Perhaps you’re like me and starting to wonder if the RIM BlackBerry Bold is just a mythical creature like Bigfoot–spotted in the wild a number of times but yet to be captured, or in the Bold’s case, released. The smartphone was announced way back in May for AT&T, but we have yet to hear about an actual availability date. Oh, and trust us, we’ve asked RIM numerous times for just a teeny tiny hint and have been met by the same answers: “this fall” or “very soon.”

We do think the launch is close, but if you’re looking for something a little more concrete, here’s something to nibble on in the meantime. On Monday, the Boy Genius Report posted screen shots of what looks to be Best Buy’s computer system, showing an in-stock date of October 26 for the Bold. BGR goes on to say that the smartphone will have a price of “around $600″ (come again?) and will be released a week or two ahead of AT&T.

Again, this is all speculation so take it for what it’s worth. Personally, I’m tired of waiting and have already moved on and set my sights on the RIM BlackBerry Storm. Anyone else?

We got something else coming later today.

Upcoming Warrior Changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

NOTE: These changes were in the works before the recent round of dps discussions. I hope to have some Arms and Fury changes to report soon.

Armored to the Teeth — Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn’t want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It’s still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.

EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.

Thunder Clap — Increase in threat generation. No target limit. Swipe gets the same treatment. With these changes, all 4 tank classes should be able to generate very respectable AE threat. Consecration is still a little higher in threat to account for Thunder Clap’s debuff.

Revenge — Added to Sword and Board as a chance to proc Shield Slam. Increased its damage significantly. We want Revenge to be the button you push first.

Shield Slam — Increased its flat damage to compensate for the Devastate nerf a few weeks ago. The Revenge change will help dps too, though only when you’re tanking. We didn’t want to increase the scaling portion of Shield Slam for fear that warrior threat becomes too high at ultimate gear levels, but we might still change it if they fall behind. We’re not saying (for now) that Prot must do dps with a shield instead of dual-wielding Devastates, but this should make it more viable.

We’re doing some more mitigation and survivability tests now. Our suspicion is that warriors are fine in this department and paladins might fall behind in the area of Shield Block Value at very high gear levels. But we’ll see.

Blue Posts

Drak’Tharon Keep Heroic
Trollgore has been hotfixed. He should no longer Consume, land a melee swing, and perform the Crush ability for 20k+ damage all within 1 second of each other anymore. (src)

Death Knight
Death and Decay’s threat increased
We did several threat per second tests and decided to increase Death and Decay’s threat in order to make DK’s more effective AE tanks. You still aren’t going to be able to spam it, but an initial D&D should get enough threat against the targets that you’ll have time to Pestilence, Blood Boil or whatever else before losing targets. (src)

Druid
Swipe’s target limit removed
We are going to remove the target limit on Swipe. (src)

Priest
Shadow tree still being worked on
Because we’re not done. (src)

Prayer of Mending threat
We’ve really buffed threat generation for tanks. Even when broken classes were doing 4500 dps in raids, they weren’t pulling off the tanks. We’re trying to back off threat management as a major component of grouping (though we’re not removing it). Raid fights should be more about keeping people alive, knowing the fight, and coordinating with your group. As part of this philosophy, we are trying to make more consistent spells with odd threat rules, and PoM fell into that category.

When threat numbers are very low, then things like PoM going off or even a Renew tick can cause threat problems. We think this is a little sucky and are trying to come up with elegant ways to fix it. While the start of a fight can present this problem, I actually think it’s worse once a fight is well undeway and there are adds and spawns of some kind that go right to the healer.

Another reason we changed the way spells like PoM healed was so the healing credit would actually go to the Priest in mods that track such things. (src)

Ghostcrawler on Lightwell
I actually think Lightwell is borderline OP at the moment.
The inherent design of this spell suffers from a fundamental problem that we’ve been working forever to solve. That is, with the possible exception of the tank, the raid generally assumes that healing is the sole responsibility of the healers and that if they take any time to heal themselves, they will “lose” the damage meters.
Lightwell has always been useful. It’s just most classes won’t take the time to use it. To be fair, when they tried in the past, they weren’t impressed with the results, or the charges went away as soon as they got close or whatever. It’s a pretty sweet heal now, so if people would just get over the (deserved) lolwell reputation of the past, they’d find it’s well worth the clicky.
Fortunately, Naxx, Chamber of the Aspects and Malygos do have several moments when you need to move, pause or otherwise hit a point in the fight when you can’t dps. That’s when Lightwell shines. (src)

Prayer of Divine Spirit is not giving the spell damage buff
We’ll look into it. (src)

Rogue
Fan of Knives energy cost and cooldown
We picked that cost pretty much because it competes with Sinister Strike. If FoK is 40 or 30, we worry you would hit it every single time it’s up. Now that depends a little on your weapons and poisons, etc. But that was the concern.
We want to use it in groups where you need to AE, to try to get a little bit around the rogue’s inherent weakness at switching targets or having targets die with a few combo points up. It’s not supposed to be a go-to ability. In fact, if you look at a lot of the new spells and abilities we added for a lot of classes, very few of them are core, rotational abilities and most of them are situational. Bacon of Light and Wild Growth help those healers heal when they aren’t in an optimal situation.

We can talk about the cooldown some more. Some AEs are targeted and some aren’t. I’m not sure there is a reason it has to be targeted. We’ll look into that too. (src)

Rogues in Raids
We tend to test single target dps because that is what most fights are, especially the boss fights that people care the most about.
But we definitely keep the AE capabilities of classes in mind as we adjust numbers.
We realize that a huge challenge of this new system is making sure that a raid doesn’t just take 12 of one class. That’s not what we want to see, and we’ll just keep changing numbers to avoid that. (src)

CoS not removing Chains of Ice/Mark of Blood
It seems like Cloak should remove Chains, maybe Mark of Blood, but probably not Death Grip. I’ll look into it some more. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
Given what we feel is a lack of group utility of the rogue class, what do you see as the value of the rogue in a group/raid setting now that their DPS is available from any other class? And will you be giving rogues more utility to balance this?
Bottom line is we want to see rogues in raids. We think you’re going to be there, but if we’ve miscalculated we’ll just keep working on it. This is a pretty big change to our raiding structure, and as nice it would be to declare it 100% done, realistically we are going to be tweaking it for a long time when we see what happens in the “real world.” In terms of the big raid buffs, the ones we consider rogues bringing are Expose Armor, Wound Poison and Mind Numbing Poison. There are plenty of others more along the lines of Kick and Sap that are harder to quantify.

With that in mind can you tell us any plans that you have to better close this PvE to PvP gap that we’re seeing with certain trees? How do you plan to make all three trees viable across the board?
Yes, this is definitely a priority. It is a lot harder with classes in which all specs are still focused mostly on dps. We understand that some specs are just going to be better for 5-mans, for PvP or for raiding. We’re trying to equalize as much as possible, but we’re also trying to be realistic about our chances.

How do you plan to deal with talents which ware still considered all too needed by rogues, particularly in the case of Relentless Strikes? Is there any possibility of making Relentless Strikes a core class ability we can all train?
Mandatory talents are tricky. There are certainly plenty of them in every tree. Every warrior spec without Cruelty is pretty experimental, as is every druid spec without Omen of Clarity. Part of the problem is we keep offering new character levels along with new talents, so each expansion ends up constraining you more and more to one tree. The real red flag, for me at least, is when a spec has so many truly mandatory talents (which is a funny thing to say, since it’s still a little subjective) that they don’t have any optional talents. Instead of a cookie-cutter build being something like 20 plus your choice, they become you must get these 24 talents. If that makes sense.

I will point out again as I have done so in the past. At the end of the day there will ALWAYS be a best spec. It is IMPOSSIBLE to create anything but carbon copies of abilities in each of the 3 trees and not have SOME variance. If you want the highest DPS there will ALWAYS be a max DPS…even if by 1 or 2% one spec will ALWAYS be better.
I think it is very likely there will be a theoretical max dps build. However:
1) It will probably vary from boss to boss.
2) It might depend a lot on the skill of the player.
3) Because there are so many variables (by design) it may be really hard to “solve the equation” for which actually is the highest dps build.
4) For 90% of players (maybe more) that kind of damage difference is in the noise. Very few players can do 2500 dps one night and then 2525 dps another night (a 1% difference). Usually the delta is much larger than that because of random elements including things as non-gamey as Internet lag, how tired you are and just bad luck. If taking the most optimal build can’t gaurantee you dps higher than the random element in the equation, it may very well not be worth taking. Now if the dps gain is significant by taking the best build, then I agree with you.

If a Blizzard developer is saying Expose freaking Armor is one of the more important factors when considering rogues in PvE raid situations, I might just have lost all hope for our class.
Unless you have high level alts in other classes, this new thought process may sound foreign to you. In BC, you might sit down to build a raid by saying that you need X shamans for WF and Bloodlust, 3-4 paladins for all their blessings, a Disc priest for Spirit, 2 Shadow priests for mana, a warlock for Curse of Shadows, etc.

In LK, you can get all the “needed” buffs in a relatively small number of players. After that you take who you want. If rogues were clearly the best dps in most situations, you would fill up your raid with maybe 5-6 rogues. But now what you really want to do is fill up your raid with the best *players*. That may be rogues for some guilds, but it may be mages, Ret pallies or death knights for others. Any group that leaves really good rogues out in order to bring a bunch of redundant buffs does so at its peril. Much more of the emphasis will be on gear and skill now, and less on the magic buff that earns you a raid slot.

The only time I can see this being a problem is if A) you aren’t a very good player (sorry) and you were just brought along before because there was nobody else to do Kings or WF, or B) you like to pug a lot and pugs can’t evaluate your skill, so they take you for your class instead.

Shaman
GC on Enhancement & Future tweaks
We view Enhancement as a melee class that should be wearing melee gear. However, one of the interesting things about the shaman is throwing out some spells with that melee too.
Our view of things is that some smart theorycrafters started wondering if using two fast caster weapons with two flametongue enchants would end up being the right way to go. The way the discussion sort of ended up was “maybe, but it might be close” but a lot of the community took that as a mandate. Or maybe they were just shocked by the supposition because it felt wrong for a melee class.
We agree it feels wrong, so we’re doing some tweaks to make it even less likely to be the most optimal set up. If you are saving up badges or arena points or whatever for your enhancement shammy, I would definitely NOT go out and get two fast caster weapons. (src)

Warrior
Thunderclap’s target limit removed
Done. (src)

The original post about Upcoming Honor Items and Honor Reset has been updated.

Quote from: Eyonix (Source)

As many of you know we will be featuring a new Battleground, a dedicated world PvP zone and all new PvP items in Wrath of the Lich King. In order to make the transition from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King flow as smoothly as possible, all accrued honor points will be reset at the launch of the expansion. We do this to ensure select players do not have an unfair advantage at level 80 from stockpiling honor to instantly purchase the newest Wrath of the Lich King PvP rewards. For those with unspent honor points prior to the release of the expansion, we will be offering a few upgrades and special rewards in next content patch solely for purchase via the honor system.

Update:
All of the gems that can be purchased with honor will have the Bind on Pickup and Unique-Equipped tags removed so multiples of them can be equipped and they can be traded (or auctioned). The new items that will be available are:
Cloaks - The Gladiator’s Resolution, Cloak of Certain Reprieve, Volanthius Shroud, Sergeant’s Reinforced Cape
Trinkets - Battlemaster’s Courage, Battlemaster’s Resolve, Battlemaster’s Aggression, Battlemaster’s Celerity

Note: The cost for the new items are still unknown.

BlizzCon Tournament Brackets and Player Profiles

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

The brackets for the StarCraft, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft Arena tournaments at BlizzCon are now live. These brackets show the starting matches and also provide some information about the contestants who will be competing in this year’s BlizzCon tournaments. We will be updating these brackets during BlizzCon, so make sure to check back to see the latest tournament results and replays.

Check out the brackets here: StarCraft, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft Arena Tournament

New Fan Arts

The Blizzard Fan Art Section has been updated with new artwork.

Daily Blue

PTR Testing / Expansion launch / ZA Bear Mount
We have no released a date for when the patch that is in testing on the PTR will go live. But I agree with some of the people above in that there isn’t a lot of time left since the expansion launches on November 13.
The current plan is to make it unobtainable with the upcoming patch. We are still doing some testing on this but this is how it should go. (src)

Wrath of the Lich King releasing on DVD only
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King will only be available on DVD, not on CDs. That goes for both the regular box and the Collector’s Edition. (src)

Drak’Tharon Keep - Heroic Mode
The version of Trollgore you have is insanely brutal due to a bug that makes his Crush ability land as the exact same time as one of his melee swings. We’ve already fixed him internally, but I’ll see if we can hotfix Trollgore so you can get past him and do the rest of the dungeon. (src)

Eye of Eternity - 10 Player
The issue where he seems to randomly face people all the time in phase 3 has been hotfixed. (src)

Silvermoon City Boss - Arcane Blast fixed in the next beta build
I fixed Arcane Blast for the next beta patch. (src)

Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth
This is fixed in the next build. The “Mammoth-Tech” completely changed. If you bought the old Grand Caravan you’re out 15k. Sorry!
If you have the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth you’re ok for upcoming patches (no need to buy another one). You will be able to ask your vendors to leave (Eject!) and friends in your party may then take their seat. (src)

Loremaster achievements
Ok, here are the new numbers. They won’t be in (most likely) until two beta builds from now:
Alliance - Eastern Kingdoms: 700 | Kalimdor: 730
Horde - Eastern Kingdoms: 550 | Kalmidor: 700 (src)

Death Knight
DK now do x2 dmg on melee/spell critical hits
Death knights now do double damage on melee and spell crits. Normally spell crits are only 1.5x damage.
This was an intended change. Death knights derive a lot of damage from spells, but not so much that it made sense to give them a talent to increase spell critical damage. It’s just a passive bonus for them.
We were worried about certain specs not scaling as well with high levels of gear. (src)

Death and Decay damage lowered
Crypt Fever was removed from its damage, though apparently not for everyone?
That shouldn’t have affected the damage for Blood and Frost though. We’ll try to figure out what happened. We had no intention to nerf it. (src)

Does Blood Gorged need a buff?
It’s somewhat balanced because the similar talents in Frost and Unholy are dependent on diseases, which are also unpredictable in PvP.

It’s possible you will be doing 10% less damage than other classes, but A) if our balance is so good that you can detect that difference - yay, and B) PvP fights have a lot more to do with crowd control, interrupts, healing, burst damage and mana drain than overall dps. If we think these talents’ relative weakness in PvP is the tipping point, of course we will revisit them. (src)

Druid
Typhoon
I believe there is a bug with rank 5. The others seem to work correctly. (src)

Hunter
Aimed Shot dmg will be lowered
We’ll have to tone down the damage of Aimed Shot actually, probably in the ballpark of less than what it is now but more than what multi-shot does to a single target or arcane shot. We have not yet settled on the appropriate number.
In terms of their duration and cooldown, I think those are pretty in line with the Warrior variant. The idea behind this change is that the Hunter was intended to be a source of the “mortal strike wound” in group PvP, but keeping up the debuff is too difficult with a cast time. (src)

Trap Mastery will not be linked to Explosive Shot
It won’t be, no worries. (src)

Bestial Wrath bug fix in the next build
We’ve actually fixed that bestial wrath bug recently, should be in the next build. (src)

Pets base health
We still are working on bumping the base health of the pets up. (src)

Lock and Load currently bugged
It isn’t 100%, its more around 2/4/6% on periodic damage from Serpent Sting. Its proc chance is in the ballpark of Shadow Trance (Nightfall) for Warlocks, though 2% higher (since Nightfall is 4%).
Seems like a tooltip bug.
Edit: Nm, seems like its really bugged. (src)

Paladin
Retribution expected benchmark
Ret should be as close to the top as anyone else. Our buckets at this point are basically DPS, Tanks, Healers. When the tank and healer are doing dps, it’s even closer.

You may be a couple hundred dps lower than a pure dps class (hunter, mage, warlock, rogue) but for most players, the numbers will be close enough that a raid with a good Retadin and an okay rogue will see Ret on top.

This is a change in philosophy from the BC era, where we would engineer hybrid classes to be 25% to 30% and sometimes much lower than dps classes. (src)

Priest
Twisted Faith
As for Twisted Faith*, it increases damage if the target has Shadow Word: Pain not “mind flay” already on it. That’s a typo. (src)

Reason behind Fade changes
We did notice that getting random healing aggro was annoying as a Priest (on new mobs that aggro), which is why we changed Fade to drop all aggro while its up. (src)

Rogue
Combat tree to get a damage buff
We’re looking into pumping the damage up in Combat, still. (src)

Shaman
Riptide will see additional changes
We have a lot of work to do still on Riptide. We still think the niche is good, but the numbers don’t feel right yet. (src)

Elemental tree to get damage buffs
We started to realize Elementals were going to log into 3.0, even before Northrend, and see LB damage way down. That feels pretty cruddy. So we’re talking about ways to get the damage back up there to where it feels decent in small groups or solo.
The good news is that overall, Elemental damage was low. That’s going to give us a lot of room for Balance-like damage buffs. I’m not saying we’re going to handle it the same way, but you should see it go up noticeably in a patch or two. (src)

Enhancement future changes
I can say that we aren’t thrilled about seeing Enhancement shammies in caster gear, with two fast weapons and dual FTs. We have some ideas that will shift Enhancement back to caring about AP more, while still letting you do a lot of spell damage, because that’s a cool part of the class. I predict that WF / FT will be more popular, but you never know. (src)

UR changes
If I didn’t mention it before, UR should be affecting ranged attack power too. We’ll get that fixed. (src)

Koraa on Elemental DPS
Elemental was doing more sustained DPS than any Mage or Warlock spec, which is why we had to tone down some of the talents. Going into WOLK we did lower the coefficient. It always had a higher coefficient because there was no nature damage debuff. Now that there is, we’ve fixed the coefficient to be more in line. There’s a reason why Elemental Shaman have some of the highest burst damage in PvP, and it’s because their base nuke does more damage than other classes. Other classes require debuffs like Curse of the Elements, Shamans don’t (until after the WOLK fix). (src)

Warlock
About the Affliction tree
Haunt - It should be more than 20%. Haven’t settled on the right number yet. Should be “coming back” when you apply a new Haunt or when the effect ends, will check on that.
Pandemic - I’m not sure it works the way you’re describing, are you sure it rolls twice? I’ll check tomorrow.
Shadow Embrace - Not sure I buy that, Haunt has a 10 second cooldown, the duration lasts 12 sec. Suppose we could put Drain Life on this. You aren’t really intended to just AOE MS.
Everlasting Affliction - The philosophy is that Shadow Priests and Affliction Warlocks have harsher DPS rotations than most classes, so we chilled those out and gave the classes who had little to no rotations a rotation. You can still ignore this talent and go crazy with your rotation if you wish. (src)

Haunt rank 2 is not healing and the imp hp buff is bugged
We’ll fix this. (src)

Warrior
Arms Talent Feedback
This thread is a little bit different from some of the others I’ve started, because I’m going to povide a little more direction on a few specific talents. This is a discussion of ARMS however. Also note that we want the tree to be both PvE and PvP viable so keep that in mind when responding.

First, we’re not dramatically overhauling warrior stances. At least not now. We have talked about it quite a bit, and it’s something we might do in the future, but it does require a lot discussion. So we aren’t taking away the penalties and we aren’t adding a bonus to Arms for now. However, if there are less dramatic changes that totally “fix” Battle Stance for you, feel free to mention those. An example might be putting Pummel into Arms (perhaps with a talent).

Second, Bladestorm. Currently it allows you to use white attacks and we’re inclined to leave it that way. It can do an awful lot of damage right now, so I hope your feedback isn’t that it doesn’t hit hard enough. I know several people want it to break fear instead of just prevent it.

Third, Sudden Death. Some people love it because it’s actually a decision when it lights up. Other people hate it for the same reason.

Fourth, Wrecking Crew. This is pretty much just a discussion of the Enrage mechanic, unless you just think the numbers are off or something.

I shouldn’t need to remind you of this, and many of you will probably disagree anyway, but warriors are exceedinly difficult to balance. Because of the way rage works, it is really easy to make warriors too weak or too powerful and hard to hit the sweet spot. And yes, you are very gear-dependent. (src)

Fury Talent Feedback
With one exception. No Titan’s Grip talk permitted.
I know you want to talk about it some more, but the topic has a tendency to fill up every thread into which it sneaks. I want to make sure other Fury issues get ample coverage. Anything else is open game. (src)

General warrior Q/A (src)
How do you feel about the heavily random nature of the arms tree?
There’s always been a bit of that compared to Fury.

Why does bladestorm have a self-CC element? Why doesn’t it remove CC, stuns, snares or roots on use? Will this be reconsidered?
It does great dps. It would be too good if you could do other stuff too and too good if you could Intercept someone down. We might reconsider the CC issue, but really that’s the kind of thing to pop out of PvP testing.

Are there any plans to make the improved charge and improved heroic strike talents not bad? Less bad?
We buffed Imp Charge recently. Imp Heroic Strike might seem a little bland, but that may be because we’ve changed a lot of the old talents in various trees that used to do simple things like this. Heroic really does hit like a truck now, so I assume your issue is what the talent does to rage cost?

Why was enrage’s bonus damage reduced so severely? Would you consider allowing deathwish to stack again now that the bonus is so low?
Because we changed it from “be crit” to “be hurt.” We might consider letting it stack.

Does the hamstring glyph stack with the improved hamstring talent?
That is the intent.

Have you looked at the math supplied by Torgal and company that demonstrates titans grip isn’t such a massive increase as you think it is? If their numbers are correct, then what is your stance?
Our numbers say differently. I haven’t looked to see where they differ. I’ll try to get to that.

You say you don’t want any single talent point giving a 10% damage increase (as for example.) On 25-man Kel’thuzad and Sapphiron last night, mortal strike amounted to approximately 17% of my total damage done. On Sapphiron, slam was approximately 40% of total damage. Will mortal strike, bloodthirst or improved slam be nerfed based on your talent budgeting?
No. That’s not a hard and fast rule. In your example though, if you had not used Mortal Strike or Slam you probably would have used the rage for something else. In the case of TG though we do have serious concerns about it being too good (sans a stiff penalty). While we might change our minds after more data, you’re not going to change our mind by pointing out logical inconsistencies in talent trees. There are plenty of them.

Do you see the glyph of resonating power (Increases the maximum targets affected by your Thunder Clap ability by 4) as being mandatory for tanking? If yes, do you feel that’s acceptable? If no, why not?
It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.

Can you offer an approximation of the proc rate/PPM on furious attacks?
It’s a frequency-based proc. It’s a little complicated to explain but you might compare it to Omen of Clarity. I’ll try to get back to this later.

Are there any plans to make unending fury not bad? Less bad? Seriously, it’s really really bad.
Yeah, this one doesn’t feel done.

Do you feel that Vigilance is currently worth the talent point? If no, what is being done to fix it?
It’s pretty uber if we’re talking about the same version.

Damage shield is, according to some very basic testing, not generating threat from damage dealt. Can you confirm this? If so, is this intended?
It appears to generate threat based on the damage done. But there might be a bug.

Are there any plans to buff revenge baseline so that it’s worth injecting into rotations for protection?
Putting it into Sword and Board is something we are discussing.

Do you feel that shockwave is, or should be, our be-all answer to AoE threat generation? Is there any chance of lowering the cooldown?
No, we don’t want it to be your go-to AE ability, because then Arms and Fury can never tank a 5-player dungeon very well. We want it to be useful obviously.

Is it possible to give Disarm the same functionality as rogue’s Dismantle, or at least, the removed Shield Break skill?
I’ll have to investigate this.

Do you feel heroic throw is strong or interesting enough for a level 80 skill?
Yes.

The devs seem to have originally planned several means for warriors to interact with the new enrage mechanics. Will enraged regeneration and the rend bonus be all that we see for the expansion, or is more being considered? Specifically, enraged assault.
The problem we had with Enraged Assault was our warrior testers and designers didn’t feel like they had enough GCDs to work another attack into their rotations. It was just too much. I love the idea though (it wasn’t mine) so I wouldn’t say never.

While you’re doing numbers passes, any chance of restoring flurry to its original 30% bonus? Compare it to shamans flurry and it’s clearly underbudgeted.
It all depends at this point on whether shamans or warriors are doing too much damage.

Will we be seeing any sort of “good raid-slave” bonus for warriors who take rampage, given the overwhelming presence of feral druids across the raiding scene?
That is in the long-term plan. On the other hand, we can’t really imagine a warrior skipping that talent because it is so useful solo. Mostly, we need to make sure the big raid buff overhaul really works the way we want it to.

Why was the healing component of bloodthirst nerfed?
We thought it was too good, though to be honest, there are clandestine whispers echoing through our offices in the dead of night to change it back.

Do you think some of the design is being rushed by the looming deadline?
Nope. We just can’t worry about stuff like that or one of two things would happen: we’d get rushed and sloppy, or we’d just keep delaying the release. Class design, item design, talent design and game balance are never realy done, so we just keep working on them.
The truth is we can release stuff on a day one patch. We’ll also have [a period] in between the 3.0 patch and the actual release of Lich King in which we’ll get more time to see the new talents and mechanics in action before everyone starts leveling again. And then there are hotfixes, mini-patches (there will doubtless be a few) and then big content patches.
We have enough experienced people on the team now who have been through this a couple of times that we plan on being able to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
But since we can’t wait until everything is 100% perfect (because it never is) it doesn’t make much sense to worry about the impending release either.

SEBASTOPOL, Calif.–From a corner of a nondescript office building at the edge of wine country, Carl Malamud is masterminding an electronic guerrilla war against governments across the nation.

Most geeks tend to be a bit obsessive, and Malamud is no exception. He’s devoted his life to liberating laws, regulations, court cases, and the other myriad detritus that governments produce daily, but often lock up in proprietary databases or allow for-profit companies to sell for princely sums.

“One of the most important products our government makes is information,” said the 49-year-old tech activist, who created a Lego animation to buttress his point. “We forget the important role of the government in producing these vast databases of information. That to me is infrastructure no different from electrical lines or roads.”

Malamud’s solution typically has been to create a proof-of-concept Web site, with the hopes of embarrassing government entities into building that infrastructure themselves. In the 1990s, his activism was responsible for persuading the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office to make their data available for free on the Internet. Now, on his public.resource.org Web site, he’s resumed posting hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents–all of which are, or at least should be, in the public domain.

This month, he’s busy liberating California government codes, including San Francisco’s building code, electrical code, fire code, and zoning code. That means purchasing printed copies for as little as $40 or as much as thousands of dollars, digitizing them, and posting them as PDF files without copy protection. Two months earlier, he posted the California Administrative Code.

One hitch is that San Francisco is one of those municipalities that claims its building code is copyrighted. (The notice says: “All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed by any means or stored in a database or retrieval system without prior written permission of the City and County of San Francisco.”)

“I haven’t heard from anybody” in the city government, Malamud said, since the documents were posted early last week. “That is a little surprising. I would have expected that someone would have at least called up and asked what we hoped to accomplish by doing this.”

Adine Varah, a San Francisco deputy city attorney, declined to answer questions on Wednesday about legal action or the enforceability of the copyright notice. “The city and county of San Francisco strongly supports and ensures the public accessibility of its municipal codes,” Varah said. “The San Francisco Municipal Code is a public record under our state and local public records laws. In addition, the city and county of San Francisco makes those codes publicly available for free on our Web site.”

Varah warned that Malamud’s document may prove to be out-of-date, and that city residents rely on it at their peril: “The city does not make any representation as to whether codes accessed on the Internet through non-city Web sites are accurate or up-to-date versions of the San Francisco Municipal Code.”

California’s Code of Regulations: only $3,288 for one year
One reason that city and state officials tend not to appreciate Malamud’s efforts is that selling copies of regulations can be a source of revenue.

In California, Barclay’s, a subsidiary of Thompson West, is the officially-designated publisher of the state Code of Regulations. A 2008 price list says the complete code of regulations is $2,315 in printed form and $3,288 with a one-year subscription with updates. A CD-ROM version with updates is $1,556.

Susan Lapsley, director of California’s office of administrative law, said on Wednesday that the state claims copyright “to protect that intellectual property of the state.”

“Here in California, we are the ones who publish (and) compile the regulations,” Lapsley said. To take legal action against Malamud, “we’d have to go through the state attorney general. We haven’t investigated it.”

Lapsley said the state already makes an effort to distribute at the materials on the Internet, in state depositories, and through libraries. She said having government-certified sources is useful because the code is constantly in flux, with her office approving or rejecting 5 to 10 rulemakings a day and updating the official version accordingly. (In response, Malamud says that only a portion of the code is online and that the second part with building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and elevator regulations must be purchased.)

“It’s a little bit more concrete in other states but here it’s very organic, so the products they’re getting from him are likely outdated,” Lapsley said.

Sonoma County, just an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, has chosen LexisNexis, part of Reed Elsevier, as its commercial publisher. The 42-chapter Sonoma County Code can be bought from LexisNexis’ online bookstore for a mere $200.

It’s true that Sonoma’s code, which covers everything from wood-burning stoves to abandoned vehicles and home water delivery, is available on LexisNexis’ Web site without charge. But the company’s terms of use says that the content is “protected by copyrights” and that it cannot be used for “commercial” purposes, one reading of which would prohibit commercial contractors from accessing it.

Malamud says that’s why he prefers to buy physical copies and pay a local business to scan them in. “The electronic stuff either has a terms and conditions on checkout, or they’re using some sort of copy-protected PDF–it is a DMCA thing,” he said. “Plus, on checkout, you agree to abide by that. They’ll put some sort of contractual restriction around it.” The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, broadly restricts circumventing copy-protection measures.

At least California, San Francisco, and Sonoma let their citizens view the documents without using digital rights management techniques. Not New York state, which boasts a DRM-enabled building code on the Web site of the International Code Council. The PDF files can’t be printed, probably because the ICC sells the code in book form for $105 a copy.

Given that Malamud has made a habit of butting heads with Reed Elsevier, Thompson West, and various government entities, it’s almost surprising that he hasn’t been sued. He’s not exactly hoping for it, but also is doing nothing that could be interpreted as shying away from a fight. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation has from time to time provided him with legal advice. His nonprofit group, Public.Resource.Org, has received money from Google, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s charitable foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation. He’s renting office space from O’Reilly Media.)

One recent spat arose when the state of Oregon began sending cease-and-desist letters in April to Web sites that had posted the text of the Oregon Revised Statutes. That is “copyrighted material, the author and copyright owner of which is the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon,” the warning said.

Malamud and some of his allies replied by drafting a sample court complaint, which made the common-sense argument that the copyright was invalid: If citizens are required to comply with state law, they should be able to reproduce it freely without threat of lawsuits. And, besides, the government employees tasked with creating the law have their salaries paid for by taxpayers.

That dispute, at least, had a happy ending. Malamud showed up to testify before the state legislature (”the fact that works of government are in the public domain is thus one of the foundations of our system of government”), and politicians eventually backed down.

These are merely minor skirmishes in what amounts to a far broader ambition: to persuade all branches of government, at every level, including the court system, to open their massive data banks to free public access through the Internet. Malamud convened a group he calls the Independent Government Observers Task Force that has held a series of meetings and compiled a list of eight principles for what they view as a truly open government.

One of those says the data should be “reasonably structured to allow automated processing,” which would allow Malamud and his allies–including the Internet Archive and the Boston Public Library, which Public.Resource.Org is paying to scan 2.5 million pages of congressional hearings–to repackage files with XML tags and permit them to be readily indexed and cataloged. Eventually, search engines might even become smart enough to interpret those tags and act accordingly.

“I believe access to knowledge is a human right,” Malamud said. “When I see people putting barriers around useful information, I find that offensive.”