The basic thing you would hope Blizzard learns from everything is lack of developer feedback creates quite unhappy ideas. And if you are releasing partials of lists with several more changes as well at least make note of it instead of acting like its the full list of changes.

Instead, I fear Blizzard will go with hiding even more information.

Boss tuning better be done CORRECTLY is all I can say. Seems like melee dps get the shaft once again with the consumable nerf and I'm seriously doubting the glancing blow penalty change will remotely outweigh the damage lost from all the consumables I use currently.

Now:
Flask of Relentless Assult
Fel Strength Elixir
Elixir of Mastery
Elixir of Major Agility
Elixir of Major Strength
Warped Burger (20agi)
Total AP: 600 and ~3 crit or so.

After 2.1:
Flask of Relentless Assult (Nerfed version will probably be ~275AP)
Warped Burger
Total AP: 300 ~.5 crit

Pretty huge nerf as far as damage goes. I guess on the upside of things I'll only have to farm consumables once every few months and my bags will be no where near as full anymore. I just still find it hard they made elixirs next to useless. Like when would I ever even need to create another elixir for myself?

Take a deep breath guy and think about this. If they reduce all the consumable use and tune the bosses for that effect, you no longer need all those pots. This is not a nerf. Quit being silly, stop reading the WoW General boards, whatever you need to do, but start looking at this from a logical standpoint.

The consumable change is NOT a nerf. It is a much needed correction.

I would actually have to go on the side that this is the wrong fix. The fix would have been as simple as greatly increasing the amount of herb spawns and/or decreasing the mats by a lot. Reducing the power of it simply means that we get to work less for less reward in term of power gained, which isn't really a net gain. That and the tailoring rumors makes me an unhappy raider right now. Let's hope the patch notes are better than this.

While it's all speculation at this point, I highly doubt Relentless Assault is going to be beyond 100 AP or so, with similar scaling down of the other Flasks. As a feral druid, for example, I can spend X herb cost for 35 str (84 AP) that goes away when I die (though I'd almost always use Greater Agility - which is another issue), or spend Y > X for 100 AP that lasts for 2 hours. Something like that to situationally allow flasks and elixirs to coexist.

Still hasn't addressed the issue of certain pots going obsolete (like Onslaught). I suppose those will be sort of "well, I have the herbs, I'll use these in instances and save my Greater Agi/Fel Strength for raids."

Development of programs as complex as WoW requires a moderate pace to insure proper testing. While some bugs do hit us on the live servers the number of bugs is minimal considering any code change can break a feature or cause a bug and there is a lot of code in WoW.

There are not many companies developing a product with as much code as WoW with a shorter patch/content release cycle. I'm as eager as most for new content/fixes/enhancements in WoW, but I'm also familiar with development cycles and understand that good things take time and that moving too fast will make long term planning much more difficult.

It IS going to be a nerf overall to melee dps in comparison to our caster counterparts and further distance ourself on damage. As a result it leaves even less incentive to bring rogues and dps warriors to raids. I'm not crying about my particular damage, but only in relation to ranged dps and to how much the elixir changes don't affect them as much as they affect the melee.

I'm looking foward to some of the DPS intensive fights in the game, such as Leotheras next patch, just to see if they can tune their shit right.

This part worries me:

I'm hoping it doesn't mean that the drop rates for motes is now gonna be reduced to account for a chance of dropping Essences. That would be.... unfortunate. To tell the truth, I don't quite understand why they're having more Essences drop. Aside from a few Jewelcrafting recipes, and a couple of enchants that people don't really get anymore, why do you need Essences? I didn't see them used at all in Alchemy, so why are they needed?

This is turning into a WoW forums thread. Probably about time to lock it.

Yeah I don't really understand this change either, unless it's due to future plans.

I'm going to break the "no rampant speculation" rule and make a wild guess that they want to get Black Temple in ASAP so they can move everyone on to that next expansion, which is supposed to hit *checks his watch* oh, in about 9 months. I'm guessing the plan is to announce and demo the expansion at the recently announced August BlizzCon.

I don't know if you'll read this far down in the thread, but if you do - err on the side of over-communication please.

Someone earlier in the thread pointed out - anything you guys say is going to cause a commotion. I can guess how difficult this is for you guys, but from a customer standpoint, I personally prefer real information - even if it's 'preliminary' and 'subject to change' rather than rampant speculation.

Nothing in this entire thread scares me more than the word refrain in your above comment.

Funny thing about that, though. I don't seem to remember them saying they'd release an expansion every 12 months, just every year. So one in 2007, one in 2008, one in 2009 and so on and so forth gives them alot more leeway than just a 12 month period.

Otoh, given how fast the expansion came out after Naxx, their track record isn't quite as brilliant in that department. But Blizzard has shown it has the capacity to learn from it's mistakes

As a caster I go from:

Flask of Supreme Power (150 SD)
Adept's Elixir (24 SD 24 Crit)
Elixir of Major Xxx Power (60 school specific SD)
Blackened Basilisk (23 SD)
Total: 257 SD 24 Crit

Flask of Supreme Power (100? SD)
Blackened Basilisk (23 SD)
Total: 123 SD 0 Crit

Looks roughly the same to me. (half the AP vs half the SD boost)

You're thinking about this the wrong way. Conumables are BROKEN, just like 5/4 Windfury. I can bitch till the cows come home about WF getting 'nerfed', but I know it shouldn't have functioned that way in the first place. Same logic applies to consumables. Starting with the creation of flasks they've just spiraled out of control, and the raid game is suffering because of it.

If they tune boss armor / def around the non-consumable stacked raid, rogues warriors (and enhancement shaman) will still have a place in raids. They did it properly with Gruul, and they can do it with the rest of raid encounters as well.

Found: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....75607940&sid=1

Edit: This was posted 3 pages ago.

I take it you missed that whole glancing blows discussion in another thread huh? That's a percentage increase to your damage (how much of a percent is tbd) and it won't benefit casters or hunters one bit.

I'd wait to see the final result before jumping to conclusions. There's more than one moving piece here.

Thanks for the post Tigole.

Anybody else have the image of him striding down the hallway and saying

"TOO SOON NETHAERA, YOU HAVE AWAKEND...er RELEASED THIS PREVIEW TOO SOON"

It is a bit annoying that you have to go to the old world (and can't fly /cry) but it's not that difficult to get on my high pop server. People are just lazy and have money to burn. Same thing with dreamfoil, which I was tripping over while farming up a bit of gromsblood last week.

As regards Essences, this is Rampant Speculation, but I'd suppose that most essences were gotten in places that max level characters used to hang out - Silithius and the like.

If I'm remembering correctly, there's something called.. vertical integration? Or something like that, low level players and high level players impacting each other's gameplay (and not in the "I have 1g... SFK" way). That is, hi, I'm selling you mister level bored 70, 374 tailor some of this netherweave that I have clogging up my level 61 bags that are otherwise bereft of cool things, like, say, money. The problem is, the second someone hits level 58, to Outlands they should go, so there's no natural funnel for essences to continue to join the economy.

It isn't, at first blush, a max level change. It's simply ensuring that Essence of *, for someone releveling (or leveling in the first place) profession X that optimally could use 16 of them, isn't like finding hens' teeth.

No, no information is just as bad as minimal communication. Basically there is a communication balance that needs to be acheived that we really have not seen in a very long time.

Giving no communication just leads to complete speculation and makes it appear as if the company is doing absolutely nothing. You do not want this ever from a business perspective as people will leave or change their business.

In Blizzard's case giving too much information can lead to disappoint if a feature doesn't get implemented. Lastly giving very little info when you haven't seen information in a very long time leads to speculation and people picking it apart which is what we have seen here. After all it was the only thing we really had to go on.

So you want to strive for a constant steady stream of communication. People want to see progress and want to know you are still actively doing something.

Emphasis on that last line. I think Tigole has done more than enough to prove that they are taking some significant steps towards fixing TBC and bringing it more in line with what they envisioned would happen on 1/16. Games like this can adapt quickly based on their players and sometimes in extreme fashion, and massive retuning is required. Heres to hoping we can hop on the PTR soon and try this new stuff out.

Maybe we're getting a recipe to turn essences into motes? Like how leatherworking turns leather into the next kind of leather. On the other hand, why not just increase the mote droprate then, like say every mob gives a guaranteed 1 mote every time.