One of the biggest surprises Hunters found when they logged on after this morning's patch was that all was not as it was supposed to be. Although the tool tip for Scare Beast reads as instant cast, the old 1.5 second cast time is still intact. Netheara confirmed that the reversion of the cast time was, in fact, intentional. It was considered too strong and reverted, although the 30 yard range buff is still intact. The instant cast designation in the tool tip is an error that will be fixed.
While we've gotten tid bits of information here and there from Blizzard posts over the past few months, the news has been relatively dry with regards to any official announcements about Wrath of the Lich King. We know that it's in alpha testing, and we've had a bit of fun with some screenshots. But that's about it.
Nethaera tells us that the development is coming along really well, which we've all heard before. However in her typical witty fashion she also gives us this gem of a line, in response to people calling WotLK vapor-ware:
"The great thing about vapor is that at some point it condenses and becomes rain. The rain then falls and nourishes that which it falls on. It takes time for it to happen, but it does happen. Signs point to clouds forming in the sky, but you never can tell when they will let loose the rain..."
Take that for what you will, but I read it pretty squarely as "Some major WotLK news is on its way." And that is news in and of itself.
So Growl has been having some problems since 2.4 went live. Pets refuse to cast it in the right order, which is wreaking havoc with Hunter aggro, especially on boar pets, who depend on a Charge/Growl combination to gain their fabled massive aggro. I myself have noticed that I have a lot harder time keeping aggro from my beloved boar Bonnie when I solo on my Hunter. So now on the PTR, we have some new lines in the latest update of the patch notes:
• Boar Charge: This ability will no longer make Growl cast immediately after it generates excessive threat. • The pet ability Growl will no longer scale with pet Attack Power.
It should also be noted that Nethaera has said that Growl will now scale with Hunter AP instead of Pet AP, so there's no fear that it's become a non-scaling flat skill.
Now, this all sounds somewhat ominous, but what does it actually mean?
Sometimes it's just not your day.Some people consider themselves to be just plain unlucky.Gainus of Icecrown posted a thread on "Murphy's Law," as it applies to World of Warcraft.Murphy's law states "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way."This particular adage is regularly applied in situations of irony and coincidence, in much of Western Culture.
The original poster noted "Every time I get to that point in 2v2 arena where a psychic scream will let me get off 2-3 mana burns, my fear makes my target run in a perfect L, away from me and behind a pillar before I can even get off 1 cast. It's like that's the exact path they would have taken if they weren't feared."
Nehthaera today wanted to let a lot of the naysayers out there know a thing or two about their April Fool's jokes and the issues with the servers. She tells us the obvious, more or less: the people who do the April Fool's work are completely separate from the people that do the server and development work.
So these elaborate and well done jokes have exactly zero impact on the servers. They don't have anything to do with maintenance, with patch 2.4, or with Wrath of the Lich King (well, unless you actually believe there'll be a bard class). This means they could have done nothing for April Fool's, and things still would have been as difficult as they were yesterday.
I want to give Nethaera two thumbs up for her post. I really enjoy it lately when GMs and CMs lay the smack down about issues like this, especially to whiney forum posters.
We are all rather critical of Blizzard at times. After all, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time in the game; especially the WoW Insider staff on patch days. We expect things to work in a certain type of way, and we expect that when we encounter a problem, things will be solved ASAP.
Nothing is wrong with these expectations we have, and indeed we should have them. After all, we want this game to be the best game possible. For many folks it's the only one they'll play. The happiness and smooth sailing in game is principally the responsibility of the customer service department at Blizzard. They're the ones to fix our issues when something goes wrong.
Drysc, one of the most visible community managers, made a wonderful post earlier this week on exactly what happens in Blizzard's support services. The full post and response are worth taking a second to read. The bullet points of his posts are as follows:
Yesterday's TTR Stress Test had its up and it had its downs, but overall it was a very fun experience. It was rocky in the beginning, with the server needing to be pulled down for a hardware upgrade shortly after the test was scheduled to begin. The TTR was riddled with soul-searing, unplayable lag up until that point, so I'd say it was needed.
The WoW Insider gang sat around for an hour doing a load of nothing until the server came back, but it was worth it. Most of the lag was gone, the Blizzard Entertainment crew were out and about doing their thing, and we were finally able to hit the arena. Unfortunately, our first match was against a three Resto Druid team. In a magical fairy world where Druids don't have Innervate or any natural mana regen whatsoever, I'm pretty sure Adam would have still gone OOM trying to Mana Burn all three of them to nothing.
Interested in the good times we had? Hop on past the cut and I'll give you the details!
Sunday's Tournament Test Realm stress test was, in my opinion, a huge success. Despite the lag, the occasional crash or kick, and a one-hour maintenance downtime, the server held up quite well considering just how many people were bombing around on it. After maintenance, the lag improved quite a bit, and I'm guessing that Blizzard learned a fair amount that will help them to design the arena tournament realm.
Of course, interaction with the GMs, fighting spawned bosses dropping orange epics, being polymorphed into all sorts of things, receiving rare mounts, and reading through /general, /say, and /yell, not to mention tells, were the real highlights from yesterday. While Alex has already given a fairly detailed account of our adventures, I have some stories of my own to tell.
We've been preparing for the stress test, are mostly gemmed and enchanted up, and are looking to fight! I'll be updating this post as things happen, hopefully with riveting tales of victory and triumph over Alliance Care Bears. (Kidding of course, my main is an Human warrior.)
Read on after the break for the updates! We'll keep this front page only for things that are affecting everyone.
Updated 5:23 p.m. PST: Live blogging wrapped up for the day. Many many thanks to all the fans and GMs out there! It was a great day with lots of cool stuff happening. More analysis over the next couple days!
After Skellum of Dalaran posts on the forums asking just where all these PTR changes are coming from, Nethaera sobers us all up about what the PTR is all about: progressive testing. She says that Blizzard has said from the beginning that there will be changes in the notes, and that things we thought were the end of the world in the beginning have changed or been completely removed. Welcome to the perilous world of progressive testing.
And it occurs to me that I've broken my own rule about patience on the PTRs. When those Shaman notes dropped with only a Stormstrike icon, it didn't occur to me (or almost any other players) that Blizzard wasn't done yet. And while the latest changes still aren't done (we're still waiting for an Elemental buff), things have been fixed somewhat since then.
But is this really just players doubting Blizzard? They posted the patch notes with just one small disclaimer -- would they have been able to quell the furor a bit more if they'd made it more clear that what's posted on the PTR notes has almost no connection to what will show up on the live realms? But then again, Neth never really answered the question of where these changes are coming from -- if Shamans hadn't QQ'd so much over the Elemental Mastery and Nature's Swiftness nerf, would it ever have been reverted? Blizzard seems to be simultaneously telling players to be patient and also give feedback. If players had been patient when the EM and NS nerf came down, and it hadn't caused such an uproar, would it have been changed back at all?
As time moves forward, so does WoW's built-in interface. Last patch we got some big additions in voice chat and guild banks (alright, that's not quite interface, but it's not quite gameplay either), as well as cursors and tracking for various types of objects and NPCs. There's not much in terms of interface news in patch 2.4, but Nethaera has just confirmed that a future patch will bring a big new feature: threat meters. (We first heard about this back at Blizzcon.)
Required by many raid groups, two big threat meter add-ons have been available for a while: KLHThreatMeter (a.k.a. KTM) and Omen Threat Meter. They both work very well (and Omen's new version is going to have some shiny new features), but they share a flaw: they don't have direct access to the game's threat info, relying instead on databases of clever deductions and discoveries painstakingly built up over months. This means whenever a new patch comes out, the developers have to figure out what, if anything, has changed in terms of threat numbers, and how much. Presumably, Blizzard's threat meter will have direct access to the numbers. And hopefully when the threat meter is added to the game there will me methods added to the API for accessing the numbers, so KTM and Omen can become even better alongside the new official meter.
Dramatized has a simple but intriguing question on the forums: "Is Azeroth flat or round?" It's got to be round, right? You can prove that the world is round a number of different ways, but do they actually work? I don't ever remember seeing ships disappearing beyond the horizon (in fact, Tydeus confirms that ships don't drop below the horizon, so either Azeroth is flat or just really, really big), and in most places on Azeroth, the horizon is actually a mountain range. And I've never seen an eclipse on Azeroth, so we have no idea what shape the world really is. The ingame map between Azeroth and Outland hints that it may be a globe, but really it's just the map overlaid into a circle -- no hints there.
Neth hints in the thread that maybe even the Explorers' League doesn't really know if the world is round or not. But whether it's round or flat, it's a pretty good guess that there's a lot to this world we haven't yet seen -- if it is flat, neither the Horde or Alliance have reached the edge yet, and if it's round, you'd wonder why someone hasn't sailed from Darnassus across to Azshara (and if Northrend is what's north of the two main continents, what's south?). Remember this the next time someone asks just what else Blizzard can visit in future expansions -- there's a whole world out there we haven't been able to see yet.
There's a new chapter in the ongoing saga of Shaman disappointment with patch 2.4, and it's this: "1, 2, 3, 4... 6?" As you may have noticed in the patch notes, Call of Thunder (an Elemental Shaman talent that increases the crit strike chance of Lightning spells) had five ranks that gave 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, and 6% respectively. But patch 2.4 will bring it in line with standard arithmetic, and have rank five give 5% crit chance.
An obvious nerf, right? Blizzard doesn't seem to be so sure. Players say that there was a reason rank five gave 6% chance to crit, and it was probably to balance the ability with other abilities in endgame. But Neth says that though it is a nerf, the devs did it just to bring the values in line with other similar ranked talents. Even giving Neth the benefit of the doubt on the devs' decision, that seems really unlikely-- no one would "accidentally" count 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Clearly the extra percentage crit chance was in there for a reason, and the devs shouldn't change it back unless Shamans really are critting too much (and by all accounts, they are not).
It seems like a lot of whining over a small issue (and yes, that could be said about all of this Shaman business), but once again not only is Blizzard not clear on their communication, but they continue to mangle Shaman relations-- in a patch where Elemental Shamans are finally hoping for a buff, the devs decide instead to nerf one of their biggest talents, supposedly to fix a mathematical bug. If the devs suddenly said that Fel Concentration was getting nerfed to 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50% (rather than the 14%-70% it's at now) because those numbers were more "in line," Warlocks would throw a fit. And that's exactly why Shamans are so unhappy right now.
When I reported this morning that the Restoration Druid arena sets were having their four-piece bonus changed from +15% outdoor movement speed to -0.25 sec to Healing Touch casting time, many druids were, reasonably, upset. Perhaps you will be pleased to learn that in the next PTR build, the bonus is being changed again, this time to -0.2 sec to Regrowth casting time. Furthermore, the Feral four-piece bonus (movement speed increase) will now apply to Cheetah again (source). Are you druids mollified now?
This is another good example of the progressive testing nature of patch 2.4. Sure, the blues always say "don't panic, it's testing, it might change" when people complain about things on the PTRs, but more often than not the initial PTR changes survive largely intact into the live patch. Not so in this patch so far, which is good if you ask me. I like to see Blizz take player feedback more seriously, since sometimes we do indeed know what we're talking about.
Everyone's favorite candle has some news for us about the PTR. She reveals that the development team is changing the way they test by adding content progressively to this patch, and changing the patch notes to match. As the testing goes on, they may add or remove test notes or various functions they wish to test.
At this least, this could make monitoring the PTR process exciting as we try to figure out what Blizzard may add and take away. In addition, although Blizzard has said that they don't plan any major classes changes, this might mean that we can still hope for the tweaking of some abilities. Nethaera's already made it known that she's watching a few well constructed shaman threads about the changes to the class or lack thereof, at least.
In other news, Bornakk has updated his post on International PTRs with the news that Blizzard now plans to make the servers accessible over multiple regions for 2.4.0 only. So unfortunately, if you were planning any raiding or PvP tourneys to see which region reigns supreme, all bets may be off.
With this new progressive testing announcement, we'll be sure to keep an eye on the notes for you and tell you as soon as we see any changes, so keep us in mind here at WoW Insider for your patch news needs.
While we've gotten tid bits of information here and there from Blizzard posts over the past few months, the news has been relatively dry with regards to any official announcements about Wrath of the Lich King. We know that it's in alpha testing, and we've had a bit of fun with some screenshots. But that's about it.
Nehthaera today wanted to let a lot of the naysayers out there know a thing or two about their April Fool's jokes and the issues with the servers. She tells us the obvious, more or less: the people who do the April Fool's work are completely separate from the people that do the server and development work.
We are all rather critical of Blizzard at times. After all, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time in the game; especially the WoW Insider staff on patch days. We expect things to work in a certain type of way, and we expect that when we encounter a problem, things will be solved ASAP.
We've been preparing for the stress test, are mostly gemmed and enchanted up, and are looking to fight! I'll be updating this post as things happen, hopefully with riveting tales of victory and triumph over Alliance Care Bears. (Kidding of course, my main is an Human warrior.)
After Skellum of Dalaran posts on the forums asking just where all these PTR changes are coming from, Nethaera sobers us all up about what the PTR is all about: progressive testing. She says that Blizzard has said from the beginning that there will be changes in the notes, and that things we thought were the end of the world in the beginning have changed or been completely removed. Welcome to the perilous world of progressive testing.
As time moves forward, so does WoW's built-in interface. Last patch we got some big additions in voice chat and guild banks (alright, that's not quite interface, but it's not quite gameplay either), as well as cursors and tracking for various types of objects and NPCs. There's not much in terms of interface news in patch 2.4, but Nethaera has just confirmed that a future patch will bring a big new feature: threat meters. (We first heard about this back at Blizzcon.)
There's a new chapter in the ongoing saga of Shaman disappointment with patch 2.4, and it's this: "1, 2, 3, 4... 6?" As you may have noticed in the patch notes, Call of Thunder (an Elemental Shaman talent that increases the crit strike chance of Lightning spells) had five ranks that gave 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, and 6% respectively. But patch 2.4 will bring it in line with standard arithmetic, and have rank five give 5% crit chance.
When I reported this morning that the Restoration Druid arena sets were having their four-piece bonus changed from +15% outdoor movement speed to -0.25 sec to Healing Touch casting time, many druids were, reasonably, upset. Perhaps you will be pleased to learn that in the next PTR build, the bonus is being changed again, this time to -0.2 sec to Regrowth casting time. Furthermore, the Feral four-piece bonus (movement speed increase) will now apply to Cheetah again (source). Are you druids mollified now?
Everyone's favorite candle has some news for us about the PTR. She reveals that the development team is changing the way they test by adding content progressively to this patch, and changing the patch notes to match. As the testing goes on, they may add or remove test notes or various functions they wish to test. 
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