Blue Post 2009-03-16

Voici les dernières nouvelles pour les RAIDs et le Guerrier (source MMO-Champion) :

Raids & Dungeons - Hard Mode
Ulduar has a ton of bosses. While I'm sure some players would love for us to deliver an instance with that level of content every month or so (and throw in a 5-player run to boot!), it's not in the cards, at least not for the next couple of years.

Instead, what we tried to do with Ulduar is offer a lot of different ways to play the encounters. While the progress-oriented guilds may clear it quickly, we hope that some of the hard modes will offer them a lot to chew on. All of the players who are somewhere between barely being able to clear the instance and the "world first" crowd should be able to find a comfortable difficulty level as well.

Your old model towards end game was a success, it brought you eleven million players.
Most of whom never had a chance to finish a raid. They didn't get to see some of the best art in the game, hear the unique music or voice over, or in many cases even see the villian at the end of their quest line. From a production POV, instances are very expensive. It seems an odd choice to lavish all that attention on such a tiny percent of the player base.

At the same time, we know there are players who love a challenge and are willing to do almost anything to beat a raid-destroying boss provided they also have a shot at the best loot. They don't want the instances to be over too soon. They like banging their head against the wall.

And so hard modes were born. We tested the water a little with Obsidian Sanctum. We're going full bore with Ulduar. (Source)

Raids & Dungeon - Raid Composition
As you well know, assuming you read the thread, this was a case of a class or spec wanting a unique buff to guarantee them a raid spot. It wasn't enough to bring *a* buff. They wanted a unique buff such that their guild would say, for example, "We have to take a Retribution paladin or we'll be really behind."

In BC, you "had" to have warlocks to bring Curse of Shadows (never mind that it mostly helped the warlocks) and you had to have a 2 or more Shadow Priests as a mana battery. The list of who you had to bring was so inflexible that doubling up (and in some cases even finding room for one player) was prohibitive. Ret is actually a great example. Their dps was fine, if they were in the right group and had all of the right buffs to prop up their damage. Problem was by the time you put those other 4 characters together, the Ret was the only person benefiting from those buffs and your dps would generally be higher with a rogue in that spot instead. Since the Ret dps in the caster group would be bad, there just wasn't much reason to bring the Ret at all. (Now there are exceptions and clearly Ret paladins did get to raid some of the time, but most Sunwell-level guilds know exactly what I am talking about.)

Rather than just nerfing buffs to such a degree that you don't actually notice a power increase from being in a group, we spread all of the buffs around to multiple characters. Because there are no (or very few) unique buffs, you shouldn't have much problem finding someone to bring a necessary buff, even Replenishment, and honestly unless you are doing hard modes, you can probably do without a few of those buffs anyway. (Source)

Warrior (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Unrelenting Assault in 3.1 and Shattering Throw
This was basically where we were coming from. It sounds powerful, until you compare it to Pummel which stops all casting from that school and is off the GCD. Priests and druids have some instant heals which can work around the threat of the Overpower. Getting the bleeds off can also help.

As with Shattering Throw, this is a new mechanic and we're going to have to monitor it closely to see how things develop. If the duration is too long or internal cooldown too short, that's the kind of thing we can adjust in a hotfix. Similarly, we can always buff as needed. (Source)