Kind of looks like a development on season 7 gear…pretty badass considering what we’ve been dealing with in my opinion.

early look at the patch notes taken from korean site

Dungeon and Raid

Icecrown Citadel

• The Scourge and the Lich King’s last hold, Frostwing Hall is added. However, in order to enter the wing, the Ashen Verdict must shatter the barrier first.

(ex. I guess the patch goes live this week and we still have to wait a week to enter the wing)

Halls of Stone

• Since Brann Bronzebeard exercised constantly, he will walk faster during the escort.

Forge of Souls
Devourer of Souls will cast Mirrored Soul less frequently.
Few monster’s Spell Reflect abilities have been changed. They now have casting times, procs only twice, and chance to reflect reduced to 75% from 100%

Nexus
Anomalus casts Create Rift only once now. (Down from 3)

Ahn’Kahet: Old Kingdom
Elder Nakox’s Ahn’kahar Guardian only spawns once now.
Jedoga Shadowseeker only do air phase once now.
Some monsters between Jedoga Shadowseeker and Herad Volazj are now deleted.

Pit of Saron
Dead players are now able to enter the dungeon during Krick and Ick or Forgemaster Garfrost encounter.

Utgarde Pinnacle
Players only need 3 harpoons to bring down Skadi’s drake during the encounter. (Down from 5)
Svala Sorrowgrave only casts Rituals of Sword once. (Down from 3)

Vault of Archavon
Toravon the Icewatcher is added in the dungeon. He awaits your challenge both 10 and 25 man difficulty

Violet Hold
New portals will open faster after players defeat bosses

Battleground and Arena

Arena

With brand new rewards, Season 8 is officially started!

Druid
• Talent
o Balance
Earth and Moon: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6% (Up from 1/2/3%)

Shaman
• Talent
• Elemental
o Shamanism: This talent now increases your Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning spell damage by 4/8/12/16/20% (Up from 3/6/9/12/15%) and Lava Burst spell damage by 5/10/15/20/25% (Up from 4/8/12/16/20%)

Warlock
• Talent
o Affliction
Shadow Embrace: Now stacks 3 times (Up from 2) Healing reduction effect reduced to 2/4/8/10% (Down from 3/6/9/12/15%)
o Demonology
Demonic Pact: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)
However effect to party or raid members remains still.

o Destruction
Conflagrate: Periodic Spell damage increased to 40% (Up from 20%)

Empowered Imp: Damage done by imp increased to 10/20/30% (Up from 5/10/15%)

Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases Shadow Bolt damage 2/4/6/8/10% (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)

Warrior
• Talent
o Protection
Concussion Blow : Damage is decreased by 50%, but threat generated by this ability remains still.
Devastate: Damage is increased to 120% (Up from 100%)

Shield Slam: Damage increment from block value decreased, and starts to decrease from lower block value. If your gear is almost High-end, players won’t really recognize the change. In addition, threat generated by Shield Slam is increased by 30%

Warbringer: Now only affects Intervene
Player Interface
• Party leader created by Dungeon finder is now called “Pathfinder” (ex. I have no idea what is really gonna be called on EU or US client)
Promoted players in raid now able to do Ready Check

Item
• Ashen Verdict Faction Ring now offers new ring to Strength dominant classes.
Tier 10 Elemental Shaman set 4-pieces effect (redesigned): Whenever Lava burst successfully casted on the target, it increases Flame Shock during by 6 sec
Halls of Stone
Since Brann Bronzebeard

A Season Passed Casually, the Fall of the PvP Rogue

I’m going to be honest here. I wanted to come say that I managed to get glad playing only the last day of the season. I was hoping to tell a feel good story to start but I can’t. Monday night I was hit with the abrupt reality of rogue arena in season 7. This was something I couldn’t really grasp until then, almost entirely due to the fact I spent most of the season searching for a team.

A big reason for this turned out to be trying to make something work with Aeias. I’d like to think I tried everything I could to make things work, but I guess sometimes things aren’t meant to be. For whatever reason every time we tried to make an rmp things just didn’t work out things would always end in arguments. We really just had conflicting views on arena and WoW in general, so unfortunately that’s how things turned out.

Last week I ran into my old friend Marco, who I met when he was playing DK in my guild at the start of WOTLK. I knew he was a solid player and he also had a HWL rogue, but it turns out he used to play shadow priest and just started again, and I randomly found he had a full relentless troll shadow priest on Blackrock. I also found Rests, a shaman who I also remember from Cho’gall who is just starting to play again.

We couldn’t really get started until the night before the last day of the season and we leveled the team up the first day. The second day, I thought we had a good chance at glad. The cutoff in BG9 was around 2610. We leveled our MMR from 2050 when we started and got as high as about 2530. It looked like we had a good chance at glad but the combination of fatigue from playing way too many games, our inexperience with new comp strategy, Rests’ full furious gear setup and Marco just starting to play priest at high level arena proved too much for us. In the end, we went on a losing streak all the way back to 2350. Times have changed a lot; I remember being able to make multiple glad teams in a day throughout BC and even in S5, but with the current state of rogues it’s a lot more difficult to form a new team without a lot of experience and succeed immediately.

The good news is the comp seems like a lot of fun, and with more practice and gear I’m interested in how far it can go next season in the competitive environment of BG9. Shadow priests have come a long way, especially with the will nerf, and although the comp is probably weaker than RLS, it’s very comparable. Hopefully my team will stick together and we will have some success in S8.

Resilience Change Coming

We are currently in the process of applying a hotfix to buff resilience. While some modifications may be made, we intend to have this buff in effect for the remainder of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The change will double the value of resilience in reducing damage done by players. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players. The critical strike chance and critical strike damage reduction components of resilience will remain unaffected by this change.

We are also aware of the possibility that this change will make healing in PvP too difficult to counter. While we are not making any immediate changes to address this issue, we have prepared some further changes that will allow us to quickly deploy a PvP-only healing adjustment if we feel it is warranted.

We will be applying this change very soon while we are between Arena seasons so we can evaluate how it works in multiple PvP scenarios for the upcoming Arena season, and as we continue to prepare for Cataclysm. As we have mentioned previously, one of the goals for Cataclysm is to have a PvP environment where it is harder to regularly achieve so much damage and healing in relatively few global cooldowns compared to what we currently have in the game.

Resilience damage reduction doubled
We think crits need to be proportionately weaker in PvP than in PvP. I’ll explain why in a minute, but first let me reiterate that the buff we are making to resilience just affects damage. The relative value of crit in PvP won’t change at all with this hotfix. You won’t be critting less or doing less proportional damage when you crit. If you hit now for 3000 and crit 30% of the time for 6000 then after this change you might hit for 2700 and crit 30% of the time for 5400. Crit damage will be lower, but crit damage relative to normal damage will not. We don’t want to get to the point where a crit is actually mitigated lower than an actual hit. That would be bizarre and do bad things for a lot of talent trees.

As to why we think resilience needs to reduce crits, it’s because you’re playing against another human and not an AI-controlled creature. Creatures generally don’t heal or blow defensive cooldowns, or at least not very well. The ability to pack a lot of damage into a small time window is much more important in PvP just because the opposing player or team have so much control over the size of that window. If you whittle them down to 10% of their health but can’t “close the deal” then they may be back up at 50% or 100% in no time. This kind of mechanic happens in PvE too, but much more rarely. The ability to crit in PvE is important largely because it buffs your damage or keys into talents. But the burst portion of crits themselves (high damage in a short amount of time) is much more important in PvP. Thus, we think the value and role of crit would be too high in PvP without a way to mitigate that through stacking resilience. (Source)

PvE Gear in PvP
I think teams may try to focus on PvE gear as a way of blowing up healers on the other team. If that doesn’t work (because the healer has resilience), then the PvE-geared guys won’t have the survivability to stick around long. If you can’t blow people up very quickly, then the glass-cannon thing just doesn’t work and longevity becomes more important to everyone. If you can blow up healers too easily (while wearing PvE gear), then we might need to buff resilience even more. If you can blow up dps specs wearing PvE gear easily, well, mission accomplished. If you can never defeat healers (note I said defeat, not blow up in 2 globals) then we will need to nerf healing. Again, the goal is to have slightly longer matches with a little more back and forth. (Emphasis on “little” — 20 min matches can be as tedious as 20 sec matches are unsatisfying.) (Source)