Class News for Dec. 15th

Death Knight
New defense sigil
This sigil is specifically for death knights who have trouble reaching the 540 “cap.” Because it is reliable, you aren’t depending on a random roll to keep your defense high. If you don’t like having to use Icy Touch (or whatever) to keep your defense high, then this sigil isn’t for you. There are other options though. (Source)

New facial textures and skin tones for DKs in 3.0.8 removed
This line has been removed from the patch notes. This should be reflected on our website soon. There are no new physical features being added for death knights in 3.0.8.

There never were any new skins beyond those that have already been added. This line in the notes originally referred to somewhat of a fix to the way the interface works when selecting one of the unique death knight faces. It sometimes acts a bit oddly when choosing a skin tone, unlike the standard faces for each race. A proper resolution has not yet been determined yet though, so this line is being pulled from the patch notes. (Source)

Dual Wielding
On every spec for which we have allowed dual-wielding and propped it up with talents, DW tends to dominate. It’s tricky, but we want death knights to have the option of DW for dps or tanking. Too many talents will push DW as the only way to go. (Source)

Druid
Feral itemization changes
If you go back and look at the history of this discussion, you’ll see that several Feral druids were saying it was kind of awkward that:

A) They went from weak to godly with just a couple of the right +armor trinket drops.
B) They were very dependent on getting those items to drop to be excellent tanks.
C) Armor was still so important that almost no other stat mattered. Druids in some cases were wearing BC or even level-60 items because of the +armor.

Now to be totally fair, I initially didn’t think the situation was that bad. I thought there were plenty of armor trinkets, necks and rings in the game, and that enough stamina or other stats would make up for the armor. But players showed (on this and other forums) that the math heavily favored a few, relatively rare +armor pieces. And we ended up changing our minds on the issue.

Is the gameplay of gearing up a Bear perfect now? No. We think it is a good change that armor doesn’t trump all other defensive stats by so much. However, we do think there should be a more interesting way for bears to gear up though without just wanting the leather pieces at each tier. It is something we are working on, but it’s complicated. Players have made some good suggestions, but we don’t quite have a model that clicks yet. We don’t want to give druids parry or blocks, or they lose one of the features that makes them unique. We don’t want to let them scale defensively because of AP, because AP can get to really high levels when fully buffed and much lower levels in 5-player dungeons.

This thread is touching on a couple of different points:

A) Are bears competitive with other tanks at similar gear levels?
B) Is there another way to design bear defensive gear?

They are both issues worthy of discussion, but they are different issues and blurring them together just confuses the discussion. B is not necessary for A. We could slap a “you are at the armor cap” bonus on to Survival of the Fittest and, boom, you’re the best tank in the game. Now we wouldn’t do that for a couple of reasons, but my point is that it is easy to get druid numbers to where they need to be with this new system. (Source)

AP as a defensive stat
AP -> defensive stat might be okay if it only counted AP from gear and not from buffs. We already have some balance issues in the game we aren’t happy with that occur because of high scaling in larger groups.

Arcane Int for example was intended to buff your Int, not as something that would feed into your talents to boost other abilities. (Source)

Armor loss after itemization changes
You shouldn’t be losing any armor unless you already have the best jewelry and trinkets available in the game. The reason we announced this change very early was so players didn’t go through heroic efforts to procure those items only to find their armor component later nerfed. One of the reasons we made the change was because druids without those pieces felt like sub-standard tanks with regard to mitigation.

For druids without those pieces, the change should be a buff. (Source)

Protector of the Pack and very bad fansites.
I don’t believe we made any changes here. It could just be they are picking up the change because we reworked the talent to get rid of the group size dependency. (Source)

Hunter
Is there anything planned to switch pets when dual-spec is released?
Yup. I think you’ll like it though. (Source)

New Deterrence
Preventing ranged attacks during Deterence but allowing melee attacks is also something we’ve discussed. (Source)

Upcoming hunter changes (Source)
One of the concerns with nerfing Steady Shot was hurting the dps potential for Survival hunters. One of the opportunities with the nerf was to make other shots more attractive so that hunter dps wouldn’t be so much about auto + steady.

Here are two changes we are going to try on the PTR.

• Arcane Shot — mana cost lowered to the cost of Steady Shot.
• Explosive Shot — damage increased substantially (e.g. from 260 to 520 base at rank 4), and additional scaling added to compensate. No longer deals AE damage to other targets.

Adding the AE component back might make a decent glyph or something, but really we felt like hunters had options for AE and what we really needed to do was give Survival a button that really did some major damage.

Priest
Priest Issues
As Nightshroud pointed out, these are kind of apples and oranges. We don’t start each day with a sorted list of priest issues and decide which is the most critical to handle first (and then somehow bizarrely decide that it’s Levitate).

Levitate was a 2 minute change that took no discussion and very little testing. It doesn’t have huge balance implications. Almost all of the suggestions that routinely get brought up in these forums are exactly the opposite: they are often big problems that require expensive (from a time budget point of view) solutions. That doesn’t mean we don’t hear you or that we aren’t working on solutions. I am sorry I do not come by more than randomly to assure you of that. (I really am.) (Source)

Reflective shield now only works on the priest
We have long term plans to let you cast it on others again but it would require rebuilding the spell, which takes some tech we don’t have available at the moment.

Healing amount of Glyph of Dispel Magic has been lowered from 6% to 3%. Dispels are already very powerful in PvP. We didn’t want anyone to be able to just heal via dispels. It was too powerful.

Divine Aegis stacking
It is supposed to stack, just like we said. We haven’t released a build for months though. The next one should have it. We can’t let Divine Aegis stack with itself though. That gets into crazy situations. (Source)

Shaman
Elemental Shaman changes (Source)
Hopefully this won’t get buried here. Here is what we are thinking about to try on the PTR for Elemental:

• Elemental Oath — In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.
• Elemental Mastery — Overhauled. Now increases the Shaman’s critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains 3 minutes. We recognize this might be a slight nerf in certain PvP situations where players relied on the shaman to nuke an injured person to death. Still, I’m betting most shamans will prefer the new design.
• Glyph of Lightning Bolt — No longer affects cost. Now increases damage by 4%

Glyph used to fix Lightning Bolt
We didn’t make the change for that reason. We looked at what specs were getting out of their glyphs and it turns out that some specs were getting a decent dps increase while Elemental was not. No matter what we did to other talents and spells, this imabalnce would continue to keep Elemental dps lower than what we wanted. (Source)

Reasons behind the changes to Water Shield
This was the issue. It wasn’t a healer niche problem at all. Shamans were just abandoning Healing Wave to cast Lesser Healing Wave since it was more efficient for procing Improved Water Shield, which felt weird. (Source)