wrath of the lich king beta-blue posts 1

Hunter
Upcoming Tenacity pets changes
Next patch Tenacity pets will lose Dash and gain Charge. See how that feels. We'll switch the Boar back to benefiting from Charge as well. We're not pulling Charge from Ferocity. The ideas is that Charge is generally better than Dash, but is deeper in the tree. Under this new change, for Tenacity Intervene is better and deeper. (src)

Druid
Swiftmend to be fixed in the next build
Unfortunately, the data was pulled when some abilities were temporarily broken. It's fixed for the next build, apologies! (src)

Balance polish inc
Currently working on a polish pass of the Balance tree. Get ready for more bloat! (src)

Premades lvl 80
Premades will be available at a later date and on a different server. (src)

Storm Peaks Closed- 8/22/08
Due to some issues that are occurring with Storm Peaks, we are closing this zone until further notice while we work on correcting them. We will notify everyone when this zone is available once more. Thank you for your continued patience and feedback. (src)

Arthas encounter requirements & 10 man
Exact details on what players can expect when facing Arthas (and with how many) is still being ironed out. Players WILL be able to face him (as of this point in time) with both 25 and 10 player encounters, however, there may yet be some additional thought put into just how 10 player groups will be able to access him. It may not come until after a 25 player group has killed him first to unlock the 10 encounter. This will be decided and made known at some point in time, but in the meantime, there is all of Northrend that still will need to be encountered and his forces to cut through. (src)

Kill Shot
The knockdown doesn't really matter very much if the target dies right after the shot, which is what the ability is intended for. It's a little unclear right now because it can also be used when the target is at any health. It's most likely going to only be usable if the target is at the 35% or lower health, and just do a high amount of damage base (instead of the conditional it has now).

If you use it and the target doesn't die, then somebody's a huntard (basically).

That said, not sure if we're going to keep the "knockdown" effect. We'd like to keep it, but if it hampers the ability too much then we can re-work it. (src)

About Pet specials
They should scale with AP, though many of the numbers themselves are definitely placeholder. (src)

Heart of the Phoenix cooldown
Unfortunately this is a limitation of the talent. Hunter pets reset all their cooldowns when they are summoned. So without this up-front cooldown, you could use the ability instantly every time the pet died, because death resets the cooldown. Originally, we had this talent as an automatic, but that was less useful. (src)

Separation Anxiety
I agree it's the actual damage it gives you is a bit lackluster comparatively, I think the design of the talent is fine though. We can bump it up. (src)

Improved Stings increases ALL damage by 30%
This is a bug and will be fixed for the next build. (src)