The Daily Blues

We will be performing rolling restarts on Tuesday, March 2, beginning at 5:00 AM PST for all US realms and 12:00 AM PST for Oceanic realms. Downtime for each realm is expected to be minimal.

Thank you for your patience.

Greetings,

We will be conducting maintenance on the PTR servers tomorrow (3/2) at approximately 6:00 AM PST. The duration of this maintenance is scheduled for 6 hours of downtime.

We will update this thread as more information becomes available. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

We'd like to thank everyone that participated in this event. Please watch for more event postings in the PTR forum soon. Blue poster text.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the second week of our Five Year Anniversary Contest! Congratulations to our twenty-five winners, all of whom have won a pair of PPK gaming eyewear from Gunnar Optiks!

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/fiveyear/winners.html

Take a moment to check out the winning entries and don't forget to get your cameras and send us your submissions now! Remember that this week's theme is Cute Companion Battlecry!

http://www.wow-europe.com/contests/fanartcontest.html?locale=en_gb

The World Championship of the fourth Intel Extreme Masters (Electronic Sports League) in World of Warcraft 3v3 Arena will be held on March 2-4 at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

Twelve international teams will show lots of thrilling action while competing for an overall prize pool of $50,000. You can see all the matches live with English commentary on ESL TV — a free non-stop video stream. For more details, including team profiles, interviews with participants, and the video stream, see the official coverage page – http://www.esl-world.net/masters/season4/hannover/

When threat doesn't matter as a tank, then maximizing your rotation doesn't matter much either. To use the warrior example, you could skip Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam and just autoattack and use defensive cooldowns. Is that fun?

On the other hand, many of the requests we see are for harder hitting attacks, especially on the AE front, so that in essence it's less work to tank multiple mobs at once. Is this really what you want?

I would assert in the current game that threat is almost never an issue. It might be an issue in the first few seconds of a fight (including when new adds join the party) or when the dps severely outgear the tank (such as in a Dungeon Finder situation). Especially in a world with Misdirect, Tricks of the Trade, and Tauntable bosses, tanks on single-target raid fights get so far ahead of the dps and healers, that catching them would be almost impossible. We could definitely tone this down a little such that tanks needed to fight for threat a little more than they do now. Some players would welcome that change and some would say that Blizzard hates tanks and makes them work too hard.

Discuss.

I dont think we read the same posts, it isnt about how complicated it is. It's about how another ability (obliterate) does the same thing, better.

I was reading the posts in this thread. Two of them above said essentially "it's not as cool when it doesn't hit for Shadow damage" and "the tooltip is complicated." I was responding to those points.

To respond to some of the others:

We're happy with how much damage DKs can do in PvP. They were too susceptible to dispels, and we have now implemented a fix to help with that.

Class abilities are different. Envenom is not Scourge Strike. Rogues still do a lot of physical damage. Frost Strike still hits for 100% magic damage, but it's a more controlled ability. The DK in PvP hitting for huge Scourge Strikes over and over again is not something we're going to go back to. It may have been fun, but I assert it was fun because it was overpowered not because Shadow damage is somehow more entertaining.

Players using armor pen to hit for physical damage do not hit for magical damage. The closest argument could make is that bleeds act similar to magic damage.

Obliterate is a different ability. Unholy has talents that play off of both Scourge Strike and Shadow damage. If we see Unholy DKs literally going to Obliterate and skipping those relevant talents (which some PvE DKs were doing before), then we would make changes, but they don't seem to be doing that now. We're certainly not going to make Scourge Strike HIT REAL HARD in order to distinguish it, so make sure you're asking for what you really want and not try to sneakily ask for a damage buff.

In general, I find arguments to be generally weak that say "This class does X so I should be able to as well." If you have specific problems in PvP, mention those. If you think your damage is too low to exert pressure, that's a fine conversation to have. I would try to do it without the "But X ability hits hard, so mine should too" talking points.

Finally, this dead horse feels a little dead to me. You might want to check out some of our (numerous) comments on the intent for Scourge Strike before you hit that Post button again.

A more accurate quote probably would have been "They are all for combat."

We are still working out what exactly you can blow a shard on. Some of the in combat but not damage abilities, such as the Fel Dom example from Blizzcon, are still on the table.