General

• The Darkmoon Faire vendors have new items now that trade routes into Northrend have been better established.

Achievements

• The Perma-Peddle Achievement is no longer a part of the "Fool for Love" meta-achievement.

PvP

• PvP vehicles are no longer immune to most player spells, are immune to all CC and snares, but can be diseased, poisoned, and cursed.

Arenas

• Arena rating requirements for all Deadly Gladiator's Arena items have been reduced by 100.
• Ring of Valor: The small pillars will now rise immediately once the arena begins.

Battlegrounds
Lake Wintergrasp

• Wintergrasp PvP vehicles have had their health increased.
• Wintergrasp Tower cannons have had their health increased.
• The Wintergrasp Fortress Exterior walls have had their health increased.
• The Fortress Keep door now has had its health decreased.
• The Orb is now instantly clickable.

Strand of the Ancients

• The Strand of the Ancients Demolisher has had its health increased.
• The Strand of the Ancients tower cannon has had its health increased.

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Horn of Winter now has no cost and grants 10 runic power in addition to its stat buff, but has a 20 second cooldown. (Old notes had 30 Seconds)
• Howling Blast: Cooldown removed.

Druid (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Aquatic Form is now available from druid trainers at level 16.
• Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
• Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.
• Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
• Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on shapeshifting into an animal form.

Hunter (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
• Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
• Tranquilizing Shot has had its cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, down from 15.

Paladin (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Avenging Wrath: Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Avenging Wrath cannot be used within 30 seconds of each other anymore. Forbearance removed from Avenging Wrath. (Note: Not affecting Hand of Protection anymore)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Mental Quickness and Static Shock have switched positions in the talent tree.
• Mental Quickness: Reduces the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power.
• Elemental Oath: In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.
• Elemental Mastery: Redesigned. Now increases the Shaman's critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains at 3 minutes.

Warlock (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)

• Demon Armor and Demon Skin: Armor increased by approximately 120%.
• Demonic Circle: The teleport now clears all snare effects.

Professions
Alchemy

• The Cooldown on Transmute: Titanium has been reduced to 1 day, and the materials required have been simplified.
• Reduced the cooldown on Northrend Alchemy Research from 7 days to 3 days.
• The chance to discover a Northrend transmutation has been increased.
• Changed the Crazy Alchemist Potion so it always gives health and mana. It also grants the benefit of another random potion effect.
• Potion of Nightmares functionality changed. You can now move to interrupt the effect, and damage taken is no longer increased while you are under the effects of this potion.
• Added a new recipe for Ethereal Oil to grand master alchemy trainers.
• You can now discover a recipe for the Elixir of Water Walking with Northrend Alchemy Research.

Blacksmithing

• Increased the materials required to make several recipes that require cobalt.
• Added a new recipe for shield reinforcements that increases the block value of shields.

Cooking

• A recipe has been added for Kungaloosh. You can learn this recipe from an NPC in the Dalaran sewers once you have completed the quest 'The Taste Test' in Sholazar Basin.
• A recipe for the incredible Fish Feast can now be purchased for Dalaran Cooking Awards.
• Succulent Orca Stew and Shoveltusk Soup have been removed from the requirements for any cooking achievements as they will not be added to the game.
• A new recipe for Worg Tartare is now available for purchase with Dalaran Cooking Awards. This delicacy imbues hit rating and Stamina upon those brave enough to eat it.

Enchanting

• Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.
• Increased the Fire damage inflicted by the Icebreaker weapon enchantment.
• Reduced the armor penalty granted by the Berserking weapon enchantment.
• Added a new recipe to enchant bracers with Stamina. You can buy this recipe from Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran.
• Added a new recipe to enchant a weapon with Stamina. You can buy this recipe from Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran.

Engineering

• Reduced the cooldown and increased the duration of the effect for Hyperspeed Accelerators.
• Added a new recipe for epic plate spell power goggles.
• Weakness Spectralizers are now usable by druids.
• The Saronite Bomb recipe now creates a lot more bombs for the same material cost. While this breakthrough was discovered by goblins, all engineers can take advantage of it.
• Gnomish Lightning Generator has had its cast time and cooldown reduced.

Inscription

• Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.
• A new recipe for Glyph of Arcane Blast has been added to Master and Grand Master Inscription trainers.
• Glyph of Death Decay has been changed to grant 20% additional damage instead of its current effect.
• Glyph of Invisibility duration has been increased.

Jewelcrafting

• Added a new recipe to convert a frozen orb and some green quality gems into several superior quality gems.
• Reduced the s...

Theorycrafting with PTR numbers
We pay attention to player-generated numbers, but you must admit that if we took all player-generated numbers as gospel that the game would end up in a pretty funky state.

Your build will nearly always be behind ours, even in beta and on the PTR. We get the benefit of seeing the combined effects of many changes at once, including bug fixes. To estimate the effect that changes will have, you have to do just that -- estimate. Some players can still generate excellent numbers, and others, whether through mailicious intent or just because they forgot to consider something, do not.

But if we are wrong, I have no problem admitting we're wrong. We were wrong about Elemental shamans -- they are lower than what we thought they would be. We were wrong about warlocks -- they are probably too fragile in PvP. If we nerf hunters too much, we will fix them in later patches. But we can't be so terrified of making mistakes that we don't make changes when we think they are warranted. (Source)

Paid character transfers blocked on some realms
The primary goal right now is to reduce the most severe queues on our realms. At its peak concurrency Dalaran saw over a 400 person queue last night. This isn't the highest queue across all US realms by any means. With that said, allowing transfers to the realm would have a greater negative impact on all players of Dalaran, than allowing Horde to transfer to Dalaran would have a positive impact.

At the largest gap last night between the Horde and Alliance populations of Dalaran, the Horde made up for roughly 40% of the total realm population to the Alliance's 60%. While faction balance is a concern for all realms, overall population and realm queues have the better part of our attention at the moment, particularly as is the case for Dalaran.

Transfers may be reopened to Dalaran if and when the realm is no longer experiencing exceptional wait times at peak hours every day. (Source)

Balancing realm population
The answer at this time is not to provide experience incentives for players to transfer. We are reviewing realm populations, wait times, and faction balances at the moment to determine what solutions will work best. We'll provide additional updates when they are available.

[...] We're looking to open up free transfers for a number of high-population PVP realms to low-population PVP realms as soon as the request goes through the appropriate people. We would also like to make a new PVE realm available and open it up for free transfers from a number of high-population PVE realms. Lastly, we're looking to open up free transfers to Gundrak from the high-population Oceanic PVP realms. (Source)

Hunter (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)
Aspects off the GCD
No, it's not over. We took them back off the GCD. (Source)

Hunters in 3.0.8 and 3.1
We talked about it, and Aspects on the GCD is not that big an issue for us. We don't think it's a huge balance problem either way. We can understand though why it feels like a nerf to not have the GCD now and to get it back in 3.0.8. So we can keep Aspects off the GCD. No harm done. (They will still have the 1 sec shared cooldown.)

The argument of why you can't just do too much damage until Ulduar is a silly one. Hunters are doing too much damage. Yes, some other specs are also doing too much damage, but we are reigning those in too.

Remember, our tests are not done with the PTR data. Our builds are more recent than that and have numbers, bug-fixes and data you haven't seen. We try and give you a heads up to major changes when we can, but we can't give you an accurate picture of the data with just words.

We understand the concern that Survival's damage is too high relative to other hunters. That may be the case on the PTR but it isn't the case for us. We have some different numbers for Explosive Shot than the PTR has. We understand the concerns about T.N.T.

[...] On the Aspects issue, we don't like taking things off of the GCD. There is a reason we have a GCD and it has everything to do with being a server-client based game. We tried to fix the problem with Aspects being difficult to manage by reducing the need to switch from a defensive aspect (Monkey) and an offensive aspect (Hawk). Enough people (and not just on this thread) said Viper would still be a problem, so we agreed in this case to take the Aspects off the GCD. This is a good example of feedback working. (Source)

Patch 3.0.8 pet changes
We are iterating on the pet abilities I mentioned earlier and we have new numbers for anyone out there who is still trying to theorycraft this. One of the reasons I don't always provide numbers is because we change them a lot.

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison - 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake - 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike - 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.

We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we'd like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community. (Source)

Rogue's Dismantle
I just wanted to comment on this for any hunters who are new to being disarmed. Weapon chains affect your global disarm duration. They aren't tied to the weapon per se. An offhand weapon chain works on both weapons and your bow.

When disarmed, you lose abilities tied to that item and armor, but not other stats.

Priest (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)
Circle of Healing nerf and other talent trees
We do care and we do listen. But I think sometimes players don't listen to each other. There are plenty of players who say they understand CoH was overpowered (even if they disagree with our solution) and there are plenty of players who say they like healing on their priests and that their priests are the backbone of their raid. If you don't feel that way, that's cool, but you can't realistically expect us to only listen to you while ignoring them.

You can tell us what you don't like about the class and what your concerns are, and many of you have. We appreciate that feedback. But that doesn't mean we are going to make a whole lot of changes if we don't feel they are warranted. We're not asking you to design a class for us to go implement.

Saying a class is broken doesn't make it broken. You can say it's underpowered in specific areas if you feel that way, or even that you think the mechanics are clunky and don't play wel...

Weekly Maintenance, 07/01
This Wednesday there will be a live maintenance, i.e. rolling restarts of all realms between 05:00 and 07:00 CET. Each realm will receive a 15 minute notice prior to being restarted. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

January 5, 2009, 4:20 PM PST
We will be performing maintenance for all realms on Tuesday, January 6th.  The downtime will begin at 3:00 AM PST and end at approximately 11:00 AM PST.

Patch 3.0.8 Notes and current PTR Build
The PTR is a build, much like an actual patch. It represents the data at a moment in time. Since the PTR went out we have fixed other bugs and changed class spells and abilities, some based on feedback coming out of the PTR. If we think we are close to releasing a live build, we won't update the PTR. Otherwise, we will keep refreshing the data.

I am unable to tell you when we plan for the patch to go live for the same reasons we usually don't announce when we think a patch will go live. (Source)

Tanking in Ulduar
Most of the heated tank debates seem to involve if one class is better than another or missing a critical skill or something. Those are all totally valid issues and the kind of thing we monitor.

Specifically on BoSanc, we understand the concern. We're not ready to make any changes yet because we aren't convinced it's going to end up slanting things much one way or the other. But Ulduar is coming. It's going to be harder and it's going to have bosses no one has tanked before. There will be a lot more to discuss, and unfortunately I also suspect a lot more consternation about who doesn't feel like they have the abilities to tank Ulduar. (Source)

Naxxramas and Ulduar raid difficulty
I think some of the other players have answered this the way I would. The idea is not that you can bring 25 prot warriors because they are all excellent players and expect to clear Naxx. I exaggerate, but you get the point. The idea is that you have enough coverage over "critical" areas with fewer players so that you have enough free spots to bring who you want. I put critical in quotes, because it varies depending on groups. Some players think Heroism is mandatory. It probably isn't for Naxx but it probably was for Sunwell. Some kind of poison dispel is probably mandatory for Naxx. Innervate isn't mandatory. Battle rez is useful while learning the encounters. And so on.

Having two priests is currently mandatory for heroic Naxx to do one encounter (that gates some others). We knew we were pushing the envelope with what we could expect of of raids with that design. I think most 25-player groups have 2 priests, but I'm sure not all of them do. If we had asked you to have say 2 Survival hunters, that would clearly be over the line. If we had asked you to have a death knight MT for Saph, that would have gone against the design. Perhaps we should have left up one crystal so you only needed one priest.

I think expecting one of each class isn't too much to ask for a 25-player group, provided we aren't asking for a particular spec or a particular role (like a druid tank or a paladin healer). But this is the kind of thing we're going to have to explore a little more to see how it feels.

Ulduar is going to be more difficult than Naxx, and we expect to see a lot more concerns or complaints about specific classes, specs or buffs being mandatory. We're not designing the encounters that way, but with tougher tuning, I wouldn't be surprised to see more given how much we've seen about relatively easy raiding content. We will deal with those problems if and when they arise. (Source)

25 Players raids composition and effects of the upcoming Wild Growth / Circle of Healing changes
Seriously though, I recently addressed this in a healer thread. We knew heroic Razuvious was pushing the envelope asking for 2 priests, but we also wanted to explore a little of how much we could push the envelope. One of the nice things about Naxx is you can make progress on other wings while you wait for priests to log on or whatever.

I'd say in general we might make the assumption in a 25-player raid that you have every class available, but not every spec available. We might assume you have a paladin, but not a Prot paladin. We might require you to spellsteal but not deep freeze. In a 10-player raid you should be able to roll with 1-2 tanks and 2-3 healers of any kind. At most you might have unconventional solutions to some fights that benefit more from not having too many melee (KT) or instant hots (Malygos).

We haven't nerfed Malygos' Vortex yet because frankly people have beaten him with every combination of healers possible (including 3 Holy paladins). We are prepared to nerf Vortex however if a lot of groups suddenly can't handle the encounter any longer. Once you get a certain amount of health, which many guilds are starting to acquire, Vortex becomes a lot less deadly. I won't offer too many more tips because I think it rubbed some players the wrong way when I gave suggestions for Loken, but rest assured, it can totally be done.

[...] I don't think heroic Raz is anything close to that scale, and in any event, I would not anticipate many encounters like that. We hate to rule them out completely, just because we design a lot of boss fights and frankly the diversity is nice. One of the things that is cool about the encounter is that priests get to tank for one fight -- something they never get to do (the MT can just do the control on the 10-player version) and Mind Control, which often doesn't work in instances, gets to shine. (Source)

Changing classes / specs between encounters
The best guilds in the world already send people to respec between fights or swap out classes between fights. We don't want this to be the standard way everyone raids, but we don't think it's worth implementing a lot of punitive measure to prevent either. So dual-spec won't affect those guilds much.

So then it comes down to what is most likely *your* guild (unless you are in one of those cutting-edge guilds, in which case I salute you). In your guild are all the players such amazing players that they can always hit the theortetical max dps predicted by spreadsheets and combat dummy tests? If so, then the pure classes should still be on top. If not, then you still don't have much to worry about. If you are an amazing mage and can out dps the shamans and druids, then you'll probably get a spot. If you aren't an amazing mage, but you have good friends in the guild and they like having you along then you'll probably get a spot.

The groups that might get caught are those that struggle with content and feel like stacking classes is the solution to get them through. But in nearly every case I see this, the group would do far better to just get better gear, talent builds, or learn how to handle the encounters or which buttons to push. The exception are the cutting-edge guilds that ARE struggling with cutting-edge content, but they are going to stack classes per encounter anyway (and 99% of us aren't in those guilds). (Source)

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent Glyph Calc.)
Dual Wield
There are talents that benefit DW more than 2H. We think that is more interesting than every talent always giving you the same benefit no matter what your gear choices. BCB, Killing Machine and Necrosis, among others, should benefit DW.

If DW is too stron...