Here are all the latest blues, highlighting all issues and things that need noting about WotLK’s initial release and what is going to be fixed in the coming months. As we can see from below, there is a lot to do before the release of 3.1…

Gear Upgrades (Source)

Because we didn’t make any big changes to gear itemization the improvements aren’t as drastic in this expansion. If we assumed every player already had season 2 gear and made improvements to that from the initial quests, that would put some players at a disadvantage which we don’t want to do.

Keep leveling and keep instancing, you’ll find upgrades soon enough.

Level-up Dungeon Difficulty (Source)

We actually think it’s a good thing that players are running the level-up dungeons. Too often in WoW these were viewed as a distraction at best or perhaps even a waste of time from grinding on mobs or completing quests.

Let’s see what happens when more players are running heroics. They seem to be providing much more of the challenge you’re looking for.

Tank Spec PvP Viability (Source)

Yes. PvP for tanking specs is not our highest priority, but it is a priority.

Death Knight

Blade Barrier’s Annoying Spell Effect (Source)

This was fixed for the next patch. It is a more appropriate animation.

Hunter

Survivability Versus Magic Damage (Source)

We think survival against magic is a legit concern, and unfortunately gets overshadowed by (some) hunters concerns versus melee. We are discussing changing Deterrence.

Disengage While Snared (Source)

As I have explained before, the slow leap that occurs when snared is a bug. It shouldn’t remove the snare, but the leap itself should not be slow.

Freezing Arrow (Source)

Freezing Arrow is a way to remotely deploy traps. It is not intended to be an unavoidable, instant cast, long range, instant effect, 10 sec crowd control that you can reapply every 30 sec. I can understand why you or any class would want an ability that reliably and unpreventably takes a player out for 33% of their time though.

Hunters In Arenas @ 80 (Source)

I understand your point, but we still are always going to be very skeptical of players who claim that they are able to see into the future. I have acknowledged that hunters were way too underpowered in Arenas for far too long. We don’t want to see that happen again. We made some changes to try and address that. I understand they are not the changes you wanted or would have made if our roles were reversed.

To name just a few examples, we think the hunter mana situation is in much better shape now, we think your base attacks are not so dependent on shot rotation mods or macros, and we think Disengage is a button worth pushing. We tried some Arena maps with fewer LOS-blocking elements and no safe starting rooms. We gave pets some cool abilities like Roar of Sacrifice and decent crowd control.

I know that the rest of this thread will be filled with counterarguments for why these are terrible ideas or won’t work for whatever reason. That is the way these things go, where you need to argue from your point of view. So ultimately, it is probably best if I just say we want hunters to be good in Arenas and are willing to make changes that perhaps we weren’t willing to make before to get to that point.

Paladin

New Snap Aggro Ability Coming (Source)

We think this is one of the strongest reasons to go with a new ability – paladins don’t have a ton of snap aggro abilities at the moment. We’re working on something now but it’s too early to announce it yet.

Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield: 30 sec shared cooldown (Source)

That last part is still the plan.

There are limitations to what we can hotfix. Those are essentially server-side changes. Changes to your client require an actual patch. Patches, sadly, are much more difficult to do. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to us. It just means we have to test patches very thoroughly. Breaking everyone’s WoW is almost always a lot worse than whatever bug or issue we were trying to fix.

We will patch this before the first major content patch (Ulduar AKA 3.1).

Rogue

Fan of Knives (Source)

We should keep the discussion of whether Fan of Knives is worth using a little separated from the idea of whether you can just AE your way through dungeon content.

What I mean is that getting in the mode where only AE matters so we keep buffing everyone’s AE doesn’t really get the game into a place where we want it.

By most account so far, you can’t really AE your way through the heroic 5-player dungeons, so we’d like to see more people get to 80 and try those first. It is not our intent that CC and single-target dps are just a thing of the past. Sure Nexus and Drak’Tharon may be a little easy, but you know, at least people are running the level-up dungeons instead of skipping them. That’s a good thing.

Fan of Knives is a separate issue. We do want it to provide rogues with decent AE in situations where they need it, and it may not be doing that enough right now. We would just need to set up the mechanics to where you never wanted to use it on single targets.

General, World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King Blue, Official, posts, wow