From mmo-champs:
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Recent In-Game Fixes - September 2009 - 09/08Quote from: Bornakk (Source)09/08/09For both 10- and 25-player heroic modes, the Felflame Infernals and Mistresses of Pain will spawn a little quicker in the Lord Jaraxxus encounter.
Gormok the Impaler no longer attacks quickly after a parry in any difficulty.
Icehowl takes a bit longer to enter the arena in 10- and 25-player Heroic modes.
Icehowl takes longer to berserk in both 10- and 25-player Heroic modes.
Relentless Gladiator ranged weapons damage has been adjusted to the appropriate value for their item level.
Holy Wrath now has diminishing returns and shares this with all other stuns.
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More specific about some of them:
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Holy Wrath HotfixQuote from: Daelo (Source)We just deployed a hotfix to modify Holy Wrath so this spell has the same diminishing return mechanics that other player stun spells and abilities currently have. This will prevent Undead creatures that we wish to be susceptible to stun from being permanently stunned if you include enough Paladins in your raid who then rotate their Holy Wrath casts.
This will affect the difficulty of Anub'arak, but we didn't want the "right way" to defeat this fight to involve bringing five Paladins who glyphed their Holy Wrath spell.
Trial of the Grand Crusader Difficulty HotfixQuote from: Daelo (Source)We just hotfixed the following changes to the Trial of the Grand Crusader (aka Heroic mode).
Northrend Beasts
Fixed a bug where the flag that prevents a creature from gaining attack speed after a parry was inadvertently left off Gormok the Impaler. This bug is fixed in normal mode as well.
Increased the amount of time players have to defeat the encounter before Icehowl berserks.
You have an extra half second to get out of the way of a very angry charging Yeti. Players with high ping rejoice.
Icehowl will become tauntable. (This particular element isn't hotfixed quite yet, but should be shortly).
Lord Jaraxxus
Infernal Eruption will now spawn an additional Felflame Infernal the instant the eruption occurs.
Nether Portal now summons Mistresses of Pain slightly more often.
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Incoming in 3.2.2:
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Quote from Blizzard staffArmor Penetration Nerf in 3.2.2There is rarely an ideal time to announce a nerf. In the case of e.g. the Prot paladin healing nerf, we had already decided we were going to fix it and how we were going to fix it so we announced it relatively early. The armor pen decision included more debate. I am sorry if the timing was bad for any of you personally, but we certainly can't promise that future nerfs or buffs won't necessitate gear changes.
I wouldn't focus too much on the issue of using too many of the same kind of gem. There are plenty of situations where that has been the case since BC (though it's not ideal in a perfect world). Rather the case was that classes that had been using Agi or Str or whatever were now switching almost exclusively to armor pen and being greatly rewarded for it. Gear without armor pen was being passed over. Specs that benefited a lot from armor pen were outstripping specs in the same class. As many other players have concluded, it was just too good.
That said, we don't think it will be a trash stat if we make this change. If you could beat plate-wearers in PvP before we don't think that will suddenly flip overnight. We don't think you'll feel the need to shard your items with armor pen.
We also think the change is good for both PvE and PvP. My earlier comment was to try and discourage players from thinking their PvE got nerfed for PvP reasons, though that absolutely happens sometimes when we can't avoid it. Some players have been concerned about the power of melee classes in Arenas. While this change alone isn't likely to sway their opinions, chilling out melee damage in PvP probably isn't a bad thing.
Yes, armor pen is gone in Cataclysm, at least as a rating on gear. Until then we want it to be a good stat but not one that trumps every other gear consideration. (Source)
Best stat for me
We're not trying to prevent having a "best stat for me." To some extent, that's unavoidable. But if the best stat isn't far above the second best stat, then gearing is a decision beyond just "take the thing with the best stat." While there may still be a best in slot item, those are rarely trivial to obtain and in the meantime you might have to actually consider the drops you do get.
Some of you are saying you'll never touch armor pen again, which I find questionable, but we'll see. Some of you are saying you'll stack it even more to get as close to the cap as you can. But there is a point at which you are giving up too many other stats just to benefit from armor pen. Not many people really wanted it when it was at the original LK value (we'll call that 100%) so there has to be a sweet spot between that and the 3.2 value of 125%.
One valid point many players have mentioned is that stats that cap, say hit, just keep getting a more and more generous allotment of rating on higher gear even though players don't necessarily need more as they face tougher foes. That is a design flaw with the system, though not necessarily an easy one to fix with these kinds of number tweaks. (Source)
Reasons behind the nerf of Downranking
We were spending more and more of our design time trying to make sure that the lower ranked spells didn't always trump the higher ranked spells since with enough spell power etc. the coefficients start to matter a lot more than the flat value of the heals. We kept nerfing the coefficients over and over and could have kept doing that, but at some point we asked ourselves why so much of our healing design time was spent balancing downranking when it was a pretty obscure concept (from a new player perspective) in the first place and we were having trouble getting healers to use their entire arsenal of spells.
We recognize that there is some fun in matching the right heal to the job, and we would love to add some smaller heals back to the game, but first we have to get the balance right where huge, fast, expensive heals don't always win. Otherwise, offering you small, cheap heals won't do anything. (Source)
Balancing Tanks
Tank balance was a non-issue in classic and BC (that's 4 or so years of your 5 years) because warriors were designed to be the best tank. In other words, we made no attempt to balance the tank classes, so beating us up for not accomplishing what we weren't trying to do seems odd to me.
In most cases warriors were the best tank. They were certainly far and away the most common. When there were situations that other classes started to outstrip warriors, we took steps to make sure the warriors still came out on top.
We changed that philosophy in LK (and added another tank). Now all 4 tanking classes can tank any encounter in the game. It is closer than it has ever been in the history of WoW and is close enough that you have to be on a very cutting-edge encounter at the absolute limits of your capabilities for it to really even be a factor. Many of the world first kills and most of the cutting-edge guilds still use a warrior MT and obviously they're still cutting edge. For 90% of us, usually upping your game (learning the strategy, changing what you do, or just improving your skill) or getting better gear will have a bigger impact than switching tanks. In those cases where that has stopped being the case (and that has happened) we took steps to correct it.
It's pretty close. Could it be closer? Absolutely. But make sure when you are making your "tanks are horribly impabalanced" posts that you have experienced those encounters first hand and aren't just replying with what you've read on the forums about how your class needs buffs. (Source)
Balancing the game
There are two basic strategies for balancing the game. One is that we just let things go until major content patches (or even expansions). The other is we step in and make adjustments when we feel it's appropriate. We tried the first way for a long time, but it was fairly frustrating for classes who were behind or had other issues knowing that they would be that way for months or longer. We've been trying the other way more lately -- making pretty rapid adjustments, though not always as rapid as some players would like. However there is a consequence that sometimes you'll get nerfed even as other classes get buffed, or you'll have to rethink your gear when some stat becomes better than something else. It's a two-way street. Now, we don't want it to feel like a roller coaster or feel arbitrary in any way. But we also don't want broken things to just endure, and everyone here would agree there is more we can fix. (Source)
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On a different note, i looked at some of the stats of the guilds that killed ToC25 hard mode as first and second in the world and the majority of their dps is 8k+, i'm trying to look up the highest DK in the group (Liha, Unholy, 9.58k) but ofcourse the armory is down. The 6k difference between me (or us, as we are all about 6k lower then them) and her (them) cant only be gear difference... can it?
Topic: Heroic Anub'arak World First Kill by Paragon
