First of all it means that casters and hunters nuking the mage get the 100ish dmg it does. secondly, since impact proccs of firedmg, it probably means it can procc impact, too. Could be another boost to fire pvp, nothing fancy but fun after all.

Looks scary. Most of the changes have already gone live on PTR and these patch notes were posted long before the 2.4 PTR was up. They can't be serious with all the druid nerfs.

Reducing the cast time of Ghost Wolf to 2 seconds is a great change. I'm looking forward to playing with that as enhancement in pvp. The NS+EM nerf was necessary and should have been expected in my opinion.

Now this is something that needed to be addressed solely for the sake of balance in PvP, but the consequence is that the affects for PvE is a massive backwards progress, well more for mages than shamans.

There needs to be an alternative put in place that doesn't nerf a classes potential dps in PvE in order to balance them in PvP. Think the freeze mechanic associated with IV is the problem with nerf more than the haste is. Think if they just removed that part of the spell everyone would be a little bit more happy. I wont comment on the shaman nerf, but isn't Lightning Overload the real culprit of most problems? Or am I thinking of a different issue.

Just to clarify, as this phrasing appears vague:

Player A is a member of a 2on2 team, but has a higher personal rating than his teammate Player B. The team has a rating of let's say 1800.

Player A
2on2 Personal Rating: 2000
3on3 Personal Rating: 2300
5on5 Personal Rating: 2300

Player B
2on2 Personal Rating: 1600
3on3 Personal Rating: 1600
5on5 Personal Rating: 1600

Today:
Now A and B queue for 2on2. As their team rating is 1800, they should be matched accordingly with a 1800 rated team.

Postpatch:
A and B queue again, and Player A's personal rating exceeds his team's rating. But which personal rating is being considered? Is the team matched against a 2000 rated team or a 2300 rated team?

I lean towards 2300 but I am not absolutely positive, though I guess it makes the most sense. This change would amount to a very steep learning curve for (low rated) players who want to play with high rated friends.

What do you think?

How is that vague?
Seems to mean that in your scenario that the matchmaking will use the 2000 rating.

It's pretty obvious it will be the personal rating for that bracket. Why would 5v5 rating count towards matching a 2v2 game?

What that does basically is making sure boosting teams will be much more difficult as you won't be fighting sub 2k teams anymore, even at 1500, if your personal rating is 2k+.

So if a 2k team faces a 1.5k team (with a 2k pr player in it), would the points for win/losses be based on 2k vs 2k or 2k vs 1.5k? I would assume the former as it would suck to lose so many points at 2k rating to a potentially equal team and have it happen regularly.

Points are always calculated on team ratings. Personal rating is only used to restrict buying weapon and shoulders, and as of next patch, to more accurately match the games.

This addition of matchmaking is only to prevent a current exploit which isn't very popular where you can boost a player's personal rating above team rating, and then use good players to boost the team rating. This is good for alts/selling ratings etc. It can work until 1850, but after that it's very time consuming, frustrating and practically undoable.

The two second root on chastise is way too short to make it useful, I would be much happier if they just nerfed the cooldown to 60 seconds instead of changing the effect.

More like matchmaking will use the 2300 rating, as that is player A's highest rating.

This appears to be a *very* welcome change, as currently there're way too many boost teams selling personal rating.

In related things, team rating change is calculated always team rating vs team rating. So for example 2v2 (numbers hugely estimated and do not reflect reality)

Team Alpha - 1500 rating
Player A - prating 2000 (from 5v5 team)
Player B - prating 1500

Team Beta - 2000 rating
Player Z - prating 2000
Player X - prating 2000

Scenario 1)

Team Alpha loses
New Ratings:

Team Alpha - 1499 rating (-1)
Player A - prating 1499 (prating 2000 from 5v5 team)
Player B - prating 1499

Team Beta - 2001 rating
Player Z - prating 2001
Player X - prating 2001

Team Beta curses about bad luck, pitiful +1 from hard win. Team Alpha barely loses any points.

Scenario 2)

Team Alpha wins
New Ratings:

Team Alpha - 1530 rating (+30)
Player A - prating 1530 (prating 2000 from 5v5 team)
Player B - prating 1530

Team Beta - 1970 rating
Player Z - prating 1970
Player X - prating 1970

Team Alpha gets huge amount of rating due to big difference in 2v2 ratings. Team Beta slices wrists in frustration ("WHAT?! -30 points?!"). However, it seems very unlikely that 1500 rating player is able to compete at 2000 rating level.

Indeed, however, most high end pvpers tend to have teams in all brackets, and only sell in one or two brackets. Not foolproof, but good direction.

I am sorry to say but arena change against team selling fails. Most people that are boosting does not care about personal rating (they got their shoulders/weapon). Therefore before you boost anyone you can just quit all teams and volia you are "1500" player in all brackets. Of course it is minor annoyance for those people as they need to play their real teams after boosts but it is not big deal.

This will help only few first weeks of every season until players got their personal rating items. Better than nothing but still not a final solution.

Aside from arena... It seems that "fake" notes are coming true after some internal testing.

EDIT: And how about when 1500 team (with 2300 member(s)) will match 2300 team and 1500 team will win? 2300 team will loose loads of points then? How that is fair? Unless of course points will be based on personal rating too.

That's horrible for classes that have different levels of viability at different sizes (all but Warrior?).

I agree on this. If the system would match against the rating of the person for a particular team only, the boosting issue would remain unaffected.

Player Advanced
2v2 - 1500
3v3 - 2154

Player Needsaboost
2v2 - 1500
3v3 - 1116

Let's say player Advanced has just created a 2v2 team with player Needsaboost and this fresh team starts at 1500 rating. If the system would queue at 1500 rating, there is no change at all. But if the system would queue at 2154 rating, boosting player Needsaboost would be alot harder.

The other side of this is that if player Advanced and player Needsaboost are good friends, they wouldn't be able to enjoy a 2v2 very much. It also kind of disables good PvPers to teach others in this way.

I would still choose this over the current situation though, it would be nice to play the arena without meeting fully s3 geared people at 1500 rating which is very common in my battlegroup.

I hope posting the exact details of this exploit isn't frowned upon, because I think it is the best way to explain the matchmaking change.The matchmaking change is not intended to stop arena point selling, it is intended to stop the personal rating boost tactic of intentionally losing games down to 1200 or 1300 while the person whose personal rating you want to boost sits out. Then you bring that guy in, win games up to 1500 or so which will put his personal at like 1600ish. Then, he sits out again, and you lose back down to a really low rating, and repeat the process to cheese that guy's rating up to 1850 so he can buy a weapon after the legit players rebuild the team's rating to 1850 while that guy sits out again. Theoretically, you could do this for shoulders too, but it is a very time consuming process, as it takes a very large number of games. It does work, though.

It should only be checking the personal rating of people on the team for the particular bracket they are playing in. To check personal ratings for other brackets would be downright insane and break the system because of how some classes perform really well in certain bracket sizes and poorly in others. You can't take a shaman on a top rated 5v5 team, and then throw him into the same rating level in 2v2 just based off his 5v5 personal rating, it doesn't make an ounce of sense, especially since if that did happen, losing in 2v2 wouldn't change his 5v5 personal at all, so he would be stuck with a 1500 team rating that was guaranteed to get 2400 games no matter what.

I also see a big problem with potential griefing with that change, though. What's to stop spiteful 2.2k+ teams from having a 2.2k personal rated player sit out, then lose games on purpose to drag the team's charter way down to a low rated level, then queue with your usual team? You will be getting matched against the SAME teams you did before you tanked your team rating, but now your team's rating is 1600. You'll be taking 30+ points from them if you win, and lose next to nothing if you lose. The player with the high personal will only lose a "normal" amount of personal rating, like 10-15, so you will likely keep getting matched against these same teams.

Unless I've misinterpreted something here, I'm not entirely sure the personal rating boost loophole is worth fixing in that manner. It is such a time consuming process, as it takes a ridiculous amount of games to pull off.

We haven't had any GM assistance in any way, the best we've gotten was a Flaskataur on our original Kalecgos progress on the first or second day of the servers being up with enough people over, the second was when we killed Brutallus 3.0 and instantly had Flaskataurs spawned around us, albeit late and pointless at that help. No DT's of any type.

So US guilds do not get serious GM assistance, just working character copies (our shaman class leader's copy is still pending for EU PvE, yay for respec healers); flaskataurs where we have to wait on guild bank chars to copy over and normal lateny against our normal+300. Still, no worries...
Bitterness aside, for us the EU PTR is about learning the bosses for server first kills, any bugs/problems we encounter have already been reported in the US and have been or are being taken care of. GM assistance for this purpose would surely be overkill.

The GMs refused to help us last night since we weren't Vis Maior.

I'm sorry, did I miss something? Flaskataurs?

Did the talent Improved Ghost Wolf change as well or will Ghost Wolf be an instant spell?

I'm assuming the talent will be unchanged. They're just reducing the base cast time of the spell to 2 seconds, so with the talent it will be instant cast.