Icecrown Citadel Videos, Blue posts

PTR Raid Testing Videos
A few guilds released videos of their raid testing on PTRs during the past two days. A video of Sindragosa tested a few hours ago is also included.

<div align="center">BlizzCast #11: BlizzCon 2009 in Review
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
In our eleventh episode of BlizzCast, we have a roundtable discussion with members of the community team to recap the major happenings, announcements, and other highlights of this year’s BlizzCon. Join our discussion as we relive some of our favorite moments from the show.

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/communi...1.html?rhtml=y




Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
New LFG Channel
I don&#39;t think a world-wide LFG channel would be something you&#39;d really want. It would immediately become the global chat channel for trade, spam and Chuck Norris jokes.

On live it&#39;s restricted to people using the LFG tool. The new dungeon tool honestly makes matches so quickly under most conditions that that implementation won&#39;t work. We feared people would just use the /trade channel if we didn&#39;t make a similar /lfg channel. (Source)

Dungeon system gear requirements
It uses all the items you own to make that determination, not just what you have equipped.

Honestly though, we are really relaxed about how we use this restriction. It&#39;s basically in there to prevent newly minted 80s in quest greens from rolling into a heroic dungeon that is likely to kick their butt. Most players sophisticated enough to be on these boards won&#39;t run into it in day to day practice. (Source)

Looking for raid NOT working cross-realms
If a dungeon group falls apart after 1-2 bosses, it&#39;s not nearly as big of a deal as if a raid group falls apart after 5 bosses of Ulduar. If the group wants to continue it and somebody from another realm (who can&#39;t really contact you easily) beat you to it and cleared it with their friends, that would probably leave you a bit upset. This is just one example that came to me off the top of my head.

Sure, there could be ways to resolve this with a variety of rules, but we will see how things go for now. A lot of raids are able to happen once people are found so we mainly just want to make it easier to find people for now. (Source)

Additional stats in monsters tooltips for Cataclysm
We&#39;d be more likely to just put it on the stats screen as a tooltip for your hit chance for example. To get the information from particular creatures will require a little more work on our part. (Source)

Boss difficulty
I&#39;m talking about an Icecrown boss being tougher than an Ulduar boss, not that the Ulduar bosses look at how much gear you have and scale themselves up accordingly.

Bosses get more damage and health. If they also got more expertise, defense and maybe armor then as character item level grew their relative strength to boss stats would not increase. As it is they increase enormously, requiring the bosses to have even more health and even more damage. Shifting some of that health and damage to other stats would fix a lot of problems. (Source)

Giving wands to level 1 characters
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They&#39;re generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters&#39; action bars specifically so new players aren&#39;t inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.

With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets. (Source)

Chill of the Thrown / Tanking (See Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!)
Reasons behind the change
I&#39;ll address this one more time and then leave it because I think players are more interested in trying to turn this into a huge tanking nerf than understand what&#39;s going on.

We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.

The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team. (Source)

Diminishing returns
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won&#39;t affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won&#39;t get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.

The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.

It won&#39;t be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We&#39;re not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard. (Source)

Stamina less important?
It arguably makes stam less important (though it will always be important for tanks). Many players are probably telling you right now that only stamina and armor are important because if you ever fail to avoid two boss hits in a row that you&#39;re going to die. Under that environment, avoidance loses a lot of value.

If bosses hit for less in IC (which they will, since they will hit more often) then the value of avoidance for purposes of survival increases.

I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won&#39;t be as big an issue. (Source)

Effective Health
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.

When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It&#39;s reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.

However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn&#39;t, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don&#39;t depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.

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