The
official patch notes have been updated with several new additions (see below):
Druids
- Improved Moonkin Form: Now grants 10/20/30% of spirit as spell power.
Paladins
- Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.
Warlocks
- Fire and Brimstone: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 3/6/9/12/15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25%.
- Sacrifice (Voidwalker) redesigned: Sacrifices a portion of the Voidwalker's health, giving its master a shield that will absorb X damage for 30 seconds. While the shield holds, spell casting will not be interrupted by damage. 1-minute cooldown.
Items
- Furious Gladiator’s Staff and Furious Gladiator’s Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.
Glyphs
(Removed) Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.
Bug Fixes
Rogues
- Tricks of the Trade: To prevent exploits, this ability can no longer be cast on non-player targets.
Daily Blue
General
Heirloom items - no plan to change how they work
There are no immediate plans to change how the heirloom items work or what they cost. We do plan to add more of them in the future, but it isn't a high priority and while not every class/spec/preference has something perfect for them, we feel the current spread covers most things pretty well. (Source)
Realm populations and ratios
We are keeping an eye on realm populations and ratios. We recently opened transfers when patch 3.1 came out to low populations realms to help out on the queues and total populations. We are in the middle of helping the population for the Latin American realm Drakkari right now. Overall there aren't a lot of terrible ratios right now and there are no realms with terrible queues. We will continue to keep an eye on things and offer FCMs as needed. (Source)
About the lagfest in Wintergrasp
We have seen a spike in the amount of players participating in Lake Wintergrasp battles since patch 3.1 was released. We have tried implementing measures to increase the amount of fighting going on around the southern towers to spread people in the zone out, but that's not going to help if the zone as a whole is packed full of participants.
There's been a great deal of discussion here at Blizzard about ways to potentially decrease the server strain caused by such large numbers of players in Wintergrasp. It almost makes me nostalgic over all of the posts I had read before the expansion came out where players theorized this place was to be a ghost town within a month of its release. :)
Some things to consider for those that would claim to know the solution to this:
1) The entire selling point of Lake Wintergrasp is that it is not an instanced battleground. A lot of the cool features of Wintergrasp and the Vault wouldn't be so neatly realized if this place were a 40 vs. 40 instance.
2) Putting in very restrictive thresholds to keep out excessive numbers of players defeats the purpose of having an open PvP zone. There might be a reasonable solution to this end, but it will take very careful consideration.
3) Buying new hardware is not such a simple answer as many would claim. For one, the hardware of our realms is quite top-of-the-line. If upgrades were possible here and there, the acquisition and implementation of new hardware would take months. It's not an entirely unrealistic solution, but it certainly would not alleviate any of the lag we're seeing in the short term. (Source)
Ghostcrawler on Does ElitistJerks make everything suck?
Theorycrafting is a fun part of the game for many players. We love the EJ guys and other communities that embrace it.
What many players would do well to remember though is that the mission of EJ (and others) is to determine the best possible optimization. That can be a fun goal both in theory and in practice. But that does not mean that every player should adopt what they conclude yields the most damage / healing / survival / efficiency.
As an example, I have seen players do things like choose talent tree A because talent tree B "sucks." By "sucks" they mean that the damage of tree B was concluded to be 10% lower by simulation or web stats. Yet some of these same players have older, cheaper enchants, or aren't hit capped, or aren't using flasks, or aren't attacking from behind (as melee), or making any number of similar "mistakes." For them, the dps gain by adopting the cookie-cutter spec is less of an improvement than other changes they could make to their character. For many of these players the marginal gain by optimization is lost in the noise.
I'll make a real world comparison. You know those "space age" wetsuits that Olympic-caliber swimmers now wear? Would you swim faster in one of those? Probably. Is it worth the expense if you aren't Olypmpic-caliber? Probably not. Are there other things you could change about your technique that would improve your swimming to a larger degree (especially considering the cost)? Probably. Are there other things you could change about your WoW character that would improve your performance more than adopting the cookie-cutter spec? For many of us, the answer is also probably.
I'm not at all saying theorycrafting is a bad thing or that there aren't specs that yield better outcomes. Just keep it in perspective. (Source)
Ghostcrawler on casual players and BG rewards
People use "casual" in a couple of different ways. One is the more traditional way, specifically someone who is relatively new to the game or just not as obsessed with the minutae as many of us are. They may not reach level 80, or if they do, they might not participate in PvP or raiding.
There are also players who are hardcore in mindset, but just don't have the available time to play often or for long periods of time because of other obligations (family, work, school, sleep, active social life, etc.).
Part of our design goal in Lich King was to offer raiding content for that second type of more casual player. You probably don't need to farm for flasks or the best enchants and gems if you want to run Naxx. Even Flame Leviathan and increasingly the earlier bosses in Ulduar in general are relatively easy compared to our older raid content. You might not be able to participate in the entire raid, but you might be able to come for a boss or two. If even that is challenging to orchestrate, the Vault of Archavon and Obsidian Sanctum are very short raids and designed to be pug-able.
The BG situation is slightly more complicated. Raids have lockouts, which guarantees that players who play often and for longer periods can earn gear faster, but not a whole lot faster than players who play less often or for shorter periods. But you can play an awful lot of BGs in one night, so if we let players earn gear after a relatively small number of BGs then players who play a lot will be drowning in items. We also don't like the idea of locking out BGs or otherwise restricting access.
Now one possible solution is to make the rewards for the daily BG quests even greater so that someone who doesn't play often can focus on that, while still letting players who play more often earn additional honor.
It's definitely a challenge in MMO design to strike the right balance between "playing an hour a week is rewarding" and "playing four hours a night is rewarding." If the latter is so much more rewarding, then the former feels lame by comparison. On the other hand, if the latter doesn't provide some additional reward then it's easy for players to run out of stuff to do even when they really want to play. (Source)
Ghostcrawler was an oceanographer
Technically I was an oceanographer. People don't always understand the difference. Oceanographers are trained in physical, chemical and geological science in addition to marine biology. That said, tsunamis were not a specialty for me. I studied ecology (which you can roughly define as how organisms interact with their environment), population genetics (ugh), benthic ecology (stuff that lives on the bottom), and toxicology (how stuff reacts to contaminant exposure). The most helpful thing I learned from that career with regard to the current one (aside from general communication skills) was statistics. In my experience, players (and some game designers) tend to over-interpret small data sets, attribute too much power to certain variables, or struggle to make sense out of large data sets or complex situations. Statistics can help manage all of that. It can be as simple as familiarity with how probability works or as complex as actually doing multivariate tests on data. (Source)
Classes
Mage
Fire in PvP and Frost in PvE
Fire in PvP and Frost in PvE is still something we want to improve. We don’t think it takes a massive overhaul of the talent trees or mechanics to get there though. It isn’t as much of a priority as systems that effect entire classes, but the order in which we make changes is not governed by an extremely rigid process. (Source)
