Cataclysm

[Simond]

Think we hit level seven a days or two ago.

[Ingmar]

They appear to have gotten us to level 7 during my absence, so no beatings will be administered.

[Merusk]

We're 50% to L8.  We cap every day, so we'll hit 25 April 11th with the other catasses. 

[apocrypha]

We're level 3. And that's with the most activity our guild has ever, EVER seen over the last 3 weeks.

[caladein]

I quite liked Vashj'ir, in large part because it was so damn coloful.  I don't think it's my favorite zone of the expansion, that probably goes to Lost Isles or Southern Barrens or maybe Deepholm, but it's up there.

[Azuredream]

I thought this was kind of entertaining; they changed Tol Barad so that if you successfully attack you get 1800 honor instead of 180 if you win on defense. I'm not sure if the change is live yet, but already people are telling everyone to not defend and just trade TB back and forth for the massive honor boost. I'm sure on most servers people will still defend but I will not be surprised when a lower pop server gets the win-trading to simply be how the game is played on that server.

[Simond]

Looks like Christmas holidays are over at Blizzard: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/1829962

We have a lot of players at 85 now doing everything from Heroic dungeons to rated Battlegrounds, and the class design team is starting to prepare our list of items to investigate for our next patch.

Before you dive down into the meat below (not really a pleasant image, that), be advised that we’re still early in the preliminary stages. The patch isn’t coming out tomorrow. I wrote this before the end of the year and other things may have cropped up in the meantime. Just because your class or pet problem isn’t mentioned below doesn’t mean we won’t address it.

PvE

We’re happy with damage overall. We have very few traditional tank and spank fights (even Argaloth likes to parry melee) so it’s hard to get consistent numbers without very large data sets. Still, we see Survival hunters and Unholy DKs on top of a lot of single target fights. Arcane, Marksman, and Beastmaster damage is too low. Retribution, Shadow, and Fire and Frost mage damage might be too low, but we’re still watching them. We aren’t seeing a lot of Subtlety rogues in PvE yet, so that sample size is still small. On fights where there is a lot of area damage, Demonology warlocks, Frost DKs and possibly Survival hunters are all too high. Shadow priest AE, mostly due to a weak Mind Sear, feels too low.

Healing in PvE is working out pretty much as intended. There are some Heroic dungeon bosses that are probably tougher than the required item level average permits. In general, you might have a tough time upon zoning into a Heroic dungeon with a bunch of strangers as soon as Dungeon Finder permits, especially if your group isn’t willing to communicate and work together. We want Heroics to be challenging -- if you want to zerg the content, stick to normal dungeons.

Tank balance overall seems good at this point in time. Threat seems to be in a good place -- good tanks don’t have much of a problem, but they can’t “phone it in” either. We’re seeing all four tanks get a lot of use, even on Heroic raid fights. That could change as more guilds are able to make serious heroic attempts.

PvP

The larger health pools, decreased impact of Mortal Strike debuffs, and slower healing are all having the desired effect in PvP. Burst damage has its place, but doesn’t determine the outcome of every encounter. There are several individual abilities that we aren’t happy with in PvP.

We’re keeping a close eye on dispels. We still like the design of making dispels more of a commitment rather than liberally sprinkling around dispel resistance or consequences for every class. Defensive dispels (removing a debuff) generally feel good, but we think offensive dispels (removing an enemy buff) feel too powerful, especially for DPS specs. In particular, Purge and Spellsteal will probably get nerfed.

We’re also looking at crowd control, interrupts, and self-healing in PvP. It’s possible we’ll reduce the durations of some crowd control effects, especially the area effect ones, and decrease the duration of interrupts.

Priests are a little weak in PvP, especially at mobile healing. We have made some changes to glyphs and talents to enhance their survivability and instant healing.

We also want to make sure the epic PvP gear isn’t too easy for just anyone to obtain, given that the PvE endgame content is more challenging than it was in Lich King. We don’t want the player base to just migrate to the most efficient epic delivery mechanism; we want you to participate in what you find most enjoyable.

Stats

We’ll make a pass to make stats that aren’t attractive (but are supposed to be) more attractive. For example, we don’t want Assassination rogues to dismiss crit or Feral tanks to dismiss haste. We are considering making some physical attacks such as Lacerate, Steady Shot, and Slam scale with haste.

Mastery is a new stat for us, and there are a few specs that don’t value it enough. In some cases (e.g. Combat rogues), the design for mastery is fine and we just need to buff the effects to make it more desirable. In others, we don’t think it’s possible to buff mastery enough in its current form. For example, the Retribution mastery, Hand of Light, is fun, but it doesn’t contribute enough damage. To make it contribute enough damage, the proc would need a very high chance, which then can cause paladins to devalue other sources of Holy Power. Instead, we are redesigning Retribution mastery to add a percentage of the damage of Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm as Holy damage (which also plays better with Inqusition). Because Hand of Light is fun, however, we are going to change Divine Purpose as a chance to proc Hand of Light instead of a chance for extra Holy Power (which will also remove a little of the randomness from the rotation). Unholy DKs are another spec for whom mastery just isn’t working out. Our current intent is to redesign their mastery so that their attacks cause more damage to diseased targets (in a similar manner to the Restoration druid mastery).

Potpourri

Some additional class-specific tweaks (keeping in mind this is not the full list):


    *    Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.

    *    Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don’t have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.

    *    We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it’s a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.

    *    For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

    *    We’re making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.

    *    We’re buffing Wild Mushroom. It’s a cool spell that isn’t getting enough play.

    *    Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We’re also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.

    *    We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don’t account for too much mana savings.

    *    We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.

    *    Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.

    *    Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.

    *    We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.

    *    Censure will no longer break Repentance.

    *    As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.

    *    To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.

    *    We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.

    *    We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.

    *    We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.

    *    Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.

    *    For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.

    *    We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.

    *    We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we’ve seen more PvP.


“GC, is this the final list of changes? Does this mean I can expect no changes for my class? Does this mean you don’t care about me?”

No. This is some stuff we are looking at so that you’ll have some context if you see changes on a future PTR. The final list of class patch notes for the next patch will doubtless be much longer.

Also the last week's worth of hotfixes: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/136974/cataclysm-hotfixes-updated-dec-27

[Merusk]

Interesting, I must be doing something wrong in my unholy rotation because I come out top in AOE (unless there's a frost DK.. I said back in October Howling Blast was going to get nerfed, though.) but middle of the pack on single target.    Nice to see they recognize that mastery is near worthless for Unholy, though if they'd sat down and thought about it for just two shakes they could have realized that at the initial design.  When Dots are the lowest damage contribution, scaling them by anything less than massive amounts isn't going to be useful.

[Typhon]

Anyone play a frost DK?  I have both a Fury warrior and a frost DK.  Pre-Cat, the Fury warrior had to sit alot after even relatively small fights, and the DK (unholy at the time) never, ever had to sit.

Post-Cat, the Fury war never, ever, ever needs to sit and the DK, while doing decent damage (if you get procs), seems to need to sit too frequently.

The Frost DK just seems tedious to play compared to every other alt I have.  Even the 73 combat rogue is more self-sufficient than the 81 DK.

Am I doing it wrong?  (Note: I read the comment in the post about death strike, and guessed that other folks are feeling some of the same pain with the DK)

[SurfD]

If they take the Fear Immunity off of Berzerk, they better fucking add it to a glyph or something.  That immunity was pretty much the ONLY thing that let us kill locks and priests, and it was a very useful ability in a lot of situations as a tank as well.

[Azuredream]

Just glancing at Argaloth 25 parses, you have to go down 21 places to find a parse that's not an Unholy DK or a Survival Hunter. Chimeron (which, I haven't fought but I believe is the closest to a Patchwerk-style fight for the DPS in the actual raids) has a fair amount of Unholy DKs also.

The most broken AoE at the moment though is I believe demonology warlocks. You have to go down 28 places to find somebody who isn't a demo lock on Maloriak 25. 89 of the top 100 are all demonology warlocks.

(@Merusk)

[Hawkbit]

Yep.  I've shelved my Frost DK for the time being.  It's the combination of melee without self heals that is killing mine.  In dungeons it's not terrible, but soloing is tough.  Death strike heals for ~2kish at 81.  It's just not enough to keep me playing him.  

I really, really like this:  "We want Heroics to be challenging -- if you want to zerg the content, stick to normal dungeons."  I know people are going to bitch about this overall design change, but I like it.  If you're finding heroics too hard, then back off into normals until you can gear for heroics.  It will get you some practice on the fights as well.  

[Oban]

I could be horribly wrong, but that quote will most likely come back and bite them in the ass.

Casuals make up the overwhelming majority of the WoW player base and right now this game is not nearly as casual friendly as it was before the expansion.

[kildorn]

My frost DK was pretty trivial to level. It was all about interrupts and bursting things down before you lost much health. There are a few areas where the mobs hit crazy hard and I had to either switch specs or adjust my kill rate, but for the most part my DK will pretty much murder things in the opening few seconds of a fight. I roll one disease (FF from HB) in solo pve, though. Oblit hits hard enough ;)


Making Surge of Light proc Flash Heals or GHeals that can crit is stupid. So, so stupid. Simply because if given the choice between an instant zero mana FHeal or GHeal, the only reason to ever use the flash is to proc serendipity. Not for actual healing throughput.

[01101010]

Making Surge of Light proc Flash Heals or GHeals that can crit is stupid. So, so stupid. Simply because if given the choice between an instant zero mana FHeal or GHeal, the only reason to ever use the flash is to proc serendipity. Not for actual healing throughput.

True, I will be using Gheal over Flash now. They prolly could have just kept it just Flash and allowed it to crit but I am not going to complain.

[caladein]

The EU post has a bit clearer wording on this (bolded the added word):

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

I take both versions to mean: "You have a 3/6% chance when you Smite, Heal, Greater Heal, or Flash Heal to cause your next Flash Heal to be instant cast and cost no mana but incapable of a critical hit."

As kildorn pointed out, the other interpretation doesn't make any sense aside from leveling, since you get Flash Heal at 3 but Greater Heal at 38, and Sanctuary.  This also makes the talent a lot better for Disc as I've pretty much dumped Heal completely in favor of Greater Heal.

[01101010]

The EU post has a bit clearer wording on this (bolded the added word):

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

I take both versions to mean: "You have a 3/6% chance when you Smite, Heal, Greater Heal, or Flash Heal to cause your next Flash Heal to be instant cast and cost no mana but incapable of a critical hit."

As kildorn pointed out, the other interpretation doesn't make any sense aside from leveling, since you get Flash Heal at 3 but Greater Heal at 38, and Sanctuary.  This also makes the talent a lot better for Disc as I've pretty much dumped Heal completely in favor of Greater Heal.

Good catch. Thinking of it like that makes more sense.

[K9]

This makes Surge of Light pretty decent now tbh.

[Lantyssa]

Casuals make up the overwhelming majority of the WoW player base and right now this game is not nearly as casual friendly as it was before the expansion.

It will, but then with the amount of bitching going on, it seems like it will be some time before things settle down regardless.

"Design for the audience you have, not the audience you want."

[Paelos]

Casuals make up the overwhelming majority of the WoW player base and right now this game is not nearly as casual friendly as it was before the expansion.

It will, but then with the amount of bitching going on, it seems like it will be some time before things settle down regardless.

"Design for the audience you have, not the audience you want."

They'll temper things a bit. Blizzard has still never learned not to get butthurt by players facerolling their content at maxxed out level. They hear about it for months because the cycles take so long to produce new content, so by the time they get it out it's "Choke on this, fuckers!" Expect heavy heroic changes by the end of January.

[kildorn]

The EU post has a bit clearer wording on this (bolded the added word):

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

I take both versions to mean: "You have a 3/6% chance when you Smite, Heal, Greater Heal, or Flash Heal to cause your next Flash Heal to be instant cast and cost no mana but incapable of a critical hit."

As kildorn pointed out, the other interpretation doesn't make any sense aside from leveling, since you get Flash Heal at 3 but Greater Heal at 38, and Sanctuary.  This also makes the talent a lot better for Disc as I've pretty much dumped Heal completely in favor of Greater Heal.

Good catch. Thinking of it like that makes more sense.

Okay, that version makes a lot more sense. Ghostcrawler needs more coffee.

And on more warlock notes: please, please take Imp Soulfire out back and shoot it. It's an aggravatingly stupid mechanic due to the ICD.

[K9]

According to guildox there are already three level 9 guilds worldwide
 

[Shrike]

Another purge nerf? I mean, really. It barely works as it is. Just get rid of it already. And take the friggin' totems with it. Or increase their range to 100yds and take them off the GCD. They're still a pain in the ass, especially the schizo searing totem. Fix it.

Happy to see another reference to purging (so to speak) caster mainhands from enhance. It's been a problem since the beginning of LK and with mastery this bit of nastiness has reared its head again--with a bullet. Just get it over with and make WF MH only and dump the bedamned internal cooldown. Also, fix the (lack of) scaling issue with WF. It's always sllightly overpowered at the beginning of an expansion and way underpowered by the end because of this. Fix it.

Oh, and add some more fucking enhance weapons while you're at it. Practically every axe I see is a tanking weapon. Why aren't these swords? Where are the slow AGI weapons? One axe and one claw in all those heroics isn't getting it done. I thought we'd moved past this crap in ICC, but apparently not.

I've been playing my 2h frost DK quite a bit lately (since PuGs blow goats and I'm already running out of things to do). She's a one-draenai wrecking crew. I was a bit concerned initally with frosts' lack of recovery, but that didn't last long. I've been saying HB has been needing a nerf since 4.0. Guess they finally figured that out. Will take some of the fun out of frost, but it is sick, sick stuff right now. 2h frost as a leveling spec is rocket-powered steamroller. Practically disease free with massive AoE and essentially unlimited RP for frost strike spam...yeah, it's fun, but a bit much.

[Fordel]

Purge works TO well right now. If you are a class/spec that relies on defensive buffs, you are 100% boned against any shaman or priest. They removed all the RNG protection talents for Cata. 

[Ashamanchill]

As for ferals, the cat nerf is warranted. I'm not even that good at pvp and I was coming first in killing blows in the last few battlegrounds because of my bleeds.

But for the love of god I hope they buff bears, at least in pve. Most fights are run into a pack, blow all my aoes (which of course is two moves), and if a mob doesnt stick to me, it's tough shit. And god forbid I dodge the first three hits in a row, then I won't even be doing those two moves. Anyone other bears (Ingmar) have this problem? These are problems that simply do not exist on my paladin tank. Not in the slightest.

[Malakili]

As for ferals, the cat nerf is warranted. I'm not even that good at pvp and I was coming first in killing blows in the last few battlegrounds because of my bleeds.

But for the love of god I hope they buff bears, at least in pve. Most fights are run into a pack, blow all my aoes (which of course is two moves), and if a mob doesnt stick to me, it's tough shit. And god forbid I dodge the first three hits in a row, then I won't even be doing those two moves. Anyone other bears (Ingmar) have this problem? These are problems that simply do not exist on my paladin tank. Not in the slightest.

I'm not playing Cata right now, but this is more or less exactly the problem with I had in some of the harder heroics when Burning Crusade was new.

[SurfD]

As for ferals, the cat nerf is warranted. I'm not even that good at pvp and I was coming first in killing blows in the last few battlegrounds because of my bleeds.

But for the love of god I hope they buff bears, at least in pve. Most fights are run into a pack, blow all my aoes (which of course is two moves), and if a mob doesnt stick to me, it's tough shit. And god forbid I dodge the first three hits in a row, then I won't even be doing those two moves. Anyone other bears (Ingmar) have this problem? These are problems that simply do not exist on my paladin tank. Not in the slightest.

I'm not playing Cata right now, but this is more or less exactly the problem with I had in some of the harder heroics when Burning Crusade was new.

I think about 2/3 of the problems with bear AoE tanking could probably easily be solved if they gave us a glyph (maybe a minor one) that let us cast Thorns without it shifting us out of bear form.  Have the effect be something like "Allows thorns to be cast in bear form, halves the damage it does, but doubles the threat caused by that damage, and makes thorns self cast only" and boom, bears would have a usefull, mid range cooldown, that lets them generate extra threat on stuff that is hitting them.  Paladins are outright easymode simply because they have a lot of reactive damage that generates threat for them on things that mele them without them really needing to actually DO anything to earn that threat.

[koro]

As for ferals, the cat nerf is warranted. I'm not even that good at pvp and I was coming first in killing blows in the last few battlegrounds because of my bleeds.

But for the love of god I hope they buff bears, at least in pve. Most fights are run into a pack, blow all my aoes (which of course is two moves), and if a mob doesnt stick to me, it's tough shit. And god forbid I dodge the first three hits in a row, then I won't even be doing those two moves. Anyone other bears (Ingmar) have this problem? These are problems that simply do not exist on my paladin tank. Not in the slightest.

I'm not playing Cata right now, but this is more or less exactly the problem with I had in some of the harder heroics when Burning Crusade was new.

I think about 2/3 of the problems with bear AoE tanking could probably easily be solved if they gave us a glyph (maybe a minor one) that let us cast Thorns without it shifting us out of bear form.  Have the effect be something like "Allows thorns to be cast in bear form, halves the damage it does, but doubles the threat caused by that damage, and makes thorns self cast only" and boom, bears would have a usefull, mid range cooldown, that lets them generate extra threat on stuff that is hitting them.  Paladins are outright easymode simply because they have a lot of reactive damage that generates threat for them on things that mele them without them really needing to actually DO anything to earn that threat.

And make that thing available at low levels, so that bear tanking pre-36 isn't nigh-on impossible.

[Merusk]

According to guildox there are already three level 9 guilds worldwide
 

Err.. did Blizz not reset some servers/ guilds then?  We've capped every single day since the last guild reset (Including hitting level 2 twice in that first 36 hours) and we're only at the 50% point of level 7.  Something's fishy.

Azure: Hm, in that case maybe it's my ilevel 333 weapon.     Can't get heroic drops for a damn.. I'm also not dual-wielding (which is apparently the shiznit right now.) because I knew the design intent of UH was 2h so it was only a matter of time before unholy dual wield got nerfed.

[kildorn]

As for ferals, the cat nerf is warranted. I'm not even that good at pvp and I was coming first in killing blows in the last few battlegrounds because of my bleeds.

But for the love of god I hope they buff bears, at least in pve. Most fights are run into a pack, blow all my aoes (which of course is two moves), and if a mob doesnt stick to me, it's tough shit. And god forbid I dodge the first three hits in a row, then I won't even be doing those two moves. Anyone other bears (Ingmar) have this problem? These are problems that simply do not exist on my paladin tank. Not in the slightest.

iirc, Ingmar doesn't have an 85 bear yet. But healing and DPSing, I notice this with bears on the threat front. They're one of the only tanks I will reliably pull threat off of with my lock. Everyone else I may start pushing 80some percent, but bears I'll actually use soulshatter and get random adds heading my way.

[Azazel]

    *    We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.

    *    We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.

    *    We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.

This kind of thing annoys me. Why not let players have some choice in the matter rather than forcing that level of homogenization?

[Ingmar]

It has bad effects on loot rolls and itemization when people want weapons they're not supposed to. They distribute weapons through instances with the idea that X number of specs are going to want each one, etc.

On the druid front, haven't leveled mine yet, transferred the old one and am doing a new one from scratch to see the new Alliance Kalimdor content.

[Ashamanchill]

Thanks for the input! I'm at a weird impasse right now where I find this druid less fun to play than my prot pally right now, yet he has all my achievments so I can't give him up. Yes i am sick that way 

Concerning that thorns glyph idea: that would be perfect. It is one of those things where the players know exactly what the problem is, and exactlty what would fix it, but Blizzard seems weirdly recalcitrant on it.

[Lantyssa]

It has bad effects on loot rolls and itemization when people want weapons they're not supposed to. They distribute weapons through instances with the idea that X number of specs are going to want each one, etc.

They might as well just add "Druid Only", "Warrior Only", etc. tags to items if that's their philosophy.  It's not as if they aren't heading towards a game where you're only supposed to play exactly the way they want.

[kildorn]

The unholy DK one is the only "stop doing that" in the list. Everything else is an oops (shaman wanting caster weapons. seriously, it's just a broken side effect of +spelldamage being left on some items. Rogues were nerfing themselves by thinking that a mastery that rewards slow offhands = we use slow offhands, when in reality they were nerfing themselves by doing so)