Hmm yes that is an interesting concept for the future... what? You changed it now!? Deathwing?

Threat changes
The latest dev watercooler was certainly interesting, with talks of threat changes and active use of mitigations. Among them were some likely changes:

Hotfix: The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done.

In an upcoming patch: Vengeance no longer ramps up slowly at the beginning of a fight. Instead, the first melee attack taken generates Vengeance equal to one third of the damage dealt by that attack. As Vengeance updates during the fight, it is always set to at least a third of the damage taken in the last two seconds. It still climbs from that point at the previous rate, still decays at the previous rate, and still cannot exceed the current maximum.

So that was interesting and maybe I missed the "hotfix" part here. But I certainly welcomed the increase in threat generation in the future.

Lo and behold, today we have a hot fix where said threat changes went live!

This should mean that tanks in 5 mans can probably AOE tank stuff easier, with less chance of mobs escaping their attentions. It should also mean raids will become even easier threat wise on a pull, currently the pull is the only part where threat of my tank matters, after a few minutes of a fight I usually have a big lead and can actually slack off on the threat quite a bit and prioritize keeping Demo Roar and Pulverize up over doing uber threat/DPS.

I am quite surprised by the speed of the hot fix however, clearly the water cooler series is actually talking about features the development team have already decided to deliver. They are using it as a vehicle to explain why they are changing certain things, rather than showing how they are thinking and what might just change in the future.

I can't wait to try the threat changes out tomorrow.

Patch 4.3 The Wings of Death
In other news, it turns out that patch 4.3 is the Deathwing raid, which is a little soon, but this leads to some intriguing questions.

When is the next expansion out? If 4.3 is coming out, say Holiday 2011, to coincide with a certain other MMO which is releasing then, will the next xpac be 4-5 months after? Like in 2nd quarter 2012? Another certain MMO is releasing in April 2012, which is certainly in 2nd quarter 2012. Putting the Wow xpac up against that would seem to be a cunning move. So here are my predictions, based upon nothing but the release dates of other MMOs which Blizzard are sure to want to compete against. Plus that we are not interested in waiting 6 months between content patches.

Will they announce the expansion and its date at Blizzcon? I was expecting the xpac to be announced (as some Panderan thing), but a date would be super-handy for sure. After all, it should have been in development since Cataclysm shipped, so they might have a good handle on when it will be ready.

Gamona.de are processing their video of the interview, so hopefully when that is put up we will have more information.