Tier 14 Sets Recap
Now that the Tier 14 sets are more complete, here are some previews we haven't done yet. If you want to see the Tier 14 tokens or Items themselves, check out our Tier 14 Armor Sets page!
| Class | Male | Female | Video |
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| Male Human | Female Human | Video |
| Male Human | Female Human | Video |
| Male Human | Female Human | Video |
| Male Pandaren | Female Pandaren | Video |
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| Male Human | Female Human | Video |
| Male Human | Female Human | Video |
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MMO-Champion Forums Moderator Recruitment
Good news everyone! We're recruiting moderators for the forums again! The amount of users and posts keeps increasing and we reached the point where we need some help before the trolls take over and play Whack-a-Mod in the Darkmoon Faire. I know it sounds fun, but I'm going to assume we don't want that.
Please be sure to read the entire post before applying!
Introducing the Guild Mentoring Program
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Azeroth -- It’s a land of turmoil, harsh and unyielding for heroes of the Horde and the Alliance as they struggle against enemies from within and without. For those stepping forth for the first time into this implacable realm, life can seem overwhelming, but surviving in this hostile environment is not insurmountable with a little help. Will your band of brothers and sisters, heroes and mentors, heed your call for aid?
Azeroth needs more heroes to rise through the ranks and your guild can help. We’re looking for a few good guilds to volunteer for the new Guild Mentoring Program. Guilds participating in the program will take part in identifying new players within selected realms, offering to invite them into the guild, and teaching them the ways of Azeroth as they level and reach the end game content.
F.A.Q.
Q. What is the Guild Mentoring Program?
A. The guild mentoring program identifies guilds on select realms to act as mentors for new and low level players (below level 85).
Q. How long does the Guild Mentoring Program run for?
A. The Guild Mentoring Program will run for a period of three months from the time that guilds are selected and notified.
Q. Is there a certain criteria for being selected as a mentoring guild?
A. Guilds must meet certain criteria to be considered for the Guild Mentoring Program:
- Guilds must be located on one of the selected realms.
- They must be willing to commit to the program for a three month period.
- They must be willing to change their name for the three month Guild Mentoring participation period. (Names will be changed back at the end of the program.)
- Guilds must be at least level 6 and have an active membership.
Q. How many guilds will be recruiting per realm?
A. Only one guild will be selected per faction on each realm.
Q. What does my guild need to do to volunteer?
A. The guild leader will need to submit an application to wowguilds@blizzard.com with the following information:
- Current guild name and guild leader name
- Current realm and faction of the applying guild
- Current guild level and number of guild members
- Guild leader’s real name and phone number (this information will not be published and is for internal use only)
- Brief description of the Mentoring Guild
Q. How long are you accepting applications for?
A. We will be accepting applications for two weeks. We will then select a guild for the Guild Mentoring Program from those that meet the criteria and contact the guild leader.
Q. On what realms will this program be available?
A. Mentoring guilds will be chosen for the following realms:
US Realms
- Aggramar
- Azuremist
- Blackhand
- Cenarius
- Dalaran
- Doomhammer
- Garona
- Garrosh
- Ravencrest
- Sen'jin
- Shu'halo
- Ysera
Oceanic Realms
- Dath'Remar
- Saurfang
EU EN Realms
- Thunderhorn
- Azuremyst
- Lightbringer
- Aggramar
- Stormrage
- Aszune
EU DE Realms
- Thrall
- Alleria
- Malygos
- Arygos
EU FR Realms
- Hyjal
- Dalaran
- Eversong
Q. Do participating guilds get anything special?
A. Some of the benefits for taking part in the program include:
- MVP status on the forums for the guild leader and recruitment officer
- Guild member private forum access
- Recognition for your guild as being participants in the program
Beta Class Balance Analysis
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
It's especially bad if they keep this constant, quick nerf method that DS experienced. As Enhancement, I have rampup AoE, which means my numbers on fights like Yor'sajh and Madness have gone down as the nerfs have gone up because I no longer have sufficient time to get my AoE going before everything's dead.
Like I said earlier, it felt like the guys designing the classes' AoE never coordinated with the guys designing fights. It doesn't really matter if my AoE 20 seconds in is OMGWOWAWESOME if there's never a fight where AoE lasts for 20 seconds.
Class designers and encounter designers are all part of the same team. There is even some overlap in office space. You may also have tried a boss in Mists where you need to AE for five minutes or more.... At the risk of turning classes against each other, if you think there are specs that are essentially just channeling Blizzard and going from 0 to 100% very quickly, please let us know. We are more likely to adjust those than we are to give every spec very simple, boring AE rotations given that AE is more of a thing even on bosses these days.
The argument that you aren't contributing meaningful DPS on nerfed content is a little tough to address. It is most important for every spec to be able to contribute on cutting-edge content, when the risk of class stacking is at its greatest. Most reasonable players understand that as content gets nerfed, fights will get shorter and shorter, and that allows different cooldowns and mechanics to shine. If your raid leader is threatening to sit you because of your AE DPS on very easy content, then maybe he's avoiding telling you the real reason. (I jest.)
90% of your playerbase lives outside of truly cutting edge content. Most of them have damage meters. Whether you like it or not, a large part of the fun of DPSing is getting to see your name at or near the top of the meter every now an then. When there are certain phases (namely AoE here) where by default you know you have ZERO chance to see your name there, it's a little depressing.
Ultimately that's why all of this matters. You may feel it's shallow, and that's certainly your right to feel that way. It doesn't change that it's a huge part of how players get valued, and value their own experience.
We understand that winning meters can be fun. We're not going to design encounters around that though. There are DPS checks, but sometimes they are to beat the boss before the healers run out of mana or before the boss enrages, and other times they are to kill a key add in an even shorter window. Players already know ways to pad meters by cleaving adds that don't matter and the like. Overall, we don't think we're doing anyone a favor by emphasizing DPS meters even more than they already are. We'll commit to making sure you don't feel like a third wheel on any fight, especially when it's new or within the first couple of progressive nerfs.
I was puzzling it over, but it would be nearly impossible to guarantee that even when we nerf encounters to 20%+ that the relative damage dealt by everyone is going to stay in sync. When the length of a fight shortens so that you can no longer squeeze your 3-minute cooldown into the fight twice, that's going to have an impact. I understand the concern, but I'm not sure of a reasonable way to solve it. We're not going to buff and nerf classes every time we do the progressive nerfs -- that would feel crappy to everyone I think.
Because it was the only time where it was really controversial?
It's easy to play the "I didn't see feedback on X, therefore there wasn't feedback on X" card. We wouldn't have removed Judging for haste if plenty of players hadn't told us they hated the mechanic. If there's a mechanic the developers don't like, I'm more than happy to state that, so there isn't a need for us to invent some kind of silent majority to justify changes. You'll just have to trust me that when I say we heard feedback, that it really exists.
Related, we don't remove mechanics just because we receive negative feedback on them (or else there would be nothing left in the game!); it's a balancing act, based on how much feedback we here from different vectors (keeping in mind that we have a lot of players who don't post on US or even English forums), the logic made in the argument, how much the argument makes sense to us, how much we respect the arguers, and so on. There's no red meter on the office wall that we can read, and even if there was, sometimes the right answer is still one that may be unpopular in the community (at least at that moment). But I digress.
I don't understand why the 30s reduction in the outbreak CD was removed in contradiction to this portion in the article. Was it to make the first tier of talents more viable?
We feel like the short Outbreak for Blood wasn't a great design. It was probably the right choice at the time, but in Mists, every tank will have to focus more on what were traditionally DPS abilities (since they translate to resources and therefore threat). We didn't think it was compelling gameplay to let Blood opt out of disease transmission. That said, you can get a lot of the gameplay back through Unholy Blight if you choose.
If this is the preferred design why do Guardians have to spend rage for Maul? It has been stated a few times that Maul would never be used except to solo things (an only if the damage comes up).
Maul is still a DPS button. It may not be one you use often, but there will be times when you don't care about surviving (when the boss needs to die NOW, or even when you're solo or running a scenario perhaps). We may eventually end up adding a proc or something (hopefully not exactly like Ultimatum), but we're not sure it's needed. At the moment Guardian damage is too high, so encouraging more Mauls isn't super high priority.
Based on my testing so far with the snake trap formula, it looks like snake trap is going to be doing enough damage (at least for SV) that we would want to include it in our rotation (assuming I calculated the scaling right).
You're probably right, and we don't want Snake Trap to be used rotationally. We do want Snake Trap damage to be in the non-joke range. We'll try to find some middle ground.
In the current beta build, survival's damage is being hindered by explosive shot ticking for almost less than a serpent sting tick.
In ilevel 460, I show Serpent Sting ticking for about 6K and Explosive Shot ticking for about twice that. Overall, Explosive Shot contributes 3x or 4x as much damage as Serpent Sting. What are you seeing?
It feels extremely weak while PvPing, have you played survival in a bg recently? You can barely make a difference without spamming cobra shot.
Survival gets a lot of damage from dots, which is just a different model than Marks. We can push damage numbers around a bit (perhaps nerf Cobra Shot so it's not quite so much of an upgrade over Steady Shot) but at some point that's just going to mean the difference between MM and SV is the name of their signature shot. Dots also can be really powerful in PvP. I would want to see some more testing before determining that Survival needs very high burst damage to be PvP viable.
This honestly bothers me a hell of a lot, because when you nerf energy regen for monks, you're making their best tanking stat haste.
It's a good stat for Brewmasters for sure, and it needs to be because monks will have haste on their gear. However, Brewmasters probably have the most valuable secondary stats of any spec in the game. They don't really have bad stats, and their good stats aren't a ton better than others. (If you think that isn't the case, please feel free to argue that point though.)
That talent is the only thing keeping Rshamans wanted due to our lack of spread healing(Double HTT helps with that). If you remove that ability you might as well leave us how we were in T11/T12 due to lack of such healing. It also doesn't help the other two choices are not even a choice due to how bad they are. You can make Cote a 30 minute cd and we would still take it.
We don't want Resto shaman to be balanced around a mandatory talent, and you probably don't want that either. The design we are trying internally right now is letting it reset all totem cooldowns less than 3 minutes, but lowering its cooldown to 3 minutes.
From the logs I have seen so far we are either behind other healers or barely equal in select cases with regards to healing numbers and I pray hardmodes will solve this due to our mastery. Not to mention our mana regen is nothing to brag about
We look at all of those logs and watch many, many raid boss attempts. If you have specific cases where you feel like shaman aren't competitive healers or struggle with mana, please point those out (but as I have said, Mistweavers are an outlier right now, not the target.) Specific examples are much more useful to us (and I suspect other players) than general "well, what if there's a fight with these parameters?"
A simple quick glance at this list clearly shows the cheapest spell for shaman being more expensive than ANY priest spell in either spec.
As other players pointed out:
Flash Heal costs 19,800 mana.
Healing Surge costs 18,960 mana.
In any case, as I said, you have to look at the whole package. Healing Rain heals for a lot, but it's also not a cheap spell. Paladin heals appear very expensive, yet they have a lot of free heals. Healing Surge's throughput is propped up partially by Tidal Waves. I also know shaman like to call Mana Tide Totem a raid cooldown and not a personal cooldown, but it still gives you mana. If you just stand their OOM with Mana Tide available, your raid leader may scratch her head.
Is it intended for Elemental Blast to give a random buff instead of your increasing your highest stat?
Yes.
Is it intended for Glyph of Riptide to not proc Resurgence?
No. We’re changing Glyph of Riptide to reduce the healing done by Riptide’s initial heal by 90%, instead of removing it, so that it still functions with Resurgence, Ancestral Awakening, Echo of the Elements, etc.
Of course it affects our regen, and of course we are going to use it. However, the problem is that it also gives the same amount of mana to every other healer in the raid. Because every other healer gets Mana Tide plus Divine Plea/Shadowfiend/Innervate, Shaman regen will naturally feel lower than that of other classes (and probably output will also be lower because of not having a personal regen cooldown).
We like Mana Tide Totem's group benefit though. If Resto shaman struggle with mana, then we'd more likely buff the mana return from Resurgence rather than give them another cooldown. (We could also have Mana Tide give more mana to the shaman, but then you might have to make an unfun decision about whether your mana needs were more important than the other healers.)
Right now, the specs with the spammiest AoE are doing a lot more damage. I'm harping on Destro's AoE as an example of a stupidly complex AoE rotation that does very weak damage.
Ultimately, Destro is largely using their single target spells to do AE along with Rain of Fire. You can also prepare for the ramp up by saving up embers just before the AE moment starts.
- Pyroclasm - Is it intended for it to be a dps loss to use the Backdraft charges on CB?
For maximum sustained damage, you will probably do better using Backdraft on Incinerate. There are times when burst damage is more important though, and faster Chaos Bolts will be attractive.
I say this with a little tongue in cheek, but for some players, winning meters is more important. For others, beating the boss is.
- Dark Soul - Are you happy with the benefit that each spec is deriving from this cooldown? Right now, Destro yet again feels like it falls behind because RNG can significantly negate the benefits of its cooldown (i.e. - you may not crit any more than you would normally; it's even possible to crit less frequently during its duration!
Well, Chaos Bolt always crits, so you can align them with Dark Soul....
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
New LFR Loot System
I think one of the real questions here is how does the game determine this exactly.
It starts at the first player and rolls a number from 1-100. If it rolls