<font size="3" style="line-height: 1.3em;"><b>Sk Gaming wins MLG Columbus!</b></font><br />After an exciting two days here at MLG in Columbus, the World of Warcraft tournament has reached its final destination - declaring a winner.<br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;"><li><b>1st Place: </b>SK Gaming - $9,000 US</li><li><b>2nd Place: </b>eMazing Gaming - $4,500 US</li><li><b>3rd Place: </b>Ensidia - $2,250 US</li><li><b>4th Place: </b>Complexity</li></ul><br />We will run the stream for a few more hours while we replay all the matches, Video on Demand should also be available shortly. Thank you all for watching! <br /><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://www.gotfrag.com/wow/story/44251/" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/june/mlgcolumbus.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></div><br /><font size="3" style="line-height: 1.3em;"><b>Blue posts</b></font><br /><div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><span class="corners-top"><span></span></span><div class="blizzquoteheader"><span>Quote from <b>Blizzard staff</b></span></div><div class="blizzquote"><span style="color: white;"><b>Soon™</b></span><br />We have to be very careful announcing changes. Last patch, we listed out some specific things we were working on. Some of them came to pass and some did not. For the ones that did not, some players took it very hard. They became upset. They posted that we didn&#39;t care about them or weren&#39;t doing our jobs. Now it&#39;s easy to ignore a few bad apples, but when a large enough portion of your community responds negatively, it can affect the entire community. It can cast a dark cloud over these forums. That isn&#39;t fun for anyone.<br /><br />Check out this link. It&#39;s a press release about Blizzcon. Scroll down to the bottom and you&#39;ll see a painfully long explanation about forward-looking statements. Most of that is more geared towards business issues than class changes, but ultimately it&#39;s all part of the same philosophy. It is unfortunate that that is the world we live in. Announcing stuff too early when we aren&#39;t 100% sure we can do it just gets us in trouble. <img src="http://www.mmo-champion.com/Smileys/classic/sad.gif" alt="Sad" border="0" /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/090217.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: white;">http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/090217.html</span></a><br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Classes overhaul</b></span><br />If you are looking for a major overhaul for any class in the game, you&#39;re going to be disappointed. Whenever we see that term, it&#39;s a near certainty that the players making it have an entirely different vision for the class than the developers do. The changes to the paladin class seals and judgements are about the largest "overhaul" you&#39;re ever going to see, and that one was an extreme. We like the way the classes work. Nearly all can be improved, some more than others. None of them need an overhaul. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17619782879-shamanpve-is-blizzard-still-not-convinced.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Healing Meters</b></span><br />One of the designers had an interesting experience. Their first Holy priest had much larger healing (total and effective) on the fight than their second Holy priest, so they asked the second priest to go Shadow. They kept wiping. They then swapped them, and made the star Holy priest go Shadow. The second Holy priest&#39;s healing was much lower, but they won on the first try. The second priest just had better timing and cast the right spell at the right moment, even though his total and effective healing was lower overall. The moral of the story is meters are very useful, but like any tool, their ability to measure what happens in reality has limitations. In my experience, players put too much emphasis on them, especially for healing. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17619782879-shamanpve-is-blizzard-still-not-convinced.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Healing Changes</b></span><br />We nerfed regen a little, knowing it probably wasn&#39;t quite sufficient, and there was quite a bit of name-calling in this very forum. We&#39;ll get there, but it&#39;s important not to freak out too many players in our efforts to eventually make things better.<br /><br />I will note that nerfing regen doesn&#39;t affect PvP as much as you might think because even 5s have far fewer buffs from other players and PvP gear typically doesn&#39;t have much in the way of regen stats.<br /><br />Yes tank avoidance would need to come down along with many other long-term changes, but from a healer point-of-view what we&#39;d like to achieve is a clear distinction between your bread-and-butter heals and your emergency heals. The latter are typically made expensive to discourage their casual use, but when you have the mana for it and the tank always requires those big heals, there is no reason not to use them. It may be that mana costs are not the best way to balance spells. Maybe it&#39;s cast time. Maybe it&#39;s cooldown. Likewise, maybe we should have more fights where say 5 players take damage at once rather than the whole raid. Then the smart, instant heals wouldn&#39;t be quite as attractive in every situation.<br /><br />There were some good aspects of the healing in vanilla, but we&#39;re not eager to go back to the days of /stopcast macros and healer rotations (meaning someone sits out for OFSR regen while a fresh healer steps in). That&#39;s not what we mean when we say that the risk of running OOM has to exist. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17615562781-xt002-hard-mode-kill--wmo-parse.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>All specs viable?</b></span><br />Having all specs viable in PvP is a goal, but it&#39;s a long term goal. It&#39;s more important that every class has at least one PvP option.<br /><br />Having all specs viable in PvE is also a goal, and we&#39;re a little closer on that one, but not quite there yet.<br /><br />PvP is harder to balance, which should be no surprise to anyone. When to make a change to PvE you often only affect one class or spec. When you make a change to PvP, you affect everyone. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/17617974001-all-specs-viable-in-arena.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>MLG WoW 3v3 Tournament Classes Representation</b></span><br />We think it&#39;s an interesting phenomenon. A lot of the complaints you see, especially in these forums, don&#39;t always jive with who is actually winning in Arena (though to be fair, sometimes they do).<br /><br />There has been so much discussion about double melee "Cleave" teams and the death of casters while RMP has continued to be really strong if not dominant in 3s. Now maybe it&#39;s only at the lower ratings where it&#39;s an issue, or maybe players are noticing an up-and-coming trend while the tournaments tend to emphasize groups who have a lot of experience playing together.<br /><br />I&#39;m not saying everything is perfect, and ideally we&#39;d love to see more mixed comps than RMP so often. But it is interesting when the Internet buzz doesn&#39;t always match who is winning. <br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Crowd Control in Arenas</b></span><br />But isn&#39;t that basically saying that Arena is all about CC and that classes without very strong CC are by definition not cut out for Arena? We don&#39;t give the warrior class much in the way of CC. What they have is mobility, snares, interrupts, some survivability tricks and MS. Faceroll or die?<br /><br />Maybe I&#39;m reading too much into it, but it sounds like you&#39;re saying that a team without a rogue, druid or maybe mage is by definition faceroll and shouldn&#39;t typically win. CC is part of the game, no doubt. It&#39;s not supposed to be the whole game. (Neither is always killing your initial target in 5 sec.) (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/17615364272-mlg-representation-surprise--rmp-dominating.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/ipaladins.gif" alt="" border="0" /> <b><span style="color: #F58CBA;">Paladin</span></b> (<b><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=610" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">3.1 Skills List</span></a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.</span></a></b>)<br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Holy Paladins</b></span><br />We have some plans for Holy paladins in 3.2. We&#39;ll talk more about them when we get closer and we are more confident that they are the actual changes that will go live (modulo PTR feedback). (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17617973243-blue-to-paladins-your-class-isnt-fun.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/ishamans.gif" alt="" border="0" /> <b><span style="color: #2459FF;">Shaman</span></b> (<b><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=660" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">3.1 Skills List</span></a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?shaman" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.</span></a></b>)<br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Chain Heal</b></span><br />I know some amazingly good shamans too from guilds you&#39;ve heard of and they still use Chain Heal. That isn&#39;t to say it couldn&#39;t be better, but we are not at all convinced that the right thing to do is abandon the spell. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17619782879-shamanpve-is-blizzard-still-not-convinced.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br />[...] We wouldn&#39;t want to see a cooldown on it either. Honestly, the throughput it gives is good on the first couple of targets. But perhaps it does fall off too fast. We&#39;re happy with the cast time -- the game has too many fast spells already to the extent that players are asking for faster spells as much as they&#39;re asking for things to be off the GCD. The range of the jump could be an issue, particularly in the 10-player instances. Some of the mods that tell you how far away you are from other players seem to use 10 yards as the magic number (even though many of the attacks they are trying to avoid only go to 8 yards). (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17619782879-shamanpve-is-blizzard-still-not-convinced.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)<br /><br /><span style="color: white;"><b>Healing Wave</b></span><br />We&#39;re less concerned about HW than we are CH. As you point out, it does have a role with NS and ultimately trying to carve off niches between smaller and bigger heals that are otherwise similar is tough unless you make mana so expensive that you are loathe to overheal. That&#39;s not the way Ulduar is though. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/17619782879-shamanpve-is-blizzard-still-not-convinced.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: white;">Source</span></b></a>)</div><span class="corners-bottom"><span></span></span></div></div><br />[s...


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