Difficulty Adjustments to Ulduar
Quote from: Daelo (Source)
We're currently in the process of making further difficulty adjustments via hotfix to the following encounters:
? Ignis the Furnace Master
? Razorscale
? XT-002 Deconstructor
? The Assembly of Iron
? Kologarn
? Auriaya
The difficulty of these encounters is being lowered in multiple ways. Some of the adjustments are live already, others will be live soon. Note that some of the spell tooltips for the encounter will not reflect the hotfixes being deployed until the next patch. As the hotfixes are deployed, the Service Status board will be updated. You can check the current hotfix thread here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft....icId=16474158165&sid=1
Further adjustments are highly likely to some of the other encounters in Ulduar, but these were the highest priority encounters for us. We want to allow additional players to experience more of the cool Ulduar content.
Recent In-Game Fixes - 04/28
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)
Keep in mind that some of these changes my require the realm to be restarted to take effect.
Noblegarden
? Spring Flowers will not cast or go on cooldown if the target already has the buff.
Ulduar
? Pure Saronite mining nodes have temporarily been disable in Ulduar and will return in the future.
? The Ignis the Furnace Master encounter has received the following changes: The interrupt effect and duration of the damage from Flame Jets has been reduced, the damage from the Slag pot has been reduced, the number of Heat stacks needed to transform an Iron Construct into a Molten state has been reduced, the base melee damage done by Ignis has been reduced, and the damage bonus Ignis receives from Strength of the Creator has been slightly increased.
? The Assault Bots on the Mimiron encounter will now attack faster, in turn they will do less damage per hit.
? The XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has received the following changes: The duration of Tympanic Trantrum has been reduced, the timer for XT-002 to hit berserk has been increased, the damage of Light Bomb has been reduced, the effect radius of Light Bomb has been reduced, and the health of XM-024 Pummeler has been reduced.
? The aggro radius for several trash mobs before General Vezax has been reduced and the health has been reduced on Void Beasts and Faceless Horrors.
? The Kologarn encounter has received the following changes: The damage of Stone Grip has been reduced, the amount of time to break someone out from the right hand has been increased, the radius and damage of Rumble has been reduced, and the damage of Focused Eyebeam has been reduced.
? The Assembly of Iron encounter has received the following changes: The damage of Rune of Death has been reduced, the damage of Chain Lightning has been reduced, and the damage of Lightning Whirl has been reduced.
Vault of Archavon
? The Emalon encounter has received the following changes: The total health of the Tempest Minions has been reduced and Emalon?s Chain Lightning spell will now have a limit on the number of targets it can hit.
Priest (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
? The effectiveness of the Priest spell Divine Hymn has been reduced.
? The Priest ability Soul Warding now only reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by 15% instead of 30%. The tooltip for this spell will be updated at a later date.
? Glyph of Mass dispel will now reduce the cost of the spell by only 35%.
Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Classes
Two-Hand Tanking Weapons
There are some high stamina, 2-handed maces in the game currently. However, 2 handed weapons are not in the immediate future going to be given tanking statistics. This is simply because both of the classes who can use these items to tank have been, more or less, designed around the premise that they would not need the additional itemization in those slots to make them effective. We also don't want to create an entirely new branch of items that will also clog up loot tables for a fraction of the population, especially when it's been handled in other more unique ways. (Source)
Ulduar
Yogg-Saron Clouds bug
We're looking into this, and can verify that you can rarely trigger the spawning of a Guardian of Yogg-Saron without being "in" the cloud. (Source)
Player versus Player
Arena Balance
? 1) Players tend to over-emphasize whatever makes the strongest case for themselves. We do have Arena teams beyond 2s and 2s are probably always going to be the trickiest to balance.
? 2) Even if we do nothing, comps tend to change over time. Players develop counter strategies and new fotms roll around. That isn't an excuse to do nothing, but it is worth keeping in mind.
? 3) We let DK and pally stay dominant too long last season. Rogue - priest looks like it is heading the same way. We don't think it's good for the pvp game for such comps to be so dominant.
? 4) We are happy with both classes in PvE. Any changes would just be for PvP reasons. Glyphs are a good place to look.
? 5) I would like to personally request that you chill any "QQ got us nerfed" rhetoric. We'd much rather focus on the classes in question and not our decision making process.
Strands of the Ancients coin toss
The plan is to implement the virtual coin toss at the beginning of the match randomizing which faction starts on defense in an upcoming patch. This was originally slated for 3.1 but had to be pushed back. Other temporary fixes for the issue would take just as long to implement, if not result in the same issues caused by randomizing offense/defense that came about in Beta. (Source)
Upcoming Patch (see the announcement)
Equipement Manager and new Argent Tournament mounts
These improvements had been in the works already. We have a hierarchy of things that must make a patch and things that we can add in later. We often utilize the smaller patches (when we can) to implement things that either needed further testing or needed additional time. Large patches often have many interconnected items sewn within the technology and the way we want things to work that make some aspects absolutely necessary to implementing the patch as a whole. Smaller patches can and do happen as we need them to in order to better support the larger patches either by implementing a starting framework, implementing bug fixes, or adding new elements that can stand on their own.
We definitely have a schedule (internal) that we are working from and are doing what we can to keep on that schedule as much as possible. Things like this,often have less impact on the release of large content patches.
Argent Tournament Mounts clarifications
The current mounts in the game are being updated to the new look. If you already purchased a mount from the Argent Tournament vendor by the time this minor patch goes live, your mount will be updated with the new look automatically. The cost for the updated mounts (new look) will be 100 Champion's Seals. [...] Just to clarify on this point, the new ways of obtaining Champion's Seals will not be added until the next major content patch (not the minor content patch referenced in the original post of this thread). (Source)