Quote from: Blizzard (Source) Hi Alisperis, We only provide mirror links for full client patches. Background downloads do not count. You have around 1+ month to download this file so we're not really worried about your speed. :)
Quote from: Blizzard (Source) Rated Battlegrounds Battleground and Arena gameplay are different and currently completely separate. Some players enjoy battlegrounds more but they cannot gain Arena points in battlegrounds and thus they cannot receive Arena rewards. Rated battlegrounds will be an alternative way to get Arena points. Each week, there will be a featured battleground, helping concentrate queues and keeping the rated battleground experience exciting and different from week to week. If you win a game in a rated battleground you will gain rating, however your mileage may vary depending on the BG. Each victory in a rated BG will also give you Arena points. However, a loss will not affect your rating, nor your total number of Arena points. If you have Arena points, you should spend them on something epic! Among the possible rewards, the most exciting will be the return of the classic honor titles like Grand Marshal or Knight Lieutenant. Players will also be able to earn epic ground mounts and vanity items such as tabards and pets in addition to helping their guild acquire levels and achievements. Tol Barad Tol Barad is a brand new battleground which will have features similar to those found in both Wintergrasp and the Isle of Quel’Danas. When battle mode is active, the contest will be similar to WIntergrasp with PvP fights, vehicles and destructible buildings. When battles are not in progress, Tol Barad becomes a daily quest hub like the Isle of Quel’Danas. The faction that wins the battle in Tol Barad will not only get Tol Barad marks of honor, but also will get access to bonus daily quests and special bosses. Guild Advancement Guild advancement will be one of the biggest changes made to the World of Warcraft game system when Cataclysm arrives. Guilds will be able to level up and gain talent points, develop guild professions and gain achievements. Players earn guild experience in a variety of ways, for instance by gaining levels, reputation ranks, boss kills, rated battleground or Arena wins, or profession ranks. Each guild level grants a talent point that can be spent in a guild talent tree which works similarly to character or pet talent trees. Some of the options in this tree include repair cost reduction and increase in looted gold. Guild talents will affect all guild members. To give fair opportunities to both big and small guilds, only the top 20 earners per day in each guild will contribute to guild experience points. Guild experience will be converted into a special guild currency, which can be used to buy a variety of rewards such as profession plans, recipes and reagents; vanity items (mounts, tabards, etc.), and guild talent respecs. Guild heirlooms can be created with the help of professions and are bound to the guild, which means that if a player leaves a guild, the item will be returned to the guild. Guild items require less reagents, which can be bought with guild currency. Players will be able to earn achievements as a guild as well. To do so, at least 75% of guild members (for the moment) will need to complete an achievement to make it appear in the guild achievement tab. As players’ guilds complete achievements, players who are offline will be able to read the latest guild news through an RSS feed to the World of Warcraft Armory and get access to profession info and much more. Guild banks will receive a percentage of gold looted from a boss when guild members make boss kills. Also, it will be possible to invite other guilds to various events such as weekly battlegrounds.
Over 1400 PvE items added to the game in 3.3 Many of the stats have gone in relatively recently. If you tried out the PTR a few weeks ago, bosses weren't dropping loot at all. We recently went back and changed our paradigm for how we wanted to handle sockets on these items. Sockets have a budget and in this case the other stats were not adjusted correctly for the socket change. We are adding over 1400 PvE items to the game in 3.3. There are going to be some bugs. Usually we catch them all before they go live, but some still slip through. We don't try to catch them all before we make a PTR build. Sometimes we're right in the middle of doing something (e.g. changing sockets in this case) and it's not worth holding up all the massive machinery that generates a build just for a few simple bugs that aren't really going to affect the PTR experience anyway. Also consider that item bugs generally aren't as serious as class bugs since the former only affect a smaller percentage of the latter. Bugs are bugs though. I won't try to justify them. (Source) Armored Frostwyrms as PvE raid rewards from Icecrown There will be a Frostwyrms up for grabs for Icecrown raiders, achievable in a similar way to previous rewards such as the Ulduar proto-drake. (Source) Chill of the Throne ("Icewell Radiance") The "Icewell Radiance" is designed to account for very high avoidance levels. It lets us lower the damage bosses do per hit because their hits will connect more often, keeping boss dps the same but lowering spike damage. However, I also know what that message says to some people. It says that if I go into Icecrown and wipe on a boss all night that Blizzard lied to me about boss damage. We're just sort of bracing ourselves for the inevitable "I couldn't beat Marrowgar because he hits so hard. I thought bosses wouldn't hit hard." Bosses hitting less hard does not mean bosses can now be facerolled. It just means they hit less hard. To be fair, most of the folks posting in this thread understand the difference. But it's not uncommon for us to see our quotes misused in other forums where we can't necessarily bop in to correct the misunderstanding. (Source) Gear scaling They're just numbers. We don't think it starts getting scary until the human mind literally has trouble processing the digits. If your new staff has 152,420 spell power, well, yeah that's a mouthful. But if your new staff has 4000 spell power, the only thing that can really be freaking you out is that 4000 is just a really big number compared to the 100 spell power you might be used to. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars too.... :) When players say we had scaling problems in Lich King, what they mean (or at least what they *should* mean) is that we picked the end numbers we wanted for percentages such as crit and dodge and then picked ratings that would get us there. When we inflated the item levels to account for hard modes (with a little help from things like glyphs too) then the percentages ended up higher than we intended. That doesn't mean that exponential scaling on gear is bad. It just means that we misjudged our endpoints. Gear inflation is just part of MMOs, or at least the kind of MMO that we make. Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too. :) (Source) Set bonuses I think gear might get really boring if you didn't have set bonuses (and perhaps trinkets) to look forward to. Somewhat boring gear is okay... to a point... in PvP, where you need to strike a balance between skill and gear. Players want to enter PvP thinking they have a relatively level playing field, but we still use the gear reward as an incentive to participate. PvE gear is already relatively inflexible on primary stats. If anything I wish there was more variability from tier to tier. Players have become pretty intolerant though of gear that doesn't feel like an unambiguous upgrade. That's not intended as an insult to anyone. It's just the state of a five year old game. :) (Source) The Sacred and Corrupt (Shadowmourn Quest) The quest requires friendly Ashen Verdict rep to begin. It may also only be acquired by Warriors, Paladins and Death Knights. (Source) Zarhym on Blizzard, please stop making gear worthless There is still a lot of gear from Trial of the Crusade that cannot be obtained with Emblems of Triumph alone. Heroic gear and set pieces purchased with Trophies of the Crusade will still separate players conquering the biggest challenges Trial of the Crusade has to offer from those who will be farming emblems after patch 3.3. In addition, there will be scores of new items available in the Icecrown Citadel raid. The average raider will need to gear up a good deal while progressing through this raid dungeon if they wish to eventually defeat the Lich King. Wrath of the Lich King really advances one of the most popular story lines in the Warcraft universe like never before. Players have been watching the saga unfold since Warcraft III and are not far off from finally attempting to end the Lich King's reign. We want as many players taking part in this adventure as possible, and 3.3 will provide smaller or less-experienced guilds the opportunity to gear up and advance through Icecrown Citadel. We've been putting a ton of work into this final dungeon and want players enthused about taking their shot at killing one of the most infamous characters in Warcraft history. Make no mistake though, this raid will be very hard. If you think that, by allowing players to farm Emblems of Triumph, we're completely nullifying any gear gap and giving the average player an easy stab at clearing Icecrown Citadel and besting the Lich King, you misunderstand the evolution of this game and make too many assumptions about how the 3.3 changes will affect it. Clout, if you're going to be one of the first players at the Frozen Throne ready to tank the Lich King when the opportunity comes, I trust he'll show you how he feels about you saying this game is being 'dumbed down.' So sure, everyone go farm for ilevel 245, non-set gear after the 3.3 content update. Go prepare yourselves as best as possible to enter Icecrown Citadel. Just know that it's not a park, and you ain't just walkin' through it. ;) (Source) Mage Fingers of Frost The Fingers of Frost issue is really challenging to solve. It it procs on hit then the procs don't get eaten but you may have to interrupt a Frostbolt. If it procs on cast, the procs can get eaten. Those are really the only ways it can proc though. Mixing travel-time spells and instant spells can muddy things up. Things also get more complicated when you have silly amounts of haste, which through no fault of their own, many mages do. Fingers of Frost seems to work fine so long as you have Frostbite, but due to some technical limitations, the two talents don't play well apart. A long-term solution might be to make Frostbite a prereq for FoF or just merge the two talents together. Letting Fingers of Frost display its charges is a good idea. We might not be able to get that in for 3.3 but we'll put it on "the list." Our thanks to Lhivera and others among you who have explored these issues so throughly. (Source) Shaman Elemental T9 nerf We don't want players to stick with older tier sets when new pieces become available. (It's one thing if it's a really good trinket -- it's another if it's your entire set..) We balance some things around absolute values (we're shooting for a target) and other things around relative values (how X looks compared to Y). A lot of shaman were saying they weren't going to upgrade to tier 10 despite the, frankly, gratuitous stats on the new gear. We concluded that was because the T9 set bonus was too good and the T10 set bonus was too weak. We suspected the T9 was too good for some time, but didn't want to nerf it while the T9 was all that was available. We did the same thing with a few other sets (or relics). We try to pick interesting set bonuses, but that means that they will sometimes end up being over or under-budget once players figure out the best ways to optimize their play style around the bonuses. A little of that is okay -- it's interesting when a new set changes your spell rotation a little bit. But when an older set is so good that players feel like upgrading is a bad thing (ignoring the pain of having to get new enchants and gems or whatever) then we think we have a problem. From a player point of view, I can understand why the attractive answer is always just to buff the new stuff. But continually buffing an outlier instead of bringing the outlier back into the pack is a good way to lead to power inflation on gear. (Source) Warlock Soul shard resource system implementation 1.Will it be implemented in Cataclsysm or faded in through patches considering the seemingly huge gap in content? Cataclysm. 2. Even with the new system will warlocks be given a secondary defense to fall back on, on a long CD should fear become useless? You mean like Demonic Circle? :) 3. Are there plans to link the system to a warlock pet? I know fel domination is one of them, but popping soul shards for more power for the pet are being considered? Example- Refreshing CD's? Sure. We don't have a lot of details we can share yet. 4. What is going to happen to those spells that required soul shards? They won't. Some of them may change though. Perhaps the un-enhanced version will be weaker than the current shard version. Stuff like summoning (people and demons) just won't cost shards. 5. Are there plans to change hellfire to an AoE knockback snare like a secondary defense warlocks can fall back on or will it be outright removed? No, there are no plans. 6. Are there plans to extend Inferno's duration similar to before where we have to enslave him, but with no capping prohibitions? As I opined recently, IN-FER-NO probably just needs a different mechanic. The trade-off for getting the demon can just be the cooldown. 7. Are there plans to reduce slot problems with curses? Like CoT and CoEx being merged? Yes to the general question, no to the specific example. 8. Are there plans to add dispel resistance to curses through talents? Probably not. We'd rather tone down the potency of dispels in general, not require everyone to stack more defenses for them. 9. Will CoD be modified to be castable on players? If so will you modify the damage/duration/CD on it or will it remain the same? We haven't talked about it. 10. Do you plan on fixing the debuff problems to pets. The fact the duration on debuffs remain the same until the pet is out on the field while buffs continue their duration course regardless of the pet being summoned or not? This isn't really a soul shard question is it? That is more of a technical limitation and not a design goal. The answer has more to do with prioritization than intent. 11. Will soul link be removed from the demon should it despawn/dimiss? Don't know yet. 12. What are the plans for drain soul in the new shard system? Don't know yet. One idea is an emergency backup system for long fights or situations where you screw up. Ideally we don't need this though so we haven't resolved it. 13. Are there plans to make enslave demon a little more viable for PvP and example is the doomguard and inferno? If you're talking about warlocks stealing each other's demons, I'm not sure that will lead to those demons getting more use. It might make you giggle when you steal one though. 11) Will the soul shard system allow you to empower our primary nukes chaos bolt/soul fire for increased damage on a short cd? Yes. The example we used at Blizzcon was some kind of duration-limited or "your next spell" limitation. We haven't set this in stone yet. 12) What will happen to soul fire? Will it still require a shard to use? Could it find more acceptance in our normal rotation considering its potentially our most powerful nuke It won't require a shard. It might require a shard to make it something you want to cast though (imagine a PoM - Pyro). 13) How will the soul shard change work in regards to different trees? No idea yet. The talent trees aren't done. One thing we threw out at Blizzcon was maybe Demo gets an extra shard, but that's just hand-waving at this point.
