Blizzcon 2009 Date Announced

An official date for Blizzcon 2009 has been announced!

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its fourth BlizzCon® gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on Friday, August 21 and Saturday, August 22. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®’s Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® universes. In response to the festival’s increasing popularity, this year’s event has been expanded from three convention halls to four.

“We’ve been amazed by the incredible response to each of our previous BlizzCon events,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re pleased to be bringing the convention back to Anaheim this year, and we look forward to this new opportunity to meet Blizzard gamers from around the world.”

BlizzCon will offer a wide variety of activities throughout the two-day event. In addition to serving as a gathering place for Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, attendees will be able to enjoy:

• Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment games
• Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
• Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
• Community contests with great prizes
• Commemorative merchandise based on Blizzard Entertainment’s game universes
• A silent auction
• More exciting activities and attractions to be announced

Further details, including ticket availability and pricing, will be announced on the official BlizzCon website, www.blizzcon.com, as the event draws closer.

To keep pace with the continued growth of World of Warcraft as well as development on other Blizzard Entertainment games, the company is currently hiring for numerous open positions. More information on available career opportunities can be found at http://eu.blizzard.com/en/jobs/.

Patch 3.0.3 News and Changes Compiled

PTR 3.0.3 News Compiled

• New / Updated Glyphs
  
• Class Changes
• Retribution Paladin Nerfs
• Hunter Aspect / Pet Changes

Recent Blue Posts

• Ghostcrawler on Dots, Glyphs, Balance and More

Dual Spec Information

As a few people have pointed out, hardcore raiding guilds already respec in between bosses. All it takes is a little bit of patience, gold and maybe a warlock. The new feature just takes some of the busy work out of it by remembering say what spell you had on button 2 or button 3.

What the new feature really is supposed to do is let you change your mind. Oh, I was going to PvP tonight but now my buddies want to do Naxx 10 instead. I can flip on the fly instead of having to run back to Org or IF to respec and get summoned.

Very skilled or “into it” dps players absolutely can maximize their trash or boss dps through their spec. In fact, you hear a lot that certain talents aren’t good for bosses because they do things like improve your down time, AE or survivability. But all of those things can be great for fast clears. Players also sometimes say (silly) things like how they only care about how they perform on a boss. But if you want to do something like the LK equivalent of a ZA fast clear for the bear mount, you need to be fast across the board, not just on the 4 bosses. Players wipe on trash too.

We’re not going to make crazy fights where we expect the entire raid to respec into something weird. That was even asked at Blizzcon and the guy in charge of all of the boss design said simply “No” in reply. If we can’t assume you have a warrior or druid tanking, then we can’t assume you have a mage with an obscure talent build or 12 healers or something else abnormal.

Having to run to town to respec all the time between two common specs was a burden, just like pots and drums were a burden. Very few players enjoyed having to farm consumables for their raid night. (Though to be fair, some did). Players may have enjoyed the advantage those consumables might have given them, but of course they forget that the encounters were designed around the expectation that the group was chain potting and doing drum rotations. The encounters should be of similar difficulty, with the major change being that you don’t have to farm (as much).

Likewise, I understand that some players like having to commit to a talent spec at least for the night. Those players may feel that this is a “catering to the casuals” decision, but it’s one we think is right for the game. The different needs, for example, of PvE and PvP combat were putting a lot of constraints on the design of talent trees. Every talent needed to be very useful in both modes, which also tended to make them overbudget. That’s not the only reason for the feature, but it’s still a good one.

We won’t let you change specs within an Arena or BG, nor will we let you do it in combat of any kind. When the feature is fleshed out more, we’ll let you know more details.

Living Bomb Change

We still like Living Bomb. We realize not everyone does, and that’s cool. Not every spell or ability in the game is going to appeal to everyone and players are constantly re-designing spells into something they’d rather see.

However, we do think the mana cost on Living Bomb is too high, and we’ll be lowering it to something more like Arcane Explosion.

Restoration Shaman Mana Longevity

Teams stacking all dps do seem like they might be too dominant at the moment. We’re going to keep an eye on it for a little longer, but it is something we’re concerned about. One of the things I like about Arena is that healing strategy and tactics are a really big deal (vs. say BGs where it’s more about just killing stuff).

Enhancement Shaman DPS Changes

Right now, Enhancement dps is very high. If we changed say UR, we’d have to also nerf Enhancement dps to make up for the extra talent points you’d get to spend. It is something we want to take a look at, but there are also classes and specs right now whose dps is too low that need more attention.

Titans Grip, 12% Miss Rate

It should be fixed before Lich King itself goes live. That depends a little on what other issues crop up over the next few days that need more urgent attention. But the plan is to get all of those changes out soon.

Warlock Demonologist Changes

The Felguard magic damage reduction now extends to Holy. I believe this was hotfixed yesterday.

Typically we don’t change Holy resistance (which this is not), but it’s consistent with other damage reduction abilities (which this is) to reduce all magic damage. This should help warlocks stand up to paladins in particular in PvP.

Blizzcon Day 1 & 2 Recap

With Blizzcon finally over we are at last getting to sit down and take a solid look at all of the changes. All in all I’m really happy with how Blizzcon went this year, I think the developers did a great of explaining their reasoning behind many of the upcoming features and changes for WotLK. There’s no doubt in my mind the expansion is headed in the right direction.

Major Blizzcon Announcements

• Blzzcon Secret Project Announced – next gen MMO outside of WoW / SC / Diablo universe
• Future WoW Patch News - includes info on patch 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3
• Dual Spec Feature – allows you to switch between 2 talent specs you’ve setup at no charge, however you cannot change specs during the middle of an arena match.
• Return of BGs – Blizz wants to bring back battlegrounds competition, potentailly creating rated battlegrounds and / or rated guilds
• Strand of Ancients – Changed from 10v10 to 15v15

Blizzcon Panels

• Blizzcon Day 1 Recap Compiled – Includes classes, groups, user interface panels from day 1
• Blizzcon PvP Panel
• Blzzcon Raids and Dungeons Panel
• Blizzcon Developer’s Panel
• Blizzcon Class Panel Part 2 – part 1 is in the day 1 recap.

Blizzcon WoW Class Panel – Part 2

Make to check out the blizzcon wow class panel part 1 as well.

The dual-spec system will interface with the UI.

• Action bars will flip when you switch your spec so you don’t have to re-do all your keys.
• It will likely also tie into Glyphs so you don’t have to re-do Glyphs whenever you switch specs.

Q: Ghostcrawler, do you plan to be as active on the live forums after Beta is over?
A: That is his plan. He’ll have to see how crazy things get.

Q: Thanks for the new Hunter Pet system. Any new info on the Hunter 45-point survival talent?
A: They want Trap Mastery to be useful. It could be a lot sexier than it is now. It’s not a change they can make right away.

Q: Any feedback on the current state of Elemental Shaman?
A: Class balance is so reactive. Each class type reacts to changes of other classes differently. Elemental Shamans, like Hunters, fight the GCD quite a bit, and Devs have tried to give them some help in that regard. Changing totems to the physical school may help. They have to wait and see how it all plays out.

Q: Hunters. How do you maintain a balance between Arena and Raid DPS?
A: Hunters have always been top sustained Raid DPS. That has continued in Wrath. They are keeping an eye on the PvP balance of it.

Q: Rogue Combat tree. Daggers and poisons were fixed, but will Combat Raid utility be improved?
A: The buff/debuff system has been entirely overhauled, ands that effects poisons and other Rogue abilities. Devs definitely want to get Combat up equal to other DPS specs. There have eben a lot of recent big changes to Combat in particular.

Q: DKs starting at level 55 is great. Will any other classes ever start at higher levels? (Lots of applause.)
A: They currently have no plans to change other classes. They did things like Refer a Friend bonuses to help leveling, but they want players to experience low level content. However, they know old content is not of the same quality as the new stuff.

Q: Devs have said they want more Raid utility for Discipline priests, but that’s not obvious in beta. Penance is good but using Greater Heal, you still have mana issues.
A: That’s good feedback. People always ask for more mana in feedback and it’s hard for devs to know when they really need it. They want to play up distinctive healing styles, but large, slow heals will never go away.

Q: Shadow Priests and Warlocks. Will DoTs ever tag a mob for kill credit?
A: That is on the list of things to do, for sure. It’s just a question of when.

Q: Amplify Curses was completely changed to a haste increase for curses. How is this useful and will it be changed?
A: When the talent was designed, it was meant for for PvP and Arenas where you have to reapply curses more often than in PvE.

Q: Endgame 10-man raiding is great, but it also means if you lose a player or two it can be difficult since less people are in the party. Could another class perhaps get a Battle Rez?
A: What class did you have in mind? (Audience jeering and yelling out suggestions.) Death Knights have a self Battle Rez!

Q: Death Knight tanking. Devs have said that Rune Strike was redesigned to help give back threat that is lost to parries and dodges. With recent change to Rune cooldowns when parries and dodges happen, will all that extra threat still be necessary?
A: In an ideal world, you would get more threat from overall damage than one single ability. They are monitoring it.

Q: Will there be resistance-based fights in Wrath?
A: Devs always have trouble deciding. Resistance fights bring a lot of flavor, but is it worth it? (Corwd shouts “No!”) A lot of mobs and bosses get affected by diseases and poisons now, and that’s something they need to keep an eye on.

Q: Class homogenization issues, especially Paladins. Pally tanking skills keep being given to other classes.
A: It’s a big concern for Devs to make sure all classes have the tools they need without having them all be the same. Do Paladins have to have a single-target taunt? Do all classes have to have a Battle Rez, or is it good for just Druids? They don’t want Paladins to be the only tanks people take. They are still trying to balance this.

Q: Tanks in PvP. Any ideas for “defender” type abilities in PvP?
A: Protection Warriors have a lot more PvP utility. Devs do not know if they will ever add in something like a PvP taunt, but they would love to make tanking specs more PvP viable whenever they can. The respec thing is a band-aid for this as well, but they want to do more to help those specs.

Q: Will Elemental Shamans ever get a Talent that boost spell power with spirit like other casters have?
A: If they need it. Devs are to the point where spirit is no longer the mana regen stat, it’s more of a boost for spell power. They don’t feel everyone needs a Talent like this, but if it’s needed, it will be added.

Q: Do you forsee Battle stance being more viable in PvP?
A: Devs are keeping an eye on Battle Stance skills. Devs think Stance dancing isn’t that hard. They may make more changes to Stances in the future.

Q: Why is Stoneclaw the protective totem for PvP when it prevents the use of other Earth PvP totems? Any plans for a flat totem health increase?
A: We will double it! (Laughter.) No, we felt Stoneclaw was the right totem to use. It felt right. Players should have to make a choice between the snare, the fear warding, and the totem strengthening.

Q: There is a Glyph that lets Excorcism have a spell interupt. Will this spell be usable on non-Undead targets to make it more useful in PvP?
A: It’s an idea! Maybe.

Q: Shadow Priest’s Dispersion is lackluster. Any chance for some buffs?
A: Probably not. The Devs are happy with the way it is. It’s a partial shield that does not root you. Yeah it’s not terribly useful for high-end PvE, but it is beneficial in other way and 51-Point talents are often very situational.

Blizzcon WoW Developers Panel

Q: One of the cool things about classes is the art styles. will pallys and druids ever see their relic have some graphic?
A: We’d love to have some physical representation, but we don’t have any plans currently. it’s something we’ll definitely consider.

Q: There’s a lot of rumors on speculation about DK’s when the next patch hits, we will be able to create DK’s so we can get them started before wrath hits and lock those in?
A: DK is a class that comes with WoTLK expansion. it’s not coming before wotlk.

Q: How viable will a holy priest be able to heal as well as other healing classes if disc and shadow can heal just as well?
A: Should holy priests be worried? circle of healing is a deep holy talent that is a powerful healing spell that the other specs can’t match that. all the healers can do more dps and all the dps can do more healing. the shadow priests should be doing damage, not healing because they’re shadow. what allows good dps’ers to survive is they have a few talents so they aren’t super fragile but holy priests are still doing fine in all our testing.

Q: Why do i have to turn into a guy when i switch into bear or cat form as a druid? i get teased a lot! have you seen the bear dance? i realize the glyphs will make us be polar bears, but will there be a difference?
A: Are you asking if genitalia will be added? we’re a teen rated game so… androgynous bears man. we’ve had a lot of druid form questions and its something we’ve been talking about for a while, but it’s just a matter of time.

Q: I’m a big fan of members in a raid playing a role so how will you keep people interacting in the encounters without recycling content?
A: Wait, so we have to be more creative? we’ve said this before and it starts to sound cliche. we have no shortage of ideas. we jsut have shortage of time and man power when it comes to awesome boss encounters. the malygos encounter is completely unique then you have the chamber of aspects. you have different modes to complete the fight like killing all the dragons first or not. we’re working on the ulduar raid and we’re going to be doing things you’ve never seen before like seige weapons and destructible buildings.

Q: You mentioned hybridity in classes and you don’t want them to smash rogues, but DK is a tank but he tanks through his druid like a druid. where you do you want damaging DK to stand?
A: A tanking DK trying to damage will feel like a prot warrior or prot paladin. a tanking DK who is damaging must sacrifice some damage to try to do damage when they’re not tanking. ultimately the design is that they won’t be ont he top of the meters.

Q: What’s the next Hero Class ?
A: We announced that. it’s the bard. april fool’s!

Q: We’re taking over northrend in this expansion, what about the next?
A: Something else! starcraft 2! not what you expect in a very good way. it’s not about comments, but i guess it kind of is but boldness is next! unbelievable boldness.

Q: What are the plans for sacred cleansing?
A: I don’t have an answer to that. it’s something on the white board list, but i don’t have a big unveil for it yet.

Q: Will hunter aspects ever be taken off the global cooldown and be more fluid?
A: Tricky, hunters want everything off the GCD. i wouldn’t rule it out completely.

Q: When it comes to dailies, they’re very repetitive. will there be a key ring later on for daily quest items like bombs?
A: Dailies feel repetitive after a while. something we want to pursue we want to randomize dailies like cooking and fishing. in wotlk, we have randomized cooking and JC quests to make them less repetitive. on our to-do-list is the quest UI as a whole and we want to revamp it. we have a great quest interface and we want to make the usuability more clear to players.

Q: Now that you’ve made more rogue talents for daggers, how can you bring that back around for swords?
A: We’ve made great lengths to improve the combat tree and found it was falling behind the assassination tree. we’ve buffed up a lot of the talents and the tree like increasing vitality. our suspicision is the combat tree will scale better than the others so we’re testing it.

Q: Achievement points – will we get t9 epics for these at some point?
A: No. Achievement points will never be for anything in game. all the rewards are purely cosmetic at this point like mounts and titles. it’s to recognize your acomplishements, not create new ones.

Q: we loved the kael’thas fight, but around again we hated that time for him to stop talking. are you going to have more fights where we have to wait for the boss to stop talking?
A: We weren’t going too but we will now. we have bronzebeard in wotlk, and he has some great speech where he pushes the storyline forward. internally we realized we needed to give a fast forward button

Q: With spellpower and dual specs, as it becomes easier to become a hybrid, how do you protect the classes who can’t respec to tank or heal?
A: That’s a totally valid concern. we knew goign into this, that makeing the hybrids more viable we took some of the hybrids buffs away which is threatening to some classes. we’re trying to buff their utility so they are bringing something and we can’t allow their damage to fall down so they can still compete. its important that those four classes are still doing a lot of damage as long as they’re not doing 30-40% more damage than everyone else. the best mage or rogue should be at the top of the meter. it shouldn’t be just the class.

Q: Why do i put 13 points into discipline as a priest?
A: I feel we’ve gone too far sometimes that a spec puts all their points into one tree. we like the idea of cross specing between the trees. we think its pretty cool for classes to do that so its not mandatory for classes to do. its also why we’ve been changing the raid buff system. if other classes bring that buff then you don’t have to worry about it. players who run out of mana quickly are not necessarily good players. we don’t want you to run out right away, but as we look at feedback, we’ll make decisions about how close to the mark we are.

Q: The sound for HoR is so annoying and needs to be changed. as far as taunting, the 3 target taunt is great until you’re trying to taunt one thing and is there any chance the 11 point talent would be a single target taunt.
A: It wouldn’t be a 11 point talent. it’d be pretty lame to have to spec down into that. there’s a glyph to make it single target but it comes down to how similar do the classes have to be? we had to change the DK because it was too much like warriors and druids.

Q: About holy pallies, the relationship between classes and talent specs. the classes provide a framework and the trees allow you to specialize around that framework. the holy tree keeps pallys away from melee as much as possible, but are there plans to keep them with that paladin ideal?
A: We wanted to make tanking more fun and the next thing to look at ont he list will be healing. we did add death grip to DK to keep the holyp ally in melee range.

Q: WoW movie by legendary pictures?
A: Well you phrased it well. we’re working on it. we’re working hard on it. the story we have cooking is really cool and if i say more i’ll be shot and that will be bad for me. patience. good things coming.

Q: Professions are a big part of the game for me and towards the end of bc, much of the gear i could make was obsolete. i knwo there are plans for sockets, but what other plans are there to combat obselence?
A: We don’t want to repeat your example of frozen shadoweave because it ended up being a problem for us later on. w/ that being said we want to make an effort to examine slots that you can create gear for and we want to provide plans for each tier that you can have access too.

Q: about arms warriors, will there be a possibility to group all weapon specs?
A: Weapon specs are jsut one of those things that fit the kit when specing. in our experience, we haven’t felt that you change out your weapons so often where the respecing becomes a burden. specing is a burden for other reasons right now. we’re comfortable with how the specializations are ironing out.

Q: When are you going to make omen of clarity non-dispellable?
A: We’re not entirely happy with the dispel system right now. there’s the whoel strategy of junk buffs. we changed a lot to see how things would work out and the balance would stand. if we say omen cant’ be dispelled, then we have to look at what else can’t be dispelled.

Q: About warlock’s fel domination, will there be a mechanic to switch pets out?
A: We want warlocks to use more types of pets, but b/c you’re actually shifting to another instead of brining out another because one is dead. we’re not sure how we want to handle that, but we’re talking about it.

Q: I pvp as a holy pally and i was wondering with cyclone and mind control. pallys have no great offensive pvp ability so will we get something?
A: It’s a valid concern and we’re keeping our eye on other healers. they have a lot of offensive abilities and we’re going to keep our eye on pallys and try to help them out.

Q: The 11 point talent has always been defining, pallys have kings but it was moved. we don’t have that class defining talent anymore now that RF has no mitigation.
A: Warriors got a lot of what pallies can do, and now pallies can do what warriors do. we’ll definitely end up giving pallies something else, but we need to see where protection tanking takes us.

Q: Why is arcane blast something in wotlk something that no arcane mages want to touch?
A: I don’t agree with that. i’ve used arcane blast as my main damage spell. we’re trying to tune it so that it’s not the only spell arcane mages are using. we saw mages were using 1 button and that’s not what we want to have happen. we’re trying to design it so you balance between arcane blast and arcane missles or barrage.

Q: will you ever make the 10 man loot look different from the 25?
A: We would like to. we would like all our armor sets to look different. but its a matter of what we have time for.

Q: Damaging siege weapons as a priest is really hard, is there any plan to fix this ?
A: Priest is one of the classes we’ve been actively tuning. one of the big reasons we gave them mind sear is so they’d be viable in the aoe situation. we’ve been doing a lot of testing lately and we definietly want to bump up spriests.

Q: With the new BoA items that scale, are you looking at doing something similar with legendary items? will we be able to upgrade them?
A: Getting a TF is more dicey than getting a BoA item. if i want to gear out my alt, i need to do MC till i get a TF. while we do like to give legendaries a special effect that makes them more meaningful, as far as all things like an item with power, they have to go to the wayside at some point.

Q: Our raid gear to do brutallus, we had to get s4 gear but if pvp gear drops in a pve raid instance, the pvp gear gets disenchanted. will you put pvp gear in raid instances?
A: If you do the same raid as a pvper, you have the same chance to get those weapons. if you turn in the tokens, then you can get the gear. the weapons from pvp can give you a head start in pve. you shouldn’t feel compelled to pvp though.

Q: I was wondering about personalization like moves that could be changed in the dressign room. dragonball z style fireball cast or something like that?
A: It’s not currently planned, but its something we’ve discussed. with our animation system, we have the ability to add more as we go along and it’s something we’ll look into.

Q: Do you have any plans to extend the championing system so that we will still be able to get titles?
A: We want to see how players like them first before we go ahead with more. we need to look at the old reputations that are difficult to grind out. we have some places where you can fix your ravenholdt rep if you’re interestd in fixing something like this.

Q: Will there be pve arenas?
A: All the geometry of the boss area is important and a small arena wouldn’t have the same feel. would they drop the same items as the boss would normally? both of these complexities make it difficult, but it’s something to think about.

Q: What other spells are going to be useable indoors? mounts?
A: We have one great update. Blizzcon exclusive! In the 1st content patch that follows wotlk, all of your ground mounts will no longer dismount in water. they’ll swim now.

Q: It’s really frustrating when you spend all this time getting t4, t5, t6 gear and walking into a bg and getting wrecked because you don’t have resilience. will you plan on adding resilience to pve gear?
A: We offer the ability to turn in pve tokens to pvp pieces so its a foot in the door. we encourage the cross over of gear and we support that as much as possible

Q: Why are the pandaren the only race not to be in wow yet?
A: We ran into some issues with china and what their perception of the panda is. china is an important part of our game. i can’t say it’ll never happen, but its not ont he horizon right now. the rumor mill has it that we might have some fiction around them, an action figure at some point. we want to keep the hope alive.

Q: With SWP, you added a lot of cool daily quests and goals, are you planning on something like that for arthas?
A: We’re planning on making arthas accessible to everyone. people who have been in the beta know that you interact w/ arthas all the way up. the game will be full on daily quests. they came with the 1st content patch after BC. we want solo players to have access to big name characters like arthas. we’re talking about having some 5 man arthas interaction at some point.

Q: Will we ever find out what happened with alleria and tyrion and deathwing?
A: Working on it and yes.

Q: What will blacksmithing get? will we be able to repair our own armor? enchanting, alchemy, and JC are the only endgame professions.
A: With wotlk, we’re trying to make all the professions applicable to end game. bs can socket gloves and belt. glove sockets are for your self only. theres going to be end game viability that everyone can use. it will stack with enchanting.

Q: As a 2k holy paladin, when I do a heroic its sort of hard its hard for me to heal the whole group in the dungeon when there’s a boss that does aoe dmg since pallies are a single target healer.
A: Beacon of light is really supposed to be the spell that covers that role. there are talents that will help with flash of heals but your big aoe is beacon of light.

Q: Why do you think that perception is such a better racial than other ones in the arena?
A: its one of the racials we see swinging the fights. it was very hard for players to compete if they weren’t human rogues. its one of those racials that’s only really good in a very narrow area of the game and we never wanted it to be so specific. we wanted it to be more broad in the arena case.

Blizzcon WoW Raids and Dungeons Panel

5 Man Dungeons

Halls of Lightning

• Just like all the dungeons built by the Titans the Halls of Lightning had to feel huge while restricting the gameplay space to make sure that players don’t have to run around too much.
• Players aren’t really able to fight titans because they’re obviously way too big and way too powerful to be fought, that’s why designers had to come up with new ideas of creatures to let people experience this part of the lore.
• The first boss roams between multiple platforms and you can decide where you will fight him, the 2nd boss is visible as soon as you enter the first room and is located on a platform above to make players want to go up here and figure out who this guy is.
• There are plenty of Titan themed arts like statues shaped as constellations, astral maps, etc …
• The 3rd boss is an air elemental with a custom model, developers want to use more of that to make bosses feel more “unique” and would like to stop using so many “trash” models for bosses.
• The last boss, Loken, is a messenger of the titan and his fight also feature a fairly long storyline.

Ahn’kahet

• Ahn’kahet is the 2nd part of the Azjol-nerub dungeon, as you go deeper into the ground more influence from the Old Gods can be seen. (Temples, etc …)
• This is also the first time you will encounter Faceless Ones in World of Warcraft.
• New technology has been added to make this underground dungeon feels like a very huge cavern, it actually mix up outdoor and indoor elements to achieve this.
• Ahn’kahet looks pretty big when you enter the instance, but you only get to travel through a very small part of it. (As most of the elements are here to make the cave feel bigger and nicer)
• There are plenty of new unique abilities used by the bosses here, and the instance uses a bunch of a new mechanics to make the fights funnier.
• The last boss is a Faceless One and rely heavily on the new phasing technology. Each player is phased into a world where his own teammates will attack him, once he managed to defeat them he will be switched back to the normal world to help his teammates.

Raid & Dungeons

Obsidian Sanctum

• The Obsidian Sanctum was made with scalability in mind. TBC entry raids (Magtheridon) were far too difficult at the release.
• Players here will fight Sartharion and 3 adds, they can choose to kills these adds before killing Sartharion or keep them alive instead to get more items.
• As the fight get more difficult, the players are rewarded with better rewards in case of success, the best reward being the Reins of the Black Drake for the 10 man version and the Reins of the Twilight Drake for the 25 man version)

In it’s current state on beta servers, the encounter goes as follow :

• 1 Add alive (10 Players) : Extra ilvl 200 Item
• 2 Adds alive (10 Players) : Extra ilvl 213 item
• 3 Adds alive (10 Players) : Reins of the Black Drake

Pretty much the same with 25 players, but with slightly better gear.

• 1 Add alive (25 Players) : Extra ilvl 213 item
• 2 Adds alive (25 Players) : Extra ilvl 226 item
• 3 Adds alive (25 Players) : Reins of the Twilight Drake

The Eye of Eternity

• Malygos is a huge lore figure and this dungeon had to feel special. As you enter it you will just see a floating platform and the script relies a lot on scripting to make it as interesting as possible.
• To enter this dungeon at least one player in your party needs the key to start the encounter, you will have to kill Sapphiron in Naxxramas to complete this questline.
• This dungeon also features the Red Dragonflight, as developpers didn’t want such a strong lore figure to be killable by players alone.

Additional Q & A

• A feature might be added to “kick” AFK players in raid without having to wait 30 minutes until they disconnect
• They’re still thinking about how 10/25-man legendaries are going to work and feel that new caster/healer legendary items are needed. They would also like to bring back atiesh-like legendaries with a long questline instead of random drops.
• Uldum is still on the table, but definitely no ETA for it.
• The amount of items dropping should be fairly balanced between casters and melee weapons.
• There won’t be many level 80 attunements, the only attunement right now is the one for Malygos and it only requires one person in the raid to kill Sapphiron in Naxxramas
• Hunters should be able to off-tank with a defense-speced pet but aren’t meant to main tank anything with it.
• Sunwell was way too hard, developers want content to be challenging but you shouldn’t have to do 500 try on bosses like M’uru to kill them.
• The goal in WotLK is to have a smoother progression between the different types of dungeons (Normal > Heroic > Raid). In TBC some heroic dungeons were way too hard and some of them way too easy.
• Devs would like to add more portals between wings of the same instance (a bit like Dire Maul) to let people decide if they want to keep going in the dungeons, or just stop here.
• The Ashbringer storyline will continue, and you’ve only got a few days left to complete Atiesh from the old Nax. (= Patch 3.0.2 this week)
• A lot of improvements are on the way for the LFG tool

WotLK Itemization

Death Knight Scourgeborne’s Battlegear (10) Scourgeborne’s Battlegear (25) Scourgeborne’s Plate (10) Scourgeborne’s Plate (25) Druid Dreamwalker’s Battlegear (10) Dreamwalker’s Battlegear (25) Dreamwalker’s Garb (10) Dreamwalker’s Garb (25) Dreamwalker’s Regalia (10) Dreamwalker’s Regalia (25) Hunter Cryptstalker’s Battlegear (10) Cryptstalker’s Battlegear (25) Mage Frostfire Garb (10) Frostfire Garb (25)

Paladin Redemption’s Battlegear (10) Redemption’s Battlegear (25) Redemption’s Plate (10) Redemption’s Plate (25) Redemption’s Regalia (10) Redemption’s Regalia (25) Priest Garb of Faith (10) Garb of Faith (25) Regalia of Faith (10) Regalia of Faith (25) Rogue Bonescythe’s Battlegear (10) Bonescythe’s Battlegear (25)

Shaman Earthshatter’s Battlegear (10) Earthshatter’s Battlegear (25) Earthshatter’s Garb (10) Earthshatter’s Garb (25) Earthshatter’s Regalia (10) Earthshatter’s Regalia (25) Warlock Plagueheart Garb (10) Plagueheart Garb (25) Warrior Dreadnaught’s Battlegear (10) Dreadnaught’s Battlegear (25) Dreadnaught’s Plate (10) Dreadnaught’s Plate (25)

Source: thanks to mmo-champion who compiled the gear lists above.

Blizzcon WoW PvP Panel

Finally, the panel I’ve really been waiting for is here!

The Ring of Valor – Orgrimmar.

• Animated Platforms – Pillars that rise up at timed intervals. Trying to stay away from randomness to let it be skill based. Pillars block line of sight, you can ride up and down on pillars.
• Dynamic Fire Hazard – Strips on the ground that damages players. On a timer. If you are CC’d on the fire you will not be killed. Designed as a choice.
• Close Starting Positions – Start on platforms that rise up at the start.
• New, dynamic feel to the Arenas while keeping it skill based.
• Pillars on opposite timers as fire to force decision making
• Landmarks on pillars and around arena to give players more ways to communicate where they are during a game.

Dalaran Sewers – Under Dalaran, the Central City for WotLK

• Small, to the point
• Dynamic Water Feature – Pillar on timer that blocks LOS. If you are standing on water pillar when it turns on it knocks you back so you can’t get stuck. Terming this dynamic – “area denial”
• No mounts allowed. Travel forms will work.
• Starting areas off-limits: Start in pipes that are elevated from the ground. Jump down into the arena at start. If you stay in at start, you get knocked out by water.

Strand of the Ancients

• Attack/Defend Map – Destructible Buildings and Vehicles. Play both sides of the teams.
• Time each attack run, if the other team can’t defeat you in the same amount of time that team loses.
• Increased player limit to 15v15 from 10v10
• Doubling amount of Siege vehicles from current Beta
• Siege Combat – Series of walls that lead to capturable objective at the top. Land on beach, get into siege engines and begin moving through the walls. If you aren’t in a vehicle, you will be able to pick up and drop mines to do siege damage. 3-4 seconds where the opposite team can disarm mine. Something for everyone to do.
• Multiple angles for attack viable. All walls have unique icon and color so players can identify and communicate where they are going.

Wintergrasp – Entire Zone PvP in Northrend

• Huge Numbers of Players – hundreds, with siege vehicles and destructible buildings.
• Non-Instances PVP
• Attack/Defend Map. You have a fortress with surrounding walls. Break through walls…choose any of 30 walls to break through. Capture and then sides flip with a cooldown – currently 2.5 hours. Cooldown to allow victor to reap the benefits of winning.
• Victor gets daily quests, portal from Dalaran to Wintergrasp, opens a unique raid instance. Archivon (raid boss), with wide select of loot – one day cooldown, open for everyone on the winning faction. All bosses around wow drop a shard for the current victor as currency to buy, mounts, gear, gems, wide variety.
• Victor defends the next round.
• Ranks to earn vehicles – Ensures players are contributing. Get and HK, get rank. Currently 2 Ranks required to get in a siege vehicle. Different vehicles require different ranks.
• Vehicles still vulnerable to players. Necessity for players on the ground to defend siege weaponry.
• Spent majority of design time ensuring servers will handle the load and play smoothly.

Whats Next – Future of PVP with Chilton

• Revisit PvP itemization, including arena and BG rewards
• Support all the play styles and balance the rewards from all – BGs, Non-instanced pvp, arena
• Queue from anywhere in the Azeroth.
• Competitive battle grounds. Potential rating system to measure individual success in BGs.
• Potential for Guild Battlegrounds
• Allow players to level up in Battlegrounds.

Additional Q & A

Q: Why can’t Hunter’s shoot within melee rang
A: Different than a caster – not wearing mail armor. Don’t want Hunter’s to be able to blast away while tanking. Disengage gives a more fun mechanic than just standing there.

Q: Why Can’t Pets have resilience?
A: Tuning the benefits of a pet. Find the balance to make sure its viable strategy to kill the Hunter’s pet, but also costs enough to decide to kill the pet. Lost of new options to customize pets with talent points to increase defense.

Q: Will the old BGs and Arenas get a facelift with the new Dynamics?
A: Does tends to be PVP content burnout. Want to address it by making better effort to introduce new Battlegrounds.

Q: Future changes to help Paladins stay in Melee range? (Loud booing ensues!)
A: No intention to give Paladins Shadowstep or Intercept. Make sure the control that Paladins have are more useful. Glyph that increases HoJ range a lot.

Q: Population imbalance on Wintergrasp? Anything planned to balance with a Buff?
A: Buff called Tenacity. Scales based on imbalance of BG to make the smaller side stronger by scaling damage input and stops incoming damage as a percentage. Still tuning the balance.

Q: How will Ranks reset in Wintergrasp. Still get HKs while idling. How will it be fixed?
A: No forced grouping, so you would have to be in a group that carries you and feeds you the HKs. Rank will reset each battle for Wintergrasp

Q: Ring of Valor. With fire, will range be an immediate benefit.
A: Visual Queues for fire (gears and doors opening). Can certainly shoot through the fire as a ranged class

Q: Balance for Druid PVP. Resto overpowered, how can you lower Restos effectiveness without hurting Balance or Feral
A: Changes with WotLK going to be very different balance. Does not look like Druids will be the dominant force they are now in WotLK, especially in the lower brackets.

Q: Any plans to remove or balance racials in arenas?
A: Make sure they don’t change rules of Arena too much or it feels like it isn’t part of World of Warcraft. We have already limited consumables, to take that burden off each match. With WotLK arena is going to change a lot and we are certainly watching the role racials play. If it continues to be a problem in WotLK, they will address it in the future.

Q: As a healer, in a BG that doesn’t force grouping you just have to spam target other players on your team to see if they need healing. Is there any way to give healers a way to heal more effectively in that situation?
A: Avoiding that for the time being. Grouping system only supports 40 players ATM. And that would need to be addressed before any mechanic like that is added.

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

Blizzard’s Secret Project Announced at Blizzcon

For months rumors have been flying around as to what Blizzard’s “secret project” could be, and after the Blizzcon announcement earlier today it appears the project isn’t so “secret” after all…

The new project is blizzard’s next generation MMO, an MMO which according to the Blizzcon announcement will not take place in one of the franchise’s current universes. As for what this “new universe” is, who knows, we won’t have any definitive answer for several months.

Though this project wasn’t all that secret, it’s still great too get confirmation that it will be outside of the current WoW / SC / Diablo world’s. I’m very interested to see this project built from the ground up.

Best Blizzcon Achievements List

As many of you know Blizzcon is right around the corner. It’ll be 2 days of big announcements, exciting changes, and some of most ridiculous footage of gamers hanging out in the massive convntion center (I can’t wait!).

If do happen to be joining this year’s festivities at Blizzcon 2008 consider participating in the strictly unoffical Blizzcon Achievemnts!

• “Little man in big Place” – Made it to Blizzcon in one peice
  
• “Did you catch that?” – Sit in the back row of each board both days
  
• “I went to Blizzcon and all I got was this lousy Shirt” – Buy a T shirt from the Blizzcon Store
  
• “Champion of your Realm” – Punched everyone from your server in the face. Awards Title: Felon
• “Ruler of Blizzcon” – Survived both days of Blizzcon without Sleeping, eating, and showering
• “The status is not quo” - beat someone with an inflatable frostmourne as they try to protect with an inflatable bubble hearthing paladin.
• “Finalizer of the Truth” – Learn, without doubt and with photographic evidence, the gender of Ghostcrawler.
• “Slayer of the Dragon” – Hand out mints to five people with the “dragon” breath.
  

Thanks to Killertotems from the WoW forums who initially started this list.

What would you add to the list?