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

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Mists of Pandaria Beta - Build 15961
A new beta build will be deployed on beta realms soon.

Achievement Changes
Reputation
Guild

• Ambassadors (New) Raise 25 reputations to Exalted.
• Diplomacy (New) Raise 15 reputations to Exalted.

Set Bonus Changes
Item - Priest T14 Healer 2P Bonus - Reduces the mana cost of your Flash Heal spell by 20%, up from 10%.

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New and Changed Items
Not many this time, but you can see them all on WoWDB!

• Healers take note, you now have a Sha-Touched weapon as well!
• Epic Shoulder Enchants made by Scribes now require Inscription to use.
• Malevolent Gladiator and Dreadful Gladiator gear got some socket bonus and PvP stat set bonus changes. (Example in tooltip)

489	Miscellaneous	Tank	Finger	Seal of the Unscathed
489	Miscellaneous	Melee	Finger	Seal of the Bloodseeker
489	Miscellaneous	Spell Spirit	Finger	Seal of the Prime
489	Miscellaneous	Physical DPS	Finger	Seal of the Windreaver
489	Miscellaneous	Spell DPS	Finger	Seal of the Lucid

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Spell Changes
Death Knight (Forums)

• Horn of Winter now has a 100 yd range, up from 45 yds.

Druid (Forums)
Talents

• Soul of the Forest now gives Feral 4 Energy per combo point for finishing moves, up from 3.
• Typhoon (New) Summons a violent Typhoon that strikes targets in front of the caster within 30 yards, knocking them back and dazing them for 6 sec. Useable in all shapeshift forms.

Feral & Guardian

• Survival Instincts is now a Feral and Guardian spell.

Hunter (Forums)
Beast Mastery

• Focus Fire now consumes your pet's Frenzy stack, restoring 6 Focus to your pet and increasing your ranged haste by 8% (was 6%) for each Frenzy stack consumed.
• Frenzy proc now grants 8% increased attack speed, down from 10%.

Pets

• Demoralizing Screech now has an 8 sec cooldown, down from 10 sec.
• Monstrous Bite now has a 10 sec duration on the healing debuff, up from 8 sec.

Mage (Forums)
Arcane

• Arcane Blast damage reduced by 6%.
• Arcane Charge now grants 20% damage per charge, down from 25%.
• Arcane Missiles damage reduced by 6%.

Monk (Forums)

• Chi Burst damage and healing reduced by 25%.
• Chi Wave (New) You cause a wave of Chi energy to flow through friend and foe, dealing 307 damage or 384 healing. Bounces up to 7 times to the nearest targets within 20 yards. When bouncing to allies, Chi Wave will prefer those injured over full health.
• Expel Harm had a tooltip fix.

Talents

• Chi Wave now bounces 7 times, up from 5.

Brewmaster

• Vengeance is no longer capped at maximum of 10% of your health, instead has a 20 sec duration.

Paladin (Forums)

• Execution Sentence damage increased by 56%.
• Sanctity of Battle (Protection) now also works with Avenger's Shield.
• Stay of Execution healing increased by 80%.

Talents

• Holy Prism damage and healing when cast on enemies increased by 30%. Healing when cast on an ally increased by 44% and damage when cast on an ally increased by 17%
• Light's Hammer damage increased by 30%.

Protection

• Vengeance is no longer capped at maximum of 10% of your health, instead has a 20 sec duration.

Priest (Forums)

• Shackle Undead now costs 2% of Base Mana, down from 9%.

Warlock (Forums)

• Enslave Demon now costs 5% of Base Mana, down from 10%.
• Unending Resolve now grants 40% damage reduction, down from 50%. Duration reduced to 8 sec, down from 12 sec.

Talents

• Grimoire of Sacrifice got spec specific tooltips, be sure to read them to see how it will work for your spec!

Affliction

• Unstable Affliction SP scaling increased by 25%.

Destruction

• Havoc now also works with Chaos Bolt.

Warrior (Forums)

• Battle Stance now has a 3 sec cooldown.
• Berserker Stance now has a 3 sec cooldown.
• Defensive Stance now has a 3 sec cooldown.

Talents

• Double Time gives Charge two charges. Each has a 20 sec recharge time.

Arms

• Taste for Blood duration increased to 15 sec, up from 9 sec.

Protection

• Vengeance is no longer capped at maximum of 10% of your health, instead has a 20 sec duration.

Major Glyphs

• Glyph of Bull Rush now grants 15 additional Rage from Charge, up from 10.
• Glyph of Overpower: Cleave hits increases the damage of your next Overpower by 20%, up from 10%.
• Glyph of Rude Interruption buff now gives 6% damage for 20 sec, rather than 5% damage for 30 sec.
• Glyph of Sweeping Strikes now grants 1 Rage when you hit a target with Sweeping Strikes, down from 2.

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Professions
Blacksmithing

• Masterwork Forgewire Axe Reagents: Ghost Iron Bar (12), Spirit of Harmony (2). 5), Kyparite (30).
• Masterwork Ghost Shard Reagents: Ghost Iron Bar (15), Spirit of Harmony (2). 5), Kyparite (40).
• Masterwork Ghost-Forged Blade Reagents: Ghost Iron Bar (12), Spirit of Harmony (2). 5), Kyparite (30).
• Masterwork Phantasmal Hammer Reagents: Ghost Iron Bar (12), Spirit of Harmony (2). 5), Kyparite (30).
• Masterwork Spiritblade Decimator Reagents: Ghost Iron Bar (15), Spirit of Harmony (2). 5), Kyparite (40).

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A Engineer change is some plans now require: Reagents: Tinker's Kit.

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Patch 5.0.4 now available on the Background Downloader
This afternoon the preload for the pre Mists of Pandaria patch started. It is a little bit over 6 GB in size.

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Is the World Event for the Attack on Theramore Isle going to be available for testing soon?
We are not currently planning on opening this up for public/beta testing. That may change but for right now we're testing it internally.

[chaos5061]

Beta Experience Required to Level Changed
The amount of experience required to level changed recently in beta, decreasing for a portion of leveling under 85 and significantly increasing with level 85 and onward. See the table below for a rough idea of the changes.

Due to the lack of people leveling in beta, it was hard to get data for some of the level ranges. If you happen to have a character in the questionable level range, be sure to check and let us know what you find!

You can get a good idea of the XP rewarded by the new quests by glancing over the various Zone Pages on WoWDB.

1-9	Old	Same
10-39?	Old	(-20%)
40-82	Old	Same
82-83	4,004,000	2,669,000 (-33%)
83-84	5,203,400	3,469,000 (-33%)
84-85	9,165,100	4,583,000 (-50%)
85-86	10 million	15.5 million (+55%)
86-87	11.6 million	18 million (+55%)
87-88	14.6 million	22.6 million (+55%)
88-89	17.6 million	27.3 million (+55%)
89-90	21.2 million	32.8 million (+55%)

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Character Creation Preview Gear Updated
The latest beta build added shoulders to some of the new gear used in the preview when selecting a class during character creation. This is not the gear that your character will get when starting the game, but the gear that is used to show you what a higher level character will look like. You can find the sets that were not updated in our original post.

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Beta Class Balance Analysis

We are changing the new Vengeance model to work on unmitigated damage. This means the number is calculated without regards to armor, stance, cooldowns, etc. The net result is that any given creature should generate the same average Vengeance for all tanks. The conversion has been reduced from 5% to 2% to adjust for this change. (This is not yet on your current build.)

concerning "imortal' buffs (such as Guardian Angel, Ardent Defender) and cooldowns that allow the tank to soak an amount of dmg that would otherwise kill him (Zen Meditation, AMS) ..

how those would affect vengeance?

a) are the "entire dmg" used in the calculation? for example the boss skill does 999k dmg, but we are able to survive that with that kind of cooldown, does it account for that 999k dmg taken, skyrocketing vengeance to heavens ?

b) only the dmg taken is used on the calculation? for example, the tank with 500k hp will take 500k dmg, but the cd/buff prevents his death, and the extra dmg (that is absorbed by the cooldown) is not accounted on the vengeance?

c) while using that kind of cooldown any dmg taken will not account on vengeance?
We're not entirely sure yet of the right call here. You could theoretically dump all your survival cooldowns in order to give your tank an AP buff. Maybe that's not worth it, or maybe it's an interesting decision to help you get through the hard phase of a fight. Obviously we wouldn't want survival cooldowns to no longer be used for survival, but I suspect that won't be the case. Try and abuse it and let us know what you find.

Just wanted to point out that for guardians and blood dks that the vengeance tooltip was not updated with the removal of the 10% max health cap. The new model is in just need the tooltip update.
We just overlooked that tooltip and it is now fixed. There is no cap for any tank at this time.

Just confirming that with the new model, our starting jump up Vengeance (to prevent long ramp up) is: (UnmitigatedHit/3.75) * 50%
Yeah, that calculation should work.

Have you ever considered adding a buff to heal spec DPS that is only active while the healer is not in a group/raid? Probably the same could be asked for tank specs. Then those players are not forced into a DPS spec or slower gameplay while out grinding and questing.
The advantage of tanking when solo is supposed to be that you are very hard to kill. It's a common solo tank tactic just to pull lots of stuff at once. Similarly, healers also don't die. They might not be able to kill something in 3 GCDs, but it shouldn't take 12 either, and then they can throw a heal on themselves and go on to the next pull.

We don't want tanks and healers to do dreadful DPS when solo, and to be fair, I don't think they do. But we also don't want to see leveling guides encouraging Ret paladins or Shadow priests to swap specs just for leveling purposes.

I leveled a Resto druid as Resto through LK, and I could nuke stuff down just fine. The problems I had were with say spellcasters because I couldn't interrupt them. NPCs who could heal just kept healing themselves until they ran OOM.

If anyone feels like their healing or tanking character in the current beta build would have a lot of trouble leveling or completing daily quests while solo, please let us know.

Earlier, you mentioned that swing speeds slow down dynamically if an attack speed buff expires mid-swing. Does this also apply to temporary haste rating effects (say, a trinket proc or the elemental blast buff)? Do swings also speed up dynamically if you gain an appropriate buff mid-swing?
Yes to all of these.

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Death Knight
There appears to be a serious problem with DK rune regeneration in the current build. Our apologies. We will work on a solution as soon as we can.

Hunter
I'm noticing that the damage on improved serpent sting seems to not match a logical formula since the patch hit. The best fit I can find to explain it is that it may be using the old serpent sting formula (9.7% RAP + 2030.22) instead of the new one (8% RAP + 1620.19). Applying that and the 100% bonus from the ability description gets me within a few damage of the expected amount, but it's still slightly off.

I can't imagine this is correct, but I was hoping you could clarify if it's a bug or if the mechanics have changed and the tooltip wasn't updated. I'm getting 12615 damage from imp sting with 18528 RAP and 9.84% mastery (and no debuffs on the target).
It was indeed using the old formula for Serpent Sting’s damage in Improved Serpent Sting. This has been fixed for the next build.

Is wild quiver proc'd when ranged attacks cast? or when they impact the target? (on cast)
When the attack successfully hits.

Can wild quiver proc from an attack that misses or is dodged? (yes)
No.

Does a wild quiver shot qualify as a ranged attach that could recursively proc another wild quiver shot? (I would think so from the tooltip)
No, it can’t proc from attacks that are procs themselves.

Do non-bow attacks (e.g., trinket procs) trigger wild quiver? (no)
No.

Is murder of crows supposed to trigger wild quiver? (I thought yes but it doesn't)
No.

Ghostcrawler look at these numbers http://www.simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H.html
I think you guys kinda overshot hunter nerfs a lil don't you think? We went from being up top with Boomies and Demo locks before the nerf/patch to dead last now.
I can't debug the Simulationcraft numbers. Those guys are working very hard from what we can tell to be as accurate as possible, but when they're not, I am unable to give you explanations without a lot more information.

If you have some raid parses or something else showing hunters on the bottom, we could discuss those.

Monk
Is Elusive Brew on your radar? I haven't crunched the numbers but I just KNOW everyone's going to be surprised when they see how much more effective it is when you use each charge as you get them.

At first glance, everyone wants to use it like Tigereye Brew (wait till high/max stacks, use it for the burst damage), but I'm theorizing that sipping it like Mana Tea suddenly converts it into a Savage Defense clone given the rate of charges that we can gain. If we time it, we can spend the charges as we gain them (1 or 2 at a time depending on how many Elusive Brew procs) on individual melee swings, greatly improving its effectiveness in a way that probably wasn't counted on considering its previous version.
You might not have the recent change yet, where we added a 9 sec self-only cooldown to the Elusive Brew button. It is still off the GCD.

[chaos5061]

Paladin
Could we get Sacred Shield to stack?
Yes, it will stack from multiple paladins. It is still limit one per paladin.

Can Sanctity of Battle affect Avenger Shield?
Yes.

Rogue
Recuperate does not seem to be benefiting from PvP power.
Percentage health increases shouldn't benefit from PvP power, since they already scale with your health pool. They were doing this in an earlier build, but we have since fixed it.

Shaman
Is there a possibility you can look at giving the same treatment to Earth Shield? If you are going to allow multiple Sacred Shields on a single target, (in addition to much earlier making a similar change for Beacon and Lifebloom, etc) what is the reason Earth Shield is still limited?
We'll discuss it, but Earth Shield is really powerful.

I am 99% sure healing stream and Healing tide in some way or bugged. Before the bug where they where not geting the + 50% to water totem's they were healing for more then they are now after it was fixed. Seem's like either only geting 25% of the water totem buff or not geting the 25% to shaman heal's buff..
No, you're right. It wasn’t getting the buff to all healing. Fixed.

Elemental Blast tooltip and intention claims 3,500 yet the buff and actual gain is still 3,000 Haste/Mastery or Crit.
It is intended to be 3500. We can look into hotfixing it depending on when the next build will go out.

Healing Rain is currently gaining the buff from Unleashed Elements. Is this a bug?
No, that is intended.

Warlock
A note for Demonology warlocks: There’s a bug in the current beta build which is preventing your Metamorphosis Melee from casting while casting other spells. You should still be able to do that, and it will be fixed for the next build.

So what's going on with Shadow Bolt? The damage it's doing isn't meshing with the spell's tooltip, or what I should be seeing when I math it all out based on my stats, and the damage it's doing is oddly consistent (26,723 to 26,724 with my current stats).
Yeah, the tooltip was wrong. Fixed for the next build.

Destruction Warlocks are once again non competitive and it seems every expansion you try and bandage fix their dps later on and it still doesn't work out. Simulationcraft has they WAY behind not other lock specs but other classes in general. Now you would think hey not every fight is standstill perhaps they will do more on multitarget or aoe fights but.......WAY behind demo and other classes there too. We've had to deal with rain of fire (aka rain of fail) for our aoe now and there still isn't a good aoe option competitively.

Now before you say: hey on single target what if you move your spec might be better there but NOPE; destro is a nuke class and benefits least from moving around. Thus this spec has no use for ANY situation over ANY lock spec. It needs a serious fix now.
I can't debug the Simulationcraft numbers. Those guys are working very hard from what we can tell to be as accurate as possible, but when they're not, I am unable to give you explanations without a lot more information.

If you have some raid parses or something else showing [your dude] on the bottom, we could discuss those.

Also, see the excellent post above by Lokrick. Don't hold up Simcraft or any theorycrafting to unrealistic expectations. Channel your energy towards helping those guys instead. Do their numbers match what your character can achieve? Do you see anything wrong with their assumptions or calculations? Just telling us that Simcraft says you are low isn't conveying any actual information to us.

I am afraid "posts Simcraft and pouts" posts are going to be added to our drinking game.

Fel flame is really expensive that it sometimes because a struggle to even weave it into our rotation. As many have said in the past, is there any possibility to bring down the cost of fel flame a little so it won't seem so painful to cast.... especially when we are low on manner.
Fel Flame isn't intended to be part of your single-target, stand and nuke rotation. It's for movement or quick kills.

Warrior
Is enrages while enraged not proc'ing more charges of Raging Blows intended?

It is for the moment at least, but we're not crazy about it. Specifically, using Berserker Rage while Enrage is up doesn't give you more rage or Raging Blow charges. The concern was that Fury would just macro Berserker Rage into every attack. With the previous design, this wasn't worth doing because once you were enraged being more enraged wasn't valuable. Now it is. It's more intuitive (and probably fun) if Berserker Rage always grants a charge, but we want Berserker Rage to be a button warriors actually use, not macro. Another option would be to put Berseker Rage on the GCD, but we thought this would feel even worse. If we become convinced warriors won't macro Berserker Rage, we'll happily revert the change.

Enough smart players have stepped up to the plate to convince us that this probably won't be a problem (in other words, that you could macro Berserker Rage but optimal play is not to), so we are going to revert this change. Berserker Rage will grant a charge of Raging Blow and rage even if you are already enraged.

As an aside, we are also going to try warrior stances off the GCD again, but with a 3 sec shared cooldown. This should allow you to shift stances for short periods without a damage loss because of the spent GCD, but not for individual attacks.

[chaos5061]

Recent Vengeance Changes
We don't want tanks to do awesome damage just for being tanks. We want tanks to do awesome damage when they are actually tanking. That remains the governing philosophy behind the design.

Remember, Vengeance doesn't exist to give tanks something fun to do. It exists solely to make sure tank threat stays high when DPS characters are gearing for higher DPS while the tanks gear primarily for survival. Tanks only need to generate high threat when they are tanking, and typically threat is the most important on the most dangerous opponents, which also tend to be those who hit the hardest.

As an aside, if I was able to design WoW solely for me, threat would still be an important stat to gear for. Raiders would scoff at tanks who stacked only Stamina as being bad tanks because they couldn't hold aggro. It was fun for me back in BWL to try to generate higher threat than the warlocks. I don't think it was that fun for the warlocks though. I don't think it was that fun for the rest of the raid when I screwed up e.g. my Heroic Strike use and caused us to wipe without them feeling like they could do anything to resolve the situation except stop DPS. Fortunately, I recognize that WoW would have far fewer players if I got to design it totally around what I find fun.

It would be nice if your successful Taunt granted some Vengeance.
We're toying with that idea. It would be a percent of Vengeance of the character you taunted off of, not just free AP.

The scenario we want to avoid is Tank A is tanking, and Tank B taunts off, but then avoids three boss hits in a row. The boss is likely to go back to Tank A. The avoidance wouldn't be a problem if it came later on, because we average things out, but if it happens early on, we have nothing to average.

You could have solved that if you just gave everyone threat drops. Why would that have been such a problem? Even now I run into bad thanks that can't hold threat off my Warrior or DK, and I have to sit there doing nothing because one special attack will rip threat.
I don't think that really solves the problem. If dumping your cooldown regularly was necessary then it would almost become part of your DPS rotation which doesn't seem like it's adding much gameplay. If dumping your cooldown was something you only did when the boss turned to attack you, then it would still be really sub-optimal to have the boss always bolting around, cleaving, breathing or whatever else to the group. I think you'd still just want to keep the boss on the tank and have the raid do slow DPS.

And lastly, Threat being fun back in Vanilla (and it was) was only possible because the dungeons required you to understand and react to it.
I'm not sure it was fun in vanilla. It was fun for me because I was a tank. I see mostly tanks say it was fun. I haven't seen too many DPS players say it was fun to try not to do so much DPS that they caught up with the tank.

I know "scaling" is the fall guy for just about anything, and it's the most over (and wrongly) used word on the forums...
Totally agree with that. The rest of your post was good too, but I believe we have fixed the differing mitigation problem.

I think I started writing a reply to the Vengeance topic earlier, but I deleted it. Just didn't seem like my voice would matter, because I'm fairly sure I come down on the opposite side of Blizz in regard to the topic of Tank damage. My feeling is low Tank damage is one of the contributing factors to the insufficient Tank supply and that many Tanks would enjoy doing much higher damage.
"Every voice matters." I disagree with you a little about tank shortage. I think it is almost entirely because tanks have a lot of responsibility to set the pace of things, know the boss mechanics and often even have to explain them to others.

This game has spectacular framework and is bar none the best game I have played, however sometimes I feel like you really don't understand what we find fun.
A little off topic, but I would argue that perhaps you don't realize that some players find fun things that you don't find fun.

1) Tanks need a way to scale up their threat output as DPS gear up into threat stats only while tanks take primarily defensive stats (even in this new active mitigation model it seems).

2) The current versions of vengence on both live and beta have similar problems and quirks that make it "not fun" to quest in a tank spec, or to have to deal with tank swaps.

One hundred percent agree that point 1 is important. That was the genesis of Vengeance. We don't think tanks need high damage in order for questing to be fun, and you can even argue that it's not important for tanks to be good at questing. (I'm not arguing that specifically, but I don't think it's a hard argument to make.)

[chaos5061]

Upcoming Beta Hotfixes
Update on this issue: We'll be applying a hotfix overnight that should fix the Death Knight rune regen issues, and also should address the odd "phasing" issues that were present throughout testing today.


Launcher Now Downloading Data For MoP Update
I'm just popping in here to confirm that the background download for Mists of Pandaria content has begun. It's like September 25 is getting closer every day... (!)

By the way, answers to a lot of common questions about the Blizzard Background Downloader can be found here: http://us.battle.net/support/en/arti...downloader-faq
It's a good read for troubleshooting and general information.

Mists Of Pandaria Leveling Speed
FYI, instance leveling is very very slow compared to questing, so much so there has been numerous amounts submitting bug / feedback reports regarding the XP gained.
The developers haven't done yet the final pass on experience balance for the beta. So some dungeons, quests, etc might feel off.

Conveniences and Things to Do In WoW
You're forcing people to grind the rep to exalted multiple times if you require exalted with the rep to use the mount. If you make the mounts all BoA and don't require the exalted rep on a toon to use said mount, I'd be fine. But until a decision regarding that is made, I'm 10000000000% against this system. On top of this, you made the new dragons mounts require the skill you get from hitting Exalted. There's ANOTHER thing you HAVE to grind to exalted on ALL your toons if you intend to use one of the best looking mounts in game that you ALREADY had to grind to get. It's just ridiculous. You keep talking about choices, but when it comes to rep, A. Not Account Wide. B. You do it this way, or you don't get to do it at all.
I believe all of the faction mounts are account wide.

Our basic philosophy is that you don't have to get exalted to earn the best gear. Earning revered, even with every faction, isn't that daunting for someone who wants to log in and play regularly. Exalted is about prestige and vanity rewards, of which are best are often mounts. We want those mounts to take some amount of effort but they also aren't something you "need" in the game in order to do other content. I don't think it will be a brutal grind, and ideally you'll have fun along the way, but at the end of the day we want the game to be about playing to earn rewards, not just earning rewards, if that makes sense.

This is further reinforced by removing 310% flight from What a Long Strange Trip it's Been. If I spend an entire year getting the achievements on multiple toons (because I don't want cooking or fishing on one toon for instance), then I should get it on all toons. You guys told us LESS THAN A YEAR AGO that 310% was indeed a perk for WALSTIB. So a lot of people have been working towards it since then BECAUSE you told us.
We had to change that design though in order to allow account-wide mounts, which we suspected would be an even more popular feature. With account-wide mounts, every alt you ever made would have 310% flying for free had we not made that change. We want playing an alt to be about playing an alt, and not having that alt immediately as powerful as your main (though there certainly are a lot of shortcuts).

When players start getting forced to play every single day just to keep pace, you no longer have a game, you have a job.
I agree with that overall, but the definition of "forced" is pretty slippery. Some players might feel forced to play because they really, really want a nice mount.

I fundamentally believe, though there is a fair bit of data to back it up, that players lose interest when they can no longer progress their character. There are two main ways you can fail to progress. One is that you finish everything and there is nothing else to do. The other is that the tasks you want to do feel so insurmountable that you lose the urge to try. The former can be a problem if content is too gated and players are held back too often. The latter can happen when encounters feel impossible or the grind seems never ending. The challenge is to strike the right balance where players who can't play a lot feel like they aren't falling far behind, but players who want to play a lot feel like they have something to do. We can't cater to either extreme and just dismiss the other.

Those players who are complaining about nothing to do have plenty to do. Their problem is they aren't doing it. They are generally focused on one type of content (usually raiding) to the exclusion of all other. When they run out of new raid content, when they've received all the loot they want, they sit there and complain about nothing do it.

They could be going back to do the existing faction dailies but they don't. They could be farming old content for fun and maybe items to sell on the AH for transmog but they don't. They could be questing to experience the lore and storylines that have changed since the release of WoW, and especially in the Old World zones for Cata, but they don't. They could be engaging in Archaeology or fishing but they don't. They could be doing Arena or rated BGs with friends, but they don't.

Their complaints are all based on not having enough of one specific type of content when WoW is home to multiple types.
There is always more to do in the game if you look for it. Theoretically, I could tell a player that they could organize a huge roleplaying event on their server, or try to kill every boss in the game in one day, or try to /hug every NPC in Kalimdor, but that may not be anything they are interested in. Players are actually fantastic at creating their own fun -- just look at stuff like the Ironman challenge. But again, that's not going to appeal to everyone.

One of the challenges we have with maxing out professions or completing achievements or leveling alts or playing BGs is that players have done it all before. Sure, with a new expansion they'll have an opportunity to do some of that content again, and if we're lucky some of it will feel fresh, but overall we think we need to offer new plays to play as well. Then, we also have to structure the reward system in such a way that goal-oriented players are interested in pursuing that content in order to earn those rewards. That is ultimately how the endgame of MoP came to be designed.

We understand the concern from players with many alts that while Valor of the Ancients provides a form of Valor catch up for alts, that we could stand to have a Faction catch up for alts. That's a reasonable request and something we will investigate.

To state our philosophy very simply, leveling four characters should require a lot more work than leveling one character, but there is no reason it needs to take four times as long.

[chaos5061]

Content Difficulty and Consumption Speed
extra mechanics. take rogues and druids, stealth through the dungeon. take a shaman healer, use Symbosis or whatever on him / her, they get stealth. run through the dungeon and kill crap. That's basically your extra mechanics.
Except for the fact that there're requirements through the challenge dungeons that force you, among other things, to kill a set number of creatures on the dungeon to complete the objective, so ignoring pulls won't net you anything.

Also, you want challenging content, and your answer to that challenging content is that, rather than doing it you'd just stealth through it...

Why should "bud" have similar rewards than those that dedicate alot more time into mastering the game? Its like paying for a vacation while the next gets maybe a day less of the same vacation but has to pay alot less. I would feel like getting kicked in the balls.
Except he doesn't. Hardcore raiders have heroic titles, heroic only bosses/bosses with heroic only phases, heroic mounts, achievements for those heroic kills. "Bud" wouldn't get that on the LFR.

Curiosity: Initially this mode appealed to me. And then it dawned. Let's say I make my A-team for this, run through it, get gold. What reason is there to go back? In other words, what is the replay value of this extra mode (rehashed nonetheless)?
If noone on your realm ever beats your time, none. If you don't care about getting to the top of the table for that dungeon in your realm, none.

In the other hand, if you want to show that your team is simply the best, you'll probably keep going back many times, as with gear normalization there's just no other way to do it faster than through improving efficiency.

How hypocritical of you, as always. Challenge mode's purpose is to finish the dungeon as fast as possible. That means that any way to do it is to be taken into account in order to do it asap.
If you go out of your way (not you, specifically) to ask for challenging content and speak about how much you love challenging, difficult content, but then proceed to say that you'd just skip the pulls in those dungeons, then something doesn't add up. Because in fact, what you'd be doing by skipping pulls, is making your way through difficult content by just not fighting it, which doesn't sound (at least to me) like actually wanting to face challenging content.

Honestly for challenge modes I was just expecting and wanting really tough bosses/pulls. Not arcade style speed runs.
I'll reiterate it again: Challenge mode is tuned higher than Heroic, there's additional pulls and mechanics, and there's a criteria you need to fulfill (similar to Scenarios) in order to complete the challenge. In that criteria there's a number of creatures to be defeated inside that dungeon.

Legendary Items
I feel like there is a lack of legendary items. Obviously this is because they are meant to be super rare and I understand this...Keep them very hard to get and taking the majority of the expansion to farm for.
Would the legendaries just end up as 'the' weapons to have for each class though? To the point where people wouldn't be considered for guilds/raids unless they have it, assuming the updated stats were as good as they were originally.

Suggestion: White-Worgen
It’s a cool idea and we might consider it for the future, although right now, we don’t really have any plans to implement additional worgen color options.