Random dungeon 15 minute vote kick limit gone in 3.3.3
It's not mentioned in the notes, but the Vote Kick option no longer has a 15-minute cooldown. Enjoy. (Source)

Vote kick reason in 3.3.3
This might not answer your question -- which may or may not have been rhetorical anyway -- but we did find that a lot people were clicking "Yes" on the Vote Kick alert, then later asking, "why did we kick that guy?" The idea is to make the person who wants to kick someone from the group give everyone else a reason. If the reason is silly or defamatory, a surprising number of people could very well reject it.

While many people are quick to take into account all of the worst possible scenarios with any presented changes to the game, we find that those cases are typically the minor fringe cases once the changes are put in action. The patch notes are out and the speculation is brimming, but let's see how things turn out before clenching our crystal balls, shall we? (Source)

Seasonal bosses only accessible through the Dungeon Finder in 3.3.3
Yes, the Dungeon Finder must be used. The interface will have a separate selection for special World Event bosses in dungeons. If players zone into the dungeon without using the Dungeon Finder, the bosses will not be there. (Source)

On-Proc Talents changed to Auras in 3.3.3
We made those changes for a few reasons.

Basically, they are balanced around more-or-less 100% uptime now. We think talents of the variety when X crits, now you can do Y are cool, but these auras really weren't in that category anymore. They were just cute ways of getting a passive buff up. Nobody tended to think Leader of the Pack was boring because it was just on all the time.

Removing the constant application and removal of these buffs (through both the passive aura and the range increase) might improve performance a tiny bit, will clean out your combat logs (which actually improves performance too), and reduce the UI and in some cases spell effect spam, which might make combat a little more easier to understand.

There are some auras where location on the battlefield is supposed to matter, such as totems, the imp, shouts, and paladin auras. Those didn't change. (Source)

Why not naturally scale DoTs with Haste/Crit?
Having everything benefit from haste or crit is a good goal and ultimately necessary to keep stats that are going to appear on your gear anyway attractive. We don't want to do that for every single ability yet because in some cases those specs don't need that kind of buff and we'd just have to take the damage away from somewhere else.

Haste is a mixed bag for dots or hots because it makes you cast them more often, using up GCDs. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Icy Touch threat bonus in 3.3.3
We wanted Icy Touch to feel a little like Shield Slam -- the big hit you could launch when you need a lot of threat to say grab a recently spawned add. I don't think most DKs will mind having a little more single target threat overall, but we don't want to turn them into a rotation of all Icy Touch. If that happens, we might have to notch the threat down a little more. (Source)

Will of the Necropolis Cooldown Removal (Check the original post for more details)
I think attributing so much power to Will of the Necropolis is one of those consequences of trying to covert everything into effective health. In fact, the reason we took the cooldown off is because we don't think it will be that noticeable.

In the theoretical case where the DK is ping-ponging between 40% and 20% health, it's crazy good (as is Ardent Defender), but those situations don't happen often. (They might happen more in Cataclysm, where it would be nice to see tanks at 50% health for more than a fraction of a second.) Most of the time, Will of the Necropolis is just extra health, which was the case before we removed the cooldown.

We added the cooldown during PTR testing in which we had a Patchwerk who kept stacking his own damage. When he was hitting for 110% of the tank's entire bar, the DK with Will of the Necropolis could survive, and nobody else could. Duh. In retrospect we probably overreacted, since we don't actually make boss encounters like that. You have say Steelbreaker Fusion Punch, but those hits aren't so often that the 15 sec cooldown is the issue.

[...] Seriously though, the only thing that changed on Will of the Necropolis was the cooldown. The health savings were always there. Tanks typically are at full health, avoid every other attack, get hit, and then get topped off. We typically don't hit tanks more often than 15 sec with really big attacks. It will perform as it always has against periodic attacks, including Soul Reaper (which is a 30 sec cooldown IIRC). If the pure melee hits from the Lich King allow DKs to literally take 15% less damage from him at all times, then we might put a 5 sec cooldown on it instead or make it work like Ardent Defender (which only reduces the damage that took you over the threshold). Against most bosses I'd be surprised if you even noticed the cooldown was gone.

Remember, you're looking at current content with current gear and we are forecasting slightly into the future with changes like this.

[...] But like I said, if it looks like it's going to be a problem, we'll add a small cooldown or something back on. I think it's too premature to do that yet. (Source)

3.3.3 Will of the Necropolis in the Lich King Encounter
We talked over the WotN change with Daelo and the guys who made Soul Reaper. They're not convinced it will be a problem. When someone trivializes the encounter with an undergeared DK, then we'll start worrying about it. (Source)

Frost potential changes
We realize there are still some things that need to be fixed in the tree. The Icy Talons chain of talents feels pretty expensive. Killing Machine can be hard to use. Stuff like that. I can't promise we'll get all of that taken care of quickly, but we'll get it taken care of eventually.

I don't recall us buffing the Gylph of Obliterate from 20% to 25% as has been reported. It's possible I just forgot or there may be something else going on. I will investigate more next week. (Source)

Glyph of Chains of Ice
One change we have made in the interim is to make Chains of Ice apply Frost Fever baseline, and keep the current (live) Glyph of Chains of Ice as is (causing damage). If you don't change your PvP spec at all (and assuming you have a pretty cookie-cutter PvP spec), then you should see extra damage from the Strength in Endless Winter and a Scourge Strike that hits harder on undiseased targets. (Source)


Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Balance burst damage
The patch notes are not done. While, frankly, Tranquility is not something we're going to mess with, we do want to add more burst to Balance for PvP purposes. If some of that spills over into PvE for more damage overall, I don't think many druids would complain. (Source)

Eclipse
As I've said before, the goal isn't merely to get you to use Starfire and Wrath. The goal is to have a rotation that is more than just 12121212 or even 111222111222. RNG is something we actually want. The best players should be the ones who can pay attention and react to situations, not the ones who can mash their keys the fastest (or download the most recent macros).

The biggest problems with Eclipse are:

1) It's too much of a damage increase. Here we see the problem with overbudgeted talents. The RNG wouldn't be an issue if the magnitude of those random rolls wasn't so huge.

2) It suffers too much from movement. Losing an Eclipse proc when you have to run is a problem, particularly given point 1. Now we have no problem with classes taking a dps hit when they have to move and we don't even mind of some specs pay a heavier penalty than others. But it's a problem when the delta between dps when moving and dps when not moving is so great. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Beast Mastery
In my opinion, players spend too much effort trying to compare their rotation to that of other classes or specs that they may not understand as well. Bad Arcane mages mash two buttons and bad BM hunters mash two buttons. You're not going to top charts as Arcane if that's all you do.

We don't want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet. If the pet does 50% of your damage (which is an exaggeration) and the pet dies, then your dps just dropped by 50%. Even if you can get the pet back quickly, you've suffered a lot of damage loss. Secondly, the pet doesn't require that much babysitting. Few players are clicking their pet abilities on and off. As such, it just acts like a dot with cool art. When we talk about the risk of BM being too easy to play, we don't want to over-reward players for just doing Steady and having the pet attack. What I'm saying is that the more damage the pet does, the less the hunter player even has to pay attention. If the pet required more micro-management, then that would change. If pets built up combo points, or Kill Command acted like a Conflag, or something where the hunter had to react, then more pet damage wouldn't be so bad (though the risk of death doesn't go away).

We'd like to buff BM PvE damage, but we have to be careful not to buff it too much in PvP where it still has really high burst. This means we can't just do things like boost the Arcane Shot damage of Ferocious Inspiration or the like. The damage would have to be more of the slowly stacking / sustained variety, and that's harder to implement. (Technically, it's not hard to implement per se, but it's hard to get it feeling right without causing weird things to player behavior, the talent trees or causing other problems that lead to a two hour fix taking two weeks instead.) (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Elemental Shamans / Totem of Wrath
As I've said before, the right change to make to Totem of Wrath is to make it grant spell power almost exactly the way Demonic Pact does so, and to make it less of a dps loss for Elemental to use.

Elemental damage should be in a pretty good place now if you don't drop ToW, so really I think the only risk is if you're in a guild that won't take you because they get a slightly higher buff from their Demo lock and can't afford to bring you both. I'm a little skeptical that that situation happens too frequently based on the number of Elementals we actually see in dungeons and raids. If it happens to you, I apologize (and you don't need to post 'it happens to me!" in this thread) but you might want to sit down with your raid leaders and discuss if the difference is really as great as they think it is.

I can understand if the inconsistency in the design just offends you, and it is something we want to fix, but please be realistic about how much it would really impact your WoW playing. We thought implementing Flame Shock scaling was more important. (Source)

Glyph of Flame Shock
The current (for us) Glyph of Flame Shock does something like let Flame Shock crit at 230% damage. We'll try to get a new patch note up soon. Whatever it ends up as will probably be some relatively simple damage buff to replace the old crit buff. (Source)