Quote from Blizzard staff

Dungeon and Raid
Icecrown Citadel

• The Scourge and the Lich King's last hold, Frostwing Hall will be added to the game. However, in order to enter the wing, the Ashen Verdict must shatter the barrier first.

Halls of Stone

• Since Brann Bronzebeard exercised constantly, he will walk faster during the escort.

Forge of Souls

• Devourer of Souls will cast Mirrored Soul less frequently.
• Trash mobs Spell Reflect abilities have been changed. It now has a cast time, 2 charges, and chance to reflect reduced to 75% from 100%

Nexus

• Anomalus casts Create Rift only once now. (Down from 3)

Ahn’Kahet: Old Kingdom

• Elder Nadox’s now spawns only one Ahn’kahar Guardian.
• Jedoga Shadowseeker air phase now only happens once.
• Some monsters between Jedoga Shadowseeker and Herad Volazj have been removed.

Pit of Saron

• Dead players are now able to enter the dungeon during Krick and Ick or Forgemaster Garfrost encounter.

Utgarde Pinnacle

• Players only need 3 harpoons to bring down Skadi’s drake during the encounter. (Down from 5)
• Svala Sorrowgrave now casts Rituals of Sword only once. (Down from 3)

Vault of Archavon

• Toravon the Icewatcher has been added to the Vault of Archavon. He awaits your challenge in both 10 and 25 man difficulty

Violet Hold

• New portals will open faster after players defeat bosses

Arena

• With brand new rewards, Season 8 is officially starting!

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/idruids.gif) Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Balance

• Earth and Moon: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6% (Up from 1/2/3%)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/ishamans.gif) Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Elemental

• Shamanism: This talent now increases your Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning spell damage by 4/8/12/16/20% (Up from 3/6/9/12/15%) and Lava Burst spell damage by 5/10/15/20/25% (Up from 4/8/12/16/20%)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarlocks.gif) Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Affliction

• Shadow Embrace: Now stacks 3 times (Up from 2) Healing reduction effect reduced to 2/4/8/10% (Down from 3/6/9/12/15%)

Demonology

• Demonic Pact: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%). The buff effect to the party or raid members is unchanged.

Destruction

• Conflagrate: Periodic Spell damage increased to 40% (Up from 20%)
• Empowered Imp: Damage done by imp increased to 10/20/30% (Up from 5/10/15%)
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases Shadow Bolt damage 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarriors.gif) Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Protection

• Concussion Blow : Damage is decreased by 50%, but threat generated by this ability remains still.
• Devastate: Damage is increased to 120% (Up from 100%)
• Shield Slam: Damage increment from block value decreased, and starts to decrease from lower block value. If your gear is almost High-end, players won’t really recognize the change. In addition, threat generated by Shield Slam is increased by 30%
• Warbringer: This talent no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares. Intervene remains unaffected.

Player Interface

• Party leader created by Dungeon finder is now called “Guide”
• Promoted players in raid now able to do Ready Check

Item

• Ashen Verdict Faction Ring now offers new ring to Strength dominant classes.
• Tier 10 Elemental Shaman set 4-pieces effect (redesigned): Whenever Lava burst successfully casted on the target, it increases Flame Shock duration by 6 sec

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)
1) We're much more concerned about tank single target dps than we are tank AE dps. Especially in Icecrown, there are virtually no fights where the tank's dps contribution on an AE fight is really going to amount to much. You can make an argument that the single target dps can be relevant on e.g. Festergut (though again, I still don't think there are that many cases where the difference between success and fail are the tank's dps).

2) You may find Devastate boring, but Devastate is a very easy ability to buff because even small tweaks have large effects given how often it is used. Buffing say Shield Slam (or even Def Stance) would make the PvP balance we're trying to solve even worse. You'd have to buff Revenge enormously to see a difference. Any buff to Heroic Strike affects dps warriors in PvE as well who aren't hurting at all. Some of the ideas about e.g. Rend are interesting, but we're pretty sure the last thing the warrior needs is yet another ability to manage while tanking. Long term that might be the kind of thing we consider, but given that we're looking for a safe and easy buff, that's not the kind of thing we want to mess with now. (Consider that even if we did a PTR, who is going to be on there when the competition is new bosses in Icecrown?)

3) There are differences in how tanks generate AE threat, and therefore damage. Warriors are jealous of the DK and especially paladin persistent area-based damage, and the others are jealous of the warrior's burst AE threat on incoming adds. Druids are jealous of anyone with more than one button.

So, yes, one way of handling this is to give every tank a burst AE attack like Thunderclap, a sustained AE attack like Consecrate, and a mass taunt like Challenging Shout just for good measure. That's the kind of thing we are really reluctant to do though because it just works against the justification for having 4 tanking classes when they all perform the same way including using the same kind of tools. Now, on the other hand no tank should be horribly gimped in any of those situations, and except for rare exceptions they really aren't. We're mostly talking quality of life issues here. (One such exception: DK offtanks on Yogg had trouble picking up adds and the dps couldn't afford to wait. As long as there aren't a ton of fights like this though, we don't think it's a systemic flaw.)

4) Long-term, the paladin manner of generating AE damage and threat is probably too good, especially given how simple it is. To be honest, we have very mixed feelings on the whole AE tanking game. We brought the druid and warrior more in line with the paladin for fear of recreating the Shattered Halls / Mount Hyjal experience, where other tanks just weren't competitive. What that has led to of course is the AE tank + AE style of damage for almost every pull. You need the tools to be able to tank legitimate adds fights (imagine lots of incoming mobs), but does that mean every pull needs to devolve into that? We'd like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone's AE tools isn't going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can't afford to have a "best AE tank", and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren't fair enough.

Sorry for going off topic here, but these kinds of questions have come up a lot lately, so I figured I'd just share some of our discussions publicly.

Quote from Blizzard staffBeastcleave during MLG Orlando
I don't think this is a clothie issue at all. In fact, appropriate use of Ice Block and Demonic Circle defensively made a big difference.

I also don't want to discount the skill of those players at all. Make no mistake - these are very good players. While some of the matches were over very quickly, I think you're dramatically underestimating things if you think anyone would have performed the same with same setup.

That said, coordinated damage (from the BM + the shaman's wolves for example) is just really high, and in some sense it has to be or everyone will just be healed again. We need to see more matches where everyone in the game is playing in a wounded state. You need to be able to wear someone down (without just wearing the mana of the healers down). Health just needs to be higher for everyone across the board, even in PvE, and healing power has to be lower. The buckets need time to fill and drain instead of being full or empty 90% of the time.

I also think it's cool to see warlocks, hunters, shaman, paladins, druids and whatever classes I forgot that saw a lot of use at MLG Orlando, besides just RMP. Ideally those other comps would use a bit more CC (even if it's not quite at the RMP level) and there would be some matches that would last longer. The announcers did a good job of the play by play, but sometimes there just weren't enough plays to really have a sense of the kind of back and forth that make competitive sports interesting. (Source)

[...] This thread quickly deteriorated from talking about the MLG matches to the same old tired arguments:

1) RMP is skill. Anything that isn't RMP is faceroll.

vs.

2) CC is boring. Let's kill something.

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. There is room in competitive Arena for a lot of different comps. I for one am glad to see really talented players gravitating to something besides RMP vs. RMP for every match. It was nice to see other classes in there. I do wish the hunter + shaman combos fell back on other strategies more often than instantly blowing wolves + Bloodlust. In an ideal world it would be very effective (you are gambling a lot of cooldowns on that opening move after all), just less so than it is now.

I don't fault the players at all -- they do it because it's effective. They focus because they have to focus -- because getting someone to 50% and switching targets would be ineffective. But if other teams could survive that initial burst a little more often, then it would be more risky, and in turn it wouldn't be so popular as the the first thing to do when the gates went up. I really don't think we're that far away from that, by which I mean we don't have to redesign every class to have Frost Nova + Ice Block to make Arena matches last a little longer.

But as I said above (and most smart players realize) just buffing health / lowering damage alone won't do anything but put even *more* emphasis on burst, because getting someone to 2% will be as irrelevant as getting them to 99% (because the healers will just reset the match). Lower damage *and* lower healing and the matches will almost certainly last longer, hopefully without richocheting to the other extreme of layered CC or mana drains being the only way to play. (Source)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarriors.gif) Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
The problem with Warbringer
The problem with the PvP side of Warbringer is that when you consider prot warrior versus mage (just as an example), there was nothing a mage could do to a well versed warrior. The warrior carries a lot of stuns, silences, and then any attempt to root him is broken by multiple abilities. So then the warrior's teammate (like a hunter) is just doing tons of damage while the target has no defenses.

For the other side of this change, we certainly don't design 5-player or raid content with the assumption that the tank has Warbringer (or a way out of snares and roots in general). We understand that it can be a big help in specific situations but we don't feel it's the only option in any PvE circumstances. (Source)

Patch 3.3.x nerfs for prot warriors
Let's look first at the Warbringer change.

Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. Aside from stuns and Dismantle, rooting or snaring the Prot warrior is the major way to keep him off of you. Considering all of the stuns and silences that Prot has, when they can also jump out of every Frost Nova with Warbringer, then there's not much in the way of skill a mage can employ to stay alive. They just get countered in every way.

Will it nerf them for PvE? Yes, but really slightly. I'm not sure I can ever remember a case in my WoW-playing history where my warrior or some other tank caused a wipe because of a root, so even if it did happen, it can't happen that much or be that memorable. Warriors certainly won't get sat because of some new Achilles' heel and we don't design encounters around the assumption that tanks can't be rooted. The important part of Warbringer from a PvE perspective, removing the stance restrictions, is still intact.

Now the damage change. As Bornakk posted recently, what we essentially did was look at some of the successful Prot PvP characters and compare them to some of the Prot tanks out there. We nerfed the block conversion to Shield Slam damage so that it would hit the PvP guy without really hitting the PvE guy. (The PvP warriors aren't stacking a ton of Shield Block Value, but they do have a lot of Strength which also converts to block for purposes of making Shield Slam hit harder -- many of these guys are wearing PvE dps plate.)

Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. We want Prot to be able to hit reasonably hard, but they also need to pay some price for their massive survivability. We thought the Warbringer change alone would nerf the warriors vs. e.g. mages but wouldn't control their damage. Those big Shield Slam crits should go down a lot.

Will it nerf them for PvE? Probably not, or at least not much. If you tank with a lot of Strength or SBV, you might see your Shield Slams go down, but that's why we buffed the threat of Shield Slam to compensate.

Again, keep the changes in perspective. We want Prot to be PvP viable. We don't want Prot warriors to dominate PvP or have everyone feel like they need one for their team. Likewise, we want Prot to do higher damage than the almost trivial damage that they did in BC. But that doesn't mean they need to be competitive with the dps while they're tanking. (Source)

Gear Requirements increased for Heroic Halls of Reflection
We recently increased the gear requirement for heroic Halls of Reflection which is probably the issue. I looked at the profile you mentioned and it appears to be really close to meeting the requirements, it will probably take one more upgrade on one of those blues and you would be all set (disclaimer: no guarantees as I can make mistakes). (Source)

Healing in Icecrown Citadel
Now, healing is going to be tough on some of these encounters. This is not Halls of Stone. If it takes a few weeks to beat some of the Icecrown bosses, that's not the worst thing in the world. You might have to gear up a little or look at your normal healing strategy. We see a lot of the same complaints about Northrend Beasts when that content was new, but of course players figured out how to heal through that too. Just make sure you aren't calling every situation in which your healing is being challenged excessive, unpredictable burst damage on the part of the bosses. (Source)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/irogues.gif) Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rogue nerf and consequences
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is. (Source)

Nerf to Combat rogues
This question keeps coming up despite our making several attempts to answer it, so I'll just sticky it up here. Why did we nerf Combat rogues too?

We thought Combat damage was too high as well, just not as high as Assassination. (Source)

Hunger for Blood Nerf
I suspect a lot of this talk is just grumbling over being nerfed in general, but I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is over Hunger for Blood. From a design perspective, it's really nice to have a knob that is so easy to tweak like that. You don't have to go potentially break other talents. You don't have to change base points or coefficients in ways that affect other specs or even lower level members of the class. In fact the mastery system for Cataclysm works somewhat similarly, giving us the ability to adjust numbers independently without causing a cascade of undesirable effects.

To use a different example, consider Affliction locks. We want to buff their dps as I said, but we want to do it in such a way without giving them a big boost in PvP where they do pretty high damage. We don't want to over buff Destruction or Demonology (because we want Affliction to be a real choice) so we can't easily touch spells that overlap or talents that those other guys might use. If we had an Affliction talent ("Hunger for Green Fire") that let us easily tweak them up or down, then in turn we could make adjustments more easily and with less risk.

(Let's not turn this into an Affliction thread. I just wanted to illustrate the contrast between an easy to adjust and hard to adjust tree.) (Source)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/ishamans.gif) Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Bonus
In the next minor content patch we're making a change to the tier-10 elemental shaman 4-piece set bonus. In addition to lowering Lava Burst's cooldown, this bonus also no longer requires Flame Shock to be present in order for Lava Burst to be a guaranteed critical strike. (Source)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarlocks.gif) Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Buff to Warlock's damage - Details
As Ghostcrawler mentioned in the “Balance Adjustments” thread for 3.3, we would like to buff warlock PvE damage for all three talent trees. We have a few changes in mind we can share with you and welcome your feedback. That being said, of course these changes are not yet implemented and are subject to revision or reversal before the next minor patch.

Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.

Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.

Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.

As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.

Again, these are preliminary ideas. These changes might be revised or reverted before going live. Just the same, these are not necessarily the only changes we are willing to make and your feedback is appreciated. (Source)

Empowered Imp Buff
The talent would increase the imp's damage by 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%. The other effect of the talent would remain unchanged. (Source)

Demonic Pact Buff
At top rank, Demonic Pact will provide a base 10% spell damage increase for warlocks. The buff applied to party or raid members remains unchanged. (Source)

Changes in the next minor patch
One thing to keep in mind is that these changes are intended to be made in the next minor patch. It's much more risky to make drastic changes in a minor patch when we're concerned with it being released in a very timely manner. We're allowed to experiment more in major content patches when we have more testing time, including by the public.

Smaller tweaks to particular coefficients are better, more immediate adjustments we can make to improve the performance of a specialization without more drastically altering talent functionality with little testing. Taking that risk tends to lead to bigger adjustments in the other direction in the future, which is almost always perceived very negatively by the community -- as I would assume could be demonstrated by what you've written in quotes. We try to avoid the practice of "the devs giveth and the devs taketh away" whenever possible.

Another thing to consider is that we're talking about taking steps to keep all three specializations of a pure DPS class viable in PvE, even if it means some of these steps cannot, unfortunately, be taken in the next minor patch. There are other pure DPS classes a lot further away from having three viable PvE specialization choices. (Source)

(IMG:http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/iwarriors.gif) Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Warbringer changes in 3.3.2
In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.

We'll see if any further changes come down the pipeline. (Source)

Potential changes to Shield Slam
We are also considering some changes to Shield Slam to where it won't affect players in normal tanking gear but it will affect the scaling of block value for those who are stacking it. This isn't guaranteed as we still want to make sure it doesn't have a real negative effect on PvE, but in turn we may have the threat caused by Shield Slam just straight increased. We'll see how this goes as we test it internally. (Source)

Protection warriors in PvP
There are numbers in between 1 and 10. Players have a bad habit of viewing everything in terms of extremes. Yes we want Protection to be viable in PvP and most likely it still will be. Nerfing them because they are overpowered is not the same as them being useless.

Expecting the forum-visiting WoW community to ever come to a consensus on anything is unrealistic. That said, Protection warriors in PvP wasn't one of the arguments where there were a lot of very passionate souls on both sides. Many players suspected or were outright convinced that Prot was overpowered at worst or at least really frustrating to play against. On the other hand, we've posted several times that if the totality of their beef is just seeing Prot in PvP at all, then they're out of luck.

These arguments are somewhat similar to those rogues saying "But we're supposed to do high damage" and seeing nothing wrong with being 1000 to 2000 dps higher than others in their group. Yes you're supposed to be in PvP. You're not supposed to own PvP.

If you're one of those players with no interest in PvP and just don't want to see your tanking potential hurt, then I am slightly more sympathetic, but then again you should know what I'm going to say by now. WoW is a game with PvP and PvE components. Just because one of those isn't of interest to you personally doesn't mean we should neglect it. (And as I've said, we aren't interested in nerfing Prot warriors who are actually tanking.) (Source)