Bornakk on Bracket Rating Improvements Are Now Active (Source) The update to the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets are now active. (see below) The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2. As a result of the above improvements, this change will prevent an excessive number of players from reaching much higher ratings and acquiring the highest grade of weapons in-game. The increase in rating requirements is designed to keep the number of players able to obtain these arena weapons on par with the number of players who are able to obtain the same grade of weapons from Heroic Ulduar. When Arena Season 7 launches we plan to return the highest rated season 7 weapons back to 2200 while also ensuring that the difficulty in achieving that rating is closer to what is intended, yet of similar difficulty for all brackets (rather than being easier for 2v2).
Future Patch Engineering - *very cool things coming* There are some very cool things coming, I wish I could specify as to what they are. Unfortunately, I can't just yet. As soon as we get the go ahead to divulge information, you can bet we will. (Source) Zeppelin between Ogrimmar and Thunder Bluff in an upcoming patch The Zephyr is getting set to transport players between Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff in an upcoming patch. (Source) Itemization Game design and itemization We changed some of the base design of the game to cut down on the idea of content (and the items come with it) being only for a certain group of the playerbase. We have tried to open up content and give more people more things to do. I don't have any numbers to share, but we are seeing more people in the raid instances than in the past, so people are running things and picking up as many epics as possible. A lot of players are skipping normal dungeons because it's faster to do so, but they have done it on other characters already so they know the fights and just want to get geared up asap. Sure, we could limit the number of epics to certain content and whatnot, but we don't feel that would be a real benefit to the game. (Source) Itemization Q/A Why do you keep referring to AP as the only alternative to a 4th stat on Plate DPS gear? Why can it not be Crit Rating. Then the rest is free for Hit/Exp/ArP. All Plate DPS would take crit. Hit, Exp and now Armor Pen can all be capped, at which point they become “worthless” stats. At that point all plate is Strength, Stam, Crit. How is having strength and attack power on an item any different then having crit rating and agility on the same item, which there are plenty examples of. A few players above answered this, but since people keep quoting it, the answer is that Agility and crit are not the same stat. Agility also provides crit (and a little dodge and armor). Strength and AP both provide AP (and a little block). and pets get no benefit from crit, ArP, or haste Pets don’t benefit from a lot of stats, but we view that more as a problem with how pets scale with your gear and not with the gear itself. I don't understand why a high stamina, expertise, hit, strength weapon is so unreasonable. DPS can put all of these stats to use, too. Because then you expect to have several of them every tier and the hit-capped plate dps classes are sad so we end up having to drop both. Bosses have bigger loot tables, so nobody is happy. (Source) Classes Druid Balance T8 4-Piece Set Bonus The reason we increased the proc chance from 5% to 15% is because of the issue where you can lose the proc on an existing Starfire. For a number of technical reasons, we can't apply the proc to a spell already being cast. The problem is that you can't modify a spell's cast time while the spell is already being cast. The tooltip is accurate... if frustrating. We just talked about it and we might have a solution. It might not be hotfixable, but it shouldn't take until 3.2. We might lower the proc rate if we got it to work however. I'll try and update when we work it out. (Source) Tree of Life form This is an open question to the community. Is druid Tree of Life form fun? The question applies to both PvP and PvE, so it would be helpful to provide for which part of the game your answer applies. We think cat and bear forms are fun. They have very clear roles and unique abilities. Tree of Life has no unique abilities. It essentially forces you to give up a portion of your class abilities in order to be as good a healer as other classes. In PvP it lets you tank a little, but again with the downside of giving away a good deal of your mobility, damage and crowd control. Please do not over-interpret our asking for feedback. No huge changes to Tree of Life are on the way and we may in fact never change it. But it's something we have been discussing lately, so we thought it would be interesting to get a wider perspective. (Source) Paladin MP5 is worthless for holy paladins Yes, that is exactly what I said. You are saying you’ll just use the shaman gear. Why? Because you don’t care about the mana regen. Why? Because your mana regen is so good based on things like Illumination that mana regen stats are not attractive. That doesn’t mean we stop putting regen stats on plate. That means we nerf Illumination. An even better solution would be to get rid of MP5 and make Illumination return mana based on your spirit. Now not only do you want a regen stat, but you want the same stat that other healers want. (Source) Priest Haste on shadowpriest gear We have allowed the “good stats” and “bad stats” to get too far apart. The answer, as you point out, is not to only design gear with very narrow uses because it is only attractive to one spec (but then exceedingly attractive to that spec). We can’t be in a situation where armor pen is junk for Unholy DKs (because they do so much spell damage) because then we are making Unholy DK tier sets. From an item design point of view, yuck. We just need to get the stats closer together on a class-side, not an item-side. (Source) Shaman Elemental shamans don't gain anything from MP5 or spirit itemization Agreed. As you point out, that is why we made sure your tier sets didn’t have them. We can’t remove the regen stats from everything else for obvious reasons. We can make the regen stats useful to you, but then we need to put them back on your tiered sets as well as nerfing your damage across the board to make up for the fact that some kind of new regen to dps conversion scaling will make you better. The conversion mechanics do the job, but they’re a little muddy and complicated and I’m not sure we’d call them a raging success long-term. (Source)
