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Blue Posts
Over 1400 PvE items added to the game in 3.3
Many of the stats have gone in relatively recently. If you tried out the PTR a few weeks ago, bosses weren't dropping loot at all. We recently went back and changed our paradigm for how we wanted to handle sockets on these items. Sockets have a budget and in this case the other stats were not adjusted correctly for the socket change.
We are adding over 1400 PvE items to the game in 3.3. There are going to be some bugs. Usually we catch them all before they go live, but some still slip through. We don't try to catch them all before we make a PTR build. Sometimes we're right in the middle of doing something (e.g. changing sockets in this case) and it's not worth holding up all the massive machinery that generates a build just for a few simple bugs that aren't really going to affect the PTR experience anyway. Also consider that item bugs generally aren't as serious as class bugs since the former only affect a smaller percentage of the latter. Bugs are bugs though. I won't try to justify them.
Armored Frostwyrms as PvE raid rewards from Icecrown
There will be a Frostwyrms up for grabs for Icecrown raiders, achievable in a similar way to previous rewards such as the Ulduar proto-drake.
Chill of the Throne ("Icewell Radiance")
The "Icewell Radiance" is designed to account for very high avoidance levels. It lets us lower the damage bosses do per hit because their hits will connect more often, keeping boss dps the same but lowering spike damage.
However, I also know what that message says to some people. It says that if I go into Icecrown and wipe on a boss all night that Blizzard lied to me about boss damage. We're just sort of bracing ourselves for the inevitable "I couldn't beat Marrowgar because he hits so hard. I thought bosses wouldn't hit hard."
Bosses hitting less hard does not mean bosses can now be facerolled. It just means they hit less hard. To be fair, most of the folks posting in this thread understand the difference. But it's not uncommon for us to see our quotes misused in other forums where we can't necessarily bop in to correct the misunderstanding.
Gear scaling
They're just numbers. We don't think it starts getting scary until the human mind literally has trouble processing the digits. If your new staff has 152,420 spell power, well, yeah that's a mouthful. But if your new staff has 4000 spell power, the only thing that can really be freaking you out is that 4000 is just a really big number compared to the 100 spell power you might be used to. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars too.... :)
When players say we had scaling problems in Lich King, what they mean (or at least what they *should* mean) is that we picked the end numbers we wanted for percentages such as crit and dodge and then picked ratings that would get us there. When we inflated the item levels to account for hard modes (with a little help from things like glyphs too) then the percentages ended up higher than we intended. That doesn't mean that exponential scaling on gear is bad. It just means that we misjudged our endpoints.
Gear inflation is just part of MMOs, or at least the kind of MMO that we make. Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too. :)
