In this Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft card reveal, we have the latest intel from the front lines on one of the Warrior’s powerful class-specific cards—Commanding Shout. Do you want to learn about the way of the Warrior? Do you have what it takes to be in command? What was that? Could you speak up? Say that again. We can’t HEAR YOU! Why the need to shout? HERE’S WHY! *ahem* Sorry about all that. We got carried away. We’re just excited to show you what Commanding Shout can do for the bold (and brash) Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream. Commanding Shout keeps your minions alive—albeit barely—but barely breathing is good enough. In Hearthstone, you’ll often use your minions to attack your opponent’s minions. When you attack, if both your minion and the enemy minion die, it’s called a “trade.” Commanding Shout makes sure you never trade. Upon hearing the bellowing roar of your Commanding Shout, your minions will survive engagements with enemy minions instead of trading. Sure, they’re probably standing on the precipice of death, but they’ll live to fight another day . . . or moment . . . whatever. Some minions enjoy getting hurt. Check out this guy: The Amani Berserker thrives in the midst of battle, as reflected by his Enrage ability. This troll gets +3 Attack while he’s damaged. You have numerous ways to damage your minions and Enrage them. Some cards can deal direct damage to minions, including your own. You can also send your minions into battle, ideally attacking a weaker enemy. It can be tricky to find just the right opportunity to attack another minion without trading, though. That’s where Commanding Shout comes in. With this card, your rage-filled minions are guaranteed to survive any attack! But Enrage isn’t the only reason you’ll want to keep your minions bruised and bloodied.... Rampage turns that nearly dead minion into a RAMPAGING POWERHOUSE for only 2 Mana! Nothing feels better than watching your opponent deal a few damage to your minion, hoping desperately to finish the job on the next turn, only to see it become an unstoppable behemoth. Warriors love to deal damage, but they also love to TAKE it. So next time you’re on the opposite end of the table staring down the son of Grom Hellscream, poised to launch a Fireblast at one of his soldiers, think twice before you hurl it. You might be playing right into his hand.

They're talking about the reputation needed to purchase the valor gear. Not getting the valor itself. All of my alts are valor capped but you know what I can't do? SPEND IT. Why? Because I refuse to do xmillion dailies, or farm a million warscouts on all of my alts. Shado-Pan Assault rep is gained by killing bosses, not doing dailies. But whatever, item upgrades are coming back in 5.3 (and they're cheaper) so that'll be a nice way to dump some VP. And you recommend that people get the 480 ilvl required to get into T15's LFR... how exactly? You can't rely on LFR drop rates even after the increase that was provided, and the majority of players don't have 50k in gold to dump on every alt that they hit max lvl with to buy crafted items. You can't discount the entire idea of running 5.0 LFR to gear up because drops are random. Sure you could still get some bad rolls and it may take you a bit longer, but there are many who (with a bunch of Elder Charms, aka bonus rolls) are able to completely gear up for ToT within two weeks. If you want an absolutely reliable way to see an item, do something, and get that item no questions asked, you can do dailies to gain rep and get them for VP, but it's not going to be the quickest way. This isn't a question of what you can and can't do, the only question is how you want to do it. The Catching Up to 5.3 blog assumes you want to gear up as quickly as possible. Valor gear should not be gated by rep. And what I want to do in many cases is gain rep... but you've left me with no options other than dailies to get rep reliably in virtually every case. Yeah I think that's something we learned from and agree with to a point. The Shado-Pan Assault is technically a rep, but the limit is determined by boss kills. VP items are intended to fill gaps when your boss kills don't give you the items you need. Instead of implementing yet another currency and 'boss kill tracking system' to allow you to fill in the gaps, your access to items is determined purely by killing bosses. Plus tying it to a faction helps make it feel like it's a part of the world and not just a static tracking system. Most of the good SPA rep rewards are frontloaded at Neutral to Honored at least. You hit Friendly week 1, and Honored shortly after that. Getting to Exalted is almost purely vanity, since it's just a tabard and some shoulders that don't even have a socket. You also don't have to do dailies to unlock those 522s, just a week or two of LFR. Right! Unless you're waiting for a helm, in which case, HAHA! Jokes on you! Seriously though, is there some reason for not putting helms/boots on SPA? We tend to not want everything to be super formulaic. It gets tiresome when every tier of every expansion the same items are available in the same ways. Mix it up, etc. etc.

We like that people enjoy having alts. It's been a personal hobby of mine to continually level characters, and it's of course something a lot of people do. However, in some ways it works against some game systems that are intended to be a part of the MMO experience. Professions are one such system. The intent with professions is that you can only have two, and for all the other professions you don't have you have to work with others within the game to get what you need. Say you're a blacksmith, and you can make an item another player or even that player's profession needs, and that interplay creates interpersonal interactions and even those small interactions feed into the larger social experience. Over the years a number of things have changed and lessened those interactions based around professions, but probably none more impactful than alts. With good intentions to help people catch up to the end-game, it of course allows for people to have more alts with more professions, which in turn reduces reliance on others and shrinks the reasons you have to interact with others. Most people don't keep tons of alts geared up for end-game, but quite a few do have alts that are there to help 'feed' their one or two main characters. Which is where the binding comes in. You're playing on one character, getting motes/spirits, and wanting to transfer those to alts to make stuff, which then feeds back to your main in either the items made, or the gold from selling them. That's totally understandable, but really fundamentally goes against the intent of profession limits. It can also lessen the personal value of playing and connecting with a character. When you have everything, your personal connection to any one of those things is diluted, and you naturally care a little less about each. I understand that may be a hard sell because it's a limitation and not letting people do whatever they want, but it's at least logical. I think it is, anyway. Maybe one solution is we could say you can only have two professions per Battle.net account! And really strong arm people into it, but of course that'd be a pretty negative change in taking so much away. Instead saying here's an item that we really want you to earn and use on the character you're playing and obtained it with to reinforce the value in playing that character (and not just shipping items off to crafting alts). People still have crafting alts, of course, and some choose to play them a little just to seek out the motes/spirits, and that's ok. What we don't want is to encourage the notion that you can just play one character and keep a cadre of alts that ensure you have everything you'll ever need. Working with others to achieve great things is by and large the overarching point of these kinds of games. All that said we have tended to remove the soulbinding of these types of crafting materials as the expansion that introduced them draws to an end.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

1. In game surveys are accessible to everyone with an active account. Due to a myriad of reasons, not all players can or choose to post on the official forums to voice their opinions (ahem, players with "forum bans" or players who simply do not utilize the forums). Totally agree with you there, the forums, fansites, front page, and even gaming-websites as a whole is just one slice of the playerbase. Most players don't learn about new patches until they log in when it's released. Which probably seems crazy to everyone here, but that's because you're the type of person that would come to a gaming forum, read the posts, and even less likely actually log in and post(!). Most or all of your friends are probably like you as well, because (unsurprisingly) we tend to make friends with people that are like us. It's that projection bias that makes it difficult to understand that there are people out there that are not like us. We love you for being who you are, passionate people coming and giving us feedback is a big reason for why we exist, but we all have to understand (and account for the fact that) most people just don't do that. Still, I don't think surveys would be as useful as you may think. 2. Surveys allows players to "vote" once per active account on features they would like to see implemented. No more players jumping on alts to voice their opinion for or against a given feature in forum threads! Surveys can be great on getting individual's perspectives, but it can also be dangerous in creating expectations. As much as some people say they won't get their hopes up, asking people which of three new features they want to see will absolutely incline them to expect the feature they chose to be implemented. Some more than others. And - not to get into it too much, you can find all sorts of papers and articles and such on it - what people say they want and what they actually want are two different things. Sometimes it's interpreted as game developers telling players what they want, and to some degree that's true. It's important as designers to be able to filter things down to their root causes. Sure someone says they want Dance Studio, but in fact what they're really after is ... I don't know, more character customization options, and in fact the Dance Studio is probably a pretty poor way of achieving that, and the development time investment to do it would compromise our ability to ... have unique raid bosses, item tiers, have to cut an entire zone, or etc. etc. Most people don't care to think about dev resource management, and that's good, because it's not very fun. 3. Surveys tied to accounts allows developers a way to analyze a lot of player opinion data very quickly (who does and doesn't like x feature, their pve/pvp participation, subscription history, etc). This way, Blizzard can see what type of player likes which particular features, and can adjust accordingly. We do have a lot of data already. We know what PvE/PvP participation is, we know how often people are using their farms, we know often often people take talents or glyphs, we know how often people are using specific abilities, we know subscription history, we know how often groups are clearing content, we know queue times, etc. We can anticipate what the majority of players are looking to do, and develop that content. Not too long ago Heroic dungeons were a big thing and a lot of people were upset and wanted more in this expansion, which isn't possible to pull off before the end of this expansion, but we did hurry to put together some challenging small-group content with decent rewards to see if we could scratch that itch with Heroic Scenarios. It will be interesting to see... well first what people think of them, and second how close it gets for people to filling that role, but also just how many people actually try them, considering how loud of an issue that was. Ultimately though there is no right single way to gather feedback. We use a variety of methods and venues to see and experience how people are playing the game, what they think, and what they want. We're always looking for more, and certainly surveys could be a part of that, but we get so much feedback and data already I'm not sure the pros for surveys outweigh the cons.

Yea, who needs arena spectating when you've got this The pet battle spectating is not really "spectating" as such. You do not get to watch players versus other players, you only get to see them when they are fighting a wild pets. Before this change all you would see when a player was battling wild pets was them just standing there idly, now the battle will be visible to outside parties and not just to the player battling the wild pets. This means that the "pet battle spectating" is not really a new system for watching pet battles that had to be developed, it was simply a change to make wild pet battles visible to outside observers. The same cannot be said for an arena spectating mode though. In order for us to create a system for arena spectating we would need to build a system from the ground up. While the ability to spectate arena matches is something that we would definitely love to implement into World of Warcraft, at this current point we have no plans for it. Its coded message to PvP community "We dont give a fck about PvP or you, pokemon is all that matters" That's as far from the truth as it gets, there is loads of new content and changes on its way for PvP in patch 5.3;

• Balance adjustments/changes
• New Arena
• New Battleground
• Conquest point catch-up system
• PvP gear changes
• PvP stat changes
• Battle fatigue changes
• And more...

If we did not care for the state or well-being of PvP in World of Warcraft we would say so, however the reality is that we do care for PvP and we are constantly making changes and additions in order to improve it.

We consider the entire forums (all of them) to be an opportunity for you all to share your ideas/constructive feedback etc. with us. We're always reading. It's also worth noting that Heroic Scenarios are a first go for us in giving players who want a bit more of a challenge within the Scenarios a way to get it. That said, that doesn't mean that these are the last "new" thing we'll ever add to the game. We're always looking at new ideas or concepts to push the gameplay within World of Warcraft further. We can't talk about all those ideas until we know we are able to make them work and are going to implement them (or at least we try not to if we can), but that doesn't mean we aren't listening or planning on our end too. I understand that many people would like new dungeons and we've addressed this a few times now, but at this point in time, we're not adding them. We have a lot of other things that we're putting efforts into that we think will be great additions to the game. Again, we're not ready to talk about those just yet, but once we can share that information with you all, we will. For now, we wanted to share a bit more about what the new Scenarios will bring. If you haven't tried them on the PTR, you may just want to give it a shot. They're fun and add some great story elements as well.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

In this Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft card reveal, we deal out a card that’s bound to make your enemies tremble and quake before you—the Void Terror. The indomitable Warlock Gul’dan stops at nothing in his pursuit of power, and the whisper of his name strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies. Among all his devices of dread, one card in his arsenal is especially terrifying. THIS CARD. The Void Terror is able to absorb the minions next to him upon being summoned. Are you in control of a pair of feeble murlocs? Not anymore. Now you have a giant Void Terror. What happened to those night elves you had? Now they have become one with the void. Void Terror can also help make your forces less vulnerable to Area of Effect (AoE) spells. Hellfire would cripple a deck filled with small minions.... Void Terror can help turn that army of puny minions into a huge, shadowy behemoth. That 3-damage blast of flame would barely faze your big blue demon on his path of destruction. This minion really shines when you can convert single-turn, temporary effects like Power Overwhelming into a permanent bonus. Give one of your puny minions a taste of SUPREME POWER, let him strike for a single, glorious attack, and then let the Void Terror suck his newly enhanced essence into his being. (Don’t be sad, it was going to die anyway.) In fact, a quick death in the Void is probably more pleasant than the alternative. Now that temporary +4/+4 bonus lives forever within the Void Terror! When playing as Gul’dan, your role is not to care for the well-being of your minions. They are TOOLS for you to manipulate on your way to victory, and to be fed to the demons you’ll summon from the Void. Like any good tool, the purpose they serve is yours and yours alone. I just wouldn’t get too close to this one if I were you. He looks hungry.

Greetings Champions! Once again the song of battle calls we Blizzard employees forth to the fields of honor! Who will accept the challenge and test their might against ours!? (/rp) Tomorrow (5/3/13) from 4pm-6pm PST we'll be logging onto the PTR realms and queuing for 5.3's new battleground Deepwind Gorge. We'll be identified by the guilds [Blizzard Horde] & [Blizzard Alliance]. So come on to the PTRs, queue up for Deepwind Gorge, and be hungry for a fight. Hope to see you there!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Throne of Thunder
  • Lei Shen
    • Lei Shen's hitpoints have been reduced by 10% on Raid Finder difficulty.
    • Static Shock from the North Conduit now deals 300,000 damage at 0 energy, down from 650,000 on Raid Finder difficulty.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Here's what we're thinking and working on at the moment, and again, please share your thoughts and feedback: Aquatic: Harmful DoTs reduced by 50% (up from 25%)

• Aquatic-types currently reduce the effect of harmful damage over time abilities by 25%. Because few creatures have more than one DOT, this ends up being a less than steller damage reduction over the course of the battle. We feel increasing the effect to 50% should help aquatic pets benefit more from their passive.

Critters: Immune to CC completely

• Critters currently reduce the duration of crowd control effects by one round, which makes fast critters significantly more powerful. We'd like critters of all speeds to benefit equally from their passive, so we're considering making them immune to crowd control effects completely. This would include stuns, roots, and other incapacitating effects.

Magic: Cannot be dealt more than 35% of total health in one move (down from 40%)

• Magic-type creatures currently cannot take more than 40% of their maximum health as damage when struck. When balance changes were made to reduce the damage of some very heavy-hitting abilities, this passive was indirectly nerfed. We're thinking if we buff the effect to 35% of maximum health, that should compensate for previous adjustments.

Again, everything is subject to further adjustments, but our ultimate goal is to bring all passives up to the power level of some of the current favorites, such as Undead.

Didn't people complain about class favoritism whenever a class got something special? And now people complain about this. Figures. We still strive to make the classes as unique as possible while offering a balance that doesn't lead to anyone feeling useless in raids (which was a very real concern a few years ago), and to a greater or lesser extent, I think we accomplish that goal. When I play a Warrior, Death Knight, Rogue, or Monk, for example, there are certainly similarities--they are all melee classes, after all. Crucially, there are also significant differences that span the entire experience of playing each class, and which contribute to a distinctly different feel for each one. Even among "pure" classes, each spec can feel quite distinct from the others, and that's certainly the case amongst hybrids. So, for fear of using an often tossed buzzword, "homogenization" is a matter of degrees. I personally don't feel that we've at all crossed a threshold where playing one class feels essentially like playing another. I find myself reading posts where players are talking about the buffs a class brings to a raid, or listing off the abilities a class has like a litany. These lists are, themselves, devoid of context though. More classes bring more buffs because that was a problem we needed to solve. Classes have similar abilities to encourage flexibility in group composition. If these are the only measures by which you judge how similar classes are, then I think that you're missing the trees for the forest. Nuance matters. "Feel" matters. How a class toolset interacts with itself matters. I would make the case that, for the purposes of game play, how a given spec or class plays is really what makes it distinct from the others, even if different classes can sometimes share similar roles. After all, that's nothing new to World of Warcraft; we've always had healers, dps, and tanks. Players have greater flexibility than ever to choose a class that they enjoy playing for the raw experience of playing it, rather than for what buff it provides. I don't mind so much the same effects on different classes to even out raid need but I do wish that the classes were different enough that just by eying a piece of gear you could tell what class it was meant for even if it wasn't a set. A good example was back in BC when you could tell the difference between Lock oriented gear and Mage oriented gear by the amount of Stamina on it. This is intentional. There was a lot of "wasted" gear back in the day. It was very common to go into a raid without a full assortment of classes (which was also common, because some of the classes simply didn't have enough to offer in a raid), and get gear that wasn't good for anyone in attendance. It didn't prove to be a good item design then, and I suspect that it wouldn't work much better now. We've done a lot to solve problems like this over time. Introducing actual choices in gearing is extremely difficult, because when it comes to player power, all it takes is a spreadsheet showing that item A is better than item B, and suddenly item B is "trash". It becomes a let down to get it, even though ostensibly it's supposed to be an upgrade. Is that why rogues all feel the same? Rogues are something of an edge case, and moving previously spec defining abilities into the talent tree probably contributes to this, though I'd argue that it's resulted in a class that's more fun to play overall. Still, I find that Combat feels different from Assassination feels different from Sub. The differences are admittedly more subtle (no pun intended) than some other classes, though.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

We're going to be buffing some pet passives in a future patch, and elementals are on the list. We feel that the elemental passive is currently too confusing in that it is somewhat ambiguous with regard to direct effects of weather, but not effects that are not directly related to weather. For example, if your opponent has a pet that gains an additional attack in a Blizzard, they will still get the additional attack against your elemental pet. This can feel bad in some cases and we want pet passives to always feel good and useful. We also feel that weather is one of the more fun and synergistic elements of Pet Battles, so at this point in time, we’re thinking of redesigning the elemental pet passive along the lines of a ~50% reduction in damage for the turn one is swapped in. Our goal being that we’d rather have a passive in place that increases the strategic depth of elemental pets, and is clear in its intention and functionality. Keep in mind, we’re still evaluating the numbers and everything is subject to change, but we’d sincerely appreciate any constructive feedback you may have!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

With the development of patch 5.3 in full swing, we’ve collected a series of PvP-focused questions from the community; the development team has the answers in this new edition of Ask the Devs. PvP Item Level Cap Question - How are we planning to have the ilvl cap work in patch 5.3? Rumor has it that the cap will slowly increase over the course of a season. If this is the case, where is the big enjoyment we get out of new gear, especially weapons? Answer - For patch 5.3, PvP items will just be capped outright. The current plan for 5.4 is to have the cap gradually increase over time so that players won’t acquire new gear that doesn’t benefit them (because it would just be lowered to the cap). We’re also talking about different ways in which to calculate the cap. For example, if you had full ilevel 496 gear and acquired a new 520+ weapon, it would just get dropped to 496 as well. Maybe we can design the system so that your average overall can climb to a slightly higher number. Overall the intent is that elite PvP gear is cosmetic. We don’t want item levels within PvP gear to have such a huge disparity that a new PvP player has a miserable experience—that’s the entire intent of this change. Question - Currently the 5.2 ladders are being plagued with PvE trinkets that have really nice procs. Are the ilvl caps going to assist with any future cases of strong PvE items and trinket procs? If not what have you got planned to avoid PvE items being BiS for PvP? Answer - We think “plague” is too strong a word here. Our goal is not to prohibit all PvE gear in PvP, or we would do just that. We like that either gear type can be used to get a leg up in the other format. What we don’t want is for players who are in full Conquest gear to feel like they need to go pursue a PvE item in order to be competitive. We have made some changes to trinkets already and we will modify others if we feel it’s necessary. Our tactic overall is to have PvE trinkets with the potential for PvP burst (such as those with a large primary stat proc) to proc more frequently but for smaller amounts against players. Resilience Changes Question - Why did you decide to remove resilience from PvP gear? Don’t you feel that there are bigger issues in the current pvp system, like too much cc or better class balance? Answer - As it stands now, players need a certain percentage of Resilience just to have any fun in PvP. It’s a very discouraging experience to step into a random Battleground with a bare minimum of PvP gear and not be able to stay alive enough to contribute to your team at all. However, we were concerned that if we brought the minimum level of Resilience up that there wouldn’t be enough head space remaining to be able to offer it as a progressive stat on gear; starter gear would have had 65% and max gear would have something like 70%. Yet Resilience as a concept is still important—the damage that a player can do was originally and is ultimately calibrated around how long it takes to kill a quest creature in the outdoor world, but PvP battles at such a fast pace aren’t very fun. Therefore, we decided it just made more sense that players take less damage from other players. Changing the way gearing works doesn’t preclude making other PvP changes we feel are necessary, and indeed there are several class PvP changes in patch 5.3. On the topic of crowd control specifically, overall we don’t feel like there is too much. We think crowd control is critical to PvP, because without crowd control, battles among players devolve into tunneling and burst cooldowns. Knowing when and who to control, when and who to dispel, and how the various diminishing returns work is knowledge that helps to differentiate player skill in PvP. We would like to make another pass at the amount of instant crowd control in the game, and we think the diminishing returns system could stand to be slightly streamlined overall, but I wouldn’t expect major overhauls to this design. Question - With the changes to PvP gear and resilience in 5.3, how is it that you plan for World PvP to work so that PvE gear won’t be overly dominant? Answer - Fully geared Conquest gear gives you about 60% PvP Power, which translates to 60% more damage. Wearing such gear, you will have a significant advantage over the LFR-geared player, have a moderate advantage over the normal-geared player, and should be pretty competitive with a Heroic raid–geared player—they may have more survivability, but you might do more damage. Statistically, Heroic-geared raiders are a very small percentage of WoW players, so you’re unlikely to even encounter them out in the world. If you do, the outcome will likely come down not to small gear disparities, but who is more skilled at PvP, who got the jump on whom, and which side outnumbers the other. World PvP is inherently unfair, which is also part of its charm, compared to structured Arenas and Battlegrounds. (Imagine for a moment world PvP with gates that opened after a shared countdown!) Overall we think the gear changes we’re talking about will be a good improvement for organized PvP, without causing much or any harm to world PvP. Question - In patch 5.3, all resilience is being removed from gear. Does this include the PvP heirlooms? If it does, will we be replacing the stats with something else that is useful? Answer - We did not remove Resilience from heirlooms for patch 5.3. If we feel like the other Resilience changes in 5.3 are successful, then we might go back and look at the lower-level PvP gear, including heirlooms. One option is to replace the Resilience with PvP Power. Also keep in mind that the 65% Resilience is at level 90; it will be smaller at lower character levels, where the presence of Resilience on gear can still provide some benefits. Question - Because of base resilience and the iLvl cap, what do you plan to do about PvE geared tanks in rated battlegrounds? They will be a clear choice over flag carriers with PvP gear. Answer - The main role of tanks in PvP is as flag carriers. There is a debuff that applies to flag carriers that causes them to take additional damage, and we made a change to have this debuff even stronger for tanks in Rated Battlegrounds. Philosophically, we’re okay with tanks being useful in PvP, but in general, characters that are hard to kill with a reasonable amount of control aren’t fun for anyone else, so we’re definitely not trying to encourage even more tank participation in PvP. With this change, you can still use a tank as a flag carrier, but it should also feel more feasible to try having other classes and specs carry the flag as well. Question - Why was 65% resilience the chosen number? Do you feel that this will be too much or too little damage reduction and do you plan on changing this in the future? Answer - It’s close to what players have today in full Conquest gear, and we think survivability feels okay for those characters. We may increase it to 70% or higher depending on how things feel, especially in patch 5.4. Question - What is the objective of allowing resilience gems and resilience enchants in a pvp set? We have experienced that right now everything that adds resilience to your gear is useless. Are you going to improve resilience gems and enchantments to make them more appealing to use or are you going to remove it over time? Answer - As we said above in regard to heirlooms, we wanted to evaluate the Resilience changes in 5.4 before propagating them through every system in the game. It could be that we redesign Resilience gems and enchants in patch 5.4. Keep in mind that the relative survivability you get from those gems and enchants has not changed, even though the numbers are smaller. If you enjoyed 10% less damage before, you still will now. Question - Will this resilience change have any impact on PvP Power? Can you elaborate on what you are doing to make it a more attractive stat for Flag Carriers and healers? Answer - We increased the PvP Power benefit to healing from 50% to 100% and increased Battle Fatigue by a proportional amount. These two changes should keep healing at about the same strength as in patch 5.2, but make PvP Power as a stat more attractive to healers. We discussed flag carriers a bit in an earlier question; we’re not really worried about tanks anywhere but CTF, and we have a CTF-specific solution. Rewards and Incentives Question - The Elite set is becoming a vanity item again in patch 5.3, and it’s very expensive and frustrating having to gem and enchant your gear a second time. Have you considered making Elite gear function similarly to Challenge mode gear? Answer - The current design is a remnant of our plan in patch 5.2 where the older piece is consumed in order to purchase the newer piece. We implemented the system in such a way because it allowed players to transfer the upgrades to the new piece without requiring additional Conquest points. Now that we don’t support upgrading PvP gear, we could reconsider this design for the next season and make Elite gear behave more like Challenge mode gear. Question - In patch 5.3, the elite gear will be quite difficult to attain for casual Arena players. What kind of rewards do you have planned for casual PvP’ers to keep them interested in PvP? Answer - Elite gear is positioned as one of the ultimate PvP rewards. Similarly, Heroic raid gear is also hard to obtain for casual players. In the meantime, more casual PvP players should see steady rewards as they earn the normal Conquest pieces. We do think that there’s room for more PvP rewards that aren’t just aimed at the very best PvP players. Next season, we’re discussing some rewards aimed at participation (e.g. win 50 Rated Battlegrounds) and not just the players with the highest win percentages. Class Changes Question - The change in patch 5.3 that makes Gateway require a four second cast time and being attackable is going to be quite damaging to warlocks when affliction is already in quite a poor state. What was the reasoning behind this change and what do you plan to do with Affliction to make it more competitive? Answer - Our overall goal was to make Gateway less binary. As implemented on live realms right now, it feels very hard to get up, but then brutally punishing to the other team once you get it at full effectiveness. With these changes, it’s easier to get the Gateway up but less transformative when you are successful. We are still evaluating their health—we don’t want them to be trivial to destroy. One change that players may not be aware of is that in patch 5.3 the first charge happens after 5 seconds (down from 13 seconds), and each additional charge requires 10 seconds (down from 15 seconds). We don’t feel that Gateway is the key to making Affliction more competitive. We changed Haunt to refund a Soul Shard when it is dispelled, with the intent that Shards spent on Haunt instead of Soul Swap shouldn’t feel wasted. We also redesigned the PvP set bonus to grant additional damage to DOTs. While this benefits all Warlocks, it will benefit Affliction the most, which should help make them more competitive with the other Warlock specs. Question - What is the reasoning behind the upcoming changes to Void Shift? This spell already has a high risk to use, why target it for a nerf? Answer - Shadow is overperforming and something needed to go. Shadow priests have high damage, strong defenses, and lots of utility. What we think was putting them over the top was being able to save their healer with things like Void Shift and Mass Dispel. Question - Why are you buffing the way PvP power affects hybrid healing? Classes without healing abilities are also affected by PvP fatigue, such as Second Wind and recuperate. What about the survivability loss those classes get from this change? Answer - In patch 5.3, all specs (even classes without healing specs) benefit from a PvP Power-to-healing conversion. This means that any heal should benefit from PvP Power; this includes percentage heals such as Second Wind and Recuperate. Previously things like Second Wind and Recuperate weren’t benefitting from PvP Power at all. A Few Extras Question - Are there any plans for patch 5.3 or beyond to allow players to be able to join multiple 3v3 teams at once, or even allowing cross-realm arena teams? Answer - Not in patch 5.3, though we may do something like this at some point in the future. We think that such an idea is interesting and could encourage more people to participate in PvP. Question - Casting spells is still quite a painful process, especially with skills like Mind-numbing Poison and Necrotic Strike. What have you got planned for 5.3 to start moving the game back to casted spells rather than instants like was promised some time ago? Answer - It’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue. We’ve gone on record as saying we think PvP would be more fun with fewer instant spells, since instant spells allow players to move a lot and don’t open them up to being countered. Once we tame instants, it’s entirely possible that Mind-Numbing Poison and Necrotic Strike will be too powerful. They already slow player casts by less than what they do on creatures, and that number could be even lower (though at some point the debuff would just end up being unnoticeable). Regardless, a change like this one is huge—it’s not just a simple data tweak, so don’t expect something for 5.3. Instants are used throughout the game and we can’t simply, for example, change the cooldown of Holy Shock. Question - A new battleground and arena are planned for patch 5.3. This is really cool, do we have any more plans for battlegrounds and arenas and what can you share about these? Answer - There is nothing new in the pipeline at this time. We may spend some time fixing older ones. We have a lot of data now about which Battlegrounds players are voting out of participating in, so that gives us some direction on which Battlegrounds we could potentially fix . . . or even cut.

After some lengthy deliberation on this topic and evaluation of all facts, we’ve decided to overturn our decision on this matter. We will be re-instating Fs’s achievements. Our apologies to Fs for any frustration this has caused.