There already were a few other hotfixes announced and most of them involved other things like specific items or certain bugs to certain dungeon encounters. Those can be seen in a post by CM Crygil here. A few more recent hotfixes involving class abilities were announced by Ghostcrawler and probably have taken effect already. Rogues, Death Knights and Warlocks are the classes affected by the changes.

Rogues: Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%

Ghostcrawler mentions that they wanted to increase the damage of Assassination rogues but in doing so, they overdid it a bit. Hunger for Blood was the candidate for some nerfing since they buffed it before when they wanted to give the tree a damage boost. But now it’s been changed again to lower the damage to what they want it to be.

Death Knights: The shadow portion of Scourge Strike can no longer crit.

The Unholy talent Scourge Strike has a physical damage portion and shadow damage portion. Only the physical damage portion will be able to crit now. At first they wanted both to crit but that proved to be too bursty for PvP and gives too much sustained damage for raids.

Warlocks: Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely

This problem sounds familiar and I actually thought this would have been fixed by now. This same thing became an issue for Druids rolling lifebloom indefinitely to maintain any buff that was used in the first cast like a healing increase trinket. Apparently it’s sort of the same issue for corruption and haste, leading to some high damage that Blizzard feels just isn’t right. With the hotfix, the hasted corruption should correct itself within a few ticks after it’s refreshed.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Ghostcrawler replied to a thread talking about PvP and PvE and how they affect each other in terms of health pools, damage and healing are concerned. The OP of the thread mentioned that the current situation sees us having DPS meant to deal a large amount of damage in a short time, one of the formulas to success in PvP. He also says that PvE situations make it that healers also are able to heal through large amounts of health with little effort, which has could be powerful in a PvP setting. I’m not sure what to say about his assessment since I don’t do PvP that much but Ghostcrawler has the following to say:

Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

You’ll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons. source

No matter how you look at it, this is a nerf to healing (and dps in a PvP setting) but probably needed to fix the scaling problems people have been talking about throughout this expansion. With this change it certainly looks like things are going to be slower throughout the game. The dps will take a wee bit longer to kill players in PvP because of the bigger health pools and it’s going to take a wee bit longer for the healers to top of players to full health with the weaker heals. I wonder how this change is going to affect a scenario where heals are not part of the equation, like a one on one fight in a battleground between a rogue and a warrior for example. With this change, it should be a lot harder for the rogue to take the warrior down if at all.

We’ll just have to see how this plays out and hope that it will ultimately fix the problem.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The topic of the thread revolved around the Rogue Subtlety tree and how it’s underwhelming compared to the other trees. But Ghostcrawler’s reply contained something for all pure dps classes to be concerned with. Perhaps it will also be true for other classes that have more than one dps tree too. Here is the interesting reply of Ghostcrawler:

Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it’s likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It’s going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. source

What I understand from this then is that their goal is to design the different pure dps classes so that damage potential is not the deciding factor for their different talent trees but a desired play style. If what I understand is correct, this should be true whether you’re talking about PvE or PvP. We’re seeing this already to a certain degree in the present trees. For example, the Frost tree is usually associated with PvP and AoE farming but steps have been taken to move Frost closer and closer to being competitive to the other specs.

Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to choose your spec because you like how that spec is played and not because it’s the best damage dealer? It’s similar to how a shaman would pick Enhancement because he likes the melee play style and how another would pick Elemental because he likes being ranged DPS. A warlock would pick Destruction because he likes the direct damage while another would pick Demonology because he likes what his minions bring to the table and relies on them more.

I’m not sure exactly how they plan to see this goal through but something tells me that the Mastery talent system coming in the Cataclysm expansion will help. The Mastery system will give players more room to be creative with their talents and not stick to cookie cutter specs. By allowing players more leeway to play around with their specs, this will give them a better opportunity to further customize the trees to fit how they want to play.

Of course this is all just plans and no one knows if we’ll truly get to that “play style rules all” state. But it’s something to look forward to and something to hope for.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

icecrown citadel

Below are a few important points taken from the interview:

The designers were really excited about working on the Icecrown Citadel because it’s such an important part of Warcraft history and since Arthas himself is such an important and popular figure since the days of Warcraft 3.

The design of the Icecrown Citadel was inspired by the original look in Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne. The whole Citadel was designed around the original spire.

The Icecrown Citadel is bringing back a few aspects of past raid dungeons that we’ve seen like the winged sturcture similar to Naxxramas and the teleporters similar to Ulduar.

Blizzard is taking advantage of the number of bosses to make every boss have something for a wide number of players. This was something that was harder to do in Trial of the Crusader, which had only 5 bosses.

The designers want the loot in Icecrown Citadel to feel epic in every sense. Considering this is highest tier of loot until the Cataclysm expansion comes out, they want the loot to last until then. This also means they don’t want to be giving this loot away too fast. I guess this explains a lot of the difficult raid access progression Blizzard is implementing here.

The design of the Icecrown loot has its inspiration from the Citadel itself, with mage gear looking like Blood Princes and hunter gear having Nerubian elements. They said to look for lots of blue, ice, skulls and spikes in the gear!

Loot in Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning don’t have the titan-ish feel that you see in the Ulduar gear. Since both the 5 man dungeon and the raid were developed at the same time, expect to see similarities in the gear in terms of look and naming.

The vertical design of the Icecrown Citadel means we’ll be seeing things like elevators, teleporters and gunships to get players through the place.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

icecrown citadel

Before going into the issue itself, I just find it quite interesting because this whole thing looks like a way to show how badass the Lich King is and adding to the whole epic difficulty feel of the place but the devs said that it was something they didn’t have to do if not for something you would originally think would be the reason. According to Ghostcrawler, they didn’t anticipate that they would add more gear tiers because of the heroic modes so their avoidance numbers are messed up. He also said that Cataclsym will better handle the avoidance numbers.

So players have actually seen this before with a buff that mobs in the Sunwell Plateau had called Sunwell Radiance. According to them they would want tanks to take a constant stream of damage over time but having high avoidance numbers would make their incoming damage more spiky than the raid would want. They would want healers to better plan their heals and for tanks to better react to incoming damage using cooldowns.

I have to be honest. I don’t tank and only have a very limited knowledge of all this technical stuff concerning tanking stats. This reasoning actually sounds to me like it’s actually better for the raid that tank avoidance is getting nerfed. That doesn’t sound right to me any way I look at it. It makes more sense to me if they just said that “we want the place to be badass so we’re nerfing your tanks”.

Right or wrong, there’s now a debate going in the forums about how this change will affect the avoidance tanks as opposed to the mitigation tanks. All tanks are affected by this of course but it seems like druids and death knights who rely a lot on avoidance (death knights need to dodge or parry to get a rune strike going, which is one of their threat increasing tools) are going to be affected more than the paladins and warriors. Others say that there really won’t be a big difference and that druids might even come out ok because of their high health pool levels.

Whatever the right answer is, this announcement surely is causing a ruckus in the tanking community and I’m sure it will add to the epic difficult benefiting a raid dungeon like the Icecrown Citadel and a boss like the Lich King.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

glyph interface

At it’s current state, the only real effect haste has on DoT’s and HoT’s is lowering the global cooldown and the devs want to make haste a more attractive stat especially for Restoration Druids, Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests who use HoT’s or DoT’s more extensively than other classes and specs. Ghostcrawler said that they now have new technology that will allow HoT’s and DoT’s to tick faster. By this he doesn’t mean shortening the number of ticks but making each tick more powerful – that’s already in the game. It means making the time between ticks shorter, which would make sense for a haste stat.

Of course the drawback to this is that faster ticks means more refreshing to be done. Because of this the devs don’t want to use this new tech to change the base spells. Instead they want to add this effect using glyphs. If it proves popular then they might consider making them talents or even base abilities. For now, Blizzard wants to introduce this with three new glyphs that may or may not see the light of day come patch 3.3 – glyphs of Rejuvenation, Corruption and Shadow Word: Pain. This should allow these spells to tick faster the more haste you have. Blizzard said that Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain would likely take the place of Glyph of Mind Flay while increasing the range of the Mind Flay base spell by 10 yards. Since there already are Glyphs of Corruption and Rejuvenation, they’re not sure how to resolve that problem yet.

It sounds like a very nice buff for classes who use DoT’s and HoT’s often. I don’t really care if this is going to make you work a bit more by doing more refreshing of the spells as long as it’s ultimately going to help. I really this passes the test and makes it in the game eventually!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

spellbook

The thing that looked like an obvious advantage of the removal of spell ranks was that you’ll only need to learn the spell once and you’re set for life. The accumulated savings a player will have by not having to spend for so many ranks, especially on a character starting from scratch, should really help in the leveling process.

It’s quite obvious that by having spell ranks removed, the spell grows on its own somehow. At first I thought it would like how pets automatically learn spells and spell ranks at certain levels as they grow up. I thought that while spell ranks are gone from a training perspective, they would still exist as they are as the character grows like learning rank X of spell Y at level Z. Apparently it’s a lot cooler than that!

According to Ghostcrawler, there really won’t be ranks as we know them today. He said that a spell will just grow a bit every time you level up so that you’re getting a wee bit better every time as you journey towards the level cap. He said though that while it’s a better situation, it’s not that much better than what we currently have. The concept is great though since at least by the time this is implemented, you won’t have players feeling gimped using a certain spell because it’s been a while since new rank was trained for it, making it weak.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Undead Rogue

Ghostcrawler mentioned that there will be a change to Vanish by patch 3.3 which should be a significant buff to the spell so much so that they might have to compensate for its power elsewhere. Exactly what that is is still unknown but at least it’s great to hear that something is finally being done to hopefully fix this issue for good. One of the more annoying bugs that seems to happen is during PvP when the rogue hits vanish but his/her opponent is still able to get a hit off.

While we don’t know exactly what this change will be, we already have a hint from the Rogue Q&A that was released before. Ghostcrawler mentioned that they might implement a change to vanish that could put the rogue into stealth for a minimum of one second. This should hopefully be enough to fix this ability and make it work as it should. I mean when rogues want to Vanish they really should go poof, canceling any incoming attack since there’s no more target.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

soul shards

Right now it’s still very vague as to how exactly this would work. I was thinking that since the warlock is a pure DPS class, the new use of the soul shard would also be used to boost their damage. In the Warlock class Q&A, Ghostcrawler mentioned that the new soul shard system would give warlocks a combat boost and that’s why more damage was the first thing on my mind (in the form of more spell power, crit, or haste for a short period of time). But Ghostcrawler recently came out in the forums and said that the new soul shard system would indeed be cool but not necessarily a dps buff. This statement poses a few questions right away.

If it’s a combat boost but not a dps buff then exactly what is it? The only stuff that I can think of are more of the cute maintenance things that the current shard system already has. Maybe more threat management abilities or survivability abilities? Maybe they’re things like more stuns and other crowd control effects? But these don’t scream core class mechanics to me.

If it’s not a dps buff, would making it more prevalent in class mechanics actually make it more annoying? I mean, this means you’ll have to worry about shards even more than before. It’s really got to be so cool and so fun to make the extra effort worth your trouble. Somehow i wish Ghostcrawler would give a clearer picture about what he’s really talking about but I guess even giving an example would come across to other people as “this is what it’s going to do” instead of just an idea.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

icecrown citadel

While discussing tanking niches, Ghostcrawler let loose that Icecrown Ctiadel will have at least 31 bosses and even went on to say that the Citadel is that big. 31 bosses!! That’s the most ever! Even if you say that the dungeon will be divided into wings like in Naxxramas (which most probably will be the case) that’s still a heck lot of bosses. It’s also almost certain that a lot of those bosses will be optional It’s now much clearer why the raid lock out extension feature was released. I mean if a guild plans to fight all at least 31 bosses in there it’s gonna take a while and would definitely spill over to the next week’s lockout.

Just the other day I was thinking about how Icecrown is already pretty crowded with the Argent Crusade and The Knights of the Ebon Blade doing their business in their various quest hubs throughout the zone. Icecrown now also has the Argent Tournament and the Coliseum. The Alliance and the Horde also have their business to do in the zone. Then next patch will have the 5 man dungeon plus the at least 31 bosses in the Icecrown Citadel raid. I knew Icecrown was going to active with it being the Lich King’s area but I never thought it was going to this crowded!

UPDATE: Ghostcrawler came out to say that he was trying to be sarcastic when he wrote about the 31 bosses. Everyone just misunderstood and thought he was serious. Even then I won’t be surprised if the Icecrown Citadel had more bosses than usual.

Post from: WOW Obsessed