So speculate how long until MOP? June, August, October, December or ?

[chaos5061]

Battle.net® Update: Updated Terms of Use
In preparation for the upcoming launch of Diablo® III, we’ve updated the Battle.net® Terms of Use to cover some key changes that will be occurring prior to the game’s release.

New Battle.net Balance Limits and Security Requirements: With the upcoming release of Diablo III’s currency-based auction house, account security will become more important than ever; we are making a few changes to ensure that players who wish to use the auction house have a safe and worry-free experience. Beginning prior to the launch of Diablo III, in order to carry a Battle.net Balance greater than $100 USD (or equivalent), players will be required to attach a Battle.net Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator to their Battle.net account. In addition, we will be instituting a Battle.net Balance maximum limit of $250 USD (or equivalent). We’ll go into more detail about the different options for making purchases in the currency-based auction house prior to launch.

Global Play: When Diablo III presales began, we mentioned as part of the purchase process that Diablo III players would be able to choose to play on game servers based in the Americas, Europe, or Asia, regardless of what region they were connecting from or which language-version of the game they purchased (with certain restrictions). As you’ll see in the updated TOU, the name for this functionality is “Global Play,” and we’ll be providing more information about exactly how it works, including the restrictions noted above, prior to Diablo III’s launch.

Stay tuned to diablo3.com for further details on the currency-based auction house and Global Play in the coming weeks.

[chaos5061]

If anybody wants to add me to the friends list with Battletag check my sig.

[chaos5061]

We’ve sent the remaining 400,000 Annual Pass beta invites last night, which concludes the entirety of those who have signed up for the offer thus far. Of course the Annual Pass offer is still available, providing those who sign up for a year of World of Warcraft with a special in-game mount, a beta invite for Mists of Pandaria, and a digital copy of Diablo III. From here on out we’ll be continuing to invite anyone else who signs up for the Annual Pass.

See you in Pandaria!

[chaos5061]

Couple of Bugs I noticed in MoP tonight.

This is just a couple of notes for people who are in the beta of bugs I ran into.

1: Tooltip bug on Monks Tiger Palm ability. Says does 0-0 damage but does damage just a tooltip error.

2: Paladins have a problem with the Judgement ability. Judgement after picking either Pursuit of Justice or Long Arm of the Law when you use Judgement you will crash in about 5-10 minutes and when you log back in your Judgement ability is on a 25 day cooldown according to the tooltip. Now is that a nerf or what? LOL. But this means that Judgement is totally unusable right now. I haven't tried the Talent Speed of Light but it may be affected too.

3: I tried to make a Human Female Monk and a Female Gnome Monk. The are no starting quests in the Starting zones for Human Monks. The first quest you can get is the quest to make that delivery to the inn in Goldshire but after that your going to have to grind levels to get any of the quests in Goldshire. For the Gnome you can get the quests to get out and be decontaminated but after that your in the same boat as the Humans no more quests there are none to get not even grinding levels unless you leave the starting zone.

[cabby]

That #3 bug of yours affect about half of the races. You can do a dwarf monk and not have any problems, just they don't have it all worked out yet for the starting areas for a lot of the races.

[chaos5061]

Thanks for the info cabby.

[chaos5061]

Galleon World Boss Defeated

[chaos5061]

Stormstout Brewery Broken Dreams Quest

[chaos5061]

Blue Posts

Monks don't have Nunchucks!
We asked the developers about this recently. The idea is definitely cool, but we don't currently have weapons that have moving parts quite like nunchaku. They'd require some pretty hefty animation work to get lookin' good.

Personally, I'd love to see it. But alas there are many priorities for our artists. Maybe some day? (Chaos5061: God I hope so.)

Mistweaver Off-Hands
Mistweavers essentially have two weapon options: a two-handed staff, or a caster weapon and an off-hand. They won't be able to heal with Agility weapons (the monk will have no spellpower) and may not even be able to dual wield (since you can't dual wield caster weapons).

Mistweavers who want to melee a lot will do more dps with a staff (though caster staves do less damage than melee staves), but we can make sure the healing is the same whether using a staff or a healer mace / dagger / sword.

It's also not the end of the world if healer monks slightly prefer staves, since not all healers want staves.

Paladin Talent Trees
It's cool if you found a lot of interesting choices in the 4.3 talent builds. I just want to make sure you understand that you're in the minority.

I think you mentioned paladin, so I'll throw out a few examples.
100% of Retribution paladins on live in North America have Zealotry. I couldn't find a single one without. It makes sense. Zealotry is decently fun and a definite DPS upgrade.
2% of Retribution paladins have the Eternal Glory talent. One can argue that some of those may just be user error. Maybe a few of them found the talent really useful though.
75% of Retribution paladins have Repentance. Okay, that starts to get a little interesting. One can assume that most paladins find the talent useful, but some find other choices more compelling. Unlike Zealotry or Eternal Glory, I would argue that Repentance is an interesting choice. Incidentally, we left it as a choice in the 5.0 talent trees.
20% have Selfless Healer, though if you look at players who PvP a lot, it jumps up to over 90%. Here is another interesting talent (by which I mean not a no-brainer) and it's also a talent we left in 5.0 in a modified form.

So here is another talent tree model we could have used: we could have given you 12 or more talent rows, and left some of them as no-brainers. Maybe we put Art of War up against Reckoning. I bet most Ret paladins would take Art of War. So we saved you having to make a button click and just gave it to you.

(Aside: I've said before that we do think there is room in the game for some safe choices. Sometimes clicking a button that you're 100% certain you are going to click is still fun. That kind of "choice" has its place. We just don't think the talent trees are the best place for that design, given that some of the rows are supposed to be real choices and some would just be "feel good about yourself" choices.)

There is yet another model where we somehow make Reckoning just as competitive as Art of War for Ret paladins. That might be an exciting model, but it's also pretty overwhelming both for us to develop and for you to learn and master. The combinatorial effects for even a six tier talent tree are enormous.

We aren't done with the new talent trees, but you also shouldn't assume that everything is so in flux that it isn't worth giving feedback. If you feel there are no-brainers, let us know specifically which choices you're talking about and why. Is it just a manner of number tuning? Is it a case of just your play style and that others might disagree?

(Please don't do that in this thread though -- we have a whole forum for beta class feedback, and we read all of the posts.)

With spells, glyphs, and talents being so far spread out (as well as automatically being granted spells), folks who are leveling new toons in beta aren't feeling as though their character is improving over time
Note that you’re probably getting about the same number of spells as you level up (or ideally a few less because most classes have some bloat). You are getting fewer talent choices, but as I tried to explain above, we feel like many of those weren’t real choices.

The talent system was originally implemented way back in vanilla beta to give players some ability to customize their character. We’d rather it serve that purpose than being an interesting level up mechanic. Leveling up is generally pretty rewarding on its own. It is at max level where players often find themselves getting bored. There are many reasons for that and we’re trying to address the problem in multiple ways in Mists, but letting two Fire mages standing next to each other have different talents is a good start.

I totally agree with this. There are a few interesting choices in there, but for the most part I felt like it didn't matter. I could have clicked anything and it would have made no difference.
I see this opinion sometimes, but it’s sort of a catch 22. The argument goes that if there is one obvious choice from three, then the choice isn’t interesting. I'm with you so far. But if all three choices are valid, then the argument is that the choice still isn’t interesting because there isn’t a wrong answer. I don’t think that ultimately holds water though – saying there are valid choices isn’t the same as saying the choice is irrelevant.

Let’s assume that housing prices and average pay are similar between Austin and Milwaukee. (I have no idea if that is true, but let's assume I took the time to Google average housing prices and pay scales in two USA cities and found two suitable examples.) Moving to either city might be a valid choice. There isn’t a “right” answer. But you would certainly notice the difference! Decisions don’t become irrelevant just because there are multiple valid options.

I have respecced 5 times on the beta. That is 5 more times I have respecced my unholy spec on live in a year.
Win.

I think the biggest issue, and the one you never seem to grasp in all of your silly replies, is that if I am a holy paladin, I want to make choices related to healing. If I am a ret paladin, I want to make choices related to DPS. If I am a prot paladin, I want to make choices related to tanking.
If we give you a tanking, healing and DPS choice and you are a Holy paladin, then you’re going to pick the healing one. It seems like we should just make that automatic rather than require you to pick it manually.

Or as Malis says below: When I go to a lobster buffet I still want them to serve me rice, baked potatoes,fries, and salads that I'm not going to eat.

If you’re asking for a Holy paladin specific talent tree with 3 good choices per tier, that gets back into the issue I mentioned before, where the number of talents in the game would be insane (612 I think). Probably you'd just see a lot of +5% crit talents again.

Besides, things like survivability and crowd control are mechanics that are useful to virtually every character. One of the cool things about scenarios is that they often don’t have a tank, so stuff is attacking you more, so you have to deal with it. Survival, control and escape buttons are really useful for those.

Even in very hardcore raiding situations, the healer that worries only about healing and nothing else (including their own survival) isn’t a great contributor to the team.

and who gives a damn about the trash before said bosses
Tragically, trash do kill players and any time you spend there is less time you have to focus on bosses that night. Bosses often have adds as well.

I was unaware of any poll to back up this statement.
Miscomm. My comment wasn’t about how much players like or dislike the system. My comment was that players who come up with builds that are creative yet effective in the live game are in a very small minority. The overwhelming number of players use the same builds, which should be a pretty good indication that the system isn't meeting its goals of offering choice.

I don’t need to poll players to figure out that data, because we can just look at the data.

This example makes no sense- OF COURSE 100% of ret paladins have Zealotry, because you're forced to put 31 points in a tree to access the other two. Many players used to use mixed specs such as SL/SL or reckadin specs back when that was an option, and probably still would if it was actually possible.
I have a lot of confidence that 90%+ of Ret paladins would take Zealotry if it was in the first tier of Holy. The only reason players historically went halfway down two trees is when they found degenerate builds that were so brokenly overpowered that it was worth giving up the core abilities that we assume they have in order to function. On the other hand, if you were a Ret paladin who liked to be able to heal a little, the new talent trees should help you do that.

[chaos5061]

Blue Posts

You're absolutely right, Mr Crab, Cataclysm talents were horrible. Instead of stripping away even more character customization and experimental playstyles, how about you go back to the perfectly functional talent system we had in WOTLK and before?
Now that data I don't have in front of me, but I'm fairly confident that the kinds of percentages I offered above would look the same for LK or BC. There might have been more variation in vanilla, but that was probably because you got worse results from Googling “Combat raiding spec” back then.

Take these new talents but put them at the bottom of talent trees. To get to the bottom of these trees, we have to click some colored boxes that do nothing. Now people will feel like they're choosing these new talents because they're clicking more boxes just like the good old times! So much customization!
Lol. We debated a system where players could choose the order they earned spells or even combat stats like haste, so long as everyone ended up with the whole package at max level. We ultimately decided that enough players would ask “Why offer a choice with so little impact?” and weren’t sure we’d get enough bang for the buck out of such a feature.

Shamans Totems Aren't Fun
Shaman have been telling us for years that they don't find buff totems fun. Back when the shaman role was essentially to buff the other classes, the design worked okay, but now that we have moved shaman into being a "real" healer and damage-dealer, we also gave plenty of other classes and specs buff capacities of their own, which rarely have the downsides of totems. Another concern was that shaman out questing while solo felt that having to drop 4 totems every boar kill got to be a drag.

We are trying in 5.0 to shift totems over to cooldowns that are more situational but that you'll actually feel. It's hard to feel the effects of Strength of Earth Totem.

However, we have a large and diverse audience, and we understand that there are shaman players out there who enjoyed dropping 4 buff totems and that that made them feel like a shaman. It's hard to reconcile that desire with the desire of others not to have buff totems, but we hear you.

Warlock Rotation Changes
His inference is people were doing it because they are stupid.
On the contrary, they were doing it because they were smart.

We have to balance around the rotations players actually use. Players wouldn't find it acceptable if Destro warlocks did 20% higher dps than the next closest class just because players figured out to use a spell we intended for Affliction. In that case one of two things happen -- either we somehow change spell rules and numbers such that you drop the Affliction spell, or we are unsuccessful in changing things, you use the Affliction spell, and we still have to balance your dps against everyone else. In that world, warlocks have a more complicated rotation to execute for the same dps as everyone else. That's not so cool.

It's not often a more engaging rotation either. Backdraft procs are kind of fun, but dependent on Conflag (in 4.3 anyway). If you could find a higher DPS rotation that neglected Conflag, you'd feel compelled to do it, even if that meant no Backdraft. You can find plenty of examples where players say essentially "Please nerf this rotation, because it's not fun." They're smart and know that we balance players based on actual performance (in other words we'll still make sure their DPS is competitive after nerfing the sucky rotation).

(You also have to consider how much development time we spend doing things like trying to discourage spec A from using spell Y. That is development time better spent on making your character more fun to play.)

With the concept of spec spells, we can say that e.g. Shadow Bolt is for Demonology. We don't have to worry about Destro warlocks trying to squeeze it in their rotation, because they don't have the button period.

Now having said that, I feel like I need to soften that a bit lest we get accused of overly constraining player experimentation. If smart players can find small dps improvements by doing tricky things, we're generally cool with that. Less skilled players won't be so far behind that we need to nerf the class as a whole or balance around the assumption that most players will be doing the clever trick.

[chaos5061]

Official MoP Beta Email

Okay everyone. I just recently got into the MoP beta so I figured that when I got the email I would post it here. I double checked to make sure it was the real one before posting this. (Thanks cabby ) But I would also like to STRESS to still NOT to click ANY LINK in the email regardless if you think it's real or not. Always go to the Battle.net Account Page to make sure. That link takes you to the log in for US change that for your region. The email came from the email address: WoWMoPBeta @ blizzard.com (remove spaces) But even if you see that it still could be FAKE. So make sure to go to the account page just to make sure.

Email:

[chaos5061]

Also no where in the email does it say annual pass. So this should be the same email you get as a opt-in also.

[chaos5061]

Also remember this is sort of what your account page will look like if your in:

Just click World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Beta then in there should be the links to download either the Windows or Mac client which ever you need.

[chaos5061]

Kun-Lai Summit Zone Preview

[chaos5061]

WoW China Developers Q&A

Will we be able to steal people's crops in the Tiller's farming area?
No, you are the only one who can see your farm.

Will there be more faction-themed mounts (e.g. Armored Razzashi Raptor and Rivendare's Deathcharger)? Some complain that Alliance can have more Horde-themed mounts.
We want to make sure both factions have all the new mounts. After all, even in the old days, all that it took to collect all the mounts was a lot of time investment.

Are there plans to adjust leveling speed? Or lower the XP required to level from 60 to 80?
It's hard to say. The current leveling speed is already too fast. Many players switch to next area so quickly that they cannot experience the full quest lore. We might adjust the quest routes for levels 60 to 80 so that players can choose the route they want.

I heard there would be archaeology dailies. Are these dailies available only when archaeology skill reaches 525? Or is it like the fishing and cooking dailies in Cata, which merely require minimum skill points?
The latter. Archaeology dailies are like fishing and cooking, chosen randomly from 3-5 quests every day.

Is there a reputation requirement to use elder tokens to buy gear?
No. You will be able to use elder tokens to buy gear from specific NPCs. The elder-token gear is different from the reputation gear sold by reputation vendors. Except for some gear that requires certain levels, you can buy many enchants from these NPCs (similar to those provided by rep vendors in Cata). Rep vendors will also sell some rep gear like before that costs gold, not elder tokens, and this gear requires certain level of reputation.

Is it possible to introduce the option of invalidating the Alt+Tab combination like SC2 does so that players who do arenas or raids won't accidentally switch to their desktop? Such accidents are common because many players use Alt in their customized hotkeys.
Currently we don't have such plan. Our UI settings are already too complicated.

Will there be some graphical upgrades in Mists of Pandaria?
We further enhanced rendering, shadow and environment fog. But they are not easy to see. We may consider giving a detailed list of changes or some before-after comparison screenshots.

Some players feel empty during the time of leveling from 1 to 85 because of the acquiring frequency of skills and talents decreased. What do you think?
The frequency at which you acquire skills is as high as it was before, if not higher. After all, those skills that used to require talent points are available from your specialization directly. The most different part now is players do not click talent trees once every 1 or 2 levels. We never considered it interesting to have players choose to add 1% damage to their frost spells. We plan to introduce a window to tell players when they can learn a certain spell. However, the new talent system is more important to level 90 characters than the leveling characters. We will introduce a similar mechanic to dungeon unlocks. (e.g. a Level 15 Horde character will receive a message to tell him/her that Ragefire is accessible now)

Is there going to be a queuing system for challenge mode dungeons like the normal and heroic dungeons?
Np. Challenge modes will be extremely difficult. You have to run the challenge with a group that you are familiar with. Our current design philosophy is that once a member goes AFK after entering the dungeon, you will have to start over.

Is there going to be any requirement to enter challenge modes? Since all the ilevels of a player's gear are normalized, will there still be something like an ilevel requirement?
There will be a minimum ilevel requirement, maybe higher than heroic dungeon.

Ideally, how long will it take for a PuG to complete a run of a heroic dungeon in Mists? You mentioned earlier that the difficulty of heroic dungeon would be close to the ones of WotLK, so how about the time taken?
The time needed to complete a WotLK heroic dungeon varied greatly from the time this expansion launched to the introduction of LFD. In Mists we believe 30 to 45 minutes is an ideal average value.

Will there be any rules about pet trading? Will we be able to trade pets of limited editions (like Panda Cub) or Blizzard Store pets （like Wind Rider Cub）? How about achievement pets?
We plan to allow players to trade Blizzard Store pets excluding Guardian Cub (because it's not BoP and it's unique). Collector's edition and other limited edition pets (like Mini Tyrael or BlizzCon pets) will not be tradable, either.

You said earlier that not all pets can take part in pet battle system. What are the exceptions?
Currently the exceptions are pets with humanoid children models. They will not be included in pet battle system. Nor will the Guardian Cub.

Scenarios seem fun enough. Will they provide some solid rewards other than VP and rep? And are all scenarios accessible only to level 90 players?
Given the simplicity and convenience of Scenarios, VP and rep are enough. Currently scenarios are accessible to level 90 players only, but we might introduce some low-level scenarios in future.

Compared with WotLK and TBC, leveling from 80 to 85 in Cataclysm is significantly faster. How about MoP?
It's hard to predict before the game goes live. On average we think it won't be faster than Cataclysm since you are not allowed to use flying mounts during leveling. So the time taken should be a little bit longer.

Some players think it's not a good idea to have Mistweavers healing while damage-dealing. Have you considered other devices of gaining chi?
We won't force Mistweavers to do so. It's only an optional game style, just like Atonement Priests healing with Smite. In some special encounters, Mistweavers can totally stay in the back of the raid with other healers. We haven't completed all the Monks skills so chances are some other ways of gaining chi can be added in.

The number of 25-man raiding guilds seems to be declining. Are there going to be any plans to encourage them? Or do you plan to remove 25-man raids?
A: The number of 25-man raiding guilds is probably going to keep decreasing, but we will still continue to provide 25-man raids unless one day no one does 25-man raids anymore. We do not have direct plans to encourage players to choose 25-man. We hope to keep 10-man and 25-man raids close enough so players can choose the type that they find interesting. (Provided you have enough people to run 10-man or 25-man raids)