Ghostcrawler on Dual Spec

While i am at it, i will add a blizzcon video (that i forgot to post) from the second class panel about the dual spec feature.

Dual Spec video: WATCH IT HERE!

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

Spec swapping, I sincerely hope this is not a /script SelectSpec("ZOMGFIRE"); macro out of combat to swap to fire spec. That would be heinously lame. 12 - 24 hour cooldown at a trainer (or other appropriate NPC), possibly pay gold to violate the cooldown at slightly below the respec cost from scratch. Without such restrictions the raid stacking game you fought so hard to remove will become the spec juggling game and be just as terrible.

We're unlikely to enforce a time-based cooldown on it. That defeats the whole purpose of giving players flexibility. We're also unlikely to make it simply macro based. There will be some choice (as in whether to do it or not) involved.

Armory Update - Player Calendar

New Login-Protected Feature: Player Calendar

The Armory now supports the new Player Calendar, one of the new features added to the game in patch 3.0.2: Echoes of Doom. The Player Calendar allows players to create their own events such as raids, arena matches, and guild meetings, and keep track of the many activities in the worlds of Azeroth and Outland.

Every player can access their calendar from the Armory via the new “Calendar” tab that has been added to character profiles. You can browse your calendar in the same way that you can in-game. In addition, you can respond to events through the Armory’s calendar interface – which will then become effective in-game.

Like guild banks, player calendars are a login-protected feature. Before you can access your calendar you will be taken to a separate login screen, similar to the one that displays when attempting to access Account Management. Enter your World of Warcraft account name and password in the fields to access the calendars of the characters on your account. In addition, several changes have been made to the Armory Login process, including the ability to pin multiple character profiles.

For more information on the Armory’s Player Calendar, refer to our features list or the Armory Calendar FAQ. For more information on the new Armory login, refer to the Armory Login FAQ.

Player Calendar Interface

The Armory’s new player calendar support allows you to view the in-game calendar of every character on the World of Warcraft account you use. Here are some of the features of the Armory’s player calendar:

• The player calendar can be accessed by clicking the new “Calendar” tab on a character profile. Clicking this tab will take you to a login screen, where you will be prompted to enter your World of Warcraft account name and password.
• On the top right of the Armory, a notification window appears if you have pending invitations and upcoming events.
• Switch between the different characters on your account under the redesigned Options menu on the top right of the Armory. This menu also allows you to select what characters you wish to display in the new drop-down character select menu.
• The main calendar interface is similar to as it appears in-game. Click the arrows next to the month name to switch between months. Clicking on an event itself brings up that event’s detailed information window.
• An event’s information window contains its name, time, description, and list of invitees as they appear in-game. The right side of the panel displays a tally of classes where the player has a status of either Accepted or Confirmed for that event.
• If you are invited to a given event, the date of that event will appear with a large question mark and the buttons to take action on the event will be active. Accept or Decline the invitation to change your status accordingly, or Remove it to remove it from your calendar. These status changes will take effect in-game.
• Player-created events display with custom background images befitting the nature of the event. For example, an event for a Black Temple raid displays a picture of Illidan Stormrage.
• The “Filters” menu allows you to toggle the display of various categories of recurring events such as battleground holidays and raid resets.

Patch 3.0.2 Changes and Additions

Besides the Player Calendar, many changes have been implemented to reflect the new content and functionality of Patch 3.0.2:

• Game mechanic changes: Character profiles and item tooltips should reflect the changes to character and item statistics including the consolidation of bonus spell damage and healing into Spellpower, and the combination of other previously differentiated physical and spell bonuses into a single statistic each.
• Character talent trees have been updated to reflect the many changes in 3.0.2, including the new 51-point talents.
• Glyphs: The new items associated with the Inscription profession are now searchable in the Armory.
• A small assortment of new Honor Rewards has been added to the item database.

Blue Posts

Class DPS
If you were a lock who was used to handily beating all the other class and were used to life at the top of the damage meters with 2-3 of your lock buddies, then yeah, life is going to be different now. But you shouldn't consistently be second tier either.

Retadin dps, despite the nerfs, is still pretty high at 70. We're okay with this for now because it's only going to last a few more weeks and we don't want Ret to be too nerfed for 80.

Hunter dps is huge at 70 and 80, and is something we're keeping an eye on. Good hunters were always near the top of the charts, but it seems even more consistent now.

Rogues and warriors are trickier, because if you follow the threads, some of them are convinced their dps is gimped, even at 80. Clearly that isn't holding true in every case, so we're trying to figure out what the mitigating factors are.

As several people pointed out, both Destro and Affliction have had to change their rotations somewhat for BC so there is more of learning curve than for some of the other specs who didn't change as much. (src)

Why no Glyphs for new abilties?
We are releasing glyphs in stages, and more will become available threw opening up more content.. We want it to be exciting when a new glyph for a big ability is finally available. We also didn't make many glyphs for new abilities because we thought the glyphs wouldn't feel interesting -- when you get a new ability and immediately glpyh it, then it feels like that's just the way the ability works all the time.

Eventually, we expect there will be many glyphs and multiples for some of the same abilities and you'll have to put some thought into which ones you want. (src)

PvE CC Abilities
The only think we're slightly concerned about is we don't want to see PvE CC just go away. Several classes are designed around their ability to CC, and we don't want that to be neglected. In an ideal world, this would be less of an issue of threat management and more of an issue that if the tank tries to tank 4 and 5 pulls without CC that the incoming damage is too great.

It's probably fine for MgT. We'll just keep an eye on it at L80 especially in heroics. (src)

'Bind on Account' system
We should have more information on this new system soon to help answer additional questions. (src)

C'thun kill achievement
You'll receive credit for the Husk of the Old god in 3.0.3. Just hang onto it for a couple of weeks. (src)

Pet Action Bar Problems
Autocast and aggro settings on the Pet Action bar aren't saved between summons of the spirit wolves. This leads to many problems and is the main reason why I feel the talent is largely useless. As soon as you summon the wolves they go flying off at whatever hostile target is closest and use their abilities automatically placing them on cooldown whether you wanted them to or not. Because of this all the wolves are really good for is a short boost in damage and healing, but due to issue #1 above that boost is pretty small. Obviously the settings not saving is a bug as it works with other classes pets, but it bears repeating here because this bug is actually detrimental on the live servers as well as beta now that patch 3.02 has gone live.
Unfortunately, this is just the way pet bars work. If you recall, we resisted even putting bars on temporary pets for a long time because the system wasn't designed to work that way. We do have plans to fix it, but it requires new code, and we didn't think it was worth holding the release of the expansion until we got this changed. (src)

Druid
Lifebloom in PvE
Even if you only consider PvE, the reason we changed Lifebloom, as I have said before, was it became the correct answer to any situation a Resto druid found themselves in. All the other healing tools became niche at best, or avoided at worst, if they couldn't be fit around a rotation of rolling Lifebloom.

If Resto healing begins to fall down in PvP or PvE, then Lifebloom is somewhere we might make that back up. But we don't have a lot of evidence yet that that is happening. (src)

Shaman
Bug with the Earth Shock Glyph
We'll look into it. The fact that it goes down to 1 sec suggests that the glyph itself is working and something else is blocking that last 0.5 sec. (src)

Elemental DPS
From what we've seen so far on Live after the 3.0.2 patch, it does seem as if Elemental's dps is a little lower than where we hoped it would be. We still don't think it's going to be a problem at 80, which is a conclusion we draw from a lot of testing and conversations with smart players both here and across the community.

We don't want anyone to feel underpowered at 70, though our focus is largely on 80 since that is where the community's focus is going to be in a few weeks. We don't think a large portion of players is going to be raiding or doing PvP at 70 much longer. One of the reasons we nerfed the encounters to much is so players could just go through and blast things without stressing too much about any balance problems that arise what will soon be their lower levels. (src)

Warlock
Demonic Circle and Survability
We talked a lot about Demonic Circle based on player concerns and ultimately decided that it was still a really cool and useful tool and players just hadn't had enough of a chance to experiment with it yet. It's not a straight-forward ability like a spell that just gives you +damage or +survivability. It is going to require some experimentation before we see what it can do in PvP. I understand you might disagree based on the fact that you started this thread. But that is our $0.02 on the issue.

Survivability is something we're discussing a lot right now. We've heard from many players that burst damage feels really high and that healing might not even be that useful at the moment. We're seeing lots of Arena teams with all dps at all. That is an interesting option and we don't want to make it impossible to play that style, but we wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in that direction. If it has, and it's too soon to know, we first want to address that on the damage side of things rather than individually buffing every class to provide more survivability. (src)

Warrior
Bloodthirst
Bloodthirst could always be mitigated by armor or dodged or parried. The only change we made (aside from the numbers) was to make it require a weapon. It had a weird and probably unintended advantage to the other big warrior strikes when disarmed or using Titan's Grip. (src)

Sudden Death proc rate
From what we're seeing in PvP and PvE it's only a big damage change if you were doing strange things with crit, like stacking it and nothing else in every possible slot, gemming for it, using axes etc.

In other words, if you value crit because it does good things for warriors, you shouldn't notice a big change. If you were putting crit everywhere just to get Sudden Death to proc, then it will proc less, partially because we don't want warriors to only worry about one stat. (src)

Protection & DPS Warriors
We're happy with the state of Prot now and even happier that warriors seem to like the spec. But I don't want to leave the impression it's because Prot warriors argued for changes in the right way or somehow whined correctly.

One of our goals coming into LK was to "fix" tanking. This included a lot of changes --
-- Making sure threat wasn't so frustrating, especially AE threat
-- Making sure all 4 tanks could handle the same encounters
-- Make sure tanks who were missing key tools got them (I realize the word "key" is open to interpretation)
-- Making sure tanks could upgrade their gear in a reasonable fashion
-- Making sure tanks didn't have to spend all of their talents on pure mitigation
-- Making sure tanks weren't so terrible in PvP or solo situations

By contrast, the dps specs didn't feel broken overall, although there were individual problems with many of them that we did attempt to address. DPS was something fun in the game that continues to attract a lot of different players and classes.

With regard to dps warriors, a few of these changes were --
-- Make sure they could tank a normal 5-player dungeon
-- Give them both viable PvE and PvP roles
-- Make the Arms tree about something other than Mortal Strike
-- Make Battle Stance a little sexier
-- Make sure mobilty didn't just belong to one spec
-- Try and get warriors to care more about plate
-- Make warriors a little less reliant on "pocket healers"  (src)

Ghostcrawler: "How does skill affect dps?"

You seem as if you're arguing that once you come up with the theoretical maximum dps for you class that then you can go ahead and hit that every time. And maybe it's even possible to get close on a fight like Patchwerk. But fights aren't all like that. As soon as you're running around, dealing with adds or raid damage, running out of mana, or dealing with the rest of the encounter then skill does come into play. I don't think it's all just the healers. Beating the enrage timer is the domain of dps, and if it was trivial then nobody would be wiping on Brutallus (pre nerf). To me, that's skill. Most players couldn't even hit the same dps on Brutallus from night to night. I've heard great players say they've had off nights, which is another way of saying they failed to achieve their maximum. The delta is skill.

All we're saying the new feature is that the difference in theoretical dps can be masked to a larger extent now by skill. Before, there was almost nothing an excellent shaman could do to beat a mediocre rogue. More of the challenge of the encounter was in stacking the right classes and buffs than the actual execution of the fight.

Now perhaps you can argue that mage rotation is simpler than some classes or that if you ignored your procs and cooldowns and just hit Fireball that your dps wouldn't suffer as much as a rogue who only spammed Sinister Strike. But it's not as if all mages achieve their maximum dps or even understand how to.

I guess it's not actually clear what you are arguing for. The theoretical and actual discrepancy in dps between mages and warlocks already existed. How does throwing paladins, druids and shamans into the mix change that? Or are you saying we should just anoint class A as the highest dps class and class B as the second-highest and make the challenge of an encounter all about learning the fight itself?

As far as the accountability issue, that already existed too. We could have just said that in our tests mages can beat warlocks in Sunwell so you just need to L2P. That doesn't seem to be a feature of the new system. We could have always taken the lazy way out and said it's just you. To some extent you're going to trust us or not largely based on whether or not you're having fun in the game. I've enjoyed plenty of games without having to have a conversation with the developer. Maybe I'm missing your point, but you guys stated it eloquently so I want to understand it. (src)