Quintessential - WowStead

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Welcome

Welcome to The Quintessential guild website.

Founded on 05/05/05, Quintessential is one of the longest lasting and most stable guilds on the Dragonblight server. Yes, we like the number 5.

Our primary focus is to promote effective group dynamics and enhance complimentary group skills. This includes strategy, ingenuity, camaraderie, respect, and fun. We believe that while decent groups of less than five players can be effective, groups of five players can be quintessential.

More information about us linked here, and also in our Quintessential Guide Book.

Blue News

Posted by SagenNovember 20, 2009 at 12:05 pm

Great Blue posts today!

Quote from Blizzard staff "Boring" Gear
I think gear might get really boring if you didn't have set bonuses (and perhaps trinkets) to look forward to.

Somewhat boring gear is okay... to a point... in PvP, where you need to strike a balance between skill and gear. Players want to enter PvP thinking they have a relatively level playing field, but we still use the gear reward as an incentive to participate.

PvE gear is already relatively inflexible on primary stats. If anything I wish there was more variability from tier to tier. Players have become pretty intolerant though of gear that doesn't feel like an unambiguous upgrade. That's not intended as an insult to anyone. It's just the state of a five year old game.

Gear Inflation
They're just numbers. We don't think it starts getting scary until the human mind literally has trouble processing the digits. If your new staff has 152,420 spell power, well, yeah that's a mouthful. But if your new staff has 4000 spell power, the only thing that can really be freaking you out is that 4000 is just a really big number compared to the 100 spell power you might be used to. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars too....

When players say we had scaling problems in Lich King, what they mean (or at least what they *should* mean) is that we picked the end numbers we wanted for percentages such as crit and dodge and then picked ratings that would get us there. When we inflated the item levels to account for hard modes (with a little help from things like glyphs too) then the percentages ended up higher than we intended. That doesn't mean that exponential scaling on gear is bad. It just means that we misjudged our endpoints.

Gear inflation is just part of MMOs, or at least the kind of MMO that we make. Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too.

Tanking Classes Disparities
Warrior tanks can tank every boss in the game, and more often than not get the world first and server first kills on those bosses. More raids use warrior tanks than any other. Most cutting-edge guilds use warrior tanks. We can't detect a higher "failure rate" on warrior tanks, and frankly I'm not even sure what that means given that most everyone here agrees there are far more experienced warrior tanks than other tanks out there. Some of you are arguing "when we switch to the undergeared paladin, we do better," yet very few groups are actually switching. The best we're stuck with is some kind of fuzzy "it's harder on the healers," which is pretty hard to quantify, especially since the healers aren't running out of mana healing anyone.

This is why the developers keep going back to what we are seeing happening in the game, which is warriors tanking stuff.

[...] Yes, if we see paladins or druids (or warriors or DKs for that matter) repeating what happened on Sarth or Vezax, then we will do something while Icecrown is still relevant.

When is the appropriate time to buff or nerf is something that is always going to be subjective. Buffing someone when we aren't convinced they need it (assuming it affects relative power compared to another class) is as dangerous as not buffing someone when they do need it.

And again, it's not as simple as guilds having a favorite tank for specific fights. Druids on Thorim or warriors on Anub adds didn't cross the line for us, though I understand why it might for some people.

Item stats on PTRs
Many of the stats have gone in relatively recently. If you tried out the PTR a few weeks ago, bosses weren't dropping loot at all. We recently went back and changed our paradigm for how we wanted to handle sockets on these items. Sockets have a budget and in this case the other stats were not adjusted correctly for the socket change.

We are adding over 1400 PvE items to the game in 3.3. There are going to be some bugs. Usually we catch them all before they go live, but some still slip through. We don't try to catch them all before we make a PTR build. Sometimes we're right in the middle of doing something (e.g. changing sockets in this case) and it's not worth holding up all the massive machinery that generates a build just for a few simple bugs that aren't really going to affect the PTR experience anyway. Also consider that item bugs generally aren't as serious as class bugs since the former only affect a smaller percentage of the latter. Bugs are bugs though. I won't try to justify them.

Patch 3.3 on Background Downloader

Quote from MMO-Champion The first part of the Patch 3.3 is now available on the background downloader.

Blue posts

Quote from Blizzard staff Shadowmourne Quest
The quest requires friendly Ashen Verdict rep to begin. It may also only be acquired by Warriors, Paladins and Death Knights.

Armored Froswtyrms confirmed to be PvE Rewards
There will be a Frostwyrms up for grabs for Icecrown raiders, achievable in a similar way to previous rewards such as the Ulduar proto-drake.

Icewell "Radiance" (Chill of the Throne)
The "Icewell Radiance" is designed to account for very high avoidance levels. It lets us lower the damage bosses do per hit because their hits will connect more often, keeping boss dps the same but lowering spike damage.

However, I also know what that message says to some people. It says that if I go into Icecrown and wipe on a boss all night that Blizzard lied to me about boss damage. We're just sort of bracing ourselves for the inevitable "I couldn't beat Marrowgar because he hits so hard. I thought bosses wouldn't hit hard."

Bosses hitting less hard does not mean bosses can now be facerolled. It just means they hit less hard. To be fair, most of the folks posting in this thread understand the difference. But it's not uncommon for us to see our quotes misused in other forums where we can't necessarily bop in to correct the misunderstanding.

Druid
Feral Tanks in Cataclysm
We talked about druids in bear form also getting AP from strength. Strength won't appear on leather and no piece should have Str and Agi together, so it's not like they would really double dip. That lets us still have tanking necks, rings and cloaks with strength on them that are attractive to all 4 tanking classes.

Almost all the items in the game are going to have to change. In many cases this is just a sweeping pass we can make on all gear, such as replacing the Agi + AP on leather with just Agi. So don't worry too much about what happens with old gear and talents mixed with the new stat system. The gear and talents in many cases must change.

Warlock
Soul Shard System in Cataclysm Q&A - Full Q&A
I can't answer Q&As like this all the time or even very often. I probably won't be able to keep coming back to this thread to answer follow up questions. Understand that when I do answer some questions and it drives expectations that everyone is entitled to have *their* questions answers, things get complicated. Sorry for all of the caveats, but I've kind of learned what to expect.

Mage
Fingers of Frost
The Fingers of Frost issue is really challenging to solve. It it procs on hit then the procs don't get eaten but you may have to interrupt a Frostbolt. If it procs on cast, the procs can get eaten. Those are really the only ways it can proc though. Mixing travel-time spells and instant spells can muddy things up. Things also get more complicated when you have silly amounts of haste, which through no fault of their own, many mages do.

Fingers of Frost seems to work fine so long as you have Frostbite, but due to some technical limitations, the two talents don't play well apart. A long-term solution might be to make Frostbite a prereq for FoF or just merge the two talents together.

Letting Fingers of Frost display its charges is a good idea. We might not be able to get that in for 3.3 but we'll put it on "the list."

Our thanks to Lhivera and others among you who have explored these issues so throughly.

Rogue
Rogue Weapon Swapping Addon
We also killed the addon, but we didn't want to do it without also trying to fix the problem it was trying to fix.

Shaman
Elemental Tier 9 Nerf
We don't want players to stick with older tier sets when new pieces become available. (It's one thing if it's a really good trinket -- it's another if it's your entire set..)

We balance some things around absolute values (we're shooting for a target) and other things around relative values (how X looks compared to Y). A lot of shaman were saying they weren't going to upgrade to tier 10 despite the, frankly, gratuitous stats on the new gear. We concluded that was because the T9 set bonus was too good and the T10 set bonus was too weak. We suspected the T9 was too good for some time, but didn't want to nerf it while the T9 was all that was available. We did the same thing with a few other sets (or relics).

We try to pick interesting set bonuses, but that means that they will sometimes end up being over or under-budget once players figure out the best ways to optimize their play style around the bonuses. A little of that is okay -- it's interesting when a new set changes your spell rotation a little bit. But when an older set is so good that players feel like upgrading is a bad thing (ignoring the pain of having to get new enchants and gems or whatever) then we think we have a problem.

From a player point of view, I can understand why the attractive answer is always just to buff the new stuff. But continually buffing an outlier instead of bringing the outlier back into the pack is a good way to lead to power inflation on gear.

Shadowmourne

Posted by SagenNovember 19, 2009 at 11:07 am

For lack of any other news at the moment... I suppose I could show you the new Legendary weapon... ;-)

Learn how to get it here.

IC Raid Progression Outlined

Posted by SagenNovember 18, 2009 at 2:43 pm

Quote from WowHead Lead Encounter Designer Daelo has published a lengthy post on the official forums that outlines Blizzard's plans for access progression in the Icecrown Citadel raid. The citadel will be broken up into four sections, and all of them won't immediately be available when patch 3.3.0 goes live.

Here's a list of the noteworthy points Daelo mentions in his post:

The Lower Spire will be the first section that is available. Plagueworks will open several weeks later, followed by the Crimson Hall and Frostwing Halls.
Players may not attempt the Heroic 10/25-player encounters until they defeat the Lich King in the normal 10/25-player encounters.
The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Also, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless these three encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week.
Raids will have a limited number of attempts total each week to defeat Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. As these boss encounters are unlocked, the number of attempts available per week will increase.
Once all 12 encounters are unlocked, a zone wide spell effect will be applied to all players in the following weeks and months that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. The effect will increase in effectiveness over time. Also, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters will become available during this time period.

Quote from Daelo Icecrown Citadel testing has been progressing very well over the last few weeks, and this has been a huge help to the encounter design team. I want to thank everyone who has logged onto the PTR and tried the encounters there.

As we're now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, I wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point I can't give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I'll update the community so they can plan appropriately.

The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks. Then the Plagueworks will open with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide becoming available. After another period of time, the Crimson Hall will open and you can then fight the Blood Princes and Blood-Queen Lana'thel. The final Frostwing Halls unlock then occurs after that, making Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, and the Lich King available. We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.

There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.

The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Furthermore, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless the three aforementioned encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week.

The Ashen Verdict provides reinforcements and material for players to assault Icecrown Citadel, but this support is not endless. Raids will have a limited number of attempts total each week to defeat the four most difficult encounters in Icecrown Citadel: Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. As these boss encounters are unlocked, the number of attempts available per week will increase. The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana'thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses. After a raid has exhausted their attempts for the week, the Ashen Verdict must withdraw their support and the four most difficult bosses all despawn and become unavailable for the week. The limited attempt system is a feature of both Normal and Heroic difficulty.

There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).

In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish.

Latest Blue Information

Posted by SagenNovember 17, 2009 at 11:03 am

PUG with the blues - Round 3!

Quote from Motive Since our first two tests went so well, we’d like to invite everyone out again for round 3! Come join the fun on the PTR and instead of getting the PUG blues, you could end up grouped with a blue. Members of the Development Team (including the encounter designers themselves), the QA team, and the Community Team will be on the PTR to test out the new dungeon system and want you to come join in the fun.

To have a chance to group up with one of us, just queue up for a random heroic through the Dungeon tool. We will be playing both Alliance and Horde and since the Dungeon tool allows players to group cross-server, it doesn’t matter which of the two PTR realms you join from.

Join us Wednesday 11/18/09 at 4:00pm PST.

Emblems in Patch 3.3

Quote from Zarhym

Bosses in Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity, Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, and all Heroics will drop Emblems of Triumph. Bosses in the Icecrown Citadel 10- and 25-player dungeon will drop Emblems of Frost. Choosing the Random Heroic Dungeon option via the Dungeon Finder (new in content update 3.3) and completing whatever dungeon is selected for you will award you with two Emblems of Frost the first time you do it (this is in place of the daily Heroic dungeon quests which are being replaced with weekly raid dungeon quests).

Continuing to use the Random Heroic Dungeon option within that same day to complete dungeons will award you with two Emblems of Triumph each time in addition to those dropped in the instances. The random option can also select Heroic dungeons to which you may already be saved, so you can technically do every Heroic dungeon more than once in a day by continuing to use this option.

Blue posts

Quote from Blizzard staff Kirin' Tor Rings in 3.3
Item level 251 versions are currently planned for patch 3.3. I'm not sure what the cost to upgrade is but it will probably be similar to previous upgrades. We are only upgrading the existing ring types, not providing a new one, so that means no tank version.

Tank Shortage
The "shortage" is caused by a lot of people not wanting to tank or not spending the time to gear up and tank - and if they don't want to gear up at all then they probably don't want to tank anyway or maybe don't want to spend the time learning it.

I still think the new Dungeon System will help with this through the faster turnover rate and random heroic feature, but overall we can't force people to play something they don't want to play so there will likely always be a shortage of tanks or healers to some degree. You should try playing one those, it is pretty amusing when finding dps is your biggest issue.

Cataclysm gear stats
Unless I'm mistaken, the Cata gear stats will break down like this:

Melee: Hit, Crit, Haste, Expertise, Mastery
Ranged: Hit, Crit, Haste, Mastery
Caster: Hit, Crit, Haste, Mastery
Healer: Spirit, Crit, Haste, Mastery

You are not mistaken. Everyone also gets stamina, armor, and their primary stat (Str, Int or Agi). Resilience and Spell Pen will continue to be PvP stats. This is not set in stone either. Cataclysm isn't finished.

Tanks will also have block (but not block value), dodge, parry and perhaps armor. It isn't super important how many stats everyone has. Melee for example need hit and expertise, but casters need more hit. It only gets to be a problem if for example you can't piece together a set that has all the stats you need in the amounts you want. Many tanks for example will happily sacrifice hit and expertise for more armor and stamina.

So, I'm guessing the current plan is to get rid of the Spirit > Other Stat talents completely?
It's too early to tell. It would be nice to get rid of them for say mages and warlocks given that their gear generally won't have Spirit. We can't get rid of conversion talents completely. For example, Enhancement and Retribution will need some way to derive spell power from attack power and need a way to get mana back without Int or Spirit.

Talents Reset
Refunding talents generally isn't something we do as a courtesy. Meaning, if we had our way, we would never refund talents. We only do it when the data would get seriously jacked up by not doing so. For example, you may still have points in a talent that no longer exists or something similar.

As to why we don't like to refund talents, part of it is avoiding the expectation that regular talent refunds are something that happens often. Another part is that while it may be exciting for very active players to get a talent refund, it can actually be a major bummer for the alt you play seldomly or even the player who only logs on every few weeks. Now you feel like you have to do a lot of research and action bar management before you can even jump in and start playing again.

It's quite likely everyone will get a talent refund when the Cataclysm data changes go in (which if history holds, will actually occur before the Cataclysm box is available at retail). I wouldn't expect any before then.

World of Warcraft vs. Starcraft 2
Couple of things....

SC2 is being developed from day one as a multiplayer and single-player game. WoW added Battlegrounds and later Arenas after it had already shipped. That's a little bit about what Rob is talking about -- the difficulty we have had retrofitting WoW's PvP. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I don't think he is saying Arenas were a mistake. It's the way we introduced Arenas that has continued to cause ourselves a lot of work and occasionally caused frustration for players. We like the Arena gameplay though or we would have cut it or overhauled it long ago. We do think we have shifted the PvP attention a little too much towards Arenas and away from BGs, and yes we understand that loot rewards are a big part of the reason why. We aim to fix this with Cataclysm.

Starcraft is also just a fundamentally different game. You aren't taking your campaign character into competitive multiplayer. In fact, there is no multiplayer character per se in the sense that you can grant your character more power over time. You start every map with the same base and units as everyone else. Starcraft also isn't going to change over time except for whatever balance or design changes the team makes. There is no equivalent to the new gear or whatever that suddenly shifts the balance of power.

We make PvP-specific rules when we think it's appropriate. Resilience and diminishing returns are two obvious examples. SC2 does the same thing. Not everything works completely differently between the two halves of the game though.

Tank Balance
On Sartharion +3, cutting-edge guilds who normally tank with a warrior would (perhaps somewhat begrudgingly) use a DK to tank instead because the benefit was so massive. The same thing happened on Vezax where good guilds replaced their warrior tanks with DKs. Death knights were overpowered at the time.

We are not seeing the kind of massive swapping one class of tank for another in ToC or the preliminary Icecrown testing. It's just not happening. If paladins or druids are too good or warriors or death knights aren't good enough, we're just not seeing them getting used for those fights to anywhere near the extent that DKs replaced other tanks on the encounters mentioned above.

As just one example (and I wouldn't put too much weight behind this), the number of paladin tanks used to test Icecrown on the PTR has been almost imperceptibly low. It's possible there were actually none this weekend, or else the numbers were so small that we missed them. Sure these are not the hard mode encounters generally being tested, and you can come up with your own explanations for differences between how players might approach PTR and "real" raiding. But these are the kind of lopsided datasets we have to deal with when we're looking at who is using what tank and how that relates to success.

I'm not talking about balancing around representation, as players often mistakenly claim. I am asking the question that I have asked before: if one or two of the tank classes have such a superior and unequivocal advantage in making a fight easier, why aren't more guilds using them, especially given the evidence that they have swapped tanks on previous encounters? I understand individuals of you may state it has happened to your guild. That's fine, but understand you are in a small minority. Overall, it's just not happening.

One conclusion you can draw (though certainly not the only one) is that whatever differences in survivability there appear to be "on paper," just don't make a significant difference in the actual fights, or at least not enough of a difference that guilds feel compelled to switch or are held back by not switching.

As an aside: there are some specific fights where the specific mechanics lead guilds to tend to use one tank over another, say a druid to tank Thorim hard or a shield-using tank on adds for Anub hard. Most players aren't as concerned about these one-off encounters because it feels like such an encounter-specific problem and doesn't feel like anyone's job as guild main tank is in jeopardy. (Individuals of you may feel differently of course.)

I know there are lot of threads on this topic right now. I avoided many of the ones that are doing a good job discussing numbers because I didn't want to derail them.

New Quest UI

Posted by SagenNovember 14, 2009 at 10:22 am

Content Update 3.3: Quest Tracking Preview

Quote from Blizzard staff We're making several improvements to the user interface for tracking quest objectives in our 3.3 content update. These new features will serve to improve the questing experience for players through a multitude of new tracking options.

Quest Log
We've added a new "Show Map" button on the Quest Log. The "Show Map" feature highlights any quest in the log and will pull up the map for the zone in which the corresponding quest objectives are located.

Map
When viewing the large zone map ('M' key), players will notice that all quests they have for that zone will be automatically tracked. In addition, this large map is now separated into four separate interface panes.

To the right of the map, all active quests for that zone will be listed by name and be represented with a number. These numbers will be placed on the map highlighting areas of interest for each quest.

A third panel below the zone map will give players the full quest text for any highlighted quest, while the fourth pane will display the quest reward. The quest map tracking feature is enabled by default. Players can disable this feature and restore the map to its original state by un-checking the "Show Quest Objectives" box in the lower right corner.

Areas of Interest
All areas of interest in a zone will be represented with a number corresponding to the number assigned to each active quest in that particular zone. When highlighting a specific quest, the corresponding number on the zone map will be highlighted as well.

If the area of interest is large, for example, and a player needs to kill a number of quest creatures or collect quest items found within a large area on the map, the entire questing area of interest around the number on the map will be shaded blue.

If quest objectives can be accomplished in multiple areas of the zone; for example, certain creatures need to be killed for a quest and have several different locations, the map will automatically display the nearest area of interest in proximity to the player.

Shrunken Map and Objectives Tracking
When viewing the large zone map ('M' key), players can click the arrow in the top right corner to bring the zone map out of full-screen mode.

The map will show all areas of interest for the zone; however the other three interface panes will be removed so players can still view their character, spells, and abilities with the map open. The standard quest objectives window has been improved and will now show numbers next to each quest displayed, or a gold question mark if the quest has been completed.

The objectives window is now docked below the mini-map, next to the right two action bars and can display up to ten active quests in the zone. Players can toggle between minimizing and maximizing this quest objectives window at any time by clicking on the red arrow in the top right corner of the objectives frame.

Quest Difficulty Tracking
This feature is turned off by default and players can choose "Color Quest Difficulty" under Objectives in the Interface Options menu to enable it. Enabling this option will color-code all quest names in the new map interface according to the player's level (grey, green, yellow, orange, and red).

This new feature has been built to work with nearly every quest in World of Warcraft with only a few exceptions. For example, if a quest requires that a player turns in some sort of cloth or other trade goods that can be purchased from other players, the map will not display an area of interest for where these items can be found.

All other quests, whether they require players to slay groups of creatures, gather some type of quest object, or hunt down a single specific target, will be tracked on the map, provided that the player is viewing the map of the zone in which these objectives can be completed.

Blue posts

Quote from Blizzard staff Satchet of Helpful Goods reward from low level random dungeons
It appears the contents are different depending on the level of the character. From what I can see, it looks like one Rare quality item, possibly with random stats. Seems to be one of every type of wearable item, except weapons and trinkets. There's a chance I'm reading the data wrong, but that's how it appears to me.

2010 Blizzcon in Vegas?

Posted by SagenNovember 13, 2009 at 12:09 pm

There are rumors floating around (and Blizzard is denying it left and right) that the 2010 Blizzcon will be held in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This would make sense since I think the Anaheim Convention Center is getting a little too small for the event.

Since Blizz is denying this change of venue (so far) I don't recommend you spend anything on travel just yet.

Tanking 3.3 and into Cataclysm

Posted by SagenNovember 12, 2009 at 3:11 pm

A must read for tanks, healers and melee.

Quote from Wow.com

In patch 3.3 Blizzard is implementing a 20% dodge reduction via a spell that will be present in Icecrown Citadel's raid called Chill of the Throne. As Daelo points out, if your tank had 30% dodge, he now has 10%. They are doing this in order to negate the spike damage that's become prevalent in raids lately.

So while dodge will be nerfed, the ceiling on damage given to a tank will likely decrease. This will in turn, at least theoretically, make healing more about strategy (applying HoTs and planning heals) and less reactive (twitch response to apply the biggest heal at exactly the right time).

This is interesting to note as it's a move towards the Cataclysm way of tanking, as has been explained by Ghostcrawler: less avoidance on tanks, less spike damage, and thus requiring smaller heals.

Quotes from Blizzard staff, compiled by Wow.com From Daelo:

For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Why are we doing this?

The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we've implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.

We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.

Ghostcrawler has also chimed in:

Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion.

The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance -- basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.

Additional relevant statement from Ghostcrawler yesterday:

What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can't just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.

Blue posts

Posted by SagenNovember 11, 2009 at 2:04 pm

Quote from Blizzard staff Random Dungeons and Heroic Lockout
It's not that you don't get saved to a Heroic dungeon when using the Random Option in the tool; rather, the Random Option will ignore your Heroic lockouts if you continue to use it, though it will attempt to weight the chance of being randomly selected for a Heroic dungeon to which you've been saved lower than those to which you have not, provided there are enough people in the queue to fill a group for an alternate instance without making you wait an excessive amount of time for a dungeon you have yet to do.

5-Man Dungeons Loot Quality
We tend to provide better loot for forward progression, not the other way around. So you'll see better loot in the three Icecrown Citadel five-player wings (which will include the chance to embark upon the epic quest line to obtain Quel'Delar) given that the dungeon is tuned for higher gear levels than Oculus, just as you see better loot in Trial of the Champion than existing Wrath of the Lich King dungeons today. I'd prefer it if you didn't call it an act of laziness either, as there are plenty of new items with unique art being added in the 3.3 content update.

In any event, given that Oculus will award Emblems of Triumph in patch 3.3, two Emblems of Frost if it's your first Heroic dungeon of the day run via the Random Dungeon option in the Dungeon system, and two additional Emblems of Triumph if you complete the Heroic dungeon via the Random Dungeon option each time after that, you're technically provided access to better rewards -- and a faster accumulation of emblems -- than you are today.

Oculus difficulty
It's funny. Last week several community managers, developers, encounter designers, and quality assurance folk logged in to the test realms to try out the Dungeon tool by playing in pick-up groups with players via the Random Dungeon option. One of the encounter designers was hit with Oculus first. In jest, we all had a good laugh at the choice provided him for his first go. No one left the group and they cleared it in a flash, I believe getting the 20-minute achievement as well. This was before creatures and bosses were tuned down a bit, and vehicle gear-scaling improved on the test realms.

It's anecdotal to be sure, but players certainly didn't shy away from enjoying the time running the dungeon with a Blizzard employee; and they had little trouble clearing it. It's one of the faster dungeons in Wrath if done right. Maybe we should implement a system where, every time Oculus is selected for you in the Dungeon tool, a Blizzard employee is put in your group. :p

[...] This might not fully address your question, but part of the reason the changes were made to Oculus was due to the fact that players were shying away from that dungeon while testing the Dungeon system more often than they were from other dungeons. This is the type of data we're watching on the test realms, particularly when features such as this come along.

Are the test realm players a typical sample audience? Perhaps not. But in the grand scheme of our World of Warcraft player base, I wouldn't even say those regularly running Heroic dungeons are a good sample audience. This is a large game and people enjoy many different aspects of it, some more so than others.

Vault of Archavon Difficulty
The vault bosses are designed and meant to be very puggable so pretty much anybody can do them (within reason of course). The problem this brings about is what gear they can drop. If we put tokens on them then they are guaranteed loot for everybody in a very easy way - when gear is this easy to get we generally wouldn't want it to be as good. By making it so it's basically a lottery on what drops/what you get we feel we can put some top notch gear on the bosses and it doesn't cause any big issues.

Rogue
Weapon Swapping
Let me put it this way....

Fine: A rogue changes targets so needs to swap weapons to get a different poison on that target. This is more of a strategic thing -- something you only do a few times per fight.

Not fine: A rogue swaps weapons constantly on the same target in order to get lots of poisons on that target. This is more of a hassle, not an interesting decision the player is making. This is more in line with a caster switching weapons to maximize a proc and then swapping back. It's not fun and it feels like you have to do this annoying and unintuitive (unless you read the forums a lot) trick to maximize your dps.

Now like someone said above, you could make a weapon swapping mod for say Feral druids and few people would feel the need to use it. It's not the existence of a mod that's a problem. Mods do lots of crazy things. It's a problem if it feels mandatory to raiding rogues. That however is a very subjective call and one that's ultimately up to us to make. We're keeping an eye on it.

The solution is very easy (conceptually) - when Deadly Poison procs and a 5-stack is on the target, cause your other hand's poison to proc. This effectively replicates the effect of weapon swapping, works for all specs, and slightly buffs rogue PVE DPS beyond where it's at right now - something which rogues are in dire need of, looking at the parses coming out of 3.3 so far. Additionally, it ensures that raiding rogues will use Deadly Poison, as Blizzard has worked so hard to make it attractive to us.

We've heard that suggestion a few times and it might be something we explore. We'd certainly rather make swapping not necessary rather than just be mean and prevent it.

Some of you are posting that rogues will use anything that maximizes their dps and this maximizes their dps. That's not really the point.

Our original comment on swapping was that it appeared to provide a marginal dps increase and we knew that some rogues who tried it weren't happy with how it worked because the risk was high of screwing something up. So while it theoretically maximized dps, it was risky enough and the gain low enough that we weren't sure it would become mainstream.

Now things are trending that the dps increase is significant and Adrine's mod is written so well that it takes a lot of the risk away, even in PvP. That weights things more towards doing something about it, though judging from Adrine's posts, I don't think he'll mind.

Rogues aren't getting nerfed
Agreed. We're not interested in nerfing rogues here, just making an annoying mechanic less attractive.

Warlock
Soulshatter hit chance
As far as we know, Soulshatter always hits. It isn't tied to any other talent, such as Suppression. It would still hit if you had zero +hit on your gear. This was changed at some point after LK launched.

Fel Armor healing threat
Fel Armor causes no healing threat in 3.3. This was a relatively recent change though.