PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues, Part III

Round Three. Fight!

- This thread is primarily aimed at theorycrafting, especially DPS tuning.
- This is not a good thread for brainstorming, pitching talent ideas, or general gameplay feedback. You are welcome to make these in other threads, but be aware we're pretty close to shipping patch 5.2.
- This is not a good thread for whining. Whining posts will be deleted and developers will be grumpier for your having wasted their time.

Paladin
- We like our recent change to a lower cooldown on Avenging Wrath for Retribution in PvP. We like it so much that we want to make it a baseline change for Retribution and not a set bonus, since many PvE paladins are benefiting from shorter wings today, and our recent DPS testing suggests that Ret needs a DPS buff. However, this does mean changing the existing T14 4pc PvE bonus.

So the list of changes reads like this:
- Retribution has a two minute cooldown on Avenging Wrath baseline.
- We are reverting the PvP set bonus change. The Retribution set bonuses remain as they are on live. This line will no longer appear in patch notes.
- We are changing the T14 4pc PvE bonus to +10% damage on Seals and Judgment. We want you to graduate to the T15 set bonus fairly quickly and you won't be losing the shorter Avenging Wrath cooldown.

Tuning Adjustments
- These are in addition to any previous changes, unless specifically noted.
- You can't just apply these to 5.1 numbers. You need to keep the entire suite of changes in mind. I say this because we always get a few players who only see -20% on some ability and get all "Don't nerf me, bro."
- That said, feedback on these changes is always welcome. Numbers are more persuasive than feelings. PTR logs are better than simulations, since the latter are very dependent on the talent and time of the person doing the simming.

Death Knight
- Might of the Frozen Wastes to 20% melee damage, up from 10%.
- Icy Talons increases attack speed by 30%, up from 20%.
- Blood Plague and Frost Fever damage +30%.
- Howling Blast damage to primary target +23%. Damage to secondary targets remains unchanged. Note: the tooltip for secondary damage says 0.5 but it has been 0.8 for some time.
- Scourge Strike damage +7.7%.

Paladin
- Retribution damage was too low, but as I mentioned above, we buffed it through more frequent use of Avenging Wrath.

Rogue
- Envenom damage +20%.
- Dispatch damage +15%.

Priest
- Shadowform increases damage by 25%, up from 20%.
- We have heard some concerns that Atonement damage is higher than intended, so we are checking that out, but no changes to announce yet.

Shaman
- Shamanism increases Lightning Bolt damage by 70%, up from 50%.
- Elemental Focus now increases spell damage by 15%, up from 10%.

Hunter
- Aimed Shot damage +10%.
- Chimera Shot damage +50%.
- Steady Shot damage +20%.
- Black Arrow and Explosive Shot damage +15%.
- Hearing lots of concerns about Power Shot in PvP, so we may need a PvP-specific tweak there.

Druid
- Rip damage +15%.

Warrior
- Reduced damage of Bloodthirst, Colossus Smash and Raging Blow by 10%.
- Yes this is a nerf in a sea of buffs, but the Bloodsurge and Arms Deep Wounds changes ended up being too much of a buff.

Warlock
- Hand of Gul'dan, Shadowflame, Shadow Bolt, Touch of Chaos and Wild Imp Firebolt +15%.
- Soul Fire damage +22%.
- Conflagrate and Immolate damage +20%.
- Incinerate damage +10%.

And now, they only post changes for DPS's... =/ A sad day for healers... time to start rerolling i think.

Whining. :(

These PvE changes are going to do too much harm to PvP.

Vague. :(

For clarification, is the AoE aspect of Howling Blast going to be increased by this 23% single target buff, or will the AoE coefficient be lowered to compensate?

Single-target buff. That's what I meant by damage to secondary targets remains the same.

However, in case it wasn't obvious, these were all single-target changes. We haven't completed AE, healing or tanking changes. Healing or tanking numbers look pretty solid overall though, so don't expect much change there. (And feel free to disagree, but please provide some kind of evidence to back it up.)

I want to play Unholy!

We buffed Unholy early on in the patch and I did mention disease and Scourge Strike buffs as well.

You stated that shadow priest were overpowered in PVP and yet they received a 20% damage buff and now another 5% overall buff in shadowform how does that make any sense?

We're not convinced that Shadow's OPness in PvP came from overall damage. We think it is probably a combination of many things, and those we hit the hardest were healing and Phantasm. We did nerf the Mind Spike glyph, which will reduce burst.

(Gròmmash's answer above is good too.)

I'd imagine so since FnB is just a multiplier on the existing spells.

Correct.

Hand of Gul'dan, in metamorphasis form, is chaos wave. Does the 15% buff apply to the chaos wave too?

Yes.

Are there buffs designed to compensate for assassination getting less from the set bonuses?

Partially. This is a challenge for us, because we need to take the set bonuses into account, but everyone needs to function with the old set bonuses as well. We try to look at both situations.

Ret paladin damage will still be outclassed by other melee classes, causing us to be undervalued in the PvE scene, especially with the buffs to DK.

We're not seeing Ret DPS below where we want it on live, except on AE or cleave fights, which these changes aren't targeted to correct. Again, as I mentioned above, you can't just take 5.1 numbers, mentally add these percentages to them and predict 5.2 numbers. I wish it was that easy, but a whole lot of things change. For example, we missed the mark on the current DK set bonuses, and they have been nerfed in 5.2.

There's no theorycraft until now, just people asking for buffs and giving ideas read thousands of times. Main post completely ignored.

Yeah, par for the course, though to be fair, the changes have only been posted for a few hours and not all the folks who benefit from the numbers feel the need to post their results here (nor should they).

But your post is a helpful reminder that these threads are intended for a specific purpose and not a general forum for any game feedback or an "Ask GC" thread.

Yeah, I'm thoroughly confused to the Fury nerfs after the MINOR buff to WS, a move that is used AFTER everything else.

Sorry, I brought too much focus to that one issue. Fury's DPS was just too high in 5.2 before these changes. It is a little high in 5.1 as well.

Legendary Meta-gems

In order to further discourage the use of these in PvP, the effects are dispellable. Not all of them are Spell Steal-able because frankly some of the effects are too complex to work correctly when stolen.

In order to provide feedback on potential changes to rotational priority or damage modeling, please confirm these estimated new values, or provide the accurate value in their place:

Sure. Here are the correct values. Flat amounts are the values at level 90, as you’d expect.

- Howling Blast: 575 + 85.1% of Attack Power
- Frost Strike (motfw): 126% Weapon Damage
- Obliterate (motfw): 386.4% weapon damage, +25% w/ two disease
- Scourge Strike: 633 + 140% Weapon Damage, 25% shadow damage per disease
- Diseases: 187(FF)/223(BP) + 17.9% AP
- Diseases (Unholy): 299.2(FF)/356.8(BP) + 28.64% AP
- Soul Reaper (motfw): 120% weapon damage

…based on modeling I've done (with assistance from Theck and Hamlet), [Gaze of the Twins is] actually a Guardian's best trinket for Rage Generation.

Gaze of the Twins will only proc for Str users.

Thoughts on an Unholy Death Knight using Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen and using Festering Strike to maintain these 100% crit chance diseases permanently?

Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen will only proc for Int users.

The first the comes to mind is on the mage class. In frost spec, taking the rune of power talent, I noticed that the frost pet's waterbolt apparently is double dipping from Rune of Power. The first effect (reasonably) comes from the mage at 15%. But, it has another multiplicative 15% on top of that.

We’re not seeing this. Are you perhaps seeing the result of the Frostbolt debuff?

Rune of Re-Origination

We're going to make some changes to this trinket based on testing and feedback. Our goal was to make it decent if you didn't game it at all but offer some opportunities for enhanced benefits if you did. We're going to try to meet that goal better with these changes:

- 10 sec duration (down from 20 sec) but with double the proc rate.
- Increase your highest secondary stat by 200% of the sum of your two lowest secondary stats. For example: you have 3500 mastery, 5000 crit, 7000 haste. Rune procs, and you get [-3500 mastery, -5000 crit, +17000 haste]. Same logic as before, just double the size of the buff to your highest stat.

Forgive me for saying this....we are high right now? Locks/mages are topping meters and all I see is + + + + + + for them. If you go to raid-bots (shows what people are actually doing with the classes), click on any fight other than Galaron....look at who is on to....mages and locks (speaking 25 heroic).

We did not ask for a buff to haste.

I work for a software company, so I understand you have tools to see things that we don't. But don't friggin cop out and say things like "you are higher than you should be now"

Arcane and Affliction are high on many fights in 5.1, but they shouldn't be in 5.2. It's almost always the wrong argument to compare yourself to the highest DPS specs out there. "Middle of the pack" is actually where everyone is supposed to be.

Also, many warriors did ask for a buff to haste. Feel free to bring it up with them. :)

I try to always be careful to say "X is where or not where *we* want it." I say that because we pick the target DPS for everyone, not the community. We find that when we phrase it that way, players spend less time (though still a lot) campaigning for DPS buffs.

As someone who's main-specced Beast Mastery through most of his hunter career, these adjustments concern me about the implications for spec balance. Rough estimate, this seems like it's about a 5% adjustment upwards for Survival, and closer to 10% adjustment upwards for Marksman (maybe more if the rotation changes from 5.1 to favour Aimed Shot more).

This is why I added the caveat that you can't just take the 5.1 environment and mentally add buffs or nerfs. My advice here if you can't test it yourself on the PTR is to trust your theorycrafting community and see where they think everyone will end up in 5.2. (Zeherah made a post up above.)

I believe he's saying the damage buffs for pve will harm pvp, as a lot of ptr feedback was already very worried about very high burst and sustained damage ( people being gibbed in a few globals constantly) in pvp in full tyrannical gear with resil gems.

But that's a vague answer. That's not anything I can discuss with my design team. What would be more helpful are as many specifics as possible. What are you worried about from Shadow priests or Frost DKs? Mind Spike? Obliterate? Dots? We can go look at those specific cases where there are concerns. We don't think it's appropriate just to nerf everyone's PvP damage by 15% or something just in case.

GC we've still yet to get a clear cut answer on whether or not Lava Burst will scale (i know you hate that word, sorry) with crit rating (IE More crit chance = higher damage like Soul Fire/Chaos Bolt). Also, Bombay or Tanka Rey?

You used the word correctly, so no worries. What makes me reach for the Bombay are vague concerns about "scaling issues" masquerading DPS buff requests. (If you're worried about your DPS, just be up front and say you're worried about your DPS.)

We are unlikely to add extra crit damage to Lava Burst given the amount of time we have left for testing because we don't feel we can accurately predict what it would do to gear or rotational choices, and there is a PvP burst risk as well. We're not against the idea in theory and might try it at a future date once we have more information about what the 5.2 changes do to Elemental overall.

I also bet you did not test both Titan's Grip and SMF, since both do substantially different in Raids.

We treat SMF and TG (and also DW and 2H Frost) as separate specs for purposes of our testing. Nowhere do we see Execute anywhere close to the percentage of damage you're suggesting.

That said, several warriors have asked us to nerf Execute instead of the numbers we did hit. We might still do that, but Execute damage is a scary thing to mess with at this stage because it can cause relatively-hard-to-predict changes to priorities and damage between TG and SMF. We'll consider it though.

Yeah, that's whining, STOP MESSING UP OUR CLASS!!!

Our only recourse after we've asked you not to whine is to ban you. Sorry.

The fact that the reason behind the nerf was totally false.

You're conflating two issues. Stampede had a bug causing it to do too much damage, which we eventually found and fixed. At the same time, we also wanted to tone down all of the "because I'm immune to everything I'm going to come beat your face in" cooldowns. We deeply regret having so many "I'm immune to everything" mechanics. We don't think they are good for PvP overall, even though it can be fun to beat someone's face in while they have no recourse.

Anything uncounterable is probably something we are trying to phase out in PvP.

Blizzard seems to be unable to admit that having Sanctity of Battle as baseline for Paladins was a mistake.

Sorry, we just don't think it was a mistake. If you go back and look at a lot of the feedback about haste for paladins, many players like how haste feels. They like how well it ties into their active mitigation. We don't think there was any mistake here. We just have to make sure (long-term) that avoidance still has some role for tanks. We reduced the proc chance of Grand Crusader because we also allowed it to be caused from dodge and parry, which helps to make those stats somewhat more attractive.

There are numerous, serious issues with multiple different healer specs/classes. All of them are essentially being brushed under the rug so 5.2 can go live on schedule.

If we, the developers, though there were numerous, serious issues with multiple specs, we would delay the patch. We are fortunately in a position where we can do that and we do it all the time (heck, with almost every product we release). There are some players out there with concerns, and that is their prerogative, but it's also pretty par for the course for any of our major patches or expansions. We think things are pretty close.

with buffs to warriors/dks/rogues I only see the gap between us and other melee getting even larger.

We need evidence to evaluate claims like that. Unfortunately, as I've said, 5.1 evidence isn't super useful at this point.

If they make our cooldowns lower, damage without cooldowns becomes less of a concern

Yep. There is nothing inherently stronger about sustained damage than burst damage, provided the end result is the same (and often the opposite is true). There are encounter specifics that throw that out of kilter, such as the frequency of burst windows and the length of the fight, but in general we like those complexities because they help prevent every class from behaving exactly the same way. When CDs are too long, then the risk of things getting out of kilter are increased - consider the example of a 10 minute cooldown, that will rarely ever get used more than once per fight. We think a 2 min CD solves the problem sufficiently. Your DPS at any given second won't be the same as everyone else's -- this is a good thing -- but integrated over the course of a fight it will be close, again taking into consideration that we like variation among encounters.

Even including the 4-piece T15 bonus and boosted stats, I'm simming that 2/2 upgraded T14 gear is outperforming T15 gear of equivalent difficulty levels because of the reduced CD on an incredibly buffed Penance. This is an issue.

We have considered nerfing the priest T14 set bonus to 1 sec off of Penance (under the argument that Penance is more powerful now) and just reducing Penance by 1 sec baseline. That undoes a little bit of the first part of my argument, but Penance is a fun spell and a single-target one at that.

Tiriél is also correct that partially it's just a comparison between upgraded heroic 5.0 gear and normal 5.2 gear ilevels.

No. I can reproduce this consistently (100% of the time) on the live server. Steps to reproduce (at least on live, I will verify whether this still exists on PTR):

Okay, that sounds like it is just the tooltip and not the damage itself, but we'll still check it out. Tooltips can only be so accurate since so many things affect spell points these days.

Shaman
- Spirit Walk – cooldown reduced from 2 min to 1 min.

Priest
- Penance – cooldown reduced from 10 sec to 9 sec.
Tier 14 4pc – cooldown on Penance reduced from by 3 sec instead of 4 sec. (In essence, this nerfs T14 and buffs Penance while keeping the same end result.)
- Power Infusion – we are lowering the +10% damage buff to +5%. Our goal here was noble to make Power Infusion more attractive to Shadow, but we’re worried about making the talent too powerful in PvP. Many PvP players had concerns about the buffed version of Power Infusion.

Warrior
- Recklessness – We are considering changing it to a 3 min cooldown with a +30% crit chance (down from 5 min, 50%). The glyph would need to change as well. We’re trying to move away from very long cooldowns, especially those without a lot of visual noise (e.g. a 1 min Army of the Dead would be pretty annoying to see, but Recklessness is pretty chill). It would let Recklessness line up better with Skull Banner (and maybe we would eventually just merge the two buttons), and have the added bonus of reducing warrior burst in PvP while still giving them more frequent use of the CD to avoid that all eggs in one basket feeling.

DPS Tuning
- Warrior – we reverted the nerfs to Bloodthirst, Colossus Smash and Raging Blow. We planned on taking the damage out of Execute instead, but before we do that, we’re concerned that the actual problem is the legendary meta-gem being too good for warriors, and we don’t think it’s fair to nerf all warriors because of an item that nobody will have for some time. We may nerf the metagem for warriors instead.
- Priest – we also reverted the 20% buff to Mind Blast. This buff had also become a big PvP damage burst concern. It has a pretty small effect on PvE damage overall, but we will buff something if needed. The buff to Shadowform remains.
- Monk – In efforts to further discourage Jab, Jab, Uplift, we increased the mana cost of Jab from 6% to 8%, increased the mana restore on Muscle Memory from 2% to 4%, and increased the mana cost of glyphed Uplift to 16% mana. So that monks feel like they can be less reliant on Jab, Jab, Uplift, we also changed Soothing Mist to generate chi more consistently (to avoid long stretches of bad luck) and increased its generation rate overall.
- Death Knight – We reduced the health of Bloodworms to 15% (from 18%) and reduced the health healed to 25% from 30%. Our earlier buffs were too generous (and they are still significantly buffed from 5.1).

GC said it's a bug. I noticed that it also has not been fixed (um, GC, can you guys pls fix??).

We thought we did fix it. Any more information? It costs 1 ember, but if it kills the target or the target dies within 5 sec, it restores 1 ember, for a net costs of 0. If it ever restored 2 embers on a kill, that was a bug and probably got fixed.

Quick follow-up though: Is the ICD [on Rune of Re-Origination] still 22 seconds with the "new" version?

Yes. We considered lowering that to match, but held off on that for now.

It has been shown quite conclusively that a Monk using 2 one handers will out dps an equal skilled, equal geared 2h monk by about 2-3%.

It's much more helpful to show us that evidence (or link it) than to state that it exists, unless it's just up in the thread somewhere and we missed it. In any case, we're not seeing it at all. DW has an additional enchant and gem, but 2H has slightly more stats and more procs.

Capactive Meta-gem
Proc now uses ranged crit/hit chances for Hunters.

But mages are allowed to 100 to 0 anyone in a deepfreeze every 30 seconds with instant casts, awesome

This is either vague and/or hyperbole and without more information I can't tell which.

I feel like fury could use some nerfs (especially SMF).

We're not seeing this in 5.2. Any more information?

Either way, the point remains that Supremacy is highly inferior in most situations. This is because your mastery (extremely powerful for affliction and destruction) does your pet no benefit. Additionally, your haste does not scale the fel energy gain of the minion. This leaves your pets scaling tied directly to critical strike and spell power, unless using a pet with melee attacks (which then gets marginal haste benefit).

We think this is a legitimate criticism. We think it's only a problem at very high gear levels, but once players see the highest DPS players choosing Sacrifice, it's going to be conventional wisdom that you just have to take that talent... which we really don't want. If anything, this talent should be rare. As I've said before, the common warlock should be one with a demon. Short of having Supremacy and Service somehow give Affliction and Destruction Demo's mastery or just nerfing Sacrifice to the point where it's really only for players who hate pet bars (even at a DPS loss), we don't have a great solution yet.

If this is even remotely true then blizzard has done a horrible job.

This is the first time I've read or heard the sentence "middle of the pack" regarding mages and warlocks.

I think you might be misinterpreting my comment. Perhaps it was vague. What I meant was that if you are a player wondering if your DPS is low, compare it to someone in the middle. Players almost always compare themselves to the guy at very top of the stack rank, but that dude is often overpowered and it's rarely our goal to buff everyone else up to that line. More than likely, he'll be getting a nerf.

Is removal of the T11 Protection tier gimmic going to be addressed before 5.2 hits so don't have to keep it for a 45 sec guardian prepull as retribution?

We addressed it in 5.2. When you remove the set bonuses, the buff is also cancelled.

Mage frostbolts are doing crazy damage on the PTR on full resilience targets. Something along the lines of 200k damage crits with CDs.

We did shift some damage to Frostbolt, but overall it's a good thing for the game for mages to hard cast. They have to stand still and you can cause a Frost lock.

[Asked by everyone] Are you done changing my class?

It is impossible for us to answer that.

This

I've never been in a forum where this is welcome. It's particularly unwelcome in threads this long that move this quickly. If you really agree with someone and can't add anything to the conversation, use the up vote.

Blizzard really does need to start listening to the higher rated players on the PTR testing this !

We actually do and not all conversations happen on the forums.

Warrior
- We are going to lower Recklessness to 3 min cooldown, 30% crit. We will have to adjust the Glyph of Recklessness and T14 4pc (and probably other mechanics I forgot) to keep them at the same relative power.

Warlock
- We are going to go ahead and grandfather in the bug of Shadowburn granting 2 embers on a kill. It is technically a bug, which is why we fixed it, but it's been that way since MoP launched and we don't think it's causing huge balance problems, so in cases like this, we think the right thing to do is just make it official.

Mage
- While we like mages hard casting spells more often in PvP, we agree with the consensus that we overdid the buff to Frostbolt. We are going to revert one of the earlier changes and have it once again increase its damage by its own debuff. Base damage has been reduced to compensate, but should not change for the fully stacked case.

Old patch note: Frostbolt deals 52% more damage, but its debuff no longer increases subsequent Frostbolt damage.

New patch note: Frostbolt now deals 32% more damage.

I'm still confused. In 5.1 I never felt my DPS, or rather DK frost DPS in general was bad, or even close to bad. Where are all these buffs coming from, is there going to be some kind of counterweight in 5.2 yet to be announced?

It's a lot of things. Overall, we are balancing for 5.2. That's a different environment. Nearly everyone will quickly get better gear with more secondary stats. While everyone scales to some extent with those stats (and as much as I like to tweak the community about its seeming obsession with scaling) the fact still remains that those numbers do affect damage. Set bonuses will change. There are new trinkets and meta-gems. Not everyone will get all of those items, but we still have to take into consideration with our tuning that many will. We have to look at the new bosses. While we like there to be some variation from boss to boss depending on encounter mechanics, we also understand human nature well enough to expect that players will quickly start worrying only about their performance in the new raid and stop worrying about how well they did on the previous one. For DKs specifically, also recall that we also nerfed the current T14 2pc because it ended up so good that there was a risk DKs wouldn't feel like they could upgrade to the T15 gear.

im not saying revert the dk buffs, they are fine...but by that same logic, where are the ret sustained buffs to keep us competitive? we are already pretty far behind frost as it is.

Unless you can demonstrate to us that Ret is behind Frost in 5.2, we can't do much with comments like this.

We think Ret and Frost are where they should be in 5.1 with the exception that Frost pulls ahead too much in certain cleave and AE situations.

Do the spirits from the DK 2-piece DPS set "snapshot" your stats like the Ghoul do upon summoning?

Neither the 2T15 Zandalari or your Ghoul “shapshot” stats (and hasn’t since 5.0).

GC, when dealing with the Rune [of Re-Origination] trinkets, will the only difference be between the three trinkets be the agility on the three or will there be a further adjustment of stat allocation.

The proc frequency changes based on the ilvl of the trinket:

541 ilevel = 112.88% proc multiplier
535 ilevel = 106.74% proc multiplier
528 ilevel = 100.00% proc multiplier
522 ilevel = 94.56% proc multiplier
502 ilevel = 78.49% proc multiplier
463 ilevel = 54.57% proc multiplier

This counts for both Unerring Vision and Rune of Re-Origination.

Are there any plans in 5.2 for changing or removing the ability to build up Tigereye Brew stacks before a pull and use them as a pre-pot? I grow tired of casting Spinning Fire Blossom.

Yes. The charges and buff are cleared upon beginning raid boss combat. Ultimately we'd like to remove the burden from players for any behavior like this, such as using Holy Shock to stack up 5 Holy Power prepull. We just have to be clever about it to distinguish between this annoying use and a legit use, such as pulling a boss quickly after trash, the way you might in Challenge Modes.

Druid
- The Symbiosis version of Dispersion is now 3 min.

Hunter
- Dismiss pet now has a 3 sec cast time (up from 2 sec). This is to discourage swapping pets in the middle of PvP to get a different form of CC.
- Powershot now cancels Camo when the cast begins rather than the shot landing. Powershot is much more effective in 5.2 since it is so reliable now.

Mage
- Incanter's Ward can now be dispelled. We agree with the concerns that the 30% damage buff is a significant contributor to mage PvP burst and often one not recognized by the recipient of said burst.

Monk
- Spear Hand Strike's silence has been reduced to 2 sec.

Meta-gems and Trinkets
- All of the PvE Legendary meta-gems, the Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen and Rune of Re-Origination now have a reduced chance to proc against players. We're not crazy about hidden penalties like this, but we don't want PvP players to feel obligated to pursue these raid items in order to stay competitive.

DPS Tuning
- We overshot the mark on DKs and hunters a little, and we think warriors need that Execute nerf after all. All of this may change tomorrow as we look at different situations, so don't overly freak out about anything.

Death Knight
- Might of the Frozen Wastes to 15% melee damage (down from 20%).
- Icy Talons increases attack speed by 25% (down from 30%).
- Blood Plague and Frost Fever damage +15% (down from +30%).
- Howling Blast damage to primary target +8% (down from +23%).
- Scourge Strike damage +3.8% (down from 7.7%).

Hunter
- Chimera Shot damage +25% (was +50%).
- Black Arrow and Explosive Shot damage +10% (was +15%).

Warrior
- Execute damage -25%.

EDIT: Added the actual chances above. As always, you don't need to understand ANY of that to benefit from the trinkets.

Monk
- We'd rather you try out Soothing Mist in a combat situation rather than try to predict how it will feel, but the chi proc chance is 15% plus 15% for each tick that it doesn't proc. The chance to generate chi increases with each tick that doesn't proc and resets when it does.

Could we get some clarification on how the "time since last chance to proc" variable in the RPPM equation interacts with ICDs?

For RPPM procs with ICDs, none of the attacks during the ICD are considered chances to proc. So if I have a 22 sec ICD, the first attack after the ICD ends will have the full capped 10 sec ICD. In other words, option “A”, as you have it working already.

Jabx2 - BOK costs 6% more mana (100% increase), requiring BOK to be preceded by jab to proc muscle memory. The cleave change is a nice mechanic change and will make BOK circumstantially less unviable.

Against a single target, you should pretty much never be using 2 Jabs in a row (at least when efficiency is a concern). To Blackout Kick, you’ll use a Jab plus the chi from Renewing Mist. In a 3+ target situation, you’ll likely want to use Spinning Crane Kick instead of Jab, which is considerably more efficient, and does more damage.

Surging Mist now costs 8.8% of base mana, up from 8%.

It already did cost 8.8% mana by default. The glyphed version was mistakenly still at 8%.

Water Jet is back on the Frostbolt tooltip. As much as I would dearly like this to indicate a return for Water Jet in some form, am I right in assuming this is just a result of a rollback to the tooltip of the version that buffed Frostbolt's damage? (Or, of course, just a datamining error.)

Unfortunately, that is just a persistent tooltip bug. We still are interested in the concept, but are not introducing Water Jet for now.

I would really like to know why Monk healers were given a dps increase and healing decrease?

Assuming you’re talking about fistweaving, that’s always been the intention (and always been the case). Fistweaving is an alternative that provides less HPS in exchange for very significant DPS.

Think about it like this:

Holy priest / Mistweaving monk: 100% healing
Combat rogue / Windwalker monk: 100% DPS
Atonement priest / Fistweaving monk: 50% DPS AND 50% healing at the same time

DPS Tuning

- Standard, yes, this is a roller coaster. Our process is to try things out and iterate if we don't like them. If the churn offends you, just hang on for another week or two.
- Undid the buff to Vitality for Combat. It's back to 30% AP.
- Partially reverted the -25% nerf to Execute. It's now -15%. (As mentioned previously, we adjust the meta-gem.)
- Rising Sun Kick now increases your damage to the target by +10%, down from +15%.
- Sword of Light now increases damage by 15% up from 10%.
- Haunt now increases damage to the target by 30% up from 25%. This is partially in compensation because we also nerfed Sacrifice for Affliction because it was looking too mandatory.
- Partially reverted the buffs to Conflag and Immolate. They were +20%, and are now +15%.
- We are concerned that fully geared Subtlety, Enhancement and Windwalker DPS are still too high. None of these are particularly easy specs to play, so it might be okay that given that players won't realistically be able to hit their theoretical maxima. Just wanted to let you know they are on our radar.

What I'm wondering, is how long it'll take you to notice/nerf/fix fistweaver monks using agility 2h weapons while fistweaving. Is that going to be intended game play?

Do you have some evidence or numbers of this? We've heard it a few times from the community, but we don't see how it would work.