Onyxia Revamped in 3.2.2, Arena Changes and more – World of Warcraft

For the 5th year anniversary, the brood mother Onyxia is having a comeback and return back in the forefront of Azeroth as part of the upcoming 3.2.2 patch!

This will convert the Onyxia’s Lair into a 10 and 25-player dungeon. New items will be added, mainly looking like good ol’ Tier 2 Set items (Helms). Additional to the new loot, she will also be dropping a 310% flying mount, which looks like Onyxia herself and called “Onyxia Broodling”. The Encounter mechanic will also be updated to be more on level of modern Wrath of the Lich King raiding (I’m just unsure if this is such an good idea :P). But Blizzard said, that deep breath will still remain. So have fun with raiding her with casuals to stupid to run away and die in the breath.

Arena Rating Cap

3k Arena Rating will be removed, so the rating cap won’t be an issue for the end of this season.

Arena Matchmaking System 3.2

The 5 time additional queue was hotfixed today and lowered to 2 minutes. It was the time which was added to your normal queue to play against a team you just played against (It’s made to prevent people form having to fight each other several times in a row, especially in nightly matches, where most people where sleeping and block down cheating the rankings).

Battleground Experience Gain

This is something we’re watching very closely and right now we’d be inclined to agree that there are some battlegrounds where we may need to boost the amount of experience awarded. However, that isn’t to say that all battlegrounds are less than they should be. Still, we are looking at adjusting the experience sometime in the near future. (Source)

Crusader title

Nothing like this was removed in patch 3.2, everything is still obtainable. Yes, something like the Crusader title still takes a lot of time and a lot of daily quests to get through, but it’s still sitting there and waiting for you. (Source)

Balancing Arena Brackets

It’s not, in our mind, an issue on which bracket is the most balanced. It comes down to which bracket is the most balance-able.

The 2s bracket has two flaws built into its design. One is that it tends to select for those classes who have a lot of different options and utility built into one class. Since your team is just one other guy, and he or she is often going to be focused or CC’d, you can’t rely so much on your teammate’s abilities. You have to rely on your own abilities. What players kept asking for, and the direction we realized we were taking, was just to give more and more abilities to more and more classes so that everyone had everything. We don’t think that’s good for class design long term. Arena is intended to be about teamwork not self-sufficiency.

The second problem is the relative balance of power of healing. If a healer can keep themselves and one other person alive in 2s, then they probably can’t keep three people alive in 3s. That tends to squeeze healers out of 3s. On the other hand, if a healer can keep a three-player team alive, then they can probably keep a two-player team alive trivially.

We didn’t remove the 2s bracket from the game. If you like it, it’s still there for you. But we wanted to be able to focus more of our balance effort on the 3s bracket and wanted more of the high-end potential gladiators to focus their balance feedback and effort on that bracket as well.

…Think about it this way. We offer 10 and 25-player raids in the hopes that players who like smaller groups or larger groups can both find something that suits them. We could take that to extremes and also offer a 15-player raid or still offer 40-player raids too. But the more of these options we add, the more effort it takes to balance them all and the bigger chance that something will break at one of the extremes.

We think 3s and 5s will ultimately offer a better play experience. But we have supported 2s for a few years now and some players have grown to enjoy them, so we thought it was overly harsh to just cut them from the game. (Source)

[Mage]Ghostcrawler on buffing Arcane

I said we wanted to buff Arcane but wanted to do so without adding back some of the fast burst damage that we have worked hard to reduce in PvP. We agree that it’s worth changing things that can be really frustrating to play against even if it doesn’t reward the other guy with high representation or ratings. (Source)

[Priest]Glyph of Mind Flay

I’m almost positive that the way it works is the glyph leaves a 10% snare on Mind Flay today on live (the glyph didn’t change in 3.2). The reason is because we thought it might cause a lot of bugs related to whether a target was officially snared or not. A 10% snare isn’t particularly useful but it is noticeable.

What we’re talking about is changing the glyph to not affect the default snare at all. The glyph would just boost range. (Source)

[Warlock]Ghostcrawler on buffing Demonology

The context was how do you find 3 distinct niches for a dps class such that each of the trees has its moment to feel special and shine yet over the course of a raid tier, all 3 feel like they do about the same dps. That’s a really challenging goal.

It wasn’t a “buff Demo” discussion as much as what the roles should be for pure dps talent trees, unless you fall back on the classic “PvP, PvE and the spec nobody takes.”

If we buffed Demonology, and we buffed it too much (even if it was only on some fights) then what you’d probably see is most raiding warlocks shift to Demo. This is exactly what happened when we made Survival better than Beastmaster. What does that really accomplish other than giving players whiplash and perhaps giving those players who really just love a certain spec a little bit of time in the sun? (Source)