There’s still a lot to do like doing more heroics and getting those emblems of frost for better gear. For those people who aren’t raiding ICC, it’s going to take a lot longer to work towards getting the gear purchasable with them. For PvP there’s the new arena season to participate in. But apparently what we have now as content won’t be the only stuff we have to work with before the new expansion comes out.

CM Zarhym mentioned that they have plans to come up with new PvE and PvP content before the expansion comes out. I’m assuming that we’ll have the customary pre-expansion patch that features a few new things to prepare us for Cataclysm. Perhaps we might see the reworked talent trees with the Mastery system already. But aside from that we can expect real content to work with. There’s a lot of talk speculating what this new content could be but you can rule out a new raid dungeon that’s a higher tier than ICC. Zarhym said that ICC will be the final big raid in terms of tiered progression. Of course that opens up the possibility of non tiered progression content, perhaps even a new 5 man or a short non tiered raid dungeon that will prepare us for Cataclysm.

One idea that’s been floating around is to open at least one more portal in the Chamber of Aspects. We currently have the Obsidian Sanctum available but it’s possible that we could see one more from one of the other dragonflights. Not sure why we’d ever have to fight anything from the good dragons though like the reds and the greens. Personally though this is something I’d rather see in Cataclysm than before it. As for PvP, maybe another arena or even a sneak peek at the rated battlegrounds could be a possibility.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

When Blizzard announced this PvP healing debuff they mentioned that all shield effects would not be affected. Well they’re turning that stance around now with a change that seems to already have been hotfixed in. According to CM Zarhym, the PvP healing debuff will also reduce the effects of the paladin spell Sacred Shield and the Priest spell Power Word: Shield by 10% for Wintergrasp, Battlegrounds and Arenas. As always they will be monitoring the effects of this latest change.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

battlegrounds battlemasters

Patch 3.3.2 saw the implementation of this PvP healing debuff, which will affect all players in Wintergrasp, Battlegrounds and Arenas. The debuff will decrease all healing by 10% including healing from potions and Healthstones. This debuff will not affect auras or defensive shields. As this is something new and therefore quite experimental, Blizzard said that they will be monitoring how these changes play out for the three areas mentioned. Considering that the latest season of the Arena Tournament just started, it really is quite a concern to monitor.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

CM Bornakk announced that they will be implementing a change that will double Resilience value as far as reducing the overall damage taken by players is concerned. All the other effects concerning Resilience will stay the same. Depending on the player’s amount of Resilience, players should experience about a 10%-20% reduction in damage taken from other players when this change is hotfixed into the game. Blizzard will also be monitoring how this change will affect healing as they anticipate that healing might become too strong. They will also be ready to implement a PvP only healing nerf if they see the need.

The common complaint for this expansion as far as PvP is concerned is that there’s too much burst damage (and healing too). This change should help prepare things for the Cataclysm expansion where they’re working to even things out and more away from this problem.

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

Well it wasn’t really Blizzard but it’s someone high up enough to give this statement a bit more “oomph”. Blizzard’s VP for Game Design and WoW mastermind Rob Pardo recently had an interview with Warcry.com on his view about the 5 years of WoW. It was here that he talked more about how the game has been evolving from a more hardcore game to a more casual friendly game where more players can see the content they come up with. He explains that this was because a lot of designers including himself came from being hardcore gamers in other MMO’s like Everquest and it was this hardcore gamer in them that made them think that’s how things should be. But as we know they’re learned that it didn’t have to be that way to make the game fun.

Anyway, it was in that interview where Mr. Pardo said it outright that the Arena Tournament was a mistake. To clarify, he mentioned that when they thought it up before they never expected how much it problems it would cause in terms of balancing classes especially when taking both PvE and PvP into consideration. These his words:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. source

Mr. Pardo even said that if he could go back in time, either he would go back to before the game came out and changed the rules to make the Arena easier to implement or he would just scrap the idea. Of course they can’t scrap the Arena Tournament now so we just have to live with it, taking the good with the bad. Right now I’m just have this happy feeling that what I was thinking all this time ever since it came out was right all along.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

As you know, one of the ways to obtain Stone Keeper’s Shards is to do dungeons and kill bosses while your faction controls Wintergrasp. Since Wintergrasp is a per server thing, the status of control varies depending on what server you’re in. There are times when you do dungeons and you can’t get Stone Keeper’s Shards from bosses and there are times when you can. Since this is a per server issue, this becomes sort of a problem when you’re doing cross-server dungeons using the new LFG system coming out in patch 3.3.

According to CM Zarhym, the system is set up to determine the state of Wintergrasp control in your server and reward Stone Keeper Shards accordingly. So only players whose faction controls Wintergrasp on their server can get the buff that allows players to loot the shards.. It’s actually a pretty simple and fair solution and would be something I would have suggested if someone asked me.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

battlegrounds battlemasters

Blizzard didn’t forget about twinks when they released the feature to gain experience from Battlrgrounds, They did provide a feature that allowed players to turn off their experience gain so that twinks can not only PvP without the fear of leveling past their bracket but also play against their fellow twinks in their battlegroup. This is also to prevent casual players who are doing battlegrounds for fun as they level up from getting stomped over and over by the twinks. This whole thing has caused a bit of a problem though.

Keeping the twinks together and away from the casual guys is a great idea in theory. The problem is that, in certain battlegroups there don’t seem to be enough twinks. Many players have reported that they often have to spend so much time queuing up for the xp-off games. This just proves that twinking isn’t equally popular across all battlegroups. Blue poster Crygil acknowledged that they are aware of this problem and that they are watching this closely. They’re working on a solution to this that won’t affect players who aren’t interested in this practice. The only solution I can see right now is to pool all the twinks into one battlegroup but unfortunately CM Zarhym said that massive technical limitations prevents them from doing this.

Well just have to see what solution they have for this issue but I don’t expect that this is anywhere near the top of their list since twinking still isn’t something they endorse but just allow.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

strand of the ancients

Blizzard has said that they really intended Strand of the Ancients to make sides random but what they did just caused some bugs so they fixed it at Alliance starting out on offense while Horde defends. By patch 3.2 this problem will finally be fixed. It’s about time too since it’s been more than six months already since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out. I’m not one who does battlegrounds a lot and Strand of the Ancients isn’t exactly my first choice when I do decide to do some but this news makes me feel good because I like hearing that it’s finally getting the fix it’s needed for a long time. I like hearing that something will finally work as it’s supposed to.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Vindication tooltip

One of the changes is coming in the form of a hotfix concerning the Paladin Retribution talent Vindication. Thankfully it’s a PvP change that doesn’t have a big change in PvE since Vindication is mostly a PvP spec talent. As it is now, Vindication reduces all the attributes of the paladin’s target by a certain amount. The hotfix will change it to reduce all attributes except Stamina and Intellect.

According to CM Bornakk, one of the reasons this change is being is because players who face Ret Pallies in the Arena pretty much automatically get handicapped by having their health points reduced at the start of the fight, something that could be powerfully annoying in a PvP setting especially in Arena. I imagine though that the stamina reduction that Ret pallies give would be at least a bit useful for leveling Paladins out there

I’m sure a lot of PvP-ing ret pallies are mad about this because one of the biggest PvP advantage of this talent was taken away. To make things worse, it seems like while this talent would still have some use against the melee classes like Warriors, Rogues and Death Knights it doesn’t do much to affect the caster classes/specs. But comes to think of it, before this change it probably didn’t anyway aside from the intellect reduction. There’s a suggestion to make this talent reduce spell power and attack power instead but I don’t know how powerful that will be.

Post from: WOW Obsessed