Operation Gnomeregan/Echo Isles event start date (Source)
The events themselves are not currently scheduled to go live with patch 3.3.5. We're simply taking the opportunity on the PTRs to test these events while they're up and running in case we do not have another opportunity to do so before marking these events live.
The release of the events will be contingent upon the development of other features leading up to Cataclysm, but their release will likely not coincide directly with a patch. They're events that simply need to be "turned on" when we're ready.
Trying to balance around 30 specs is bad design (Source)
I wouldn't call it "bad design." Just challenging. Maybe it would have been easier if WoW had been developed with 10 classes instead of the virtual 30 we have now, but that ship has sailed.
We try and balance around specs first, but if we can't quite hit that, we fall back on class. It would be awesome if Fire mages were competitive with Frost mages in Arena, but failing that, at least a mage can have a Fire build for PvE and a Frost build for PvP. If on the other hand mages themselves had no viable spec, then your only choice it to roll an alt. As easy as leveling is these days, it's still not trivial.
PvP viability for specs; only 50% of the playerbase will ever be competitive? (Source)
To be clear, this isn't our design, but you could design the game where 5 specs are PvP specs in the same way 4 specs are PvE tanking specs. If you rolled a shaman and really, really love to tank and perhaps even rolled your shaman back when they were tanks, then you are just out of luck. If we went that route (and again we're not) then we could provide a really balanced PvP experience for those 5 specs because we could focus all of our attention on those few. There is a reason RTS games who go for massive differentiation (like StarCraft II) have only a few races, while RTS games with many sides (like the Age of Empires games I used to work on) don't go for massive differentiation.
There are plenty of players out there who could care less if Balance druids or Fire mages are ever viable in PvP so long as there are some classes / specs that they can choose which will provide a really balanced, compelling, dynamic game for them. There aren't many posting in this thread, which frankly doesn't surprise me, but they are out there and their opinions count too. You can argue they are a very small minority of our player base, but they are also the ones for whom class balance discrepancies are most meaningful because their skill at the game is so refined. In the same way, we spend a lot of effort on heroic LK 25, even though very few players have the ability to experience let alone beat that encounter. That's also not to say we spend 90% of our encounter time on the Lich King and ignore the 5-player dungeons. Make sense?
Shared diminishing returns displayed on tooltips (Source)
Yeah, we would like to do this.
Concerns with underwater content in  Cataclysm (Source)
We have plans that will hopefully address many of your concerns when it comes to underwater encounters. I'd suggest trying it out and providing feedback on it should you get the opportunity within the beta once that starts.
Healing - Groups don't die often at the moment (Source)
I disagree with you a little there. You're first arguing that groups generally don't die, which we know isn't true. Groups die constantly, and it's usually from damage. If you're not doing content that challenges you then you won't die, but that isn't going to change either.
Second, you're kind of describing a situation in which healing is fun only when there is no realistic chance of failure. The problem is that when there is no realistic chance of failure, there is no challenge, and the game becomes less fun. I enjoy healing a lot more the first time we encounter a boss than months later on a milk run when I know I only have to toss out a heal once every 15 seconds without consequence.
I know a lot of you are saying that any change to the current healing design won't be fun for you. I get that and I appreciate the feedback. Where you lose me is saying that it won't be fun for anyone, which means you are ignoring all of the healers (some of them long-term healers) who are excited about the change.
Single target healing in Cataclysm (Source)
Specs won't single target heal the same way. They will have enough basic tools that nobody will have a massive hole in what they can cover. We don't want the Disc priest to throw up her hands when asked to tank heal, or the paladin asked to sit out when on a fight with a lot of AE healing. You need to be able to run a 10-player raid with any 2 healers (ideally 2 different healers) and be okay. You need to be able to do any 5-player content with any healer (before you over-gear it as many of you do these days).
Proactive healing (Source)
There is nothing wrong with proactive healing. It's challenging to use spells like Prayer of Mending for anything but. It only becomes a problem when you aren't making decisions. If you are pre-hotting or shielding folks you expect to take damage, that's great. You're actually forecasting and otherwise paying attention to what is going around you. If you are doing it to everyone just because you can or doing it at random because it doesn't matter, then that's a problem. You may not play that way today, but a lot of players do. I have done it myself on a lot of fights just to try it out and it's way too successful a strategy given the low amount of skill or even basic decision making involved.
 Mage
Incanter's Absorption (Source)
We designed Incanter's Absorption. It's our fault that it worked the way it did, our fault that players assumed they were supposed to stand in fires, and our fault that they assumed their dps was balanced around the assumption that they stood in fires. 
I'm not quite sure of the origin of this recent sentiment that GC blames everything on the players. Let me be perfectly clear. Everything we don't like about WoW is our fault and our responsibility to fix. I like to use the first-person plural to remind everyone that ours is a very large team all working together, but in this case I'll make an exception and take personal responsibility for plenty of the criticisms we have with the game right now.
 Priest
Discipline healing (Source)
The fact that your talent tree has talents such as Improved Flash Heal and a component to Borrowed Time that improves spell haste should suggest that it is not our intent that you heal with PW:S and Penance and nothing else. Though if you get routinely outhealed by dps-spec shaman and paladins as you say then I guess I can understand your confusion.
In a broader sense though, you're not reading what I am saying. Here is what I am saying: All healers will get the tools to be able to perform in a variety of roles. What you're saying: We don't have the tools to perform in a variety of roles.
 Warrior
Cataclysm Fury rotation (Source)
First off, I would avoid any discussion of glyphs at all. We haven't finalized our glyph changes, but it's safe to say that many will change and many will go away. I cautioned the folks participating in the alpha that feedback isn't terribly useful that says something like "We'll never use that talent because of the glyph" or "We always prioritize X because of the glyph." Treat glyphs like current set bonuses. Relevant now, but perhaps not later.
For Fury, we expect Whirlwind to only get used when there are multiple targets around. We run into balancing problems when warriors (and DKs and Ret paladins and anyone else) do their normal rotation on one target and just get free damage if they can manage to get a second target into the same area. Melee need to work more like (most) casters in this regard: the Shadow priest shifts to Mind Sear when there are groups rather than just getting splash damage from Mind Blast.
That leaves Fury with Bloodthirst and Slam and Heroic Strike. Heroic Strike will play more of a role since it will require a GCD, but you also may not want to push it every time in low rage scenarios. So we do think Fury will need one more rotational button. The one we are messing with right now is Victory Rush. It feels pretty cool so far, but a lot of things will change with classes over the next several weeks. Not sure yet whether it works better as a proc (like Sudden Death) or something available all the time. |