General

• Experience needed to increase from level 86 to level 90 has been reduced by 33%.

Classes

• Druid
  
  • General
    
    • Tranquility now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-player instance. This change also applies to players using the Symbiosis version of Tranquility.
  • Restoration
    
    • Ironbark now has a cooldown of 60 seconds, down from 2 minutes.
    • Swiftmend's area-of-effect component now heals injured allies within 10 yards, up from 8 yards.
    • Wild Mushroom: Bloom now heals all allies within 10 yards (up from 8 yards) for 100% more, and includes bonus healing from Rejuvenation overhealing.
  • Item Sets
    
    • Restoration PvP 4-piece set bonus now reduces the cooldown of Ironbark by 30 seconds (down from 90 seconds).
• Hunter
  
  • General
    
    • Revive Pet now has a cast time of 4 seconds, down from 6 seconds.
• Monk
  
  • Mistweaver
    
    • Revival now has a healing cap of 15 raid members (up from 6) when used in a 25-player instance.
• Paladin
  
  • General
    
    • Devotion Aura can now be used while the Paladin is silenced.
  • Glyphs
    
    • Glyph of the Battle Healer now heals a nearby injured friendly target, excluding the Paladin, for 20% of damage dealt while Seal of Insight is active, down from 30%.
• Priest
  
  • Glyphs
    
    • Glyph of Smite no longer causes the additional 20% damage dealt by Smite to transfer into Atonement.
  • Discipline
    
    • Atonement now heals nearby friendly targets for 90% of the damage dealt, down from 100%.
    • Penance now deals 10% less damage, but healing done is increased by 10%.
  • Holy
    
    • Divine Hymn now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-player instance.
  • Shadow
    
    • Vampiric Embrace now has a healing cap of 15 raid members (up from 6) when used in a 25-player instance.
• Warlock
  
  • General
    
    • Demonic Gateway cast time has been reduced to 4 seconds, down from 5 seconds, gains its first charge after 5 seconds (down from 13 seconds), and gains a new charge every 10 seconds (down from 15 seconds). The summoned gateway has 100% of the summoning Warlock's health, 100% of the Warlock's resilience, and can now be attacked and killed by enemy players.
  • Item Sets
    
    • Warlock PvP 2-piece set bonus no longer reduces cooldown on Unending Resolve and have been replaced by the former 4-piece set bonus where the Warlock's Twilight Ward absorbs damage from all magical schools.
    • Warlock PvP 4-piece set bonus now increases damage dealt by Agony, Corruption, Doom, Immolate, and Unstable Affliction by 10%.

Pet Battles

• General
  
  • Pandaren Spirit Pet Supplies now has a chance to drop a family specific rare Battle-Stone.
• Battle Pet Quests
  
  • A new achievement and reward has been added for characters that complete every Pet Battle daily quest in a single day.
  • Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to Battle-Stones from pet supplies bags and wild battles. Each bag or battle that does not provide a stone has a progressively better chance to award a stone to the player.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Raids
  
  • Bonus Roll
    
    • Reduced the number of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune needed for the Mogu Runes of Fate weekly quest to 50, down from 90.
  • Terrace of Endless Spring
    
    • Players no longer need to have defeated Grand Empress Shek'zeer to enter the Terrace of Endless Spring in Normal difficulty.
  • Throne of Thunder
    
    • Primordius
    • The Genetically Unmodified Organism achievement has been redesigned. It now requires players to defeat Primordius while none of the players in the raid received a harmful mutation.
• Dungeons
  
  • Completing the Challenge mode daily quest now awards a Heroic Cache of Treasures with a chance to contain an epic item!

Items

• Shado-Pan Assault belts now require Friendly reputation to purchase, down from Revered.
• Shado-Pan Assault chest pieces now require Honored reputation to purchase, down from Revered.
• The following PvP trinkets now have a cooldown of 2 minutes, down from 5 minutes.
  
  • Bequeathed Insignia of the Alliance
  • Bequeathed Insignia of the Horde
  • Inherited Insignia of the Alliance
  • Inherited Insignia of the Horde
  • Inherited Mark of Tyranny
  • Insignia of the Alliance
  • Insignia of the Horde
• The following trinkets have on-use effects reduced by 33%, but have a 100% increase to duration when used in a Battleground or Arena.
  
  • Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun
  • Renataki’s Soul Charm
  • Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault
  • Wushoolay’s Final Choice
• The following trinkets have on-use effects reduced by 75%, but have a 400% increase to duration when used in a Battleground or Arena.
  
  • Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire
  • Gaze of the Twins
  • Primordius' Talisman of Rage
  • Talisman of Bloodlust
• All other trinkets above ilevel 502 have on-use effects reduced by 50%, but have a 100% increase to duration when used in a Battleground or Arena.

I have a love hate relationship with Wrath and Archon for that matter. This is a topic that I felt I should at least comment on since it's come up on many occasions. There is no fundamental flaw with having a 2 minute cooldown ability that transforms your character and is really powerful, the problem is when it becomes a forgone conclusion that these AWESOME abilities are up 100% of the time and instead of being excited that they are up you are annoyed when they fall off. We have talked about what if anything we want to do with these abilities in the long term. I will say we have no short term plans to change them but we don't like that they aren't fulfilling their original purpose which is to provide a really awesome button that mixes up the tempo of combat for a small window of time.

Whatever you do, I hope you don't penalize those of us that use it as intended, that is people that just use it for the occasional boost and not a permanent boost.
I want to make this point clear. Wrath is an awesome ability, when the game first launched players used it the way it was designed to be used which was as a huge, temporary, power boost to kill a hard champ or fight a boss. The problem stems from the ability to keep it up 100% of the time. Any future change that we would consider making to either this or Archon would be focused on making these not a 100% uptime abilities. So yes as was stated above Wrath isn't the problem, Thrive on Chaos and the assist duration extending mechanic of Archon are the problems.

We are still working to improve monster density across all Acts, and this includes tuning the monster density on Act IV. There have not yet been made any additional changes to Act IV though, but you should hopefully see some improvements on this in a future PTR patch.

With the development of patch 5.3 in full swing, we’ve collected a series of PvP-focused questions from the community; the development team has the answers in this new edition of Ask the Devs.

PvP Item Level Cap
Question - How are we planning to have the ilvl cap work in patch 5.3? Rumor has it that the cap will slowly increase over the course of a season. If this is the case, where is the big enjoyment we get out of new gear, especially weapons?

Answer - For patch 5.3, PvP items will just be capped outright. The current plan for 5.4 is to have the cap gradually increase over time so that players won’t acquire new gear that doesn’t benefit them (because it would just be lowered to the cap). We’re also talking about different ways in which to calculate the cap. For example, if you had full ilevel 496 gear and acquired a new 520+ weapon, it would just get dropped to 496 as well. Maybe we can design the system so that your average overall can climb to a slightly higher number.

Overall the intent is that elite PvP gear is cosmetic. We don’t want item levels within PvP gear to have such a huge disparity that a new PvP player has a miserable experience—that’s the entire intent of this change.

Question - Currently the 5.2 ladders are being plagued with PvE trinkets that have really nice procs. Are the ilvl caps going to assist with any future cases of strong PvE items and trinket procs? If not what have you got planned to avoid PvE items being BiS for PvP?

Answer - We think “plague” is too strong a word here. Our goal is not to prohibit all PvE gear in PvP, or we would do just that. We like that either gear type can be used to get a leg up in the other format. What we don’t want is for players who are in full Conquest gear to feel like they need to go pursue a PvE item in order to be competitive. We have made some changes to trinkets already and we will modify others if we feel it’s necessary. Our tactic overall is to have PvE trinkets with the potential for PvP burst (such as those with a large primary stat proc) to proc more frequently but for smaller amounts against players.


Resilience Changes
Question - Why did you decide to remove resilience from PvP gear? Don’t you feel that there are bigger issues in the current pvp system, like too much cc or better class balance?

Answer - As it stands now, players need a certain percentage of Resilience just to have any fun in PvP. It’s a very discouraging experience to step into a random Battleground with a bare minimum of PvP gear and not be able to stay alive enough to contribute to your team at all. However, we were concerned that if we brought the minimum level of Resilience up that there wouldn’t be enough head space remaining to be able to offer it as a progressive stat on gear; starter gear would have had 65% and max gear would have something like 70%. Yet Resilience as a concept is still important—the damage that a player can do was originally and is ultimately calibrated around how long it takes to kill a quest creature in the outdoor world, but PvP battles at such a fast pace aren’t very fun. Therefore, we decided it just made more sense that players take less damage from other players.

Changing the way gearing works doesn’t preclude making other PvP changes we feel are necessary, and indeed there are several class PvP changes in patch 5.3. On the topic of crowd control specifically, overall we don’t feel like there is too much. We think crowd control is critical to PvP, because without crowd control, battles among players devolve into tunneling and burst cooldowns. Knowing when and who to control, when and who to dispel, and how the various diminishing returns work is knowledge that helps to differentiate player skill in PvP. We would like to make another pass at the amount of instant crowd control in the game, and we think the diminishing returns system could stand to be slightly streamlined overall, but I wouldn’t expect major overhauls to this design.

Question - With the changes to PvP gear and resilience in 5.3, how is it that you plan for World PvP to work so that PvE gear won’t be overly dominant?

Answer - Fully geared Conquest gear gives you about 60% PvP Power, which translates to 60% more damage. Wearing such gear, you will have a significant advantage over the LFR-geared player, have a moderate advantage over the normal-geared player, and should be pretty competitive with a Heroic raid–geared player—they may have more survivability, but you might do more damage. Statistically, Heroic-geared raiders are a very small percentage of WoW players, so you’re unlikely to even encounter them out in the world. If you do, the outcome will likely come down not to small gear disparities, but who is more skilled at PvP, who got the jump on whom, and which side outnumbers the other.

World PvP is inherently unfair, which is also part of its charm, compared to structured Arenas and Battlegrounds. (Imagine for a moment world PvP with gates that opened after a shared countdown!) Overall we think the gear changes we’re talking about will be a good improvement for organized PvP, without causing much or any harm to world PvP.

Question - In patch 5.3, all resilience is being removed from gear. Does this include the PvP heirlooms? If it does, will we be replacing the stats with something else that is useful?

Answer - We did not remove Resilience from heirlooms for patch 5.3. If we feel like the other Resilience changes in 5.3 are successful, then we might go back and look at the lower-level PvP gear, including heirlooms. One option is to replace the Resilience with PvP Power. Also keep in mind that the 65% Resilience is at level 90; it will be smaller at lower character levels, where the presence of Resilience on gear can still provide some benefits.

Question - Because of base resilience and the iLvl cap, what do you plan to do about PvE geared tanks in rated battlegrounds? They will be a clear choice over flag carriers with PvP gear.

Answer - The main role of tanks in PvP is as flag carriers. There is a debuff that applies to flag carriers that causes them to take additional damage, and we made a change to have this debuff even stronger for tanks in Rated Battlegrounds. Philosophically, we’re okay with tanks being useful in PvP, but in general, characters that are hard to kill with a reasonable amount of control aren’t fun for anyone else, so we’re definitely not trying to encourage even more tank participation in PvP. With this change, you can still use a tank as a flag carrier, but it should also feel more feasible to try having other classes and specs carry the flag as well.

Question - Why was 65% resilience the chosen number? Do you feel that this will be too much or too little damage reduction and do you plan on changing this in the future?

Answer - It’s close to what players have today in full Conquest gear, and we think survivability feels okay for those characters. We may increase it to 70% or higher depending on how things feel, especially in patch 5.4.

Question - What is the objective of allowing resilience gems and resilience enchants in a pvp set? We have experienced that right now everything that adds resilience to your gear is useless. Are you going to improve resilience gems and enchantments to make them more appealing to use or are you going to remove it over time?

Answer - As we said above in regard to heirlooms, we wanted to evaluate the Resilience changes in 5.4 before propagating them through every system in the game. It could be that we redesign Resilience gems and enchants in patch 5.4. Keep in mind that the relative survivability you get from those gems and enchants has not changed, even though the numbers are smaller. If you enjoyed 10% less damage before, you still will now.

Question - Will this resilience change have any impact on PvP Power? Can you elaborate on what you are doing to make it a more attractive stat for Flag Carriers and healers?

Answer - We increased the PvP Power benefit to healing from 50% to 100% and increased Battle Fatigue by a proportional amount. These two changes should keep healing at about the same strength as in patch 5.2, but make PvP Power as a stat more attractive to healers. We discussed flag carriers a bit in an earlier question; we’re not really worried about tanks anywhere but CTF, and we have a CTF-specific solution.


Rewards and Incentives
Question - The Elite set is becoming a vanity item again in patch 5.3, and it’s very expensive and frustrating having to gem and enchant your gear a second time. Have you considered making Elite gear function similarly to Challenge mode gear?

Answer - The current design is a remnant of our plan in patch 5.2 where the older piece is consumed in order to purchase the newer piece. We implemented the system in such a way because it allowed players to transfer the upgrades to the new piece without requiring additional Conquest points. Now that we don’t support upgrading PvP gear, we could reconsider this design for the next season and make Elite gear behave more like Challenge mode gear.

Question - In patch 5.3, the elite gear will be quite difficult to attain for casual Arena players. What kind of rewards do you have planned for casual PvP’ers to keep them interested in PvP?

Answer - Elite gear is positioned as one of the ultimate PvP rewards. Similarly, Heroic raid gear is also hard to obtain for casual players. In the meantime, more casual PvP players should see steady rewards as they earn the normal Conquest pieces. We do think that there’s room for more PvP rewards that aren’t just aimed at the very best PvP players. Next season, we’re discussing some rewards aimed at participation (e.g. win 50 Rated Battlegrounds) and not just the players with the highest win percentages.


Class Changes
Question - The change in patch 5.3 that makes Gateway require a four second cast time and being attackable is going to be quite damaging to warlocks when affliction is already in quite a poor state. What was the reasoning behind this change and what do you plan to do with Affliction to make it more competitive?

Answer - Our overall goal was to make Gateway less binary. As implemented on live realms right now, it feels very hard to get up, but then brutally punishing to the other team once you get it at full effectiveness. With these changes, it’s easier to get the Gateway up but less transformative when you are successful. We are still evaluating their health—we don’t want them to be trivial to destroy. One change that players may not be aware of is that in patch 5.3 the first charge happens after 5 seconds (down from 13 seconds), and each additional charge requires 10 seconds (down from 15 seconds).

We don’t feel that Gateway is the key to making Affliction more competitive. We changed Haunt to refund a Soul Shard when it is dispelled, with the intent that Shards spent on Haunt instead of Soul Swap shouldn’t feel wasted. We also redesigned the PvP set bonus to grant additional damage to DOTs. While this benefits all Warlocks, it will benefit Affliction the most, which should help make them more competitive with the other Warlock specs.

Question - What is the reasoning behind the upcoming changes to Void Shift? This spell already has a high risk to use, why target it for a nerf?

Answer - Shadow is overperforming and something needed to go. Shadow priests have high damage, strong defenses, and lots of utility. What we think was putting them over the top was being able to save their healer with things like Void Shift and Mass Dispel.

Question - Why are you buffing the way PvP power affects hybrid healing? Classes without healing abilities are also affected by PvP fatigue, such as Second Wind and recuperate. What about the survivability loss those classes get from this change?

Answer - In patch 5.3, all specs (even classes without healing specs) benefit from a PvP Power-to-healing conversion. This means that any heal should benefit from PvP Power; this includes percentage heals such as Second Wind and Recuperate. Previously things like Second Wind and Recuperate weren’t benefitting from PvP Power at all.


A Few Extras
Question - Are there any plans for patch 5.3 or beyond to allow players to be able to join multiple 3v3 teams at once, or even allowing cross-realm arena teams?

Answer - Not in patch 5.3, though we may do something like this at some point in the future. We think that such an idea is interesting and could encourage more people to participate in PvP.

Question - Casting spells is still quite a painful process, especially with skills like Mind-numbing Poison and Necrotic Strike. What have you got planned for 5.3 to start moving the game back to casted spells rather than instants like was promised some time ago?

Answer - It’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue. We’ve gone on record as saying we think PvP would be more fun with fewer instant spells, since instant spells allow players to move a lot and don’t open them up to being countered. Once we tame instants, it’s entirely possible that Mind-Numbing Poison and Necrotic Strike will be too powerful. They already slow player casts by less than what they do on creatures, and that number could be even lower (though at some point the debuff would just end up being unnoticeable).

Regardless, a change like this one is huge—it’s not just a simple data tweak, so don’t expect something for 5.3. Instants are used throughout the game and we can’t simply, for example, change the cooldown of Holy Shock.

Question - A new battleground and arena are planned for patch 5.3. This is really cool, do we have any more plans for battlegrounds and arenas and what can you share about these?

Answer - There is nothing new in the pipeline at this time. We may spend some time fixing older ones. We have a lot of data now about which Battlegrounds players are voting out of participating in, so that gives us some direction on which Battlegrounds we could potentially fix . . . or even cut.

After some lengthy deliberation on this topic and evaluation of all facts, we’ve decided to overturn our decision on this matter. We will be re-instating Fs’s achievements. Our apologies to Fs for any frustration this has caused.

Classes

• Warlock
  
  • Destruction
    
    • Fixed an issue where targets of Havoc were receiving more damage than intended from Immolate.

Quests

• Eyes of the Thunder King: Engaging Unblinking Eyes and Focused Eyes will now place all members of the raid in combat, preventing players from releasing when they die.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Throne of Thunder
  
  • Ra-den
    
    • Fixed an issue where it was possible to have 2 instances of Unstable Vita active during the Ra-den encounter.
  • Twin Consorts
    
    • Crane Rush now deals 5 million damage, down from 30 million damage in Raid Finder difficulty.

Items

• Brutal Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault now grants a reduced bonus of 4400 to Strength, down from 8800 Strength, and the effect duration now lasts 30 seconds, up from 15 seconds when the effect is activated in PvP combat.
• Tyrannical Primal Diamond when socketed to a bind-on-equip helmet now causes the helmet to become soulbound.
• Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault now grants a reduced bonus of 4400 to Agility, down from 8800 Agility, and the effect duration now lasts 40 seconds, up from 20 seconds when the effect is activated in PvP combat.

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue where Capacitive Primal Diamond's effect was not activating properly.

Crowd Control and PvP
With regards to crowd control, we don't really feel like there is too much of it, right now. We feel that CC is integral to PvP because without it battles simply become about tunneling and burst cooldowns. This is actually another situation where the question is touched on in a bit more detail in the "Ask the Devs — The Answers" blog which we plan to post tomorrow. So be sure to keep your eyes open for that

Freezing trap, Sap and Gouge share the same DR. Same goes for Fear, Psychic Terror (Psyfiend fear) and the Blind disorient. Just wanted to mention that, but also that the developers briefly mention diminishing returns in the blog tomorrow as well. (Source)

Shado-Pan Trinket Changes
It procs and i got 6900 agi for 40 seconds.. ???
This is actually just the tooltip not being updated yet as that requires a client patch. If you check your character sheet while in either Battlegrounds or Arena, you will see that the effect only applies 4400 Agility or Strength and the duration of the buff has been doubled.

This effectively halves the burst potential of the trinket and doubles its duration. This results in the damage being much easier to heal, but lasts a longer amount of time. So this isn't actually a bug, it's an intended change, the tooltip for the buff just isn't updated yet.

Btw nakatoir any reason you guys don't just remove it completely from pvp?
Because that is not our intent. Our end goal is not to prohibit PvE gear in PvP, if it was, that is what we would do. There is actually a question about PvE items in PvP, in the upcoming "Ask the Devs — The Answers" blog. Keep an eye out for that as we plan for this to go live tomorrow.

None wants Pve trinkets in PvP, NONE. Why even make it viable? 4k agility for 40 seconds is almost better then 20 seconds because certain hunter rogue healer comps only have 40 seconds games Don't forget that in 5.3, this trinket will also be getting scaled back to iLevel 496. This means that the stat proc will be getting lowered with the reduced iLevel and then halved as well when inside Battlegrounds and Arena. So in 5.3, the affect of this trinket will be diminished even further. (Source)

Five Player Dungeons
I love 5mans, always did, they just seem to fit perfectly with what I enjoy most about WoW, playing with a small group of friends that also happen to be very good players. For me this made heroic dungeons one of the most entertaining things about WoW ever since The Burning Crusade, followed only by Arenas and heroic Raiding. So on that regard, totally agree, I would love to see more (heroic) dungeons popping up, but I don't necessarily agree that they’re needed because of catching up issues.

We’re aware that not everyone finds LFR entertaining, yet some of those players still run it for the drops, and of course… that’s not ideal. I mean, almost everyone enjoys the hunt for loot, it’s a big part of the MMORPG experience, but you should be having fun while doing it.
This is where I believe heroic scenarios and challenge modes can make a difference, those players will (hopefully) become more inclined to run these instead of LFR. (Or in addition to LFR; as some players will always go where there is at least 1 loot upgrade for them no matter what, and that’s ok.)

These rewards will have a higher ilvl than current LFR gear (still subject to change). With the possibility for better rewards than LFR, I would expect to see skilled casual players choosing to do for example one challenge mode daily quest and one heroic scenario instead of an LFR wing.

Also important to notice, Ghostcrawler recently said that devs are considering making heroic scenarios require a pre-made group.
This is quite a change, and if that goes live I believe that we’re on the path for having content for just about every kind of player, new and casual players will have dungeons, dailies, LFR and Battlegrounds; casual (due to lack of time) but highly skilled players will have challenge modes, heroic scenarios and Arena/RBGs, and the more hardcore/highly skilled players will have normal and heroic raiding in addition to all the rest.

So would 5mans still make sense? Of course, there will still be players that probably prefer 5mans to any other type of content but unfortunately with the current pace of development, we need to decide between raids and dungeons, because that’s the issue, they compete with each other in terms of resources, and while I think we can and should always try to improve on this, in both the efficiency and efficacy in which we produce content, I believe that right now most players still prefer to have more raiding content than dungeon content.

We have dailies, heroic scenarios, challenge modes, LFR, crafting, BGs, RBGs and Arenas, all of these have the ability to provide more than enough gear to be able to start raiding (at least) on normal mode.

There needs to be some progression too, we don’t want players to ding 90 and jump directly into ToT normal, but if you’re in a guild that has run previous raids and is just trying to fill some of the open raiding spots, you can afford to take slightly less geared players and still maintain an overall decent average raid ilvl. In the case of a new guild, you won’t have to wait too long before you step into ToT with all the options players have for gearing up that I’ve mentioned before, including previous raids.

I would also question the argument for skipping content. I could understand it if you’re close to the end of an expansion and you want to see the latest content before it “expires”, but otherwise, you’re just skipping on a lot of entertainment value. Personally, I still am quite fond of those old Kara alt-runs even when we were doing BT with mains. Having a path that you have to follow to evolve your characters is a good thing, too much skipping just devalues content even faster, content that could otherwise be a source of great entertainment. Personally it makes me a bit sad inside to see all that old content being somehow wasted away, what was once the glory and jewel of each of the previous expansions’ PvE content shines now somehow a little less bright and has devalued in a way that makes it almost obsolete, I only wish we could one day make all that content available for everyone to experience again the way it was designed to be experienced in a seamless fashion. Oh well, blues can get nostalgic and dream too you know.

I'm quite excited to see how heroic scenarios will turn out, and also for the changes being applied to the challenge mode rewards, I'm hoping to see a lot of players running both of these, and I will for sure be one of them. (Source)