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

[chaos5061]

We all contribute to coming up with achievement names. It's fun. Kaplan used to name them all, then I named them all, but now everyone pitches in. Quest designers name quest achievements, encounter designers name encounter achievements and so on. It's one of the areas of the game where it's acceptable to be a little goofy.

Getting content out faster is probably the best thing we can do. It's okay if guilds that work really hard get a short break. It's when that break grows long than players start to lose interest.
I know we've been saying "more faster, more better" for years, but it can often take years to turn a ship this big.

We have discussed buy orders specifically for those big ticket, risky items like end-game gear or expensive mounts. They would be nice for anything expensive but low volume. We don't think buy orders are needed for things like flasks or normal enchants that are pretty much always available.
We had buy orders on the MoP feature list, but had to punt it in order to get some other features out. This is a very common phenomenon for us. We often start and expansion with double or triple the number of features that we can reasonably do. We get around to doing all of the good ideas eventually.

We initially balanced melee and casters to do about the same damage, figuring that melee ability to do damage while moving would offset the caster target switching. Over time, we gave casters so many ways to do damage while moving that they just ended up dominating on any movement fight. (Melee still did great on static encounters.)
We now give an even bigger edge to melee DPS, knowing that on actual encounters the damage done will even out with the casters.
You should be fine mixing melee and casters in MoP. Let us know if you don't think it is working out.

You won't need to repeat the quest. Think of the quest as earning the right to buy gems, at which point you can buy as many as you need (not necessarily for cheap). The gem itself is unique equipped. You can equip two sha-touched daggers, but only one can have the gem. You can have another gemmed sha-touched dagger in your bags.

The Protectors of the Endless encounter in the Terrace of Endless Spring raid in 5.0 works exactly like the Iron Council hardmode from Ulduar; if you defeat Protector Kaolan last on that encounter, you get "Elite" loot that is even more powerful than the normal rewards from the encounter.
It's the sort of thing we'd like to continue to experiment with and introduce where it makes sense. For some of the Ulduar encounters it was intuitive (kill Freya while her protectors are still alive), but in other cases it was obscure (how many people would have discovered the Vezax hardmode without an achievement describing what to do?) or an outright trap ("Why is XT hitting so hard?"). We literally spent as much time arguing over how to trigger the Mimiron hardmode as we did designing the fight itself, before someone half-jokingly suggested, "what if we just put a big red button on the wall?"
So the toggle is here to stay, but we're definitely keeping our eyes open for places where it makes sense to apply the Ulduar model.

[chaos5061]

Since there aren't a lot of people that can authoritatively answer one of your questions, I'll tackle it.
"Going off that, there seems to be a significant lack of clarity on many people's parts about what impact (if any) Activision has had on Blizzard. As the people designing the game, do you feel there has been a change in how things are done since the merger, either within game development or the company in general?"
I'll come out and say it. Activision gets an unfair reputation among our players for this, as does Bobby Kotick. We do demos for the Activision executive team about twice per year (sometimes only once). They ask intelligent questions about why we're doing what we're doing, but at no point have any mandates (or even "suggestions") about the game's design been issued.

I'll tackle the lore part of your question, about the Old Gods.
Obviously the Old Gods have had a major impact all over the world. They aren't directly pulling any strings in Pandaria, however, you can still feel the cold grip of their influence, many thousands of years later. If you're interested in the lore, you owe it to yourself to reach exalted with the Klaxxi faction to learn a little more about their origins.

I guess this depends on what you think defines that event. Are you asking for more quests that have an awesome climactic cinematic? Are you asking for more quests that require you to do a whole lot of things over one or more zones before it all comes together? Are you asking for quests where you delve into major cities for huge lore events?
The answer is: Yes, yes, and ... yes.
Although these events are few and far between - we want them to feel special. And some big events will happen in the patches. Glad you liked the Wrathgate! It was a big milestone for WoW storytelling.

[chaos5061]

I said that CRZ wasn't intended to fill up the auction houses of realms with low auction activity. That wasn't the goal of the feature, so blaming it for not achieving that goal isn't terribly fair.

I'm glad you enjoyed the novel! Golden is a fantastic author who works very closely with us to do justice to the franchise.
If you're getting psyched about the storyline, I think you'll love the next novel which focuses on Vol'jin. Have you played the troll 1-10 intro experience? Vol'jin flat-out tells Garrosh he doesn't trust him and he'll stab him in the back the moment he sees an opportunity. The novel carries his story forward and really meshes in with the events of patch 5.1.
One of our ongoing goals is to make sure that the games and novels compliment each other, and that major lore events don't happen in the novels without some kind of representation in-game. This is a huge challenge for us!! But I think we're getting better at it.

Yes. We'd like to do make queuing for random bgs better by ensuring some semblance of healer balance between alliance/horde. For example, having no healer on your 15 person team when the opponents have 3 can have a huge impact on your team's chance of success. Also, we're considering more aggressively separating players with entry-level gear from everyone else (unless they're grouped with a player with non entry-level gear).

We're certainly going to continue to iterate on the design of the talent system over the course of Mists. There are 198 talents. The odds that all 198 are perfect are rather slim.
With regard to that shaman tier in particular, the cutoff for Call of the Elements was changed to 3 minutes to prevent it from being mandatory as a throughput increase, or essentially demanding that it be paired with Healing Tide in the 75 tier. Beyond that, a shaman who drops Spirit Link to equalize his group's health and then picks it up instantly for a 90sec cooldown refund from Totemic Restoration, or a shaman who stuns his enemies with an expertly-flung Capacitor Totem via Totemic Projection, will probably be experiencing some meaningful gameplay difference as a result of his or her talent choices. That said, that tier is certainly a candidate for further adjustment.

We have a target number of players for a zone. If you're on a high pop realm, then in general you won't get merged as often with other realms. However, CRZ is more static than say Dungeon Finder. The latter can spin up more instances as needed. With CRZ, we didn't want realms to be merged and unmerged constantly. If you saw someone in Silverpine, we wanted the possibility that you would also run into them in Hilsbrad. Now that the system is live, we'll gain a lot of data to help calibrate actual zone populations better. If our estimates were off and a zone is too full, then we'll merge it with fewer realms or not merge it at all. But that will take some time to adjust -- it doesn't adjust on the fly.

[chaos5061]

We weren't happy with the way Abyssal Maw was shaping up. It managed to take on a life of its own in players' minds, but believe me, if it had been an awesome raid, we would have shipped it. One of the hardest parts of this job is killing a feature you're excited about because it doesn't meet our quality bar. I suspect you'd see far more complaints if we had shipped a bad raid than not shipping one at all. We took the resources and put them back into Firelands and got a couple of extra bosses out of it.

Perhaps this has already been asked, but what's the deal with the spam of 'skills learned' every time I enter a new zone? I assume that it was not intended, and that you're working to fix it, but I saw just a few minutes ago that it hasn't been fixed yet with the latest patch. Any chance you could explain it to me like I'm five what exactly is causing that? Unless no one knows, hence why it hasn't been fixed yet, lol...
That is a bug and our engineers are working on fixing it. It should be something we can hotfix.

As with many things, if we can't do something right, we end up not doing it (yet). We still aren't close to satisfied with the Runeforging system as it currently stands, but we also didn't have an overhaul to that system that we were happy with. It's a feature we're still discussing and working on.

From somebody that has worked for nine years in an effort to provide fun, thanks for being such a dedicated long-time player!
We'd definitely love to expand raid finder and scenarios to lower-level characters. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome as it relates to scaling/tuning the content and appropriately rewarding characters of varying levels though, so it isn't something we've gotten to yet. Someday I think it'll happen. Although, we're certain to be accused of trying to pawn off "rehashed content" when we get to it. =[
I totally agree that there are tons of cool things we can (and should) be pursuing to make our professions gameplay much more interesting. This is something we'd love to tackle!

Well, first she'd have to run out of corpses, so from that perspective, the war is REALLY helping the Forsaken out...
This is a good question, because the nature of the Forsaken makes them a really unstable ally. That leads to some great stories. At the moment, Sylvanas is fortifying her position - she's making a landgrab, she's fortifying her borders, she's using the Valkyr to boost her numbers... But what's her long-term plan?
At least Garrosh called her out on it. What will the next Warchief do about it? Better question: What if SYLVANAS is the next Warchief? Oh man.

We really want to show Thrall developing as a character, not moving backwards. He's learned a lot about himself after Cataclysm. He'll continue defining himself in the wake of Mists...

During your recent Cdev, you stated that it wasn't an Old God underneath Tirisfal. Any chance you could give us any kind of hint as to what's down there? Any tidbit of info would be awesome.
I hate to do this, but I didn't want to leave you hanging without an answer. My answer is: We're not saying. Not yet.

[chaos5061]

We want to make sure the loot you get is commensurate with the logistical effort involved. That doesn't meant the loot has to be higher item level, but it could mean you earn loot faster.
We're not trying to kill 25 raiding. I totally agree we haven't yet done a good job of saving it.

At some event, I met a man who said he had trouble communicating with his teenaged son. Somehow they managed to start playing WoW together, and through that they were able to start talking, at first about the game, and then about life in general. They still had trouble talking face to face, but the barriers were relaxed over chat or voice chat or whatever they were using.
We're making a game here. We're not going to save the world. I get that. But it was a really memorable conversation.

We try not to design classes by filling out forms -- where is this dude's gap closer? Where is his DPS cooldown? That's a great recipe for every class feeling alike.
That said, in addition to PI we also made the Shadow Fiend do pretty serious damage for Shadow.

Hopefully this isn't too buried, I wanted to talk briefly about cutscenes. If you've been playing the game since vanilla, you know that our storytelling is constantly evolving. We're always trying new things.
When it comes to full-on cinematics, we definitely have more of them in Pandaria. They highlight KEY moments in the game and the lore; you'll see one when you first get your mission to go to Pandaria, and there's a whopper of a movie when you play through the climax of the Jade Forest. This stuff is AWESOME, we've got a great team who's put together some really magical pre-rendered moments.
HOWEVER!
It's way more important to us to convey story through gameplay, not movies. To that end, there's a lot of "less flashy" stuff we do in Pandaria to surround your character with story as you play. NPCs will seamlessly start to follow you or fight with you, the environment will change around you as you do things, and we try to have a lot more key lore characters directly involved in your experience. We're trying to do all of these things without breaking players into different phases constantly (there's less phasing in Pandaria than in previous expansions), and we're trying to do it without having super-linear zones anymore.
It's tricky. I can't say we've "nailed it." But I think Pandaria has the best in-game storytelling we've ever had in an expansion. I'm really looking forward to seeing it all play out!!

[chaos5061]

If your questions were buried because the post was very large, I don't see a problem with you submitting in a new, streamlined format. I don't remember off-hand what you originally wrote, so I can't guarantee a response. But it's likely that some of the really large posts that fell to the bottom will not be addressed in time.
I hear developer keyboards pounding away all around me!

We love what the admins of this subreddit have done to foster and support a respectable segment of our community. Holding the AMA here affords us the opportunity to make the broader community better aware of this great resource that is /r/WoW!

Hello John, Dave, Ion, Greg, and Tom! Welcome to Reddit! I have three quick questions for you.
Have you considered adding in a system to make it easier for PVP'ers to find team mates for arenas and rated BG's? Such as cross-realm LFG channels and a list of players that are LFG with class/spec/rating etc?
Have you considered adding some sort of gold income to PVP, such as a small gold reward for doing random BG's?
What is your current opinion on the overall state of Mists PVP? Is it where you want it to be with regards to player survivability, healing, damage, and CC?
Thanks for doing this!

Hi Eldacar.
Yes, a system like this is something we'd like to see. We have a variety of improvements we're planning for both rated and unrated bgs.
It has been considered, but isn't currently in the works. We'll see how the MoP endgame plays out before further consideration. Bear in mind I say this as a habitually broke WoW player that spends a lot of time doing PvP and would definitely benefit from it.
At 85 the numbers are kind of wild... healers heal for a ton as a percentage of a health bar and non-healers die too quickly. At 90, health pools increase more than damage does (by roughly a 3:2 ratio, although your mileage may vary), so it should be noticeably better.

In short, we're not satisfied with the current status of 25-player raids. There are clear logistical challenges to sustaining a 25-player raiding group. It's inherently 2.5 times as much churn, and thus 2.5 times as much recruitment needed. In terms of actual encounter difficulty, while we haven't always succeeded, we feel that we can deliver on a comparable experience between the two modes: 10-player raiding often involves greater personal responsibility, while 25-player raiding is more complex on a macro level (more moving pieces). Even perfect tuning doesn't compensate for the logistical difficulties, though.
Our hope and intent when introducing the parallel 10/25 structure in Cataclysm was that people would be free to pick the raid size that they prefer, but I'll admit that in light of the organizational challenges of maintaining a 25-player roster, we may need a slightly larger incentive to make that choice a truly free and fair one. When you're the guild leader of a 25-player raid group, and you realize that you only have 21 people regularly showing up, it's much easier to just forge ahead in 10-player mode than it is to go through a fresh recruitment cycle to bolster your ranks. And if Mechanar taught us anything, it's that players will always take the path of least resistance when the rewards are equal. (Note that this doesn't mean that it's necessarily the most fun path or what players would choose in the absence of any outside forces pulling them one way or another.)
A small step we've taken to that end has been to increase the amount of loot dropped in 25-player Normal mode in 5.0 to 6 pieces per boss, matching the Heroic loot rate as it has stood in Cataclysm. That's something. But it's not a true solution to the problem. It's something we continue to discuss on a regular basis.

[chaos5061]

At some event, I met a man who said he had trouble communicating with his teenaged son. Somehow they managed to start playing WoW together, and through that they were able to start talking, at first about the game, and then about life in general. They still had trouble talking face to face, but the barriers were relaxed over chat or voice chat or whatever they were using.
We're making a game here. We're not going to save the world. I get that. But it was a really memorable conversation.

We try not to design classes by filling out forms -- where is this dude's gap closer? Where is his DPS cooldown? That's a great recipe for every class feeling alike.
That said, in addition to PI we also made the Shadow Fiend do pretty serious damage for Shadow.

A couple of reasons. First, there is a long history of theorycraft in this game. I think if we remove too much of the mystery and experimentation, then the game loses some of its charm. There is less motivation to try out different rotations or gems to increase your DPS if you know with near certainty even before you begin what your max DPS is.
Second, I feel like we'd have to monitor players using it correctly. Within seconds a bunch of "My DPS is lower than you said it is" posts (whether unintentionally or maliciously) would spring up, which we would then have to troubleshoot or verify.

Yeah. Check out what we've done with Cooking and Inscription specifically. They have some good catch-up mechanics, and we'd like to weave those into the older recipes if the systems prove popular.

I don't think Raid Finder is a good substitute for having a group of friends to play with. I think it's a good substitute for when your friends aren't online or you don't currently have a solid group or so on.
Raids with friends >> Raid Finder >> no raiding at all.

[chaos5061]

The entire premise of the new LFR loot system is that your chance of winning loot is independent of absolutely all external factors. The moment you can trade items to and from your guildmates, that ceases to be the case.
And sadly, even if you would only use the ability to trade items to make the day of a random stranger in LFR, others would use it to have 24 alts funnel items to their main in a premade group.

The way I see it, our player base has just diversified greatly. In vanilla and BC, very few players had the expectation of raiding, but fortunately things like questing and making a bunch of alts still felt new and rewarding. These days, we have been able to encourage many more players to participate in dungeons and raids and PvP, which is fantastic, but those players come with very different skill and commitment levels. Making the game very easy would alienate players as would making the game too difficult. The answer we believe is to have different content for different kinds of players.
Someone like you might enjoy the heroic raids, particularly the optional elite modes for bosses in the Terrace of Eternal Spring. You also might try Challenge Modes. Challenge Mode dungeons, when shooting for gold especially, may very well be the hardest content we've ever offered.

I have never posted on Reddit before… So this might be a stupid, off-topic question.
But, Ghostcrawler, are you a brony? I couldn't help but notice that you have a Rainbow Dash icon next to your name instead of a blizzard icon.
It would be the best thing ever if you were.
That pony icon just appeared by magic, but it's pretty much the best thing ever.

I'll add to this by saying that the nature of the way the player population distributes itself, merging servers ends up not really being the great solution many players imagine.
At this point, the overwhelming majority of players online at any given time are at max level and hanging around in major population centers. Merging servers makes the cities far more populated, but the outdoor world still ends up feeling dead, nothing like what the world feels like when the player population in general is still leveling-up. Even if you assume MoP succeeds in getting people back out into the world, it's important to understand that that will mean people will be out in the world in Pandaria, but the rest of the world would still feel abandoned.

http://www.reddit.com/user/Zarhym
http://www.reddit.com/user/TheFargo
http://www.reddit.com/user/Kalgan
http://www.reddit.com/user/WatcherDev
http://www.reddit.com/user/Ghostcrawler
The 5 accounts answering questions.
Thanks. I should've posted that in the OP, but I figured the names and flair were enough. I'll edit that in though! <3

[chaos5061]

Great question! Sha energy is CENTRAL to the story in Pandaria. It's the reason that pandaren culture has evolved along the lines it has. (If you're really curious about the Lore, follow the story of the Last Pandaren Emperor by finding all of his lore objects hidden in the world and talking to Lorewalker Cho.)
The arrival of the Alliance and Horde on the continent really uncorks the bottle - this long suppressed energy explodes out, causing havoc from coast to coast. You can earn the trust of the wary pandaren by helping to clean up your mess. There's a real cultural exchange that happens: The pandaren learn a lot about the Alliance and Horde, and hopefully the factions learn a lot about the pandaren that they can apply to their own situation.
At a deeper level, there's a lot of symbology with the sha, which is good from a storytelling perspective. There are some wonderful moments in the game - one of my favorite stories has to do with a Shado-Pan warrior dealing with the death of her husband, which opens up her heart to the Sha of Hatred.
If you're intrigued by the concept, you'll find that the sha plays a big role in a lot of the quests, dungeons, and raids. Sweet!
Is the sha a threat to Azeroth as a whole? Possibly. I'd be more worried about the orc with the nukes.

Actively working on updating character models! It's a high priority for us.

Challenge mode dungeons. Our 5-player instanced content at this point is primarily consumed by randomly matchmade groups through the Looking for Dungeon system, and it needs to be tuned accordingly (a lesson learned from Cataclysm release Heroics). Challenge modes offer us an opportunity to return to some of the really fun core MMO gameplay that will test the skill and coordination of groups of friends and guildmates. Crowd control, assisting, target prioritization, and so forth are essential to success, and because we're normalizing any gear that is superior to level 90 dungeon blues, you can't outgear them, only outskill them.

We're always hiring developers. We can't hire them fast enough. But we are extremely picky about who we hire. A lot of Blizzard's success has to do with our culture, and we risk diluting that culture if we hire too many people too quickly, who may not be able to absorb our values or (gasp) may not even believe in them. You can't solve every problem just by throwing money at it.
If you know of good people, send them our way!

[chaos5061]

I wish I had a better response to this, but the truth is that our team was focused on making Pandaria itself absolutely beautiful. Stormwind and Orgrimmar are complex pieces of architecture, and while there's a great story reason to fix them, there's no gameplay that results from that work.
I think we all want to see the gates of Stormwind patched up, but it'll take some time. Apparently the King has a bad track record with the local masons....

I think it's a fair criticism that too often your response to seeing another player (even of the same faction) is negative because it means more competition rather than positive because it means more cooperation.
We're concerned that just turning off mob tapping would lead to everyone just joining the raid in that zone to share experience. This was common back in the farming furbolg days, and we don't see any reason why players wouldn't still gravitate towards the most efficient way to level. However, there are some other ideas we can explore to encourage cooperation without mandating it.

Because they are so, so pretty.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of a cop out to assume that we buff the specs we like and nerf the specs we hate. That would be a pretty dumb strategy to keep players happy and I am certain I would have been fired long ago if that's how we operated.

[chaos5061]

I'm not the right person to answer this, but nobody on the UI team is here, so I'll just chime in. We definitely support the add-on community as much as we can. Many mod-makers are able to contact us directly. It's a high priority for the UI team, and for all of us at Blizzard. I wish I could give you more specifics, but it's outside of my realm of expertise.
If there are specific issues or questions you have, we check the forums.

To be fair, Dragonsoul -> Pandaria will have been several months faster than ICC -> Cata. That being said, I totally agree that it's still way too long. This is something we're committed to making better.

One of the dangers when we tune a Heroic raid encounter to the razor's edge is that we stress areas of our class design that aren't as well-balanced (nor were they ever intended to be). We can promise that classes will do comparable DPS on a fight like Ultraxion. We can't promise that every class will do comparable DPS in a 20 second burst window, a 40 second burst window, while cleaving two targets, while AoEing 8 targets for a minute straight, while damaging 4 targets that are all spread out, and so forth. (And a world in which those were all equal would be a rather boring, homogeneous world. We think it's pretty cool for a Combat Rogue to get excited when a fight is going to involve two enemies tanked next to each other, or for a Fire mage to get giddy when thinking of Yor'sahj or Halfus.)
That doesn't mean that we can't tune brutally hard encounters, nor does it mean that we can't stress specific class mechanics, but it does mean that we need to be careful to vary the types of mechanics that matter most in a given fight when we're tuning it that way. It was really interesting to watch guilds progress on Heroic Ragnaros, to use a specific example. Guilds ran into a hard brick wall in phase 2 of the encounter initially, just trying to deal with Molten Elementals, and we saw some of them bring as many as 9 or 10 Balance Druids because they had the best burst targeted AoE in the game. And that got them to phase 3, where they promptly realized they had no hope at all of meeting the DPS check to avoid having more than 2 meteors spawn while stacking so many moonkins, because while their targeted AoE was excellent, their single-target sustained DPS while dodging World in Flames was not. And so guilds gradually brought fewer and fewer druids, adapted to handle Phase 2 in other ways, and ultimately ended up defeating the encounter with balanced compositions.
But if not for the Phase 3 DPS check, it's safe to say that the first Heroic Ragnaros kills would have looked suspiciously like the first Heroic Nefarian kill.... So there definitely were lessons learned from Spine: specifically the importance of stressing varied and conflicting mechanics at the same time, instead of just one.

[chaos5061]

We agree that the system could use some more visual oomph. Especially when you don't win an item from a boss, you feel the lack of some of the ceremony of downing a boss that used to be present, with a bunch of Need/Greed loot dialogues popping up on your screen, reviewing the loot to see if you needed anything (or, let's be honest, clicking every Dice icon that was clickable...) and then watching the rolls unfold.
There's room for improvement there, and it's something we're continuing to polish.

Personally, Azjol (first as a zone, then as a raid) was one of the scrapped ideas I was saddest to let go. I love the idea of deepearth / underdark (Deepholm was cool, but really more of a single huge cavern than a network) and particularly coupled with the alien architecture of the nerubians. I was sad we weren't able to do more with them in the LK expansion, but I hope we can revisit them someday.

GREAT questions! Re: Jaina. The novel gets inside her head and traces all of her reactions before, during, and after Theramore. [Spoilers!] At the end she's heading up the Kirin-Tor, and she really sees them as a beacon of light that will help the world ultimately move forward and on from the war. EXCEPT... her story doesn't end there. We'll catch up with her in the patches.
Re: Lordaeron. Without having the book in front of me, I'm not sure which passage you're talking about. The Alliance can't retake Lordaeron until they get to it; Sylvanas held them off at Andorhal, as depicted in-game.
What's Varian been up to? Well, after focusing on the Lich King, he wasn't using Alliance military might to conquer new territory. He used it to, among other things, provide aid and rescue the Gilneans. Does this make him a bad leader, or a noble one? That's a good question.

Rexxar for Warchief! Who's with me!?

Part of doing new models would have to be doing new animations. The pandaren are just capable of so many more evocative or even charming animations than the older models with their older rigs can do. Obviously, that makes the task bigger, but that's what we'd like to do.

Cities should not be merged. If that's happening, it's a bug. It is also possible that you are seeing groups formed of friends who invited Real ID or Battle Tag friends to adventure with them. One of the benefits we get from CRZ is being able to quest with friends from other realms.

This is the most red-shirtiest of questions so far! Congrats!
But it's a good question.
Matoclaw was just estimating when she says "a decade ago." It was closer to ... what, seven years I think?
I can tell you that the quest team is definitely being a little ambitious with Anduin - we write him as though he's 17 or so, but in reality his age is younger.
And since we're being honest, we're intentionally a little bit vague about exact time periods in-game. The content we put in will be played for years, so sometimes things get a little ... spongy.

[chaos5061]

Arathi Highlands has the potential to be a real epic convergence of a lot of stories, the Forsaken warmachine was last seen setting up camp here, Stromgarde sits eagerly awaiting revival as well as being the last line of defense between the Forsaken and Khaz Modan, giving the Dwarves and interesting stake in it.
What are your plans with this zone, if any?
Agree completely. But, it's unlikely we'll revisit old zones once again. Until the next Cataclysm...

Feedback from Cataclysm is that people don't like when they "lose" a character to neutrality. So I hear you. Jaina's story continues, and we have plans!!

Good to see a Vol'jin fan! You're going to dig the novel.

I'm trying not to spoilerize here, man!

That’s about all the time we have for the evening. We’d like to extend a special thanks to the administrators of /r/WoW for helping to foster an awesome gaming community. Please extend your gratitude for their efforts here! And thank you as well. Hopefully this has been insightful for everyone reading or posting along -- it was extremely helpful for us to see all of your questions and comments. We truly appreciate your feedback and can’t wait for the mists to part on September 25!
Whether on reddit, the official Blizzard forums, or elsewhere, we always love to hear from you! Feel free to follow Greg Street, Dave Kosak, lead content designer Cory “Mumper” Stockton (he’s sad he couldn’t be here today to chat with you), and me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler
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http://twitter.com/Mumper
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Love, Zarhym

[chaos5061]

Here you'll find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to the recently released World of Warcraft patch 5.0.5. Hotfixes are updates we make on our end without requiring you to download a new patch. Some of the hotfixes below went live the moment they were implemented, while others may require your realm to be restarted to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch update. We will continue to update this list in the days to come as additional hotfixes are applied.

General
The Ethereal Soul-Trader pet is now immune to player abilities.
We've made numerous fixes to the behavior of various systems in Cross-Realm Zones.

Classes
Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Dash again provides the intended speed bonus when reactivated after shifting out of and back into Cat Form.
Feral stealth has been made more effective.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Camouflage should no longer be cancelled on the hunter when an effect causes it to be cancelled on the hunter's pet. Cancelling a hunter's Camouflage should always cancel it on the pet.
It should no longer be possible to spell reflect Narrow Escape.

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Combustion should no longer ignore target damage multipliers when calculating the damage of the Pyroblast DoT on the target.

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Divine Purpose should only have one chance to activate once per finisher (which must land on at least one target).<

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Lightwell charges are no longer consumed and wasted if a player rapidly clicks on the Lightwell.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Stealth has been made more effective.

Dungeons and Raids
The Glory of the Cataclysm Hero meta achievement no longer improperly requires a Mists of Pandaria dungeon achievement.
Karazhan
The Chess encounter should once again proceed at its former, more leisurely pace.
The Eye
Kael’thas Sunstrider’s Gravity Lapse should once again function properly.
The Ruby Sanctum
Halion should no longer despawn shortly after entering combat.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.0.5 Build 16057
Patch 5.0.5 Build 16057 is headed our way at some point in the near future. It contains no significant changes, making it likely just bugfixes and changes that couldn't be hotfixed.