MoP Changes

Hey guys, really sorry about how long it took to get this post out there. As always we've been super busy working on MoP changes for the site and we just weren't able to actually put out a changes document until this weekend.

We will be updating the documentation, but it might take a bit of time to get that done. Of course git push requests to the API documentation are always appreciated :)

Things to note: There will be changes in the coming weeks. Not only bug fixes but also new features. Some will be released prior to the expansion and some will come into play when the expansion hits. When pre-patch release hits your pets and mounts data won't be reliable. We plan to get these added back in as soon as possible and we know this is an inconvenience.

• Pandarens have three race ids. 24 is neutral, 25 is alliance pandaren and 26 is horde pandaren.
• There are some known bugs (on the website and API) with some of the tooltips and spell information. We will be fixing these asap.
• Account wide achievements will show up on all characters in an account.
• The biggest api change for the pre-patch is the format of character talents.

Achievement API Changes
Criteria now show a max and their order. Be aware that achievement and criteria id's might have changed and that criteria can now be shared between different achievements. If you have any code that looks up an achievement from criteria id it might need some work.

Achievements also have a new "accountWide" field to show if they are one of the account wide achievements (shown as blue headers in the game).
{
id: 2144,
title: "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been",
points: 50,
description: "Complete the world events achievements listed below.",
reward: "Rewards: Violet Proto-Drake",
rewardItems: [
{
id: 44177,
name: "Reins of the Violet Proto-Drake",
icon: "ability_mount_drake_proto",
quality: 4,
tooltipParams: { }
}
],
icon: "achievement_bg_masterofallbgs",
criteria: [
{
id: 7553,
description: "To Honor One's Elders",
orderIndex: 0,
max: 1
},
...
],
accountWide: true
}
Character API Changes
The optional "stats" field no longer has a "resil" field but does have "pvpResilience" and "pvpResilienceRating" fields along with the new "pvpPower" and "pvpPowerRating" fields.

There are some fields spread around: "calcSpec", "calcClass", "calcTalent", and "calcGlyph" which can be combined to form links to the new talent calculator on the game site.

Please also remember (like I said above) that while some pet and mount data will show up, it might not be complete or accurate... we apologize.

The optional talents field however has the most changes. The talents themselves show where they are located in the new talent selector via a zero-indexed tier and column field. Here's what the new one looks like (this character doesn't have a second talent spec, so the second talent group is an example of what an empty one looks like):
talents: {
selected: true,
talents: [
{
tier: 0,
column: 0,
spell: {
id: 115173,
name: "Celerity",
subtext: "Passive Talent",
icon: "ability_monk_quipunch",
description: "Allows you to Roll and Chi Torpedo more often, increases their maximum number of charges by 1, and reduces their cooldown by 5 sec."
}
},
...
}
],
glyphs: {
major: [
{
glyph: 1015,
item: 85685,
name: "Glyph of Breath of Fire",
icon: "ability_monk_breathoffire"
},
...
],
minor: [
{
glyph: 1041,
item: 87888,
name: "Glyph of Fighting Pose",
icon: "ability_monk_dpsstance"
},
...
]
},
spec: {
name: "Windwalker",
role: "DPS",
backgroundImage: "bg-monk-battledancer",
icon: "spell_monk_windwalker_spec",
description: "A martial artist without peer who pummels foes with hands and fists.",
order: 2
},
calcTalent: "01.01.",
calcSpec: "b",
calcGlyph: "Vfp"
},{
talents: [ ],
glyphs: {
major: [ ],
minor: [ ]
},
calcTalent: "",
calcSpec: "",
calcGlyph: ""
}
The pet section no longer has talents, but has a spec choice (and a "calcSpec" field for the talent calculator):
pets: [
{
name: "MyPet",
creature: 57239,
selected: true,
slot: 0,
spec: {
name: "Tenacity",
role: "TANK",
backgroundImage: "bg-deathknight-blood",
icon: "ability_druid_demoralizingroar",
description: "",
order: 1
},
calcSpec: "Z"
},
...
]
The achievements field hasn't changed in structure but be aware that criteria aren't tied to one achievement anymore.

Progression data hasn't changed but be aware that achievements don't trigger site progression for the time being. If they did it would occur for all characters (account wide achievements) and we don't know if we want that yet. This means that you might need to go kill some of the old bosses if you haven't killed them since their statistics were added to the game.

Item API
The only change (that we know about now) is the addition of PvP Power as a bonus stat. Its id is 57. Some stats were deprecated and the old resilience is replaced with PvP Resilience.

---

Well that's it for now. Again there will be other changes and I'll try to communicate those as soon as we can. I apologize in advance if there are any differences from these posts and the final version. There may be some downtime on the API during the pre-patch release as well so be ready for that :)

If you have any other questions please ask, I'll try to answer as many as I can.

There is not going to be any account level information (except for different things being included onto the character profiles [achievements, pets, mounts, etc]). This includes not including BattleTag information in the wow api profiles.

I would like to include the statistics but we weren't able to get to it before MoP launch.

Thanks for the updates. Good stuff. We know you folks are busy, just do what you gotta do and we'll be standing by. :)

Do you have any info to release regarding the Black Market Auction House? Will it be added to the AH API at some point?

I don't have any data about the BMAH right now, I will make sure to find this out.

08/26/2012 08:46 PMPosted by Bloodsekeer

I am not sure where to put this , I have been looking but this say mop changes so w/e lol. Um how will Cross realm zones affect stuff like Rares like Time lost proto stuff like that, that is already hard enough farming lol?

This is a forum about the community API, I can't answer any questions regarding the game, sorry!

Is the talents array a list of all talents available? Or just the talents chosen? Or is it all available talents, but only shown in the top spec?

I'll admit, I'm not sure why you would send the tooltip and structure for talents chosen, and listing all available ones seems like needless bandwidth to me. The fact that the second blank spec has nothing in the array implies it's only the ones chosen.

If I want to know the tooltips, I'm pretty sure I would want to know all of them for a class, not just the ones a character has picked. So I would be eating unnecessary bandwidth just to rely on an in house cache of all tooltips. Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but... you know.

As you assumed the character data only list talents you've chosen (so if you're level 16 and only have one talent select, it will be a list of that one talent). Same with the glyphs, it's only the glyphs you've chosen.

This sounds like a great idea. We're going to add a new /data url to get the full talent calculator data. It will include the list of talents and glyph options at least. We can't promise it for this week of course but we'll add it soon.

Thank you for the information- this will be a big help.

Is there any chance we'll be able to get the pet type name (or id) as part of the pet data in addition to the creature id? On the HTML version of the site that data is available but it hasn't been in the API and converting a creature id to the pet type (i.e. cat, wolf, whatever) requires a great deal of additional information that I'm not sure exists in a compiled form anywhere.

I may be the only one who needs this information, but identifying the pet type allows me to determine which raid buffs are being provided by the pet so it'd be useful to have this information so my users don't have to manually select it.

Correct me if I'm not answering your particular question, but pets in MoP aren't stuck to a certain type anymore. You can spec any pet into the three types. In the pet data I'm giving you the spec information which should let you compute what raid buffs are available. Let us know if this isn't what you're asking for, the spec information should be what you need.

08/26/2012 10:22 PMPosted by Wanttowrite

Progression data hasn't changed but be aware that achievements don't trigger site progression for the time being. If they did it would occur for all characters (account wide achievements) and we don't know if we want that yet.

Just wanted to clarify, does that mean that currently it's undecided whether progression is going to be account wide?

Other question, are you going to include boss kills of current tier in character feeds?

After pre-patch launches progression data will only be driven off of kill statistics and not achievements to keep it from being account wide (Achievements will be, just not the progression at the bottom of the game site and the progression via the API). It's undecided if it will stay that way in the long term. If you have strong opinions either way please let us know in the website feedback forum (or here).

Boss kills should be in the character feed afaik. I think there is a bug that's preventing some from showing up, but we'll try to look at that before MoP raids start up.

08/26/2012 10:55 PMPosted by Ziarre

Correct me if I'm wrong, but pets in MoP aren't stuck to a certain type anymore. You can spec any pet into the three types. In the pet data I'm giving you the spec information which should let you compute what raid buffs are available. Let me know if this isn't what you're asking for, the spec information should be what you need.

You misunderstand. The question was not about pet spec, but pet family. Due to changes during Wrath and Cataclysm, pets have become 'buff bots' of a sort, with each family bringing a specific buff or debuff. Cats bring Mastery, Wolves bring Crit, Chimaera bring a Slow, that sort of thing.

Changing pets from fixed-spec to any-spec doesn't change the buff a particular pet's family may bring (a wolf is still a wolf and brings a wolf's buff), and thus the ID of a pet's family would still be useful.

Ahhhh, makes sense. Teaches me for never playing a hunter...

I'll make sure to get some good data about the buff a pet provides (or at least the type) added. Adding to known issues list as well.

As far as progression goes, would exposing the time that the boss counter was updated in the progression view, as well as supplying the full Normal-10/Normal-25 counts help out as well as the other things you've mentioned?

08/27/2012 12:02 AMPosted by Zeherah

Also I'm curious if all pets will be provided with their spec in the pet data list or if it will be just the active pet?

For now it will be just the active pet (relatively the same as it is now).

08/27/2012 08:06 AMPosted by Zonous

Q: with the updates will we be getting the set pieces name and id's?

We would like to get to all of the known issues solved,but as of the prepatch, the only changes are the ones I've mentioned.

First kill timestamps is not something we could add on the short term. Adding a last-updated timestamp to progression data or improving the character news feed in some way (or adding one just for progression) is something we might be able to do for MoP.

Progression data hasn't changed but be aware that achievements don't trigger site progression for the time being. If they did it would occur for all characters (account wide achievements) and we don't know if we want that yet.

So far I noticed there is no progression-related achievements that are marked as account-wide.
Cataclysm and Pandaria raid bosses achievements currently character-only.
Will it stay as it is now? You aren't going to change these achievements?

Be aware that achievement and criteria id's might have changed and that criteria can now be shared between different achievements. If you have any code that looks up an achievement from criteria id it might need some work.

Changing id's, this is the most scaring part. It seems raiding achievements not affected.

The accountWide flag is the same as the blue border in game. This just means that the achievement either must be done by one character, or can be done by multiple characters.

The issue I was mentioning is that in 5.0.4 all achievements are shared across characters so checking whether a character has an achievement does not tell you if that particular character has killed the boss. Due to this all of the progression data in the API and website now only use kill statistics (the ones you can see in game) for this data, and not achievements.

Some criteria ID's have changed (you probably saw this as a lot of character feeds got "new" boss kills for old bosses when they logged in after the 5.0.4 update). No achievement id's have changed that I'm aware of.

The issue I was mentioning is that in 5.0.4 all achievements are shared across characters so checking whether a character has an achievement does not tell you if that particular character has killed the boss.

Okay, I understand. Currently there is no way to get data for most bosses.
How long do you plan to keep it in this mode?

Sorry, I don't understand the question. There are kill statistic for all bosses in the game that I'm aware of, so while some characters (that had the achievement, but didn't have a kill since the criteria were added) have lost some progression you should have access to getting the kill counts of any boss that matches up with the in game statistics screen. (If not there is a bug).

There are no current plans to change how progression is working.

What returned in "fields=progression" queries is not enough because it misses kill time.
Aren't you going to add timestamps to the data? Or to add bosskills of current tier to activity feeds?

In this thread it's been said that we would like to add last updated timestamps to the progression data. The lack of current tier boss kills is a bug and we will look at it. Sorry if I wasn't clear on either of these two points before.

08/30/2012 08:21 PMPosted by Wanttowrite

Thanks for the info. Do you plan to make these improvements before MoP release or it's just something you're willing to do in future?

We should be able to add lastUpdated timestamps very soon. As far as the feed bug we can't say until we figure out what the bug is ;-)

Thanks for the great work! :)

Here is a bug that, as far as I could see, was not reported yet: one of the things added by 5.0.4 is the fact that hunters now need expertise. Their expertise isn't reported in the character JSON though. I would have expected to see a new "rangedEpertise" field in the "stats" block. (Their "main hand expertise" and "off hand expertise" does appear in the JSON, but hunters no longer use main hand or offhand weapons. The fact that something is still reported for those might be another bug)

I'll check with the wowTeam about which profile fields are needed now. It's possible that there has been some deprecation and mainHandExpertise should be renamed as expertise. I will try and find out.

Racials can affect expertise on different weapon types. We have rangedExpertise in the character profiles and I'll expose it in the API with the next update.

In the guild member list could you please keep the 'achievementPoints' value the individual character's achievement points and ADD an 'accountPoints' value for the character's account-wide achievements? This would help my guild when they claim their alts as their alts should generally have the same number of account-wide achievements, hence validating their alts. I am finding it odd though that the achievement points from alts lower than level 85 do not match that of the characters at the maximum level (although they DO match ingame).

Kinda cool that I'm starting to see the spec structure show up on some of my guild's characters already... looking forward to finding a use for that.

This is not something we'd be able to do soon. The achievements we get for each character are either account-wide or not based on the setting that this character has chosen in game. Right now we don't have the option to get both.

Most likely those guild members have just not logged in and out of their alts yet in order to trigger profile updates. Once all of the characters have updates (and once their achievement point totals get into the cache) the guild roster (fields=members) view of the API should settle out (except for those that choose to only have character achievements show up on their profiles via the in game setting).

Peratryn,

I can see some new info on the item API, such as armor, and displayInfoId. Any idea 1) what these are, and 2) what other fields have been added? It is difficult to tell what the complete list of possible fields are in the item API without traversing the whole list of items, which I'm sure you don't want me abusing my app key for.

1) armor is the total value of armor that an item has on it (baseArmor plus any bonus armor given from bonus stats). Display info id is just an id that describes what the item looks like. Both were added prior to 5.0.4.

2) The main fields that were changed or added for 5.0.4 were listed in the OP.