclipse proc when you have to run is a problem, particularly
given point 1. Now we have no problem with classes taking a dps hit when
they have to move and we don't even mind of some specs pay a heavier
penalty than others. But it's a problem when the delta between dps when
moving and dps when not moving is so great.
Hunter
Beast Mastery
In
my opinion, players spend too much effort trying to compare their
rotation to that of other classes or specs that they may not understand
as well. Bad Arcane mages mash two buttons and bad BM hunters mash two
buttons. You're not going to top charts as Arcane if that's all you do.
We
don't want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of
reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet. If the pet
does 50% of your damage (which is an exaggeration) and the pet dies,
then your dps just dropped by 50%. Even if you can get the pet back
quickly, you've suffered a lot of damage loss. Secondly, the pet doesn't
require that much babysitting. Few players are clicking their pet
abilities on and off. As such, it just acts like a dot with cool art.
When we talk about the risk of BM being too easy to play, we don't want
to over-reward players for just doing Steady and having the pet attack.
What I'm saying is that the more damage the pet does, the less the
hunter player even has to pay attention. If the pet required more
micro-management, then that would change. If pets built up combo points,
or Kill Command acted like a Conflag, or something where the hunter had
to react, then more pet damage wouldn't be so bad (though the risk of
death doesn't go away).
We'd like to buff BM PvE damage, but we
have to be careful not to buff it too much in PvP where it still has
really high burst. This means we can't just do things like boost the
Arcane Shot damage of Ferocious Inspiration or the like. The damage
would have to be more of the slowly stacking / sustained variety, and
that's harder to implement. (Technically, it's not hard to implement per
se, but it's hard to get it feeling right without causing weird things
to player behavior, the talent trees or causing other problems that lead
to a two hour fix taking two weeks instead.)
Shaman
Elemental
Shamans / Totem of Wrath
As I've said before, the right change to
make to Totem of Wrath is to make it grant spell power almost exactly
the way Demonic Pact does so, and to make it less of a dps loss for
Elemental to use.
Elemental damage should be in a pretty good
place now if you don't drop ToW, so really I think the only risk is if
you're in a guild that won't take you because they get a slightly higher
buff from their Demo lock and can't afford to bring you both. I'm a
little skeptical that that situation happens too frequently based on the
number of Elementals we actually see in dungeons and raids. If it
happens to you, I apologize (and you don't need to post 'it happens to
me!" in this thread) but you might want to sit down with your raid
leaders and discuss if the difference is really as great as they think
it is.
I can understand if the inconsistency in the design just
offends you, and it is something we want to fix, but please be realistic
about how much it would really impact your WoW playing. We thought
implementing Flame Shock scaling was more important.
Glyph of Flame Shock
The
current (for us) Glyph of Flame Shock does something like let Flame
Shock crit at 230% damage. We'll try to get a new patch note up soon.
Whatever it ends up as will probably be some relatively simple damage
buff to replace the old crit buff.
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