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

[chaos5061]

489	Leather	Spell DPS	Wrists	Clever Ashyo's Armbands	Revered	1250 x
489	Leather	Spell DPS	Hands	Ogo's Elder Gloves	Revered	1750 x
489	Mail	Spell Spirit	Feet	Sandals of the Elder Sage	Revered	1750 x
489	Mail	Physical DPS	Feet	Steps of the War Serpent	Revered	1750 x
489	Mail	Physical DPS	Wrists	Tiger-Striped Wristguards	Revered	1250 x
489	Mail	Physical DPS	Hands	Sentinel Commander's Gauntlets	Revered	1750 x
489	Mail	Spell DPS	Wrists	Brewmaster Chani's Bracers	Revered	1250 x
489	Mail	Spell DPS	Hands	Ravenmane's Gloves	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Tank	Feet	Yu'lon Guardian Boots	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Tank	Wrists	Battle Shadow Bracers	Revered	1250 x

[chaos5061]

489	Plate	Tank	Hands	Gloves of the Overwhelming Swarm	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Melee	Feet	Tankiss Warstompers	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Melee	Wrists	Braided Black and White Bracer	Revered	1250 x
489	Plate	Melee	Hands	Streetfighter's Iron Knuckles	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Spell Spirit	Feet	Bramblestaff Boots	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Spell Spirit	Hands	Gauntlets of Jade Sutras	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Spell DPS	Wrists	Fallen Sentinel Bracers	Revered	1250 x

[chaos5061]

Golden Lotus
Jaluu the Generous can be found outside of Mogu'shan Palace.

90	Mount			Reins of the Azure Riding Crane	Exalted	3000
90	Mount			Reins of the Golden Riding Crane	Exalted	3000
90	Mount			Reins of the Regal Riding Crane	Exalted	3000
489	Armor	Tank	Finger	Alani's Inflexible Ring	Revered	1250 x
489	Armor	Melee	Finger	Ring of the Golden Stair	Revered	1250 x
489	Armor	Spell Spirit	Finger	Leven's Circle of Hope	Revered	1250 x
489	Armor	Physical DPS	Finger	Anji's Keepsake	Revered	1250 x
489	Armor	Spell DPS	Finger	Simple Harmonius Ring	Revered	1250 x
489	Cloth	Spell Spirit	Shoulders	Tenderheart Shoulders	Revered	1750 x
489	Cloth	Spell DPS	Shoulders	Mantle of the Golden Sun	Revered	1750 x

[chaos5061]

489	Leather	Physical DPS	Shoulders	Imperion Spaulders	Revered	1750 x
489	Mail	Spell DPS	Shoulders	Mindbender Shoulders	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Tank	Shoulders	Shoulders of Autumnlight	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Melee	Shoulders	Stonetoe Spaulders	Revered	1750 x
489	Plate	Spell DPS	Shoulders	Paleblade Shoulderguards	Revered	1750 x
85	Other			Mogu Rune of Paralysis	Honored	100

[chaos5061]

Character Creation Screen Update

The Alliance finally have a new character creation screen! The Pandaren got a small update to make their character creation screen a little less sparse as well.

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

What is the final word on DoT specs? There is no doubt that "Split DPS" can influence a guild to take a DoT class over burst but encounters like Spine of DW can also encourage guilds to take burst dps over a DoT class
Multi-dotting is a perk. On some encounters, dot classes will do well. If they are doing 150% of the damage of non-dot specs, then that's not cool. We're not trying to stamp it out though.

However, I have done raid testing on two healing classes (shaman/paladin), and in both cases, regen feels too weak, and definitely feels weaker than it did starting T11 raids in blue gear. It feels like you need to spam your low throughput/slow/efficient heal more than ever. This is surprising given the fact that we are scaled to first tier epic gear levels for raid testing. It feels like either regen cooldowns or Spirit scaling needs to be bumped up across the board.
That's useful feedback. We just need to make sure that the problem is really healer mana regen and not the fact that players may not fully understand the encounters yet (so are taking more damage than intended from stuff that is supposed to be interrupted or avoided), or that certain encounter abilities are overtuned.

Death Knight
Another issue is our aoe threat. Currently blood boil and DnD hit like wet noodles and that creates a lot of issues with aoe threat. The first few seconds are also an issue. Having to apply diseases to get the weakened blows debuff on the mobs can be a pain compared to the other tanks. With the few seconds time of getting diseases up can cause even more aoe threat problems.
We'll look at Death and Decay. It was fine the last time we looked at it, and I believe Unholy still uses it as part of a single-target rotation, so that implies the numbers can't be too far off for Blood.

There was at least one bug with Blood Boil (the disease bonus only affected the base points, not the AP scaling) and we buffed it even beyond that. It should hit much, much harder now.

Incidentally, the biggest problem with Army of the Dead was pet scaling, which was apparently broken for almost every class. Our apologies. We have that fixed up now so you should be able to evaluate the results soon.

Monk
That bears the question: Is everyone else too low, or are they too high?
Mistweavers are too high. Other healers are about right.

While we are trying to hold things relatively stable for a bit so that you can really dig into rotations, monks are new, so they are less stable than other specs. There are still bugs and unimplemented tech that we need to make them work correctly. We still appreciate monk feedback -- we are emphatically not saying don't bother -- but take monk numbers with an even larger grain of salt than other classes.

Rogue
The current way Sanguinary Vein works is like how Bandit's Guile works on live which you said was to punishing. Is there anything going to be done to make this mechanic less punishing to match what was done for the other 2 rogue specs?
We want Sub to use Rupture (and recently buffed it). We don't want Sub to get the full benefit of Sanguinary Vein without having Rupture going. The old Bandit's Guile was a stacking mechanic, which feels redundant with poison stacking mechanics and combo point stacking mechanics. Having to have ability X up before you can do max damage doesn't cross the same line for us.

[chaos5061]

Scarlet Halls (Challenge Mode)
In this beta build, we will be unlocking the Challenge mode for the Scarlet Halls instance.

A few relevant testing notes:
You must have completed the Heroic version of the dungeon once in order to attempt the challenge mode.
Item level will be normalized to 463.
There is no queue system for challenge modes; groups must be formed manually and you must zone in from the outside world.
The current Gold/Silver/Bronze times are not final.
While the challenge is active, the group leader may Reset the dungeon at any time via a drop-down accessible by right-clicking your unit frame.
You may want to dig up those dusty keybindings for things like crowd control and interrupts.

Please use this thread to share feedback regarding the dungeon, including information on group composition and completion times.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria and...it's point?
Well I do love exploration and adventure.
There will be lore. Oh yes, there will be.

After questing through every zone I could count on 1 hand, maybe I'd need a couple fingers from the other, the quests that had direct ally vs horde story to it. The rest is what wow has always been, new factions, that send you out collecting and killing monsters.

If there is a war going on between ally and horde in Pandaria, there must be some island still shrouded in mist and they're all fighting over there.I should add, or it hasn't been implemented yet.
Actually, let me address this a bit for you: First off, we didn't want to force anyone to PvP that doesn't want to PvP. So, our focus is on creating opportunities for those on PvP realms just by the guard changes we hope to implement as well as having solid hubs of activity.

Second off, I don't want to give away too much, but the release of Mists of Pandaria and what you see in beta is just the beginning. Like any expansion we've done before, you can expect a patch (or two etc.) that continue to move things forward. The launch is about learning about Pandaria, what the intrusion of the Horde and Alliance (and their conflict) means for the land and the denizens within it. That would be the "explore" and "adventure" portion I mentioned. It would also seem a bit odd if that was all we focused on in Pandaria given that we don't need to go to a new land for there to be conflict between the two factions, right?

PvP Power Not Active Outside of Battlegrounds and Arenas?
Is this testing or speculation? Because PvP Power and PvP Resilience should work anywhere with regard to DPS, but of course only when you are attacking or being attacked by other players.

The only thing that doesn't work is PvP Power-fueled healing. At the moment, you only gain the healing benefit when in BGs and Arenas. The reason is because that we don't want PvP gear to be super effective for PvE content (useful is fine, but super effective is not).

That design goal is easily met for damage dealers, because they won't benefit from PvP Power when damaging creatures. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple check for us to determine if a healer is healing damage done by PvP or PvE. In an Arena or BG you can make that assumption, but in the outdoor world you may be engaging in world PvP, or you may just be questing.

We are considering just letting PvP Power affect healing everywhere but dungeons and raids. That would solve world PvP and only risk unbalancing group questing and world bosses. Even the world bosses probably don't represent a huge game balance risk, given that the option always exists to get tons of players together to zerg them.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria PvP
A nice video Braindeadly, you make some nice points and do understand that we are listening to the community and we actively pass feedback on to the developers in the US. As you can see in the recent blog on "The Future of PvP in Mists of Pandaria" we are focused on and want to have more PvP content than ever before. Hopefully there will be even more information coming that we can communicate about future of PvP.

The thing is, while we all totally agree with you, right now it feels like close to nothing is done with our feedback (just look at Rasen's thread, only reply we get is 'hey, looks good, keep discussing').
Generally any post from us can easily derail a thread, we did not want to cause this as there was some great feedback and wanted it to continue. As stated above we are actively passing on feedback to the developers.

Please do continue to add your feedback and thoughts as well as the discussion of them to this thread

A lot of these questions I sadly do not have the answers to at this time and let's also not turn this into a Q&A thread. I meant by my last post that we try to give answers to more specific questions as they occur through normal discussion. I will answer what I can from the questions raised:

Is there a spectator mod in progress? That's something alot of people want to both kill time and to improve their game in general.
There is a custom UI that was created by fans specifically for spectating to commentate arena tournaments, however that requires the people to queue for 5v5 matches and the two spectators per team to die There are currently no plans for an official spectator mode to be released at this time.

Is blacklisting going to apply to Arenas to? As you might read these forums you can't really ignore all the RoV & Dalaran map threads.
At this time blacklisting is not a part of the arena queuing system, but maybe this will change in the future.

2) What are your plans to encourage world PvP in Pandaria for especially high-end PvP'ers. Is it possible there could be PvP objectives that gave higher Conquest caps or other epic, important rewards?
No flying mounts until level 90 and an item that can dismount players, world bosses which factions will be competing against each other to kill, areas that players will want to gain control of such as the black market auction house and also us just wanting to have people back out in the world. Generally the most enjoyable world PvP is something that occurs spontaneously because you encounter others randomly, not because of stuff that the designers put in to create conflict.

[chaos5061]

Pet Battle Availability
I really want to level up my pet...
Soon! We are very close to getting it on beta. Give us a little bit more time to crush the big bugs and then you guys can have at it. =)

Why does Blizzard Nerf Dungeons?
Let's please agree to avoid making this into a "hardcore vs. casual" debate.

The long and short of it is simply we want to make sure that we provide opportunities for as many people as possible to see the content. As I mentioned previously, most people who are "cutting edge" are through the content before it ever gets any adjustments. From there, it's about getting more people through the content (as appropriate). It really doesn't do us a lot of good to create content that only a very small portion of the community will ever get to see.

Yes, Raid Finder is there to help people who want to see that content, but many like to also move on from there into Normal and Heroic as a part of their gear progression as well. Giving them the opportunity isn't necessarily a bad thing.

We have a variety of discussions going on here and what I'm seeing boils down to this:

People feel their own accomplishments are diminished if others are given the opportunity at a "lesser" difficulty to do the same thing.
People feel that players who are given a "leg up" will be less capable of doing the more difficult content because they were given the leg up to begin with.
People are concerned about not getting the challenge they seek.

Accomplishments often can be seen by the type of gear you've managed to get, or the Achievements you've earned. Those can't be taken away from you and if someone else happens to earn those, then great. While the game has a competitive nature at points, not everyone is going to be "first", but hopefully most everyone will get a shot at being able to take part in the experience anyway. Challenge modes will be available for those that want to show off their ability as solid players. The bonuses though, will be purely cosmetic. It's all about the bragging rights and transmog gear. (We'll be able to put out more information on all of this before long to remind everyone of it.)

On the second issue, if we don't get people the chance to try to begin with, then they will never have the opportunity to improve. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort for many players who automatically believe that someone isn't trying just because they may have rusty skills (from taking time away) or may not know their class well enough because they haven't had the time to truly learn it or a variety of other issues. What it comes down to though, is that if you don't give them the shot, they will never learn at all. They may not even want to learn if their experience in attempting to do so has been a poor one. You've got to let someone up now and then instead of keeping them knocked down if you want them to rise to the occasion. What you may think is a "bad" player may just be inexperienced. You won't know until they are given the chance. Are there people who may not catch on as quickly or who may not necessarily try? Sure. But that is not the majority. It's just select "bad" experiences or your own mindset setting you up for bad that makes this so.

Last, the challenge will be there if you take it for yourself. If you can't be first, you can at least be one of the first. And beyond that, there will be challenge modes or Achievements worth getting.

So yes, we will make adjustments to the difficulty to give more people the opportunity to progress whether they are casual, hardcore, experienced, new, veteran, returning players, what have you. We want people to be able to play the game that so many have invested so much time and effort into developing.

[chaos5061]

Grand Expedition Yak Price Increase

The

Reins of the Grand Expedition Yak

has been hit with a price increase to 120,000. Most players will be able to purchase it at the discounted price of 108,000, which comes from the

Bartering

guild perk.

[chaos5061]

The Lorewalker Stories

In Mists of Pandaria there are several extra

lore related achievements to go with the regular zone exploration achievements.

Once you have found all of the objects for an achievement, Lorewalker Cho will send you mail that asks you to meet him at the Seat of Knowledge. Once there he will narrate a small story that gives you some more information about Pandaria lore.

In the video below, the Heart of the Mantid Swarm story is told to you.

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

We knocked out a lot of bugs on pet scaling. You probably have some of these now and will get more updates over time.

All pets get:
Crit: 100% of your Crit (Melee/Ranged/Spell individually)
Hit: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
Exp: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
Resil: 100% of your Resil
PvP Power: 100% of your PvP Power
Haste: 100% of your Haste (Melee/Ranged/Spell/Regen individually)
Dodge: 100% of your Dodge
Parry: 100% of your Parry
Armor: Various %s of your Armor, based on pet
HP: Various %s of your HP, based on pet

Some pets get, as appropriate to the pet:
SP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
AP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
RAP: Some % of your RAP, based on pet
Mastery: Warlock and Mage pets get 100% of your Mastery
Mana: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana
Mana Regen: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana Regen

This might work in an average raiding guild. But I'll tell you right now I can already spot a few encounters where a particular class is going to outshine another class due to the mechanics of the encounter and abilities of a class.
Please provide that feedback (perhaps in the dungeon and raid forum) as you see it. We don't believe it's an unsolvable problem though. Healer representation was pretty good throughout Cataclysm, even when various classes had the fight or two that was awesome for them.

I liked the old model of Wrath far more than Cata and Mists current model. When you try to make each healer a jack of all trades you essentially take away a very key aspect of why players chose to play the class to begin with. I love tank healing, and it's actually why I rolled a Paladin to begin with. But, we've been such strong AoE healers all expansion that over the course of time tank healing duty has shifted from paladins to other classes that cannot put out the output that paladins do.
The problem with that design is that you are then saying every raid needs a paladin for tank healing, or else we say e.g. Disc priest is the other tank healer and you need one of them. The group that has a Disc priest and a paladin is just screwed. All of those single-target heals and mechanics for shaman and Holy priests become pointless because those players will say "We're the raid healers. We only AE." Now that we have 6 healing specs, it would be very challenging to make them all desirable if they had narrow niches. You can make a similar argument for tank specialization. Does a guild need to keep a Prot paladin in the wings for the fight where a Prot paladin shines? Do all the tanks just do daily quests waiting for the one fight where they get to come tank? We just think it works better if most designated specs can handle any tanking or healing situation, with enough unique mechanics that things don't get too stale.

[chaos5061]

Death Knight
HS does around 20% of your DPS. Switching to Blood Boil, then, will be a considerable drop. DS does 15% of your DPS.
I mentioned Blood Boil above. We also agree that the difference in damage between Death Strike and Heart Strike was too much, so we increased Death Strike and decreased Heart Strike.

Is the Gargoyle intended to gain any benefit from Unholy Presence or Improved Unholy Presence, given the latter's classification as increased attack speed and rune regen?
Nope. Those don’t give any Spell Haste, which is what the Gargoyle cares about.

Hunter
1) Currently having 1 pet and the glyph to duplicate said pet (assuming Ferocity) does significantly less (about ~40-45%) of having 5 Ferocity pets on-call when using Stampede. Can you clarify if there is a bug currently with the glyph?
The gylph required new code support, which may not be in yet. Regardless, it should cause no difference in damage, from just having 5 Ferocity pets naturally.

2) Assuming the glyph is being used and 4 duplicates of your current pet are called, are the 4 duplicates called with the baseline stats, or are the buffs from the original pet copied to them; i.e. is the design of Stampede intended for it to be used after AP procs and Rabid/Bestial Wrath to maximize the damage of the other pets? It seems to fit the niche of the Doomguard for Demo currently where lining up buffs causes the Doomguard to scale in damage and would add a measure of complexity to the CD.
It doesn’t copy buffs from the current pet, but all of the pets do benefit from pet scaling (more on scaling in a bit).

Paladin
Do the developers intend/want Holy pallys to use Selfless Healer, Glypth of Ascetic Crusader, and those types of rotations (Crusader Stirke for melee range, Judgement for extended range) to manage mana/heals?
There should be no mandatory talents or glyphs. We left Selfless Healer as an option for Holy paladins who like using Judgment. We don't have a problem with using Crusader Strike sometimes -- there are going to be plenty of situations where you won't want to stand in melee.

It sounds like part of the problem is that Holy is using Light of Dawn in every situation, even tank healing because of the Beacon transfer. In our effort to get paladins to use the spell again (instead of just spamming Holy Radiance and ignoring Holy Power), we may made it too good relative to Word of Glory. As I said recently, if we buff Holy Radiance too much and nerf Light of Dawn too much, then we're back to ignoring Holy Power. If Holy Radiance is too weak and Light of Dawn is too strong, then paladins can only AE heal once every X seconds.

We're not seeing paladins struggle with mana (including paladins who stay at range and aren't using Selfless Healer) compared to shaman, druids and priests in our raid tests. The more Flash of Lights and to a lesser extent Divine Lights you throw out, the worse your longevity will be, but of course sometimes you need to use those spells.

Is the expectation that Holy pallys will be an ultra specialized raid class? I'm curious on this, as currently the mutliple situtaional rotations are complex at best.
No, we don't do that anymore. Different healers do have different mechanics, which will enable them to shine in different situations, e.g. grouping up favors Resto shaman a lot. But the goal is that if your 10-player raid has 2 of any class of healer (and possibly even two of the same spec, though that may be tougher), you're in good shape and don't generally swap one healer for another on certain fights.

While I agree with your stance and understand that this is the ideal direction and that it is going to be hard to reach it, you have to at least acknowledge that SH is going to be better in mostly any scenario for PvE. If this continues to be the case I assure you that it will not be an option, it will become a mandatory talent.
I think that's just tuning. Do you think Selfless Healer would be so attractive without the Ascetic Crusader glyph? We don't think that glyph is super compelling for Prot and Ret these days (meaning beta) and it wasn't intended to have such strong synergy with Selfless Healer.

I agree that the issue is LoD being ridiculous right now. But there's more to it. Perhaps a solution to look at is adding Holy Power generation back to Holy Light. Maybe not every cast, but perhaps every 2 Holy Lights you cast you generate one Holy Power. Right now HR is barely worth casting, and as such very few are going to take advantage of it. Holy Power generation feels weak because of it. Mana feels weak because of Holy Power generation.
We may be being too cautious with Holy Radiance, but it is very easy to turn it into something like the new Light of Dawn, where every cast is better spent on Holy Radiance than single target heals. 25-player raids (which we aren't publicly testing yet) always allow healers to specialize a little more, and players haven't yet seen every raid fight, so they don't have a good grasp of how many group up vs. spread out (too over-simplify matters) there are.

We wanted to see what giving back a little haste and crit to everyone would do. If that isn't sufficient to bump up Holy Power generation a little, we're also considering reinstating Divine Favor.

There may be some way to return Holy Power to Holy Light, but we don't want a return to the style of spamming Holy Light on the Beacon target and nothing else. All of these mechanics are intended to give paladins options rather than there being the one true rotation that works for most rotations. Sometimes you should want to heal a wounded target and rely on Beacon to help the tank. Sometimes you should want to heal the tank directly (and benefit from Tower of Radiance to provide Holy Power). Sometimes you should want to Holy Radiance because several folks are wounded and sometimes the mana should be better spent on a Divine Light or Flash of Light. Sometimes Holy Power should be for Light of Dawn and sometimes for Word of Glory (or Eternal Flame).

[chaos5061]

Shaman
What are the Echo of the Elements proc chances for Enhancement and Elemental?
Echo of the Element’s proc chance is 6% for Elemental and Restoration, and 30% for Enhancement.

Warlock
Touch of Chaos is used to refresh Corruption, then is manually canceled prior to dropping from Metamorphosis to prevent any in-flight bolts refreshing Corruption without the buff Metamorphosis confers?
We think this was a little confusing, so we renamed the auto attack override to simply "Melee", and Demonic Slash to "Touch of Chaos." The new Touch of Chaos (aka, Demonic Slash), extends Corruption (instead of refreshing, which would recalculate damage). The Melee auto attack no longer affects Corruption. This means no more problems with in-flight bolts.

How is the interaction with Malefic Grasp/Drain Soul speeding Dot ticks and KJ's cunning supposed to work? Does the slowing of cast time have some interaction with the dot ticks or does it only affect the channeled spell's tick time (and therefore dmg)?
The period of channeled spells is slowed with Kil’jaeden’s Cunning, but the DoT hastening effect of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul is not. Just the MG will deal reduced DPS -- the DoTs will stay full DPS.

Also, what is the intended interaction between burning rush and KJ's cunning?
I assume you’re referring to them both affecting movement speed? They stack, multiplicatively: normally 100%, but while casting and moving 80%, while burning 150%, and while casting and moving and burning 120%.

Warrior
How does Flurry interact with auto-attack swing times? If you gain the Flurry buff on an auto-attack, does the next auto attack from that hand gain the haste benefit? When dual-wielding, does the Flurry buff that gets removed / added "mid-swing" affect the remaining auto-attack swing time(s)? Finally, at what point is the Flurry stack decremented?
The exact specifics of what happens to swings that are partially cooled down when the buff expires or is gained are a little hazy, but it should basically work like this: while the buff is up, both auto-attacks’ swing timers are shortened. If the buff falls off when one swing is 50% cooled down, it continues from being 50% cooled down at the slower swing time. If you gain the Flurry buff on one auto attack, the next auto attack from that hand does gain the haste benefit. The Flurry stack is decremented when the 3rd auto attack lands after the attack that triggered Flurry.