Blizzcon Day 1 Wrap Up – Classes, Groups, UI and More!

General Blizzcon Announcements

• Blizzcon “Secret Project” Announcement Confirmed – Next Generation MMO, outside of WoW / SC / D3 universe
• Info on next 5 patches – patches 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3

Blizzcon Class Panels

Death Knight

• The original idea behind the rune system was a totally customizable rune pool (like, 6 Unholy runes) but “it sucked”. They changed it to what is it today (2 Runes of each type)
• Death Knights shouldn’t be played like a metronome and is intended to be an interactive and reactive class.
• As a death knight, your talent trees are a good way to define “your style, but not your role”. Devs want to bring this philosophy to other classes.

Druid

• Balance druids have been greatly improved and you shouldn’t see a lot of boomkins anymore. Their DPS is now on par with other DPS classes.
• Balance DPS looks pretty good now but developers are keeping an eye on the survivability
• Entangling roots was allowed indoor to give druids more crowd control ability in instances.
• Restoration were stuck in the HoT niche and were very limited in 5-mans or raids. Nourish is new flash heal-like spell added to solve this problem on single targets and Wild Growth was added to give them an AOE Heal.
• Druids were also given an OOC resurrection spell.
• Feral druids were decent at tanking and DPSing, but couldn’t master any of these fields. In WotLK you can take all the bear talents to become a very good main tank, or all the cat talents to have a very high DPS.
• Feral mana is a known issue, and developpers don’t want intellect on feral gear. This is being looked at

Hunter

• The hunter pet system was overhauled because it was “clumsy for new players”.
• The shot rataion has been cleaned to make things easier for hunters and make them less reliant on mods or macros.
• Freezing shot was introduced to make pulls faster without having to deploy your traps on the ground each time.

Mage

• Frostfire Bolt is a way to achieve an elemental tree with mages, they should be able to deal both fire and frost damage
• Mage DPS looks pretty good now, there are still a few mana issues getting fixed very soon
• Living Bomb base damage will most likely be increased and the spell mechanics might be modified slightly. Overall, the 51-points talent weren’t meant to be spammed and developers want them to be situational
• Frost and Fire looks pretty balanced now, but Arcane needs a few more tweaks. Arcane needs to be more “mobile”

Paladin

• Paladins were decent off-tanks but not great main tanks, this is fixed in WotLK. Paladins should focus on protection gear instead of spell power.
• Holy Paladins were good healers but couldn’t do much in encounters where players are required to move a lot, however they definitely don’t want them as a HoT class.
• Retribution paladins are supposed to deal a decent amount of DPS without running out of mana.
• Retributions paladins have to be in control of their damage and shouldn’t have to rely on lucky critical strikes to deal most of their damage

Priest

• The goal with Shadowpriest is to make them a DPS class, not just a mana battery.
• Discipline priests should be viable raid healer.
• Mind sear was introduced to give priests another viable DPS ability.
• Class-specific racial abilities were cool, but the idea became got “old” with time. That’s why racials have been revamped

Rogue

• AoE DPS was really needed and Fan of Knives was added to the game.
• Purchasable poisons and the buff of the dagger spec should help “reintroducing” them to the game.
• The goal is to have end-boss less immune to poisons and rogues less dependent of Windfury

Shaman

• Totems are now physical and harder to dispell, have more life and last longer.
• Hex was added to give Shamans more crowd control ability, Riptide to improve their healing, and Lava Burst their spell DPS.

Warlock

• Warlocks pets have been made more useful.
• The warlock rotation shouldn’t be restricted to a shadowbolt spam, that’s why Chaos Bolt was added.
• Affliction Tree is still too complicated and developpers are working on it. Developers definitely want it back as a raiding spec
• Pets should be easier to summon/switch and use.

Warrior

• Protection spec has been revamped to make it cooler to play, mitigation talents now take a lot less points and will let you invest in a few other nice tools.
• In TBC, Arms was PvP and Fury the PvE spec, this will change in WotLK : Battle Stance, Overpower, and Rend have been improved. New fun abilities have been introduced like Bladestorm and Sudden Death, Fury obviously have Titan’s Grip.

Group Discussions

• 30 specs but 25 raid slots
  • More viable specs and death knights, but no room
• Buffs felt out of control
  • Complex, inconsistent, stacking problems
  • Curse of Shadows – gg mages
  • Bloodlust rotations
  • Jimmy can’t come ? No WF ? Cancel the raid

• Buff and debuff overhaul
  • Most buffs affect the whole raid
  • Multiple ways to get the same benefit
  • But no stacking
  • Plenty of room to bring who you want
  • Bring the player, not the class

  • Everyone buffs, everyone does dps!

• Downplay consumables

  • Potion cooldown

• Gear and Skill >> Buffs and Pots

• Just bring good players

• More shared gear

  • e.g. Spell Power – healers might not need second gear sets

• Four main tank classes

  • Overlap niches

  • Healing and coordination >> threat

• Dual Specs are coming – more flexibility!

User Inteface Panel