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

[chaos5061]

Death Knight
I don't understand why the 30s reduction in the outbreak CD was removed in contradiction to this portion in the article. Was it to make the first tier of talents more viable?
We feel like the short Outbreak for Blood wasn't a great design. It was probably the right choice at the time, but in Mists, every tank will have to focus more on what were traditionally DPS abilities (since they translate to resources and therefore threat). We didn't think it was compelling gameplay to let Blood opt out of disease transmission. That said, you can get a lot of the gameplay back through Unholy Blight if you choose.

Druid

If this is the preferred design why do Guardians have to spend rage for Maul? It has been stated a few times that Maul would never be used except to solo things (an only if the damage comes up).
Maul is still a DPS button. It may not be one you use often, but there will be times when you don't care about surviving (when the boss needs to die NOW, or even when you're solo or running a scenario perhaps). We may eventually end up adding a proc or something (hopefully not exactly like Ultimatum), but we're not sure it's needed. At the moment Guardian damage is too high, so encouraging more Mauls isn't super high priority.

Hunter
Based on my testing so far with the snake trap formula, it looks like snake trap is going to be doing enough damage (at least for SV) that we would want to include it in our rotation (assuming I calculated the scaling right).
You're probably right, and we don't want Snake Trap to be used rotationally. We do want Snake Trap damage to be in the non-joke range. We'll try to find some middle ground.

In the current beta build, survival's damage is being hindered by explosive shot ticking for almost less than a serpent sting tick.
In ilevel 460, I show Serpent Sting ticking for about 6K and Explosive Shot ticking for about twice that. Overall, Explosive Shot contributes 3x or 4x as much damage as Serpent Sting. What are you seeing?


It feels extremely weak while PvPing, have you played survival in a bg recently? You can barely make a difference without spamming cobra shot.
Survival gets a lot of damage from dots, which is just a different model than Marks. We can push damage numbers around a bit (perhaps nerf Cobra Shot so it's not quite so much of an upgrade over Steady Shot) but at some point that's just going to mean the difference between MM and SV is the name of their signature shot. Dots also can be really powerful in PvP. I would want to see some more testing before determining that Survival needs very high burst damage to be PvP viable.

Monk
This honestly bothers me a hell of a lot, because when you nerf energy regen for monks, you're making their best tanking stat haste.
It's a good stat for Brewmasters for sure, and it needs to be because monks will have haste on their gear. However, Brewmasters probably have the most valuable secondary stats of any spec in the game. They don't really have bad stats, and their good stats aren't a ton better than others. (If you think that isn't the case, please feel free to argue that point though.)

[chaos5061]

Shaman
That talent is the only thing keeping Rshamans wanted due to our lack of spread healing(Double HTT helps with that). If you remove that ability you might as well leave us how we were in T11/T12 due to lack of such healing. It also doesn't help the other two choices are not even a choice due to how bad they are. You can make Cote a 30 minute cd and we would still take it.
We don't want Resto shaman to be balanced around a mandatory talent, and you probably don't want that either. The design we are trying internally right now is letting it reset all totem cooldowns less than 3 minutes, but lowering its cooldown to 3 minutes.

From the logs I have seen so far we are either behind other healers or barely equal in select cases with regards to healing numbers and I pray hardmodes will solve this due to our mastery. Not to mention our mana regen is nothing to brag about
We look at all of those logs and watch many, many raid boss attempts. If you have specific cases where you feel like shaman aren't competitive healers or struggle with mana, please point those out (but as I have said, Mistweavers are an outlier right now, not the target.) Specific examples are much more useful to us (and I suspect other players) than general "well, what if there's a fight with these parameters?"

A simple quick glance at this list clearly shows the cheapest spell for shaman being more expensive than ANY priest spell in either spec.
As other players pointed out:

Flash Heal costs 19,800 mana.
Healing Surge costs 18,960 mana.

In any case, as I said, you have to look at the whole package. Healing Rain heals for a lot, but it's also not a cheap spell. Paladin heals appear very expensive, yet they have a lot of free heals. Healing Surge's throughput is propped up partially by Tidal Waves. I also know shaman like to call Mana Tide Totem a raid cooldown and not a personal cooldown, but it still gives you mana. If you just stand their OOM with Mana Tide available, your raid leader may scratch her head.

Is it intended for Elemental Blast to give a random buff instead of your increasing your highest stat?
Yes.

Is it intended for Glyph of Riptide to not proc Resurgence?
No. We’re changing Glyph of Riptide to reduce the healing done by Riptide’s initial heal by 90%, instead of removing it, so that it still functions with Resurgence, Ancestral Awakening, Echo of the Elements, etc.

Of course it affects our regen, and of course we are going to use it. However, the problem is that it also gives the same amount of mana to every other healer in the raid. Because every other healer gets Mana Tide plus Divine Plea/Shadowfiend/Innervate, Shaman regen will naturally feel lower than that of other classes (and probably output will also be lower because of not having a personal regen cooldown).
We like Mana Tide Totem's group benefit though. If Resto shaman struggle with mana, then we'd more likely buff the mana return from Resurgence rather than give them another cooldown. (We could also have Mana Tide give more mana to the shaman, but then you might have to make an unfun decision about whether your mana needs were more important than the other healers.)

[chaos5061]

Warlock
Right now, the specs with the spammiest AoE are doing a lot more damage. I'm harping on Destro's AoE as an example of a stupidly complex AoE rotation that does very weak damage.
Ultimately, Destro is largely using their single target spells to do AE along with Rain of Fire. You can also prepare for the ramp up by saving up embers just before the AE moment starts.

- Pyroclasm - Is it intended for it to be a dps loss to use the Backdraft charges on CB?
For maximum sustained damage, you will probably do better using Backdraft on Incinerate. There are times when burst damage is more important though, and faster Chaos Bolts will be attractive.

I say this with a little tongue in cheek, but for some players, winning meters is more important. For others, beating the boss is.

- Dark Soul - Are you happy with the benefit that each spec is deriving from this cooldown? Right now, Destro yet again feels like it falls behind because RNG can significantly negate the benefits of its cooldown (i.e. - you may not crit any more than you would normally; it's even possible to crit less frequently during its duration!
Well, Chaos Bolt always crits, so you can align them with Dark Soul....

[chaos5061]

New LFR Loot System
I think one of the real questions here is how does the game determine this exactly.
It starts at the first player and rolls a number from 1-100. If it rolls <5, you win loot. Then it goes to the next player. The game doesn't care what any individual player rolled, so once under a blue moon it might be possible for all 25 to get loot. (The actual chance might not be 5%, but you get the idea.)

This is why there is no concept of passing or anything else, because whether you win loot or not has no bearing on whether other players win loot.

This is sort of off-topic but semi-related, but how will World Bosses work? Will they use the LFR loot system or require that I be in the group that tagged it? I foresee a lot of same-faction griefing if it didn't use the LFR one (ie: pulling the boss early and dropping combat immediately forcing it to respawn several minutes later in a different location, or just plain pulling it early to wipe the group before they're ready) or pulling a lot of extra nearby mobs, etc.
We might have loot work slightly differently on the two world bosses since they appear at different frequencies. In general world bosses work exactly like LFR. If you want to invite everyone in the area into the raid, it won't diminish your chance to get loot. The only reason to not invite people is if you want to be a jerk for some reason. Individuals do have to be in the group that has loot rights (i.e. tagged the boss). We are fine with there being some competition especially on PvP servers; that's part of what world bosses are all about. If you just loiter in the vicinity and do a little damage but aren't part of the raid group, you won't have a shot at loot.

I know you didn't mention here, GC, but someone (Blue) has in the past, and that is the idea that the mechanism for LFR loot distribution may be that the game chooses X random people to win loot, where X is some number either hardcoded into the loot system, or chosen by some other mechanism at the time the loot drops (for example).
We considered that approach, but were concerned that it would pressure groups into killing a boss with the smallest group possible. Theoretically if you killed a boss with 5 characters, then each would win loot and you would be motivated not to invite friends or strangers. We went with a model where the number of characters has no bearing on whether you win loot or not.

All of this is for Raid Finder and world bosses. Dungeon Finder (for now) still uses the Cataclysm system and guild raids use whatever system you want, such as Master Looter or Free for All.

So does that mean if you win something in LFR in mists it is NOT tradeable? So if two friendly priests queue for LFR and one of them wins a piece that he already has, he cannot trade it to his GF who actually needs it?
Correct. Being able to trade loot works great with groups of friends. It can work okay if you are a nice person, but there isn't much incentive to look out for your fellow players if you aren't likely to ever group with them again. Overall it just seems to cause loot drama. "Trade with me, because I ran this raid a dozen times and didn't get the drop." "Trade with me, because it's a bigger upgrade for me than you." "Give me that item, because I inspected your achievements and I raid more than you." This anonymity is one of the weaknesses of Raid Finder for sure, but we think in the long run that the strengths of being able to join a raid whenever you want outweigh those limitations.

Will it select loot as it deems "appropriate" for just the class in general, or for their specific spec? I would really hate to win loot, just to find out i received an item for holy, when I am playing Ret.
It looks at your spec, not your class. We decided it was a superior design to give you something for a role that we know you use rather than trying to guess whether you ever like to tank or not. There are plenty of other avenues (dungeons, factions, scenarios, crafting, the AH, PvP, guild runs, etc.) to gear up for an alternate spec.

With random rolls you don't really get that feeling because it is all visible and most people don't believe that Blizzard is altering the /roll just for them (although sometimes it feels that way). The new LFR system doesn't look very transparent, and so a person constantly seeing nothing go into their bags might lose hope that they will win anything and stop raiding altogether.
Possibly, but there are plenty of cases today where players don't believe that random roles are random.

What if it's entirely guild based group, it will still use LFR loot rules and not master looter? that seems a bit ackward.
I honestly don't remember. Usually if we know the group is pre-made, then we let you use what loot rules you want. The only reason we would not have implemented that way is if it was technically challenging for some reason, and I just can't remember which way it ended up. For world bosses, I suspect it still uses the Raid Finder loot system, because we didn't want there to be any reason to exclude a friend of a friend or whatever.

Does this mean that you might consider switching the Dungeon Finder loot system to use something similar to the new LFR system? I realize that random 5-man groups should be able to distribute loot appropriately through communication, but in practice this seldom happens. Instead, some people will roll need on everything they can which ends up in undesirable loot distribution - particularly with respect to gear that is not armor-type restricted (e.g., Hunter rolling need on dodge trinket).
If the Raid Finder loot system works out, we would consider adding it to dungeons. One of the challenges is that dungeon bosses typically have shallower loot tables than raid bosses. If you are a Holy paladin and the dungeon boss doesn't have a Holy paladin item, we would have to decide how to handle that (maybe you can't win a roll for that boss, or maybe you'd get gold or valor instead). For raid bosses, we can make sure every boss has at least one thing you can use. (Granted, you may already own that item.)

The game keeps track of who is in who's group upon entering LFR. If say 5 friends grouped up to help one person gear, couldn't the game allow trading of items that drop between those people only? That way everyone still gets their roll chance but if a few geared players want to help a friend they still can? It wouldn't affect the overall roll chance in the new LFR system but it would allow people who want to help their friends gear up quickly for whatever reason.
Potentially. If the basic system works out we could consider adding something like this. It would have the risk / side-effect that a group of 25 players could still potentially funnel every item to one player and gear that player up faster. Maybe that's fine.

[chaos5061]

Content Difficulty and Consumption Speed
Players who have cleared have already beaten the challenge, put in the hours then 2-3 months later people who put in half the effort get the same reward.
If someone, months later, can clear the content in half the time the original group did, then it probably is a group that doesn't need the debuff to play at that level anyways.

A group that needs the 20% debuff to progress through Heroic Dragon Soul is not going to realistically clear it in half the time or half the effort than others did. It's really allowing them to tackle the content, not breeze through it.

Wether or not players haven't cleared Dragon Soul at this point is slightly irrelevant Ujellibrah, I'm saying this because when the nerfs started most had only just returned from Christmas holidays.., and considering it's only an 8 boss tier with a very limited loot table, 1 - 1½ month is next to no time for a proper gearing process in terms of a raid throughout put (Natural nerf through gearing to overcome a challenging boss)

From my PoV that's the only issue I have with nerfs, they are coming far to fast even when it's in increments as we've experienced this time
This is actually useful feedback (which you and others have mentioned on this thread) for the developers, thanks.

I love it how Draztal categorizes you as a hardcore if you liked TBC raiding above all others. I raided 3 nights a week for 3,5 hours, without voicecom. That's miles from hardcore imo. We did not manage to kill Vashj or Kael, but for the love of God we had fun trying to.
Oh, please, not at all. I loved TBC and I was very deep into raiding back then. I've actually mentioned what I think a hardcore player would be here.

When you stepped on this road, and removed attuments, our guild stopped raiding. Because we were not supposed to see MH or BT, we we're not prepared.
So, you had the chance to progress further (and actually get gear that would have helped you overcoming Vashj and Kael'thas) but you decided that, for whatever reason, you didn't belong in there, despite the removal of the attunements. That kind of self-imposed restriction is fine, sure, but I can't feel much empathy to an argument that basically says "we couldn't progress, and when you gave us the chance to do something different and progress, we still refused to take it."

Watched some documentary about raiding a while back. They described raiding as a giant jigsaw puzzle you're trying to solve with 9/24 like minded people, by putting the right pieces on the right places. With blanket nerfs, the solving the puzzle part has vanished. You solve the puzzle by slamming the pieces where ever you please, even if they dont fit. By time, the pieces break down and fit where ever you slam them. That's not how you solve a puzzle. That's not how you overcome a mechanic, which frankly arent all that hard in DS.
The debuff only makes things easier, it doesn't get rid of any mechanics, and you can't ignore them either.

Heroic modes are supposed to test your skills. It's a !@#$ed up world where we are heading if your not supposed to improve yourself. Just like demanding Rooney, Messi or Ronaldo to play x % worse just so that Mike from next door can play with them in the WC finals.
Players improve every time, some will improve more than others, but there's always something to learn when you're progressing through encounters.

Ps. How on earth can you call Hagara HC a roadblock?
It's a roadblock for the guilds stuck on that boss (others may be stuck on Yor'sahj, and others may be stuck on Blackhorn, you probably get the point).

No one who is taking raiding halfways seriousely needs a nerf in DS normal. Normal modes generally are too easy, like some kind of meaningless thing you do the first week after release to unlock heroic modes
It might be meaningless to you, but there're players progressing through Normal even these days, for whatever their reason is. If your guild is used to raiding in Heroic, that's great, but don't write off Normal as something that noone does other than to unlock Heroic, because, honestly, it's not true. There are players that do find a challenge in that difficulty, and actually expect at some point to move on and tackle Heroic, just as other guilds are doing now.

I bet we would've killed Rag, but reaching that amount of tries would have taken 10 months.
Honest question, do you realistically think your guild, you, and your friends, would have kept up with 10 months of straight bashing your head against Ragnaros? 10 months, 40 weeks of knowing that there's nothing new in your raid than this one boss you're seeing where you're making almost very little weekly progress. Time is a big factor here. There's a difference on keeping the willingness to tackle a challenge for 2 weeks straight until you see it fall, with keeping that same willingness during 10 months.

[chaos5061]

Upcoming Raid Testing Difficulty
At this point it's likely that we will do 10-player Heroic testing before we do 25-player testing. In any case, that testing is waiting on the next beta build, which contains numerous balance changes and fixes made based on the first round of tests. We'll try to provide as much advance notice as possible regarding the date and time of the next testing sessions.

Sha of Anger Testing
We have applied a hotfix that causes the Sha of Anger to respawn within minutes instead of the usual period of hours, to facilitate testing of this encounter on beta. If you have not yet checked it out, you can find the encounter in Kun-Lai Summit.

Please use this thread to share any feedback. Thanks!

Salyis's Warband Testing
We have applied a hotfix that causes Galleon and his band of marauding saurok to respawn within minutes instead of the usual period of days, to facilitate testing of this encounter on beta. If you have not yet checked it out, you can find the encounter on the southern edge of Valley of the Four Winds.

Please use this thread to share any feedback. Thanks!

[chaos5061]

New Recruit a Friend Mount: Obsidian Nightwing

Blizzard sent out an email today reminding people that have and unclaimed

X-53 Touring Rocket from the current Recruit a Friend program to claim them before July 17th. After that date the new mount, Heart of the Nightwing, will be the reward for recruiting other players. This mount allows you to carry one other player on your back.

If you have a Rocket pending and would like this new mount, you need to leave the Rocket unclaimed to get the new mount when it is released.

[chaos5061]

Terrace of Endless Spring: Protectors of the Endless

Protectors of the Endless is the first encounter in the Terrace of Endless Spring raid.

[chaos5061]

Terrace of Endless Spring
Straddling the mountain range between the Jade Forest and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, the Terrace of Endless Spring has been a sacred refuge for millennia. Its peaceful fountains are said to have the power to heal and rejuvenate, but when the Sha of Fear attacked, many of the complex's guardians turned on each other in fits of terror.

Achievements
Heroic: Protectors of the Endless - Defeat the Protectors of the Endless in Terrace of Endless Spring on Heroic difficulty.
Power Overwhelming - Defeat the Protectors of the Endless with each protector as the last member alive on Normal or Heroic difficulty in Terrace of Endless Spring.

Protectors of the Endless
Sha Corruption - Killing a member of the Protectors causes Sha Corruption to explode from their bodies and possess the remaining Protectors. Sha Corruption heals each Protector to their maximum health, increases their damage done by 25%, and grants them additional abilities.
Protector Kaolan
Touch of Sha - Protector Kaolan corrupts a player, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage every 3 seconds until players defeat Protector Kaolan.
Defiled Ground - Protector Kaolan uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Protector Kaolan desecrates the land beneath a player's location for the remainder of the fight, inflicting 100,000 Shadow damage every second and increasing damage taken from Defiled Ground by 0% for 45 sec. This effect stacks.
Expel Corruption - Protector Kaolan uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Protector Kaolan expels a mass of corruption at his location for the remainder of the fight, inflicting 100,000 Shadow damage to all players within 30 yards every 3 seconds. The damage of Expelled Corruption decreases as a player stands farther away from the source of corruption.
Elder Regail
Lightning Bolt - Elder Regail hurls a bolt of lightning at his current target, inflicting 100,000 Nature damage.
Lightning Prison - Elder Regail imprisons 2 players in a field of lightning and stuns them. The Lightning Prison causes each player to inflict 75,000 Nature damage every second to all players within 7 yards. In 25 player Difficulty, Elder Regail imprisons 5 players.
Lightning Storm - Elder Regail uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Elder Regail summons a Lightning Storm, creating several waves of lightning strikes. The first wave strikes at Elder Regail's location and then successive waves strike in a ring around him at 20, 40, 60 and 80 yards. Each strike inflicts 400,000 Nature damage to all players within 10 yards of Lightning Storm's impact.
Overwhelming Corruption - Elder Regail uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Corruption overwhelms Elder Regail, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage to all players every 3 seconds and increases their damage taken from Overwhelming Corruption by 5%. This effect stacks.
Elder Asani
Water Bolt - Elder Asani hurls a bolt of water at a random player's location, inflicting 95,000 Nature damage to all players within 3 yards of the targeted location.
Cleansing Waters - Elder Asani summons a globe of Cleansing Waters at a Protector's location. When the globe reaches the ground, it heals all targets within 4 yards for 5% of their total health every second. Targets also receive 50% additional healing from all sources for 30 sec.
Corrupted Waters - Elder Asanil uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Elder Asani summons a globe of Corrupted Water that empowers all Protectors, granting them 100% melee and casting speed until destroyed.
Purified - Destroying the Corrupted Waters grants all players within 15 yards the Purified effect, increasing melee, ranged and spell casting speed by 100% for 20 sec.
Overwhelming Corruption - Elder Asani uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Corruption overwhelms Elder Asani, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage to all players every 3 seconds and increases their damage taken from Overwhelming Corruption by 5%. This effect stacks.
Minion of Fear - Minions of Fear pour from the Terrace of Endless Spring, pursuing the Protector with the lowest remaining health.
Corrupted Essence - When a Minion of Fear dies, it infects the 2 closest players with Corrupted Essence, increasing their damage done by 10% for 2 min. This effect stacks up to 10 times. If Corrupted Essence ever reaches 10 stacks, the player replaces the Corrupted Essence effect with the Essence of Fear. In 25 player Difficulty, Corrupted Essences infect the 5 closest players.
Essence of Fear - The Essence of Fear inflicts 250,000 Shadow damage to all players within 30 yards.
Greater Corrupted Essence - When a Minion of Fear reaches a Protector, it fills them with Greater Corrupted Essence, increasing their damage done by 10% for 2 min. This effect stacks up to 10 times. If Greater Corrupted Essence ever reaches 10 stacks, the Protector replaces the Greater Corrupted Essence effect with the Greater Essence of Fear.
Greater Essence of Fear - The Greater Essence of Fear inflicts 500,000 Shadow damage to all players and horrifies them for 3 sec.

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Agree 100%, I think GC is too stuck on balancing for PvE right now, not really looking into how survival feels in PvP, rather just saying "dots are powerful in PvP", not really, especially when the enemy has heals. And survival has no burst even with the current LnL. Not to mention dispell protection, but dispells are on a 6 second cd now..
We are stuck on numbers for purposes of this thread, and numbers just don't relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE. It's easier (but not trivial) to demonstrate that (for sake of argument) Survival's damage is lower than Marks. It's much harder to argue that Survival has PvP challenges because of that theoretical disparity. If you have PvP concerns, those are totally appropriate things to relay somewhere in this forum. Not having enough CC or group utility or whatever aren't really related to understanding theorycrafting and rotational analysis, which is the purpose of this thread.

Awesome. Basically it was the tooltip applying the diminishing returns on Agility and not on Dodge that was throwing everything off. With that, we should have better evaluations from the Guardian community.
Yeah, we will try to add dodge from Agi to the Agi and dodge tooltips. Currently they’re just included in the title of each of those tooltips, which are final values after summing all of the sources and applying DR. The “(before diminishing returns)” line in the dodge tooltip, refers just to the “dodge of X adds Y% dodge” line, not the total. It’s somewhat confusing right now. All of this goes for Strength / parry as well.

Death Knight
Question regarding Soul Reaper: assuming it costs Runic Power
We have no idea if it will cost Runic Power yet. Runic Power works okay for Unholy, but it creates a really bad rotation for Frost in execute range as you try to juggle Frost Strikes (which is why we didn't go that route to begin with). We need some time to try some things out before we're happy enough with Soul Reaper to turn you guys loose on it again.

It's not about the QQ. Yeah, other tanks get it free. So what? Classes are different. What we need to focus on is the consequences of this change. To put it briefly, Blood DKs will ignore diseases beyond using the free outbreak to maintain 50% uptime.
This is great feedback because it focuses on the consequences of things, not complaints or lobbying for buffs. While this thread aims to be all about theorycraft, there is still a place for useful feedback that doesn’t include numbers, and this post is a great example of that.

We recognize that DKs (and to a much much lesser extent warriors) currently need to sacrifice their tanking performance in order to put up Weakened Blows, and are looking at some possible solutions to that issue. We’re currently trying out a change where the Scarlet Fever passive for Blood DKs also makes Blood Boil refresh your diseases on targets it hits, but are exploring other options as well. With warriors it's trickier, but one option is to have Thunder Clap generate a tiny bit of rage. It might be fine for warriors as is though.

Druid
I don't know if it's something new to level 86+ players but to me it seems like there is a new, unforeseen formula when calculating the Agility to Dodge variable. On my level 85 Worgen Druid on the beta, I can easily get the 243.58281085 Agility to Dodge conversion working. It does appear that Base Agility is now being affected by the Agility to Dodge (whereas on live it is not).
All Agility (base and bonus) grants dodge at a rate of 951.158596 to 1% at level 90. However, dodge from bonus Agility and dodge rating is affected by diminishing returns. “Bonus” Agility refers to all Agility beyond what you have with no gear/buffs (for example, a level 90 troll Druid has 97 base Agility and all other Agility is Bonus).

[chaos5061]

Hunter
Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.
At the time we thought it was a problem. I'm not sure it's going to be a problem in Mists, but feel free to try and prove us wrong. Do you think that ranged weapon damage is going to grow faster in subsequent tiers than RAP is (keeping in mind that ranged weapons are now balanced like two-handed weapons)?

Part of our testing is to look at theoretical damage in subsequent and even final tiers. As I said before, we don't know yet what set bonuses and trinkets will look like, and it's possible we will tweak the design or numbers of a few abilities by then, but we do have a pretty good guess of how things will fall out. (To be fair, we used to suck at scaling. In vanilla there were some abilities that did a percent of attack power and some that just did flat numbers and that was that. We have gotten a lot better at keeping everything scaling with gear at about the same rate, particularly in the last two expansions.)

Can we have some on demand burst with survival's LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot...
What numbers are we talking about? Trying this out right now, in 463 gear, with no outside buffs, a non-crit Chimera Shot does 40 K damage. Three Explosive Shots do a total of 80 K damage, non-crit. (It's possible our numbers are different from beta at this point.)

Paladin
Also, CS seems to hit like a wet noodle currently in beta vis a vis HotR
Are you using a white weapon for those numbers or something like that? We show Crusader Strike hitting for about 10K and HotR for 6K in gear similar to yours.

Priest
I would IMAGINE it would be additional ticks/akin to Efflor, but am just looking for clarity. (I ask also, so we can start calculating how Haste will affect HW: Sanc from a breakpoint perspective...)
Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.

Shaman
Glyph of Riptide. Points about the lack of AA and Resurgence procs aside (because they were addressed earlier), what concerns me most about this glyph is the usage that it's seeing by shaman in the Beta, who are recording parses where RT is their primary or secondary heal because of its Rejuv-spam-like application. This practice essentially devalues Tidal Waves management and spell weaving in favor of RT blanketing.
We like the Glyph of Riptide quite a bit because it really opens up a different healing style. You can act like a druid and blanket the group with hots, which might sometimes be really effective or at the very least give you a different style of healing to try. If it looks like every shaman is going to take the glyph, we'll nerf it, but as you point out, it has downsides (like Tidal Waves).


Glyph of Chaining is incredibly weak, such that Shaman would be better off electing to handle AOE raid damage on a spread raid as we have since Ulduar--through single-target healing.
The glyph is getting a lot of use for dungeons and 10-player raiding. It's not going to be as attractive across the board in 25-player raiding because there are usually some groups around in which you can use an unglyphed Chain Heal. The melee are often grouped for at least part of any fight, and in a 25, there are usually plenty of melee.

Warlock
If that's the case, can we look into removing Ember decay?
Embers don’t decay until you’ve been out of combat for 30 sec, and decay at a rate of one every 25 sec. So if you’re spending a full minute between pulls, you’ll lose 1 ember. It shouldn’t feel particularly punitive. You may be remembering how it felt several builds ago, where they started decaying immediately and decayed one every 10 sec.

We aren't trying to be punitive here. What we want to avoid is the warlock feeling like the right way to play is to go build up full embers before any boss encounter or other serious fight. That stops feeling like breaking the rules in a fun way and starts to feel like a chore. "Let me eat food, drink a flask and go find something to build up my embers."

[chaos5061]

The Language Barrier in LFD and LFR
I'm absolutely astounded at the fact that Blizzard has put Latin realms into US Battlegroups. I am not a racist person by any means, but I do find it extremely frustrating that when I que up for a random dungeon, 9 times out of 10, my group is composed of 3/5 people who cannot speak English. I do believe that the Latin realms should be divided into their own battlegroup, considering how there is definitely enough of them. It creates quite the language barrier and creates many problems when you get a group of 5 people, and half of them don't understand the other half.
While we understand some of the sentiment about this, it's important to understand that by separating pools of players, we impact queue times. Overall, the language of the game itself can bridge the gap in most cases. There's not much else I can say about this other than I'm going to close this thread since these can often devolve into inappropriate discussion.

Arena Pass 2012 Rewards - Mount/Title Sent Out?
Both the title and the pet have already been awarded to those who were eligible. If you believe that you should have received either one of these rewards but it was not given to you, please contact our customer support team as they should be able to assist with determining your eligibility.

Do note though the characters that you use to qualify for both the pet and the title must play all of their qualifying games on the same team and must also remain in that team for the duration of Arena Pass. If you leave your team at any time it may void your eligibility by resetting the number of games that need to be played. This means that if you have left your team after you played the games to receive your pet then you might not receive it because of that.

We are currently investigating this matter where players are eligible for the pet but have not yet received it. We will get back to you on this as soon as we have an update.

Content Difficulty and Consumption Speed
Sometimes players shouldn't be able to get the BiS gear and they shouldn't complain about it, since only a few people with decent/high skill should be able to.
Why? I mean, why with objective reasons. Not because some people need to be able to brag about the awesome gear they have that noone else can but dream of acquiring.

I like the example someone gave and you decided to ignore. 'We don't ask rooney, messi,... to play worse, so mike from next door can come play in the WC football'.
I ignored it because it's twisting my example just to try to make it sound unfair. Read my wording on that post. Would you enjoy being told that you can't play football because you can't perform at the level those football players do? Probably not.

The comparison to your example in WoW terms would be asking Paragon to play worse so that Mike can join their guild, which is not what I suggested. Not. even. close.

It should be worthwhile to do the whole content of an expansion and not only the latest tier.
Well, it is worthwhile. If someone hasn't experienced Sinestra yet, I encourage them to do so. It's a fun encounter. Same applies for Heroic Ragnaros and his Heroic only phase.

No one will want to improve if they can just wait for nerfs, Jito.
Why wouldn't they want to improve? I'm actually yet to see a player in the forums saying something like "waiting for the 20% nerf before raiding!" (that it's not trolling, either).

It's one of those arguments that I've never understood. Apparently, other than you (those saying this), noone wants to improve. When in reality, what's happening, is that in most cases people have different learning curves. Some will learn and improve very quickly, and others will need much longer before reaching that same level.

Arena Spectating
As has been mentioned a few times in this topic, spectator mode for arenas and battlegrounds would be cool and it is definitely something we would like to do. At this point however, we have no plans to implement such a feature.

Just how long are they planning on waiting?
As Tom Chilton said in the video, "It's just a question of being able to get around to doing it, so someday...Hopefully"

[chaos5061]

Going to Comic-Con this week? Here is the full line-up of where you can find our licensed products!

Blizzard Entertainment Product Showcase
Thursday, July 12
Room 6BCF
2:15 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Love Diablo, World of Warcraft and StarCraft? Join Chris Metzen (Blizzard Entertainment SVP Story and Franchise Development) and a team of esteemed guests as we reveal never-before-seen licensed products and plans for 2012/2013! Talk to the creative minds behind the Blizzard product lineup, including the Mega Bloks sets, novels, comics, statues and more! Panel and Q&A session moderated by Kat Hunter (host of BlizzCon coverage on DIRECTV).

Blizzard Entertainment Autograph Signings
Insight Editions Booth (#1035)

Book of Cain -- Friday 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Micky Neilson, Flint Dille, Matt Burns

Art of Blizzard -- Friday 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Chris Metzen and Sam Didier

Christie Golden Autograph Signings
Thursday from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Cryptozoic Store
411 Market Street, San Diego CA

Thursday from 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Mysterious Galaxy Booth (#1119)

Our licensing partners will also be showing off new and upcoming Blizzard products.

Insight Editions: Stop by for a sneak peek at the upcoming The Art of Blizzard book, which offers an exclusive look at the ideas and imagery that have defined Blizzard games. Booth #1035

Brady Games: Drop in for a discount code towards the upcoming Mists of Pandaria strategy guide from Brady Games. Booth #2913

Sideshow Collectibles: Check out sculptures featuring characters from the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises, including the latest terrifying figure from Diablo III, to be revealed during the Blizzard Product Showcase panel. Booth #1929

Cryptozoic: Check out the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game at the Cryptozoic store in the San Diego Gas Lamp district. 411 Market Street

[chaos5061]

Upcoming Beta Patch
It has been a while since we have had a beta patch, but Zarhym hinted at another beta build coming tomorrow or soon after. Cory Stockton jumped in to tease us as well!

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

GC -- if you dont mind me asking -- what is the armor value for lvl 93 raiding dummies? Theck needs that data for some of his calculations.

I'm not GC, so this isn't official, but the armor number I've gotten from other sources is 24835 for the 93 dummies.
And yet, you never see Zeherah and GC anywhere at the same time. Coincidence? In any case, the number 24835 is correct.

Weapon modifier scaling is simply more fluid and linear. It benefits from both weapon upgrades and from additional AP as more AP boosts that +WDPS% that gets calculated in our shot coefficients.
Totally agree that certain classes/specs have scaled slower or faster than others in the past, but we’re not convinced that the only solution is to make everything an equal component of AP and weapon damage percent.

These are just hypothetical numbers, but if you have two shots, one of which does 100% weapon damage + 1700, and one which does 60% Attack Power, both of those shots will stay the same damage both in 463 gear, and gear at the end of the expansion. If you upgrade just your weapon, the 100% weapon damage will be ahead. If you upgrade just your armor, the %AP one will be ahead. We’re fine with the idea that when a new tier of content opens up, and you get a new weapon, Marksmanship (for example) gets slightly more of a boost from that than Survival. But if you upgrade a few pieces of armor first, Survival gets slightly more of a boost. And once you upgrade all of your gear, they’re equal again. If the two didn't reach the same target (which has happened in the past) then there would be a problem.

Essentially, is smart healing based on absolute heath values or on relative health percentage. Further, does smart healing have an inherent 'priority', preferring to heal say, Tanks over healers over DPS?
The logic for target selection on smart heals is potentially customized for each heal, but the general behavior is that they choose their target(s) based on % health, and prefer players over pets and guardians. The specific example you’re asking about, Glyphed Surging Mist, is slightly tweaked from that in that it only smart heals players, not pets or guardians at all, unless you’re channeling Soothing Mist at them.

Once upon a time there were like two smart heals in the game and now there are probably dozens. We need to eventually sit down and see if they should all use a more consistent system. (It may be fine for some of them to work differently in the name of being different too.)

But I don't need them to be equal when I've cleared all the content, I need them to be equal when I actually getting the gear and I need my abilities to scale.
If we were talking about a situation where the hunter with the new bow gets a 10% DPS increase and the hunter going for armor had to piece together an entire set of armor to get that 10% DPS increase, then that could be a problem, but it's not nearly that extreme. It's more on par with one spec that prefers haste and gets a haste trinket while the guy who likes crit has to wait a couple more weeks for a crit trinket. We want different specs to favor slightly different types of stats and items, and it's always possible for one player's current collection of gear to favor one spec or another at that moment. We don't see it as an inherent advantage for Marks, and in fact it can be a disadvantage if the weapon drops late in the zone, or has no vendor equivalent.

We can take another look at the damage scaling from just weapon damage in subsequent raid tiers (for all specs) and make sure it feels appropriate to us.

Hunter
When he says 3 Explosive Shots adding to 80k, he's referring to the individual ticks.
I meant the entire shots, not ticks. Remember that the periodic effect is rolling now, so looking at individual ticks can be misleading when multiple Explosive Shots are chained back to back to back, so we look at entire shots instead.

In regards to the Explosive Shot ticks vs shots, why in the world are we comparing 3 individual shot casts to a single shot? That's just a simple curiousity in order to understand your PoV on the topic Ghostcrawler.
That was the context. The original (probably hyperbolic) claim, IIRC, was that a Lock and Load proc didn't beat a Chimera Shot.

It's not intended that every attack in the game do equal damage, and as I said before, we think the choice of hunter spec would be pretty lame if all you got was a different icon and name for essentially the same attack. Lock and Load is two free / instant shots, and a Survival hunter tends to fire about three times as many Explosive Shots as a Marks hunter fires Chimera Shots, and the three Lock and Load shots is the burst damage that a Survival hunter would want to use for a kill window in PvP. The comparison seemed reasonable to me.

I've got some concerns about the damage of Arcane Shot versus Cobra Shot. GC has said regarding Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn that it doesn't feel very good for the builder to do more than the spender, and I think this applies here too. I'm in the vendor pvp gear fully gemmed except the meta and my Arcanes are hitting for 15-20k (so we'll say an avg 17.5k for calculating purposes) and my Cobras are hitting for 22-27k (24.5k for calculating). I went ahead and reforged for the raid levels of hit and expertise and then crit, leaving me with 5.36% haste, which brings my Cobras to a 1.9 second cast.
We agree that Arcane Shot should probably beat a Cobra Shot. It's something we can adjust as we continue to refine hunter numbers.

Also, are you able to elaborate on your previous comments about Dire Beast's tier move and Thrill of the Hunt's redesign? Like are there any thoughts on this that you would be willing to share? Both potential changes actually have pretty substantial impact on the playstyle of the Beast Mastery Hunter, far more than the other two specs.
This is sort of like the Soul Reaper problem, where giving a hint of something without you guy being able to dive into all the details and trying it out ends up producing more questions than answering anything. However, for the same reason I mentioned Soul Reaper (we didn't want DKs to keep spending effort exploring it when we're potentially going to redesign it), I'll offer a little.

At the moment, Dire Beast is on the same tier as Fervor and Thrill of the Hunt. Thrill of the Hunt has been redesigned to make Arcane or Multi-Shots free. Readiness is no longer a talent and we might try it as a core ability in some form. There is a new talent called Blink Strike with Murder of Crows and Lynx Rush. Blink Strike lets your pet teleport behind a target and cause damage on a 20 sec cooldown, somewhat like the old Warp Stalker ability. We are trying to preserve the idea of Murder of Crows in a format that is more performance friendly (as I said before, creating units is surprisingly tough on the client). Try not to make assumptions about the numbers of any of these until you get a chance to try them.