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

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Rather than quoting several additional questions and issues, we'll just do a lightning round of out of context replies. As always, just because I did not respond directly to an issue does NOT mean that it is being ignored. Please try to be reasonable about the "I'm going to keep posting until I get an answer" posts. Those never end well.

- Hurricane being stronger than Astral Storm is intended.
- Blacksmithing having a stronger profession perk is something we’re investigating.
- We’re investigating some bugs on Tranquility and Wild Growth under extreme haste (e.g. Soul of the Forest).
- Eternal Flame being on the GCD for Protection is unintended. The hot not benefitting from mastery is intended, or that talent might feel mandatory for Prot.
- Battle Healer costing mana is a bug.
- Force of Nature should scale with your crit and haste.

We're just not seeing healing priests falling behind on HPM or HPS in the current raid or challenge mode testing. I don't want to dismiss the concerns though, and we will keep an eye on it. Lack of "raid utility" is a very slippery beast. In my experience, healers always think their particular character lacks it. We believe however that all of the healers will continue to see plenty of PvE use, as they did in Cataclysm, and we want to get more of them competitive in PvP.

Warlocks, we want to mention that one thing inflating Demonology on beta currently is a bug with Decimation, which is making it trigger from Shadow Bolts on targets at any health % a majority of the time. That’s going to significantly influence target dummy comparisons. That’ll be fixed in the next build. (This isn’t to say that Demonology isn’t higher than Affliction/Destruction, but it's a discrepancy worth noting.)

Druid
Is it intended that Bonus Armor is affected by Guardian Mastery? For example the Mantid Elixir which provides +2250 Armor is multiplied by the Guardian Mastery for a bonus of 2475 armor (before gear and buffs).
Yes, this is intended. Guardian Mastery should be a final multiplier on all armor.

Bloom's nerf now puts its mastery buffed healing per Shroom at 9.25k (LvL 90, full PvP gear, no gems/enchants/buffs).

For a 25man that number is somewhat acceptable if you manage to heal 10+ people with all 3 Shrooms for a total of only 277.5k healing done (without DR or AoE cap). After at least 3 GCDs of set up that just does not make it that attractive of a spell.
Bloom is not intended to be worth using rotationally. It should be worth planting the ‘Shooms when you have downtime, or lulls in healing requirements, and then Bloom them later on when you need burst healing (since Bloom is off the GCD). The numbers do appear off a bit for that design so we will adjust.

Hunter
One concern about the latest changes to marksmanship hunters- the new mastery proc rate seems problematic to me. If I'm doing the math correctly, this puts a 7200 mastery rating hard cap on MM hunters, since that seems to be the amount of mastery rating at which you have a 100% proc rate on wild quiver.
A valid concern. Mastery being capped is not something we were intending with that change, and so are going to bring mastery back to 2% chance to trigger Wild Quiver per point, and double Wild Quiver’s damage back to 100% weapon damage (normalized).

Paladin
Sanctity of Battle and Spell Haste
The intent is that Sanctity of Battle is based on melee haste instead of spell haste but we are waiting on a code change for that.

Shaman
Purification + Water Totem Healing
It should work as the tooltip of Purification says; it not working is just a bug, and is fixed for the next build.

[chaos5061]

Warlock
Haste scaling was nerfed significantly through this.
- Under the old model, the scaling of the extra dots was linear with the scaling of haste on additional dot ticks during the duration. In other words, as I go from six to seven ticks of my corruption, for a full MG channel I go from 12, to 14 ticks total.
- Under the new model, as I go from 9 to 10 ticks on my corruption, malefic grasp isn't giving me any extra ticks on the MG channel, and I'm therefore not getting any extra ticks on corruption. I do realize MG will eventually gain another tick, but not nearly as fast as my dots will...in other words the linear scaling will no longer apply.
With the new form of MG, it does indeed smooth out haste’s breakpoints. But that doesn’t mean that haste as a whole is worse, just that you don’t care as much about specific breakpoints of haste. MG ticks will accelerate with haste just as fast as DoT ticks will.

The spec is now bound to MG's ticks rather than MG's channel. - Under the new model, the haste effect of the Dot is tied to a discreet amount of MG channeling, i.e. 1 second. .9 secs of channeling gives me nothing. 1.9 secs of channeling isn't any better than 1 second of channeling. This brings latency and the need to move into the spec in a way that's hugely detrimental to a huge chunk of our damage. The old MG didn't have this issue, every instant spent channeling was beneficial to our DPS. This is hard to model in a simulation and easy to ignore, but this will matter and makes the spec significantly harder to manage for the average player. It's true that not waiting for a tick of MG before "hurt" your dps, but the effect was miniscule compared to the effect under the new design.
This is the problem we were trying to solve with the change to MG: What you describe here is how you thought it worked, but it didn’t actually work that way. The precise timing of which MG was applied and when it faded was actually very important, in very unintuitive ways. You would expect that if you had 71.3% MG uptime (just making up a number), you would get 71.3% more DoT ticks (and I believe were simulating it something like that). You wouldn’t. You’d actually get somewhere between 50% and 90% more DoT ticks, depending upon where the MG applications/fades lined up with natural DoT ticks.

We liked the design of MG before, but it was something our combat engine was just going to struggle with. We didn't want it to feel buggy. We hope the new form of MG is more reliable. When it ticks, you get an extra tick.

The community simulation results of this new build that I’ve seen so far are showing Affliction and Destruction very close (and we hope to make them even closer before release), with Demonology significantly ahead. We’re also seeing that internally, though not quite as extreme. We’re investigating that, to see what discrepancy there is there, and how much of an adjustment is in order.

Also, for anyone, note that if you feel your damage is lacking, please let us know in what situations and compared to whom. It's not sufficient to say "my damage felt fine before and I don't like being nerfed." Nobody likes being nerfed, and stating that doesn't give us much to go on.

Affliction's best stat is now mastery, by far, with haste being down where crit is, but our dark soul grants haste. Point for point we gain the least from our dark soul. Now the numbers are very okay at the moment, so it would be iffy to cause Dark Soul to grant the "highest" stat rather than the stat favored by the spec that you decide on, it just really bothers me that our main cd is worth (stat weights included) 33% less than the other two.
We’d like to hear more about why SimulationCraft (or any other community theorycraft) is seeing haste drop in value due to this patch. With the same amount of haste, you should see the same number of ticks of each DoT, before and after this last patch, after accounting for the reduced period on UA and Corr. It’s possible that we’re missing something.
The tooltip for Nightfall says that it's now a 5% chance instead of the previous 10% chance. Since Nightfall was actually a stacking 2% chance, is there any change to it's internal mechanics? Do extra ticks caused by Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul cause Nightfall procs? Finally, is the Soul Shard generation component of Soul Harvest actually removed, or was it just moved off of the tooltip?

edit: Also, the tooltip for Malefic Grasp is a bit confusing. It says that it causes your DoTs to instantly do 50% normal periodic damage every 1 second when MG does damage. Does that instant damage count as periodic damage for related effects (Nightfall for Corruption, trinket effects related to DoT ticks, etc)? Does that instant damage happen every 1 second regardless of haste or does it happen when MG does damage?
My previous post answered most of this, but to answer the other parts… Nightfall is a 0.5% stacking proc chance now (averaging out to a 5.7% proc chance over time). That’s not intended to be a nerf to the frequency that Nightfall procs because you’re getting roughly twice as many chances per second to proc Nightfall as before.

The extra DoT ticks happen whenever MG ticks, not just every 1 sec. It still scales just as well with haste as before. These extra DoT ticks will show up differently than the regular DoT ticks in the combat log, but will have all the same benefits as the regular ones; same things it can proc, same chances, same damage (other than the 0.5x dmg multiplier from MG), everything.

Mannoroth's Fury
This is actually a rather interesting talent, because the feedback has been negative for many forum posters, yet many of the guilds in our heroic raid testing have been using Mannoroth’s Fury for most encounters because it is so strong. We’re totally open to the idea that it’s an unattractive talent and should be changed, but so far we’re only seeing the perception of that, not it actually being that.

Before a dozen Warlocks jump down my throat for telling you that Mannoroth’s Fury is awesome, I’d encourage you to check out how it’s being used in many of the raid encounters and PvP.

[chaos5061]

Active Challenge Modes?
None is currently open. We'll open up a couple more challenge modes for testing next build.

Missing Achievements?
I've noticed that there is no "Cataclysm Safari" achievement, and that Cataclysm pets are not included in either the "Eastern Kingdoms Safari" or the "Kalimdor Safari" achievements.
Cataclysm pets are included in the EK and Kalimdor achievements.

Account Wide PvP Mounts
All arena mount rewards and their associated FoS are unique per character. This might be bugged in the current build though.

Transmogrification Rules
I just spent quite an amount of gold for making a weapon and gemming it. I reached level 83, eagerly awaiting to transmog it to a weapon that fits my brownish warrior theme very well. But it won't allow that! This goes against the stated transmog rules...
The issue is indeed being fixed in Mists, as you said. Sorry you can't enjoy wielding it for the time being.

However, there are two schools of thought regarding class-only items. Some people really like having items that only their class can use, it makes them all the more unique, special and rare.

Having said that, if anyone still wants it, there's still some time to get it!

Legendaries Are Too Common?
So on a somewhat related topic, how do you all feel about the argument to be able to transmogrify legendaries? I assume most of you would say no to that, considering you feel legendaries should be 'rare'.

Horde and Alliance Faction Differences
Yeah, things do feel a little cosy between the Horde and Alliance at the moment. I wonder how that's going to work out...

PW: Solace Change
Solace is intended to be a choice. Those of you saying you *have* to have a fast cast time because you *have* to spam Solace or you'll have no mana are arguing for the wrong thing, because I hope it's obvious that isn't the intent.

I know some of you are worried about your priest (and before that it was shaman and before that it was paladin and I probably missed druid in there somewhere) but we also have to rectify that with the performance and opinions of the players we see tackling the content on beta. If you want to be as helpful as possible, try to be very explicit with the situations and cases you feel your priest can't handle. The more detailed, the better. What spells are you casting? Which encounters? What feels different from Catclysm, remembering that you are no longer in end level gear?

[chaos5061]

Beta Warlock Changes
As some of you may have noticed, there's already some notes about the latest beta build out there.
You have also a few posts (#1, #2, #3, #4) with information from development regarding warlocks and the latest changes.




Here's a short summary if you don't want to read all those threads:
The Everlasting Affliction glyph was providing a huge DPS increase, but we don’t want huge DPS increases to come from glyphs.
Instead of simply nerfing the glyph, we baked the benefits that the glyph provided into the entire class via Pandemic, a level 90 passive ability, and changed the glyph to something completely different.
Drain Soul still deals double damage under 20%. It being missing from the new tooltip is just a tooltip error and has been corrected for the next build.
The 25% nerf to most Affliction-specific abilities should amount to a ~20% nerf. This is indeed a rather extreme amount, because they really were that extremely overpowered.
The Malefic Grasp mechanic change should not be a nerf at all.
The community simulation results of this new build are showing Affliction and Destruction very close with Demonology significantly ahead. We’re also seeing that internally, though not quite as extreme. We’re investigating to see what discrepancy there is there, and how much of an adjustment is in order.
Nightfall is a 0.5% stacking proc chance now (~5.7% proc chance over time).*
That’s not intended to be a nerf to the frequency that Nightfall procs because you’re getting roughly twice as many chances per second to proc Nightfall as before.




These changes come after devs realized some numbers were simply off. The game is still in beta, it is expected and completely normal for this to happen and it's usually in the latest stages of development that this kind of fine-tuning gets more attention.
While we take players feedback very seriously, it's important to understand that these changes are not a direct consequence of any complaints about warlocks being overpowered. Changes are done to the game only after getting everything thoroughly checked out and verified internally. External data helps us a lot with directing our attention to subjects that possibly otherwise we could miss or be slower at fixing, but never work as a basis for a direct change.




The discussion on this kind of threads can easily get derailed, so as always, please keep your posts on-topic and continue providing us with constructive criticism and opinions about MoP here, if possible, backed up by real data and in the case of bug reports, please clearly describe a way for us to replicate any issue you may encounter over on the bug report forum and be sure to read the guidelines before posting.




Talks about numbers. Ignores the Instant Spammable 8 second fears elephant in the room.
I understand and share your concerns with giving warlocks another instant fear, but on the other hand MoP adds and changes a lot of abilities to all the other classes, and we can't think of any new spell independently from everything else. I wouldn’t dare to claim that this is unbalanced until I actually experience it in a good testing environment, and that means playing vs all classes with players that are already experienced with all of the new MoP abilities.
You can be sure devs are paying very close attention to both the PvE and PvP side of MoP, we’re still a long time away from the final version, and there’s still enough time to change anything related to tuning.




Also, making fear instant or castable matters little for PvE, while for PvP it makes a huge difference. So you can be sure that on a spell that is clearly directed at PvP, developers will make sure it feels balanced, and they do take a lot of the feedback from the community when deciding this type of changes, so if you guys actually provide good, sensible reasons, if possible backed up by data, as to why do you think an instant fear with 10 sec cd in the environment of MoP, considering all the new variables that MoP's content brings in, every new kind of synergy that will exist between classes, etc… and after that you still think the ability is overpowered, then I’m sure you’ll get their attention and if it turns out they agree with you, I’m sure a new patch will come fixing the issue.




We're all free to speculate about how every new change in the beta affects PvP Balance, but I'd wait a bit more before jumping into conclusions about how some class will be OP in the final version, there's still a long way to go, and if you want to help us out, we really do appreciate it if you could stop by the beta feedback forum and gives us your constructive input.*

[chaos5061]

25-player Normal testing will continue on Wednesday. The testing schedule for remaining Normal modes will be somewhat accelerated, since the encounters are already familiar to many testers and we are just verifying functionality and tuning.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Normal
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Wind Lord Mel'jarak (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Normal
12:00 PDT (15:00 EDT, 21:00 CEST)

Lei Shi (Terrace of Endless Spring) - 25 Player Normal
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

The Spirit Kings (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Normal
15:00 PDT (18:00 EDT, 24:00 CEST)

Amber-Shaper Un'sok (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Normal
16:30 PDT (19:30 EDT, 01:30 CEST)

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

[chaos5061]

Please note that we have removed the Dial-in Authenticator from our Battle.net security options. If you’re currently using the Dial-in Authenticator, it will continue to work normally until August 15, 2012, at which point we’ll be removing it from any accounts that have it attached.

If you’re not already taking advantage of one of the Battle.net security measures listed below, we strongly encourage you to select the option most convenient to you:

Battle.net Authenticator
Battle.net Mobile Authenticator

We also offer Battle.net SMS Protect, which can be used alone or stacked with one of the options above for an even greater level of protection.

If you’re currently using the Dial-in Authenticator and want to add any of these security options before August 15, you’ll first need to remove the Dial-In Authenticator from your account by following the instructions listed here.

We’re fully committed to account security, but please keep in mind that it’s ultimately a team effort. While making use of the available security options can go a long way in helping to protect your characters and items, it’s also important to be aware of the other things you can do to help ensure your account is as secure as possible. Review our Account and Computer Security article for more information on email security, web browsing safety, critical software updates, and more.

[chaos5061]

Disc of the Red Flying Cloud

We finally know that the

Disc of the Red Flying Cloud mount comes from being Exalted with the Lorewalkers!

[chaos5061]

Lorewalkers Quartermaster

The Lorewalkers also offer some other nice rewards at their Quartermaster. You can get Restored Artifacts by completing archaeology items or purchasing one for aSpirit of Harmony.

60	Mount		Disc of the Red Flying Cloud	600	Exalted
90	Jewelcrafting Recipe		Design: Jade Panther	200	Revered
90	Blacksmithing Recipe		Plans: Living Steel Belt Buckle	50	Exalted
90	Tailoring Recipe		Pattern: Greater Cerulean Spellthread	25	None
1	Miscellaneous	Tabard	Lorewalkers Tabard	10	Exalted
1	Junk		Lorewalker's Lodestone	Restored Artifact	Exalted
1	Junk		Lorewalker's Map	Restored Artifact	Exalted

[chaos5061]

Different Rules for Spells in PvP and PvE
Is there a reason damage spells can't effect players differently?
We do this already. Look at abilities such as Colossus Smash and even the concept of PvP CC durations, which has been in the game for a long time.

It's not our option of first resort because it's not intuitive for players and it means anytime we want to make balance adjustments, we must change two sets of numbers.

Content Difficulty and Consumption Speed
That way, maybe some of the prestige of killing bosses pre-nerf, or on lower levels of nerf stay.
Other than world firsts, was there ever any prestige to killing a boss? (outside the guild itself achieving that kill)

Heck, even people following the race don't care who killed a boss 2nd in the world, much less 20th...

No, but they care on their own servers, even if they don't raid themselves. It's a bit like Britain's surprise medal in the gymnastics yesterday; I don't like gymnastics so don't care about that at all. However, if one of those gymnasts lived on my street, I would be interested.
Sure, realm firsts might also have some prestige on the realm level, you're absolutely right. But as before, other than that... (and perhaps the first faction kill on the realm, as well).

Sounds like you are admitting that realm communities have been killed. By LFD and LFR.
You're reading too much into that post.

Actually, challenge dungeons will help bring back that realm community feeling that might be missing for some of you, as groups for those dungeons have to be manually formed.

This comment alone, shows that you have no idea what is going on on realms regarding raiding.
You didn't understand my post at all. I said it very clear, outside the guild itself (which is what you mention in your post), not many players really care about who killed a boss other than world first and perhaps their realm first.

Any reason as to why we're not seeing a developer respond in this thread to some of the proposals made to revive aspects that should already be there.., but aren't due to some clear direct "features", one would think they could squeeze in a few minutes considering they have all the time in the world to reply on us forums?
These forums are for you, the players, to interact between you and discuss almost anything you want. And we're taking care of noting the feedback we can find, as in this thread, and sending it to them (which we're doing not just with this thread, also others).

It is abundantly clear to even the slowest of individuals that you have absolutely no clue as to what drives players Draztal which is quite astounding after 185 pages, and even more clear that you only serve a purpose of ridiculing what people here say.
I understand it, I honestly do. I'm a raider myself and I share some of those desires you have expressed here. But there must be a reason for it that can be based on something else than "taking something away from others" or "prestige", etc. And there've been individuals here that have spoken clearly about those reasons, and we've noted them and we've sent feedback to the devs with the most common points here.

The response quoted and the fact that you claim challenge dungeons will bring some realm community back is testament to incompetence at the highest level for reasons already highlighted many times over the past 100 pages, but I'll happily point one out for you. If challenge modes aren't completed to a gold medal standard by a sufficient amount of characters we will see "balancing" (normal people would call it nerfs) so that you can ride the high horse claiming success just as is the case with lfr / lfd.
You're making assumptions, and judging my posts based on those assumptions. You're also forgetting that on challenge dungeons you're actually competing against the clock, and you'll be able to prove that you've been faster than everyone else.

I also feel my comment was ignored. Just as the people above me stated, i dont see any facts you base your comment on regarding almost no one caring beyond world firsts, apart from a very broad and ( in my opinion ) unjustified generalization.
Well, in that case, I guess it won't take you long to show me a forum post cheering someone for the world 36th kill of Heroic Hagara, right?

I think it's actually you that does not understand how much people care about those. The more I read your posts the more I think you absolutely have no clue.
Ah, but that's the thing. And that's why I'm still posting on this thread. I understand why people care so much about those. But I can't find an objective reason to back it up (I'm speaking about arguments like only a minority should see the content, etc, not the whole thread). Some concerns did have objective reasonings to back them up, and that was great. Some others can only really relate to nostalgia (wanting TBC back without mentioning the downsides it had) or wishing to retain exclusivity/prestige in a way that is demeaning to others.

[chaos5061]

Are you kidding me? When i tried to give an idea, i was ignored. By Draztal too, he said world firsts matter only. That was the reply to my idea of a design change. Now, thats how much they care, in my experience.
I can't comment on your ideas. But I've certainly haven't said that world firsts are the only thing that matter. What I've said is that for the community at large, it's usually just that what's mentioned. And you can check that by yourself visiting the most popular fansites out there. You won't see them mention that X guild has been 10th in the world killing a boss.

Both of them care immensely about what position they are inside their faction, realm and world.
Read my post again, that's not what I meant (and I even specified it on that post). Of course your guild cares about its position. People outside your guild, though, probably don't (unless they're looking for a guild to apply to) unless you're world first/realm first/country first/etc. Hopefully now what I was trying to get through makes sense? It's not about how your guildmates feel about your position.

The fact that people mention TBC has little to do with nostalgia, it has to do with the idea that there was a lot more content available back then. TBC had a certain policy when it came to progression and that policy was changed in WotLK.
A policy that had side effects that have been discussed in this thread at length. Those are the downsides that noone has really mentioned during this discussion.

There should always be ongoing competition in WoW, and something for people to aim towards, as soon as there isn't there won't be any drive to improve yourself as a player.
You tell us that we can't speak for an entire population, alright, but then don't doing it yourself telling us what we do and don't care about.
If you look at popular community tools such as wowprogress, there're always new kills being made every day, so to me that looks as ongoing competition.

Not gonna quote the rest of your post, but it's a spot on explanation of how gamers think and act. We are competitive by nature and we do care of our own performances, even if its no 134 in the world.
Of course, but not everyone is interested in the raid race and just want to experience the encounters at the pace they can.

I get what you mean, but people do care if they pass another guild that was faster than them on the last tier. So your point is not entirely true. If you pass another guild they do care that someone else did that, if it makes them fall behind in the race of killing bosses first in their realm. It does work the other way around aswell, when we manage to kill something people rush fast to see if others managed to do that on the same night.
I agree with this. My post was talking about the prestige perspective specifically, which is a different one than this. Of course, if your guild advances over another in the realm rank, you'll cheer about it, and the other guild most likely will try to advance as quickly as possible to retake that position.

You're not serious about being in a raiding guild yourself are you?
I am, as I said, I've been raiding since 2005, still do, and have no intention of stopping in Mists of Pandaria.

Do you honestly believe those sites would have such high hit numbers when people really don't care as much as you suggest? The numbers prove you wrong. Last tier though, even wowprogress was more for "who got it fastest" (on our realm) then who is furthest, which is directly reflecting on the main concern, too little content for the expected amount of time and the dilution of raiding as a whole.
Of course they care about their own progress and how they compare against them. But once you leave that specific case, people in your realm that is raiding at a different pace most likely don't really care about what your guild is doing (and care about theirs, obviously) and care about what's happening to the guilds around their same place.

I'm quite frankly stunned at how it seems to be acceptable to demand nerfs and easier, simplified gameplay, but asking for a challenge is tantamount to sacrilege.
Asking for a challenge is right, and the answer is that you have that challenge there. You can turn the debuff off at any time and face those bosses without the Power of the Aspects. But that's an answer some of you don't like. And while it's fine that you don't like the answer, it's not right to say that there's no way to have content that you feel is challenging for you today.

Okay. Nobody cares what guild killed Heroic Ragnaros heroic 4th, but they will care about AoE fest speed runs? What is the point of Blizzard adding Challenge mode dungeons when competition does not matter?
You're mixing competition with prestige...

[chaos5061]

The Purpose of LFR
However, LFR does make a person get sick and bored of DS extremely quickly... running it lfr and normal on multiple chars each week has removed alot of peoples passion for raiding DS
If you are running LFR and normal every week on multiple chars, I don't think it should be a surprise you eventually lose the passion for raiding the place... After so much of doing the same, you'll get tired, be it LFR, HC raiding, dailies... anything, really.

Yes i could skip LFR altogether, but the tier bonuses are something most players want and are needed to become competitive.
You get the same tier bonuses (and higher item level) from Normal and Heroic DS.

and yet, you guys have made running older tiers obsolete, with forcing (by gear i mean) to chain run the latests tier raid.. feels kind of silly, yes?
You can run older tiers whenever you want. Not just for experiencing the content these days, also for the gear for transmogrification (if you like a particular tier set that you're missing), achievements and so on.

Any game that cannot pose even a slight challenge before completion is pretty messed up development wise.
And even with the 30% debuff on DS, the game poses a challenge (perhaps not to you, but certainly to others).

appease people who think that paying for a game entitles you to see all the content
And why are they wrong on that thought? On which basis should someone think that he can not see the content even if he's willing to pay the subscription for it?

Why not just mail everyone the BiS items and rarest mounts?
Is that what the players are demanding? I'm yet to see someone ask for that (that is not trolling, either).

PW: Solace change?
We think it is possible to balance active vs passive regen. The key is in how healers use mana. Nobody needs infinite regen. You just need enough to heal a fight. If you consider a fight where you never have to heal, then Solace will crush any other mana return because you have so many free GCDs in which to spam it. However, you also don't need that mana for healing in the contrived fight with no healing. As fight intensity increases, the need for mana increases BUT the time available for Solace decreases. Solace will work best on fights where there is very intensive healing followed by quiet periods in which you can nuke. But depending on the timing, Mindbender might work for those fights just as well.

We don't like Solace with a cooldown because then you feel like you must use it on cooldown. With no cooldown, then is there is a continuum between fights where you have free time but need mana and fights where every cast time must be spent on a heal. The choice becomes the priest's.

I'm still seeing a lot of "I need to spam Solace so make it more spamable" responses. You're not going to convince us with that argument. Let us know in what specific situations you are struggling with mana and what types of spells you are trying to cast. That is the actual issue in our minds.

I am also still seeing a lot of "we have provided you with the evidence." I wouldn't be asking if you had. There are maybe 3 links to parses and a couple more with any kinds of numbers at all. If you feel it is that easy to make your case, then make it.

As an aside, the only thing we didn't like about Telluric Currents as active mana generation was that it scaled too well with gear (in 4.3) and would have been a mandaory glyph (in 5.0).

It's a very common thing that when people feel they aren't being listened to they complain louder and more frequently.
I have been in this business for 15 years, so I can say with certainty that that strategy does not work. You run the risk of your entire point being dismissed if you come across as too uninformed to make an argument with some substance to back up the sweeping claims. If you are trying to convince anyone in a situation where you can't just order them to do something, whether that person is a boss, teacher, co-worker or government official, you'll do better with logic and reason than insults and hyperbole.

We appreciate the passion -- just channel it into something productive.

[chaos5061]

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Paladin
Judgement is once again a melee attack that has a 30-yard range. (Yes, re-read that to make sure you didn’t misread it...)

Edit: Judgement is also spelled Judgment now. The developers are playing nasty tricks on me to make sure I'm awake.

It's a PvP nerf. Now it'll trigger Frost Armor and Nature's Grasp again.
Correct. This is the primary purpose of the change.

Warlock
As a result of the change to Malefic Grasp's mechanics, Agony now takes twice as long to ramp up, since the ticks are no longer faster under MG's channel. Is this additional nerf intended?
No, this should be fixed in the next build.

[chaos5061]

Alliance Pandaria Introduction
The latest beta patch added the Alliance introduction and reopened Jade Forest, now with a new starting quest line for the Horde and Alliance, as well as new and reworked quests throughout the zone. Today we are taking a look at the first few quests in the new Alliance introduction. Don't miss the part starting from 8:55!

[chaos5061]

[chaos5061]