After each region's maintenance this week, raids will no longer lose attempts on wipes in Normal mode for Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. There will still be limited attempts in Heroic mode.

We will continue to monitor developments in Icecrown Citadel in the future, especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.

Update Follow up time!

Q: If you extend your raid lockout this week, will you still lose attempts on Normal after the hotfix?
A: No.

Q: If you run completely out of attempts on Heroic, will the wing bosses and Lich King no longer respawn, even if the difficulty is switched to Normal?
A: YES. So leave an attempt left if you wish to kill them on Normal. I'll try and correct this in a future update.

Q: Why is the counter still visible in Normal?
A: The hotfix being applied just stops the counter decrementing, and nothing more.

Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

To review previous in-game fixes, please visit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21723843880&sid=1

02/08

• Sindragosa's Mystic Buffet will now pulse every 6 six seconds, up from 5 seconds. In the normal 10 player encounter the debuff increase has also been slightly reduced.
• In the Toravon encounter, the effect of the Whiteout debuff has been reduced. Additionally, the damage done by Frozen Orbs has been reduced.

Love is in the Air Perfumes (+75AP buff, etc ...) (Source Re: Love Is In the Air Perfume Question)
These items are set to disappear when the Love is in the Air event ends. 

Easier itemization in Cataclysm (Source Re: Cata changes with itemization.)
We aren't trying to kill spreadsheets or simulators, and I'm not even sure we could. The situations where two pieces have different stats but provide an equal dps increase are always going to be rare.

The problem we're actually trying to solve is where one stat is so far superior to other stats that the rest of the item is irrelevant. Currently, most casters prefer haste over crit to the extent where they might use an item from a previous tier. That's not ideal (though obviously something else could be going on with their decision, like they are passing to someone else to be nice or they have a better upgrade in mind on the next boss or whatever). In Cataclysm, given an item with haste versus one with crit your spreadsheet might still tell you the haste item will provide more of an upgrade. But hopefully it won't be such an upgrade that the decision becomes a no-brainer. Hopefully the other stats on the item will come into play more. It's too easy currently to focus on The Best Stat to the exclusion of all else. (I'm not talking about stats such as spell power, attack power or Strength, because for most of your pieces, those just scale with item level. I'm talking about the secondary stats where the real gearing decisions come from.) 

Overhealing and mana pools in Cataclysm (Source Re: Cata changes with itemization.)
That's a relative softball question, because the problem is healers overheal by so much now *and* can get away with it. If you actually care about your mana pool, then regen (Spirit in Cataclysm) matters. If you actually care about mana, then getting bigger heals (such as getting crits) matters too.

Now imagine that as a druid, your mastery stat does something interesting to your hots. It has to be *interesting* or it's just going to mimic the effects of spell power (Int in Cataclysm). Let's say mastery increased the duration of your Rejuv, but did so without reducing the healing per tick. Now Mastery helps throughput, but doesn't help burst healing as much as crit. If haste also affects how often your hots tick, then you might get some interesting gameplay out of playing off of longer hots that tick more frequently. If you don't need to spam heals as much as you do today, then reducing cast time through haste isn't as important to a healer, though it still might be desirable. Now you can make interesting (we hope) choices about whether you want more crit, more haste, more mastery or more spirit.

Itemization and power growth (Source Re: This is why the game is gettin out of han)
Yeah, exponential power growth is just part of the design. It doesn't really bother us that the delta between character level and item level keeps growing. It might be a problem someday if it takes scientific notation to express how much Agility there is on your breastplate.

The problem folks are referring to for this expansion is that we based combat ratings, especially things like crit and hit, off of one assumption for what gear would look like in 4.3, but adding the hard modes meant that the gear ended up having more stats than we thought. If we ended up squeezing in additional tiers into Cataclysm the same thing would happen, though we also have some ideas to make the scaling work better in general. 

Lovely Charm Bracelet from killing blows only (Source Re: Lovely Charms going to Killing blows?)
You can get these from any mob "of worth" so you can do any sort of kill quest to get these including from killing any mobs involved in daily quests. [...] Yes, it comes from killing blows. On my healing character, I've had no issues with getting these, (other than when I forgot to have empty space in my bags for them.)

[...] I did not get them from instances. It's pretty easy to grab a bunch of mobs and kill them solo and just as easy to get them via daily quests (or even normal questing) that you are working on as you're doing them.

The event just started so, no, there are no current plans to change the functionality of this. Should we feel it's necessary to make a change, we'll let you know. 

Tanking Cooldowns (Source Re: Explain why Dru hp was fine but not pally)
One caution is you have to be really careful in how you factor in cooldowns to estimates or simulations of tank survivability. Some attempts just assume that e.g. Barkskin is responsible for X% of damage not done over the course of the encounter. That might be true on some encounters, but it definitely is not on others. When you can or need to use those abilities makes a big difference. On some fights, those cooldowns just give you a little slop room if the healers have a lot on their plate or have to move or something. On others you just aren't going to survive without a cooldown. 

Dispells in Cataclysm (Source Re: Dispels in Cataclysm PvP)
We'll talk more about the Cataclysm dispel design when we get a little closer. Overall the philosophy is that a dispel should be a counter. That means, to us, that you should have to consider when it makes sense to use. Dispels shouldn't be a test of how quickly you can mash that key when you see the icon pop up. Dispelling at the wrong time should cost you. We also don't want to see such extremely different outcomes depending on the class of dispeller you have with you. 

Itemization in Cataclysm (Source Re: Cata changes with itemization.
Actually, we aren't trying to make gear choices easier. We like when it's a hard call on whether to upgrade vs. stick with what you have, etc. In designer parlance terms, that is an "interesting decision." Non-interesting decisions are typically no-brainers.

We want to remove some of the confusion over a complicated stat system, which we think we can do without reducing the system's depth. In fact, the other motivation for the stats overhaul was to solve some of the problems where a certain stat trumps all or a certain stat is always junk. If we nail that, then gear choices will actually be harder in Cataclysm, not easier.

As an example, when you aren't close to a crit cap and when buffs don't provide so much crit and talents don't provide so much crit, then haste vs. crit can be a pretty interesting choice. Haste lets you cast spells faster, but crit makes those spells you cast hit harder. At a very basic level you are choosing more spells vs. bigger spells, but because of a number of other factors, it's not that cut and dried. Haste may provide a dps increase for a caster according to a spreadsheet, but it depends and it might cause you to change your rotation. If you have spell A that hits so hard that you need to use it on cooldown, and spell B gets boosted by haste, then you can run into the situation where more haste on B isn't an improvement because you can't squeeze in another B before it's time to use A again. If you aren't able to capitalize on the extra haste, then more isn't always good for you. (That's in an ideal world. The way stats work in Icecrown, if you like haste, it's nearly always a no-brainer stat for you.)

Comparing armor pen vs. say attack power is much mathier, because they really just both buff melee damage in pretty much the same way. The only time it matters is when you're near a cap or if you're a spec that does a lot of spell damage. But you learn pretty quickly for your spec whether armor pen is an awesome stat for you or just an okay stat.

Many of your gear choices in Cataclysm should come down to haste vs. crit vs. mastery. You may still have one of those you like the most, but it shouldn't be double the value of the other stats, so you may have to look at the total package of stats on that item (Do I need more hit? If I take that hit, can I swap it out somewhere else?) Add in set bonuses and procs, and I'm not sure the gear choice will be all that easy, but it should be easier to understand. 

Rogue
Vanish
We tried a different approach to fix Vanish in a recent patch while it was up on the PTR. It didn't fix the problem (which has everything to do with spells already being in the air) and let rogues use Vanish as a second Cloak, which wasn't the intent. When we backed out that change, we said we were going to try a different approach where we calculate when spells are launched on the server side. Nothing has changed since then and I really can't give you any more information than that. Making more "Lol Vanish doesn't work" threads isn't going to speed that process along, and will just continue to annoy other forum participants.

Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

To review previous in-game fixes, please visit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21723843880&sid=1

02/05

• Rimefang now flies less frequently in all raid formats.
• Animated Bones summoned by the Anub’ar Necromancers, no longer award experience when defeated.
• The amount of damage being absorbed by sacred Shield and Power Word: Shield is being reduced by 10% correctly in only battlegrounds, Arenas, and Wintergrasp.
• The range of the Lich King’s Remorseless Winter aura has been increased in Halls of Reflection.
• The Val’kyr Shadowguards in the Icecrown Citadel Lich King raid encounter should always properly pick up their target.
• Deathbringer Saurfang should gain blood power less rapidly in normal 10 and normal 25 player modes and players can also no longer zone in while this encounter is active.
• Sindragosa’s Backlash ability can no longer crit.
• The Fountain of Light proc effect can now heal players outside of the caster’s party.

Druid

• The rejuvenation procs from the Druid Tier 10 will now work better in a raid group and not avoid targets that have any rejuvenation spell on them though it will continue to avoid targets that have the casting druid’s rejuvenation on them.

Warrior

• The damage bonus done by Devastate has been appropriate increased to be in line with the changes made in patch 3.3.2.