Blizzard Wrote:Adventurers will be tested like never before in World of Warcraft patch 4.3 as they take on Deathwing and his minions, emerging from the conflict with powerful new treasures. Please enjoy this preview of the warrior tier 13 armor set, as well as a visual guide to tiers 1 through 12 for Transmogrification purposes.



Warrior – Colossal Dragonplate

A simple concept: Let’s make a warrior tier that looks like Deathwing! Gnarled dragon horn and angular elementium plating with burning fire behind it were the key ingredients.

We build our player armor from a number of base templates, which means the concepts need to conform to predetermined shapes. However, shoulder pads and helmets are uniquely modeled for each set and that gives us great opportunities to create eye-catching silhouettes. In this instance, the sweeping horn shapes ensure a powerfully brutal-looking set for warriors.

Warrior Tiers 1-12

Blizzard Wrote:How the Developers Decide What Needs to Be Changed and When

My previous two blogs spelled out some upcoming changes. This isn’t going to be one of those blogs. If you care mostly about WoW news, and less about the design process behind the game, then you might want to skip this one.

A lot of game design is striking a balance, and I use that term not only to mean making sure that all the various classes are reasonably fair, but also to mean that it’s easy to go to one extreme or the other. You even have to strike a balance in how many changes you make. On the one extreme, if you don’t change anything, then the game feels stale and players understandably get frustrated that long-standing bugs or game problems aren’t addressed. On the other extreme, too much change can produce what we often call the "roller coaster effect" where the game design feels unstable and players, particularly those who play the game more sporadically, can’t keep up. I wanted to discuss today some of our philosophy on change, how much is too much, and when we think a change is necessary.

First, Some Technical Background

World of Warcraft is a client-server game. The servers (which are the machines on our end) handle important, rules-y things like combat calculations and loot rolls. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it makes it much easier to share information across groups. When a rogue stabs your priest, it’s helpful for both your computer and the rogue’s computer to agree about when and where a hit occurred and how much damage was caused (and what procs went off as a result, etc.). Second, we can trust the server in ways that we can’t trust home or public computers.

Over time, as our programming team has grown more experienced and picked up additional talented engineers, we have been able to make larger and in some cases bolder server updates without also having to update your client. Updating the client (the game on your computer) requires a patch. This can be a large patch, such as 4.2, which introduced the Molten Front questing area and the Firelands raids, or it can be a small patch, like 4.2.2, which fixed some bugs. Client patches are fairly involved. They take a lot of time to create and test, and they carry some amount of risk, because if we botch anything, we have to issue another client patch to fix it.

Changing the game code on the server has become much easier for us. There is still risk involved, but it’s also much easier for us to fix any mistakes. We call these server changes hotfixes, because often times we are able to deploy them even while you are playing. If we hotfixed Mortal Strike’s damage, you might suddenly do more or less damage in the middle of a fight. Players sometimes call changes like these stealth nerfs or buffs if we haven’t announced the hotfix yet (or in rare cases, if we don’t intend to announce them at all). We generally can’t hotfix, at least not yet, things like art, sound or text, so we won’t for example add a new boss or swap a weapon’s art around without a client patch (though we could enable a boss that had been previously added via a client patch).

I mention all of that just to explain that one reason you see so many hotfixes these days is because we have the technical ability to do so. That doesn’t mean that the game has more bugs, more boneheaded design decisions, or more class balance problems than previously. It just means we can actually fix those problems today while in the past, we (and you) might have to wait for months until the next big patch day. Overall, we don’t think it’s fair to our players to make you all wait for things that are quick for us to fix. Whether or not players are excited about the change depends a lot on the nature of the change. If we fixed a bugged class ability, that is often greeted with gratitude by players playing that class… unless the fix lowers their damage, or requires them to swap out gems and enchants to benefit from the newly repaired ability.

With Great Power Comes…

That’s the challenge in all of this. If your hunter is topping meters by a small fraction, you might ask: what’s the rush? And many players do. But you have to consider that other players are miffed that their raid leader might sit a warlock in the interest of bringing a third hunter (since their damage is so awesome) or might be really frustrated that they are so likely to lose to your hunter in PvP. “Necessary change” is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

We try to gather a lot of voluntary information from players, when they are cancelling their subscription for example, about why they feel the way they do. Over time, we have seen concerns about class balance decrease and concerns about frequent game changes increase. Clearly there is a risk that we can change things too much and drive players away. The rollercoaster effect of too many changes can be wearying to the community, even if each individual change is made with a noble goal. We have to balance the goal of providing fixes when we think they are warranted with the whiplash or fatigue that can come from players feeling like they constantly have to relearn how the game works. We debate constantly whether a change needs to be made immediately or whether we can sit on a problem for an extended period of time.

There are no hard and fast rules that help us resolve these conflicts, so I thought it might be easier to just give you a few examples of the kinds of things we might be tempted to change in a hotfix, patch or expansion, and the kinds of things we would not.

Example One: Spec Parity

After looking at many raid parses, we conclude that Arcane mage damage now routinely beats Fire mage damage. (There are a lot of elements to this discussion that I’m ignoring right now in the interest of keeping the scope of the decision to something I can reasonably discuss.) For example, if Fire is better than Arcane on AE fights, that has to factor into the decision. If Fire is harder to play or if Fire is more inherently random, then that also has to factor into our decision. Even if you ignore all of those confounding issues, this is still a really tricky call. Ideally, we want players who like Fire to be able to play Fire without feeling like they are holding back their friends.

The extent to which Fire can fall behind Arcane and still be “viable” is very dependent. For some players, having the two specs within 10% damage of each other is close enough. Others will swap specs for a theoretical (i.e. not even proven empirically) 1% gain. If we could make a number tweaks to Fire and be very confident that they bring Fire up to Arcane’s level, then we feel like we owe it to players to do so.

There are a number of risks with this decision though. If our buffs to Fire made them more dangerous in PvP, then we’d have to be very careful about the change. If more mages going Fire meant that some utility or raid buff brought by the Arcane mages was now harder to get, then we’d have to be careful about the change. But the worst outcome, from our perspective, is if we overshoot our goals. If that happens players who like Arcane might feel like they have to swap to Fire, which might involve regemming, reforging and re-enchanting and might make them mad that they had rolled on that item that dropped last week. It just puts players in a bad position.

When players talk about being on a design roller coaster, this is often what they mean. Last week Arcane was the spec to play. Before that maybe it was Frost. Next week, who knows what it will be. We’ve absolutely screwed this up before, where we thought we were creating more parity between say hunter or warrior or DK specs, but the actual result was that it made players feel like they needed to respec. Given enough time, we can get pretty close on our balance tuning, but hotfixes and often even patch changes can’t always benefit from sufficient testing.

Remember, it’s not about how much damage the Fire and Arcane mage do against target dummies. What matters to players (and us) is how they do on individual encounters given a wide range of player skill, raid comp and constantly shifting allocations of gear, PvP comps, etc. We will often take larger risks when there is a major difference in play style. It’s harder to ask an Enhancement shaman to swap to Elemental than it is to ask a Demo lock to go Destro. That may not seem fair to the player who really likes Demo, but we have to weigh the risk to the game and to the player base as a whole with even small changes that appear totally safe at first.

Example Two: Creative Use of Game Mechanics

A lot of smart people work on World of Warcraft, but there is still no way that we can compete intellectually or creatively with the combined efforts of the millions of you. Despite our best efforts, players are frighteningly brilliant at coming up with creative solutions that never occurred to us. There are a wide variety of examples here: A player finds a very old trinket, set bonus or proc-based weapon that works really well on new content; a raid comes up with a strategy that makes a boss much easier than we intended; an Arena team finds a way to layer their crowd control or burst damage that is virtually impossible to counter.

A lot of the fun of World of Warcraft is problem solving. Our general philosophy is not to punish players for being creative. We try to give groups the benefit of the doubt as much as we can. If a boss ends up being slightly easier because players group up when we expected them to spread out, or they crowd control adds much better than we thought they were able to do, then we just silently congratulate the players for being clever. If a boss ends up being much easier than intended, then we might very well take action. (Overall though, we hotfix and patch in far more nerfs to encounters than buffs.)

Where we are more likely to take action is if it forces players into odd behavior, especially behavior that they won’t enjoy. If raids feel like they have to go farm really old content for a particular trinket, or if the raid feels like it has to sit six players in order to bring one particular spec who has an ability that trivializes a fight, then we’re more likely to do something. These kind of changes are really subjective and involve a lot of internal discussion. Just remember that our litmus test is usually “Are players having fun?” and not “Are they doing something we didn’t expect?”

Example Three: Encounter Difficulty

With encounters, the decision almost always comes down to whether to make a hotfix or not. Waiting until patch 4.3 to make significant changes to 4.2 encounters once the focus for a lot of players moves on to 4.3 isn’t necessarily development time well spent. When new dungeons or raids launch, our initial philosophy is just to get all of the nails in the board at the same height, which means prying some up to be taller and banging a lot down to be shorter. After a week or so, we hardly ever buff encounters to make them more difficult. We tend to bundle several of these changes together, often when a new week starts, so that they tend to feel like a micro patch and not just a constant stream of boss nerfs.

For raids, we look at curves indicating the number of new players who beat an encounter each week. That slope tends to be steep at first as the most talented guilds race through the content, and then slows down as other players make progress. It's time for us to step in when the lines flatten out and no new players are beating the content. It’s a bit easier for the five-player dungeons because we want players to prevail almost all the time. Nobody wants to go back to Throne of the Tides week after week until they finally beat Lady Naz’jar.

The statistics we look at the most are number of attempts to beat the dungeon boss, how many kills the boss gets, and how long the dungeon took to complete. Bosses such as Ozruk in Stonecore at Cataclysm launch were strong outliers. Sometimes we can handle these changes by tuning alone (lowering boss damage for instance) and sometimes we need to change encounter mechanics to the extent we can via hotfixes, which actually gives us a pretty big toolbox since almost all creature information is on the server.

Example Four: Class Rotation Change

There are a couple of sub-categories here: intentional and unintentional changes. Often we make fixes to make a class more fun to play. Allowing Arms warriors to refresh Rend without having to constantly reapply the debuff was a quality of life change to make the rotation a little less obnoxious to play. It also ended up being a moderate DPS buff as well. It forced Arms players to relearn their rotation slightly, but it was an improvement overall, and not too many players complained.

Example Five: Overpowered Specs

This would seem to be a pretty cut-and-dried case, but is one of the most controversial, because the community will never agree on when someone is overpowered or when someone is so overpowered that the developers need to step in. Being nerfed sucks. Period.

Players would typically rather we buff everyone but their spec rather than nerf their spec, even if the outcome is the same. It’s totally human nature to want other specs nerfed immediately, but when it’s your own character that’s in question, you wonder: what’s all the rush, man? Again, it comes down not to the developers being cold-hearted bastards (though we are) but to whether or not players are having fun. It’s fun for you to be a one man army. It’s not fun when the one man army rolls over you. It’s fun for you to top meters. It’s not fun for when you feel like you have no hope of competing with the guy topping meters.

Also keep in mind that when we make class adjustments via hotfix, we want to make the simplest fix possible that addresses the problem so we minimize the risk of us breaking something else and minimize how much testing we need to do before we can deploy the change. This is the main reason we are more likely to nerf via hotfix than to buff everyone else, because it’s just fewer changes. (Remember, that if we buffed everyone up to the DPS of the outlier, that we might very well have to buff creatures as well to keep you from trivializing content, which adds a lot more overhead to the change.)

I also want to point out that we virtually never make stealth class nerfs these days, at least not intentionally. It just makes players really paranoid to think their damage might change from under them. At worst, our programmers will manage to deploy a change before the community team gets it documented in the latest hotfix blog, but that situation shouldn’t usually last more than a few hours.

Example Six: Exploits

There is a gray area between when players know they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing and when they’re not sure if the developers would consider what they’re doing to be crossing the line. As I said above, we generally give players the benefit of the doubt. If they found something clever to do and it doesn’t give them an unfair advantage or make other players feel underpowered, then we will often do nothing, at least in the short term.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad guys out there who attempt to break the game in the name of personal profit or just because they have a malicious nature. We feel like we owe it to the other players to stomp out these abuses when they happen. Understandably, we also don’t want to publicize these changes too much. If one guy figured out a way to solo a boss to reap huge gold profits, we don’t then want to give ideas to thousands of other players by pointing out the loophole he found and how we fixed it. These also aren’t changes that we feel like we can sit on for very long. We need to get them out quickly.

I just wanted to point this out because sometimes players scratch their heads about a patch note that we made to prevent or discourage exploitive behavior. “Was anyone really doing this?” is a common reaction. Just remember that by their very nature, these kinds of changes are going to be on the down low, and they need to stay that way.

Example Seven: Expansions

We generally save up a lot of design changes for expansions. We know even this is too much for some players who don’t want to have to relearn their character’s rotation, let alone how glyphs work or what the new PvE difficulty philosophy is. However, we feel like we ultimately have to fix the problems we perceive in the game design if we want to keep players playing the game. In this case, we think some reasonable amount of change for change’s sake is desirable.

We hear from players who say “My dude hasn’t fundamentally changed in years,” and they want something, anything, that makes them look at their character in a new light. We don’t want to fix things that aren’t broken of course, but we do want to make sure that a new expansion feels all new. Expansions are opportunities to reinvigorate the player base and the gameplay itself. Therefore, you shouldn’t always view a class revamp as meaning your character is horribly broken and adrift on a sea of designer ignorance and apathy. We probably won’t ever reach a point where a particular class has reached perfection and no additional design iteration is necessary. Change, in moderation, is healthy.

Stuff like this is why I say game design is an art and not a science. Given the opportunity, there is no doubt various among you who would make individual design decisions differently, and in some cases I have no doubt your decision might have been better. We’d love to see discussion on this issue though. How much change is good? When can a problem chill for a few months as opposed to needing immediate attention? How much risk should we undertake to bring small, quality of life changes? Are we on the right track? Insane? Is this just more propaganda from the Ghostcrawler Throne of Lies?

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer on World of Warcraft. He has an unnatural disdain for the male night elf shoulder roll.

Blizzard Wrote:Dungeons & Raids
Firelands

• The number of Smouldering Essences that can be collected from a single boss in 25-person Firelands on Heroic difficulty has been reduced.
• The number of Smouldering Essences that can be collected from a single boss in 10-person Firelands on normal mode has been increased.
  

Beth'tilac

• The hit points and damage done by drones and spiders in this encounter have been reduced by 10%.
  

Ragnaros

• Ragnaros should now be crushing fewer souls on Heroic difficulty.
  

Sunwell

• Kalecgos should no longer despawn when first engaged.
  

Items

• The Wrath of Tarecgosa should no longer ignore cooldowns when a clone spell procs.
• The Wrath of Tarecgosa should no longer trigger melee procs from trinkets, however, it should still trigger melee procs from abilities such as Flametongue Attack.
• The trinket Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor is now pulsier, with more lightning!
  Moonwell Chalice should no longer grant its mastery rating bonus when the activating player unequips it.
  

Quests and Creatures

• The vehicle entered when on the quest Punting Season should no longer provide players immunity to fall damage.
• Scourged Flamespitters should no longer grant experience when killed.
• Subdued Canyon Ettins from Redridge are no longer capable of being led to Stormwind.
  

Yesterday a few nerfs were put into place that have affected firelands.

• The droprate of Smouldering Essences for the Heart of Flame quest has been decreased by ~50%

Daxxarri Wrote:We didn't particularly want a lot of these items in circulation, so that's partially intended. We really do want to keep legendary weapons legendary, and Dragonwrath ended up being more readily available than we were comfortable with.

Nonetheless, we should have recognized that the completion rate was faster than we wanted, and taken action, sooner.

• The 25-man version of Ragnaros now has 246M HP, down from 290M
• The 10-man version of Ragnaros now has 74M HP

Blizzard Wrote:In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm patch 4.3, we’ll be unlocking an additional set of Alliance mounts. We recognize that when players undertake a faction change to the worgen race, there are no Gilneas faction mounts to exchange for their original faction mounts. Players who do so see their total number of mounts decrease.

With the patch, we’ll be adding Gilneas faction mounts to the stables of Azeroth. Alliance characters with exalted Gilneas reputation will now be able to claim these additional mounts to add to their own stables (and achievement numbers).

Click on the images below for a preview of what’s coming:





We hope you’ll visit the new worgen racial mount vendor to pick out a steed to call your own.

Blizzard Wrote:What Active Mitigation Actually Means, and the Future of the Blood Death Knight

We recently buffed tank threat significantly and suggested that we would fill in any potential lost gameplay with new gameplay. What I meant by that was that if tanks don’t need to hit their buttons to generate threat, they may realize they don’t need to hit most of their buttons at all, and just stand there waiting until the right time to Shield Wall. Going a GCD or two without using a combat ability is fine with us. Standing around much longer than that gets boring quickly.

What we proposed is that tanks should ideally want to hit their buttons because it keeps them alive. I didn’t elaborate on that too much except to say it would feel more like the Blood DK method of tanking, which prompted some players to state that they didn’t like the DK model, or to point out that the DK model is not just active but reactive. Fair enough.

To better explain what we meant by that we need to define active mitigation. We define it as hitting buttons regularly that have a meaningful impact on your future mitigation. You should occasionally alter your rotation depending on what is going on in the fight, but you should still mitigate regularly and not save everything for the really big, predictable hits. DKs have a little of this, but Death Strike is ultimately a heal, which is a response to damage, not damage prevention. I also think the DK model gets a bad rap because of some other mechanical problems, which aren’t really problems with active mitigation per se. So let me go into a bit more hand-waving about what active mitigation could mean for other tanks, and then I’ll share a little DK info.

Some Active Mitigation Models

Here are three different models for why hitting buttons can matter to tanks. It's easy to come up with alternative models, and none of these are perfect, nor are we ready to announce which is the one we’re going to try first. But these ideas can get some discussions going.

Model One: Tank DPS matters

This one really isn't active mitigation per se, but it is a way to make pushing buttons matter. We have berserk timers or other DPS checks on a lot of our encounters. Typically tank DPS isn’t taken seriously on these fights, which is a little puzzling at first glance. Yes, the tank may not be able to match the Enhance shaman for damage done, but also consider that the Enhance shaman would absolutely love it if she could improve her DPS by a paltry 3K. That 3K may be enough to meet that DPS check. Note that I’m not talking about tanks being able to beat out skilled DPS players; I think most of us agree that would be a little bizarre. But that doesn’t mean tank damage has to be a non-factor either. Sure, the Feral tank may be doing 16K DPS to the shaman’s 30K, but 3K is 3K.

I polled all of the class designers who raid Heroic content (which is all of them, I believe) and only one had ever given his tanks a hard time for low DPS. Sometimes it’s just not possible because of the fight dynamics. In other cases it is, but as a community, we tend to not focus on tank DPS. We sometimes ask healers to Shadow Word: Pain, even though the contribution is trivial. Go figure. Maybe we assume tanks already have enough on their plate. Maybe they really are prima donnas and we don’t want them to /ragequit. (I kid.)

One potential downside of this model is that it's just the old threat rotations but with the emphasis on DPS rather than threat per second. Ultimately, we want tanks to feel like their rotations are related to tanking and that they aren't just doing a DPS rotation with the occasional long cooldown. Another is that it makes not only stats like hit and expertise desirable, but also crit and haste, which aren’t typically on plate tanking gear. We want to make tank itemization more interesting than just “stack mastery,” but we don’t want it to be baffling either.

Model Two: DPS buttons provide mitigation

This is the model that several players in the community have predicted will be our approach, and the idea has some merit. Under this model, imagine that a warrior wants to hit Shield Slam because it makes his next Shield Block larger. Imagine Revenge procs a short parry buff. Devastate and Thunder Clap already have roles applying debuffs. This model we think could feel pretty intuitive. One downside is that each individual button might feel less impactful and make the experience less visceral. Shield Block feels awesome because when you push it, the damage numbers go way down, and you feel “safe” for the duration. If you replace one slice of that pie with Revenge and Shield Slam, then everything gets watered down. If the rotation is very simple, then it feels like passive mitigation; if not then it’s a stressful juggling act. Another potential downside is that keeping up multiple buffs and debuffs can be tedious. Rather than it feeling like a bonus to get those procs, it can feel like a penalty whenever they’re not up. Even if you are hit and expertise capped, sometimes you have to move away from the boss to avoid a fire ring, or you need to leave to pick up an add. If you can’t bank the mitigation benefit, then the risk is you feel like you don’t really have control over your survivability.

Model Three: DPS buttons build up resources

This model lets you bank the benefits. Imagine you have to build up a resource to use on short-term cooldowns. We couldn't include the Shield Walls and their ilk here, because an "oh snap" button needs to be available immediately and not in the future once you've earned some resources. But weaker cooldowns such as Shield Block and Holy Shield could certainly work this way. Imagine the paladin tank needs Crusader Strike to land to generate Holy Power, and can then decide to spend that Holy Power on Holy Shield Block or Word of Glory. Neither of those would have a cooldown in this design, so more hits landing will always be better -- it's not just a matter of hitting enough to have 100% uptime. (You'd probably also need the ability to save Holy Power more than you can today so that there was less pressure to spend a cooldown as soon as it became available.)

The choice can then become whether to use Holy Shield Block or Word of Glory. Holy Shield Block is probably your first choice, but if you screw it up or the damage is magical, or you need a reactive button instead of an active one, then Word of Glory might be a better choice. Either way, there shouldn’t be any simple answers. (As a counterpoint, deciding to spend that Holy Power on threat instead of mitigation is just never going to be interesting -- smart tanks will always use it to survive, as we saw before Protection had a Word of Glory cooldown.)

As an aside, the Feral druid's mitigation is arguably the most passive right now, and we’d want to change things like Savage Defense to be active buttons under this model. One downside of Model Three is the risk that the rotation could be too formulaic: AAAAB, for example. It could also be asking a lot of tanks -- rather than just hitting buttons to generate threat, tanks would need to pay active attention to managing a resource. No more infinite rage just for getting beat on. We want tanking to be fun, and we think that needs to include a certain degree of risk of failure for not playing well, but that doesn't mean it needs to be frustrating. Challenging and frustrating don't need to go together.

Again, these aren't the kind of changes we will hotfix in. It's going to take a lot of thought and a lot of feedback from players to get things feeling right. As a comparison, we still stand behind the mana adjustments we made for healers for Cataclysm. We think the healer gameplay is more engaging than it was at the end of Lich King, but that's obviously very subjective and took a lot of getting used to, even for seasoned players. We'd like to introduce the tanking changes more smoothly, but we still want to introduce them.

Bloody Death Knights

The risk of talking about one particular spec in a blog is then everyone will wonder when BM hunters or Disc priests are going to get "their" blog. It's not going to work like that, but since I referenced the DK tanking style so much in the previous tanking blog, I feel like it's appropriate to go into a little more detail about what we don't like about DK tanking (and how we’re going to fix it) so that all tanks have a better idea of what the future might hold for their own character.

Outbreak

One of the fundamental tensions in DK tanking is deciding whether to spend a rune on diseases (which offer necessary tanking debuffs) or save the rune for Death Strike. Our hope was that choosing how to spend the resources would be interesting. A rogue for example has to decide on whether to spend resources on Slice and Dice or Eviscerate (or a number of other things). In reality though, we don’t think this decision has been a fun one. You feel cheated if you refresh diseases and then need to Death Strike a moment later, and you feel like a bad tank if you just neglect diseases. For 4.3, we’re going to give Blood DKs a 30 second Outbreak, so they will never have to manually apply diseases to a single target. Yes, that can lead to even more Death Strikes but we think adding a fun alternative to Death Strike is not the kind of thing we can easily change for 4.3.

I feel the need to point out that we’re not just being lazy here. We understand that many players get really worn down by constant class design change, especially mid-expansion, even if they end up improving the experience overall. Deciding when to make serious changes and when to wait is a major challenge of MMO game design. I’ll try and explore this more in a future blog.

Blade Barrier

We originally designed this talent to encourage DKs to not sit on their runes, and it worked fine for that. However, the current model of Death Strike, which we also like, is that the timing of the Death Strike matters a great deal, encouraging you to… you guessed it… sit on your runes. We’re just going to change Blade Barrier to something more passive (and yes, temporarily more boring) for 4.3.

Death Strike

It sucks when Death Strike misses. "Stack hit and expertise" is an answer to that, but not one that's really viable or even fair given that other tanks will care even less about hit and expertise in the short term. Rather than making Death Strike always hit, we’re going to let it always heal you, and proc Blood Shield, even when it misses. This kind of tweak may very well be an interim solution given that everything I said above was that we want tanks to care about hitting to drive their mitigation. But we don’t think it’s fair to penalize the DK for working the “new way” while everyone else is still working the "old way," and it's too much of a change for 4.3 to apply the "new way" to the other three classes. In the long term, as in the Protadin example above, the rotation can't just be Death Strike, Death Strike, Death Strike... Death Strike.

Bone Shield

This change is something we’re exploring but may not pan out, so no claiming we "promised" this *cough*Abyssal Maw*cough*. So… CAVEAT: this may not come to pass. What we’re considering doing with Bone Shield is have it mitigate damage spikes. DKs are prone to spikes more so than the other tanks, particularly the paladin and warrior who can "block cap" (I assume most of you know what that entails, if not, a helpful explanation if someone asks in the comments would be appreciated). Death Strike can theoretically handle the spikes, but if you miss (less of an issue with the above change) or time your DS poorly, you might take much higher damage than other tanks from a single hit. Our idea is that Bone Shield would expend a charge to dampen those spikes specifically. If a single attack did a huge percent of your total health, then some of that attack would be automatically lessened for the cost of a charge. Smaller hits wouldn’t spend a charge.

Blood Shield

This is an even longer-term change. Death Strike feeling reactive is fun, and one of the things we like about how the DK tanks. Death Striking after a big hit can heal you more than Death Striking before a big hit, so you should ideally pay attention to what the boss is doing instead of just mashing buttons as soon as the runes come up. When you heal a novice DK, you may just notice they take a lot of damage. When you get in sync with a talented DK, you come to know when they are going to Death Strike and recover from big hits. However, sometimes inevitably the tank is going to hit DS too soon and not have it available a second later. Our idea is to somehow turn Blood Shield into more of a pool that you actively try to build and maintain. A system where you’re able to add to a pool of absorption would provide more granularity, which in turn would be more forgiving of errors or streaks of bad luck.

There you have it. When we're ready for the 4.3 PTR, you’ll hopefully see some of these DK changes in place. The blog we wrote that dove into our thought process for the 4.2 patch notes ended up being the most positively received blog that the class team has ever done, so we’ll definitely do one of those again for 4.3. As I mentioned, more active mitigation will probably wait for farther in the future. We might talk about how we decide on when a change is more appropriate for a hotfix, patch, or full expansion in the next developer blog. While it might be short on upcoming class changes, hopefully it will still prove interesting to some of you.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft and he probably listens to your podcast.

Blizzard Wrote:Classes

Druid

• Starfall should no longer hit enemies with whom the player is not in combat in Grim Batol or the Firelands.
• The Feral druid 4-piece tier-12 set bonus should now interact properly with Primal Madness and Euphoria.
• The radius of effect of the Restoration druid 4-piece tier-12 set has been increased.
  

Mage

• Fireblast now properly triggers Impact on the primary Fireblast target, even if that target was not yet in combat.
  

Paladin

• The radius of effect of the Holy paladin 4-piece tier-12 set has been increased.
  

Dungeons & Raids

Firelands

• A few of the Molten Surger patrols in the entrance area of Firelands have gone on vacation.
• The number of enemies that must be killed before Shannox spawns has been reduced.
  

Battlegrounds

Isle of Conquest

• Players should no longer take large amounts of damage when being launched from catapults.
  

Blizzard Wrote:Q: Are you considering making any changes to the time it will take to level to cap for newbie players after the next expansion?
A: We'll be decreasing the experience needed for levels 71-80 in patch 4.3. That's all I have for now.

Q: Will we see more "intro raids" like Naxx10 in Wrath?
A: Raid Finder is being designed to offer a similar experience.

Q: Any chance for a less steep learning curve in the game? I mean players hit a brick wall at 85, make previous content harder.
A: If anything, you'll see more variable endgame content in the future to allow players additional progression paths.

Q: Will any of the new Darkmoon Faire stuff be accessible at all times, or will it all be contained within that one week?
A: The updated 4.3 Darkmoon Faire is likely to be available the first week of every month for both factions.

Q: Will there be a "random raid" component to the Raid Finder letting us enter raids we've been previously saved to, like LFG & Trolls?
A: Raid locks will likely work like LFG under Raid Finder, though details of the system (coming soon) will better explain why.

Q: Any chance we'll possibly have a chance to get an old quest item or two restored for transmogrification once it comes out?
A: If there are really popular item looks, we'll consider adding new ways to obtain them.

Q: Will disc priests be getting their bubble graphic changed for DA "soon", is this still happening?
A: Last time we spoke with the class design team, they said the Divine Aegis effect will likely change in 4.3.

Q: Will the Raid Finder allow access to lower raids?
A: Probably not for 4.3, but it's something we'd like to do.

Q: Will the 4.3 Raid finder allow me to group with my cross-realm friends?
A: Hard to say at this stage in development.

4.2.2 will most likely be released tomorrow. It mostly includes a few bug fixes and tooltip changes.

Blizzard Wrote:Dungeons & Raids
Firelands

• The visibility of Ragnaros' Dreadflame ability has been increased.
• The size of Ragnaros' hit box during the final phase of the Heroic encounter has been increased.
  

User Interface
Raid Frames should now remember whether they were shown or hidden upon subsequent logins

Technical
Players using multiple accounts should now be available to be invited to a Real ID Party.
Attempts to purchase Arena Season 10 items should no longer sometimes cause a client crash. (Korea Only)

Blizzard Wrote:An ill omen streaks across the sky over Azeroth's Great Sea, heralding the arrival of this year's BlizzCon-exclusive World of Warcraft in-game companion: the fearsome-ish Murkablo, aquatic protégé of Diablo III's eponymous Lord of Terror! Anyone who attends BlizzCon 2011 or purchases this year's BlizzCon Virtual Ticket will receive a Murkablo to call their own, along with a yet-to-be-revealed StarCraft II in-game gift.



BlizzCon 2011 takes place on October 21 and 22 at the Anaheim Convention Center. If you order the Virtual Ticket Internet stream online through Battle.net, Murkablo and the StarCraft II gift will be automatically attached to the Battle.net account you use to make your purchase shortly after BlizzCon begins.

For further details or to order the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket, check out the Virtual Ticket web page.

Blizzard Wrote:Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Step right up and prepare to be amazed!

It’s incredible! It’s unbelievable! You’ll be dazzled. You’ll be amazed! You aren’t prepared for the Darkmoon Faire, ‘cause it’s like nothing you’ve seen before! Don’t be shy now, don’t be bashful, step right up for a tantalizing glimpse of what we’ve got in store for you when patch 4.3 arrives!

That old thing?

No, no, no, Clem. The Darkmoon Faire isn’t what it used to be and it isn’t where it used to be. The management hasn’t changed but the Faire certainly has. It’s a whole new animal. Tickets? You don’t need those old tickets, just rip ‘em right up, ‘cause we’ve got new tickets! Out with the old, in with the new -- new quests, that is! Things have changed ‘round here: we’ve got an island all to ourselves now, and what an island it is. Mist-shrouded Darkmoon Island is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. It’s a place of mystery and wonder, and you wouldn’t believe the deals we made to get it… or who we made ‘em with. But never mind that, just follow me right through here and I’ll show you what the Darkmoon Faire is all about.

All new! All spectacular!

Catch a show at the marvelous main stage or witness a dazzling fireworks display. But don’t stare too long or you might miss the stunning spectacles that surround you. Gaze in awe of our magical menagerie, get your fortune told by the amazing Sayge, go on a pony ride, experience the healthful effects of carnival food, and more!

Of course, there’s more to the Darkmoon Faire than just fantastic shows and culinary delights. You can still turn in your Darkmoon Cards, but you wouldn’t just come here for measly ol’ cards when there’s so much more to see, experience, and win. Yes, win! You like dancing bears, right? Everybody likes dancing bears. Even bears like dancing bears. How about a dancing bear… you can ride!

That’s not all! We have adorable companion pets includin’ a fez-wearing monkey, a plethora of profession recipes, toys, balloons, souvenirs, delectable carnival snacks and beverages, heirlooms for the little ones, and even replicas of long-lost suits of armor that we’re offering for your Transmogrification needs. You can also make your mark with new achievements and titles. All it takes to earn these fabulous rewards is a few Darkmoon Faire Prize Tickets and a good reputation with the carnies. How do ya get your grubby mitts on some tickets? I’m glad you asked!

Step right up! Try your luck! Everyone’s a winner!

Have we got games? You bet we’ve got games, and they’re so easy to play an orc could do it. Just head on over to the midway, buy some Darkmoon Game Tokens, and get ready to play. Easy to learn, difficult to master, anyone can play and everyone can win. Just lay your tokens down for a chance at winning Darkmoon Prize Tickets playing games like Whack-a-Gnoll, the Tonk Battle Royale, the Cannon, Ring Toss, the Shooting Gallery, and more! Five games are there to test your skills at any one time. The better you play, the easier it is to win a bucket of Darkmoon Faire Prize Tickets! Once a month, you’ve got a shot at tickets, and the fun never stops ‘cause you can play as many times as you like. But that’s not the only way to win big!

The Darkmoon Faire Field Guide

It’s your passport to riches, my friend. Y’see, we need a few things -- just some junk, nothing valuable to a big hero like you. We call ‘em Darkmoon Artifacts, and there’s all different kinds to be found all over Azeroth. The Darkmoon Field Guide helps you discover artifacts while you’re explorin’ dungeons, slayin’ monsters, and fightin’ in Battlegrounds. Without a guide, you’d never notice ‘em, and it’ll help keep you focused on the stuff we want. Whether you just reached level 10, or you’ve crushed the biggest baddies in the land, we need somethin’ from nearly everybody. You won’t have to go too far out of your way to get ‘em and each month you’ll get a new opportunity to seek out an Artifact for us. What do you get out of the deal? Don’t you worry, you’ll get your cut. When you bring a Darkmoon Artifact back to us, you’ll get valuable experience (it builds character, you know!), earn a better reputation, and possibly earn precious Darkmoon Faire Prize Tickets too!

Oh, did I mention that you can use the Field Guide to get to Darkmoon Island whenever the Darkmoon Faire’s monthly extravaganza is up and running?

So, you want to work in show business?

Maybe you’d like a little peek behind the scenes, eh? Want to see what it takes to run the greatest show on Azeroth? Well, it’s not all sunshine and cotton candy, my friend. There are beasts to heal, food to cook, and buildings to fix. If you’re willing help keep the show going and put your skills to work, you’ll not only impress us, but you can get experience, Darkmoon Prize Tickets, and even polish up your skills -- up to five skill points per profession, per Faire week, if you’re good at what you do!

Darkmoon Deathmatch!

Like any good carnival, the Darkmoon Faire has a shady side. You can leave the skilled labor to the suckers and go for a faster score instead. If you’ve got the minerals, the Darkmoon Deathmatch offers an experience unparalleled since the Gurubashi Arena. Pitmaster Pei has a big old treasure chest just brimming with goodies and Darkmoon Faire Prize Tickets that he’ll drag out into the Darkmoon Deathmatch Pit every three hours or so. Everybody wants it, so if you want a piece of the action you’ll just have to jump in and prove that you’re the toughest one in the Pit.

Oh, the Faire is perfectly safe, Clem. Just don’t wander into the woods.

Now, now, don’t panic. Darkmoon Isle might be a bit spooky, but except for the Deathmatch Pit, the Faire itself is completely safe, I guarantee it. It’s a sanctuary even, and we won’t let anybody’s beef ruin the fun. The shadowy woods surroundin’ the fair are another thing entirely, though. I wouldn’t say that people have disappeared into those woods never to return, but, well… people disappear into those woods never to return. So watch your step , and your back, when you leave the Faire. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya!

Mark your calendar

Now that you know how amazing the new Darkmoon Faire is, you won’t want to miss it. Just take a look at your in-game calendar, and the Darkmoon Faire dates will show up there on the first week of every month. Darkmoon Faire barkers and displays will also pop up in every capital city to herald the arrival of the Faire. Silas Darkmoon himself has even started up a mailer to make sure that no one misses out!

Hitch a ride

During the first week of each month, convenient Darkmoon Faire outposts with Darkmoon Portals will appear in Elwynn Forest and Mulgore, offering free rides to Darkmoon Island and the Faire!

Darkmoon Mages in capital cities and on Darkmoon Island will also be around to help you get between the Faire and various capital cities. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so naturally you’re obliged to compensate them for their services.

The all new Darkmoon Faire is coming to Darkmoon Island in patch 4.3. Don’t miss it!