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

[chaos5061]

Black Market Auction House
No one should count on this even being close to a viable option for gearing up a character. If you can raise that kind of gold in the game, you're going to have much better success paying your way into raids for gear than hoping the right items appear for you in the black market AH (which doesn't include set pieces), hoping you can afford to outbid everyone else on your realm, and hoping you're the last one to bid before the auction ends.

Sure, it'll have some of the best rewards for sale. But that doesn't mean it'll be remotely reliable for one person to gear up quickly. It's the black market, after all.

Ultimately the system is going to benefit the extremely wealthy and the extremely lucky. But in all likelihood the benefits won't at all be consistent, even for those who can pony up the gold.

Being ok with buying Raiding gear (for any price) with gold? Just seems inconsistent to me.
The two actually aren't mutually exclusive concepts. You're glossing over far too many details for this to be a valid argument.

The overwhelming majority of WoW players will not suddenly be buying their gear at the magic armor store. Taken in the context in which that quote was originally made -- where we were referring to players collecting tokens from bosses to shop at a magic store -- it still holds true.

So buying armor with a token from a boss was bad, but buying armor with gold is good?
No, my point was that those can't be equally compared. For that to be true, we'd first have to create a situation where the standard for all PvE players switches from spending tokens on powerful items, to spending gold on powerful items.

The BMAH can't be compared to the token system that way. As I mentioned before, that's glossing over far too many details about both systems.

Basically what this entire conversation is coming down to are arguments for and against buying BiS. You can swap out gold with money and have the same conversation.
No, you can't swap out the two so trivially as this. Most everyone else in this thread is arguing the positives and negatives of the BMAH. Your arguments are about what might follow the BMAH and are almost entirely conjecture.

What are those differences besides how frequently the gear can be purchased at the store?
The token system, which that original quote about the magic shop was referring to, was a means for virtually everyone to obtain their PvE tier sets. What we said was that this ended up not feeling as rewarding, 'cause you ended up just collecting a currency to spend at a vendor rather than grabbing your loot straight off the dead bodies of bosses.

The token system was implemented to try and make RNG feel a little less punishing, but it had some side effects.

The BMAH system can hardly be compared to that system. You never know when the BMAH will have something you can use, you can't buy anything out, items are BoP, and you're competing with everyone on your realm who might want/need the item.

That's much more RNG and isn't a system that, in anyway, will completely replace the act of killing bosses for loot. It will be randomly rewarding to a small minority of people who happen to have a lot of gold and are lucky with timing. But as I said originally, even then it won't be reliably or consistently rewarding. It's just a shoddy comparison.

For those speculating about the rate of gear gains from the black market auction house, here's how things currently work. Keep in mind it's still beta and this is all subject to change.

The chances that a tier-14 raid or PvP item of any given armor type will be listed each day is roughly 10%. Logistically, this means there will be plenty of days where no new armor is available to anyone. Some days, if the black market vendors are extra fortunate in their scavenging for goods, you might see a piece of gear for each armor type. The items under each armor type include belts, boots and bracers, and there will be a separate vendor offering jewelry.

Almost a better percentage of me getting some items to drop from bosses it seems though. In fact it took months to get the healing trinket from spine for anyone in the guild.
Just keep in mind you're competing against far more people than you were in your raid. You also have to be able to afford it and place your bid at just the right time.

[chaos5061]

Vendor Filters
We are talking more about adding an "All" option for vendors for players who want transmog gear, RP gear or want to see what is available for friends or alts. We'd still default to showing just class gear because we think that's more useful for the typical case.

Talking? as in, it is 50% confirmed? 70%? 100%?
I keep toning down my language, because if I say "there is a very, very, very small chance we might do X" then when we fail to do X the reply is "GC breaks promise again!"

It's something we would like to do and are actively working on but the actual work hasn't been completed yet and in cases like that there is always a chance that a problem may arise forcing us to reconsider.

Shadow of Death
Shadow of Death wasn't removed for balance reasons really. It was removed because it was very hard to get working correctly. At some point when such a huge percentage of bugs are caused by one ability, it's time to take a serious look at whether or not that ability is cool enough to justify the attention it gets.

This is super rough to the point of inaccurate, but consider a matrix, where the first value is impact on the game and the second value is work involved to get it functional, bug free, and sans exploits.

Impact - Big, Work - Small = no brainer.
Impact - Big, Work - Big = painful, but worth the investment.
Impact - Small, Work - Small = eh, probably still worth the investment.
Impact - Small, Work - Big = kiss of death.

Now please don't infer that questioning the bang for the buck of "big work" somehow means we're lazy or cheap. (I personally qualify, but that shouldn't reflect on the team as a whole.) What I mean here is that there are a limited number of developers on the project and a limited number of hours in the day. Every hour we spend on feature X is less time spent on feature Y or else longer you have to wait to get any new features. (Yes we can also hire more people to a point, and we always are. If you're awesome, check our web page.)

Everything I said about Shadow of Death is also true of Divine Intervention.

A non-exhaustive list of examples of class abilities that are very hard to get working that we still support are Mind Control / Dominate Mind, Spirit of Redemption, Vanish, Blink and Heroic Leap.

Was it the fact that we weren't paying repair bills during a wipe part of it? That's pretty much the only thing I used it for, and I never had issues being rezzed afterwards.
No, that would be a balance issue, which as I said wasn't the problem. (It is a little lame that DI became more about saving repair bills than wipe recovery, but that's a different discussion.)

The problem with DI is that we didn't have a clean way to make an encounter reset. We were increasingly having problems with the boss (especially complex encounters with lots of moving parts) not recognizing that the paladin was still alive, but invulnerable, and so the encounter was over and the boss needed to despawn and reset. It is totally a solvable problem, given enough time and resources, but we thought there were more pressing matters on the paladin and encounter side to attend to. We even tried to bring the ability back in Mists as a simpler out of combat self rez, but even that was causing so many bugs that we made the tough call to scrap the work.

[chaos5061]

Hunters and Expertise
Shots that cost focus should give a partial refund when they miss. If that isn't happening, we'll fix it.

We don't think Steady and Cobra Shot need to provide resources even when they miss. We're not going for a design where hunters can be certain to always have maximum resource income in PvP. As long as they have enough focus, they'll be fine. If we see evidence that hunters are focus-starved, we'll adjust accordingly, but we haven't seen that so far. There hasn't been a ton of PvP testing on beta yet. There has been a lot of speculation, and while that is still valuable feedback, it is understandably less valuable.

If Shred and Backstab were so reliable in PvP, I don't think there would be such a storied history of druids and rogues asking to buff alternatives to the positional requirements or just removing the positional requirements for PvP. In other words, I think "melee can nearly always attack from behind in PvP" is overstated.

If hunters get close to hit and expertise caps, they should do fine even against Agi users with high dodge chances. They won't do fine against a rogue that pops Evasion, but Evasion is intended as a survivability cooldown. Different classes are different and cooldowns and durations all vary, but I don't know that rogues have a great counter for Deterrence either.

The loss of minimum range is a huge hunter PvP buff. I don't think we've seen the full ramifications of it yet.

[chaos5061]

Beta Launcher Update
A new launcher version was released tonight that did away with the Mists of Pandaria logo and put the classic logo in its place.

[chaos5061]

Daily Quest Previews
Today we take a look at some of the daily quests available to you at level 90. Not all quests are included in this preview, as some are still in the earlier stages of testing or are not in game yet. This includes any of the cooking daily quests and the Cloud Serpent quest line.

You can expect roughly 50 daily quests available per day, with many of them rewarding 5 x Valor Points and roughly 20. This means that you can earn at least 150 Valor points and 500 per day, with more being possible as additional quests are implemented.

Daily quests are included as one of the new ways to earn valor in MoP. We don't expect many people will choose to cap their valor just by doing daily quests, but that is an option if you really like them. We expect to have around 50 dailys available from all the factions every day.

Like I mentioned before, those 50 would be randomly chosen from a much larger total pool of quests. This helps keep things feeling fresh for a long time.

[chaos5061]

Shado-Pan

The shadowy protectors of Pandaria's temples,

the Shado-Pan are wrought with mystery. You can find daily quests for them in Townlong Steppes at the Shado-Pan Garrison. Currently they offer 4 quests and one followup quest each day.

[chaos5061]

Golden Lotus

The Golden Lotus is a mysterious society of Pandaren that intend to solve the Mogu problem once and for all. All of their quests are found in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms at the Golden Pagoda, Mistfall Village, Ruins of Guo-Lai, and Setting Sun Garrison.

At a Friendly level of reputation, you can access the Gold Pagoda quests and one additional area. At Honored you can access three areas and Revered grants access to all four areas. Each area has 4 quests and one followup quest.

[chaos5061]

The Anglers

The Anglers are a group of Pandaren fisherman that hope to feed their people and grow their knowledge of fishing. The Anglers have a small village off the coast of Krasarang Wilds with three daily quests and the possibility of one more followup quest. These quests do not reward Valor Points, only reputation and gold. As a bonus, you can find certain unique fish to become Nat Pagle's friend, allowing you to purchase Nat's Hat!

[chaos5061]

August Celestials

The

August Celestials are brave Pandaren that defend the temples of Pandaria from the evils of the Sha. These daily quests can be found at the Temple of the Red Crane and Cradle of Chi-Ji in Krasarang Wilds, as well as at the Temple of the White Tiger in Kun-Lai Summit. Currently they offer three or four daily quests which involve fighting single or groups of NPCs.

[chaos5061]

[chaos5061]

The Klaxxi

The Klaxxi are Mantid Elders that are untouched by the corruption and insanity that has overtaken the remainder of the Mantid Swarm. They seek to work with the races of Pandaria to restore their Queen to glory. These daily quests can be found at Klaxxi’vess in Dread Wastes.

These quests are currently bugged, but should offer at least two or three per day. Some of the NPCs that you have to kill are more challenging than most mobs, so there are afew buffs that can help.

[chaos5061]

The Tillers

The Tillers are peaceful and productive pandaren, working with the land to feed the massive appetites of their people. These daily quests are found in the Valley of the Four Winds, in Halfhill. None of these quests are currently implemented in game, so there is no way to tell how the progression will work.

[chaos5061]

Finding Daily Quests

After reaching level 90, you can visit the many NPCs in the lower outdoor tier of Shrine of Two Moons to be directed to the various daily quest areas and scenarios.

[chaos5061]

Assassination Idle Time
That seems like too much idle time for Assassination. We'll investigate. It could very well be a bug (in the game or the sim).

Rogue Class Design
I disagree. Simulation and formulation need to be debugged, yes, but if you don't like looking at math, what would constitute as evidence? Math can, has been, and will be improperly constructed, but without some logical/rational evidence qualitative data means nothing. It's just hearsay.
We like looking at math. You wouldn't last very long in this gig if you didn't.

I know it seems like a Catch 22, but really I think it just illustrates that estimating DPS is not at all straightforward. If it was even moderately easy to do, everyone (including us) would know exactly what all of the targets were and how far everyone deviates from those targets.

There are two problems with simulations. One is that we just don't know if they are accurate. We could determine if they are accurate, but that takes a lot of our time (which is what I meant by debugging). In my experience, they tend to be as accurate as the dedication of the the group of players working on them. What this tends to mean is that certain specs are modeled very well and others... less so. That changes over time as the commitment of key players waxes and wanes. Several systems designers got their start in the theorycrafting community. It is one we are familiar with.

The second problem with simulations is they assume perfect gameplay on a static boss. Now on the one hand it makes more sense to do that than it does to compare DPS on every boss. It's often hard, even for the community, to decide when a fight has a gimmick versus being a legit comparison fight. On live, Ultraxion is the closest thing to a one-target fight with no movement, but even then it sprays the warriors with rage and the length of any fight has relevance because of how many times everyone's cooldowns are available. On the other hand, players tend to care more about how they can actually perform on a fight, not how they could theoretically perform on a boss that doesn't exist (unless you are in Naxxramas perhaps). As an aside, it's fun to go back and compare some of the predicted simulations for various tiers with actual parses.

I mentioned already the problem with comparing parses. They are reasonably good for comparing say rogues to mages, but terrible at comparing the various specs of rogues. The reason is because of the sampling bias, where all of the good rogues (and many of the not-so-good ones) swap specs to whatever spec the highest DPS parses use. There are some problems with this. Some of the highest DPS rotations are challenging to execute. Just because the best rogue in the world hit those numbers doesn't mean you ever can. It also doesn't mean that your DPS will go up by a certain percent just because you used his spec. Some fights just work out really well for some specs, because of adds or movement or burn phases or fight duration. Are these gimmicks that should be tossed out? At some point, you're tossing out every fight. Now to be fair, I'm not saying that Subtlety is secretly the highest DPS fight on Ultraxion and nobody knows about it. However, the delta between Sub and Combat is probably smaller than most people think. The sample size for Sub is much smaller and presumably its numbers are diluted by a lot of uninformed or lesser geared or skilled players or other people just messing around.

The best test I can come up with is to do a fight as one spec and then do the fight as another spec, trying to keep all other factors equal, and see how you do. That might be feasible in Dragon Soul today where you're likely looking for something to spice things up a bit. On the other hand, your guild leader might not want to hear on cutting-edge content "Hey, mind if I try an experiment?"

As I said, it's hard. I have used the thermometer analogy before. If you want to know the temperature outside, you can use a thermometer (or more realistically, a phone app) and be pretty confident that the number you see is reasonable (72 degrees F / 22 C in SoCal at the moment, as it very often is.) There isn't a thermometer for rogue DPS. There are a lot of stats and a lot of estimations that when taken collectively can give you some idea of where things lie.

Nevertheless, if you have any numbers from beta that suggest one spec is below the others, please share them with us. We are comfortable with our testing mechanics, but they have been wrong before, and reconciling them with the numbers from other people is never a bad idea. It's really not possible to have useless data, as long as you take everything relevant into consideration as part of the analysis.

Do you think you could answer whether combat rogues are intended to viably dual wield 2.6 weapons in MoP? I've heard it may be possible, but I've yet to see it conclusively proven that we can drop our daggers for a sword or axe without losing significant DPS.
We made some changes such that Combat with a pair of 2.6 weapons will be much closer to someone wielding a fast offhand than they are today. Last I looked, I believe wielding a fast offhand was still theoretically slightly better. Hopefully it is in the realm where you can use whatever drops.

So... you think there's a place for damage vs utility, you just don't think Blizzard can pull it off? It's an incredibly difficult design balance, exacerbated by any variables in which a player can interact with a target or variances that a target makes towards the player and the playable environment.

It is very difficult. I'm also not sure it would be very fun even if we did pull it off. In the theoretical example where you were choosing between a DPS cooldown and a healing cooldown, the pressure would often be to take the DPS cooldown and ask the healers to step it up a bit or just trust to random chance that you won't take that much damage. If the utility were group utility and not survival, then it gets even worse, because you'd always want the other guy to be the buff er... monkey so you can choose the DPS cooldown.

[chaos5061]

Holy Paladin Issues and Concerns
A few things:

It's hard just to compare heal costs and numbers without looking at the whole package. Paladin heals tend to be expensive because so much of their healing costs no mana. Likewise, we don't balance around perfect Beacon transference, but you can't ignore it either.

If you look at how much paladins actually heal in a fight though, it should be pretty competitive with the other healers. I know that's not easy to look at right now on beta, but it will get easier once A) raids are open, B) we enable mods again, C) more theorycrafters conclude that we aren't fiddling with numbers so much so that their time isn't being wasted. (We aren't fiddling with numbers nearly so much, so maybe that will encourage some theorycrafters).

Remember though, that each healer is different. Example: Resto shaman look great on fights where everyone can cluster for Healing Rain and Chain Heal and any time everyone stays very wounded for very long.

Because paladins have so many mana-free heals, they actually can't subsist on fumes as long as other healers. If every healer decided just to cast their Holy Light equivalent and nothing else, paladins would go out of mana faster. Now there shouldn't be any situations where you really heal like that.

Two concerns that I think warrant us looking at further are the healing of Holy Radiance and the crit chance of Holy Shock. We nerfed Holy Radiance so that Light of Dawn can be stronger -- it feels weird when the "finisher" is puny compared to the "builder." On the other hand, healers don't always have the luxury to wait for the finisher before doing some heavy healing. We've heard a lot of feedback that Holy Radiance is a little weak, so we'll take a look at it.

As far as Holy Shock goes, it did suffer from the pruning of many of the passive talents and glyphs that gave it such a high crit rate. In a vacuum, it doesn't need a high crit chance. It is an instant, relatively cheap heal that delivers on Holy Power. You're going to want to push it. But we agree that Infusion of Light is intended to help mix up what heals you cast and that it needs to proc at a reasonable rate.