New Honor Items and Gem Changes

The original post about Upcoming Honor Items and Honor Reset has been updated.

Quote from: Eyonix (Source)

As many of you know we will be featuring a new Battleground, a dedicated world PvP zone and all new PvP items in Wrath of the Lich King. In order to make the transition from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King flow as smoothly as possible, all accrued honor points will be reset at the launch of the expansion. We do this to ensure select players do not have an unfair advantage at level 80 from stockpiling honor to instantly purchase the newest Wrath of the Lich King PvP rewards. For those with unspent honor points prior to the release of the expansion, we will be offering a few upgrades and special rewards in next content patch solely for purchase via the honor system.

Update:
All of the gems that can be purchased with honor will have the Bind on Pickup and Unique-Equipped tags removed so multiples of them can be equipped and they can be traded (or auctioned). The new items that will be available are:
Cloaks - The Gladiator's Resolution, Cloak of Certain Reprieve, Volanthius Shroud, Sergeant's Reinforced Cape
Trinkets - Battlemaster's Courage, Battlemaster's Resolve, Battlemaster's Aggression, Battlemaster's Celerity

Note: The cost for the new items are still unknown.


BlizzCon Tournament Brackets and Player Profiles

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

The brackets for the StarCraft, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft Arena tournaments at BlizzCon are now live. These brackets show the starting matches and also provide some information about the contestants who will be competing in this year's BlizzCon tournaments. We will be updating these brackets during BlizzCon, so make sure to check back to see the latest tournament results and replays.

Check out the brackets here: StarCraft, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft Arena Tournament

New Fan Arts

The Blizzard Fan Art Section has been updated with new artwork.

Daily Blue

PTR Testing / Expansion launch / ZA Bear Mount
We have no released a date for when the patch that is in testing on the PTR will go live. But I agree with some of the people above in that there isn't a lot of time left since the expansion launches on November 13.
The current plan is to make it unobtainable with the upcoming patch. We are still doing some testing on this but this is how it should go. (src)

Wrath of the Lich King releasing on DVD only
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King will only be available on DVD, not on CDs. That goes for both the regular box and the Collector's Edition. (src)

Drak'Tharon Keep - Heroic Mode
The version of Trollgore you have is insanely brutal due to a bug that makes his Crush ability land as the exact same time as one of his melee swings. We've already fixed him internally, but I'll see if we can hotfix Trollgore so you can get past him and do the rest of the dungeon. (src)

Eye of Eternity - 10 Player
The issue where he seems to randomly face people all the time in phase 3 has been hotfixed. (src)

Silvermoon City Boss - Arcane Blast fixed in the next beta build
I fixed Arcane Blast for the next beta patch. (src)

Traveler's Tundra Mammoth
This is fixed in the next build. The "Mammoth-Tech" completely changed. If you bought the old Grand Caravan you're out 15k. Sorry!
If you have the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth you're ok for upcoming patches (no need to buy another one). You will be able to ask your vendors to leave (Eject!) and friends in your party may then take their seat. (src)

Loremaster achievements
Ok, here are the new numbers. They won't be in (most likely) until two beta builds from now:
Alliance - Eastern Kingdoms: 700 | Kalimdor: 730
Horde - Eastern Kingdoms: 550 | Kalmidor: 700 (src)

Death Knight
DK now do x2 dmg on melee/spell critical hits
Death knights now do double damage on melee and spell crits. Normally spell crits are only 1.5x damage.
This was an intended change. Death knights derive a lot of damage from spells, but not so much that it made sense to give them a talent to increase spell critical damage. It's just a passive bonus for them.
We were worried about certain specs not scaling as well with high levels of gear. (src)

Death and Decay damage lowered
Crypt Fever was removed from its damage, though apparently not for everyone?
That shouldn't have affected the damage for Blood and Frost though. We'll try to figure out what happened. We had no intention to nerf it. (src)

Does Blood Gorged need a buff?
It's somewhat balanced because the similar talents in Frost and Unholy are dependent on diseases, which are also unpredictable in PvP.

It's possible you will be doing 10% less damage than other classes, but A) if our balance is so good that you can detect that difference - yay, and B) PvP fights have a lot more to do with crowd control, interrupts, healing, burst damage and mana drain than overall dps. If we think these talents' relative weakness in PvP is the tipping point, of course we will revisit them. (src)

Druid
Typhoon
I believe there is a bug with rank 5. The others seem to work correctly. (src)

Hunter
Aimed Shot dmg will be lowered
We'll have to tone down the damage of Aimed Shot actually, probably in the ballpark of less than what it is now but more than what multi-shot does to a single target or arcane shot. We have not yet settled on the appropriate number.
In terms of their duration and cooldown, I think those are pretty in line with the Warrior variant. The idea behind this change is that the Hunter was intended to be a source of the "mortal strike wound" in group PvP, but keeping up the debuff is too difficult with a cast time. (src)

Trap Mastery will not be linked to Explosive Shot
It won't be, no worries. (src)

Bestial Wrath bug fix in the next build
We've actually fixed that bestial wrath bug recently, should be in the next build. (src)

Pets base health
We still are working on bumping the base health of the pets up. (src)

Lock and Load currently bugged
It isn't 100%, its more around 2/4/6% on periodic damage from Serpent Sting. Its proc chance is in the ballpark of Shadow Trance (Nightfall) for Warlocks, though 2% higher (since Nightfall is 4%).
Seems like a tooltip bug.
Edit: Nm, seems like its really bugged. (src)

Paladin
Retribution expected benchmark
Ret should be as close to the top as anyone else. Our buckets at this point are basically DPS, Tanks, Healers. When the tank and healer are doing dps, it's even closer.

You may be a couple hundred dps lower than a pure dps class (hunter, mage, warlock, rogue) but for most players, the numbers will be close enough that a raid with a good Retadin and an okay rogue will see Ret on top.

This is a change in philosophy from the BC era, where we would engineer hybrid classes to be 25% to 30% and sometimes much lower than dps classes. (src)

Priest
Twisted Faith
As for Twisted Faith*, it increases damage if the target has Shadow Word: Pain not "mind flay" already on it. That's a typo. (src)

Reason behind Fade changes
We did notice that getting random healing aggro was annoying as a Priest (on new mobs that aggro), which is why we changed Fade to drop all aggro while its up. (src)

Rogue
Combat tree to get a damage buff
We're looking into pumping the damage up in Combat, still. (src)

Shaman
Riptide will see additional changes
We have a lot of work to do still on Riptide. We still think the niche is good, but the numbers don't feel right yet. (src)

Elemental tree to get damage buffs
We started to realize Elementals were going to log into 3.0, even before Northrend, and see LB damage way down. That feels pretty cruddy. So we're talking about ways to get the damage back up there to where it feels decent in small groups or solo.
The good news is that overall, Elemental damage was low. That's going to give us a lot of room for Balance-like damage buffs. I'm not saying we're going to handle it the same way, but you should see it go up noticeably in a patch or two. (src)

Enhancement future changes
I can say that we aren't thrilled about seeing Enhancement shammies in caster gear, with two fast weapons and dual FTs. We have some ideas that will shift Enhancement back to caring about AP more, while still letting you do a lot of spell damage, because that's a cool part of the class. I predict that WF / FT will be more popular, but you never know. (src)

UR changes
If I didn't mention it before, UR should be affecting ranged attack power too. We'll get that fixed. (src)

Koraa on Elemental DPS
Elemental was doing more sustained DPS than any Mage or Warlock spec, which is why we had to tone down some of the talents. Going into WOLK we did lower the coefficient. It always had a higher coefficient because there was no nature damage debuff. Now that there is, we've fixed the coefficient to be more in line. There's a reason why Elemental Shaman have some of the highest burst damage in PvP, and it's because their base nuke does more damage than other classes. Other classes require debuffs like Curse of the Elements, Shamans don't (until after the WOLK fix). (src)

Warlock
About the Affliction tree
Haunt - It should be more than 20%. Haven't settled on the right number yet. Should be "coming back" when you apply a new Haunt or when the effect ends, will check on that.
Pandemic - I'm not sure it works the way you're describing, are you sure it rolls twice? I'll check tomorrow.
Shadow Embrace - Not sure I buy that, Haunt has a 10 second cooldown, the duration lasts 12 sec. Suppose we could put Drain Life on this. You aren't really intended to just AOE MS.
Everlasting Affliction - The philosophy is that Shadow Priests and Affliction Warlocks have harsher DPS rotations than most classes, so we chilled those out and gave the classes who had little to no rotations a rotation. You can still ignore this talent and go crazy with your rotation if you wish. (src)

Haunt rank 2 is not healing and the imp hp buff is bugged
We'll fix this. (src)

Warrior
Arms Talent Feedback
This thread is a little bit different from some of the others I've started, because I'm going to povide a little more direction on a few specific talents. This is a discussion of ARMS however. Also note that we want the tree to be both PvE and PvP viable so keep that in mind when responding.

First, we're not dramatically overhauling warrior stances. At least not now. We have talked about it quite a bit, and it's something we might do in the future, but it does require a lot discussion. So we aren't taking away the penalties and we aren't adding a bonus to Arms for now. However, if there are less dramatic changes that totally "fix" Battle Stance for you, feel free to mention those. An example might be putting Pummel into Arms (perhaps with a talent).

Second, Bladestorm. Currently it allows you to use white attacks and we're inclined to leave it that way. It can do an awful lot of damage right now, so I hope your feedback isn't that it doesn't hit hard enough. I know several people want it to break fear instead of just prevent it.

Third, Sudden Death. Some people love it because it's actually a decision when it lights up. Other people hate it for the same reason.

Fourth, Wrecking Crew. This is pretty much just a discussion of the Enrage mechanic, unless you just think the numbers are off or something.

I shouldn't need to remind you of this, and many of you will probably disagree anyway, but warriors are exceedinly difficult to balance. Because of the way rage works, it is really easy to make warriors too weak or too powerful and hard to hit the sweet spot. And yes, you are very gear-dependent. (src)

Fury Talent Feedback
With one exception. No Titan's Grip talk permitted.
I know you want to talk about it some more, but the topic has a tendency to fill up every thread into which it sneaks. I want to make sure other Fury issues get ample coverage. Anything else is open game. (src)

General warrior Q/A (src)
How do you feel about the heavily random nature of the arms tree?
There's always been a bit of that compared to Fury.

Why does bladestorm have a self-CC element? Why doesn't it remove CC, stuns, snares or roots on use? Will this be reconsidered?
It does great dps. It would be too good if you could do other stuff too and too good if you could Intercept someone down. We might reconsider the CC issue, but really that's the kind of thing to pop out of PvP testing.

Are there any plans to make the improved charge and improved heroic strike talents not bad? Less bad?
We buffed Imp Charge recently. Imp Heroic Strike might seem a little bland, but that may be because we've changed a lot of the old talents in various trees that used to do simple things like this. Heroic really does hit like a truck now, so I assume your issue is what the talent does to rage cost?

Why was enrage's bonus damage reduced so severely? Would you consider allowing deathwish to stack again now that the bonus is so low?
Because we changed it from "be crit" to "be hurt." We might consider letting it stack.

Does the hamstring glyph stack with the improved hamstring talent?
That is the intent.

Have you looked at the math supplied by Torgal and company that demonstrates titans grip isn't such a massive increase as you think it is? If their numbers are correct, then what is your stance?
Our numbers say differently. I haven't looked to see where they differ. I'll try to get to that.

You say you don't want any single talent point giving a 10% damage increase (as for example.) On 25-man Kel'thuzad and Sapphiron last night, mortal strike amounted to approximately 17% of my total damage done. On Sapphiron, slam was approximately 40% of total damage. Will mortal strike, bloodthirst or improved slam be nerfed based on your talent budgeting?
No. That's not a hard and fast rule. In your example though, if you had not used Mortal Strike or Slam you probably would have used the rage for something else. In the case of TG though we do have serious concerns about it being too good (sans a stiff penalty). While we might change our minds after more data, you're not going to change our mind by pointing out logical inconsistencies in talent trees. There are plenty of them. :)

Do you see the glyph of resonating power (Increases the maximum targets affected by your Thunder Clap ability by 4) as being mandatory for tanking? If yes, do you feel that's acceptable? If no, why not?
It's not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that's another topic.

Can you offer an approximation of the proc rate/PPM on furious attacks?
It's a frequency-based proc. It's a little complicated to explain but you might compare it to Omen of Clarity. I'll try to get back to this later.

Are there any plans to make unending fury not bad? Less bad? Seriously, it's really really bad.
Yeah, this one doesn't feel done.

Do you feel that Vigilance is currently worth the talent point? If no, what is being done to fix it?
It's pretty uber if we're talking about the same version.

Damage shield is, according to some very basic testing, not generating threat from damage dealt. Can you confirm this? If so, is this intended?
It appears to generate threat based on the damage done. But there might be a bug.

Are there any plans to buff revenge baseline so that it's worth injecting into rotations for protection?
Putting it into Sword and Board is something we are discussing.

Do you feel that shockwave is, or should be, our be-all answer to AoE threat generation? Is there any chance of lowering the cooldown?
No, we don't want it to be your go-to AE ability, because then Arms and Fury can never tank a 5-player dungeon very well. We want it to be useful obviously.

Is it possible to give Disarm the same functionality as rogue's Dismantle, or at least, the removed Shield Break skill?
I'll have to investigate this.

Do you feel heroic throw is strong or interesting enough for a level 80 skill?
Yes.

The devs seem to have originally planned several means for warriors to interact with the new enrage mechanics. Will enraged regeneration and the rend bonus be all that we see for the expansion, or is more being considered? Specifically, enraged assault.
The problem we had with Enraged Assault was our warrior testers and designers didn't feel like they had enough GCDs to work another attack into their rotations. It was just too much. I love the idea though (it wasn't mine) so I wouldn't say never.

While you're doing numbers passes, any chance of restoring flurry to its original 30% bonus? Compare it to shamans flurry and it's clearly underbudgeted.
It all depends at this point on whether shamans or warriors are doing too much damage.

Will we be seeing any sort of "good raid-slave" bonus for warriors who take rampage, given the overwhelming presence of feral druids across the raiding scene?
That is in the long-term plan. On the other hand, we can't really imagine a warrior skipping that talent because it is so useful solo. Mostly, we need to make sure the big raid buff overhaul really works the way we want it to.

Why was the healing component of bloodthirst nerfed?
We thought it was too good, though to be honest, there are clandestine whispers echoing through our offices in the dead of night to change it back.

Do you think some of the design is being rushed by the looming deadline?
Nope. We just can't worry about stuff like that or one of two things would happen: we'd get rushed and sloppy, or we'd just keep delaying the release. Class design, item design, talent design and game balance are never realy done, so we just keep working on them.
The truth is we can release stuff on a day one patch. We'll also have [a period] in between the 3.0 patch and the actual release of Lich King in which we'll get more time to see the new talents and mechanics in action before everyone starts leveling again. And then there are hotfixes, mini-patches (there will doubtless be a few) and then big content patches.
We have enough experienced people on the team now who have been through this a couple of times that we plan on being able to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
But since we can't wait until everything is 100% perfect (because it never is) it doesn't make much sense to worry about the impending release either.