July News/Discussion

[Tuftears]

In other news, vanity pets and mounts will now become taught spells - the items you get will teach you the spells to summon them. So they won't take any inventory space anymore!

[Mordekhuul]

They said Demonic Sacrifice will go back in with some changes.
Tanking right now is completely redone due to threat changes.

I believe they also said those changes will be intended to put DS in its place - something a demonologist only ever uses on a fight where it isn't practical to try keeping a pet alive so they at least get *some* benefit.

Balancing warlocks around NOT having DS will be fantastic.

[Lissa]

Balancing warlocks around NOT having DS will be fantastic.

It will be difficult to say the least as the 15% damage boost to either fire or shadow is a necessity for raiding Destruction Warlocks. Taking that damage boost away hurt, a lot... On a Warlock that is pushing out 2k DPS (as typical for heavy T6 gear), that's a loss of 300 DPS without DS as it is now. I'm not sure looking at the talents in Destruction that it will be able to keep up that level damage output, but will be interesting to see.

[Delc]

It will be difficult to say the least as the 15% damage boost to either fire or shadow is a necessity for raiding Destruction Warlocks. Taking that damage boost away hurt, a lot... On a Warlock that is pushing out 2k DPS (as typical for heavy T6 gear), that's a loss of 300 DPS without DS as it is now. I'm not sure looking at the talents in Destruction that it will be able to keep up that level damage output, but will be interesting to see.

If pets are made viable, and chaos bolt doesn't suck it won't be hard to makeup that 15% damage. Plus instead of dumping 20 points into trash talents you can get some nice utility stuff from the other trees.

[Lissa]

If pets are made viable, and chaos bolt doesn't suck it won't be hard to makeup that 15% damage. Plus instead of dumping 20 points into trash talents you can get some nice utility stuff from the other trees.

There's still a reason to go 13 deep into demonology (as there always has been) and the early talents haven't been wastes (even now) to go that deep.

[Ynir]

"Gigantique" bags make it possible for Spangles to carry 80 items at all times. Four 22 slot bags replaced four 20 slot inventory bags, which in turn replaced four 18 slot bank bags, for a total of 16 new slots. All this for the price of 15 days of dailies, such a deal.

Carrying everything enables a typical evening of raiding, farming, heroic instances and battlegrounds with a minimum of shuffling things in/out of the bank. Switching gear is performed instantly with ItemRack and StanceSets. The built-in bag carries the usual food, pots, & supplies for raiding & battlegrounds.

Stuff that is always in inventory:
Armor & jewelry for tanking, DPS, farming, and battlegrounds
Armor & jewelry for arcane, fire, frost, and nature resist (the shadow resist set, scrounged on the AH, remains in the bank)
Clothing and jewelry for formal and informal occasions
Weapons: the kitchen sink
Odds/ends: Nitebane summoner, enchanting rod, gem grinder, tiger, hippogryph, bullets and arrows

No room for:
Pets, happy fun rocks, snowballs, disco lites, romantic picnic baskets

Farming with only 10 or 12 open slots is impractical. Gear is arranged so that one bag can be swapped with an empty bag from the bank, providing 30 slots for drops & temporary quest items. These slots fill up quickly, and every opportunity for mailing/selling is important to maximize the yield from a round of dailies.

Blizzard has made it easier and more profitable to farm with the new bags. I wish that they would also make it easier to switch between two sets of talents. A typical evening starts in protection mode for raiding, then fury for farming and battlegrounds, then back to protection for an instance, and raiding the next day. That takes 100g / day right off the top, which has only become affordable because of the 300g / day gleaned from dailies.

I don't understand why they give us all this stuff to do, then impose a stiff tax for doing it. The implication is that I'm supposed to level three warriors, one each for ms, fury and protection. Nuts to that. A cooldown would be appropriate to avoid strange exploits, but whatever rationale exists for the respec tax seems out of date.

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[Chesspiece_face]

Blizzard has made it easier and more profitable to farm with the new bags. I wish that they would also make it easier to switch between two sets of talents. A typical evening starts in protection mode for raiding, then fury for farming and battlegrounds, then back to protection for an instance, and raiding the next day. That takes 100g / day right off the top, which has only become affordable because of the 300g / day gleaned from dailies.

I don't understand why they give us all this stuff to do, then impose a stiff tax for doing it. The implication is that I'm supposed to level three warriors, one each for ms, fury and protection. Nuts to that. A cooldown would be appropriate to avoid strange exploits, but whatever rationale exists for the respec tax seems out of date.

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Unless things have changed I thought that they were adding the ability to store 2 talant specs in wotlk. Is this still the case? or are they just letting you store the other spec and still have to pay the price to switch between? If that's the case, I don't really see the point. Weee you just saved me 30 seconds it takes to click my 2nd talant spec out.

[Mordekhuul]

Unless things have changed I thought that they were adding the ability to store 2 talant specs in wotlk. Is this still the case? or are they just letting you store the other spec and still have to pay the price to switch between? If that's the case, I don't really see the point. Weee you just saved me 30 seconds it takes to click my 2nd talant spec out.

It was mentioned as something they are looking into, I believe, or are planning to implement, but no details are out and I don't think this exists in current beta (or the EJ WotLK thread would have mentioned it more recently).

As someone that enjoys many aspects of the game, I'm hoping this option goes in and is quite flexible. As a raid leader, I am REALLY hoping it goes in and is flexible enough that some of our hybrids can swap their roles between boss fights (imagine the flexibility it would give Blizzard designers too, knowing they can design bosses that require stacked healing or bosses where stacked DPS matters more, and know folks can do that stacking without swapping people out of the raid).

[Kevin]

It was mentioned as something they are looking into, I believe, or are planning to implement, but no details are out and I don't think this exists in current beta (or the EJ WotLK thread would have mentioned it more recently).

As someone that enjoys many aspects of the game, I'm hoping this option goes in and is quite flexible. As a raid leader, I am REALLY hoping it goes in and is flexible enough that some of our hybrids can swap their roles between boss fights (imagine the flexibility it would give Blizzard designers too, knowing they can design bosses that require stacked healing or bosses where stacked DPS matters more, and know folks can do that stacking without swapping people out of the raid).

I've kinda been wondering about something like this myself. But I'm not sure they will go that far. I'm thinking you might end up with something like being able to change on the fly (possibly with a fee still, or perhaps you just have to spend X gold to set up your 2 specs up front) and then slapping it with an hour or 4 hour cooldown or something like that. Possible to still swap in a raid but maybe not for every boss. 4 hours is too long to be able to go from farming to instancing spec nicely, but 1 hour makes that work pretty well.

There are other ways to do it as well, but yeah it is something I would like a fair bit, though of course it's more valuable to some classes than to others. Basically any class that can heal gets way more out of it than say a mage or a hunter. Swapping between fire and frost and arcane can be helpful, sure, someplace like TK where A'lar is fire immune but you want to be fire for Solarian, etc. It has uses, but for a hunter? Not a whole lot of reason for a swap on the fly. I suppose if beast is still the top individual DPS there could be reason to swap between it and survival (which looks to add some really nice group/raid stuff). If you have a melee heavy group it could help to go survival to get expose for them and provide that lovely energy/rage/mana/runic power regen to one of the groups. So again some utiltity, but not nearly the level of having a shaman that can swap between enh and resto or elem and resto. Or a druid that could be a tree one fight, a boomkin the next fight that really loves caster DPS and a feral the next fight where you need some extra off tanking. Yeah I listed 3 for the druid but who knows maybe you'll get 3 specs to flip between.

I'd like more than 2 myself. Even for my hunter if for nothing other than arenas. I prefer a survival spec for 2's and 3's on him, but marks for 5's and either beast or survival (depending on which other hunters are there that night) for raids. So even for one of the classes that gets less out of it, I could see me using 4 or 5 specs in one day if I'm doing 2 different arena teams and a raid that day, which I've done on days when I've had 6 hours to play (20 arena games in 2 hours and then 3 hours of raiding with an hour of whatever in there).

[Mirajj]

July 29 News

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We start this week off with a great post by Artega. In it he gives us some of the macros he uses in both PvE and PvP, and asks for others. It's already got some great ones in there, so head over, check it out, and add your own.

Bornakk lets us know that Blizz is still working out the kinks in the "2 specs per toon" rumblings that have gone around recently.

ExplorerPeppy gives us a look at the new Motorcycles in action. I don't know about this one, personally. For some reason, I have no problems with the Steampunk nature of the dwarves and gnomes. But on the other hand, motorcycles just seem a bit...much? for me. Even as an Eng, I don't intend on making one (no, I don't have a helicopter, either) unless there is some other pressing reason.

Zach Yonzon takes a quick look at Runeforging, the new mechanic of Death Knights.

Space concerns are also being addressed in interesting manners. A Token Page was found in the Beta, which shows/holds all manner of things along the line of Badges of Justice.

Additionally, Vanity Pets and Mounts will be turned into items that, when clicked, let you learn them as a "spell", so that they no longer take up any room in your inventory as well.

Something else of note is that Blizzard is also addressing a rather interesting concern. Folks, when they are levelling, are used to looking like clowns due to mismatched, miscoloured armor. That is being addressed, and some of the Green Items/Quest Rewards that have been found look amazing.

As well, there is extended maintenance this week, and my beta invite is still lost in the mail.

[Mirajj]

July 29 Bonus News

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In a bold move, the new Beta build includes a little thing called "Potion Sickness". This is something new Blizz is working on to limit potion use(Yes, ANY) to one per encounter. It's a debuff with no duration, but that drops when you are out of combat. This is a HUGE change for raiding, because all of the sudden you can only use one mana potion. Or one haste potion. Or one health potion. One potion per fight. This is going to lead to some interesting rebalancing, for certain.

[NiteFox]

Screw potion sickness. The big news is tamable Devilsaurs.

Dammit, three stable slots is not enough.

[Klaus]

Screw potion sickness. The big news is tamable Devilsaurs.

Dammit, three stable slots is not enough.

If you let a tamed Devilsaur get unhappy, it should eat you.

[Kevin]

Screw potion sickness. The big news is tamable Devilsaurs.

Dammit, three stable slots is not enough.

3 slots has NEVER been enough and never will be. I personally want an infinite number but when I really get down to it I suppose I could live with 10. 3 has simply never been remotely enough and while they are making pets more generic so that family matters less, they are making them even more customizable with the talents and there are still times I will want this family over that family. It's even worse for a player like me that gets attached to their pets and doesn't want to just replace it.

[LochnarITB]

"Potion Sickness"

Someone is going to have to do an intervention on Lochnar and his Mad Alchemists! This knocks the usefulness of the Alchemist Stones down a few notches as well. Looks like Lochnar is also going to have to change spec to flask or transmute. Wow, this is such a huge change, with good implications (imho) in general but painful personally.:):(

[NiteFox]

If you let a tamed Devilsaur get unhappy, it should eat you.

Agreed, on the condition that if it eats a gnome it has a buff that prevents happiness loss for ten minutes.

[Sir_Die_alot]

July 29 Bonus News

~~~
In a bold move, the new Beta build includes a little thing called "Potion Sickness". This is something new Blizz is working on to limit potion use(Yes, ANY) to one per encounter. It's a debuff with no duration, but that drops when you are out of combat. This is a HUGE change for raiding, because all of the sudden you can only use one mana potion. Or one haste potion. Or one health potion. One potion per fight. This is going to lead to some interesting rebalancing, for certain.

My character has been an alchemist since day one of his creation, over 3 years ago. If this goes live without some other serious benifit I'm switching to something else. This is amazingly dumb. IMHO if anything alchemy needs a little buff love for non-healers not a global nerf. The more I see of WOTLK the less I am impressed.<_<

[--Pete]

Hi,

The more I see of WOTLK the less I am impressed.<_<

Ditto. Almost everything I've seen either takes away something I like, increases something I don't like, or caters to the incomptent, ignorant, casual gamer. We'll see what happens since Blizz is rather good at putting out playable games. But I fear that they think that their main target audience is a bunch of pre-teens with ADD and are re-doing the game for those.

--Pete

[Artega]

Hi,
Ditto. Almost everything I've seen either takes away something I like, increases something I don't like, or caters to the incomptent, ignorant, casual gamer. We'll see what happens since Blizz is rather good at putting out playable games. But I fear that they think that their main target audience is a bunch of pre-teens with ADD and are re-doing the game for those.

--Pete

Yeah. It especially gets to me when you see raids and other content like that getting dumbed down. I never got a chance to do Magtheridon before he got beat ugly by the nerfstick, and now he's just free badges, a free 20 slot bag, and a shot at a nice ring.

Personally, I think Magister's Terrace is a great dungeon - it strikes a nice balance between difficulty and ease, especially if you don't have three CC or are using a Holy Paladin as a healer.

That being said, I think all Heroics need to be a lot harder - they should be the equivalent of 5-man raids, basically. I was incredibly disappointed when I found out how easy they are.

[Quark]

My character has been an alchemist since day one of his creation, over 3 years ago. If this goes live without some other serious benifit I'm switching to something else. This is amazingly dumb. IMHO if anything alchemy needs a little buff love for non-healers not a global nerf. The more I see of WOTLK the less I am impressed.<_<

I heard the same exact crying when the deserved elixir nerf came. You know what? Encounters should not be balanced upon every mana class hitting a mana potion every 2 minutes, just like they shouldn't be balanced upon everyone having 8 different alchemy buffs up.

Alchemy's self-buff is currently Alchemical Blood -> makes all your products better for yourself.

Blizzard is decreasing the role of constant farming/spamming profession items for raids, while increasing the role of your own particular professions. They're giving main characters reasons to have gathering skills with their own special bonuses.

You want Alchemy to be "worth it"? People will still be using elixirs or flasks on every encounter, and have potions as an "oh crap" button instead of a constant chugging. Don't complain at Blizzard for removing one of the more broken parts of the game. Take whats left and make sure it's still balanced in its own right, or look at what else their adding.