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.

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class character creation

According to CM Zarhym, we should expect to see another round of class Q&A’s especially because of all the new announcements that have been coming out. So while the first batch focused more on patch 3.2 while touching on future plans, we should see more specifics on patch 3.3 (if they’re planning on coming out soon enough) and the Cataclysm expansion. Who knows, we might be able to see specific ideas and plans for each class’ talents, spells, and abilities for the expansion. Whatever the case I hope the next batch of Q$A’s will answer more issues more effectivley and provide something really new to the table. Before it felt like the issues weren’t really answered or very little new things were really being presented.

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priest

Priests are not a jack of all trades, master of none healer. Priests are strong and versatile healers and the only trade off is knowing how to manage the many spells that priests have since a lot of them have these small niches.

Shadow priests used to just a leveling spec which didn’t do enough damage. Then in TBC they were better damage dealers but traded damage for utility. Now shadow priests can do comparable dps to other dps classes.

Blizzard would probably want to change/add shadow talents so that they affect all damage spells and not just DoTs. This should help solve the problem of their damage needing some time to get the ball rolling dps-wise.

They think vampiric embrace damage is fine but could look into the threat even if it isn’t something they think is a problem.

They could look into changing the Mind Flay glyph to increase range without losing the snare.

Reducing the mana cost of shadowform so that it’s easier to pop out of it to heal or do holy damage is an idea they’ve been discussing.

Blizzard is considering changing shadow word: death so that it doesn’t have a backlash when the target is in execute range. They’re also thinking of changing it so that the backlash damage isn’t affected by things that would increase your damage.

Blizzard would want to improve on the mana efficiency and burst healing of the Holy tree.

Their intention is that Greater heal is the default heal while flash heal would be the heal to use for emergency since it’s fast. Such really isn’t the case now with flash heal being valued for its speed over greater heal.

They will not collapse dispel magic and cure disease into one spell. They feel that would make the dispelling game too easy. They have also expressed that dispels missing isn’t something they want in the game but would need a code fix to solve.

Inner fire will not have its charges removed unless they can think of alternatives for it just like mages have molten armor, mage armor etc. Removing the charges would make it a passive armor buff that would essentially make a cloth wearer have the armor of a leather wearer. At least mages have to make a choice.

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two rogues posing in group shot

Rogues used to be the the class with the best dps but now Blizzard has been pushing them into being more normal and having some utility instead.

Blizzard is very happy with the combo point/finisher system that rogues use. In fact there’s a risk of making other classes adapt a similar system but that would make rogues less unique.

Vanish is not working properly. A possible solution to the problem would be to make the rogue always enter stealth for a minimum of 1 second.

A long term plan is in the works to change Hunger for Blood wherein it will be more reactive and used for certain situations instead of just a plain passive damage increase.

Blizzard would like to buff the Subtlety tree a bit to make it more competitive but they want to be careful since if they make it too good, then every rogue would want to play subtlety because of its utility.

Cloak of Shadows isn’t meant to be an I-win button. Buffing it further would give them an unfair advantage even in PvP, by being immune to thing they shouldn’t be immune to.

They would like to make rogue survivability a lot easier by making some active abilities passive, like the Feint change.

Blizzard could allow rogues to be able to take more damage. Rogues seem to rely on crowd control a lot and if they can’t do this, the rogue just takes too much damage. They might allow rogues to be able to take some punishment while cooldowns are active.

Blizzard could allow a weapon swapping feature in the future similar the Diablo 2. This could be the answer for those weapon swapping macros rogues use. But they don’t feel like it’s something they need to address right now.

They’re allowing rogues to use one handed axes because of itemization and because it fits with the rogue image anyway. They felt they were dropping one handed maces a bit too much and wanted some variety in what players would use.

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argent tournament grounds

Crusader’s Coliseum

To be clear, the 5 man encounter is called Trial of the Champion. The raid encounter (both 10 and 25 man) is called Trial of the Crusader while the heroic mode of this encounter is called Trial of the Grand Crusader.

Trial of the Champion should roughly on par with other 5 man dungeons in WoTLK. The heroic mode rewards 1 Emblem of Conquest and 1 Champion’s seal per boss. Only the heroic mode will be included in the rotation of dungeon daily quests. Trial of the Crusader will award 2 Emblems of Triumph for each encounter.

There will be a jousting fight in one of the encounters in Trial of the Champion but gear won’t come into play here unlike in the “vehicle fights” in Oculus and Ulduar. It should be just like regular jousting in the Argent Tournament.

Since there are four different modes for Trial of the Crusader, you’ll be able to choose among the four just like you can choose between normal and heroic for other dungeons. This time there will be four choices.

To activate Trial of the Grand Crusader, at least one player in the group should have finished Trial of the Crusader. Activating is done by talking to an npc and everyone in the raid will automatically be doing the tribute run.

The Trial of the Crusader will have one encounter similar to Priestess Delrissa in Magisters’ Terrace. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it was basically a fight where 5 of you fight 5 of them in a sort of Arena Tournament fashion. Gives you that PvP feel inside a dungeon run.

Isle of Conquest

After some testing in the PTR, the devs decided to make a few changes to Isle of Conquest such as increasing keep walls health, lowering reinforcements for both sides, making cannons repairable and other things.

Blizzard’s ideal average time for completing Isle of Conquest (and other battlegrounds too in fact) is 20-30 minutes.

The Cobalt Mine and Oil Derrick will have an added bonus when captured. Capturing one will give a 15% bonus to all damage done by operated vehicles. Capturing both will give a 30% bonus.

Spawn killing or graveyard camping is a potential concern for Isle of Conquest. While making it back to the keep should allow players to dodge enemies, Blizzard might add graveyard portals for resurrecting at a different location if this really becomes a big problem.

While vehicle combat figures greatly in Isle of Conquest, the dev team feels that ground combat will also be a big part of the battleground. The above mentioned change about the Oil Derrick and the Cobalt Mine will make capturing them important and that requires ground combat to do.

Isle of Conquest marks of honor will be a part of the turn in quests. By adding an additional requirement, the rewards will also be increased.

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night elf hunter

Hunters are unique in that they are the only ranged damage dealers that rely on the mostly physical damage of their ranged weapon rather than spells. But what also makes them unique is the fact that they have pets and traps at their disposal. Despite being a ranged class, they still have some tools for melee combat. All of this makes the hunter design tricky. Ghostcrawler said that they want to improve on the interface involving pet control and improving what hunters do when they get in melee range of an opponent (more on these below).

Ammunition has always been a pain in the butt since the start for hunters. It’s expensive and when you run out of it, the hunter is pretty much useless. Eventually they want to push through with the mechanic that will allow non-consumable ammo wherein the haste benefit from the quiver/ammo pouch would be made up elsewhere. It seems like they need more time, probably another expansion, to implement this because of the problems it could do to data storage. For now they want to fix this problem by lowering the cost of ammo and also by changing the way ranged weapons scale so that hunter dps will still increase even if you didn’t have the best ammo.

As much as they still don’t want Hunters to be very good in melee combat, they want to give them a mechanic so that Hunters don’t always have to run away when they’re in melee range. They’re thinking of maybe a punishing attack on cooldown that hunters can execute while in melee range to give him something worth doing. Like other classes,they would like hunters to benefit more from haste. The only problem is that hunters are a very cooldown oriented class and haste doesn’t benefit that situation very much. They’ll about this problem more at Blizzcon.

Ghostcrawler mentioned that they would like to make a change that will help pet survivability in PvE. They think that AoE damage avoidance isn’t enough to help pets stay alive especially when dealing with bosses like Mimiron. the answer is to just not let certain things damage pets so they don’t die from something ridiculous because of the pet AI. Hunters already can heal and rez their pets and that’s enough. they also want to give pets more action bars because players currently have to switch certain abilities in and out. they want pet action bars to feel more like character action bars.

Lastly the devs are thinking about doing away with stables the way they are used now, making pet summoning more like warlocks in that they can switch pets anytime they want. If they do this, stables will be used more for storage of pets Hunters don’t really use but can’t part with.

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Warrior trainer

The devs think that one of the things that make the Warrior class interesting is the Rage mechanic, specifically the way rage can convert into damage which converts to rage and so on. It’s a design that they still haven’t been able to really balance. Another aspect that makes warriors interesting is the Stance system, which forces warriors to occasionally switch stances to gain certain benefits and access to certain abilities. They want Stances to be part of the decision making a Warrior has to go through and for him to adapt to a certain situation by switching to the right stance at the right time.

Ghostcralwer thinks that from a design perspective, they’re happiest with the Protection tree and that Fury and Arms need a bit of work. By this he means that Protection is now more flexible with less mandatory talents and more of the fun and useful talents. They’ve been wanting to do the same for both Arms and Fury but doing this now could mean nerfing their dps just to make them cooler and that’s something they don’t want to do. They also want to move further away from the idea that Arms is for PvP while Fury was for PvE because it’s too constraining for people who enjoy one over the other.

Just like how Death Knights can tank with any tree, the devs have been saying that they would like to give warriors at least two tanking trees someday. it certainly would be interesting to see Arms warriors tanking with a two-hander someday. In fact, to some extent I’ve seen it done already like when my level 80 warrior friend tanked regular Drak’theron Keep as Arms.

If you’re looking for a way to gauge your dps as a DPS warrior, Gjostcrawler mentioned that they should be comparable to other melee dps hybrids like Ret pallies, Enhancement shamans, Death Knights, Kitty druids. It used to be that warriors did more than that because they used to be exempted from the rule that pure dps classes do more damage than hybrids.

The devs see a problem with the way Rage is currently being generated. The way things are now, an overgeared warrior tank won’t generate as much rage because he won’t be taking enough damage to generate it and thus generating less threat. They feel that generating more rage through damage done is the way to go for the future but they still have to be careful because in this system, an undergeared warrior tank probably won’t generate as much threat. While we’re in the matter of rage generation and dealing damage, it’s worth mentioning that Blizzard feels like dps stats like Strength aren’t as useless as players might think when it comes to tanking. DPS stats are important for generating threat so they shouldn’t just stack the tanking stats like Avoidance and forget about stuff like Strength.

To see the whole Warrior Q&A you can click here.

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Tauren druid cat form

Druids have come a long way since vanilla WoW since back then they were pretty much just healers in the end game content and now they are viable in Tanking and DPS as well. Several druid forms have allowed druids to maintain these roles in a way that other classes cannot. For example warriors can use their stances and Death Knights their presences to allow for some flexibility in roles but forms make druids to do this much better… in fact some may say too good.

Let’s talk about the Balance tree and Moonkins. One major concern is that the eclipse talent, which allows some variability in the spells, allows for a solar rotation to be well received but the lunar rotation not so much. Blizzard doesn’t like that just half the talent is favored and they plan to fix this. they said the problem here is that the two spells involved, Wrath and Starfire, are almost the same thing. A suggested fix for this long term is to separate the two spells and add another one like Insect Swarm or Moonfire. They seem to want a dynamic similar to how frost mages use fireball when Brain Freeze procs. For PvP they feel that Moonkins aren’t where they want them to be especially in the survivability department. but they feel that other caster classes also have the same problem so it could take a while since they’re focused on the classes that don’t have a strong PvP presence rather than those that do but have trees that under-perform.

I think this Q&A was pretty disappointing for feral druids since Ghostcrawler didn’t really say anything new or exciting specifically for them. They’re pretty much ha[[y with the way they stand right now from how they tank to how complex the kitty dps rotations are and such things. One thing they did mention though is they really want to see a future where shifting costs are gone so that druids will be in different forms so they can be more versatile. For example, thanks to their versatility druids already shift out of Moonkin or cat to backup heal or battle rez someone. Eliminating shifting costs would make this easier.

This brings us to Resto druids. Blizzard feels that there might be a problem with the fact that druids have to be in Tree of Life form to be as good healers as everyone else, losing some of their versatility. In fact they feel that it’s not really a good thing for druids to be locked into one form the whole time and this is where the plan to cut out the shifting costs comes in. They also feel like they want druids to be in their caster form a LOT more. For Tree of Life for example they might make it so that druids only use it for certain spells or to increase healing capability for a short duration like Warlocks and Metamorphosis’ damage increase effect. Does this mean that the same would be true for Moonkins? Based on their thoughts it seems like it. In other news, they also are working on a way so that +crit is more useful for Resto druids and in fact they want all casters to value haste and crit more.

To see the whole Q&A, click here.

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Paladin

For Holy Paladins, they talked about the mp5 stat as well as the changes they made to Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield/Flash of Light. While mp5 benefits all paladin specs, the Holy paladin is the spec where it probably would have the most impact. But for now mp5 seems to be quite an undervalued and overlooked stat compared to crit, spell power or intellect. They’re making mp5 more beneficial for all classes by increasing the mp5 values on gear by 25%. They did mention something about collapsing spirit and mp5 in the future (since spirit is pretty much junk for paladins and shamans) but that will have to be done carefully. Instead of collapsing both stats maybe they can approach the problem the way they made spirit more useful for classes like mages and warlocks – adding a bonus to something based on your spirit.

They changed Sacred Shield so that when Flash of Light is used on a shielded target, the target will also get a HoT worth the 100% of the FoL amount. Beacon of Light was also changed so that the healing it does is now based on total healing done including overheals. They also mentioned that they would consider giving paladins more healing spells down the road.

For Prot pallies, they talked about how they wanted Blessing of Sanctuary to be the main blessing for them, which is why they buffed it making it also give the same amount of stamina bonus as blessing of kings but will not stack with it.

Ghostcrawler said that Ret pally dps is currently too low and they addressed that for 3.2 by redesigning Seal of Vengeance/Corruption so that it will be the go to seal for most fights, especially on boss fights. The spell now does 33% weapon damage as Holy with 5 stacks and crits do double damage while the DoT component of the spell got changed to a melee attack instead of a spell. Seal of Command’s niche would be more for shorter fights like trash mobs in dungeons and in PvP.

For PvP, they’re bringing back the use of Exorcism on player targets but added a 1.5 second cast time. This way Paladins can’t use it on the go as they’re closing out the distance between players. They’ll need to make a decision on when to use it and probably only when it becomes instant cast through Art of War procs. Ghostcrawler also touched on a plan to redo the entire dispelling system wherein one idea would be to give all healers the ability to dispel Magic but to prevent offensive dispelling altogether (so would this mean spells like Spell Steal and Purge would be out?) or at least prevent the dispelling of buffs classes should have like Arcane Intellect.

Lastly, they touched on a plan to make Librams more prominent aesthetically just like quivers for Hunters. They understand that Librams were a big part of the Paladin look especially in Warcraft 3. It’s something they’d like to do in the future but they warned that it could take time, citing that it took them this long to implement the new druid form art.

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warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.

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