blue posts

New Raid Dungeons (Source)

Our development team is currently hard at work on Ulduar. It's going to be massive. For those looking to progress past Naxxramas, this will be your place. For those looking for much more of a challenge content-wise than they've seen thus far in Wrath of the Lich King, Ulduar welcomes you.

After The Burning Crusade's final major content patch, the plan was to space out the new raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King so there wouldn't be overwhelming moments or times where several raids are released at once and slightly ill-tuned (as was the case with The Burning Crusade's launch); we also don't want extremely long periods of time where no new raids come out, as was the case after The Burning Crusade's initial launch.

I trust players can expect to find a fair amount of challenge and content with patch 3.1, and each major content patch after that in Wrath of the Lich King will offer similar new feats.

Current Healing Difficulty (Source)

You are welcome to disagree with out decisions, but I do not recommend coming onto our boards with the intention of insulting us. This is not constructive feedback and will get you banned.

I am sympathetic if you find healing too difficult. Many players do not and are clamoring for more of a challenge. There are many ways we challenge players in PvE, including complex encounters, short enrage timers and high damage. When mana management, or healing in general, are too easy then certain encounters become too easy. Furthermore, the game mechanics as designed don't work -- Spirit and mp5 become stats players aren't interested in. Choosing efficiency vs. throughput is not a meaningful decision. Healers in general are marginalized because raids can get by with fewer of them.

When you claim we are dumb for thinking healing is too easy, you are disagreeing with a lot of other players who post on these boards. Your conclusion must be that they are dumb too and we should design the game just to support your playstyle. Above all I am constantly encouraging the community to read what other players are saying. They are not always going to agree with what may be blindingly obvious to you. Does that mean they are wrong? Does that mean you are wrong? Of course not. All it means is the WoW community is large and diverse.

We have structured the game in such a way that you can find a difficulty level you are comfortable with. Naxxramas is one of the easiest raids we have ever done. Malygos gets a little more difficult, and Sartharion with multiple drakes is fairly difficult. Going into the future we will keep adding even more challenging and hardcore encounters while still making sure players who just aren't into that can still enter raids. The game has difficulty levels. If you are finding things so difficult that they aren't fun then by definition you probably aren't a cutting-edge raider. That's cool. We want to make sure you still have plenty of interesting things you can do, even within a raiding environment.

Replenishment and State of Mana Regen (Source)

We consider Replenishment mandatory. What I mean by that is we assume that you have Replenishment available to your raid. It is technically possible to go without it, but you will need to overgear the instance or otherwise compensate for it in other ways.

That doesn't mean we will or will not nerf Replenishment. But we don't want it to feel optional (assuming you are in reasonably challenging content) and nerfing it too much might have that effect.

More on Replenishment (Source)

From our POV, we assume you have Replenishment just like we assume you have a tank. You can get by without it, but it will be challenging (assuming you're on content that actually challenges you). Bloodlust is below that. It's very nice to have, but not mandatory most of the time. If you are learning brand new content or hard modes then I would definitely recommend bringing a shaman.

Keep in mind that Bloodlust's benefit is currently overweighted because the fights are so short. On a 2 min Patchwerk fight, you can have Bloodlust up 33% of the time. If that was a 5 minute fight, it goes down to 13% of the time (and the cooldown prevents you from keeping it up more).

What happened to "Threat Control"? (Source)

You might want to check out the tanking forums. Some tanks are starting to feel like they are having threat issues vs. dps again once everyone is well geared.

Clam Meat Not Auto-stacking (Source)

This is a bug and slated to be corrected in a future patch.

Theorycrafting (Source)

The theorycrafters are right a lot and they are wrong sometimes too. (The theorycrafters also sometimes make incorrect assumptions about our goals.) Hunters predicted they were going to be awful in PvP in LK, and I don't think that is shaping up to be the case. Retadins made long posts (with numbers) about how bad they were nerfed. The trick is knowing when to listen to players and when not to. It is rarely simple. Our game design process is never going to be: the community hands us numbers and we make changes. It is absolutely valuable input but it is just one tool, not the whole process.

We appreciate community feedback. Let me make that absolutely clear. That is why I am out here on these forums every day. But this is not an open source project. I don't mean for this to sound harsh, but we're ultimately not asking you to sit down and design the game with us. I promise though we will listen, even when we disagree or choose to go a different way.

Hunter (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Current Marksmanship Damage (Source)

We like the damage numbers coming out of Marks hunters. That is our target right now. Your feedback would be better directed (assuming you want it to make a difference) suggesting how to get BM and SV closer to that target.

A Hunter's Role (Source)

You are a dps class. You should be up there with mages, locks and rogues... *all things being equal.* Things are rarely equal. A very talented and well-geared Retadin or Boomkin might beat you. Even though we can disagree on which hunter spec is the easiest to play, the class as a whole is not easy to play, at least not at the expert level.

But I suspect what you are really getting at is that certain classes are doing more damage than you consistently. We know. Those classes know it too and they can probably guess what is about to happen. Then there will be many posts like this from them.

Hunters in Arenas (Source)

There are some balance problems in Arena at the moment, absolutely. However, if you look at hunter participation, it is growing every week. You can find plenty of players posting right now today that they think hunters are too good in Arena. Our ultimate goal is for every spec to have equal Arena representation. Clearly that is a very lofty goal and we aren't going to get there overnight for say Prot paladins or Fire mages.

Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Rogue DPS Is Lacking (Source)

I think this is totally valid and we owe rouges some dps. We have been cautious because we can't afford to give them any more PvP dps and those crafty rogues tend to use PvE dps for PvP.

Rogue AoE Capability (Source)

This is not a big concern of ours. The goal is not to make every dps class equal on every single encounter. Mages, locks, ele shamans and boomkins (and possibly hunters) have great AE. Not every class needs great AE. We want rogues, DKs, ferals, warriors, enhancement shammies and everyone I have forgotten to do decent enough AE that they don't feel dumb standing around on AE pulls. Every pull currently feels like an AE pull. It won't always be that way.

Rogues Lack Utility Buffs (Source)

I think this falls in between 1 and 2. Classes aren't supposed to have buffs so good that you always want to bring them. We built a lot of redundancy into the system. However we are taking a hard look at cases where someone's buff comes easier or more reliably than another class. Saying "every raid has a warrior" isn't very compelling in our mind. Saying "their buff is a passive ability while ours is a proc that takes 5 talent points" is a bigger deal we need to fix.

Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Stance Dancing Necessity and Stance Penalties (Source)

This is something we are discussing. I can't tell you anything beyond that.