MoP: War: is it really? Or is it fake?

[chaos5061]

New thread for the MoP Info until Patch 5.2.

[chaos5061]

It may take until this weekend but the 5.1 changes will be posted to http://www.zygorguides.com/forum/sho...anges-Refrence for quick reference.

[chaos5061]

Warlock Class Questline Delayed
The previously mentioned Warlock class questline has been delayed until Patch 5.2. It appears that the green fire reward is confirmed now though! Kosak also mentions that there is no guarantee here, just a plan.

Guild Cloak Transmogrification
Patch 5.1 finally allows for Guild Cloaks to be used for transmogrification!

[chaos5061]

Method Heroic Sha of Fear 25 Video
Method has released their Sha of Fear kill video.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.1 Hotfixes - November 27

Classes
Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Iron Hawk now increase ranged attack power by 15% (was 10%).

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Desperate Measures now also resets the cooldown on Expel Harm when the Monk is below 35% health.

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Light of Dawn healing has been increased by 5%.
Holy Prism will now always Heal the 5 closest allies with the lowest health.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
The cooldown of Vanish has been reduced to 2 minutes (was 3 minutes).

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Curse of Enfeeblement and Aura of Enfeeblement now reduce the physical damage dealt by all targets by 10% (was 20%).
Aura of Enfeeblement and Aura of the Elements now cost 150 Demonic Fury (was 50), and have a 10 second cooldown.

Creatures
Polluted Viceclaw Scuttlers are now much tougher customers.

Items
Sky Crystals can no longer function against Alani once Nimbus Shroud has been dispelled.

Dungeons, Raids & Scenarios
Terrace of Endless Spring
Corrupted Protectors now deal less damage in the Raid Finder version of this raid.
The Sha of Fear
A number of bug fixes and adjustments have been made to the Heroic mode version of this encounter:
The Sha of Fear will now transition to the Dread Expanse at 66% health (was 50%), and no longer heals when entering the second phase of the encounter.
Dread Spawns can now gain up to 5 stacks of Gathering Speed (was 3).
Dread Spawns now spawn at a reduced rate.
Dread Spawns will no longer sometimes cast Eternal Darkness on an incorrect target.
Dread Spawns will now always cast Sha Spine when a player picks up the Orb of Light; the damage of Sha Spine has been reduced.
Dread Spawns are no longer fooled by Feign Death.
Tsulong
The Raid Finder version of this encounter has been tuned to be more appropriate for its intended difficulty.
Tsulong will no longer despawn unexpectedly in the Heroic mode version of this encounter.
Lei Shi
Lei Shi's Spray Ability now increases frost damage taken by 10% per stack in the Raid Finder version of this encounter (was 12%).

Bug Fixes
Classes
Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Clearcasting is no longer consumed by damaging spells while Heart of the Wild is active.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Renewing Mist can no longer sometimes be cast while mounted.

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Fixed an issue that could cause Illuminated Healing to apply absorption shields when no healing was generated.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Anticipation now generates the correct number of combo points when Crimson Tempest is used.

Players can now properly earn credit for the Last Man Standing achievement.
The Turkey Shooter can no longer be used on mounted players.
Fixed an issue that would cause various items to be awarded to players of the incorrect class or specialization in Raid Finder encounters.
Fixed an issue that would prevent some items from The Terrace of Endless Spring from being disenchanted.

[chaos5061]

With the latest patch, 5.1 “Landfall”, we’ve introduced the new feature, the Brawler’s Guild. As we previously announced, entry into the Brawler’s Guild is by invitation only. Invitations can be found on the black market auction house, by invitation from somebody within the guild, and occasionally as drops from certain Horde and Alliance NPCs. Before you rush to your realm’s black market auction house, we wanted to make you aware that invitations may not be available immediately upon realms going live, but should be showing up within the next 24 hours. We wish those of you who choose to take on this next challenge the best of luck in your endeavor.

With Patch 5.1: Landfall we’ve reactivated the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza. To accomplish this we reevaluated the way time-based events work in World of Warcraft. The time zone designation for a realm doesn’t always correlate with its real-world location, and that designation has traditionally directed a player to choose a realm that shares their local time. With cross-realm features like zone coalescing (CRZ) and Raid/Dungeon Finder, linking event reset or lockout times to realm times has caused a lot of confusion, such as zones flipping between day and night upon zoning, and created substantial issues with limited-time events, such as Azeroth’s fishing tournaments.

North American Daily Event Times
In Patch 5.1 we’ve moved most time-based events on North American realms to standardized, region-wide times. Below are the updated event times for all North American realms, regardless of your realm’s local time (excluding Oceanic realms).

Times displayed in North American Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8 hours)

Sunrise - 5:30 a.m. PST*
Sunset - 6:30 p.m. PST*
Daily quests reset - 3:00 a.m. PST
Profession cooldowns and farm reset - 3:00 a.m. PST
Dungeon & raid lockouts reset - Unchanged (times still shared between NA and Oceanic realms)
Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza begins - 2 p.m. PST every Sunday
Battleground holidays - 12:00 a.m. every Friday - 12:00 a.m. every Tuesday PST
Darkmoon Faire begins - 12:00 a.m. PST first Sunday of every month

Oceanic Daily Event Times
Note that, due to the extreme time zone difference, Oceanic realms have a separate standardized time, and Oceanic realms aren’t coalesced with non-Oceanic realms for cross-realm zones. Oceanic realms are, however, still a part of the North American matchmaking pool for Scenarios, Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder, Battlegrounds, and Arenas, in order to ensure that the matchmaking system is able to draw from a healthy population of players at any given hour. Because of this, raid/dungeon lockouts will continue to reset at the same time for North American and Oceanic realms (i.e. reset times will still vary depending on your local time).

Times displayed as Australian Eastern Standard Time (GMT +10 hours)

Sunrise - 5:30 a.m. EST*
Sunset - 6:30 p.m. EST*
Daily quests reset - 3:00 a.m. EST
Profession cooldowns and farm reset - 3:00 a.m. EST
Dungeon & raid lockouts reset - Unchanged (times still shared between NA and Oceanic realms)
Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza begins - 2 p.m. EST
Battleground holidays - 12:00 a.m. every Friday - 12:00 a.m. every Tuesday EST
Darkmoon Faire begins - 12:00 a.m. EST first Sunday of every month

*Day/night changeovers are not currently set to the times listed above and will be updated in a hotfix as soon as possible.

For those folks whose play schedules are adversely affected by this, and who are blaming realm coalescing, let me clarify. It was only a matter of time (get it? ... humph) before we moved to this reset system. The problem with the fishing tournaments and CRZ was just a more blunt reminder that having non-standardized reset times is confusing in a game where realm transfers and cross-realm features are a reality.

We've used a similar system for European realms for quite some time and it's cleaner.

The new system will be better for some people, and worse for others, in terms of life schedules. But people have always had different play schedules that we can't always account for, and there are unavoidable inconveniences in that regard. The new system will just take some adjustment.

I'm on a realm where my dailies have been resetting at 1 a.m. my local time, which I've used to my advantage to do back-to-back dailies many nights before bed. I won't be able to do that anymore. But I don't think that's somehow unfair to me. It's logical, to me, for an online, very "real-time" game on the scale of World of Warcraft to have standardized times for time-based content, similar to a basketball game being broadcast live from the west coast.

Why not just CRZ realms with the same time zones together...
Not to patronize you here, but the infrastructure behind World of Warcraft is incredibly complex. As stated in the original post, just because you're on, say, a realm labeled with an east coast time doesn't mean you're connecting to a server cluster or database on the east coast. Look at the Battlegroups. There are no time zone correlations between the realms within each.

[chaos5061]

PvP Power Tooltip
I'm a little confused. Last night I had 27% and some change for PvP Power and today I have 13.51% Healing PvP Power. Did they really cut it in half? Silent ninja nerf?
Nope, as a dedicated healer you haven't been nerfed. The tooltip on your character sheet was always incorrect, but that issue was fixed in 5.1. Note that the PvP Power you have should be contributing to your damage output though.

On the same token, dedicated damage dealers and tanks (including hybrid classes using those specializations) no longer benefit from PvP Power for healing.

Loss of Control Alerts
Blizzard. Remove this crap. If player's don't understand what snares and roots are, they shouldn't be playing video games.
On the subject of "hand-holding", there is an option to disable the Loss of Control UI. Just uncheck the box titled Loss of Control Alerts in the Combat section of the Interface menu.

For many others, these are useful user interface elements.

I don't see what's so useful about it. Yeah, I'm CC'd... what else is new.
Some CC is obvious; others, such as Silences or Disarms are somewhat less obvious. We wanted to better communicate when these effects take hold, which is what the new UI element is for. Some players prefer a visual cue and a precise timer regarding when a crowd control effect will end to better plan their next move.

As I said before, if you don't find it useful, you can easily disable it, or configure it to only communicate information that you might find useful.

Well. No offense but there's certain addons that already did that and did it a lot better.
We've added quite a lot of functionality over time that duplicates the effects of useful or popular addons. Naturally, there will be players that prefer the control or customization that those addons offer, but it doesn't hurt to provide a similar option in the default UI.

You can turn it off so it doesn't show icons/timers in the middle of the screen, but even if it is turned off you can not see the cooldowns of abilities on your action bars.
I'll certainly make sure that feedback is passed on.

Upgrading Season 12 to Season 12 Elite Gear
If you upgrade the Regular Season 12 Malevolent gear twice and then say you get 2200 and upgrade to the elite, does your upgrades you already made to the previous gear remain or do you now have to spend additional conquest to upgrade the 2200 gear twice now?
They remain. If a piece of gear is used as currency for a new piece of gear, upgrades are preserved.

New Daily Quest Drop Rates
The idea is that with some effort (although we are looking at the drop rates being a bit too low), a player can go farm up the materials to summon one of the 5-person bosses who are then trapped in a cage - and from there everyone can fight it. If there are already animals in the cages there is no need to go out into the field to gather materials to summon another. Everyone can fight the boss and get credit for it (and rep), and killing a boss is a daily, so there's no need to kill more than one.

The entire process should be: someone farms up a boss with a Beastmaster's Hunt quest, everyone fights it together and gets the rep, and you only need to do that once a day.

Are you sure its working? I defeated the crane boss once and I didn't get the quest for downing it. I assumed you didn't need to be in the same group.
Did the character already get credit for one of the other two bosses? You only need to down one of them, not all three.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.1 New Pets
The new pets are on fairly long spawn timers, and are randomized (i.e. will not spawn on server restart). We've confirmed they have been spawning on some realms, so just keep an eye out!

Is "some" realms rather than all the realms working as intended? Which special realms are these so I can go make alts on them?
They're random, so they're not going to spawn on every realm at the same time. So yeah, working as intended.

Blood-Soaked Invitation
Well I was hoping there was so way I could make money off of it, is there really no way?
Well, you could do Brawler's Guild and try to get to the requisite rank when you can invite another player, then sell that invitation, which is an unbound item that you can sell, trade or gift to a friend.

Were you just killing random guards or what?
The invitations don't drop from guards; they come from certain rare spawn Horde and Alliance npcs.

Cinder Kitten Availability
The Cinder Kitten will be available in the near future. They're still a little young yet to separate from their mother and make them available for adoption.

PvP Flag on PvE Realms
Is this a bug? These PvE quests for PvE rep loot purchased with PvE valor are flagging everyone for PvP, on a PvE realm.
When are you being flagged? The quest should not flag you. Flagging for PvP should be the same as always on a PvE realm. If you're accidentally attacking opposite faction guards, you will be flagged as always.

Character Death Penalty
The death of a character should be something important, the death penalty is there to make sure players don’t disregard it, in my opinion it’s actually already too easy and too fast to resurrect.
It’s because of the penalty and the lost time when doing a corpse run, that players will be more cautious about their character.
If you decide to resurrect at the spirit healer, it’s because either your character died in a very weird place (and you should be more careful), or you just don’t want to corpse run.

I think we should all be glad that there’s no experience loss as death penalty, that would probably be a bit too harsh, but I do think we need something to keep death from being meaningless.

We’re always open to good and new ideas of what that might be; as long as it’s not “removal of the death penalty”, feel free to chip in.

By "very weird place" you mean large chunks of Panda land especially anywhere near the cloud serpent dailies.
That is something completely different, any time a player is forced to resurrect at the spirit healer while doing quests or anything usual, we will take a look and adjust graveyards or the resurrection functionality if we verify that it happens when players aren’t purposely going out of their way to get into weird inaccessible paths.

So if there’s a specific place, like around the Cloud Serpent dailies area where you might be forced to resurrect at a spirit healer, that can be considered a bug and devs usually fix those by either moving the graveyards, creating new ones or flag them to auto-res players who release in those places, we prefer to do that as we’re still hesitant about adding ghost flying to Pandaria.

Season 11 Gear Return Delayed
Unfortunately, due to some issues, the inclusion of the Season 11 items will need to be delayed, possibly until patch 5.2.

Still haven’t ventured to the shores of Pandaria? Snag a super deal on Cyber Monday by saving 50% on World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. That’s a discount of almost $20, making this a great opportunity to upgrade your Cataclysm account, or—if you’re already braving the Heart of Fear—take this opportunity to invite a former guildmate back to your weekly raid night.

Don’t delay—this offer ends Thursday, November 29 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

[chaos5061]

The Daily Blink - It’s a Content Patch, Charlie Brown!
The Daily Blink shares how Warlocks are feeling right now.

[chaos5061]

Improved Scenario Rewards
Patch 5.1 a new Greater Cache of Treasures, which is rewarded from completing a random scenario. It now has a chance to drop a 450 or 463 rare quality item, or a 476 epic quality item with a random enchantment that is appropriate for your class.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.1 Hotfixes - November 28

Classes
Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Stormlash Totem now has a radius of 40 yards (was 30).

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Skull Banner now has a radius of 40 yards (was 30).

Quests
Quest targets on Bilgewater Beach in Krasarang Wilds will no longer improperly apply PvP flags to attacking players.
Agent Malley, the Operation: Shieldwall Quartermaster, now accepts the proper currency for his wares.
The quest "Touching Ground" can now be completed correctly.
NPCs in Domination Point will no longer ask PvP Guards to assist them in combat.
Great Cranes now drop Pristine Jet Crownfeathers more frequently.
Fixed an issue that would sometimes prevent players from witnessing their respective faction's landing on the shore of Krasarang Wilds.

Pet Battles
Mr. Bigglesworth will no longer drop from Kel'Thuzad, as he can now be obtained from the achievement Raiding With Leashes.

Dungeons, Raids & Scenarios
Fixed an issue that could cause some players to be friendly with the denizens of the Black Temple.
The Heart of Fear
Garalon will no longer despawn when moved near the outside edges of his platform.
Mogu'shan Palace
Trial of the King
Defeating Kuai the Brute while he is casting shockwave will no longer sometimes prevent players from completing this encounter.
A Little Patience
It is no longer necessary to slay the Kor'kron Elite preceding Commander Scargash to engage him.

PvP
Players are once again correctly affected by silencing effects in PvP.

Items
Scavenged Pandaren Weapons are now correctly Bind on Pickup.
The Malevolent Gladiator's Ripper now has the correct amount of PvP Power.

Bug Fixes
Character specific macros should no longer sometimes be removed from action bars when logging into the game for the first time.
Players that have faction changed will now receive the correct Pandaren Campaign commissions for their current faction.
Field Merchant Skevin now appears on the Skyfire.
Spirits of Harmony can no longer be sold, auctioned or mailed.
Fixed an issue that could cause players to become disconnected during the Domination Point event.
The Sturdy Crane Crate, Sturdy Tiger Trap, and Sturdy Crab Crate are now consumed once the quests they offer are accepted.
Guild tabards will now display correctly on the character selection screen.
Classes
Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Mutilate, Killing Spree, and Fan of Knives once again apply poisons correctly.
Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
The effects of Symbiosis: Prowl will now correctly be removed once the duration of Symbiosis expires.
Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Safeguard once again properly removes snares and rooting effects.

[chaos5061]

We've seen some confusion about people from other realms showing up in the Brawler's Guild.

It's important to note that the Brawler's Guild only uses realm coalescing when the number of participants is really low, so a lot of people are seeing people from other realms due to the fact that there haven't been many invitations to join distributed yet. It's highly likely the area will cease to activate CRZ on most realms as participation increases. Having 100+ people in the queue doesn't create a good experience, but, from our perspective, neither does having only a small handful of people.

The feature is designed to bring a decent population into the guild, and those people should spend at least a modest amount of time as spectators or loiterers before getting into the ring. We didn't design the Brawler's Guild with the intention of getting you through queues in 10 minutes or less. We're not trying to replicate Dungeon Finder for the solo player with Brawler's Guild.

If the place seems overcrowded AND you're seeing people from other realms there, it could be a situation where the population check that determines whether or not to coalesce a realm hasn't run again yet. As I said before, this should stabilize in time and likely automatically disable CRZ for the guild.

[chaos5061]

Lack of Complete Patch Notes
Maybe I'm just ignorant of the reason here but is there any reason that the absolute full list of changes in a patch are not listed? For example, the stealth nerf to Spectral Guise, the change in pvp power as it relates to healing, etc. were not mentioned. Most of the times people have to find these out for themselves then wait for confirmation on their respective forums. Any ideas?
I compile the notes, so I should probably explain a bit.

Essentially, the development of every World of Warcraft patch is a highly iterative creative process. Like most creative processes, there's a little bit of chaos involved, with discreet sub-teams working on individual projects, but also coordinating closely at the same time, so there's always a frenzy of activity going on at any given moment. With that in mind, there's not one comprehensive, monolithic source of information on what's being changed. Instead, information needs to be solicited, provided, re-phrased, confirmed, re-confirmed, edited, and revised as the patch is developed and I compile the notes. That also means that if there's an omission, you can be reasonably certain that it wasn't intentional. It's also worth noting that, as the code changes to resolve issues and implement new features, sometimes things go unexpectedly wonky with older parts of the game.

I'm careful to compile the notes as completely as possible, but it's not unlikely that some things will slip through the cracks from time to time. Perhaps an item didn't follow a typical development pipeline, or something was fixed at the last second. And of course, there will be rare occasions when I simply make an error and omit something that should have been included.

In all cases, we try to make the notes as informative and complete as possible, while also keeping them relevant for 99% of players.

Because if they detailed everything that went into a patch it'd be about ten pages long and everyone would whine about that. I agree that they could be a touch more extensive though.
That's not precisely the case, but we do try to keep things relatively concise. Admittedly, there are many changes that occur that wouldn't mean anything at all to 99% of players, and really crunchy notes of that sort have historically always been omitted.

They do not mention the ones which are apt to upset a large majority of the players.
That's not the case either; there are notes in virtually every update that we know will upset someone. We don't shy away from providing information that needs to be provided, and I'm afraid that you are ascribing a motivation to an event that is actually happenstance.

So it's just coincidence that almost all of the stuff that you "forgot" to put in the patch notes are things that negatively impact the game?
I have a question for you: Do you really think that we believe that players are happier to find these things out on accident, with no warning? That somehow we think we can slip things by un-detected, when logic, history, and all evidence points to the contrary?

What's the advantage there?

This should most definitely been in the patch nots yet absolutely nothing has been said about it from Blizzards end.
Indeed, it should have been. The fact that completing a partially cleared instance should cause your next Raid Finder queue to always be a fresh instance should also have been noted as well.

I'll be adding both of those to the notes shortly, in fact.

The advantage is you can simply ignore addressing the issue like is almost always done with "stealth nerfs." Just change it and not say a word.
I still don't see how that's an advantage. We always have the option of discussing a topic or not. 'Hiding' something would just make people grumpier when it sneaks up on them, which makes it even harder to speak about it in a constructive atmosphere.

I'll be honest: I'm having a hard time picturing how you think things work around here. I admit to having a nice diabolic cackle now and then, but it's not like I'm sitting in front of a bank of monitors each filled with an angry forum thread, stroking a siamese cat and telling my henchmen that they've failed me for the last time.

But won't this just perpetuate the problem of people leaving during raids even more? If I join a partially finished raid, then go to another raid to finish the bosses I haven't done I will then be leaving after completing the bosses I need. Blizz needs to find some way to keep people in the raid for the whole thing from boss 1 to until the end.
We're always working toward a better system. In the meantime, while the scenario you describe could happen, we should still see more consistent groups and lower queue times than we were seeing previously.

Solution: release a patch note addendum. "Official" additional notes will settle questions of if a change is an actual intended change, and so on.
I've been updating the notes as items are confirmed.

[chaos5061]

Quests Causing PvP Flagging on PvE Realms
Thanks for everyone's feedback on this issue. These quests are supposed to encourage PvP, but remain PvE friendly, so the more information we can gather regarding what might still be flagging players is helpful. The following hotfixes have already been implemented:

Players are no longer flagged for PvP combat when engaging Lieutenant Ethan Jacobson.
Players are no longer flagged for PvP combat when engaging Chief Engineer Cogswrench.
Getting in combat with NPCs in Domination Point will no longer cause guards to assist them.
Removed Kor’kron Elite near a quest objective.

Obviously, some of you still seem to be getting flagged inappropriately. If you are still being flagged incorrectly, we'd like to address it.

It will help us investigate if those of you still experiencing issues could please let us know what exactly you were doing when you were flagged.

Loss of Control Alerts
You get mad because Blizzard is offering you an option to disable it? This thread is pretty absurd.. and the "anger" over this feature is pretty absurd, too. Don't like it? Don't use it.
Actually, the frustration is understandable.

This thread might have been started out of context though. The player I was originally responding to seemed to simply resent that the feature existed at all, despite being an option that can be disabled. He hadn't mentioned that the screen flash and action bar 'red out' persisted after disabling the Loss of Control UI, nor had anyone else, when I first responded to the thread.

We're looking into it now.

PvP Fist Weapon PvP Power Amount
Thanks for your report on fist weapons not having the appropriate amount of PvP power. We are aware of this issue already and are actively investigating the matter.

Nothing to investigate, you only need to look at the facts, and the facts are that the fist weapons, again, have been overlooked. Isn't it just awesome to have chosen both the Shaman class AND fist weapons on a day like this?
They have not been overlooked, the PvP power adjustments simply did not apply to them and we are investigating as to why and sorting out a resolution. It is not a simple matter of flipping a switch, but we are working to have the correct amount of PvP power on fist weapons as soon as possible.

Indeed, the PvP power on the fist weapons has been hotfixed to match other weapons - however, people who bought the weapons before today are still unable to upgrade them.
We have now hotfixed the the PvP power on fist weapons as you said, however being unable to upgrade fist weapons purchased before 5.1 is unrelated and as such requires some additional investigation to solve. We are still looking into this and hope to have it sorted out as soon as possible.

Good that it's acknowledged, got any kind of ETA (today, tomorrow, next patch, the next expansion)? It seems the ones that are on the vendors are upgradeable but not the ones that players have already bought.
Indeed, it is only the ones bought before patch 5.1 that cannot be upgraded and this is what we are looking into. Unfortunately we cannot provide any ETA at this time, but do hope to get this sorted out quickly.

[chaos5061]

BWL Soloing
How did u do it solo? The adds kill the boss way to fast.
Some adds should be sticking to you (but won't interrupt your channel). There's no debuff when using the orb, so you can interrupt it, clean adds, and retake control of the boss as much as you want, and you can destroy eggs non-stop (other than his 3 second cast).

Also, Razorgore has an ability that will put to sleep a dragonkin unit, this is very useful if he's under attack. Just keep practicing and make the most of the period between the pull and the first wave of adds!

WoW Engine Upgrades
Technology never stops evolving and we all know that most games usually end up falling behind, as time never stops, while trying to keep up with the latest hardware.

But actually, a game like WoW is constantly updating its engines, with every new expansion and sometimes even during normal patches, we get a few updates here and there, both to the graphics engine but also to many other kinds of engines, like animation, A.I., network, scripts, physics…

WoW is actually a very efficient and polished game, and it has to be so, players need a smooth gameplay while doing very demanding CPU/GPU intensive tasks, like being in a city with hundreds of players around you, 25-man raids, or even world bosses when there’s 2 or 3 more 40-man raids around you trying to tag the same boss, and then there’s addons, which introduce some overhead but provide one of the most powerful game customization capabilities that I know of, adding extreme versatility and expansibility to the game.

Many changes and updates have been done to the game’s engines throughout all these years, some players might not notice them immediately but they are there.
Most of the engines that we use are made in-house and remain exclusive to our games. That’s why we typically don’t discriminate most of those changes and release extensive technical details.

For example, with Cataclysm we were able to introduce DirectX 11 support and many new different features like dynamic sunshafts and improved “liquid” rendering (aka awesome looking water!). With Mists of Pandaria we have better and bigger textures, improved shadows, overall better and more detailed 3D models and some stuff that you just won’t notice because it’s not visually distinguishable, like performance improvements on the way the game renders the world around you.

We also need to be careful about any changes we might apply to graphics, as sometimes those changes can mean a feeling of loss to many players that love and are used to the way the world looks. We know WoW can be very close to player’s hearts and that our community is incredibly passionate about the game, so we need to be extremely careful about any design changes we apply, not only visual changes.

Burning Crusade Content Difficulty
We know that there are players interested running TBC at the appropriate character level but we can’t really tune old content to match every single change we apply to the game when we’re also adding options at the same time for high level players to enter those raids alone so they can solo bosses.

These are two different philosophies that just don’t work well together, it’s hard to tune things for both a level 90 to solo and for twinks to have a competitive and challenging raid, we do try to make that possible but our main focus is on level 90 content at the moment and in fine-tuning high level balance.

Honestly I love the idea of being able to raid all the old instances at the appropriate level and difficulty, there’s so much content left behind that new players will never get to experience the same way we did in the past and that feels like a bit of a loss to me as well, but on the other hand, I think it’s easy to understand why that happens, the amount of resources that would be required to constantly keep all old content perfectly tuned would be enormous.

With the launch of MoP, the talent revamp, all the changes that were applied to classes, all that has an effect on low level characters’ DPS, we know they’re not perfectly tuned, and although we always strive to perfect every single aspect of our game, priorities need to be taken in consideration and on top of the list needs to be high level content, when we’re satisfied with the state of that content we can start to pay a bit more attention to low-level tuning of characters and npcs.