BEST PATCH NOTES EVAR

As of 4.3:

"North American realms (excluding Brazilian, Latin American, and Oceanic realms) no longer permit letters with accents in character or guild names."

Colossal Dragonplate; LFR

Warrior Tier 13:
Protection, 2P -- Your Revenge ability now also grants a physical absorption shield equal to 20% of the damage done by Revenge.
Protection, 4P -- Your Shield Wall ability now grants 50% of its effect to all party and raid members.

Just wow. Two things: The beginnings of active abilities that affect mitigation makes me very excited. And for the first time since Strength stopped affecting Block Value, Warrior tanks will have a mitigation contribution from damage stats.

I can't wait to see what the EJ theorycrafters do with this-- at what avoidance DR point Expertise will be better point for point than Dodge/Parry. Or whether the always helpful "damage smoothing" effect of absorb shields over RNG avoidance may even be considered absolutely better in the same way Mastery was considered better even when avoidance was providing more overall damage reduction.

Shield Wall has been one of my favourite Warrior abilities since you could glyph it down to a 2-minute CD, and I'm certain that the fact that all tanks are getting a similar version of "apply tanking CD to the whole raid" means that this was designed with specific fight mechanics in mind.


I am so, so curious to see how "hard" the 25-man LFR raids end up being. On one hand, you have the massive raid-incompetence of the general WoW populace, combined with the massive co-ordination clusterfuck of twenty-five people who don't know and don't care to know each other being forced into a small space together; and on the other you have Blizzard's intimate knowledge of how simple these people require things to be in order to succeed. It really could go either way here.

I just keep thinking about how often you get a single jerk in a 5-man PuG who is intent on ruining the run for the other four... and then multiplying that by five. I wonder how many votekicks we will be restricted to per group-- and if you get booted, whether you would get any chance to recover your lockout for the rest of the week.

The more I think about this the more I remember why raiding is something that only works with an organised group.

"We thought that Rogues had maybe felt a little bit not special"

Ghostcrawler said the above in an interview with IGN.

He talked about how the idea people have suggested of a "transforming" Legendary which might be used by a wider range of classes diminishes the concept, but oh this one acts like a sword if you're a Combat Rogue and a dagger if you're Assasination or Subtlely.

He talked about how ridiculous it is to expect Legendaries to be made for esoteric roles, but the only reason he could come up with for this design decision was that Rogues were feeling a bit sad and needed some cheering up.

A Legendary for a single class

In the most absurd example of player-manipulation in recent memory, Blizzard is encouraging people to play Rogues again by creating a Legendary dagger just for them.

Well what else am I supposed to think? We already know it is not lore-related, so it's clearly a design decision.

The devs have stated on many occasions their lack of willingness to create content which is only open to one class. We've also been told that a tanking Legendary would not be possible because the tanking classes don't all use the same type of weapon-- so any they created would be used by two classes at most.

But now they have decided on a Legendary which seems to break both of these conventions... and the only reason I can think of that makes any sense is that they're trying to make raiders more inclined to play their Rogues again.

The reason Rogues are so unpopular is only due to poor design in the first place. As far as PvE's concerned, they're just a melee class that's missing a tanking spec.

(Also, are daggers even useful to all Rogue specs? I was under the impression only one spec was PvE viable with daggers.)

I feel like I keep coming back to the same arguments again and again... Blizzard seems to be spending more of their design budget inventing systems to push people into playing the way Blizzard thinks they should play than actually designing gameplay systems.