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[Doom]

Make fun of dumb quotes, share incredible stories, or play Devil's Advocate.

Enh Shamans useless because of 3.3.3 Icy Talons?
My raid sat me, not because I didn't bring a useful chunk of raid synergy, but because some other guy brought it in a more convenient package. I'm sticking with the guild though. I love those guys, even though they don't let me play much, and I think they're going places with their penchant for min / maxxing.

Seriously though, we'd like to iron out some of the disparities where one buff requires more maintenance or RNG or talent points than another, but I have a hard time imagining that many players are really being negative impacted by the relative convenience of identical buffs.

Pushing for more awesome buffs isn't going to lead to more awesome buffs. It's going to lead to more homogenization and less group synergy overall. We'd be in a land where every raid buff or debuff just passively radiates a 1% bonus or whatever so that your group composition had an almost trivial contribution to your success. I'm not sure that would be as much fun though. We don't think the buffs have to be identical. They just have to be close enough that it isn't a major consideration for most reasonable guilds or pugs.

MY GUILD SAT ME, THERE ISN'T A PROBLEM, GO AWAY?

[Rico]

Well, the Devil's Advocate part is that only making Enh Shamans carry their weight if Frost DKs are too bad to bring is bad game design and this should theoretically result in a short-order Shaman buff.

[Doom]

And Flurry is being restored to 30% haste, announced just after maintenance.

I hope tomorrow's class preview touches Totems up a bit, especially with the revelation that "some buffs should be a giant pain in the ass to use" is being abandoned as a design philosophy for Warrior Shouts.

[Pacobird]

I think the shout change is more about Rage generation becoming a more active pursuit, rather than just letting your stats do the work.  This is either a really good idea or a really awful one depending on whether the new rage-gen-designated abilities are left on the GCD.

[Doom]

Population Balancing
Keep in mind Tol Barad is still deep in development, but we do have plans to implement more stringent faction balancing measures than those which exist for Wintergrasp today. We want to have the queue system try to create a battle with as close to a 1:1 team ratio as possible. In other words, if 40 Horde and 150 Alliance players are in the queue, it's going to make the battle somewhere close to 40 vs. 40. There will be a maximum cap of players allowed on each side as there is with Wintergrasp, but there will also be a minimum cap as well. Since the system will be looking for a 1:1 team ratio, the minimum cap will be designed to ensure a battle can't be thrown by a faction if no one shows up. So, say if the minimum cap is 25, there is a chance the battle could be 25 vs. 5.

Because of this new design, it'll be much more beneficial to play on a realm where the faction balance is roughly equivalent rather than seeking a realm where your faction dominates. For this reason we'll continue to monitor faction balance on all realms and work to ensure players enjoy the best gaming experience possible.

[...] Right now the issue with Wintergrasp is it actually encourages the behavior of selecting a realm where your faction dominates. If the reverse becomes true for Tol Barad, that only serves to help improve faction balance rather than further impact it. In Cataclysm it will be more beneficial to be on a realm where your faction is underpopulated (which will lead to a natural trend of balancing out the population), or be on a high-population realm where the maximum Tol Barad cap is reached, or close to reached for each battle.

I hate to ask, but would you explain again how the maximum and minimum caps work, or shall I say how you think they are going to work? I'm a bit confused. :x
The maximum cap will essentially work the same as it does in Wintergrasp. If there are hundreds of players in the queue for Tol Barad on both sides, the system is not going to overcrowd the zone and make it unplayable. It will create an even match with up to a certain number of players on each side.

The minimum cap is intended to prevent griefing from factions which are extremely underpopulated. For example, if it's 3 in the morning and the Alliance have a very low population on a realm, a single Alliance guild could decide to boycott Tol Barad. If there were no minimum cap with the 1:1 ratio queuing system, this could lead to a situation where Tol Barad ends up being a, say, 3 vs. 3 battle leaving many Horde players locked out. So if we set the minimum cap to 25, it means in this scenario that it would be 3 Alliance vs. 25 Horde. In other words, the underpopulated faction on an imbalanced realm can't fully dictate the battle size of Tol Barad all the way down to 0 participants on either side.

Does this apply to Wintergrasp too?

I just got word that we are planning on implementing this new balancing mechanism for Wintergrasp sometimes shortly after the next Wrath of the Lich King minor content patch. So you'll get a chance to see it in action and provide us with feedback prior to the launch of Cataclysm!

So in cliff note form: With the minimum cap is 25, if 25 Horde que and 150 alliance que, the battle will be 25 vs 25.
And if 25 Horde que, and 10 alliance que, will it then just 10 v 10 or 25 v 10?

Your first example is correct. For your second example, the battle would be 25 Horde vs. 10 Alliance.

1) Will Tol'Barad flag players between battles on PvE servers? Please say yes!
2) Will flying mounts be disabled in the zone when the battle isn't taking place?

The current plan is for Tol Barad to function like Wintergrasp with regard to your questions. So it will be a PvP zone at all times and flight will be disabled once the battle begins.

If your realm has a hilarious faction imbalance, the overpopulated faction will be kicked in the stones for actually participating!

Horde side Mal'ganis not being too fond of faction equality... weird huh?

Hahaha wow. I can't decide on whether that is the best or worst zinger.

you see because blizzard directly and indirectly fails to save imbalanced realms so blah blah blah

On the bright side I guess this means they recognize that Tenacity is useless.

[Shinra]

as far as i can tell the point of tenacity is to shift into bear form and take screenshots.

I don't really have a huge amount of pity for people on faction-fucked realms. If lopsided PVP is really a problem for you, transfer. Hate to say it, but as long as there is a fix that involves handing Blizzard money, I don't see them having a huge incentive to fix it for free.

[Doom]

They refuse to merge or close completely terrible servers and I guess it's kinda rude to the naive to follow their friends to a total shit-hole or something but yeah, why care when money.