Hotfixes, Conflagration and Innervate

Today's blue posts include some extra info about the new Argent Tournament mounts, hotfixes in Ulduar and Children's Week, and many posts by Ghostcrawler about the new Innervate and aftermath of the earlier Conflagration nerf.

Hotfixes

Crygil on Recent In-Game Fixes - 4/30/09 (src)

General

Players who are Champions of Exodar should now display the appropriate Exodar banner.

If a player loses their Orphan Whistle at any time during the in-game Children's Week event they can speak to a Matron in cities to receive a replacement.

Players can now obtain another orphan whistle from an orphan matron, even if they have completed all the associated orphan's quests.

Classes

Blind (Rogue) is now in the same diminishing returns category as Fear effects, but no longer shares diminishing returns with Cyclone (Druid).

The Warlock ability Death Coil now heals you for 300% of the damage done, up from 100%.

The Warlock ability Nether Protection will reduce spell damage by 30% instead of 60%.

Mana Burn has been reduced to 10% mana burned (up to a maximum of 20% of the Priests mana), down from 13% (max 26%).

Mana Burn now causes Fear, Hex and Psychic Scream to break early when used.

Ulduar

Mimiron should no longer continue to cast Heat Wave after phase 2 is completed.

The Pollinate spell cast by the Forest Swarmer inside of the Conservatory of Life in Ulduar should no longer be spell stealable.

The NPCs in the Hodir encounter will now cast Storm Power and Toasty Fire more quickly after being freed from Flash Freeze at the start of the encounter. Toasty Fire will also be cast more consistently throughout the fight.

Developer posts

Kisirani on Argent Tournament Mount Updates
It's worth noting, by the way, that some of these screenshots don't show off all the little visual features -- the wolf has the Horde symbol painted in white on its flanks, and the kodo's drums are painted orange and turquoise.
Q u o t e:
The dawnsaber is gorgeous indeed.. fitting with the appearance of the cat group but without being similar to any of the existing colors. I'd love to see one of these available in game.

While you're poking around in here, Kisi, with all due respect.. why make the new colors so similar to the old ones, even if you're adding flavor accents? :(
The ones at the tournament in game currently are utilizing textures for the mounts that had not previously been in game in a player-attainable state. They're great for variety and we're glad to get those looks out there, but they're not quite right for a tournament of mounted combat where the riders are representing their cities and nations.

The mount appearances going into the game for 3.1.2 are not necessarily meant to be mind-blowing or "better" than the mounts you have; they are meant to sport the colors and symbols of their factions. For some of them, that means they'll be similar to others, though not the same. The Dawnsaber is lovely, but it isn't very Darnassian in theme. ;) (Source)

Ghostcrawler on the new Innervate
Q u o t e:
Pros:
Innervating Paladins and shamans is now worth the global cooldown.
A moonkin innervating himself is now worth the global cooldown.
In PvP, a druid can return a lot of mana to themselves (might allow ferals to go crazy shifting for 20 seconds).
Makes MP5 gear very good for restos (more gear selection in theory) in cases where spirit is hard to get (lol ... which certainly isn't ulduar).

Cons:
Makes spirit even MORE useless to every druid except resto.
Stealing it will fill a mage's mana bar.
Won't scale with level 80 content. (they could have gone with 300% of your base mana and X% of your spirit+intellect over 20 seconds
We agree with Kugrette's summary.

Spirit isn't an attractive enough stat for Balance druids. That's a problem, but Innervate is not a great solution to that problem. As I said in a previous post, it's more like int and crit become great regen stats for Balance, which then leaves spirit to become a damage stat... which you have to admit is a little weird. (That said, we may still boost it for Balance in the near term.)

Innervate is a situational spell, one that you use once or twice an encounter at most and often times not even on you. Do you (or do you even want to) really stack Spirit just for that? Spirit is not something PvP druids have in abundance, so we didn't think it made a lot of sense for PvE druids to just be that much better at Innervating. We also don't think Innervate needs to scale super well (at max level). Your spells are already going to hit for more (or heal for more) and your mana pool is going to be bigger. Being able to also fill that pool every 6 minutes more optimally as you increase in gear doesn't feel like a big deal. Is 15K mana awesome at level 80 in blues? Yes. It is somehow less awesome at level 80 in Ulduar hard mode gear? Just slightly. (Source)
Q u o t e:
Ok, how about this:

Experienced balance druids that know what the hell they are talking about know this isn't a nerf.

HOWEVER...

This only increases the need to re-evaluate the secondary effects of spirit for balance druids, as in more crit and/or spellpower.

This is a nerf to the usefulness of spirit for balance druids, wrapped in a welcome buff. The buff is appreciated, and was needed, but now its time to re-evaluate spirit for balance druids, or re-evaluate how much spirit needs to be on our tier set.

Well said. Making Innervate based on Spirit is not a great way to make Spirit an attractive stat.

Making Improved Moonkin Form grant 30% Spirit to spellpower instead of 15% is the kind of thing that would make Spirit a more attractive stat.

It is important to the game that some things scale with gear. We're not convinced Innervate needs to be one of them. It will scale with level since your base mana changes when you level. (Not that anyone needs to be worried about that for the next few patches.) (Source)

I posted a similar response in the damage forums, but in a nutshell:

Pros
Much more mana for PvP druids
Doesn't give too much mana in PvE
Worth using Innervate on paladins, shamans and other non-Spirit based casters
Scales with level

Cons
Doesn't scale with gear

But we don't necessarily want it to scale with gear, since that gets us back in the problem of being too good for PvE druids (regen stats are much lower on PvP gear). Furthermore, unless your mana pool grows from the 20s to the 40s by Icecrown (unlikely), you're really going to be off by only a few K mana even at max gear. Furthermore, several mana-return abilities don't scale well with gear. (Source)

Ghostcrawler on Moonkin T8 Armor: Spirit and 4pc Bonus
We aren't taking Spirit off of gear. It's a stat in the game and we need to use it. "Sub-optimal" is not the same as "worthless." Spirit on plate is worthless.

We did improve the set bonus by quite a bit, and we are considering increasing the amount of spellpower provided by Improved Moonkin Form.

Long term we would still like to evaluate whether we're happy with there being so much crossover of Int becoming a mana regen stat and Spirit becoming a dps stat. (Source)

Ghostcrawler on Conflag Change Clarification
1) The changes to Fire and Brimstone are intended as a buff. We implied before that we wanted to buff Destro PvE to make up for the Conflag nerf a couple of weeks ago, which was mostly for PvP reasons. This is that buff.

2) The Conflag glyph does require a little more attention. It does consume Immolate once again. (I mentioned in a previous post that the glyph was working at cross-purposes to the rest of the Destro tree). Essentially, if you Conflag when Immolate is about to expire, you get a self-buff which makes your next 3 Destro spells do more damage. More than likely (in the sense that you probably have this talent) this has also proc'd Backdraft for you as well, so those spells also cast faster.

3) You might want to use one of those procs to get Immolate up again. However since Backdraft now lowers the GCD of the spell as well, we don't see this as a huge sacrifice (compared to how the talent originally worked). (Source)

Q u o t e:
Calling something a buff does not make it a buff. In fact, if it's a 30% increase to the 145-169 bonus damage on Incinerate, it's a nerf to an already abysmal talent.
It looks to me like you are just multiplying the "damage" of Incinerate not the "bonus damage". I know this business gets jargony. Consider it like this: Incinerate does X damage. If cast on a target debuffed by Immolate, it does 125% of X. If cast on a target debuffed by Immolate with Fire and Brimstone, it does 155% of X. It's confusing because the Incinerate tooltip is trying to be too smart and tell you the additional damage done, not the multiplier.

Say Incinerate does 1000 damage. With Immolate, it does 1250 damage. Talented with Fire and Brimstone and Immolate it does 1550 damage. So the talent could just say "Incinerate hits 24% harder."

We'll try and come up with text which makes this more clear. (Source)

Incinerate's current damage bonus is not flat. It literally takes the damage done, multiplies that by 25% if Immolate is present, and adds it to the base damage. The talent changes that bonus from 25% to 55% (plus 30%).

The damage from the new Conflag glyph should affect dot damage. It is just a proc with charges.

Some of the arguments about the 5 sec window or consuming Immolate in general make some decent points, and that is something we will discuss.

On the other hand the arguments about how much Blizzard hates warlocks or how you want to reroll or whatever are just QQ that do not advance the conversation and are the kind of thing that will get you banned. Please don't make me waste forum space having to remind you of that sort of thing.

I didn't address Nether Protection because this thread was pretty clearly on trying to understand the way Conflag works now. The NP nerf was pretty clearly a nerf and I don't think many people will be confused about how that works or why we made the change. However, if you do want to discuss it or other warlock issues in general, I request that you do not bloat the topic of this thread. (Source)

Q u o t e:
The problem isn't really how much it increases Incinerate - it's the fact that it transfers our damage from Immolate to Incinerate, which makes it even harder to play the spec in PvP.
That is the intent though. We nerfed Conflag because it did too much damage in PvP. Adding the damage back through Incinerate should buff PvE damage without buffing PvP damage.

We understand that the 5 sec window or consuming the Immolate might be too much to ask for a PvP Destro lock or even a PvE one trying to handle complex encounters in Ulduar with a lot of movement. This is one of the reasons we wanted to get these changes up on the PTR where the community could test and respond to them versus just hotfixing them all in with relatively little discussion. (Source)