US First Lich King 10 Heroic, Blue post
US First Lich King (10) Heroic Kill + Video
On March 15, Adept (US - Dreadmaul) claimed the US first kill of the Lich King in 10-man heroic mode. Congratulations to them!
They also released a full video of the encounter, the encounter definitely looks much harder in Heroic Mode. The 1st part of the video will be available a bit later.
(The video is still processing as I post this news, quality will improve)
<div align="center">Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
AE Tanking
Here are ways we could make AE tanking trivial. None of these are things we would actually do, though players have suggested some things dangerously close to them.
-- Challenging Shout has no cooldown. Everything is pretty much taunted to you the whole time.
-- You can tank everything by spamming Commanding Shout. (Back when say warriors tanked the pre-Nef adds, they could do it by spamming Battle or Demo Shout, which generated terrible threat but just enough to actually work on that encounter. Now it really won't work... but it could with the right numbers.)
-- Thunder Clap hits so freaking hard that you hit it once and never really have to again.
-- Thunder Clap puts a dot on everything (stronger than Deep Wounds) so that you hit it once and never really have to again.
-- Defensive Stance has an 8000% threat modifier.
Those ideas would all work if we wanted you to never lose threat. That's not the goal. On the other hand, the goal also is NOT:
-- Some tank classes just generate a lot more AE threat than others.
-- Some tank classes just AE tank a lot easier than others.
-- AE tanking gets harder and harder over time as dps specs gear up.
-- AE tanking is really, really challenging and you're at the constant risk of losing aggro.
-- Just for completeness, I'll add the original one above, which is that you never, ever lose threat no matter what.
What we like about the warrior AE tanking model that is worth extending to other classes without just duplicating the warrior abilities:
-- You hit more than one button.
-- You hit different buttons than you do when handling single targets.
-- You have to pay attention to crowd controlled targets.
-- You don't totally ignore your single-target abilities.
-- You might switch targets on some pulls. (Source)
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...s/ihunters.gif Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Beast Mastery
If you're talking best possible gear, we think BM is pretty close to Survival in 3.3.3. Marks is ahead, and that's largely a function of armor pen, but again you are talking about absolute best gear. If you aren't in Icecrown 25 hard modes, then gear is likely to have just as much effect on your damage as spec. Ideally, things are balanced at all levels between level 1 and 80 with BiS gear, but there are going to be a lot of points along the way where that's probably not true. We see Survival hunters beat Marks hunters all the time in what I would categorize as average (meaning not server first guilds but capable of progressing) raids. Hopefully we'll see some BM guys up there too, but it may take higher gear levels. (Source)
I would be pretty surprised if guilds doing hard modes w/ access to lvl 80 BiS gear have hunters raiding as BM, or would be happy with a hunter choosing a spec that isn't min/max'd.
My suspicion is that the hunters with the gear you are describing will have a propensity to go Marks, because that currently yields the highest damage and raiders tend to play whatever does the highest damage. In a world without armor pen, that might not be the case (though I haven't done the math lately).
Nonetheless, it is also true today that Marks can beat Survival, and yet there are a lot of Survival hunters raiding. Our hope is that in 3.3.3 that there will be as many BM hunters as Survival raiding, which would be a really nice bump for BM. Maybe the estimates (ours and those I've read) about the boost BM is getting are overly optimistic. We'll see.
It's possible the Survival hunters are only going Survival for Replenishment, though all 3 hunters bring some pretty solid raid benefits these days. (Source)
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/.../iwarriors.gif Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Shield Block
If you don't think Shield Block is interesting enough today, that's a fine discussion to have. I'm a little surprised to see any nostalgia for the old model though. Hitting a relatively common dps button that plays into other talents and abilities is one thing. Having to constantly mash "make me slightly more survivable" is another. I'll grant you that it was fun on Illidan, but it took that mechanic specifically to make it fun.
Imagine how you'd react to this scenario:
GC: Good news, everyone! We lowered the cooldown of Shield Wall to 5 sec and balanced assuming you hit it every 5 sec.
Tanks: Um.... Thanks? Could you maybe just make it a passive at that point?
GC: But hitting buttons is fun! (Source)
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