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Blue Posts

25 Saurfang OUT OF CONTROL - BUGGED

Absorbs such as Power Word: Shield no longer prevent Blood Power from being gained when damage is dealt by Saurfang. Casting Power Word: Shield is not a bad thing to do as the ability will absorb the damage dealt. This was an intentional 3.3.2 change. We also removed the ability to knockback the Blood Beasts off the platform and the removed of Blood Power gain from Mark of the Fallen Champion damage. We unfortunately missed getting these changes into the patch notes.

Hp stealth nerf or bug?

Apologies again that we were not able to announce this beforehand. No slaps in the face were intended.

We have a large team with a lot of moving parts. In this case the programmers were quicker at pushing out the fix than the designers and community team were at getting the message out. Coordination is a good thing, but too much bureaucracy attempting to foster coordination just slows down our ability to make rapid changes, something we have worked to get better at throughout WoW's history.

Our announcements of significant changes usually make it out just before or after the changes themselves. We've been making several since 3.3.2 shipped and we just fell behind on this one. Sorry.

05/02 Tanking and Survivability Changes

We are making some adjustments to tank survivability based on what we’re seeing in Icecrown Citadel. We feel this is particularly important in preparation for upcoming Heroic attempts. This is tricky and occasionally subjective, so we might very well make more adjustments as we get even more data.

Paladin:
Sacred Duty now provides 2 / 4% Stamina, down from 4 / 8% Stamina. The cooldown advantages of the talent remain unchanged.

Death Knight:
Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.

It’s important to note that we aren’t trying to single out paladins here. We like the tank balance of warriors and druids at the moment, and we have a larger sample size of warrior tanks that we can compare. Another solution would have been to buff warriors, death knights and druids and then increase boss damage accordingly. Obviously, that would have been a much larger change with greater risks and a longer delay.

Though Ardent Defender is always a possible target for changes, we like that this talent provides such a distinction between warriors and paladins. Rather than have all the tanks have the same health, armor, avoidance and cooldowns, we’d rather have four unique tanking classes rather than just superficial or artistic differences. Yes, that design is harder to balance, but we think class distinction is ultimately more interesting, which is better for the long term health of the game. The goal remains to have all four tanks be viable for any encounter, assuming sufficient gear and skill, and any differences in performance on individual encounters to be minor. “Minor” is obviously a subjective term.

Please note that the death knight change will result in a small survivability increase in PvP, which we think is appropriate. We chose it partially with that in mind.

Nibelung: Why it should be reevaluated.

We are currently in the process of applying two hotfix improvements to the Nibelung staff. The first change is that we are improving the chance for a val’kyr to proc from 1% to 2%. While this may not seem like a significant improvement, it will be notable and result in the val'kyr appearing more often.

The second change is that anytime a summoned val’kyr casts her smite spell, she will heal herself for 25% of her maximum health. This will help keep them alive when AoE damage is happening but not make them invincible as we still want them to feel like a summoned creature and not a special form of a DoT spell that has awesome art.

We understand the frustrations players have had with this weapon so far. We currently plan to make more proc weapons in the future and are committed to making this and other proc weapons fun and competitive items.

Ensidia managed to down The Lich King encounter in 25 man Normal, congratulations to them.

Disabling Saronite Bombs

We just made a hotfix that disables the siege damage dealt by Saronite Bombs and the Global Thermal Sapper Charge. The siege damage of the bombs was causing the Frozen Throne platform to rebuild, which greatly decreases the difficulty of the encounter.

We'll reenable the siege damage in a later update when the issue with the Frozen Throne is fixed.

Blue Posts

25 Saurfang OUT OF CONTROL - BUGGED

We did make some changes to the fight to make the "Just let people with Marks die" strategy not something you want to do, but it was not our intention to make the fight drastically more difficult. We're currently looking over his abilities to see what's happening.

The Endless Culling of Stratholme

We are in the process of making changes to speed up The Culling of Stratholme, but they are not just an on-off switch so we weren't able to get them into patch 3.3.2. For more details on this check out the post Daelo made:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22749572006&pageNo=1&sid=1#6

Loot

• 10 Man Loot
• 25 Man Loot

Putricide & BQL Top 100 kills- tanks by spec

This is a cool thread.

I hesitated jumping into it for a long time, because I didn't want the participants to just start talking to me instead of trying to interpret the data that the OP (and others) worked hard to generate. Hopefully that won't happen. (And if it does, you'll know why I don't jump into the next cool discussion to come along.)

I wouldn't worry too much about sample sizes and the like. Yes, sample size is important, but it's too easy to just dismiss data as needing a larger sample size. Part of the science of statistics is trying to estimate how large a size you do need before you can interpret anything.

Also remember that players pick their class for a lot of reasons and guilds pick their tank for a lot of reasons. We know that if we buff or nerf too much that we can drive population, but we also know there are plenty of other factors at play. For example, I'm not sure how powerful a tank class would have to be at tanking before you'd see its population jump if it was really frustrating or boring to play or really hard to gear or required a ton of skill to do well or if it was terrible at every other aspect of the game. (I don't think we have any of those classes in the game at the moment -- I'm just pointing out an extreme, contrived case that could affect population.)

The biggest red flag for us will be if raids feel like they have to gravitate towards a certain tank class for the hard fights. (If you swap tanks for a couple of fights, that's not a big deal either, assuming the swap doesn't become too widespread, or you're blocked if you fail to swap.) It's a big deal if a particular tank class just can't cut it, or has to work much harder (or get much luckier) on the same content, assuming the content is challenging. I can't imagine too many guilds replacing their main tank for a different class because they are stalled at current Icecrown progression. Not many of the Icecrown fights really tax the tank, except for perhaps Festergut. That's about to change with LK and the hard modes.

02/02 PvP Healing Change

Patch 3.3.2 is bringing about a change to the way healing functions in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp. We have applied a debuff to all players in these zones which will decrease the effectiveness of all forms of healing by 10%. This includes heals from items such as Healthstones and potions, however, it will not affect defensive shields or auras. This change is being made to balance the effectiveness of healing against the recent buff we made to the damage reduction component provided by resilience. Rest assured that we will be closely monitoring the effects both the healing and resilience changes have on Battleground, Wintergrasp, and Arena PvP game play to ensure that fights last a reasonable amount of time without overtly skewing the effectiveness of any class, role, or team combination.

Arena Season 8 Begins

Arena Season 8 has now officially begun, and players can immediately begin competing for the new Wrathful Gladiator PvP item sets. We have reset all Arena team ratings, Arena points, and personal ratings though players retain their honor points and matchmaking rating going into the season.

Here is a list of some PvP items that will be available in Arena Season 8 and their expected rating requirements:

No Rating Required:
Furious Chest
Furious Legs
Furious Gloves
Furious Helm
Furious Shoulders
Relentless Bracer
Relentless Belt
Relentless Boots
Relentless Neck
Relentless Ring
Relentless Cape
Relentless Trinket
Relentless Gloves
Relentless Legs
Relentless Chest
Relentless Helm
Relentless Shoulders
Wrathful Bracer
Wrathful Trinket
Wrathful Cape
Wrathful Neck
Wrathful Ring

Rating Required:
700+: Relentless Relics
1300+: Wrathful Belt (honor)
1400+: Wrathful Boots (honor)
1400+: Wrathful Gloves
1500+: Wrathful Legs
1600+: Wrathful Chest
1700+: Wrathful Wands/Relics/etc
1800+: Wrathful Weapon - lvl264
1950+: Wrathful Helm
2000+: Wrathful Shoulders
2200+: Wrathful Weapon - lvl277
2300+: Wrathful Tabard

Update: Auction House & Armory Integration

Since the launch of the World of Warcraft Armory, we've been regularly releasing updates and new features designed to help players stay connected to the game even when they're not logged in. Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch.

While there are still plenty of details to be worked out, we're designing the service to offer auction functionality similar to what's available in-game. Players have been requesting -- and we've been hoping to implement -- a feature like this for a long time, and we're excited that the Armory and the game have evolved to a point that makes it possible.

This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don't have an exact release date yet. It's important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we'll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won't disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won't release it until it meets the quality standards that we've set for our other features and services. You may be seeing bits and pieces of the Auction House service pop up in the test builds we use for the public test realms as we go through the process of internal testing. We'll have more info to share with you here and at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as we get closer to release.

Class Changes

Druid Changes

Balance

• Earth and Moon - Also increases your spell damage by 2/4/6%. Up from 1/2/3%.

Warlock Changes

Affliction

• Shadow Embrace - Your Shadow Bolt and Haunt spells apply the Shadow Embrace effect, increasing all shadow periodic damage dealt to the target by you by 5%, and reduces all periodic healing done to the target by 10%. Lasts for 12 sec. Stacks up to 3 times. Up from 2 stacks. Down from 15% healing debuff.
• Everlasting Affliction - Your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells gain an additional 5% of your bonus spell damage, and your Drain Life, Drain Soul, Shadow Bolt, and Haunt spells have a 100% chance to reset the duration of your Corruption spell on the target. Drain Soul and Shadow Bolt added.

Demonology

• Empowered Imp - Increases the damage done by your Imp by 10/20/30%. Up from 5/10/15%.
• Demonic Pact - Increases your spell damage by 2/4/6/8/10%. Up from 1/2/3/4/5%.

Destruction

• Conflagrate - [Causes]/[Consumes] an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 60% of your Immolate or Shadowflame, and causes an additional 40% damage over 6 sec. Up from 20% damage over 6 sec.
• Improved Shadow Bolt - Increases the damage done by your Shadow Bolt spell by 2/4/6/8/10%. Up from 1/2/3/4/5%.

Shaman Changes

Elemental

• Shamanism - Your Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning spells gain an additional 4/8/12/16/20% and your Lava Burst gains an additional 5/10/15/20/25% of your bonus damage effects. Up from 3/6/9/12/15% and 4/8/12/16/20%.

Rogue Changes

Assassination

• Hunger For Blood - Enrages you, increasing all damage caused by 5%. Requires a bleed effect to be active on the target. Lasts 60 sec. Down from 15%.

Paladin Changes

Holy

• Lay on Hands - If used on self, the Paladin cannot be targeted by Divine Shield, Divine Protection, Hand of Protection, or Lay on Hands again for 120 sec. Also cannot be used on self within 30 sec of using Avenging Wrath.

Warrior Changes

Protection

• Warbringer - In addition, your Intervene ability will remove all movement impairing effects. Charge and Intercept removed from list.
• Devastate - In addition, causes 120% of weapon damage plus 202 for each application of Sunder Armor on the target. Up from 100%.
• Concussion Blow - Stuns the opponent for 5 sec and deals [0.38 * AP] damage (based on attack power). Down from [0.75 * AP] damage.

Misc Changes

• LK Arena 6 Gladiator's Idol of Steadfastness - Your Moonfire spell grants 119 spell power for 10 sec. Up from 102.
• LK Arena 6 Gladiator's Idol of Tenacity - Increases the spell power of the final healing value of your Lifebloom by 448. Up from 356.
• LK Arena 6 Totem of the Third Wind - Increases spell power of Lesser Healing Wave by 459. Up from 386.
• LK Arena 6 Gladiator's Totem of Survival - Your Shock spells grant 119 spell power for 10 sec. Up from 102.
• LK Arena 6 Gladiator's Libram of Justice - Increases spell power of Flash of Light by 510. Up from 480.
• Item - Icecrown 25 Normal Dagger Proc - Your melee weapon attacks have a chance to trigger Invigoration, granting you 4 energy, 2.0 rage, or 120 mana every 2 sec for 10 sec.
• Item - Icecrown 25 Heroic Dagger Proc - Your melee weapon attacks have a chance to trigger Invigoration, granting you 4 energy, 2.0 rage, or 120 mana every 2 sec for 12 sec.
• Item - Shadowmourne Legendary - Your weapon swings have a chance to drain a Soul Fragment granting you 30 strength. When you have acquired 10 Soul Fragments you will unleash Chaos Bane, dealing 1900 to 2100 shadow damage split between all enemies within 15 yards and granting you 270 strength for 10 sec.
• LK Arena 6 Aggression - Attack power increased by 204. Up from 174.
• CREATURE_ARTHAS_ENCOUNTER_NO_RES = "Frostmourne has rendered you unable to ressurect.";
• ERR_PARTY_LFG_BOOT_DUNGEON_COMPLETE = "Players cannot be kicked after the instance is complete.";
• ERR_PARTY_LFG_BOOT_IN_COMBAT = "Players cannot be kicked while in combat, or shortly after combat.";
• ERR_PARTY_LFG_BOOT_LOOT_ROLLS = "Players cannot be kicked during loot rolls.";
• ERR_PARTY_LFG_BOOT_NOT_ELIGIBLE_S = "That player can not be kicked for another %s.";
• ERR_PARTY_LFG_TELEPORT_IN_COMBAT = "You cannot teleport out of the dungeon while in combat.";
• Crimson Deathcharger - Summons and dismisses your rideable Crimson Deathcharger. This is a very fast mount.

Warlock t10 4pc bugged

There is a bug where the pet is not always receiving the damage bonus from the 4PT10 warlock set. We are going to fix it.

The issue of having to recast Corruption in order to benefit from the proc is a much harder problem to solve. We might be able to do something, but we can't promise a good solution there. It is just the nature of the way rolling dots work. You gain the benefit of whatever crit you on when you cast the spell, but aren't going to gain the benefit from procs that occur later on.

Bad trinkets - intentional?

Our raid item philosophy has evolved a lot since vanilla. The tier sets were once considered a badge of honor. Someone stalking around (or mailbox afking) with their full set bonus might as well have been sporting a legendary item. These days, we virtually guarantee that any player with an interest in raiding is going to be able to complete at least the lowest level version of their set with just a minimal level of persistence. This ultimately serves as a powerful reward mechanism and is in line with our philosophy of letting more players actually see the content.

This design though also has its risks. One of the big ones is that item progression becomes very predictable and deterministic. Imagine (just as an example) a model where all bosses drop emblems and every item you want is for sale. That may sound cool for a few weeks, until you hit the point that without any kind of random element to progression that you can calculate to the day/week at which you will finish gearing up your character. The excitement of what the boss drops would be gone and we feel this would end up making the purpose of clearing new content very underwhelming.

Trinkets are really the one item (weapons are to a lesser extent) that we use to try and capture that old slot machine feel from the classic Molten Core days. Yes, completely random loot with huge loot tables can be frustrating but we are pretty far from being completely random these days. Trinkets however are still somewhat random, they can be hard to acquire, and there is often a lot of competition for them.

Trinkets are also tricky to design because we don’t want them to be just a pile of stats like other items. We generally want them to be unique by having a random proc or an on-use ability or something similar. These types of things are always trickier to balance, but this is also what makes them interesting. We also don’t necessarily want every trinket to be a guaranteed upgrade just because the item level is higher. Knowing what works or doesn’t work for your particular character and play style is one of the ways players have to demonstrate their mastery of the game.

There are some aspects of trinkets for which we think we can do better. For example, it’s annoying when a superior item is on a lower tier of content to where you feel like you have to argue with your guild to go back and farm easy bosses or run a 10 player version when everyone else wants to do 25. Many of the trinkets probably represent too big a dps (or equivalent) jump given how difficult it can be to acquire them. It’s also easy for us to fall into a rut of offering basically the same one every time (often because we know players like it) rather than experimenting with different things. We like to try new things to keep gear interesting for players as we know some have been evaluating trinkets for over five years now.

We also probably just need to drop more of them. That doesn’t mean they should be trivial to acquire, but when say a caster only has 2 good options in Ulduar and 1 requires a hard mode, then there is going to be ton of competition when they do drop. We know it’s rough when the trinket you have been wanting finally drops and you have to roll against 10 other people for it. Having more trinkets would mean more variety, which means players may want different ones and ultimately will be a little more different from their friends/guildmates.

Passive/boring vs. fun/interesting talents

I think this thread is a good place to highlight a few things in regards to our plans on changing the talent trees in Cataclysm.

All talent trees will be changed in Cataclysm so that there will be less emphasis on valuable but boring talents that only provides passive increases to damage or healing. Basically we want to make the fun niche and utility talents more available and attractive by making them feel less expensive. We will most surely still see "cookie cutter" builds in cataclysm, but there should be fewer "mandatory" talents in those builds, which will allow you to spend more points elsewhere.

Some talent trees will see considerable changes, whereas others will see fewer changes, but it is not our intent to remove old favourites or completely change the focus of the trees. You will have to rethink your builds for sure, but you should still be able to easily identify the purpose of the different trees just like you can today.

We will also be looking into streamlining the trees a little more in order to avoid things like for an example Warlocks having two conflicting range increasing talents, and some trees will as a result of this get completely new abilities. These new abilities are of course in addition to the new level 81+ abilities.

We have no plans to deepen the talent trees though, so the 5 additional talent points you will get for the new levels will instead provide some interesting opportunities for previously unseen builds, such as being able to place 51 points in one talent tree and 21 points in another.

Videos

Since news has been so slow lately, have some videos! Two for those of you who dislike certain types of music.

Blue Posts

Invincible Rising

Riding on the chill winds that flow around the frozen spires of Icecrown Citadel comes the once-noble steed of Prince Arthas Menethil. Now this beast, raised from its grave, bears the fearsome Lich King on its winged back. Even in undeath, it remains an ever-faithful servant. Learn more of its tainted history here.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/invincible.xml

Epic Crafting: Gunship Battle

As the confrontation with the Lich King draws nearer, fire erupts in the skies above Icecrown Citadel. Skybreaker and Orgrim's Hammer, the flag-flying gunships of the Alliance and Horde, clash near Deathbringer's Rise -- but it wasn’t too long ago that they were just ideas on paper. Read on to find out how our development team built this airborne assault: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/gunship-battle.xml

The Night Elf Mohawk Has Packed Up

You’ve pitied and you’ve been pitied, but the time has come for the Night Elf Mohawk to pack up his Mohawk Grenades and move on. You looked goooood while his visit lasted, Azeroth, but his work here is done...for now.

Tier 10 Tank Armor Changes

This is a long post with all of the new armor stats, please click on the post title to view it.

Stats on the Ashen Verdict Strength ring

Here are the stats for the strength-based melee DPS rings coming in the next minor patch:

Requires The Ashen Verdict - Friendly

Ashen Band of Might

+91 Strength
+91 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 53.
Equip: Improves hit rating by 53.

Requires The Ashen Verdict - Honored

Ashen Band of Greater Might

+98 Strength
+98 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 57.
Equip: Improves hit rating by 57.

Requires The Ashen Verdict - Revered

Ashen Band of Unmatched Might

+98 Strength
+98 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 57.
Equip: Improves hit rating by 57.
Equip: Chance on hit to increase your attack power by 480 for 10 sec.

Requires The Ashen Verdict - Exalted

Ashen Band of Endless Might

+99 Strength
+107 Stamina
Yellow Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Strength
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 59.
Equip: Improves hit rating by 59.
Equip: Chance on hit to increase your attack power by 480 for 10 sec.

Season 8 Gear Preview

Arena Season 8 Armor Preview

With the next Arena season just around the corner, we’d like to give you a sneak peek at the new season 8 armor sets, designed to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents in battle. Take a look at the Wrathful Gladiator's attire of choice.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/arena8sneak.html

Desktop Auth

This has been a very busy week, and the batch email did not go out properly. If you have not received an email from us, please be patient as they will continue to go out.

Elitist Group

If you are like most people, ever since Patch 3.3 went live you have been running heroics with random people from LFG. Looking at someone's gear as they zone in the heroic is not easy to do, especially if you don't know other classes very well. Many people have pointed to Gearscore as the solution to this problem, but today I want to take a look at a more useful addon, Elitist Group. Elitist Group is an addon developed by Shadowed that moves the focus away from an arbitrary number generated by a formula that isn't easily visible to an overview of a person's gear, gem choices, enchanting choices, and their experience in other dungeons.

The first screen that you can use is a character profile screen, which allows you to see anything you could want to know about the player (Target someone and type /eg to open it). A list of current items is displayed in two columns, showing you what type of character is is for. If an item is not for the players current spec, type type will turn red. If the item is not enchanted, gemmed, or improperly gemmed, a warning will display under the item type. Mousing over the item will allow you to see what is wrong with it, from missing and improperly enchanted to ungemmed or using the wrong type of gems. So far the gem types all seem to match up just fine with the specs, but Shadowed has been very quick about fixing things that turn up misclassified.

The profile screen also shows you an average item level, which can be compared to the list of suggested raids. A players experience based on how many achievements or runs they have completed in raids or heroics is available to the right, providing a very easy to achieve 100% experience rating in most content. How old the data is, the current spec, and who you got any notes from is displayed as well. Notes are currently still in the early stages, but more functionality is coming for them soon.

The last part of the profile screen is the database list, which will show you every character in the database. You can search by name or server to narrow down the list and anyone currently in a group or raid with your is displayed at the top of the list and denoted with a [Group] tag in front of their name. This feature is still rough around the edges and could use a few UI enhancements to make it easier to use. Tickets are already filed for this and we can expect improvements as development continues! A new feature that was just added recently adds the Item Type, Enchant, and Gem information to the regular inspect screen. This allows you to inspect players like normal and see information about their gear choices instead of using the profile screen.

The second screen is the summary screen, shown when you zone in or request it (/eg summary). It shows each players name, spec, average item level, enchant and gem percentage, each being color coded. It also shows the position of a player in the inspection queue and the ratings you have given the player, if any. Mousing over the percentages for gear, enchants, or gems will tell you what item is wrong and why it is wrong. The raid summary list can be sorted by any of the percents or average item level by clicking on the column headers.

All of these features come at a very small performance hit, storing the addon and man characters in only a few megabytes of memory. The addon is an improvement over Gearscore on almost every level, and is well worth your time to try out. The only downside are the occasional bugs in the alpha releases and the need for frequent updating for now if you want to keep getting the new features. Once the addon is feature complete, it will not need to be updated as frequently. This addon is invaluable for quickly evaluating everyone's gear, gem choices, enchanting choices, and experience levels. Hopefully the ticket in to show everyone's experience percent for the current instance you are in is implemented quickly!

You can download the addon from Curse or WoWInterface.

Blue Posts

10/12 - Recent In-Game Fixes

Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.

The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.

We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.

Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

The Blood-Queen is no longer spawned until the Blood Princes dies. This will prevent any unfortunate entry of her highness while a raid is fighting the Blood Princes. The initial hotfix for this causes the Blood-Queen to not spawn at all in a particular circumstance, but this was also fixed last night.

We increased the duration of Essence of the Blood Queen to 60 seconds in 25 player difficulty, and 75 seconds in 10 player difficulty. A strategy developed for managing the

Essences throughout the fight that involved intentionally killing a player, and this change addresses that strategy. The new timing does interact with some of her other abilities in new ways, but there are methods that players have to lessen that impact.

Tier-10 Tank Armor Changes

We recognize that many plate tanks are making their gear choices based on the amount of armor they’re provided, as this is currently the most preferred stat. In order to make the tier-10 plate tanking sets more desirable, we will be adjusting the stats on the gloves and chest pieces in order to inflate the amount of armor they provide in the next minor patch. This will apply to all item levels of the tier-10 death knight, warrior, and paladin tanking gloves and chest pieces.

Similar items crafted or purchased with Emblems of Frost will continue to be very good and will compare favorably to all but the Heroic difficulty boss loot, so you shouldn't despair if you recently acquired any of those.

Alienware Contest

Alienware is sponsoring the World of Warcraft Rise to Power Movie Contest and giving away some very nice computers. You can find some more info on the WoW Europe site.

Are you an aspiring filmmaker? If so, you've come to the right place! The World of Warcraft Rise to Power Movie Contest, sponsored by Alienware, is an excellent way for you to show off your talents. We're looking for players to produce movies set in Azeroth, focusing on the rise to power of your favorite villain, hero, or even yourself.

The content requirements for the movies are open-ended, as long as the movies are created in-game.

The Contest runs from December 22, 2009 to January 31, 2010. Four winners will receive a $2,400 gift credit towards an All Powerful Alienware desktop or laptop.

Don’t have time for Machinima? Alienware is holding a separate raffle open to World of Warcraft players, click on the button below to enter the raffle on Alienware's site for your chance to win a gaming PC or notebook from Alienware's new range of extreme gaming machines. All featuring the latest Core i7 processors from Intel. Find out more by clicking the image below!

Blue Posts

STOP with the DMG/2sec debuffs. Please.

In general, we think it's more important to the game to have diverse and interesting fights than it is to have 5 way ties for healing "usefulness" on every fight, just as we don't go out of our way to have melee vs. ranged dps ties on every fight, or even an even number of fights.

We already place a lot of limits on our encounter designers as to whether what they want to do is fair to class balance, yet they still manage to come up with boss fights that none of us have ever seen before. Telling them they can no longer do raid-wide damage auras, or can only do them on 10% of bosses or whatever is just a restriction I don't think the game design needs. You may feel better in the short term where you're just as awesome on fight 2 as you are on fight 31, but in the long term you might lose interest in the raiding game when all the bosses start to feel the same.

Here is the most important part of my post: The community tendency is to push for homogeneity (in roles, in buffs, in healing and damage, in representation, in available enchants, in awesomeness of badge items, etc.) because "that's fair." We push for new, unpredictable and interesting things because it keeps players interested in the game.

Recent Icecrown Citadel Hotfixes

Just wanted to update players on the hotfixes that have been applied recently to Icecrown Citadel...

Blood Prince Council

- Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.

- The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.

- We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.

- Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

Blood-Queen Lana'thel

- The Blood-Queen is no longer spawned until the Blood Princes dies. This will prevent any unfortunate entry of her highness while a raid is fighting the Blood Princes. The initial hotfix for this causes the Blood-Queen to not spawn at all in a particular circumstance, but this was also fixed last night.

- We increased the duration of Essence of the Blood Queen to 60 seconds in 25 player difficulty, and 75 seconds in 10 player difficulty. A strategy developed for managing the Essences throughout the fight that involved intentionally killing a player, and this change addresses that strategy. The new timing does interact with some of her other abilities in new ways, but there are methods that players have to lessen that impact.

Hunters, Consumable Ammo, and Weapon DPS

We haven't announced the Cataclysm ammo change yet, except to say that it will no longer be a consumable.

The simplest solution is certainly that ammo goes away and guns, bows and crossbows just don't ever run out of ammo. More complicated features might be more exciting as you say, but have potential downsides too. Applying fire to your arrows sounds cool, but is ultimately any more interesting than just having a "Fire Shot" ability. Do you really conceive of a lot of situations where you'd rather do Fire damage over physical damage? Having different kinds of arrows sounds interesting until you consider the delivery mechanism of having to "catch them all" through rare drops, badge vendors or the like. As you say, hunters do have a lot of buttons and a pet to manage, so I'm not sure they really need a whole additional mechanic to worry about.

End of Season Issues

There was an issue on some realms that allowed rated arena matches to continue after maintenance completed today. We have identified these issues and ended the season on the affected realms.

The arena season ended when maintenance began and the appropriate snapshot to decide the season's rewards was taken at that time. Any of the rated matches that took place after maintenance will not be counted for last season's rewards.

20/01 PvP Resilience Changes

We are currently in the process of applying a hotfix to buff resilience. While some modifications may be made, we intend to have this buff in effect for the remainder of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The change will double the value of resilience in reducing damage done by players. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players. The critical strike chance and critical strike damage reduction components of resilience will remain unaffected by this change.

We are also aware of the possibility that this change will make healing in PvP too difficult to counter. While we are not making any immediate changes to address this issue, we have prepared some further changes that will allow us to quickly deploy a PvP-only healing adjustment if we feel it is warranted.

We will be applying this change very soon while we are between Arena seasons so we can evaluate how it works in multiple PvP scenarios for the upcoming Arena season, and as we continue to prepare for Cataclysm. As we have mentioned previously, one of the goals for Cataclysm is to have a PvP environment where it is harder to regularly achieve so much damage and healing in relatively few global cooldowns compared to what we currently have in the game.

Resilience requires additional alterations.

We think crits need to be proportionately weaker in PvP than in PvE. I'll explain why in a minute, but first let me reiterate that the buff we are making to resilience just affects damage. The relative value of crit in PvP won't change at all with this hotfix. You won't be critting less or doing less proportional damage when you crit. If you hit now for 3000 and crit 30% of the time for 6000 then after this change you might hit for 2700 and crit 30% of the time for 5400. Crit damage will be lower, but crit damage relative to normal damage will not. We don't want to get to the point where a crit is actually mitigated lower than an actual hit. That would be bizarre and do bad things for a lot of talent trees.

As to why we think resilience needs to reduce crits, it's because you're playing against another human and not an AI-controlled creature. Creatures generally don't heal or blow defensive cooldowns, or at least not very well. The ability to pack a lot of damage into a small time window is much more important in PvP just because the opposing player or team have so much control over the size of that window. If you whittle them down to 10% of their health but can't "close the deal" then they may be back up at 50% or 100% in no time. This kind of mechanic happens in PvE too, but much more rarely. The ability to crit in PvE is important largely because it buffs your damage or keys into talents. But the burst portion of crits themselves (high damage in a short amount of time) is much more important in PvP. Thus, we think the value and role of crit would be too high in PvP without a way to mitigate that through stacking resilience.

We don't want resilience per se to bring with it the "kiss / curse" of also nerfing your own healing output or heals received. We want players to like resilience on PvP gear. It shouldn't be a hard decision. We'd prefer a model where resilience improves your survivability without any real downside.

If we implement a healing change, it would be temporary because health pools will be larger in Cataclysm, proportionate to healing, so we don't think that will be a problem. Burst damage may be less of a problem too for the same reason, but we're less confident of that. If it isn't a problem, then we can change the resilience scaling again.