As you can imagine, we’ve been extremely busy lately and so we’ve gotten behind on answering your theorycrafting questions posted in the original Beta Class Balance Analysis thread. Rest assured, we’re still reading and appreciating the feedback. Keep it coming! As you may be able to tell from the changes in the recent builds, we’re generally tweaking damage, healing, and other attributes up and down to get balance just right. This is an iterative process so you may see alternating buffs and nerfs to your class between builds.

We’re getting progressively closer to balance with each build. Despite some of the proclamations we’ve read lately, no class is intended to be on the bottom of the meters. The difference between the highest and the lowest DPS in the latest build is not 30%, 20%, or even 10%. Though certain fights may favor specific specs, we’re actually seeing most specs within 5% of each other. There are a few exceptions, however, which we intend to bring in line soon: Subtlety, Frost DKs, and Frost mages. Most are actually within 2% but the few in the 2-5% range (Arms, Fury, Marksmanship, Survival) will also be brought in line soon as well. Of course, we’ll be vigilant with keeping an eye on balance and making necessary tuning tweaks as time permits.

We understand that some of the theorycrafting community may disagree with the numbers. This tends to be because they’re doing things that we don’t expect, or because the theorycrafting is inaccurate. There’s certainly going to be some confusion, but one of the goals of this thread is to provide accurate clarification. If you’re seeing substantial differences between specs, please try to identify where the discrepancies are. If a spec seems overpowered or underpowered according to the theorycraft, double-check it for accuracy by comparing it to actual results. If that checks out, maybe there’s something that you’re doing that we don’t expect; please present that info in a concise way, with as much supporting evidence (both theorycraft and especially actual log parses) as possible. We can’t debug everyone’s theorycraft, but we can try to identify large discrepancies.

Now, to catch up on questions…

08/17/2012 08:16 PMPosted by Aranis

For the past several builds Death Knights have been seeing data mined info for Death Coil showing a 1.2x multiplier for the Unholy spec. We initially thought this was to account for the loss of the Morbidity talent, however we haven't see this actually make it onto the servers. Is this multiplier intended to be there and if so will we be seeing it in a future build?

We’re not sure what 1.2x multiplier you’re seeing; can you point it out? We believe it’s doing the correct amount of damage so perhaps there’s a tooltip bug.

08/17/2012 08:36 PMPosted by Grundyus

GC, since you have access to the internal gear stat budgets, can you tell me whether it should it be viable for Monks to use Strength [Parry + Dodge/Mastery] gear (Cloaks, Necks, Rings) and should Brewmasters be getting Parry from Strength like Plate Tanks do?

No, only the plate tanks get significant parry from Strength. Brewmasters should be wearing Agility jewelry.

Regarding racial expertise and weapons, I would like to know what would happen in the following scenario:

7.50% on-gear hit rating, 6.50% on-gear expertise, Main hand Axe, Off hand Sword, racial expertise (either sword or axe)

Would you be spell hit capped or not?

OK, update on spell hit from expertise from weapon racials: It should count expertise on your main hand as spell hit. In the situation you described, an orc (axe racial, which is in the MH) would be spell hit capped, and a human (sword racial, which is in the OH) would not. The character sheet UI should properly reflect this, however, there’s currently a bug on beta where it’s not actually giving you this benefit. That will be fixed soon.

08/18/2012 10:08 AMPosted by Swizzleqt

Execution Sentence is consuming Glyph of Flash of Light, but is seeing no increase in the healing done. Is it supposed to consume the effect and receive the increase or is it not supposed to interact with the glyph at all?

Sounds like a bug. We’ll look into that.

Cobra Strike Behaviour(possible bug)

As stated on the tooltip, it's supposed to make the next 2 pet's basic hits, a critical hit. However I've done much testing on this subject and it appears that it does not behave in the way that it should be.

Also sounds like a bug. We’ll look into that, too.

08/19/2012 01:06 AMPosted by Purge

It appears that there's a hidden ICD on stormlash that prevents synchronized mh+oh swings from both triggering the effect.

Yes, there is a very short ICD on Stormlash. We’ll look into whether we need to have that or not.

We removed Tiger Strikes from Brewmasters and adjusted the proc rates of Elusive Brew and Gift of the Ox to account for the reduced number of normal attacks that they'll be doing.

Please explain this change

Sure. Tiger Strikes was removed, but we didn’t want to nerf the proc rate of Elusive Brew or Gift of the Ox. So, we increased the proc rate of Elusive Brew and Gift of the Ox by 50%. Elusive Brew now adds up to 3 charges per crit: [1.5*WeaponSpeed/2.6] for 1H weapons, and [3.0*WeaponSpeed/3.6] for 2H weapons. Gift of the Ox now has a higher proc rate on white attacks: [0.03*WeaponSpeed] for 1H weapons, and [0.06*WeaponSpeed] for 2H weapons.

08/19/2012 02:28 PMPosted by Zizith

1. Riptide is consuming both the unleashed life and fury buffs, yet only the direct portion is benefiting from the unleashed fury buff. Both the direct and hot portions are benefiting from unleashed life, but the hot is not being affected by unleashed fury.

And sounds like a bug. We’ll check it out.

08/19/2012 02:28 PMPosted by Zizith

2. Healing Rain is not consuming unleashed fury (it's working with unleashed life fine).

Not a bug! Unleashed Fury is a buff on the target and Healing Rain is a persistent AoE. We didn’t think you’d want it to just increase the crit chance of a single Healing Rain tick and then end up getting consumed by it.

08/19/2012 02:46 PMPosted by Halanad

What is the design intent behind the engineer MoP "bomb" G91 Landshark? Currently on the beta it can be used by anyone, engineer or not, and has a 1 min cooldown but can only be used once per fight. Are these intended to be sellable to all players?

Yes, there are several engineer-created items in Mists which are usable by non-engineers and sellable. These are indeed intended to be usable as consumables in raids. However, the Landsharks you mentioned share a cooldown with combat potions so these are an alternative.

Let me restate the point that Lissanna (and GC) were making. Your question, as posed, is based on the 37K difference you see in the sims. The sims are not data. They are tools to help point at where we should look for data. If the number 37K makes you itch, then look for or generate real data (i.e., logs) from the game that support your concern. A large spread in the sim might mean there's a large spread in the game. But it's more likely that the high and low classes have small sim bugs that push them up or down. It's also more likely that the sim action profiles of the low classes could be improved. Your question may be a good question, but again, as posed, it's unsupported.

For hunters, for example, MM has been consistently low in the sims. Based on that, I would try to confirm that in game, not whine at Blizzard that MM sucks. It led Zeherah and I to find a bug in how the T14 4-piece bonus was implemented (in sims) that disproportionately affected MM. Whitefyst identified priority bogosities (e.g., glaive toss may be a dps loss during careful aim). It pointed to a missing ICD for lock and load (because SV was simmed as too many LnL procs). On the flip side, the sims have also led to improvements in the game: e.g., they point to places where MM could potentially haste cap (and Blizzard fixed it), noted that it now could now crit cap (which may be deliberate), where focus fire would not be worth using (Blizzard tweaked it), etc.

So again, if you don't like the number from a sim, dig in and understand it better. Then find a real issue with real data.

This is an awesome post!

Wrathguard vs Felguard Head to Head Comparison [and other warlock testing]

Thanks for that. We recently did another pass on warlock pet damage and found (and fixed) a few more issues. The most recent build that went up should have resolved the issues. Please test it again and let us know what you find.

08/19/2012 11:17 PMPosted by Foxstar

The T30 talents no longer proc Eminence, is this intended?

Yes. Monks are a new class and Mistweavers in particular use a very new style of healing, so this definitely has the potential to change, but our general philosophy is that abilities which do both damage and healing don’t need to cause Eminence. The only exception that we can recall offhand is Chi Torpedo and we may also change that to not cause Eminence to be consistent.

08/19/2012 11:17 PMPosted by Foxstar

Also channeling CJL allows me to cast Enveloping Mist instantly, though Surging Mist does not do the same, so it feels like a bug that EM does become instant.

Yep, bug. We believe that was fixed in the most recent build.

08/19/2012 11:17 PMPosted by Foxstar

Lastly, earlier in beta, we could cast Soothing Mist on one target, then EM on another. Recently, this is longer possible, though the CJL bug allows me to do it once again. Was it a bug being able to cast EM on anyone that wasn't Soothing Mist's target?

This is intended. Being able to cast Enveloping Mist and Surging Mist instantly while channeling Soothing Mist is intended to be used to pump more healing into the target you’re channeling. You’re not intended to just keep channeling Soothing Mist on anyone and be able to cast instant Enveloping/Surging on different people.

08/20/2012 04:01 AMPosted by Evatar

People from EJ ran test on Demo (special thanks to whi for his time) to find your hidden nerfs (you did say they were coming, but not updating tooltips is mean).

It’s not done out of meanness. We’re just applying many of our balance/tuning tweaks as hotfixes directly to beta, and that means the tooltips will be out of date until you get a new client build. That said, there are a few known bugs with warlock spells having the tooltip damage wrong, regardless of hotfixes involved. If you encounter any spells that give you grief when figuring out your formulas, let us know and we’ll try to help out. In general, we usually change both the base damage and SP scaling of a spell at the same time (though not necessarily by the same amounts). If you see only one of those change at a time, it’s a good hint that you may want to retest and make sure you’ve got the formula right.

08/20/2012 10:20 AMPosted by Reeth

The melee attack speed buff does not change the cooldown tooltips on abilities affected by Sanctity of Battle, for Retribution at least - and it doesn't seem like it's just tooltips not updating, but that they're not being affected at all. Is this intentional? Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing as long as we're balanced around Sanctity of Battle not benefiting from it.

This is intended. The raid buff you’re referring to increases melee and ranged attack speed, not haste. Sanctity of Battle only uses actual haste.

Hey, just workin on some spreadsheets and was wondering if anyone had the formulas for the following:

1. Healing Tide Totem
2. Healing Stream Totem
3. Earth Shield

I'm using the formulas given on wowhead/wowdb, but it would be nice to have the actual formulas (the numbers tend to be consistently off). Also, for Healing Tide, what's the min/max for it's heal (the tooltip only gives one number, but it's not acting like HST where you're getting the same heal 7 times in a row). Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Looks like the data minable formula for Healing Tide is accurate, but the tooltip is mistakenly only showing the minimum healing amount. It actually heals for that amount plus up to 798 at level 90. That’s before multipliers (like Purification and Mastery), by the way.

Healing Stream’s tooltip does indeed seem to be wrong. We’ll try to get that fixed. The actual healing amount (again, before multipliers), is 44.5% of SP.

Earth Shield’s tooltip also seems to be wrong. It’s actually 18.5% of SP, plus 2043 at level 90 (and again, before multipliers).

I've got a question about Berserker Stance.

A recent post linked to a video of a Fire mage demonstrating burst. The target was a warrior, and over the course of a few seconds of high damage, its rage level jumped to full.

Unless I've missed a data dump, there's been a big knowledge gap about how the stance generates rage per damage (I, and I think a lot of other players didn't realize it was so dynamic). Any information you can give?

Sure. While in Berserker Stance, you gain 1 rage for every 1% of your health lost to damage.

There have been reports of absolutely ridiculous amounts of DPS being done with HotW.

As a Guardian, Wrath is hitting for ~140k with a SP weapon when active. Similar values are being reported for Healing Touch.

I know I've been saying that HotW needed a buff, but even I think that's a little on the overboard side of things.

The intention was that HotW allows you to DPS as strong as an equally-geared druid of each other spec on average. In other words, if a Guardian druid can Wrath for 140k with a 2sec cast, that’s 70k DPS before haste and crit. However, we’re not sure what gear exactly that was in, or with what cooldowns involved (it does seem on the high side). If you do any testing of how much DPS each spec can do while HotW’d into each other spec, we’d be very interested in seeing it. It’s quite possible that we over-buffed some of the combinations.

Random aside: If anyone has logs that they’d like to share with us but keep private, we understand. Just post here about it and we’ll see if there’s anything we can do. No promises, though.

08/21/2012 07:39 PMPosted by Cybrex

I am a bit confused with Glyph: Dark Soul (Destruction).

Without the glyph, Dark Soul grants 30% crit while active. With the glyph it grants 27% while active and 3% while off cooldown. Does that answer your question?

We understand the passion many of you have about class balance and particular abilities, but we would like to remind you of the intended structure of this thread. I don’t want to mince words so here is what Zarhym posted in the original thread:

For the purposes of keeping this thread as valuable to the developers as possible -- they will be actively reading and likely replying to posts here -- these are some things to know before posting:

First and foremost, as a ground rule let’s keep this one thread free of pleas about ability feedback, DPS being too low or other subjective declarations. This thread should be about information sharing. If you aren’t a theorycrafter, this thread may not be for you.

We feel the numbers are in a pretty good place right now. If you’re a theorycrafter who has been waiting for things to stabilize before submitting your class balance analysis, this is your cue to have at it.

Make no mistake, we’re confident in our ability to balance the game. On the other hand, we greatly value player feedback. And reconciling our numbers with yours is part of that.

Don’t consider this thread to be evidence that we feel class design for Mists of Pandaria is pretty much done. It also shouldn’t be a sign that X issue you may have been posting about for the last month is going to be ignored, or that we just don’t agree with you.

The primary goal is to maintain a relatively stable class system for a healthy period of time in the beta, so the number crunchers among you can really start to get into the nitty-gritty details without worrying that everything will change in the next beta build.

If there are any mechanics that are proving particularly hard to understand, feel free to ask in this thread. We understand there is a narrow line between squelching and fostering the theorycrafting community, and we’re not trying to solve everything for you. On the other hand, we don’t want you to burn too much of your time trying to figure out how potentially confusing mechanics work under the hood (e.g. monk weapon normalization). That said, we won’t just dump the coefficient for every spell -- you should be able to figure that out. However, if you just can’t figure out how a spell is designed, don’t hesitate to ask. We appreciate honest questions.

If you see that your response in this thread has been removed, please take a moment to ensure what you’re theorycrafting and wanting to discuss is within the bounds of Zarhym’s guidance. We don’t like having to be heavy-handed, but there are times where removing clutter is necessary to keep things on track and focused like a laser beam. Thanks for your understanding. =)

08/22/2012 03:38 PMPosted by Dannykin

Is it intended for there to be such a disparity between Starfire and Wrath?

Yes. Lunar side should be noticeably stronger single target damage than Solar side.

In testing Inquisition, I am not seeing the new clipping mechanic that was mentioned a while back. No matter when I refresh it, I always receive exactly 10 seconds per Holy Power used, no extra duration despite pressing the button with some duration remaining.

Is it working as intended? Did the design change? Am I missing something?

It seems to be working for us. As someone else mentioned, it gives extra time in 2-second chunks. If you have 1.8 seconds left on it, the new one will last 11.8 seconds.

08/22/2012 07:51 PMPosted by Romanticidee

How close are the lvl 45 Priest talents on DPS? My testings show SW:I the lowest (~49k), Mindbender ok (~51k) and FDCL procs seems to be bugged (~54k). I've seen 300k+ crits come out very easily with just one spellpower proc.

There was a bug where Mind Spike damage was being calculated incorrectly, but we believe that was recently fixed.

08/22/2012 08:04 PMPosted by Zarantai

Is resurgence intended to proc off each jump of chain heal? Because it's currently only proccing on the initial hit (not the jumps).

Yes, Resurgence can proc individually off of each Chain Heal jump.

Soulburning a pet seems to be triggering a cooldown to manually summon a pet. This is also happening to Soulswap while glyphed after soulburning.

Is this intended?

The first part is intended; the second is a bug.

Is it intended that Glyph of Word of Glory does not trigger when Word of Glory is used as an attack with Glyph of Harsh Words? It used to work and was changed with no change to tooltips recently.

Yes, this was an intentional change. We just haven't updated the tooltip yet which we plan to in an upcoming build.

How does the game cope with non-integer results from the above formulae? For example, say I'm using a 3.0 speed 2h. According to the above formula for 2h, 2.4 and 3.6 speed correspond to 2 and 3 stacks respectively, so 3.0 speed should generate 2.5 stacks every crit. Since only integer numbers of stacks are ever applied in game, though, this means that my crits should be split 50/50 between providing 2 and 3 stacks. Is there a mechanism in place to ensure that this is the case (that I'll get exactly 50% 2-stack procs and 50% 3-stack procs with a 3.0-speed 2h)?

Also, in the provided formulae, what exactly is the WeaponSpeed variable? Is this simply the paper doll value for weapon speed, or are procs taken into account?

It's random; if that formula says that you should get 2.4 stacks on average, then 60% of the time you get 2, 40% of the time you get 3. WeaponSpeed is the raw weapon speed, not hasted.

08/23/2012 02:01 AMPosted by Strawberry

I'm consistently getting 2 charges of Elusive Brew per crit with a 3.6 speed weapon (buffed attack speed is listed on the paperdoll as 2.26).

Is this still happening for you since we applied the latest build? A 3.6-speed weapon should always give 3 charges which is what we're currently seeing in-game. Only the raw speed on the weapon matters--no haste, attack speed buffs, passives, or anything else matter.

08/23/2012 03:21 AMPosted by Tsuki

About brewmasters and Gift of the Ox

We're going to change the 0.03 coefficient for one-hand weapons to 0.037.

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

HST and HTT still not scaling with Haste

We're going to change Healing Stream and Healing Tide Totems to benefit from haste, crit, and mastery.

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

Zizith's Chain Heal/Resurgence mechanics post - I am pretty sure Resurgence procs from any critical Chain Heal bounce on live servers, and it's a huge loss in potential regen to have it only working if the first bounce of the Chain Heal crits.

We're seeing all bounces of Chain Heal independently able to trigger Resurgence. Could you double-check this, please?

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

Force of Nature Treants should cast Healing Touch back-to-back so long as there are viable healing targets, so they do not lose potential casts under Heroism or even just from our own Haste. They are also maybe not inheriting our Crit? I got 3 crits out of 40 trials of 18 casts each, and my Crit rating is a lot higher than 0.4% ;)

We’ll see if we can get the trees to be more responsive. They should be inheriting your crit and haste, just not mastery.

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

Soul of the Forest is not affecting Tranquility at all, but Tranquility still consumes the Soul of the Forest buff.

The devs just tried this out today and when they looked at the data, everything seemed to be functioning properly. The haste from Soul of the Forest is reducing the channel time of Tranquility. It does not affect the HoT from that Tranquility, though, because it’s already been consumed by reducing the channel time.

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

Dream of Cenarius is not increasing the HoT portion of Swiftmend, even though that is now part of the spell itself and no longer an additional talent with a different spell name. DoC does work to empower both the direct heal and HoT components of Regrowth, which is IMO a similar enough spell to Swiftmend now that it should work both ways.

A fair point. It's not built such that that would work, but we'll consider making it work that way for the future.

08/23/2012 04:33 AMPosted by Dayani

Is the healing of Wild Mushrooms still being reworked? Transferring the mana cost to the Bloom spell instead of the Mushroom summon spell was a great change, but the Mushrooms themselves still do not heal for enough to warrant their usage. I could see very occasional use for them in fights where there is a long lull and the 3 seconds we spend setting up the mushrooms does not interfere with our healing, but honestly, using the GCD to blow them up is just not as compelling as using that GCD instead to cast a Wild Growth, or a Swiftmend, or even 1.5 Rejuvenations!

Wild Mushroom: Bloom (and Detonate) are instant and off the GCD. If you place them ahead of time, detonating them does not take any time away from casting anything else. They’re not intended to be used for sustained healing or damage, only for burst healing or damage.

08/23/2012 01:16 AMPosted by Robosaurus

Soul of the Forest does not give energy when used on Ferocious Bite, it correctly works with SR/Rip/Maim.

Yep, we found this bug and we'll get it fixed as quickly as we can. It actually wasn't always working with Rip, either.

08/23/2012 10:02 AMPosted by Gistwiki

Just wanted to check on one thing that I've seen since the recent Lightning Bolt nerfs - Is it intended that Lightning Bolt be below Chain Lightning for single target situations in entry level gear?

While a little bit of this is alright, we don’t want it to be a significant difference. We’re currently planning to increase the % of the damage that is chained through Chain Lightning, and reduce the initial damage at the same time. That will in effect nerf it for use against a single target but not against a group.

08/23/2012 01:08 PMPosted by Tsukiyuri

What exactly are the proc rates, ICD (if any), and hidden rules of the MoP weapon enchants?

Ask, and ye shall receive:

River's Song: 2PPM on melee attacks that land, or are dodged, or parried.

Dancing Steel: 1PPM on melee attacks that land.

Colossus: 3PPM on melee attacks that land, or are dodged, or parried, with a 3-second cooldown.

Elemental Force: 5PPM on melee damage, or non-periodic spell damage/healing, with a 0.1-second cooldown.

Jade Spirit: 10% chance on spell damage or healing, 50-second cooldown.

Windsong: 1PPM on melee damage, or non-periodic spell damage/healing, with a 1-second cooldown.

Is it intended to have Grimoire of Sacrifice only work with one talent in the level 45 tier?

Actually, all of the level-45 tier warlock talents function fine with Grimoire of Sacrifice. When you have Soul Link, Grimoire of Sacrifice also increases your max health by 20%. If you have no pet out (for instance, if it was sacrificed), Sacrificial Pact will absorb an amount equal to your current health in exchange for costing half your current health. And Dark Bargain has no pet interaction, so that works fine.

08/23/2012 10:53 PMPosted by Kihra

So my co-tank and I verified tonight that not putting up Weakened Blows will give you more Vengeance.

Good point! We’ll factor Weakened Blows out of the Vengeance calculations.

As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy, so forgive us for not getting to these questions sooner.

We first wanted to update you with several tuning tweaks that we made recently that are not showing up correctly on your client tooltips (either beta or live). We wanted to document these so-called "stealth" buffs and nerfs to aid theorycrafting and avoid any confusion. We hope to get updated tooltips to the client soon (tm).

I should also note that these are very typical of the kinds of changes we make at this stage in development now that everything else has stabilized. We're not making more changes than normal, but just trying to document them better.

AoE damage adjustments

-- Sweeping Strikes now deals 50% of the triggering hit’s damage to an additional nearby target, down from 100%. Arms’ cleave damage was extremely high.
-- We reduced the damage dealt by Glyphed Ice Lance to a second target to 40% of normal damage.
-- Warlock sustained AoE damage was significantly too high, across the board. We reduced the base damage multiplier on Fire and Brimstone from 45% to 35%, and reduced the damage of Seed of Corruption, Felstorm, Wrathstorm, Harvest Life, Hellfire, Immolation Aura, and Void Ray by 30%.
-- We reduced the damage of Divine Storm by 25%. Retribution Paladins were significantly too high on sustained AoE damage.
-- Frost Death Knights needed a boost, so we increased the damage of Howling Blast to secondary targets up to 80% of the primary damage, from 50%.
-- Chain Lightning now deals 17.5% less damage to the primary target, but chains 80% of the damage to each successive target, up from 70%. This should help spread the damage better, and also reduce the damage against a single target. The total damage remains the same, when glyphed.
-- We increased the damage of Hurricane by 7.5%. Moonkin sustained AoE damage was too low, and we also wanted to emphasize Solar’s dominance over Lunar for AoE.
-- We increased the damage of Mind Sear by 30%. Shadow sustained AoE was significantly low. It should still be preferable to multi-DoT on a few targets, but this should make Mind Sear a more attractive option against larger groups.
-- We increased the damage of Swipe and Thrash by 6.5% in Cat Form. Ferals were a bit low on AoE damage.
-- Rogues needed a rather significant boost to their sustained AoE damage. We opted to give that to them in the form of buffing something that was previously primarily there for utility, not damage, by a very large amount, turning it into a major damage button. We increased the damage of Crimson Tempest’s DoT by 700%.
-- Beast Master AoE-focused pets were extremely overpowered for sustained AoE. We reduced the damage of Froststorm Breath and Burrow Attack by 50%, and increased their costs from 20 to 50. These pets should still be a sustained DPS gain to use, but not quite so absurdly so.
-- We increased the damage of Spinning Crane Kick, Rushing Jade Wind, Crackling Tiger Lightning, and Chi Torpedo by 10%. We also reduced the period and duration of Spinning Crane Kick by 25%, and made it affected by melee haste.

Single target damage adjustments

-- We increased the damage of Ice Lance by 12.5%.
-- We reduced the damage bonus to Frost Strike on Threat of Thassarian from 50% to 40%. Dual-wielding Frost was a bit higher than two-handed Frost.
-- We fixed a significant bug that was affecting Frost Mage damage. Frostfire Bolt was not benefitting from Frostburn (Mastery). After fixing that, we brought their DPS back down by reducing the damage boost that the Frostbolt debuff provides from 8% per stack to 5% per stack.
-- We reduced the damage increase to spells from Dream of Cenarius from 65% down to 50%.
-- We reduced the attack power buff of Rabid from +50% to +25%. BM hunters needed to come down a bit, especially in burst.
-- We had previously buffed Snake Trap's appalling damage, but it was high enough that hunters might have started using it in single-target rotations, which wasn't intended. We reduced the melee damage of the snakes by 75%.

Tank survivability adjustments

-- We were concerned that Blood DKs were too susceptible to spike damage. Blood DKs rely on being able to take damage and then heal it back, despite taking the largest hits of any tank. This works fine most of the time, but strings of unavoided hits or really large hits in a row might have presented a problem. We chose not to reduce damage taken, but to increase their maximum health instead. The stamina buff from Blood Presence from +8% to +25%.
-- Brewmasters were proving extremely strong because they could maintain Shuffle as much as they wanted and Purify a very large amount of Staggered damage. Additionally, despite being very avoidance-heavy, they also were taking very smooth damage, since Stagger blunts so much of the attack’s damage. We reduced the base Stagger amount from 30% to 25%, and reduced the bonus energy regen provided by Stance of the Sturdy Ox from +30% to +10%.

Miscellaneous adjustments

-- We increased the duration of Glyph of Mind Spike from 6 sec to 9 sec.
-- We increased the healing of Chi Torpedo by 25%, but Chi Torpedo and Expel Harm no longer cause Eminence. As mentioned before, the general principle here is that spells and abilities which do both damage and healing are balanced around the healing they do, and don’t need to do additional healing through Eminence.
-- While we feel the damage of the warrior's Dragon Roar is balanced with the other two talents, the length of the stun feels gratuitous and helps prevent targets from being able to use defensive abilities. We're reducing the duration of the Dragon Roar stun to 0.5 sec, but changing its diminishing return category to the random / proc stun.
-- Finally, we were worried about mage mana regeneration at level 85. Arcane in particular works better when it has the advantage of the level 90 talents. Once Mists is released, Arcane will be able to perform fine while leveling up and running the occasional dungeon. However, we're in this rare "lame duck" period where players are still actively running what will very soon be lower level content (i.e. Dragon Soul and the 4.3 dungeons). As a temporary measure, we've doubled mage mana regen across the board to 2% per sec up until level 85. This bonus will start scaling down by 20% per level between 85 and 90.

There may be additional band-aids we need to apply (to any class) to account for the fact that the game is now largely balanced around level 90. The game systems need to function at all character levels, and they will, but most players will care a lot less about level 85 balance in a few short weeks.

If you believe any of these buffs, nerfs of changes to be inappropriate, you're welcome to share your feedback, but you will likely need stronger evidence than a link to the latest output from Simcraft or other simulations. :)

Secondly, we posted details on several weapon enchant procs previously, which seemed particularly useful. With that in mind, here are some more:

-- Lord Blastington’s Scope of Doom – 1 PPM, no ICD.
-- Vision of the Predator – 15% chance on direct/periodic spell damage dealt, 105 sec ICD.
-- Carbonic Carbuncle – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 105 sec ICD.
-- Windswept Pages – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 65 sec ICD.
-- Searing Words – 45% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell crit, 85 sec ICD.
-- Light of the Cosmos – 15% chance on periodic damage, 45 sec ICD.
-- Essence of Terror – 15% chance on harmful spell landing, 105 sec ICD.
-- Terror in the Mists – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 105 sec ICD.
-- Darkmist Vortex – 15% chance on direct white/melee/harmful-spell landing, 105 sec ICD.
-- Relic of Yulon – 20% chance on direct/periodic spell damage, 50 sec ICD.
-- Relic of Xuen (STR) – 20% chance on white/yellow melee landing, 45 sec ICD.
-- Relic of Xuen (AGI) – 20% chance on white/yellow/ranged crit, 55 sec ICD.
-- Killing Machine – 6 PPM on white melee landing, no ICD.
-- Sudden Doom – 3 PPM on white melee landing, no ICD.
-- Fangs of the Father
---- Assassination: 23.139% chance on white/yellow melee landing, no ICD.
---- Combat: 9.438% chance on white/yellow melee landing, no ICD.
---- Subtlety: 28.223% chance on white/yellow melee landing, no ICD.
---- These chances are multiplied by 0.9 for lvl 89 targets, 0.8 for lvl 90 targets, 0.7 for lvl 91 targets, 0.6 for lvl 92 targets, and 0.5 for lvl 93+ targets.
---- After adding a stack, if you have >30 stacks, you have a [1/(51-stacks)] chance to proc the Fury buff.

When I use the Unleashed Elements attack with Frostbrand Weapon and the Unleashed Fury talent, I go up to 150% speed (according to my character sheet). However, when I switch to Ghost Wolf while in this form, there is no additional speed increase; it stays at 150%, and then after 4 seconds it goes down to 130%. They don't stack. Is this intended?
Is Ghost Wolf's speed increase intended to stack with anything?

This should be fixed soon. Ghost Wolf should stack with other speed increases.

cleave is its not worth using cleave at all as SMF as the damage of heroic strike is 17645 and cleave on two targets is 17643 which is 11 damage difference, although it isn't much at all it still isn't worth using cleave at all, maybe add the do more damage when using one handers like heroic strike has.

We recently made Cleave do 1.4x damage when using a 1H weapon, just like Heroic Strike.

Echo of the Elements appears to duplicate Unleash Flame casts, but not Unleash Frost. Intended?

This should also be fixed soon. Unleash Frost should be able to Echo.

Has anyone figured out (or could a blue just tell us) how the mistweaver mastery proc rate works with AE heals? Does the chance apply evenly to every effective heal from soothing mist to SCK in the middle of 25 people, or do AE heals have the proc chance reduced? If so, by how much?

Since Mistweavers heal from such a significant variety of spells, some of which tick very fast, it’s not purely a raw chance per heal event. The chance displayed on your Mastery tooltip is the base chance, but there’s a multiplier on ticks from various overly frequent sources:

-- Renewing Mist: 0.25
-- Zen Sphere (Periodic): 0.25
-- Soothing Mist: 0.3
-- Soothing Mist (Statue): 0.15
-- Enveloping Mist: 0.2
-- Eminence: 0.2
-- Eminence (Statue): 0.1
-- Chi Torpedo: 0.1
-- Spinning Crane Kick: 0.1

A few more trinket procs. We probably won't go through every quest and dungeon trinket unless that information is really needed.

-- Bottle of Infinite Stars – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 45 sec ICD.
-- Vial of Dragon's Blood – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 45 sec ICD.
-- Lei Shin's Final Orders – 15% chance on direct white/melee/ranged/harmful-spell landing, 45 sec ICD.
-- Qin-xi's Polarizing Seal – 15% chance on direct/periodic spell heal, 45 sec ICD.
-- Spirits of the Sun – 15% chance on direct/periodic spell heal, 105 sec ICD.

Excellent, thanks a lot for that. Since they're not on the list can we assume surging mist, chi wave, chi burst, ZS:D, and Uplift are all at 1.0 multipliers per target?

Updated Gift of the Serpent proc scalars:

• Renewing Mist: 0.15
• Chi Wave: 0.25
• Zen Sphere (Periodic): 0.25
• Zen Sphere (Detonate): 0.15
• Chi Burst: 0.15
• Soothing Mist: 0.3
• Soothing Mist (Statue): 0.15
• Enveloping Mist: 0.2
• Uplift: 0.25
• Revival: 0.15
• Eminence (Self and Xuen): 0.2
• Eminence (Statue): 0.1
• Chi Torpedo: 0.15
• Spinning Crane Kick: 0.1

We said MULTIPLE times that if you limit how much chi we can have, what we are going to do? trim the fat and focus 100% of our chi on shuffle and purefying brew. Christ we been there at least half a dozen times on beta.
Every. Single. Time you guys mess with our energy regen, we left our other skills out of the rotation and focus 100% of our effort on shuffle/PB.

Great, then we’re on the same page. Other than niche situations, Shuffle, Purifying Brew (and Guard, which I assume you also are including) should be where you spend your Chi, just as a Guardian Druid uses nearly all of their rage on Savage Defense or Frenzied Regeneration, or a Protection Paladin uses nearly all of their holy power on Shield of the Righteous or Word of Glory.

The thing that has changed significantly since you last tried 11 (or 10.4) energy/sec base, is that Tiger Palm is free, so you have something to do with the extra time.

- 100% uptime on shuffle for 5 mins require 50 BoK uses or 100 chi.
- that leaves us with 55 chi to spend on other things.
If we use PB every 8 seconds that would cost about 38 chi, leaving 17 to spend on other things.
Long story short we can produce 155 chi and need 138 to keep shuffle up 100% and use PB very often.

You shouldn’t need (or usually want) to keep Shuffle up 100% of the time. You should have a limited amount of resources, that you need to intelligently distribute between Guarding, Shuffling, and Purifying. It shouldn’t be as simple as “Everyday I’m Shuffling”. :)

Now that [Crimson Tempest’s DoT] actually does some dmg could we get the rolling dot mechanic put in this? It currently works like hemo (could we get that on this too) if you use it again with a smaller one it overwrites the bigger dot. Both dots already can't crit just like ignite I would hope they could at least get the rolling mechanic it has.

It’s currently intended to not do that, though it’s something we’re considering.

Are these accurate? I only ask because since the hotfix sub is proccing as slow as combat now and you didn't say anything about it in your hotfix updates post.

Which hotfix? Nothing has changed with this recently.

Does heroic throw reset the swing timer anymore?
If not, please make it do that again, or attach a very minimal rage cost to it. Due to the ability costing 0 rage and not resetting the swing timer (So we think.), it has snuck its way into our single target rotation to fill up empty-gcds.

We purposely left Heroic Throw (and Storm Bolt) not resetting the swing timers for warriors who absolutely can't stand to have idle GCDs. As long as Heroic Throw doesn't push other abilities out of your rotation, we don't have a problem with it.

The problem with that comparison is that other tanks generally don't have a whole lot of abilities they want to use on the same resource as their active mitigation.

Think about it.

Things that use Holy Power other than SotR/WoG: (nothing)
Things that use Rage(Bear) other than SD/FR: Maul
Things that use Rage(War) other than Shield Block/Barrier: Cleave/HS (with no proc)
Things that use Frost/Unholy runes other than Death Strike: Death & Decay (with no proc), Plague Strike/Icy Touch (only used if you let diseases fall off between Outbreak).

Things that use Chi other than Purifying Brew/Blackout Kick: Guard, Level 30 Talents, Rushing Jade Wind, Breath of Fire, and indirectly (via energy) Dizzying Haze, Path of Blossoms, Transcendence: Transfer, Healing Sphere.

It’s true that monks have many resource-consuming "fun buttons," but they’re not unique in that regard. Bears, for example, are limited by both rage and time (which converts to rage). They have Maul to consume rage (at a very poor rage to damage conversion rate, but stackable), and many fun/utility abilities which are on the GCD, so effectively cost rage, or require shifting out of form, which can’t be done while actively tanking, and reset your rage. Paladins can continue using SotR and drop WoG completely for more damage, and are somewhat GCD limited. DKs have Army of the Dead, Chains of Ice, Control Undead, Dark Simulacrum, Glyphed Death Coil, Necrotic Strike, Path of Frost, Raise Ally, and Strangulate.

For Monks, you mention Guard, which is just as important as Blackout Kick and Purifying Brew, not some auxiliary fun/utility button, and Rushing Jade Wind, which is effectively free because it replaces a Blackout Kick. Breath of Fire and the level 30 talents are available to use for more damage, similar to Maul or SotR or Heroic Strike, or for group healing. If Healing Sphere were free, it’d replace Tiger Palm rotationally, and make them defensively GCD-limited. Dizzying Haze, Path of Blossoms, and Transcendence: Transfer are intended to be used at range, or to get to range.

As a Brewmaster, you shouldn’t be using the level 30 talents rotationally, other than perhaps against sustained magic damage, or where their group healing utility is more useful than your own survivability. We fully intend you to maximize your survivability and damage reduction while actively tanking, unless the utility provided by them is especially useful.

The TLDR of all this is something we try and state frequently: you can't just compare classes without evaluating the entire package. Lists of "these all work this way so my thing should work that way too" usually don't present super compelling arguments (for us at least).

Having no wiggle room on Chi generation makes expertise HARD CAP our number one secondary stat. This is a problem. No serious tank I know is concerned with having hit/exp being valuable, but having a exp HARD CAP be number one is a little ridiculous. Before the energy change a minor tweak could have changed it.. now that a missed/dodged/parried Keg Smash is even more detrimental to survivability this quirky the hard cap will have to be met.

Can you provide a source for this? We’re skeptical that hard-capping both hit and expertise is optimal for Brewmasters.

One of the healers for that run, a shaman, was really frustrated last night because she had constant low-on-mana issues that she simply wasn't having before.

There is a two part answer here, and it's a big discussion. First, mana might feel tighter at 85 than it will at 90. As I said above, we spend most of our effort making sure raiding at 90 feels good because after a few more weeks, the number of raids below level 90 will be a very small number. Part of the reason we made sure Dragon Soul was good and nerfed was so that nobody's progression would be unduly affected by the level 90 numbers.

Second, mana was a non issue for many raid healers, especially those in heroic gear due to the way Intellect provided so much longevity by increasing the mana pool. Those healers who didn't pay a lot of attention to Spirit (say you had Power Torrent instead of Heartsong) might definitely notice lower regen. So I don't want to suggest that you'll soon be back up to endless mana. Our goal for Mists was to make mana when undergeared not as punishing, but to make mana when well geared not as trivial. We just needed to reign in both extremes.

We didn't see healers struggling with mana on the level 90 raids to the point that we'd worry about it, but those characters weren't wearing the actual gear they'll acquire in Pandaria, and despite the many volunteers we had, it's still a small sample size.

So, we'd like to see how it feels at 90 before making any regen changes. If the next few weeks are unbearable for healers, then we'll do some sort of band-aid the way we did for Arcane mages above.

This isn't the appropriate thread to get back into the discussion of whether healers should ever be mana limited, or whether static mana pools are a good idea, etc. Feel free to bring those up in other threads. In this thread, the most helpful responses on the topic would be along the lines of the degree of the change. How much sooner are you using Mana Tide? Are there some fights you could defeat last week that just feel impossible this week? Is it something healers will adjust to after another week of Dragon Soul?

Posted by Rothulean
Is it intended for DK CDs like, Army of the dead and Empower runic weapon not to reset after wiping to an encounter b/c other lengthy CDs from other classes are being reseted after a wipe.

It would be great to know if that behavior is intended or just an oversight.

Is this happening to you on live? My doomguard wasn't resetting last night on live after a few wipes so it might be something we get at 90.

Does AotD reset work for you on the beta? (I'm assuming AotD would reset because it's 10 minutes, but not Empower Rune Wep since it's 5)

Most long-term cooldowns are not reset when a raid encounter ends. The ones we specifically wanted to hit were the battle rezes and the big, raid-wide cooldowns like Bloodlust and Alter Time. The question we asked ourselves was: would a reasonable, progression-oriented but not world-first guild delay their next pull by several minutes to wait for X to come off of cooldown? For Rebirth or Bloodlust, we concluded the answer was yes. For Army of the Dead or Empower Rune Weapon, we concluded the answer was no.

I agree. Guilds may just end up waiting the 10 minutes anyway. But at least now we know.

Alright, this post caused a knockdown, drag out in my office. Weapons were recklessly pulled down from walls, etc. I mumbled something about how I'm the boss and what I say goes, but that didn't work either.

After the dust cleared, we decided that we would allow any cooldown that lasts 5 minutes or longer to be reset on raid encounters. The one exception is shaman Reincarnation, because we don't want to have to include it as a true battle rez, but think it would be too valuable if you could use it every single attempt. Most fights (we hope) aren't planned around the shaman dying.

We'll implement this change as soon as we're able.

Never mind theorycrafting this and that heres hard fact.

Stating that your opinion is fact does not make it so.

This is largely a theorycrafting thread. It's fine if that doesn't interest you, but then neither should the thread.

The mechanic changed, but it's no longer affected by Master of Beasts.

Bug. Murder of Crows should also benefit.

Mostly I'm focused on the numbers, but I do want to comment on the AoE pet nerf. The particular thing I want Blizzard to focus on is that BM hunter AoE should be balanced around normal pets, beast cleave, etc. and not around the assumption that a BM hunter would bring an AoE pet (no hunter I know of does).

That’s exactly how we feel as well. We had been balancing BM AoE with Beast Cleave as the primary AoE method, and were thinking that the AoE pets would be a small boost on top of that if you went with them. However, as we recently noticed, the AoE pets over doubled your AoE DPS. The sheer damage that a Stampede of five Rabid Chimaeras were able to put out was, in a word, absurd. These changes should bring them back in line with where we intend them to be; a small boost over the other pets for AoE damage.

Additionally, we’re going to revert the more expensive focus costs of Froststorm Breath and Burrow Attack and instead go with 10 focus +5 focus per sec, and change Froststorm Breath to scale with the pet’s melee haste and crit, instead of spell haste and crit.

Quick point of interest.
Succubus and Grimoire of Supmremacy talent: shivarra, for Warlocks. Tooltip says that Seduction/Mesmerize will be applied to target who stun/silence/fears the master. noticed that as a rogue stealthed, sapping a warlock causes the seduction/mesmerize to occur and pull the rogue out of stealth.
Bug, or Working as Intended?

Bug. The Succubus and Shivarra were autocasting Seduction / Mesmerize on the CCer, without bothering to check if they could actually see the target.

Fix the pet aggro issues!
Let me at least raid as Demonology using Grimoire of Supremacy!

Should be fixed now. There were some issues with threat from pets in Dragon Soul specifically.

So we've been discussing your changes.. you mentioned dropping stagger by 5%, but the new beta build is at 10%.

Yes, you are correct. We ended up reducing it all the way to 20%, not 25% as I said before. I mentioned in another thread that we're looking a lot at tank survivability and will have some more changes for you soon (tm). These are numbers adjustments, not mechanics changes.

The new rotation keeps about the same optimal usage of Purify - 85%. The difference is instead of 80% uptime of Shuffle with that, you have 75% uptime and simply never use anything but PB and BoK. Level 30 talents are never worth using for self-healing purposes, since you would be better off pushing back to 85% shuffle uptime given additional chi.

Sounds perfect. Thanks! We want Brewmasters to use the level 30 talents, but they shouldn't be rotational as they are for Mistweavers.

Searing totem is still a 35yd range for Elemental. Could we please see it bumped up to 40 yds? Thanks!

Sure. We recently changed Searing Totem to 25 yard range base (so 40 for Elemental).

Healing Stream and Healing Tide totem pulse speed is based off of only spell haste right? or does it vary by spec?

Only spell haste.

Also is Fire Elemental's attack speed based off of spell haste or melee haste?

Only melee haste.

I'd really like to know exactly how Stormlash functions.

There is a quote from Bismark or Saxe or someone about how laws are like sausages and it's best not seeing them getting made. I used to work with Bruce Shelley, and he said the same thing about game design.

Stormlash is complicated. You do not need to understand or remember all of this to benefit from the spell. We're just sharing the insides of the sausage because it was asked for theorycrafting purposes.

Stormlash. Chapter One...

-- The base damage is 20% of AP or 30% of SP, whichever is higher.
-- That amount is multiplied by 0.2 for normal pets, and by 0 for guardian pets.
-- Next, if it’s an autoattack (or spell that we count as an autoattack such as Wind Lash or Shadow Blades or Tiger Strikes), then it’s multiplied by 0.4, and then by WeaponSpeed / 2.6. And if it’s an offhand attack, it’s then multiplied by 0.5.
-- If it’s periodic damage, it doesn’t Stormlash, unless it’s Mind Flay, Malefic Grasp, or Drain Soul.
-- For all other spells, it’s then multiplied by BaseCastTime / 1.5 sec, with a floor on the BaseCastTime of 1.5 sec.
-- And then there are multipliers for certain spells: 2x for Lightning Bolt, 2x for Lava Burst, 2x for Drain Soul, 0.5x for Sinister Strike.
-- Finally, that’s the average damage it deals. It will actually deal that +/- 15 %.
-- It also has a 0.1 sec ICD on triggering, and can miss based on spell hit.

Just to check: It sounds like the intent is that every class generates roughly the equivalent of one proc-capable event per GCD (plus or minus half a second or so)?

To testers: My very-rough mental estimate based on the above description is putting spriests and afflocks (afflocks in particular) at a slight disadvantage compared to casters, and casters at a significant disadvantage compared to melee - how is this working out in reality?

That’s pretty much accurate. Note that we aren’t trying to get Stormlash exactly balanced between classes, just that it’s within the same order of magnitude.

It is just completely and utterly false. Mana might feel tigher at 85 (post-patch 5.0.4) than it does at 90? Mana is much, much, much tighter at 90 than it is at 85 (post-patch 5.0.4). It's not even close.

We're talking about 5 different numbers here.

1) Mana at 85, pre-geared.
2) Mana at 85, post-geared.
3) Mana at 85, post-geared, post patch. <-- You're probably here right now.
4) Mana at 90, pre-geared.
5) Mana at 90, post-geared.

Our expectation is that things look like this:

2 > 5 > 4 > 3 > 1

To explain:

-- Mana for a Dragon Soul geared healer (2) is too good, but not dramatically so.
-- Mana for a new level 85 (1) is too punishing.
-- For Mists, mana for a raid-geared character (5) should feel good, but not as good as 2.
-- For Mists, mana for a new level 90 (4), should not feel as punishing as 1.
-- For the current "lame duck session" you're playing a level 85 character using Mists numbers (3). This is NOT the same number as 2 or 5. We knew this would be the case, so we nerfed Dragon Soul by an additional 5% to make sure nobody started stumbling where they had smooth sailing the week prior.

In other words, 1 and 2 no longer exist, so we're looking at 5 > 4 > 3.

Value 3 will be irrelevant to most players in a few weeks, at which point the only relevant thing is 5 > 4 (meaning geared characters have more mana than ungeared characters).

Can you clarify how Healing Stream Totem scales with haste, because it's starting to do my head in.

Sure. The short version is that it’s not a HoT, and it functions differently. The totem casts a heal instantly, and once every two seconds (reduced by haste), and despawns after 15 sec (unaffected by haste). So haste on a HoT typically works to add ticks at certain breakpoints, which will half the time increase the total duration beyond the base, but that doesn’t happen with Healing Stream Totem.

Could we get some news if the devs are doing anything to fix the range issue with Inferno Blast's mechanic?

There are some times where we do some tricky things under the hood to make things feel better, and this is one of them. The intended gameplay is that you should be able to get a Heating Up proc while already casting another spell, and follow that one with an Inferno Blast to force a Hot Streak proc. You should never need to cancel your current cast to get that benefit.

So, tricky under-the-hood things follow. Again, you do not need to know or understand this to use Inferno Blast effectively, or play Fire; it should “just work." But, for those interested in the gory details, here they are:
-- Fireball, Pyroblast, and Frostfire Bolt (which was bugged until recently) have a cap on their effective travel time.
-- Their effects will take place after a maximum of 0.75 sec.
-- The fireball visual will still travel at the same speed, but you’ll see the damage number pop up and get the Heating Up proc after 0.75 sec, even though the fireball visual is still traveling through the air.
-- We normally prefer the game to feel more visceral, by tightly syncing visuals to effects, but this change felt worth the gameplay benefit to us. In a future patch, we may be able to hasten the visual to match.
-- If you have Heating Up, and get a non-crit, then Heating Up gets removed, as expected.
-- However, if the non-crit came from a spell with a travel time, or from Scorch (which is supposed to be able to replace Fireball rotationally while moving), then we delay the removal of Heating Up by 0.25 sec.

Tank Time
I mentioned previously (though it very well could have been in another thread) that we have been looking a lot at tank balance. We think tanks surviving short windows of spike damage has been fairly balanced in beta for some time, and indeed we are seeing all tank classes used effectively in beta Challenge Modes and Heroic raid testing.

We have made a few changes to longer-term tank healing required, which will show up both on beta and live very soon. I mentioned that we were initially going to nerf monk and DK, but we now think they and paladins are fine. Instead, the rage tanks required too much healing, so we are causing them to take less damage and have more rage for active mitigation.

Druid
-- Auto attack rage generation increased by 75%.
-- Thick Hide now provides 12% physical damage reduction.

Warrior
-- Rage generation from Revenge increased from 10 to 15.
-- Rage generation from Shield Slam increased from 15 to 20. (Sword and Board continues to give 5 extra, so 25 now).
-- Reduced internal cooldown on Critical Block from Enrage from 5 sec to 3 sec.
-- Increased damage reduction from Defensive Stance from 15% to 25%.
-- Increased armor from Unwavering Sentinel from 10% to 25%.

I'm confused. Auto attacks currently generate 6.2 Rage. Does this mean they will now generate 10.85 Rage (~75% increase)?

Yeah, sorry, those are internal tuning numbers for us that won't have any context for you. It is a 75% increase on auto attack rage.

Hand of Light has a weird interaction with the spell dmg taken debuff presently.

Yeah, this is a bug. It should be 5%. It may be fixed already.

Halo and Diminishing Returns beyond 6 targets: ... wut?

Halo chooses its targets at cast time. You can think of it as firing a volley of missiles at cast time.

I was wondering if you could comment on the design intent for pets?
Currently, it seems all pets are missing avoidance and their armor value isn't enough to withstand incoming damage. Even with Mend Pet glyphed, you still have a lot of trouble healing through damage without using another ability (such as Spirit Mend) on your pet as well.

Pets lost a lot of armor coming into Mists. The new scaling system didn't make up for all of the base armor they had before. So, we are going to significantly buff pet armor across the board. Theorycrafters will want to reset the armor values of relevant pets when this fix goes live. As an example, hunter pets will go from 100% of master armor to 170%. Cloth wearers will get more and plate a little less.

Tank Time

After consideration, we are a bit worried about paladin survivability as well. Shield of the Righteous, buffed by mastery, is a massive amount of mitigation, but the risk is that whenever paladins didn't have it available, they'd risk spike damage. (As an aside, it was also weird for paladins to suddenly be the spikey tank after years of being the opposite.) We're going to increase the Stamina benefit of Guarded by the Light from 15% to 25%.

One additional paladin note is that we are moving the initial tick of Sacred Shield to the end. We didn't want players to feel like the right way to play was to constantly cancel and overwrite the bubble.

When are you implementing the warrior changes ?

It is active on live and in beta. The tooltips won't be updated until we make a client patch.

Can rogues, ferals, and hunters get some info on the change to stealth?

There was no intentional change to stealth for balance reasons, and we don't see anything immediately wrong with the data, but can investigate more.

At both level 85 and level 90, in high-mastery conditions, Rake will outscale Shred for DPE and become the primary filler move for CPs. Shred is still weaved in to extend rip duration and letting tf/proc buffed Rakes roll, but overall the rotations is largely simplified by just spamming rake.

Yeah, this seems like a valid concern (i.e. the numbers make sense). We'll investigate and try to shift damage around to discourage it.

Also, Vanish no longer(apparently) has it's +1000 Stealth level anymore.

It used to have an Effect # that said something exactly like #2 for Stealth but, 1000.
Since that's kind of unrelated, any reason for that if it was intentional?

Vanish still adds +1000. It's just in another spell now triggered by Vanish, which might be harder to data-mine.

I don't know off the top of my head why base rogue stealth was changed from 40 to 35, but the same is true of Feral druids and non-Ferals have lower stealth. I *think* this is all working as intended, but will investigate more.

Is there any info on Feline Swiftness and Cat Form? Currently, Ferals have no use for Feline Swiftness because it is not stacking with Cat Form at all (except in Org, for some strange reason). Is this a bug?

We made a change to prevent Dash and Cat Form from stacking (Dash now increases you TO 70% not BY 70%), which inadvertently also made Cat Form stop stacking with Feline Swiftness. To be clear, Feline Swiftness should stack with Cat Form. We will fix.

Can the dot ticks from the spriest mastery in turn have their own mastery procs?

Nope.

This one change though makes it feel wrong, and deprives us of one of the SS ticks. in order to not have to reapply it and miss that initial tick again i feel as if though the way to play is to overwrite this and keep it up, constantly hitting this button. Which i believe is the opposite of your intent. I still want the absorb effect but this change just makes it feel bad =/

Hmm. It looks like our fix to move the tick to the end did not work so you just lost it. That wasn't the intent. Fixing soon (tm).

Some updates on other recent changes:

Survival Hunter
We wanted to make Explosive Shot more powerful than other shots, such as Arcane. To do so, we shifted some damage from their DoTs:
-- Increased the damage of Explosive Shot by 20%.
-- Reduced the damage of Black Arrow by 25%.
-- Improved Serpent Sting now increases the damage of Serpent Sting by 50%, down from 100%.

Feral Druid
Rake was potentially able to beat Shred, with high mastery, so we moved some damage from Rake to their direct attacks:
-- Increased the damage of Shred by 25%.
-- Increased the damage of Ravage by 25%.
-- Increased the damage of Mangle by 25%.
-- Reduced the damage of Rake by 17%.

Blood DK
Blood Boil, at very high AP from Vengeance, was hitting harder than Heart Strike. Blood DK DPS was also on the high side. So, we adjusted Blood Boil damage:
-- Changed the damage of Blood Boil; base damage went up by 388%, AP Coefficient went down by 42.7%.
-- Reduced the damage bonus to Blood Boil from Crimson Scourge from 40% to 10%.

Frost DK
Since buffing Death Strike a few weeks ago, it was actually competitive with Obliterate for DW Frost DKs. Since Death Strike is only intended to be used rotationally for Blood (but should still be useful for the healing, at a DPS loss for Frost / Unholy), we made the following change:
-- Reduced the damage of Death Strike from 280% weapon damage to 200% weapon damage and gave Blood a hidden passive which increases Death Strike damage by 40%. This results in no change for Blood, but a 28.6% nerf for Frost / Unholy.

Brewmaster Monk
It’s a bug that Keg Smash doesn’t refund energy when it misses. We’ll get that fixed.

Surely this wasn't the sole reason for deciding to nerf Serpent Sting? Personally, I was quite enjoying hunters having something that actually resembled a dot, rather than what serpent sting was and now continues to be: something you only use once per fight (except when target switching). I'm just curious if that's your design intent, and whether having some form of multidotting utility was seen as overpowered.

No, we actually like Survival getting a bit of the multi-dot style. This change shouldn’t invalidate that.

Was it also intended that this change bring down SV's AoE damage? I'm not sure how we were doing at 90 AoEwise, but this definitely has a significant impact.

There was also a recent bugfix which significantly increased Survival’s AoE damage. The instant damage from Improved Serpent Sting would not be dealt if there was already a Serpent Sting on the target that was greater than 15 sec long. This meant that during AoE, when casting Multishot repeatedly, only some of them would trigger the Improved Serpent Sting damage. We fixed that, which also of course increased their AoE damage significantly. The nerf to Improved Serpent Sting and this bugfix offset each other.

These changes also have the side effect of making Death Siphon hit harder than Death Strike at 55k AP and Heart Strike at 65k AP with a Tier 14 normal weapon which has an ilvl of 489 (it's the same for heroic weapons as well except the break point goes up but never higher than we will realistically have with Vengeance).
Was this intended?

Yes, we’re fine with Death Siphon being a DPS gain in the situation where you have high vengeance but don’t care as much about your defenses. It should never win on defensive value though.

Also, did you dislike Blood being able to sacrifice survival for more damage by replacing Death Strike with Heart Strike?

Not at all. We intend for Blood DKs to do two Heart Strikes instead of a Death Strike when they don’t care as much about their defenses and would rather do more damage. All tanks can trade defenses for more damage, at a steep cost. DKs’ tradeoff was much MUCH better than the other tanks before, so we reduced it. Two Heart Strikes is still more damage than one Death Strike, just not by as huge a margin as before. It should be similar to the other tanks.

I'm just curious if there's a reason to impliment the buff as a hidden passive. WOuld'nt a passive icon in the spellbook for improved deathstrike help new players understand that a Blood DK's Death strike is not the same as a Unholy or Frost DK's Deathstrike? I'm not sure I see the point in 'hiding' this information from players.

We can add the passive visibly to the spell book or just change the tooltip for Blood.

Currently by taking "Glyph of Shred", when Tiger's Fury or Berserk is active, "Shred" is replaced by "Shred!" There are a few errors (exists on both Live and Beta).

Fixed.

Just wondering GC, have you found out why stealth level was reduced yet?

No, we're not sure how it happened, but it was indeed lowered so we raised it back up for rogue and Feral druids, restoring the same effectiveness they had in 4.3.

How is this not counter your often-stated goal of increasing the clarity of game mechanics to new players? I know I'd be confused if my DS magically hit harder when I switched specs, just like I was when CS magically changed its cooldown when I first specced my paladin Prot last expansion.

I sympathize with what you're saying, but it takes a fairly sophisticated player (and certainly not a new one) to notice that Death Strike is or is not doing 308% weapon damage + 2079. Put another way, the tooltips have never been as remotely accurate as they are in 5.0. In previous expansions they often out and out lied because the damage was affected by so many considerations that the tooltips weren't sophisticated enough to catch. Spell tooltips are pretty smart now, smarter than ever anyway, but they still have limitations. We try to get them as accurate as possible, but there are plenty of situations when that is not the case.

It's hitting for 280% in blood. The tooltip is just wrong, they forgot to reduce it to 200% in the tooltip before adding the 1.4x modifier for blood. They just added the 1.4x modifier, and left it the same according to the tooltip. It still doing 280% + whatever.

This is likely the case. We have to manually build tooltips a lot these days and the tooltip may not have been updated, but the damage was.

One of the posters on the Paladin forums theorized it had something to do with Divine Storm and Light of Dawn, but many took it to mean chain procs were basically cut from Divine Purpose. We did a few tests and chain procs were definitely not cut, but just in case, could you clarify the change for us?

It was just a few bugfixes to Divine Purpose, not a functionality change. Here's a more detailed description of what was fixed with Divine Purpose, for those curious:

-- Word of Glory was mistakenly giving two chances to proc Divine Purpose (one for the cast, one for the heal / damage). It now only gives one chance, as you'd expect.
-- As previously mentioned, Divine Purpose's proc chance is supposed to be reduced to 8.33% or 16.66% if you cast a finisher with 1 or 2 Holy Power. That was also incorrectly applying to casts of finishers with Divine Purpose active. For example, suppose you had 4 Holy Power, and cast Light of Dawn (dropping you to 1 Holy Power). That procs Divine Purpose. You then Light of Dawn again. Previously, it would see that you're at 1 Holy Power, and give that second cast only an 8.33% chance to proc Divine Purpose again. This fixes that, so that casts made with Divine Purpose have the full 25% chance to proc Divine Purpose again.
-- Some finishers would proc Divine Purpose instantly when you cast them, and some would have a moment of delay between the cast and you gaining Divine Purpose. Those have been fixed to always proc instantly; it should feel much more responsive now.

We have currently estimated that Blood Boil was nerfed by about 40% for Unholy. Does that sound accurate?

No, it sounds like you’re missing the very large increase to its base damage. It should change Unholy’s AoE damage somewhat, but it shouldn’t be huge. At low gear levels, it may be a buff even.

An earlier blue post indicated that Soul Burn: Soul Swap should NOT put soul swap on cool down if you have glyph of soul swap equipped.
On live SB:SS is still triggering a cool down. Have you changed your mind on this or is a fix incoming?

We’re seeing it working internally and on live. Can you double-check?

It's a bit difficult for us as it appears the Blood Boil tooltips have not been updated yet. I'm at work so I can't check in-game, but all the datamining sites still show it as 711-869 + 19.2% AP. I assume that the new BB numbers are 3065 base damage plus 13.45% AP.

There are a few layers of multipliers that get applied to it, but the raw damage before multipliers (at level 90) previously was 711 to 869 plus 19.2% of AP, and now is 3474 to 4244 plus 11% of AP. It was intentionally a scaling nerf.

I tested the Soul Swap glyph earlier this evening and just now at 1:50 am Medivh time on a couple of target dummies and can verify that the glyph is still triggering the SS cd preventing SB/SS from being cast. The game says, "the spell isn't ready".

That’s intended. Glyphed Soul Swapping should still trigger a cooldown, but Soulburned Soul Swapping should not (regardless of glyph).

One stack of Dream of Cenarius (damage) is being consumed on an ability miss. Is this working as intended?
Is Wild Charge (Caster Form) intended to trigger GCD?

Yes and yes.

Classes get energy costs associated with attacks at least partially refunded and sometimes fully refunded. For monks, energy is partially refunded and chi is fully refunded.
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Blackout Kick will simply eat the chi cost without dealing damage.
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However, this change affects Mistweavers and Windwalkers.

A hotfix will be going out soon that makes Blackout Kick once again refund Chi on miss / dodge / parry if you don’t know Brewmaster Training (Windwalkers, Mistweavers, and pre-lvl 34 Brewmasters).

Is Capacitor totem supposed to not be effected by hit rating? It doesn't look like my hit is helping Capacitor totem's effect land on my targets.

It should benefit from your hit chance. We will investigate and fix if needed.

Went to test some things on how exactly Ferocious Bite's additional energy consumption works on live servers, and discovered some very odd results when using a Ferocious Bite with Omen of Clarity while energy capped.

We looked at this issue, and it's all server- client timing stuff. What seems to be happening is that when you're at or near full energy, the UI doesn't get the execute energy cost displayed quickly, so it appears to take less than 25 energy. We will try to get it to be more responsive.

The 12% damage reduction added to Thick Hide is not appearing on the tooltip in game, is this simply a tooltip error or did that change get lost somewhere in the miasma of patches?

It should be active. When the most recent patch went out, some of the earlier hotfixes had to be reapplied, but that should be the case now. We will likely have to wait and update the tooltip itself in the future.

Are there any plans to change Wild Mushrooms :Bloom?

We’re keeping an eye on how people use it for now. We don't feel that it's useless as you claim, but it isn't rotational, which you seem to want.

Seeing strange behavior in channeled spells with ticks (Drain Soul, Drain LIfe, Malefic Grasp, etc).

We’re not seeing this, and it’s not an intentional design.

There is roughly a 2 second delay after the GCD when Soul Swap is off cooldown but not castable.

Okay, here's the poop. During beta, we received feedback that players would hit Soulburn, Soul Swap and then accidentally hit Soul Swap again, which would pull their dots back off the target, and prevent them from putting them back on. To prevent this, we added a hidden delay of 3 sec to prevent you from Soul Swapping to the same target.

However, with the glyph, you actually do want to hit the same target more than once quickly to effectively put dots on two targets quickly.

Our solution is to have the delay only kick in when you aren't glyphed. If you have the glyph, there will be no delay. We should be able to add this tweak easily.