Kil’jaeden FINALLY died tonight! After a few heartbreaking wipes under 10%.  This is a very fun fight, despite the nerf.  Not to say it wasn’t easier then it used to be, but we actually had to learn the fight.  It is a quality encounter after learning how not to hug people with Fire Bloom and how to all group up under a bubble.

I’m glad we got him down before WotLK hits.  Thanks to everyone that’s raided with us and who stuck around throughout all of TBC.  Congratulations everyone! Game over. Good job and very well done! See you all again in Northrend.

Achievement Hotfix

Quote from: Tigole (Source)

Today we hotfixed the “Not In My House” achievement to only require 2 kills rather than 10. The user interface will still display that 10 kills are required but the achievement will complete once 2 kills occur.

After a client patch, the user interface will be corrected.

BoP Profession Items

Quote from: Verimonde (Source)

It’s entirely likely that there will be more BoP crafted items. What there won’t be is “I have to be a crafter for item X because it’s the best thing ever!” items.

Armor Tokens

Quote from: Verimonde (Source)

Yes one of the tokens has 4 classes and two of the tokens have 3. However the tokens with 3 classes have a 30% drop rate and the token with 4 has a 40% drop rate. =)

Arena End Reminder

Quote from: Crygil (Source)

We wanted to remind everyone that Arena season 4 is coming to a close. During next Tuesday’s maintenance, all arena teams, as well as ratings, will be wiped and arena charter NPCs disabled. Thus, arena points will, unfortunately, not be rewarded for rated games played this week.

The next Arena season will begin on December 16th, and once that happens players at level 70 will be able to participate in rated matches against level 70 opponents and gain Arena points for item purchases but will not count towards the end of season rewards. At the same time, level 80 players will be able to compete in rated arena matches where they can gain arena points which can be used to purchase level 80 arena gear, as well as compete for end-of-season rewards. Additionally, players at level 70 will continue to be able to play skirmish Arena matches against other level 70 opponents even after Wrath of the Lich King launches. It’s also important to note that two new skirmish brackets (71-75, 76-80) will be available for players who wish to hone their Arena skills while leveling in Northrend.

Two New Arenas

Quote from: Nethaera (Source)

With the latest patch release, we’ve added two new arenas: the Dalaran Sewers and the Ring of Valor in Orgrimmar. These arenas offer new obstacles and challenges for strategy savvy players. The arenas have been added to the random rotation and are accessible via the queue system as Skirmishes. For more information on these two new arenas, please visit http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insider/11/arena.xml . Both Dalaran Sewers and the Ring of Valor will also be available for tournament play during Arena Season 5.

Pet Defensive Change

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We recently changed the way defensive stance works for pets. In the old design, the pet would not attack a target that you were attacking until it did something to generate threat - typically attacking you. In the new design, as soon as you attack a target, the pet will attack the target too. Our thinking was that this made defensive a little easier to use and you still have passive to override that behavior.

However, we have heard from some players (hunters mostly, though this isn’t just a hunter issue) that they prefer the old defensive stance. We wanted to get a little more feedback from players on the issue.

In order to keep this readable, please don’t stray into other hunter or pet issues that don’t directly affect this topic. Also please don’t attempt to redesign the feature (such as having four stances).

Blue posts

Europe - Realm Compensation
We have now credited all eligible accounts with this compensation. You should be able to see this in your Account Management. (Source)

Professions - New recipes
It is very likely that we will be adding more recipes to all trade skills as the content progresses. The reason the crafter only weapons were done away with however was that most people chose to take the profession purely for the purposes of being able to skip ahead of the content or not do the content because smithing provided them with something far easier to attain than anything else they could normally get. While this is ok from time to time with an occasional piece of gear, the concept of crafters making “best in slot” items was more or less considered bad from our end. When many people dropped the trade skills they enjoyed simply because taking a different trade skills made them more powerful (Stormherald, Frozen Shadowweave) than that is clearly not what we intended.

As far as “what do I get from profession X”, well I think many of the posters in this thread have pointed that out. All trade skills now provide some special benefit to the crafter that isn’t just a super item. In the case of blacksmithing it’s the ability to add sockets to your gear. Most of the profession perks are relatively equal in terms of what they provide, some are slightly better than others, but not enough so that you should feel ou are missing out by doing the profession you enjoy doing. (Source)

Druid,Priest, &Shaman
Circle of Healing / Wild Growth / Chain Heal
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We’re less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it’s not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you’d also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons.

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications — one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don’t want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

Didn’t you try this before ?
Yeah, we did. We thought it would feel like a big nerf and changed our minds. But seeing the state of healing at 80 makes us think it might be the right call again. When AE healing is so prominent, it also makes specs without great AE heals (Holy paladins and Disc priests) feel uselss.

Assume that we would lower Wild Growth by the same proportion as Circle of Healing. The exact numbers aren’t as important to this discussion as the concept that you can’t hit the button whenever you want. (Source)

Druid
Starfall
So this took some digging but apparently there was a change to stealth in between 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 so that the stars would no longer target a stealthed opponent. The AE splash from a star hitting another target will contine to take a stealther out of stealth. Maaven’s answer was technically correct. It isn’t a bug in that we changed the stealth code.The change to Starfall wasn’t intended so we’re trying to decide if we want to change it back or leave it in its current form. I’m not sure the world will end either way, but I wanted to provide an update since it was a bit of a head scratcher. (Source)

Hunter
Autoshot not casting during Volley
That is by design. Even if it wasn’t by design, the current implementation is a good idea because Volley does so much damage now. (Source)

Cat pet DPS nerfed and exotic pets balance
We made a big pass on pet dps for 3.0.3 so I’m not sure if your tests are reflecting those changes or not. Cats are still a good dps pet, but they shouldn’t flat out beat every exotic. The exotic balance is obviously tricky. BM of all hunters shouldn’t be forced to only be able to pick from the relatively small pool of exotic pets. (Source)

Disengage wasting the cooldown/mana when rooted
Is this in 3.0.3 (the most recent patch)? We actually made a change to prevent it from using the mana. You just get a “Can’t do that” error if rooted. Can anyone confirm? (Source)

Mage
Developer Q&A (Source)
1) You fixed Deep Wounds, where is our Ignite fix?
Unfortunately, they are apples and oranges with regard to fixes. Ignite sometimes munching charges has a lot to do with Internet lag. We just can’t always tell when one hit lands a split second before another one. We are still working on it though because it’s a cool talent. I know I have personally answered this question many times, so I’m surprised you couldn’t find that answer.

2) You are spending resources to make Disengage work, where is our Blink fix?
If we can fix the problem with slopes and minor obstructions that will apply to both talents. Disengage has some additional bugs that Blink doesn’t have.

3) What’s going on with Spirit? It’s still a throw away stat.
Strength is a throw away stat. Spirit benefits you, just not as much as you’d like. We’re talking a lot about all of the “converts one stat into another talents.” Many of those were implemented to solve problems with different specs sharing gear. We’re not sure we want to go down the road of providing talents to convert every second tier stat into a primary stat. That list would get long.

4) What’s going on with Arcane? Are we going to get a new rotation because we’re perceived to be OP in PvP?
We would like to give you a new rotation mostly because Arcane Blast doesn’t really work in PvE and because the PvP “rotation” seems to be: something -> something -> bored -> ARCANE BARRAGE!

On the OP issue, here is one of those times where people are calling for nerfs but we don’t believe it’s a problem. To everyone who thinks we knee jerk based on QQ posts, here is a case where that’s not happening.

5) What’s going on with Frost? Are we going to see some shatter combos?
You have some. If you mean in PvE, we would like to provide some. The two things standing in our way at the moment are: 1) Frost PvE dps is already high, so we would have to nerf it in order to build it back up through combos (which seems to be fine with a lot of Frost mages, but isn’t the highest priority ATM because the issue is “not interesting enough” instead of “broken”), and 2) Frost Bolt just does more damage than Ice Lance. If we buff Ice Lance, then PvP shatters are too high. So we need to rebuild the spells and talents to make the whole thing work — it’s not an easy fix. But it’s something we want to do.

I know we have neglected the beta forums. Beta is ending soon and I thought it was more important to try and invest a little energy in getting these role forums off to a good start.

2) “NOOBS PLAY RETADINS AND HUNTARDS…” (of course, I’m paraphrasing)… “AND THERE ARE MORE NOOBS THAN MAGES.”
The real reason has to do with the fact that we changed paladin and hunter mechanics quite a bit, so they are understandably going to require more iteration. But I try as a rule not to pay attention to “who has gotten the most attention” issues. That’s just a losing battle for me.

Paladin
Sheath of Light
Sheathe was designed to let Ret make use of the fact that, yanno, the spec actually is part of a healing class. But we can totally understand why a talent designed for someone with low healing stats that isn’t healing a lot would be attractive to someone with high healing stats that did heal a lot. (Source)

Sanctified Wrath is not giving us the “bypasses 50% of damage reducing effects” effect when we pop AW. It hasn’t been since the 3.0.3 patch.
We think we accidentally broke this effect. It wasn’t an intentional nerf, but we’re still looking into it. [...] Update: We did break it. We should be able to hotfix this soon. (Source)

Rogue
Starfall and rogues
So this took some digging but apparently there was a change to stealth in between 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 so that the stars would no longer target a stealthed opponent. The AE splash from a star hitting another target will contine to take a stealther out of stealth. Maaven’s answer was technically correct. It isn’t a bug in that we changed the stealth code.The change to Starfall wasn’t intended so we’re trying to decide if we want to change it back or leave it in its current form. I’m not sure the world will end either way, but I wanted to provide an update since it was a bit of a head scratcher. (Source)

Shaman
Elemental Shaman balance at lvl 70
Fun is very relative. I think shamans are fun now. Obviously other players may disagree. I think the part where shamans aren’t as fun is actually at low level when you don’t have a lot of spells and are forced to either slowly drop your totems every fight or just live without them.

I think the shaman is definitely playable now. The class doesn’t crash your client when you play one and if your damage is low at all, it certainly isn’t at 50% of other specs.

Being a good raid member now (and at 60) is important to us, but far, far less important than at 80. The number of raids being done at levels less than max is a trivial number and we would be doing a disservice to most of our customers if we spent too much effort to solve such edge cases. I also think there would be howls of protest if we announced we were slipping LK in order to address balance concerns at 60 and 70. Everyone knows Lich King is going to ship next week. We tried to give you plenty of fun things to do (achievements, raiding EZ mode, zombies) since some of the class changes to prepare for LK started going in several weeks ago. (Source)

Armory Maintenance

Quote from: Crygil (Source)

In preparation for Wrath of the Lich King, we will be performing an 8 hour Armory maintenance beginning on November 6, at 6AM PST. The extensive changes and feature additions in Wrath of the Lich King mean that we also have to update the Armory to reflect those changes. As part of the maintenance, all character data will be reset, and character profiles will be repopulated as players log into World of Warcraft. We thank you for your patience during the maintenance.

Wrath of the Lich King Not Available Via Download At Launch

Quote from: Claudiog (Source)

Wrath will eventually be available for download online, but this might take some time to establish. A working DVD drive will be the only way to ensure you are ready to play on launch day. Otherwise, when we initiated the online download for Burning Crusade it took 2-3 weeks to get up and running. I’m not saying Wrath will take this long (I have no idea, it may) but don’t expect it Day 1.

Blue posts

Blacksmithing Epic Weapons
There will not be a Stormherald type weapon “high level crafter only”. There are however a fair number of epic crafted BoE weapons that smiths will be able to make in LK. We didn’t like the vast number of people who felt they were required to be Blacksmiths in order to get a good weapon. Players should choose their trade skills based on what they enjoy, not what they feel they must do. (Source)

Sharpening stones not intended for level 80 items
We are having QA look into this now. This is not intentional and clearly we don’t want people to have to farm old mats to use Sharpening Stones (which aren’t supposed to be usable on high quality items). After this is fixed they will still work on several levels worth of items moving into LK just not the end game and higher end stuff. (Source)

Upgrade to the Everlasting Underspore Pod
This is something we may consider doing at a later date but we don’t want to trivialize the rest of the food and at the moment aren’t planning on introducing an upgraded version of this item. (Source)

Bind on Equip items dropping from dungeons and raids
This is actually intended. We want there to be more trickle down items from raids and part of that decision was to give each boss one item that is BoE. It helps add excitement to raids and well as provide raiding guilds another way to help pay for the cost of raiding. (Source)

Achievement: A Simple Re-Quest
As an update, there seem to be additional bugs with this particular achievement. 3.0.3 fixes some but not all. We’ll continue to research a fix. Apologies once again. (Source)

Achievement: Champion of the Frozen Wastes
The Champion of the Frozen wastes achievement currently has a bug. There is a “hidden” criteria to kill Malygos in the achievement that is not displaying to characters. This can result in a player thinking that he has completed all of the necessary requirements to fulfill the achievement but not receive credit.

Please be advised that killing Malygos is required for the achievement. In an upcoming client patch (we’re unable to hotfix this and it cannot be done for 3.0.3), the Malygos criteria will display properly. (Source)

Druid
Starfall Changes
We don’t have a problem with Starfall breaking stealth. There are plenty of other spells that do so and Starfall is hard to spam.

However, Starfall is an unusual spell in that it isn’t channeled and can even follow the druid around. So we are going to change it so that shifting cancels the spell. Having a druid run around in cat or travel form with Starfall raining down in an attempt to break stealth is not really what we had in mind for the spell.

[...] Yes, we would also remove (or possibly suppress) the spell on mounting. It isn’t intended to be used as a minesweeper. If you want to cast it in caster or Moonkin form to try and catch a stealther, that’s fine. (Source)

Upcoming Feral Changes (Repost because I only had a small link in the previous news)
ARMOR
We are changing the way bear armor works so that bonus armor on items does not receive the bear armor multiplier. Specifically this means that trinkets, rings, necks and cloaks with bonus armor will not be multiplied by the bear bonus. The normal armor on leather will still be multiplied by this bonus. We are also going to remove bonus armor from Feral staves. You’ll get your bonus armor from the leather you acquire.

Examples:
1) A ring that grants 100 bonus armor will now grant a bear 100 armor (not ~470 armor).
2) Leather legs with 253 armor will still grant a bear ~1190 armor (not 253 armor).
3) A feral staff will now grant 0 armor.

We are making this change because armor is such a good stat for bears that it makes taking pieces with bonus armor a non-decision and we don’t want acquiring these pieces, which tend to not be common, to be so much of a barrier to a druid who wants to tank a raid.

This change will NOT be in effect when Lich King ships. We are letting you know this now so that you don’t go through heroic efforts to acquire items like the Badge of Tenacity, or Defender’s Code. Defender’s Code, with 850 armor, will still be a good trinket. But it won’t be an insanely good trinket for a bear.

We will adjust the bear armor modifiers so that your net mitigation does NOT go down with these changes. Let me repeat: this is not a nerf to Feral armor. It is a change to the amount of armor you get from gear with bonus armor.

MANA
We are adding an effect to a deep Feral talent (something like Primal Tenacity) to further reduce the cost of shapeshifting into cat or bear by 50%. This talent will stack with Natural Shapeshifter for a total cost reduction of 80%. PvP-focused druids can get both talents to shift easily and often despite, no longer having Int on gear at level 80.

PROTECTOR OF THE PACK
We are removing the group requirements from this talent. The new tooltip will say: “Increases your attack power by X and reduces the damage you take in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form by Y.” The values of X and Y themselves are not changing.

Again, these changes will NOT be in Nov 13 for Lich King’s launch. We will add them in a patch that will come out sometime before the major Ulduar content patch. We’re letting you know now so that you can choose quest rewards and loot drops accordingly. (Source)

Changes to Feral druids
Part of our solution here was to make shifting easier for Ferals, not to just give you more mana. You can find that discussion somewhere in this forum. (Source)

Wild Growth
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.

Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place. (Source)

Mage
Arcane Blast upcoming changes
If Arcane is overpowered at all, it is nowhere near to the level that Retribution was. Sorry. This isn’t a contest to see who can get the least or most nerfs.

The degree to which I am talking about changing Arcane Blast wouldn’t have been a couple of errors in the tooltip. It would have made the tooltip totally irrelevant for the spell, which would have confused a lot of players. (Source)

Paladin
Potential retribution paladin changes
Our eventual plan is to put Divine Shield on a shared 30 sec cooldown with Avenging Wrath. We also plan on changing Divine Shield’s attack speed penalty (which isn’t really much of a penalty) and have it apply to all damage done while the bubble is up.

Divine Protection would no longer have the attack penalty, but since Prot paladins typically talent out of that penalty, it won’t have a big effect on tanking (though obviously that talent would need to do something slightly different).

All of this assumes that preventing AW from being used with DS actually makes the Ret tree a little more balanced. We’ll need to monitor that a little bit longer first.

We are going to go ahead and change the mana drains to a percentage of mana so that Ret paladins don’t lose so much larger a percentage of their mana than casters with 15K mana.

[...] Seriously, we are strongly considering letting Vengeance stack up to 5 stacks (perhaps for more points) to make sure sustained damage is still good enough. We may still add a secondary effect to Crusader Strike too. Burst is certainly easy to add if we need to, though I really hope we don’t have to. (Source)

Holy paladin changes
We are probably going to modify a deep Holy talent or two to add additional damage (J of the Pure maybe). That’s pretty safe. We’re not hugely worried about Prot, because there’s this thing they can do with their shields that can do some pretty sweet burst damage….

Righteous Vengeance
I looked into Righteous Vengeance, and it is in fact a magical ability. It is Holy damage, so it shouldn’t typically be resisted. It can be dispelled. There is a lot to remember about WoW class mechanics, and while I remember a lot of it, I make mistakes like everyone else.

I also misspoke about the affects of resilience. Resilience won’t prevent defensive procs but it can prevent offensive ones. The rule of thumb is that my resilience shouldn’t make my abilities worse. If my resilience makes the other guy’s abilities worse, too bad for them.

As I said, Righteous Vengeance was intended to help Ret sustained damage in PvE. We went out of our way to make it not a dependable source of damage in PvP. (Source)

Priest
Circle of Healing
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.

Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.

We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest’s healing is through CoH. It’s a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern. (Source)

Rogue
Developer Q&A (Source)
- Hunger For Blood is a very lackluster PVP talent that very few rogues go for and for PVE all it does is serve as another button we need to throw into our rotation. While the 9% damage is great, it feels like the new Rampage and it’s not really fun because all it does is create something for us to push before every encounter and add in the GCD to press this button to refresh it.
The tree was balanced around the original, much more powerful (and in retrospect TOO powerful) Hunger for Blood. We think it is a little lackluster in PvP and are talking about ways to juice it without overhauling the tree. We can overhaul the tree if that’s what it takes, but it will just take that much longer and Assassination seems to be okay in PvP and PvE for the moment.

- Killing Spree is great but many rogues complain that since it doesn’t return us to the original target it can actually be a DPS loss when used.
We do hear that complaint a lot. It’s not supposed to be the ultimate AE ability. It’s supposed to be decent at AE and really good vs. single targets. I do think screwing up your facing is a little annoying though and is something we’ll try to fix.

- Shadow Dance is still pretty much a headache to deal with. I know you removed the cooldown aspect on it but is that really enough? When Sap can’t be used if the target is in combat, we’re left with Cheap Shot, Ambush and Garrote. I don’t think anyone fears those three abilities being used in rapid succession as much as say, a Warrior with Bladestorm or Titan’s Grip.
I agree it can be a headache from the UI standpoint, but it’s an neat ability overall IMO. The multiple Ambushes alone can add up. As far as the UI goes, we are trying to implement either a true stealth bar or some kind of pseudo steal bar to make it easier to use.

- Hunger For Blood’s PVP viability was completely removed so Mutilate has to rely on Vanish to break snares and Fleet Footed doesn’t really help when we’re being kited around so easily by just about every ranged or caster class that exists in the game.
Mutilate is in a little bit of a place in PvP where you rely more on your team, but in return you get really high damage. So you don’t have as many CC breaks, but you do tend to kill things faster as a trade-off. One change that will help is increasing the proc rate of Crippling Poison to 50%.

- Shadowstep’s viability was nerfed with 3.0, but for what reason? We were never given a reason or justification for the removal of using this ability while rooted. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that our 41 point talent is vastly inferior to a Warrior’s Intercept which is trainable or a Feral Druid’s Charge, which is only a 21 point ability.
We think Shadowstep made rogues too dominant in PvP (similar to the Cloak change). Of course at the same time everyone got new tools to counter the pre-nerf version of the rogue, so it’s possible we went too far. We do caution you not to make too much of comparisons in abilities between different classes — you need to look at your abilities within the context of other tools (e.g. Cloak, Vanish, Crippling Poison, etc.)

- Sprint is an old, outdated ability that has no place in modern WoW. Ask Rogues when they use this ability effectively and you’ll get some ridiculous answers. If you’re not Combat, you need to wait while you’re not snared to use it…,
I think there is some truth here, but we did lower the base cooldown to try and compensate. Part of being a good rogue is knowing when you can safely use your abilities to get the most out of them, and that includes Sprint. That’s just part of the kit of the class. But we can keep an eye on it.

3) On Beta and on Live, many Rogues feel that Stealth is very weak compared to what it was before 3.0, as well as enemies targeting us while Vanished. Is there a bug with stealth again?
There are some mob abilities that seem to be causing stealth to break prematurely, but you seem to mostly be talking about PvP here, so I assume that’s not it. It’s always hard to figure out the state of Vanish and stealth because there are always so many players quick to say “LOLZ VANISH NEVAR WORKS,” so we can’t always detect if anything has changed. We are definitely hearing more mumblings than usual lately (though usual is also typically really high) so we’re looking to see if there are any new problems.

Is Relentless Strikes going to remain as it is currently? This change is still not sitting well with a large number of rogues.
Based on its power, the alternatives where nerfing the talent or getting rid of it. At least having to take 5 points in every tree is better than having to go fairly deep into a couple of them.

I understand that the development team didn’t want tanks to rely on avoidance as they have in the past but the recent change to the Agility : Dodge ratio has left rogues with very little dodge and at 80 we’re only seeing about 15%.
This is something we’re talking about a lot. Melee in general seem to be better at countering rogues, and we probably haven’t seen much of the hardest hitting one yet. Rogues won’t typically tak mitigation talents that aren’t also bundled with dps (except Cheat Death), so we may need to rework a few talents here and there. We definitely don’t want rogues just ignoring players that are attacking them so that they can burst down a target. We don’t want them to feel like clothies either. Definitely something we have concerns about and we’ll watch and see what happens when we get level 80 death knights.

Hemorrhage is not an ability that is not supposed to replace Sinister Strike but it’s not useful as it is currently and the Subtlety tree as a whole could use some work. Why does Devastate replace Sunder Armor for Warriors?
Hemo doesn’t replace Sinister Strike. Backstab does. We have talked about a talent that applies the Hemo debuff to Backstab (like your Sunder example) just so there’s no confusion about which is the right button to push in PvE. We added Hemo to Surprise Attacks mostly for alternate hybrid specs, if that makes sense.

I know there is a fair amount of concern about the future of the class (as there is with every class), but we think rogues are in a pretty good spot for both PvE and PvP. If I don’t respond to rogue issues as much as the community would like, it’s probably because we aren’t as worried about them as much in general (though I did mention some specific areas above).

Shaman
Elemental Shaman
I think I have posted recently (or maybe it was in the beta forums — I forget — though you probably read it either way) some of what we’re looking at for Elemental:

– More scaling at very high gear levels (higher than exist in the game now)
– More damage out of those deep talents that only grant utility now
– Real AE

But you are right that we have allowed your old utility to be brought by other classes. That was exactly the goal. To compensate, we buffed your damage. We think it’s pretty competitive at 80 with a Lava Burst rotation, but if it’s not, we’ll buff it again. (Source)

Elemental scaling
You can do things (well, *we* can do things) like make 10,000 spell power gear and then see what the damage numbers look like. Assume Boomkin and Elemental dps was close at Naxx-level gear, but Boomkin pulled way ahead with the 10,000 spell power gear. That means Balance scales a lot better. That’s probably not a problem if it takes 10,000 spell power to get there, because there will be new levels and gear and everything will have changed by that time. If it takes 2000 or 3000 spell power then it probably is a problem.

We’d like to give Elemental either a talent that converts Int to spell power or gives a better spell power to damage conversion (or both). We just don’t know yet if we’ll do this through existing talents or new talents. I’ll announce it when we know. (Source)

Totems
I do agree totems have some cool aspects and some that can be pretty frustrating. I’m not sure giving totems more health is the answer. I understand it sucks to lose them to a pet crab or whatever, but I also understand that the person fighting the shaman would be frustrated having to unleash a 3000 damage spell just to remove Earthbind.

But I’m definitely interested in hearing more discussion on the topic from both sides. (Source)

Warlock
Demonology
1) Specs that can do the most dps generally make sacrifices along other axes to get there. Specs with a lot of extra utility or flexibility give up some dps. If dps is all that matters to you, then Demonology probably isn’t the right spec for you. We can still make the dps good (and with the recent coefficient changes, we think it is), but specs are ultimately about making choices. Not every choice is between one way to maximize dps and some other way to maximize dps.

I do disagree (and I know you healers do to) that survivability on raids is only the responsibility of the healers. We have even existing fights (like Naj’entus) where you’ll just be dead if you sacrifice everything for dps. I agree that survivability in PvP or when soloing is a bigger concern than on raids. But I disagree that survivability is not a concern on raids.

2) The OP seemed to argue that Demo dps wasn’t competitive because it was supposed to have more survivability, but that it in fact did not have survivability. Maybe it doesn’t have as much survivability as you like and maybe the class as a whole doesn’t have as much survivability as you like. I didn’t really address either of those points. All I said was that people keep spec’ing Demo for PvP (not 100%, but they do spec it) so it must offer something besides highest dps.

We are looking at Demonology’s dps. The coefficient buff did help it more than you might guess. A raid-buffed Felguard can also do 1000 dps or so at 80.

Overall, for any class, I wouldn’t say the goal is for any tree to be identical in dps. They can be close, but we are going to take the rest of the tree into consideration. (Source)

Affliction revamp
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that we want to simplify Affliction’s rotation a little. Making the dot durations more consistent would help, but so would things like getting a couple of spells (Immolate and Siphon Life maybe) out of the rotation.

I’m not talking about nerfing Affliction, nor making those changes in a vacuum. This would be a redesign so that things felt more natural with ~4 abilities instead of ~6. (Source)

Warrior
Deep Wounds bugged (See post)
This is fixed now. I don’t have an ETA on when you’ll get the change. It will be in a patch that comes before the major Ulduar patch. (Source)

Sudden Death changes going live
Yes, sorry for any confusion. It has been 9% on beta for some time. We experimented with lowering the proc rate to 4% but it didn’t feel good that rare.

I remember specifically discussing the issue that we thought Arms warriors who stacked crit at the expense of everything else could hit too hard, and we didn’t want cirt (and axes) to be the only way to gear. I thought as part of that discussion, we said that Sudden Death was being changed to a proc per minute from a chance on crit. If I am mistaken, my apologies. It wasn’t meant as a stealth nerf. (Source)

Titan’s Grip penalty
We still think 12% is the appropriate penalty to make the talent balanced. But when we found Fury’s dps to be low, the penalty was an easy thing to change to bring Fury’s dps up to par. A 5% penalty isn’t a meaningful penalty though, it’s more of an annoyance for the sake of having a penalty, so my point was when we reduced it from 12% to 5% we should have just reduced it to zero. (Source)