This is going to be a little on the long side as there was a new build (you know 8820 the new patch). If you haven’t noticed by now, after every major build hits the Beta (and all of them are somewhat major) there are TONS of Blizzard posts and discussions going back and forth over every little change or new bug that popped up.
Druid
Swiftmend to be fixed in the next build
Unfortunately, the data was pulled when some abilities were temporarily broken. It’s fixed for the next build, apologies! (src)
Balance polish inc
Currently working on a polish pass of the Balance tree. Get ready for more bloat! (src)
Hunter
Upcoming Tenacity pets changes
Next patch Tenacity pets will lose Dash and gain Charge. See how that feels. We’ll switch the Boar back to benefiting from Charge as well.
We’re not pulling Charge from Ferocity. The ideas is that Charge is generally better than Dash, but is deeper in the tree. Under this new change, for Tenacity Intervene is better and deeper. (src)
Kill Shot
The knockdown doesn’t really matter very much if the target dies right after the shot, which is what the ability is intended for. It’s a little unclear right now because it can also be used when the target is at any health. It’s most likely going to only be usable if the target is at the 35% or lower health, and just do a high amount of damage base (instead of the conditional it has now).
If you use it and the target doesn’t die, then somebody’s a huntard (basically).
That said, not sure if we’re going to keep the “knockdown” effect. We’d like to keep it, but if it hampers the ability too much then we can re-work it. (src)
Separation Anxiety
I agree it’s the actual damage it gives you is a bit lackluster comparatively, I think the design of the talent is fine though. We can bump it up. (src)
Improved Stings increases ALL damage by 30%
This is a bug and will be fixed for the next build. (src)
About Pet specials
They should scale with AP, though many of the numbers themselves are definitely placeholder. (src)
Heart of the Phoenix cooldown
Unfortunately this is a limitation of the talent. Hunter pets reset all their cooldowns when they are summoned. So without this up-front cooldown, you could use the ability instantly every time the pet died, because death resets the cooldown. Originally, we had this talent as an automatic, but that was less useful. (src)
Pets – Worm’s armor debuff in raid
The worm and wasp abilities won’t stack with similar player abilities.
The idea is that if you have a tank that doesn’t debuff armor and nobody else in the raid in a position to do it, then the worm becomes an interesting choice.
The dps between ferocity and tenacity shouldn’t be that extreme in any case. We didn’t want tenacity only ever used for tanking and only ferocity pets brought on raids. (src)
Pets – Roar of Sacrifice
Almost all of the pet specials were changed to cost no Focus but be on a longer cooldown. That way they aren’t competing so much for your Bite Focus and you can use them when you want them.
Having the pet take damage from Roar of Sacrifice is still a bug waiting to be fixed. (src)
Lock and Load not triggering
This will be fixed in a future build. Data was pulled while we were still working on a lot of things. (src)
Mage
To be honest, our DPS tests right now are mostly worthless. Some talents aren’t working correctly, some ranks of spells aren’t there yet, etc. How things work is usually some designers create the spells, then other designers balance the numbers. We’ve done most of the design, but very little of balancing the numbers. That is what we’re working on now. Initial tests showed some mage builds doing ~8K DPS while our best Rogue was doing ~3K DPS (mostly because of Frostfire Bolt and the % modifiers it currently has access to). So yea, something was wrong there, and in that sense Kalgan is right that the Mage is doing too much damage (and also the Rogue not doing enough).
Note that we test things in level 80 greens, level 80 blues and level 80 epics. We also do trials with fully debuffed mobs with fully buffed raids. The way the mage from QA was able to do that DPS was through a very specific build, which I haven’t seen emulated from the beta testers yet.
Just because Kalgan says “the mage is doing too much damage” doesn’t mean we’re going to nerf Frostbolt or Fireball by 10% or anything like that. The issues we have with the Mage’s DPS right now is with talents and abilities that do not exist in the game yet. (src)
Paladin
Judgments not working on beta realms
A lot of spells seem to be broken for several different classes. We’ll see if it’s possible to get any of this hotfixed. (src)
Paladin changes? not yet
We didn’t work on paladins a lot for this patch. Any changes you’re seeing are likely because a designer was monkeying around with mechanics and numbers a little bit trying to come up with something he or she liked. Whenever you see just a few subtle changes, particularly if they are undocumented, it is more likely experimentation than anything else.
When we start to discuss next steps for the paladins, I promise to drop by and lay a few on you. But if I don’t post anything, it’s because I don’t know anything new. (src)
Warrior
Prot tweaks in the next beta push
Prot should be soon. Maybe next beta push, depending on when that is. (src)
Rampage and Prot tree
You can probably guess the intent of Rampage. It’s a nice buff to a raid, but one you can also get in other places, so that ideally none of the specs who bring it are mandatory. Hopefully there will be enough buff coverage though that even if your bring the same buff as someone else. We want to give you more flexibility in who you can bring rather than it being a checklist of buffs.
I don’t want to say much about Prot until we’re sure we can deliver on some of the talents that are in there now, but we are definitely placing a premium on talents that look so fun that you’ll just have to get them (without making a progression-minded tank sacrifice TPS or survivability). (src)
About the new Devastate sound
Yeah that current sound is pretty not awesome. (src)
Stalwart Protector
We might try to just bake in the Rage on Parry / Dodge. It was a slightly awkward talent, since it really only benefitted the tank who wore epic gear into a 5-man. (src)
Death Knight
New core ability boosting Str & Agi
The death knight brings Abomination’s Might, Improved Icy Talons, various Auras, and a new Str + Agi buff you haven’t seen yet (again depending on spec). (src)
Heart Strike / Removal of Obliterate from Might of Mograine
I hope someone can explain why this gets referenced everywhere. Rank 6 Blood Strike hits for 273 and Rank 6 Heart Strike does 355 damage per disease. It sounds like there might be an issue with Sigil of the Dark Rider not affecting Heart Strike, but that was just an oversight, and in any case should not have changed this patch.
Heart Strike should always hit for more than Blood Strike. Ideally it should always hit for less than Obliterate *unless* you have every possible talent to buff Heart Strike, but those numbers may need massaging. (The logic being that Death Rune Mastery is less sexy if you don’t want to do more Heart Strikes.)
If the difference between ZOMGBLITERATE!!!1! and (shrug) Obliterate (shrug) is Might of Mograine, it could be that the talent gives way too much dps for its points.
We’ll get around to a number pass eventually. (src)
Rune Strike & Global cooldown
It sounds like the data is older than I thought. It should be off the GCD and any melee ability should benefit from AP and other melee stats. It’s a fun ability. (src)
Howling Blast is not going to cost RP
Howling Blast costs 1F,1U. We can’t control what other sites (Wowhead & MMOChamp in this case) post, so please always take them with a grain of salt.
Obliterate will often be better vs. single targets and Howling Blast will often be better for groups, especially when they are out of melee range. Howling Blast may also be better in situations where you only have Frost Fever up. Your exact talent allocation may skew one slightly ahead of the other. (src)
Was RP generation changed this patch?
It’s exactly the same except for a buff to one of the runic power generating talents. Death Coil and Frost Strike are cheaper. (src)
DK abilities scalling & Blood Aura threat
All DK abilities scale off of AP. Don’t worry about the healing threat from Blood Aura. It’s intended to be a benefit not a kiss / curse mechanic. (src)
Chains of Ice animation
It just looked dumb having someone walking along dragging that big set of crystals and chains with them. It worked better when Chains of Ice had a root. Hopefully the art in there at the moment is not the one we’ll ship with. (src)
Merciless Combat & High Frost Damage
The funny thing is the only change to this talent (IIRC) was increasing it from 20% to 35% to bring it line with similar talents and abilities. Mobs at 20% (or even 35%) don’t last long these days. I think people are just starting to discover what Frost can do, though improvements like Rime and a lower CD on Howling Blast definitely help. (src)
Imp Icy Talons & Windfury Totem
Imp Icy Talons and WF Totem are alternatives to achieve the same haste benefit. (src)
Obliterate & Runic Power generation
While Obliterate generates half as much runic power as 2 Heart Strikes, it does its damage twice as quickly too. Putting more damage per GCD is almost always beneficial. If Obliterate did more damage and runic power per GCD, it feels like there would never be a choice about using it and talents like Death Rune Mastery might start to feel underpowered.
We can try increasing double rune abilities to generate 15 runic power, though I have the standard concern that runic power will be too easy to generate, especially with Death Coil and Frost Strike at 40. (src)
Why Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor are not using Runic Power
When too many types of abilities are on runic power or runes, it’s hard to fit in any more. Icebound Fortitude and Anti-Magic Shell cost runic power. You will always have runes coming back, but you can’t assume (and we can’t assume) that you will always have plenty of runic power. (src)
Raise Dead & Reaping
As posted elsewhere, I believe Raise Dead just stopped showing its duration. It still has one.
Reaping no longer works off of Death and Decay. It ended up not being a very good mechanic because you couldn’t really do much different with 3 Death Runes. Instead we switched it to Blood Boil to play off the change to Scourge Strike as UF. (src)
Unholy and Build 8820
Not sure what is up with the Ghouls. That ability mix seems strange. They are not supposed to be up permanently. That’s what Night of the Dead is for. Ghouls have always had the ability to Explode though.
Master of Ghouls was only ever intended to have a pet bar for players that wanted extra control over exactly what the Ghoul did. Hence 1 talent point.
Corpse Explosion is supposed to be Nature damage. That’s just a bug.
Bone Shield and the other two tanking abilities are supposed to be short cooldown buffs you can throw on yourself, like Icebound Fortitude. They aren’t intended to be permanently up as passive mitigation. We are going to keep tweaking the numbers until they are approximately equal but because they do such different things, that isn’t just simple math.
We raised the cooldown on Army of the Dead because we found tanks were basically waiting for it to do any boss pulls. It’s supposed to be an emergency ability, not something you bust out every fight.
From looking at other forums, it sounds like several abilities for all classes are broken. We don’t do a ton of testing on them because we want to get stuff out in a timely fashion, but with so many people pouring so much content into the game at once, it can sometimes happen. (src)
Frost Rotation
Integrating Hungering Cold into a standard rotation hasn’t a big design goal for us. It’s designed more for emergencies and special cases. I don’t think we’d want to give DKs an ability to do a massive group freeze every pull. We think making a decision between Frost Strike and Hungering Cold is fine.
We lowered the cooldown on Howling Blast and it’s possible we can lower it some more. But it hits big and crits bigger, so if we got to the point where you were throwing out 3 a rotation, that would be bad (though not for the DK). I think in this case, having it hit hard is more fun than having it hit often. We aren’t trying to design the trees so that e.g. Frost never uses Obliterate. They are the exact same cost for a reason. The only exceptions are Heart Strike and Scourge Strike which are intended to completely replace thier analogs.
Having finally made Frost Strike fun on runic power, I don’t think we’d be likely to change it again. It was an unloved button for too long. Now I generally only hear complaints about Scourge Strike (which I think we solved) and possibly Icy Touch and Deathstrike (and maybe Obliterate) not doing enough damage.
Frost can already Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Howling Cold -> Obliterate with Blood of the North, so I’m not sure why their rotations feel any more awkward than anyone else’s. But feel free to enlighten me if I’m just missing something.
It is entirely possible that Frost’s dps just can’t keep up, which would be a lot of fun to fix up by letting Icy Touch and friends hit a lot harder. Frost used to be a blast for big crits (esp. against wounded targets) so I’m not sure why it fell out of grace except that Blood started doing a lot / too much damage. (src)
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