wow Warcraft Recap: Dev Watercooler, Hotfixes, Azeroth Choppers + More!

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Check out the latest Dev Watercooler and the Azeroth Choppers winner!

This week's World of Warcraft Recap includes a great new Dev Watercooler post, detailing the upcoming changes to secondary and minor stats in Warlords of Draenor. The post reviews which stats will remain in the expansion and includes details on new stats, including Multistrike, Versatility, Indestructible, Leech and more! Blizzard have also released a few new hotfixes, including a drop fix that should make Flex Raiding Shamans happy! In case you haven't been following the Azeroth Choppers series, the final episode has been released and Blizzard has put together a great recap video to help get up to speed. The finished bikes have been revealed, and a winner is crowned! Based on how cool the Mechano-Hog is, I definitely can't wait to see the winning bike in-game! Check out this news and more in this week's Warcraft recap!

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Latest 5.4.8 Hotfixes - June 3 & 4

The latest live server hotfixes have been posted, including just three changes. Shamans rejoice, because an important fix has been published that will now ensure that the Kor'kron Shaman's Treasure, which contains the Shaman-only transmogrification set, will now properly drop on Flexible Raid difficulty! Less major changes include a change to the Justice Point gain from Non-random Normal Scenarios, which will now only award 30 Justice Points on completion instead of 70. Blizzard has also made it so the Ethereal Soul-Trader can no longer be summoned in Arenas or Battlegrounds.

5.4.8 Hotfixes: June 3 & 4

June 3 & 4

Raids, Dungeons and Scenarios

• Queuing for a non-random Normal Scenario now awards 30 Justice Points on completion (down from 70 Justice Points).
• Siege of Orgrimmar
  • Resolved an issue where Kor'kron Shaman's Treasure was not dropping in Flexible difficulty.

Battlegrounds and Arenas

• Ethereal Soul-Trader can no longer be summoned while in an Arena or Battleground.

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New Dev Watercooler - Stat Updates for Warlords of Draenor

Blizzard have posted an excellent new Dev Watercooler entry which details the latest developments and decisions regarding planned changes to secondary and minor stats (such as Haste, Expertise, Mastery) in Warlords of Draenor! The post also provides information about new minor stats being added in the expansion, including Multistrike, Movement Speed, Leech, Versatility and more! The stat system is being dramatically overhauled in order to provide the best possible gameplay experience, so be sure to check out all of the upcoming changes!

Dev Watercooler – Stat Updates for Warlords of Draenor

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In this Dev Watercooler, we’d like to give an update on secondary and minor stats in Warlords of Draenor. A lot has changed since we first revealed our plans at BlizzCon, so this blog will not only cover the latest developments related to what we’ve already discussed, but also go into detail on some new changes we’ve got in the pipe.

Secondary Stats

Existing Secondary Stats: Hit, Expertise, Dodge, Parry, Crit, Mastery, Haste, Spirit

As we announced at BlizzCon, we’re retiring Hit, Expertise, Dodge, and Parry. Hit and Expertise weren’t really providing very interesting gameplay, and Dodge and Parry are being replaced with Bonus Armor. Check out the Patch Notes for further discussion on why we removed these stats.

The other secondary stats—Crit, Mastery, Haste, and Spirit—work well and will be sticking around. One important note is that Spirit will only appear on items for specific slots (fingers, neck, back, and trinkets) and will give a much stronger benefit than it does today. Healers will prefer items with Spirit for those slots, but otherwise will use similar gear to everyone else.

New Stat: Multistrike
A new stat in Warlords of Draenor, Multistrike grants your spells, abilities, and auto-attacks additional chances to activate. If you’ve been following along since BlizzCon, you may remember that in our early plans, your Multistrike chance would split between two rolls and effectively have a 200% cap. We’ve since changed that to make it more clear and intuitive: the full chance is given to both rolls, with a 100% cap.

Now Multistrike grants your spells, abilities, and auto-attacks the chance to activate up to two extra times at 30% of normal effectiveness. For example, if you have 55% Multistrike and cast a Fireball that does 1000–1100 damage, you’ll have two separate 55% chances to automatically follow with another smaller Fireball that does 300–330 damage. That means every time you cast Fireball, you have a chance to see one big-damage Fireball, and then two smaller-damage Fireballs leave your hands in quick succession.

New Stat: Bonus Armor
Throughout the game’s history, some items have had bonus armor on them, which made them more attractive to tanks. After we removed Dodge and Parry, we wanted to replace these stats with a new tank-specific stat, and Bonus Armor fit the bill nicely. As with Spirit, it’ll only show up on rings, necklaces, cloaks, and trinkets. It’s clearly valuable to all tanks, and will be tuned to be much stronger than other secondary stats. Tanks will want to use items with Bonus Armor for those slots.

Retiring Stat: Amplify
We tried out Amplify on trinkets in Siege of Orgrimmar, and at BlizzCon we announced that it’d be a stat in Warlords of Draenor. The intent of Amplify was to multiply the effects of your other secondary stats. However, as we continued development, we found that Amplify had some design problems. In particular, we determined that it would quickly become the absolute best stat for everyone. On top of that, even if we were to apply heavy diminishing returns, the stat still wouldn’t have an interesting effect on your gameplay. For those reasons, it’s no longer going to be a stat in Warlords of Draenor.

Retiring Stat: Readiness
Readiness was another stat that we tried out on Siege of Orgrimmar trinkets. This one looked solid at first. Cooldown reduction is a great concept, the idea was well received, and although there were some balance issues, they seemed solvable. However, as we continued development, we hit a snag. Readiness works great in small quantities on the scale of a trinket or two, like in Siege of Orgrimmar. However, when we expand that to a point where you could potentially have Readiness on all of your character’s gear, problems arise.

Using a damage-dealing (DPS) class as an example, most of the stat’s value comes in letting you use your temporary burst-damage cooldowns (Arcane Power, Vendetta, Recklessness, Dark Soul, etc.) more often. Most of those cooldowns increase damage by 20%–30% while active, which is substantial for a temporary burst ability, but doesn’t compare well against secondary stats. If you stack a lot of Crit and can reach 30% Crit from gear, that’s more or less a 30% passive increase to damage. If secondary stats are equal, you should be able to stack Readiness instead, and get a damage increase that’s similar (or at least close). But how do we give you a 30% damage increase from letting you use a +20% damage cooldown more often? And once you get to 100% uptime, then what?

We experimented with many potential design changes but never found a version of Readiness that really felt good, so we’re going to shelve it for now, at least as a common secondary stat. You may still see it pop up occasionally in small quantities, such as on a trinket.

New Stat: Versatility
The removal of Readiness left some space in our itemization plans and room for another stat to take its place. It’s important to offer players plenty of different secondary stats so that you have a wide variety of interesting and compelling gear to choose from. To that end, we’ve been working on a new secondary stat called Versatility. Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. We won’t be tuning it to be anyone’s highest throughput secondary stat, but it’ll be close, and it’ll give you a nice boost to how versatile your character is in the process. It’ll be especially attractive to hybrids who want to feel more “hybridy.”

Minor Stats

Most gear that drops in Warlords of Draenor has a chance to have a random bonus in addition to its normal stats. We call these “minor stats,” and they provide a small but useful bonus to your character.

New Minor Stat: Movement Speed
The first of our minor stats is Movement Speed, which, as you can probably guess, increases the speed that you move by a small amount. Previously, movement speed increases came from enchants and various class abilities, but otherwise never directly came from gear. The Movement Speed minor stat will stack with all other sources of movement speed, but we’ll be keeping the maximum benefit you can get from it fairly low—we want it to feel like a fun bonus when you get it, but not a large increase to character power.

New Minor Stat: Avoidance
Another minor stat, Avoidance, has previously only ever been used for a few prominent class pets. It reduces the damage you take from area-of-effect (AoE) attacks, though compared to the pet version, the Avoidance minor stat will come in much smaller quantities. The goal is to soften the blow of AoE attacks a bit, but not allow you to just stand in the fire.

New Minor Stat: Indestructible (previously Sturdiness)
We called this one Sturdiness when we announced it at BlizzCon, and its original effect reduced durability damage that you take by a small amount across your whole character. Since then, we’ve renamed it Indestructible, and changed it to cause that specific item to not take any durability damage. We think the change will make the stat more intuitive while providing a similar overall benefit.

New Minor Stat: Leech (previously Lifesteal)
Lifesteal is another minor stat that has been renamed and slightly redesigned since BlizzCon. Our original plan was for it to convert a percentage of your damage done to self-healing. We’ve extended it to work for healers as well, causing an extra percentage of all of the healing you do to heal you as well. With that change, the name was no longer fitting, so we’re renaming it Leech.

Proposed Minor Stat: Cleave
We announced Cleave as a minor stat at BlizzCon, but have since run into some problems with it. Most importantly, it was of situational value to DPS classes,always valuable to healers, and had very little value to tanks. As a result, we were concerned it would cause items that would otherwise be equally appropriate for a healer and a DPS class to be viewed as “healer gear,” which isn’t our intent. We’ve shelved it for now, though we have some ideas about how it might show up occasionally in specific cases.

The Complete List
In summary, here’s a complete list of our planned secondary and minor stats in Warlords of Draenor:

• Secondary Stats
  • Haste: (Unchanged) Increases attack speed, spell casting speed, and some resource generation
  • Critical Strike: (Unchanged) Increases your chance to critically strike, dealing double damage
  • Mastery: (Unchanged) Increases the effectiveness of your specialization-specific Mastery
  • Multistrike: (New) Grants two chances for your damage and healing effects to fire an additional time, each at 30% effectiveness
  • Versatility: (New) Increases damage and healing, and reduces damage taken
  • Spirit: (Unchanged, healer-only) Increases mana regeneration rate
  • Bonus Armor: (New, tank-only) Increases your armor
• Minor Stats
  • Movement Speed: (New) Increases your movement speed
  • Indestructible: (New) Causes the item to not take durability damage
  • Leech: (New) Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done
  • Avoidance: (New) Reduces your damage taken from area-of-effect attacks.

As you can see, we have a lot of exciting changes and additions in the works designed to give you a variety of intuitive and interesting gearing options. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how these are playing out in our alpha and beta testing, and we’ll continue to refine and adjust as needed. As always, we look forward to hearing your constructive feedback!

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WoD Character Viewer Updated

With the most recent reveals of the updated Female Gnome and Tauren Male models, Blizzard has updated their 3D character model viewer to feature all of the currently revealed race models! You can new view Male Orc, Male and Female Dwarf, Male Tauren and Male and Female Gnome models. Blizzard has revealed details of updated Female Night Elf and Draenei models, but these are not available at this time. We've also seen a few reveals of new textures for Undead Males and Females, so hopefully we'll see a few new models in the coming weeks! Our friends over at MMO-Champion have been keeping the Alpha version of WoWDB updated as well, so you can use their 3D Model Viewer to check out the new model animations and try on armor! Looking forward to finding out how awesome you're going to look? Check it out!

• Warlords of Draenor Character Model Viewer
• WoWDB Warlords of Draenor Site

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Guardian Cub Battle.net Shop Pet To Be Retired Soon

If you were putting off buying the adorable Guardian Cub in-game pet from the Battle.net Shop, Blizzard says you're running out of time! Blizzard has announced that the pet will "head into hibernation" in "approximately two weeks (no sooner than June 18)." The pet will put into the Blizzard Archive, whatever that is, so don't miss out on your chance to buy this pet before it is removed from the shop. This is the first pet to be retired from the Battle.net Shop and will hopefully not indicate the start of a trend of retiring Shop items. The pet has not been discounted, and is sold for $10.00 USD or 10.00 EUR, plus applicable taxes.

• Purchase a Guardian Cub (US Servers)
• Purchase a Guardian Cub (EU Servers)

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Azeroth Choppers Final Episode, Recap and Winner Announced!

The eighth and final episode of the Azeroth Choppers webseries has been released, and the winner has been revealed! I'm not going to spoil it, but it probably will come as no surprise. Both bikes look absolutely excellent and Blizzard will reveal details about the in-game version in the future. If you haven't been following the show, Blizzard have also made a series recap available which will get you up to speed and ready for the final episode! Also, be sure to check out awesome behind-the-scenes videos showing off more of the build process of these epic bikes!

Episode 8

Series Recap

Alliance Behind-the-Scenes

Horde Behind-the-Scenes