Ghostcrawler on Explain Val'anyr please (src)Since everyone has now seen the tooltip but not the proc in action, we can understand how the potential for guild drama exists in deciding who gets the righteous hammer.We'll go ahead and explain exactly how it works. Just give us a couple of days to get some text together.
Bornakk on Change to "Daily Chores" (src)The Children's Week achievement "Daily Chores" has been slightly altered from the text you will see in the achievement window. It now requires simply that you complete 5 daily quests with your orphan out. There is no longer an extra step in doing things over consecutive days.
Changes to the leveling process We have made changes to the leveling process in the past that made it go faster. If we feel the need to speed this up again, we will go back and review it. Just don't expect this to happen overnight as a lot of things have to be taken into consideration, we don't want to effectively just delete a zone and put an NPC there that gives you 5 levels as a quest reward so you can go to the next zone - there still needs to be a play experience. (Source) Achievements PvP achievement from Child Week There are no plans to take it out of the meta at this time. Let the fight for the violet proto-drake begin! (Source) A Simple Request We resolved many of the issues that were affecting A Simple Request, but new ones came up with this achievement so we made a change to make it easier to complete during the time frame of the event. (Source) School of Hard Knocks Your choice of options for those that designed this achievement are somewhat stilted. We hear your frustration and, well, we understand. Unfortunately, this achievement is not meant to be "super easy". It's something you have to ... what is the word... achieve. There are certain other achievements in this particular world event that are very simple and that's fine, but not all achievements are supposed to be on that level. It just so happens that this one in particular isn’t meant to be a super-easy achievement. Does that mean it’s unduly hard? Not at all. I’ve completed this achievement on one character and almost completed it with another (I just need to cap the flag in EotS). I know other people who are having a harder time of it, but they see the achievement becoming more accessible throughout the week. Perhaps if this was Children’s "Day", this particular achievement may be very difficult, but spread over a week, it’s truly very accessible. Try simply setting a goal to get one portion of it done every day. Or organize a group of friends with the same goal to further this achievement. (Source) Raids & Dungeons Emalon Hotfixed Keep in mind we recently changed the total health of the adds that get the overcharge on Emalon. While it hasn't been live for long, it makes the encounter much more doable for a wider range of dps as long as they are able to learn the strategy properly. (Source) Blizzard philosophy about WotLK raid content I think our views on raid content are at odds. If you're having difficulty comparing the raid content of Wrath to the raid content of Burning Crusade, it's because our philosophy changed a little bit. You say Ulduar's difficulty is supposed to be on par with SSC and TK, but that's not really true. The primary goal in this expansion -- and the reason we've implemented 10/25-player, and hard modes -- is to give as many people access to the raid content as possible. Just given the nature of raid dungeons, so many resources need to be poured into making them, from art, design, and story boarding, to programming and testing. It's a very intensive process and we want our players to experience the end result. For this reason we're continuing with the philosophy that pick-up groups should have some level of success when raiding. Coordination and effort will still be necessary, as will the appropriate level of gear; but we don't want capable groups hitting brick walls, at least not within the first few boss encounters of Ulduar. The difference in difficulty between 10-player and 25-player modes should also be fairly minimal. The distinction here is between the guilds that might not have the resources to more-than-double the size of their raid. 25-player content should be more difficult, but only incrementally. You'll find all the brick walls and incredibly challenging encounters in hard modes, and they're worth the effort and status for the experienced raiders. I hope you don't take any of this to mean we expect anyone to waltz through Ulduar. That's not necessarily the case. You still need to know what you're doing and be appropriately geared for the fights. Even so, we want to get players in the door and have them feeling a natural, though slight progression in difficulty with each boss encountered. When it comes to nerfing difficulty, we do intentionally tend to slightly over-tune things at the start. Our goal is to watch players of all levels of skill attempt each encounter, and then adjust the encounters according to the percentage of raids we expect to be killing specific bosses. While some may see this as us giving content to be people who don't deserve it, we feel it's a lot better than taking away content if we were, say, to make encounters too easy from the start and then buff them up after the fact. The days of a marginal amount of players having a go at our raid dungeons are mostly over. We're continuing to brain storm ideas to keep the most-skilled raiders feeling challenged and rewarded, but we're going to continue ensuring that smaller guilds and players who haven't as much time to play each week get a reasonable chance to progress in each Wrath raid dungeon released. (Source) Player versus Player Class Balance in Arenas Currently, druid/rogue based teams in 2s and 3s aren't being seen very much (compared to other compositions). If the druid/rogue based teams actually overtake how much we currently see priest/rogue teams then I'll agree the change was faulty. However, while we fully expect druid/rogue teams to show up more often than they are now I'll be pretty surprised if they actually catch up to the priest/rogue numbers we're seeing right now. As long as the druid/rogue based comps peak out below the current priest/rogue groups, then it will have been a net improvement. Of course, if druid/rogue does turn out to be a serious balance problem, then we'll do something about it. (Source) Crowd control Crowd control is a big part of PvP, but we often have to take steps to make sure it doesn't become too big a part. Where things get out of control sometimes is when teams can chain CCs with different diminishing returns together to keep an opponent locked down for an unreasonable amount of time. Rogues have a lot of different forms of crowd control. This change was to make stringing many of them together with a partner a little less powerful. More classes have access to fears than cyclones, so we thought this change would make chaining CC with a fear less powerful. We realize there were several different ways we could have handled this and we don't expect that our solution is necessarily the one each of you would have picked had you been in our shoes. We also realize there is a risk here of making rogue - druid combos too powerful. The druid class has changed enough that we don't think we'll see the problems we had with them in previous seasons, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on. I meant of course rogue+druid, not priest+druid (though that might be interesting too). (Source) Classes Druid PvP - Cyclone of the Fear DR That could prove true, but I'd rather let it ride for some amount of time before doing something as significant as putting Cyclone on the Fear DR. It may end up being necessary though. (Source) GC on Innervate scaling We don't want Innervate to give say 5000 mana to druids in a PvP situation and 25,000 mana to raid-buffed druids (I'm picking extreme numbers to help make the point). Mana is already too scarce in PvP (little Spirit on gear, fewer buffs) and fine in PvE (or honestly, perhaps still too abundant). A flat number in this case does exactly what we want it to do. We don't think the lack of scaling at level 80 is going to be any kind of problem unless we introduced say 5 more tiers of content without also bumping the level cap. We aren't going to do that. Lack of scaling is not something to be avoided at all costs. It is only important when it actually matters. If Innervate fails to scale when you have 60,000 mana at level 80, then it isn't an issue because that situation will never come up. (Source) Priest Removal of the Pennance glyph change from patch 3.1.2 We're going to remove the Pennance glyph change from patch 3.1.2. We feel that particular change shouldn't be necessary anymore. (Source)
