60-70 XP changes confirmed for patch

'Confirmed. (src)

'Achievements - Removal of the titles for the Realm First Feats of Strength
We've decided to remove the titles for the Realm First Feats of Strength that are associated with reaching level 80. We've also removed the titles associated with the Realm First Feats of Strength associated with gaining 450 skill in the professions and secondary skill. Lastly, we've removed the title associated with Realm First to accomplish the Northrend Vanguard achievement.

Realm First boss kill achievements will still grant a title.

As a side note, Beta characters will retain their titles or end up displaying a broken title. This won't carry over to the live realms but it is merely a symptom of removing these titles from the game. If we were to do another wipe of the achievement system, the Beta titles would go away. (src)

Raid Beta Testing
Well there will be raid beta testing in the Beta, but don't forget the upcoming PTR will allow even more testing prior to changes being made live. (src)

Death Knight
Blood Tanking
A Blood knight can heal herself really well and Vampiric Blood lets the healers heal you a lot too.

I think when the damage among the 3 trees is more normalized, the threat will be too. It's possible Frost or Unholy is better for mitigation, but if so, I would expect the difference to be pretty marginal over the long haul and possibly even depending on the boss. (src)

Druid
There are a lot of huge changes in the expansion though. Warrior tanks are worried they won't be useful anymore because their big niche (surviving crushing blows) was given to all tanks. Paladin tanks are concerned because better AE threat is being given to all tanks. Death knight tanks are worried that they are going to get nerfed because of the damage they're doing. Druids are worried that they won't have the armor they are used to, and might be inferior tanks because of it. Almost every class is worried that their unique raid buff won't gaurantee them a spot in the raid any longer. We're worried about pulling it all off. :)

Druids have talents like Thick Hide, Natural Reaction, Mother Bear and Survival of the Fittest in part to make up for the fact they aren't wearing plate, parrying or blocking. Is that enough mitigation to make them just as good end-game tanks as the other three tanking classes? We don't know yet. We haven't finished our testing and nobody on beta is in Naxx yet. If Bears are getting clobbered or their healers are running out of mana trying to keep them up, we'll fix it. (src)

Paladin
Retribution Talent Tree Feedback
We are about ready to do our next major pass on the Paladin trees.

Ret Pallies, it's your turn.

Please try and focus your feedback on talents. Which ones work and which ones don't? For talents you don't like, try and separate out whether the numbers are just off or if it's a mechanic you just don't need.

We're cool discussing holes in your class (e.g. mana issues or interrupts), but let's try and stay away from direct comparisons to other classes for purposes of this discussion. These threads tend to get long, so it would be helpful not to have a dozen pages debating whether Ret dps is currently too high or low compared to death knights. (src)

Protection Talent Tree Feedback
We are about ready to do our next major pass on the Paladin trees.

We think Prot does have too many mandatory talents, and too many talents that offer passive mitigation without other interesting mechanics or even dps. This thread is a great opportunity to discuss the tree and offer your feedback.

For purposes of this thread, the kinds of feedback that are useful:
-- Which talents are fun vs. which ones aren't
-- Areas in the tree that tie up too many talent points vs. areas that feel barren
-- Talents that feel mandatory vs. talents that feel fun but optional vs. talents you'd never get

For purposes of this thread, we are less interested in:
-- Mitigation and threat capabilities of the paladin vs. other tanks (we'll get to that)
-- Holy and Retribution (we'll get to that)
-- Mana, dps, interrupts or other paladin issues (we'll get to that)
-- Whether it's a good goal for Prot to be viable at healing, dps or PvP. (It's helpful to mention when talents might fit these roles, but let's not use this particular thread for a debate on whether Prot should be at all decent in PvP.)
-- Questions about other topics, pleas to visit other forums or catty arguments

Rest assured this is not our only avenue for collecting feedback. We do talk to experienced and beginner tanks alike as well as drawing on our own internal resources to make decisions. (src)

Warrior
Protection Tree and PvP
As I said before, whether Protection shoud be viable for PvP is controversial. People on the extreme of both sides of the debate should be able to see pretty clearly that there are plenty of others who don't see their point of view. It's not an argument that is going to be won by debate, consensus or vote.

As I've also said, there are some things we want to do with Prot to improve it. We could make a very fat, very boring tree with 30 talents that promise excellent passive mitigation. I don't think that's going to make warriors any more fun to play. Here's what we'd like to do instead:

Add some more fun abilities to the tree. Warbringer is one such ability. It may not be something everyone will use, and honestly, we're cool with that. Some talents should be optional. We also know some tanks, even hardcore endgame ones are excited about the ability. As a tank it could be a good source of rage (Yes, we know you lose all your rage when stance dancing -- the design of Warbringer is not that you stupidly lose all your rage when you change to Battle Stance and then say oops.) It could also help your mobility on fights where you need to zip around a lot to put out fires -- that's part of tanking too. It's not all sitting there and getting hit by Brutallus.

To make room for some of those abilities, you have to have some options. The classic tanking build from BC doesn't leave you a lot of free talents. We need to combine a few mitigation talents together to buy you some space. Also, must haves like Imp Heroic Strike and Imp Thunder Clap may not be must haves anymore, because...

We're buffing Prot's dps. A lot. This is going to help with threat, and will make doing dps with a prot build (whether as OT, MT, leveling or doing daily quests) more fun. A lot of abilities that do +threat now are going to be doing +damage instead. You are going to see crits from Thunder Clap and Conc Blow that might blow your mind. You're going to hit Thunder Clap and have mobs stick to you long enough for you to use some other abilities. Oh and If you haven't tried Retaliation while tanking yet, it rules. For those who never got to enjoy the joys of Shield Slam with crazy +block, you'll soon get to.

Warriors lost a very comfortable tanking niche with the removal of crushing blows. We need to make sure there are still good reasons to take a Prot warrior. Vigilance and Safeguard are good starts there, but we're also looking at buffing signature abilities like Spell Reflect. A lot of the recent changes were intended as buffs, not nerfs. We'll get you your Expertise back. We'll get you your cheap Devastates back.

As we start to get the talent trees in better shape, we're going to be able to get a better handle on the state of balance. Simultaneously, people in the beta will start venturing into heroics and Naxx. This will start to give us some data for the first time on whether L80 Prot warrior threat or mitigation is too low compared to other classes. If it is, we'll fix it.

I mention that because we designed Vigilance not as a band-aid to fix Prot warrior threat (because we don't know if it's too high or low yet) but because we thought it would be fun. Use it on that reckless warlock who likes to pull aggro and you turn a weakness into a strength. Use it on your fragile healer and you can, yanno, actually *protect* them. Instead of having to say "Please wait for 3 Sunders before you attack" maybe people will say "That tank has Vigilance -- no way you'll pull off him."

We're not done with the trees yet. We still welcome your feedback on these concepts and abilities, but all this rerolling talk is quite premature... and almost always is. (src)

Warrior Tanking Q/A
Please explain to me why I have to spec into arms (43/5/23) to attain more threat generation than a full prot spec on beta:
Because we haven't done the numbers yet. But that's still a useful data point to know. It might even be okay if non-tanking specs can generate a lot of threat (heck, hunters do it), so long as they also don't have high mitigation.

Simply put, we bring nothing to a raid. Nothing, no buffs, no debuffs that can't be applied by someone else.
That is pretty much the point. No class brings anything so unique that you want them to come at the expense of others. You should earn your raid spot because you know how to tank and have some decent gear and a guild who can back you up. Maybe you're a great leader or maybe you don't argue. Maybe you've got a great sense of humor or are a good guild recruiter. All of those are better reasons to get into a group IMHO than because your buff is a unique snowflake. Quite honestly I'd rather raid with my friends than some jerk who has the perfect buff. And I really don't want to send one of my friends off to reroll a level 1 dude because we both happened to choose rogues at first level six months ago and now our group is suffering for want of a buff. If you can tank, you'll get into raids.

What they'll do is say "Ok, aside from tanking, what do they bring to the table?"
In my experience, what they do is say "This dude knows his class backwards and forwards," or "This dude has a new epic shield," or "This dude is a consistent player who won't leave us in a lurch on Thursday." But for the sake of argument, let's continue.

The druid steps forward and says "I have Battle Res, possibly the best ability in game for guilds when it comes to learning new content. I can also innervate, and I'm really good at switching to dps when I don't have to tank. If we ever get to an extreme fight that requires a lot of healers, I can respec if we need it."
The Prot warrior should also be able to switch to dps, and they come with Battle Shout and Commanding Shout, two very solid buffs. No, they can't heal.

The Paladin steps forward and says "I can cover one of your 3-4 primary Paladin Blessings. I'm still the best AoE tank for large pulls, like those spiders you see scampering around down there. I have many auras which are useful to stack in the raid, I have wipe prevention in the form of DI, and I have plenty of other tricks like BoP or BoF, or Lay Hands. Oh, and I can respec healing too if the raid really needs it for a fight."
If the paladin is so much better at AE that you take him instead of a warrior, then we have a problem. Yes, pallys are able to heal. That part is totally valid.

The Death Knight steps forward and says "I know I'm new, but I'm the WotLK favored child and you know it. I'm the best Magic boss tank, and you know there'll be fights tailored to me. And I bring just as many tricks as the Paladin, only mine are cooler cause they involve ghouls and exploding corpses."
Again, the "best Magic boss" shouldn't be to the extent that you call the raid when she can't come. There will be no fights tailored to a particular class. Sorry. Believe me, we don't have to come up with a gimmick to encourage death knight raiders. Northrend is infested with them already. Ghouls are cool though.

The Prot Warrior steps forward and says "I can Disarm...some mobs, not quite sure yet if it'll hit bosses and how many. And there's an ability that let's me put a buff like Pain suppression on people, which..maybe will come in handy, depending on the bosses we find? And I have a single-target 10% threat reducer."
You Sunder, you Demo Shout, Battle Shout, Challenging Shout. You might Piercing Howl depending on the encounter. You Execute. You Intervene. See where I'm going...? If you are really winning or losing fights based on whether your tank can Innervate, then we've probably made the content too challenging. The difference in skill (or gear) between a potential warrior and druid tank should have a much bigger effect on the outcome.

The situations we've had before have been more like "The paladin can tank all of Heroic Shattered Halls with no CC" or "The druid can do nearly double your dps while tanking" or "The warrior can achieve passive crushing immunity and has the only ability that can handle Shear." Those are egregious barriers to having 4 viable tanking classes, which is why we're trying to fix them. (src)

North American/European Warcraft Finals

Quote from: Nebu (Source)

The 2008 North American and European Warcraft Finals will be taking place this weekend, September 6-7, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Madrid, Spain. These events will feature the top eight qualifiers from the 2008 World of Warcraft Arena and Warcraft III tournaments for their respective regions. Attendees will also have the opportunity to try out demos of Wrath of the Lich King and StarCraft II on-site. Admission is free, so come by and check it out if you're in the area.

For full details on each event, please visit the tournament page.

EU - Blizzard Authenticator Availability

Quote from: Vaneras (Source)

Just a small update for you guys. The Blizzard Authenticator should be available for purchase again in a few weeks.