MoP: War: is it really? Or is it fake?

[chaos5061]

5.2 Changes and Things to Look Forward to
As with many patches, there will be new additions and changes to the Legendary quest line. Here’s a look at what’s in store (Spoiler Free Zone):

Additions:
New solo Scenario available to all class types. You’ll be able to aid Wrathion in constructing a weapon at the Thunder Forge
Reputation gains increased to Exalted
Special World Boss Challenge, Nalak the Storm Lord
New metagem – Crown of Heaven

Changes/Notes:
Sha-Touched Weapons will not be available in the new Raid tier but will still be available from previous Raids.
The gem received for completing Breath of the Black Prince can be used on Sha-Touched weapons, but will not be useable on new weapons from the Throne of Thunder Raid. (Don’t throw them out though. You never know if a gem may come back in style.)
Eye of the Black Prince will be able to be used on new Epic Weapons

*Nethaera is a Community Manager for World of Warcraft and believes you remind her of the babe. What babe? The babe with the power. What Power? The power of… Oh, you know how this one goes.

[chaos5061]

If you haven’t been keeping up on the latest World of Warcraft news, you might not be aware that World of Warcraft Patch 5.2: Throne of Thunder is on the horizon. Well, 5.2 is well on its way and it’s bringing PvE features like a brand new questing hub and a huge new raid, but it’s also introducing new features that will have a significant impact on the PvP aspects of World of Warcraft, including a number of class and gearing changes.

I thought this would be a great time to discuss some of the ways we can prepare for when 5.2 goes live and we can once again attend to the important business of watering the tree of awesome with the blood of our enemies.

Gearing Up
We’ve already covered that the way PvP gear is acquired is changing in patch 5.2, but I’ll briefly recap.
Rating requirements will be removed from PvP gear.
Malevolent Gladiator’s gear will be available for purchase with Honor Points.
A new tier of Conquest Point gear will be added that becomes available once 27000 Conquest Points have been earned for the season.
Team Rating will gradually increase during the season for teams and players who continue to compete in PvP. This system is explained in the Mists of Pandaria PvP Dev Watercooler.

As Bashiok mentioned in his recent 5.2 Currency Conversion blog, any unspent Conquest Points will turn into Honor. That could represent a significant chunk of Honor Points, so if you find that you don't have quite enough Conquest to buy or upgrade a piece now, you could still potentially afford to buy a piece of Honor gear when the new season starts.

If you’re just starting your PvP journey in 5.2, then you might want to think about investing in a set of crafted Dreadful Gladiator’s gear to get started on the right foot.

Decisions, Decisions
If you’re already wearing Malevolent Gladiator’s gear in patch 5.1, then you could be faced with a choice. In patch 5.2, the Item Upgrade vendors will no longer be active. A new set of non-upgradeable Malevolent Gladiator’s gear is being introduced in patch 5.2, though it is a higher item level and has boosted PvP Power and Resilience to compensate.

So, if you have the points to buy gear, do you buy a current Malevolent piece now, do you upgrade an existing piece before patch 5.2 arrives, or save points to buy new pieces once patch 5.2 arrives? Keep in mind that a fully upgraded (2/2) piece of 5.1 Malevolent Gladiator’s gear will be slightly better than its 5.2 counterpart, so if you already own pieces that you haven’t fully upgraded yet, then going for full upgrades might be a good course of action. On the other hand, even a piece that isn’t fully upgraded will be about as good as one of the brand new pieces in patch 5.2. Since any Conquest Points you have when patch 5.2 arrives will be turned into Honor that can be used to buy Malevolent pieces when the patch arrives, it’s up to you to decide how you want to spend those points.

Class Changes
Knowledge is power! Lots of class changes are coming in patch 5.2, so it’s a good idea to stay up to date on the latest changes by visiting the PTR patch note blog, and reviewing the class notes. Take note of the class changes—knowing what you, your teammates, and your foes are capable of will help shape the team compositions you use and the tactics you employ in battle.

If you’re feeling particularly feisty, you can download the Public Test Realm Client by visiting the Account Management page to experiment with the coming changes firsthand. Not only will you be helping us test the upcoming patch, but you’ll gain a keener grasp of what the changes will mean for you.

What About Mid-Season Catch Up?
That’s actually planned for patch 5.3. You can read more about it in the PvP Gear in 5.2 and Beyond blog I mentioned earlier.

When Does The New Season Begin?
Patch 5.2 is arriving soon, so keep an eye open for the blog announcing next season’s start date.

That’s Teamwork!
It can be difficult finding and fielding a team for organized PvP. If you’re looking for allies, you have many places to begin the recruitment process, ranging from the official forums to fan sites like Arena Junkies (also a great place to look for information), to just hopping into the General channel while playing to see if someone wants to play a few games.

If you’ve had success finding or forming an Arena Team or Rated Battleground group, how did you go about it? Let us know in the comments.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 PTR Notes Update - Feb 11

Classes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Death Knights now maintain the same health percentage when switching into and out of Blood Presence.
Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Wrath damage have been increased by 9%.
Balance
Starfire damage have been increased by 9%.
Starsurge damage have been increased by 9%.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Targeting for Glaive Toss and Powershot has been improved. These abilities will now always hit the primary target and are much more responsive about which secondary targets they hit.

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Arcane
For Arcane Mages, Evocation now restores 40% (was 60%) of total mana over 6 seconds, and consumes all Arcane Charge. For each Arcane Charge consumed, the total amount of mana regenerated is increased by 10%, up to a maximum of 80% over 6 seconds. Evocation remains the same for Fire and Frost.
Frost
Fingers of Frost now has a 15% (was 12%) chance to activate from Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt and Frozen Orb, and a 5% (was 4%) chance to activate from Blizzard.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Jab now costs 4.5% (was 4%) of base mana to use.
Glyph of Path of Blossoms is now Glyph of Paralysis. This glyph causes the Monk's Paralysis ability to remove all damage-over-time effects on the target.
Mistweaver
Summon Jade Serpent Statue no longer costs mana.
Muscle Memory: A new Mistweaver passive activated by a successful Jab or damaging at least 3 enemies with Spinning Crane Kick. Upon gaining Muscle Memory, the Monk's next Tiger Palm or Blackout Kick deals 150% (was 200%) more damage.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Holy Fire is now an instant cast ability.
Shadow
Mind Blast damage has been increased by 20%.

Pet Battles
Master Trainers in Northrend, Cataclysm, and Courageous Yon will no longer field pets with higher than intended stats.
Ghostly Bite's damage has been reduced by 20%. now has a cooldown of 7 rounds (was 3 rounds).
Ghostly Skull: Ghostly Bite and Siphon Life have swapped ability positions.

Raids, Dungeons and Scenarios
Throne of Thunder loot drops and bonus rolls are now available for testing in Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic difficulty. Art for weapons, armor pieces, and the drop rates themselves are not yet final.

Bug Fixes
Items
Effects for the following trinkets Spirits of the Sun, Qin-xi's Polarizing Seal, and Relic of Chi-Ji should no longer activate while outside of combat.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 PvP Blog Post Updated
The Preparing for PvP In 5.2 blog post was updated to reflect that the new Malevolent Gladiator's gear in Patch 5.2 that is purchased with Honor is of lower item level than the current Malevolent Gladiator's gear. The new items are new versions of the gear, so the reduced item level should not affect items purchased before the patch.

Patch 5.2 - Cross-Realm Patch 5.0 Raids
Ghostcrawler confirmed that the old Patch 5.0 raids will all be cross-realm once Patch 5.2 is live.

OpenRaid Reminder
Now that cross-realm Patch 5.0 raids are confirmed, this might be a good time to remind everyone about OpenRaid. It is a site that allows you to easily form cross-realm groups for PvP and PvE content. Currently you can do all of the old WoW content, except for Mists of Pandaria raids.

It is an easy way to grab nice meta achievement mounts like the the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher or Ironbound Proto-Drake, as well as transmog gear, chances at mounts that drop from old raids, and even a way to finish getting the drops for your old legendary item! You can also find some Challenge Mode groups and RBG groups as well.

Once Patch 5.2 is live, it will provide an opportunity to gear up your characters faster by running the Patch 5.0 raids in Normal or Heroic difficulty. Doing Normal difficulty will give you higher item level loot, extra chances at loot compared to just running LFR, and help you to catch up on the legendary quest line, so that you can get yourlegendary meta gem sooner!

[chaos5061]

Soo, in short you just nerfed us ele shamans so we can swich targets easly?
There was no nerf. Sorry if my explanation was unclear. Lava Burst with Flame Shock should do exactly the same damage it does on live. Lava Burst without Flame Shock will do more damage than it does on live. It is a buff to unfavorable situations.

Now all that said, Elemental's damage is still low. I didn't want that message to Distract players from the Lava Burst change. I also didn't want players to campaign for just buffing the heck out of Lava Burst, because that would have done damage to the rotation and PvP. Instead, we want to buff Elemental evenly. Imagine a Shamanism buff if you must until we decide the actual change.

Rogue 4 piece is COMPLETELY useless for combat. We already energy cap during Ad Rush, so giving us more energy during Shadow Blades does nothing, as de-coupling Ad Rush/Shadow Blades appears to be a DPS loss even with the 4 piece. I thought the goal was to boost combat single target damage in 5.2. Guess not.
We would need to see some numbers on this. If you hate to decouple the two CDs then I could see how it would be a problem. But decoupling them and using the set bonus should be a DPS increase.

Go back to the start, start with the principle of "Basic rotation is MS->OP->OP->X" and "Sometimes you will prioritize Slam over OP when you are running high on rage", and figure out how to make it work from there. As it is, always having OP always taking priority over all the other fillers leaves the rotation feeling too cramped and awkward, and takes all rage management out of the rotation, leaving us with no choices except hitting HS when we can't spend enough rage with the default rotation.
The intent is Mortal Strike -> Overpower with Slam used during Colossus Smash or during moments of excess rage.

We tried the change to Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death with noble intentions of making the rotation more dynamic since CS would be slightly more predictable. However, the change isn't a clear win, so we're not sure it's a good change. We are likely to go back to autoattacks proc Sudden Death, but leaving the 1 GCD on Overpower. We are also intrigued by the idea of having Opportunity Strike (mastery) also proc Sudden Death, so we might run some numbers on that. The buff to Deep Wounds, mastery and haste should all help with Arms scaling (though we remain convinced that players often focus much too much on scaling and not on overall DPS).

Do you not have the ability in-house to test this?
Of course we do. But we're not seeing what you're seeing. Therefore we need to understand the source of the difference.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
We are sympathetic to the argument that we have been schizophrenic (to use the term incorrectly) in the Shadow PvP 4pc VT dispel bonus. Originally the enemy strategy was to just "get it over with" and dispel VT until the horror went on DR. We changed the way dispels work so that isn't much of a strategy these days, however the dispel is still in the hands of the enemy and not the Shadow priest, which we agree makes the DR extra punitive. We also think we've hit Shadow hard enough in PvP that this nerf isn't required, so we're going to remove the DR from the Horror proc from VT dispels.
We haven't forgotten to have Solace provide a heal for Holy. That's still in the cards.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
We think we understand the rogue concerns on the PvE 4pc better now. We don't mind Combat having to unlink AR and SB to maximize the bonus, and we still think the set bonus is a DPS increase over not having it. However, it may be the case that the value of the set bonus forces Combat to swap to another spec because the cooldown stacking is one of the mechanics that keeps Combat competitive. To try to (ahem) combat this, we are going to do something unusual and allow the set bonus to also reduce the global cooldown on rogue abilities to 0.7 sec during Shadow Blades. This should help prevent GCD lock / energy capping. Normally we are very reluctant to reduce the GCD lower than 1 sec, so this is very much an experiment.

DPS Tuning
We continue to tweak Arcane numbers, so if you're trying to theorycraft Arcane, you may want to hold on for a bit longer. At the moment, we have restored Arcane Charge back to +50% damage and +150% mana cost but reduced the damage of Arcane Blast (-22.2%), Arcane Missiles (-22.2%) and Arcane Barrage (-13.6%).
Likewise, I wouldn't worry about the details of monk numbers, especially healing, too much yet. If you want to keep track however, here are recent changes: Mana cost of glyph of Uplift +21%, Mana cost of Jab +33%, Teachings of the Monastery now provides 2% mana to Tiger Palm, Reduced T15 4pc from -5 sec cooldown on Thunder Focus Tea.

Here's the followup question then. Will this Disable the AR glyph? That brings Combat to a .5s GCD with the glyph if they're stacked.
They will stack. As I said, it's an experiment.

[chaos5061]

Could you possibly speak on this subject? It feels like the tier is designed exclusively for Holy, and that makes me sad.
We've been searching for some hard numbers (key phrase there) on secondary stat values for Disc with the 5.2 changes, but so far we can't find much discussion out there beyond "Well, I guess we might want more crit so PoH will give DA again." If you know of any we might not have seen (another key phrase there), let us know.

Below are the scary guts of the new trinkets and metagems. This information is for theorycrafters. You don't need to read this to understand how the mechanics work or enjoy their benefits.

Trinkets

Agility DPS
Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – 15% chance on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 105 sec ICD.
Renataki's Soul Charm – 0.56 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD.
Talisman of Bloodlust – 3.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
Bad Juju – 0.50 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD. Voodoo Gnomes are mostly for flavor; they deal ~200 damage before armor per hit.
Rune of Re-Origination – 0.46 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD

Strength DPS
Brutal Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault - 15% chance on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 75 sec ICD.
Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun - 0.56 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD.
Primordius' Talisman of Rage – 3.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
Spark of Zandalar - 5.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
Gaze of the Twins – 1.00 RealPPM on critical harmful abilities and spells, periodic spell, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.

Intellect DPS
Volatile Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – 15% chance on landing harmful spell. 45sec ICD.
Wushoolay's Final Choice – 0.56 RealPPM on damage/absorb from harmful abilities and spells, and periodic spells. 22 sec ICD.
Breath of the Hydra – 0.50 RealPPM on damage/absorb from periodic spell. No ICD.
Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen – 0.50 RealPPM on damage/absorb from harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.
Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance – 1.00 RealPPM on critical harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.

Healer
Soothing Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – On Use, 180sec CD.
Horridon's Last Gasp – 1.00 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. No ICD.
Inscribed Bag of Hydra-Spawn – 1.13 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. 17 sec ICD.
Stolen Relic of Zuldazar – 3.00 RealPPM on attempting helpful spell while in combat. No ICD. Use effect has a 20sec CD.
Lightning-Imbued Chalice – 3.00 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. No ICD.

Tank
Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – On Use, 120 sec CD.
Fortitude of the Zandalari – On Use, 120 sec CD.
Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire – 4% chance on dodge melee ability or swing. No ICD.
Ji-Kun's Rising Winds – 100% chance on taking damage from melee abilities or swings, that leaves you below 35% health. 30 sec ICD.
Soul Barrier - On Use, 120 sec CD.

[chaos5061]

Legendary Metagems
Sinister Primal Diamond – 0.84 RealPPM on damage/absorb of harmful or periodic spell. No ICD.
Courageous Primal Diamond – 1.00 RealPPM on attempting helpful spell. No ICD.
Indomitable Primal Diamond – 1.00 RealPPM on damage/absorb taken from melee ability or swing. No ICD.
Capacitive Primal Diamond – 15.00 base RealPPM on landing melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD. At 5 stacks, fires Lightning Strike, which deals [280 + 75% AP] Nature damage. That base proc rate is multiplied by an additional coefficient by spec:

- Assassination: 1.535
- Combat: 0.99
- Subtlety: 0.98
- Feral: 1.934
- Windwalker: 1.084
- Beast Mastery: 1.604
- Marksmanship: 1.594
- Survival: 1.449- Enhancement: 1.093
- Retribution: 1.923
- Frost DK (2H): 1.309
- Frost DK (DW): 1.572
- Unholy: 1.34
- Arms: 1.771
- Fury (TG): 1.784
- Fury (SMF): 1.951

This will make us mistweaver only use Jab in combo with TP or we will loss so much mana.
Yes. To oversimplify, we don't want Jab, Jab, Uplift, nor do we want Soothe, Soothe, Tiger Palm. We want Fistweaving to provide significant damage and healing, but both should be less than an actual DPS spec or a traditional healer (again Atonement is the model). Fistweaving will be awesome for some situations, but we want it to be a compromise, otherwise, you'd want monks for all your healers, since you get all this bonus DPS on the side for no healing cost. In order to deliver on this, we have to make it harder to cherry pick some Fistweaving abilities and some Mistweaving abilities.

I question why Rogues are getting 0.7 GCD consideration while Feral is stuck weaving 1.5sec GCD heals into their DPS rotation.
Cat Form has reduced the GCD of spells to 1.0 sec for a few builds now. As I've said, the rogue GCD change is very much an experiment. If it doesn't work out, it's one set bonus that will eventually be replaced. This should not open the gates for everyone requesting microscopic GCDs for their spec. At the end of the day, we have a client-server architecture and the GCD provides time for data communication back and forth.

Why is the PPM different by spec considering that realPPM is supposed to give every class/spec roughly the same proc rate already?
Three reasons. A) RealPPM procs still scale more frequently with haste, which many specs have drastically more or less of. B) The proc that it gives you in this case scales directly with AP, which many specs have drastically more or less of. C) It’s not terribly uncommon for A or B (but not usually both) to occur on a trinket, and we can swallow that much variance. And there are typically other options for trinkets if one underperforms for you; there isn’t here, and we want the legendary metagems to be equally awesome for everyone. As a sidenote, we didn’t do that spec variance yet for the Sinister (caster DPS) one, but are still considering doing so. The situation there doesn’t seem quite as skewed as it did for the physical DPS, so we haven’t yet, but still very well might.

Can you at least clarify how Rune of Re-Origination would work? Wording on the trinket is not very clear.
Warning: technical mumbo jumbo follows.

At proc time, it checks how much crit, haste, and mastery you have (yes, this is a snapshot, and does NOT include the mastery raid buff). It finds which is the highest of those 3 (tie breaking rule: crit trumps haste trumps mastery), and gives you a buff of +[sum of lowest two stats] to your highest stat, and -[lowest stat A] and -[lowest stat B]. For example, if you have 6000 mastery, 3000 crit, 2000 haste, and the proc goes off, it gives you a buff that provides [+5000 mastery, -3000 crit, -2000 haste]. It does not continue adjusting that buff as stats change during its duration. Yes, this means that if you have a temporary buff to a stat that is not your highest (even with the temporary buff), and that temporary buff falls off during Re-Origination, you *could* end up with negative rating. In this obscure edge case, negative crit does reduce your crit chance, negative mastery does reduce whatever it normally does, and negative haste is ignored.

What's the rate for specs not mentioned in the list for the Capacitive Primal Diamond? Examples include Blood DKs, Prot Warriors/Paladins.
Just the base 15.00 RealPPM.

Why does the trinket note that it can stack if the RPPM isn't high enough to allow it to in the first place?
RealPPM isn’t an ICD. Note that the stacking Agi trinket is only 10 sec duration, whereas the stacking Str trinket is 20 sec duration. And remember that haste increases the frequency of procs. Neither of these is expected to stay at max stacks very much of the time. It’s more that it can quite often proc again while it’s already up and by letting it stack, that becomes an awesome occurrence, rather than a disappointing one.

Can the Capacitive Primal Diamond cause a critical strike?
Yes, but it uses your spell crit/hit rates.

One concern from Mistweavers when dealing with Capacitive Primal Diamond is that the Conductive proc would affect Eminence.
Yes, the Lightning Strike should trigger Eminence. We don’t expect that to be particularly worthwhile though.

[chaos5061]

On Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, we will be testing more raid encounters in the Throne of Thunder.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Public Test Realms.

Thursday, February 14

Jin'rokh the Breaker- 10 Player Heroic
10:30 PST (13:30 EST, 19:30 CET)

Megaera - 10 Player Heroic
13:30 PST (16:30 EST, 22:30 CET)

Twin Consorts - 10 Player Heroic
16:00 PST (19:00 EST, 01:00 CET)

Friday, February 15

Ji-kun - 10 Player Heroic
10:30 PST (13:30 EST, 19:30 CET)

Dark Animus - 10 Player Heroic
13:30 PST (16:30 EST, 22:30 CET)

Iron Qon - 10 Player Heroic
16:00 PST (19:00 EST, 01:00 CET)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

[chaos5061]

Noblegarden Comes Early to the PTR
Noblegarden is coming to the PTR a little early for testing. Be sure to hop in and give it a try!

Why? What have you done? What do you know?
Just a little bug testing. We just wanted to give people a heads-up in case they start to wonder why Noblegarden has sprung up. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

5.2 Update: You Can Keep Your Valor!
You can get reputation by raiding? For a different faction than the Shado-Pan Assault? How does that work?
Yes. No.
Only works for Shado-Pan Assault, sorry if I wasn't clear enough on my original post.

I don't care about saving valor, since as you said, we will have to do quite a bunch of raid before we can buy something good to use. In other words, we probably will have enough valor when we are able to buy something.

Actually there are items at each reputation, even neutral, and getting to Friendly is (I believe) essentially just a single boss kill. It ramps up from there obviously, but you will have stuff to spend Valor on pretty quickly.

So you do me like this, the day AFTER I spent 750 valor on my lock and priest so it won't be wasted just in case the patch was soon? You OWE me my valor back. When do I get it refunded?
I'm not sure what you're owed. You knew what you were spending points on and got what you paid for.

This is why we so often repeat with every patch that things are subject to change during development and testing. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Failbag Rewards In 5.2 - Thoughts?
The change is still in for the failbags to ... not be fail. They'll have a chance to contain things like very valuable grey items (essentially randomizing the gold you get from the bags), LFR versions of non-boss loot, Spirits of Harmony, consumables, pets and mounts, and... maybe some other stuff I forgot. Lots of things! Opening them should have some anticipation and surprise now.

Can you clarify what you mean by "LFR versions of non-boss loot" though? Do you mean ilvl scaled up 5man loot?
Meaning items that drop off "trash". Greens and blues and such.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 - Isle of Thunder Faction Quartermaster Update
The rings offered by the Kirin Tor Offensive and Sunreaver Onslaught were added to quartermasters in the latest PTR build. The rings cost 937 Valor Points and required Exalted with the respective faction.

The quartermasters also now sell Blood Spirits for 400 Valor Points each. They are used to craft item level 496 gear. You can see full reagent breakdowns on thecrafting page for each item.

496	Finger	Tank	Finger	Ancient Overlord's Onyx Band
496	Finger	Tank	Finger	Ancient Overlord's Onyx Band
496	Finger	Melee	Finger	Refurbished Seal of Jin
496	Finger	Melee	Finger	Refurbished Seal of Jin
496	Finger	Spell Spirit	Finger	Ancient Primalist's Seal
496	Finger	Spell Spirit	Finger	Ancient Primalist's Seal
496	Finger	Physical DPS	Finger	Refurbished Band of Jin
496	Finger	Physical DPS	Finger	Refurbished Band of Jin
496	Finger	Spell DPS	Finger	Restored Hexxer's Signet
496	Finger	Spell DPS	Finger	Restored Hexxer's Signet

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 - Isle of Thunder Stage 2
Another stage of the Isle of Thunder has unlocked on the PTR, unveiling another one of the solo scenarios used for storytelling, Tear Down This Wall! This time around we take a look at the Alliance version of the scenario, as the Horde one is nearly identical, just using different characters and dialogue with the same events.

After completing the scenario, you still have access to the same set of daily quests as before, but you have unlocked the outer city where there is/will be an additional questing area.

[chaos5061]

The Patch 5.2 Malevolent gear may have more PvP power and Resilience, but Patch 5.1 Malevolent gear has higher Item levels and as such stats. To have more clarity on this you can read the below comparisons:

5.1 Malevolent Gear has a higher ilevel than 5.2 Malevolent Gear.
5.2 Malevolent Gear has more PvP Power/Resilience than 5.1 Malevolent Gear.
5.1 Malevolent Gear
483 ilevel (491 with 2/2 upgrades)
~30 ilevels of PvP Power and Resilience
5.2 Malevolent Gear
476 ilevel
~36 ilevels of PvP Power and Resilience

In the end, the effective Ilvl of patch 5.2 and 5.1 Malevolent gear puts them at about equal. The reason for lowering the item level and increasing the PvP stats for the 5.2 version of Malevolent gear is because we want players to run 5.0 LFR, this means that the Ilvl of honor gear needs to be lower than the entry requirement of 483. The result of this was lowering the Ilvl (stats) of the gear, but increasing it's PvP power and resilience to compensate. That difference in power you feel is going to be extremely prominent, is actually quite minor.

[chaos5061]

Is this RealPPM calculated differently due to being on crit rather than being on hit? Does it account for a characters crit chance in the 1 RPPM or is it just a 1 RPPM that procs on a crit?
Currently, no, the fact that it only procs on crits basically doesn’t matter for more than flavor. However, we’re considering making these multiply the proc chance by your crit chance, so that they get the "more crit = more procs" effect that all proc-on-crit trinkets have had historically. Like I said yesterday, one of the reasons we haven’t posted all of these numbers til now is that they’ve been in flux as we make adjustments like this. This is one such change we’re still considering.

Tiger's Palm will restore 2% mana at all times. Is the possible use of Tiger's Palm to dump extra Chi (generated by Soothing Mists during down time, or Power Strikes, for example) in exchange for mana intended? Or are you planning to tie the mana regen mechanic to Muscle Memory to prevent this?
We’re currently still planning to let Tiger Palm always restore 2% mana. Yes, this is a potential way to convert chi into mana efficiently, but it still doesn’t generate as much mana as it cost to generate that chi, so isn’t mana positive. And the healing it provides, without Muscle Memory, is rather small. It’s definitely something we’ve noticed and are keeping an eye on, though.

Could you clarify on what trinkets you're talking about specifically? To me "stacking agi trinket" would seem to be describing Renataki's Soul Charm yet the context of the statement seems to indicate you're talking about Talisman of Bloodlust / Primordius' Talisman of Rage / Gaze of the Twins.
Sorry for the confusion, I was indeed talking about Talisman of Bloodlust, Primordius' Talisman of Rage, and Gaze of the Twins. They all are just RPPM random proc chances, and if the buff is already up when you get another proc, it refreshes and stacks to 2 (or 3, etc).

Renataki’s Soul Charm, Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun, and Wushoolay’s Final Choice all proc a buff that automatically gains a stack every 2 sec (and have ICDs such that it’s not possible for them to proc again while they’re already up). Also, this is a good time to note a nuance with Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire: its proc’d buff can stack just like Talisman of Bloodlust, Primordius' Talisman of Rage, and Gaze of the Twins, up to a max of 3 stacks. We didn’t note that in the tooltip since (apart from tanking large packs of mobs), it would be extremely rare for it to happen.

For Disc priests, will Atonement count as 'helpful spell'? In cata this was the case for some trinkets early on, but not in DS.
Currently, no, but since it’s RPPM, any single heal or periodic tick every 10 sec will give you the full proc frequency. A single Renew out, or a PW:S cast every 10 sec, etc.

Ghostcrawler, is it intended that abilities like denounce or roar of sacrifice prevent Lava burst from critting even though it clearly states "always deal a critical strike."?
Chaos bolt which has the always critical isn't affected by this. The nerf to lava burst damage means while these effects are up we do next to no damage with it even worse than lava burst not critting before. Hopefully this is just an oversight.
Whether the Immovable Object or the Unstoppable Force wins is something we’re inconsistent about at times. We'll discuss this and make a call. I agree at first glance that it would make sense to work like Chaos Bolt.

Esentially, this makes it worth roughly ~half of a generic trinket of similar ilvl, because the proc isn't adding any itemization, unlike every other trinket in existence. If there were agility specs that had huge discrepancies in secondary stat weights (i.e. best stat is 3x+ the average value of the worst two stats) then maybe someone could find some use for it, but, as far as I know, community theorycrafting indicates that this is not the case.
This is a tricky one to balance. As you say, it doesn’t actually increase your total stats, it just converts your (presumably weaker) lower secondary stats into your (presumably stronger) higher primary stats. The larger the difference in value between your best secondary and worst secondaries, and how much of those weaker secondaries you end up with on gear, all factor into this. For many classes, haste/crit/mastery are all actually relatively close in value (despite how much some people scream that stat A is “utter garbage” and the like). In that case, this isn’t much of a DPS gain, on average. However, there’s another nuance to this that complicates things further: many classes can game the proc somehow. Just to pull a random example out of thin air (this may not be a big gain, but it illustrates the point), as an Enhancement Shaman, you could try to line your Ascendance up with a Mastery Re-Origination. This is definitely one where we’d love to see more theorycrafting.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Power Infusion - in addition to current effects, also increases all damage by 10%.
And now, Discipline. Recall that the main problems we are trying to fix for Disc in PvE are that they are overpowered and relying too much on Prayer of Healing spam, especially in 25s. We made some changes to Divine Aegis, but we're not happy with them. Because of the interaction with crit and mastery, we worry Disc will be too crit-dependent and won't be strong enough when they fail to crit. On top of that, we're worried that it will be too easy to push Disc priests into loving mastery and hating crit or loving crit and hating mastery. To try and address all of those problems, old and new, we are trying a few different things:

1) Divine Aegis now works differently. It causes any critical heal to proc a bubble for 100% of the heal instead of doubling the heal. In other words, a crit for Holy is a 200% heal. A crit for Disc is a 100% heal + a 100% bubble. The bubble however benefits from mastery, so it's more likely a 100% heal + a 130% bubble.
2) Power Word: Shield can now crit for Discipline.
3) Mastery now boosts shields by 1.6% per point (down from 2.5% per point) but now also increases all healing by 0.8% per point.

What we hope this does:

Keeps the kit of Divine Aegis making crits do something special.
Makes Disc still awesome at bubbles, but not quite so weak at heals. (Holy will cast bigger heals than Disc, but not 50% higher.)
Makes Prayer of Healing good for periods of restoring damage, but makes Power Word: Shield better for periods of preventing damage. (Inner Focus to force Divine Aegis and Spirit Shell also help with preventing damage).
Making crit a good stat, because it benefits most of the toolbox (including PW:S) and causing Divine Aegis bubbles, but also keeping mastery a good stat, because the bubbles are large, and even when you don't get a bubble, it will still help your heal.

[chaos5061]

"Help, I'm a nervous Disc priest. Reassure me!"

Keep casting Prayer of Healing like you do today. Keep using Spirit Shell when you anticipate big damage. Start using Power Word: Shield more than you likely do today. Remember that we buffed Penance. Atonement still works. You might need to pay more attention to Spirit (the way the other healers do today).

Yes, I wrote all of this from a PvE point of view. We made several other Disc changes to help in PvP, and we haven't reverted any unless I explicitly mentioned them.

Will the mastery provide a straight up boost to healing too or is it still a 20% buff to absorbs + x% per point of master and y% boost to your healing?
The way mastery works for everyone is there is a base amount so that you benefit even with no mastery gear. We used to call it 8 "points" but we don't use that terminology anymore. for Disc, the base amount is +12.8% to absorbs and +6.4% to heals. A character with 8824 mastery would have +36.33% to absorbs and +18.16% to heals. The 3000 mastery raid buff would bump that up to +44.33% to absorbs and +22.16% to heals. Also note that the metagem which increases the size of your crits still works.

If you had all of the above mastery and the crit gem and you cast a heal for 100K, it would heal for 122K, or if it crit, it would heal for 126K and proc a 182K absorb from Divine Aegis.

Trinkets

Update on the RealPPM-OnCrit trinkets, Gaze of the Twins and Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance: See the previous post for commentary on why, but we’re going to change their proc rate to vary based on your crit chance:

Gaze of the Twins – [0.8*(1+MeleeCritChance)] RealPPM on critical harmful abilities and spells, periodic spell, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance – [0.77*(1+SpellCritChance)] RealPPM on critical harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.

Also, we’re going to try to get Rune of Re-Origination and Unerring Vision of Lei Shen on Flaskataur for you to try out. We don’t want to make every item in the game accessible (at some point it is possible to spoil the joy of getting loot completely), but those two in particular are unique effects for which we’d love to get more feedback before they drop for "real."

The reason Jab Jab Uplift ultimately came to be was because of it's reliability. Part of it was mana efficiency, but most of it comes down to it's the only on-gcd guaranteed chi generation.
We don't really have a problem if you use Jab Jab Uplift infrequently when you absolutely feel like you need chi. But it's going to be expensive to do so. We ask healers to make decisions about efficiency versus throughput all the time. When it feels too expensive though, switch to Jab Jab Tiger Palm or just swap to actual heals.

Also please buff offensive penance to 40 yards with the glyph of holy fire. It's the only thing that is still 30.
We tried to do that, but Penance is a funny spell, which made this implementation difficult. We went ahead and just made it 40 yards for damage baseline, which will have the same problem of not all your spells being the same range if you lack the glyph, but at least then you have the option.

With the buffs to penance and the increased focus on Atonement, are you at all worried about seeing guilds stacking Disc priests simply because of their dps?
Disc and Fistweaving monks should do less DPS than a true DPS spec and less healing while in DPS mode than someone casting healing spells. The advantage they provide is that sometimes a little healing and a little DPS is what you need. These changes weren't intended to be a huge buff to Atonement, so we'll have to see how it shakes out.

It doesn't help much, either since it doesn't fix their scaling.
This word, through overuse, has now lost as much meaning as the word "clunky." You're going to have to find another way to express your concerns if you want us to pay attention to them.

Testing has shown that our Single Target DPS is dropping on the ptr with your current changes, nerfing a middle of the pack to back of the bunch class seems like there must be a vendetta.
We need numbers or a link or something. If there is testing, we need to see it if you want any hope of convincing us. (BTW, saying you're not whining and then saying we must have a vendetta against you don't really jive.)

Holy gets it's much higher than .08 mastery when it doesn't crit always. We're doing slightly better than them on crits (and only slightly), but the crit % makes it not only really low, but very random and unreliable. Years of healers preferring haste over crit for reliability in healing should factor in here somewhere I'd think.
The hot from Holy is often overhealing. Not always of course, but often. On the other hand, the bubble is almost never overhealing, and in fact often causes everyone else to overheal. You won't crit very often, but when you do, it's essentially a big crit, not unlike an Elemental shaman doing damage. That gives crit some value that other healers don't even have. On the other hand, if you feel like you must get a bubble off and can't rely on RNG, you have four great choices: PW:S a few people, Inner Focus a Prayer of Healing, cast Spirit Shell, or use PW:B.

Also, does this make disc the first spec to have a dual mastery or have we seen this before?
Demonology's is similar. Ultimately, we want mastery to be about what your spec uniquely does, but it also has to affect a large enough percent of your damage or healing to make the stat compete against crit and haste. Our design intent for Disc is not to cast nothing but bubbles, so even though bubbles are a big part of the kit, they aren't going to be 90% or whatever of actual heals. So in this case, we felt it made sense to have mastery also help the heals in order to keep it competitive.

The DA is 160k and the heal is 200k for a 360k heal. The DA is also only 160k so it's less likely to hit the max bubble size cap.
We increased the DA cap from 40% to 60% to work better with the new design.

As someone mentioned before, because you've shifted such a huge portion of our crit heals into an absorb, we're now even more susceptible to dispels in PvP. Making DA undispellable is a pretty big hammer, so I understand that you're reluctant to do this, but there must be some middle ground.
We will discuss this. My gut is that you aren't critting enough in PvP for loss of DA to amount to that much lost healing, but it does make Inner Focus less useful, and in any case, the change isn't intended to be a PvP nerf.

[chaos5061]

While the gear grind has blown if you're late, really the new Conquest change coming in 5.2 with the "catch up" is just awesome.
Just a note: we'd love to implement the catch-up mechanic sooner, but it isn't planned to be ready before patch 5.3. There are some changes in 5.2 that will still help narrow the gear gap a bit, including better Honor gear, and Conquest Point armor you can purchase without first meeting a seasonal rating requirement. Conquest weapons will become available after hitting a 7,250 requirement for the season.

That said, it's likely that gear is here to stay. I've elaborated on this at length elsewhere, but it boils down to the fact that, even with gear differentials, World of Warcraft PvP can be very competitive. Gear and getting more powerful via gear, is a big part of World of Warcraft, and it isn't likely to be going away for the foreseeable future. That said, if you're into organized PvP and you want to do battle in an environment where everyone is operating with the same tier of gear, then you might want to keep an eye open for when the Tournament Realm begins again.

People DON'T PvP to collect gear. The dynamic combat against real human competitors provides the draw to play, and people only care about gear insomuch as you HAVE to have PvP gear to PvP with any significant success.
That's an awfully definitive statement, but I'm reasonably sure it isn't accurate. All the evidence points to the fact that a majority of players in general like being rewarded for their activities in game, including PvPers. Heck, as I mentioned in the previous lengthy discussion on this topic, the majority of modern pure competition games have borrowed elements from RPGs and implemented progression systems of one sort or another.

As I said earlier in this thread though, when the Tournament Realm returns, it'll be as close as you can reasonably get to a pure competition game in World of Warcraft PvP. It's a separate experience for a reason, though.

World of Warcraft is a progression game, and getting gear and becoming more powerful is absolutely integral to the experience. I conceptually get why there are players who want 'pure competition' in World of Warcraft. Many want it just on principle, while I suspect that others believe that they'd do better in PvP if it was in place. Still, the facts suggest that, barring significant gear disparities, knowledge and execution (skill) trumps gear. Also, in Rated PvP, the matchmaking system places teams up against roughly equivalent opponents, which somewhat mitigates the effects of gear in that context.

There are logistical and design issues at work here. It's really not as simple as simply saying "Here's your PvP suit. Go to town." If there's no PvP gear progression, then Raid gear begins outshining PvP gear and becomes the obvious choice. If the default PvP gear outshines Raid gear right off of the bat, then it becomes the obvious choice for entry level PvP, rendering those item rewards instantly obsolete. Our current design direction dictates that we don't want major, artificial divisions to exist between PvP and PvE. Your character should always be your character, and your gear is part of that package. While your current gear might not be optimal for a specific purpose, we want you to be able to take whatever you're wearing wherever you want to go (within reason, hence item level restrictions). For now, we strongly believe that arranging systems so that PvP gear only works in PvP and PvE gear only works in PvE would not feel good, nor be good for the game.

You do realize that in 5.3 "Tyrannical Gladiator’s gear can be purchased for Honor after 27,000 Conquest Points are earned for the season. (5.3)".
So you can look forward to more players queuing random with full PvP gear. Blizzard is so much in support of have gear imbalanced in random BG they are now encouraging geared players to rejoin the random BG system to earn offspec pvp gear.
I wrote that blog, so yes, I am aware. By the time that system goes in, the catch-up mechanic should be in place to make it easier for players joining PvP for the first time to get geared to a reasonable level. As others have noted, geared players do random battlegrounds for a variety of reasons even now, and that's not likely to stop. We wanted to provide those players with a reasonable way to experiment with different specs or stat loadouts. We are very interested in balancing the PvP system between easing new players in, while at the same time rewarding players for being invested.

I was wondering why the beyond was put into your "PvP Gear in 5.2 and Beyond" Draxxarri and now I see. Way to keep stringing us along with vague statements.
When writing that blog I tried to be as clear and specific as possible, by bulleting each upcoming feature and noting which patch that feature is expected to be a part of in parentheses. Might I ask what you found vague? The entire point of any blog we post is to illuminate, not obfuscate, so if something isn't clear I want to fix it.

As far as making the random Battleground experience better? That's something we're giving thought to, but I don't have anything specific to share for now. It is a challenge; even the best ideas can have significant potential pitfalls.

This. Right here is the issue. People who "dabble" in Random BG's for some honor or PvP, or new people trying to PvP without a dedicated group for rated BGs/Arena will walk into a random queue, and get smoked by an opposing team in full Glad. How do you think they feel? "Oh well, they're so skilled. I guess I should step up my game" or "Wow, they have such better gear than I do. I don't want to sit through loss after loss until I have the honor/cponquest to get close. I'll just quit now." It sounds defeatist, and it is, but that's what a lot of people think.
It is a situation that we'd like to address. It's just not as easy or straightforward as it seems, but like I said, we have stuff on the table.