Blizzcon 2009


Recommended Posts

Wow I never saw this coming. Can't wait to re-activate my account when this comes out. Re-levelling will be AWESOME in this 'new' azeroth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Third to last paragraph

Guess old WoW will be gone forever, and left to private servers heh.

Ah gotcha....hadn't looked into it that much TBH.

That being said, very interesting, its going to screw over a lot of leveling guides, quest guides, etc until they all get updated with the new info.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ill play wow for the live event and thats it. I know they are awesome but am done paying for x-pacs. Should get Rohan for LOTRO within 6 months(I hope) and get SWTOR by the end of next year. This looks cool and hell I might play it cause I wanna see deathwith stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Classes, Items, Professions Panel

This panel started off....well. With Ghostcrawler giving us this delicious quote (bleeped for the tender).

"Hi I'm Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler. You might know me as that ***hole who nerfed your class"

And with that encouraging start GC jumped right into the new class racials. Most of things covered in this panel flew by so fast my pen couldn't keep up! But I'll do my best to give you highlights and points of all they covered for us.

Goblin Racials

Time is Money - 1% increased attack and casting speed

Best Deals Anywhere - The best possible faction discounts apply regardless of your reputation.

Pack Hobgoblin - Calls your personal servant allowing you bank access for 1 minute. 30 secs cooldown.

Better Living Through Chemistry - Alchemy skill increased by 15.

Rocket Barrage - Launches your belt rockets an an enemy, dealing fire damage. 2 min cooldown.

Rocket Jump - Activates your rocket belt to jump forward. 2 min cooldown.

Goblin Playable Classes

Death Knight

Hunter

Mage

Priest

Rogue

Shaman

Warlock

Warrior

Worgen Racials

Abberation - Reduced duration on curses and diseases used against you by 15%.

Flayer - Skinning skill +15. You skin things really fast and use your claws.

Darkflight - Activate your true form, increasing movement speed by 70% for 6 seconds every 3 minutes.

Viciousness - All damage increased by 1%.

Worgen Classes

Death Knight

Druid

Hunter

Mage

Priest

Rogue

Warlock

Warrior

Worgen Form will work like shapeshift for druids but you don't get any special abilities. You will always enter your worgen form when entering combat but you will have the choice to leave form at the end of combat or use your form to just hang out when you want to.

The dev panel next moved onto the classes section. Explaining that last year they told a little about a lot of classes. This time they wanted to just focus on two classes that would be receiving the most changes. Hunters and Warlocks.

Warlocks will be no longer need soul shards! All their spells that previously required soul shards no longer require them. Shards will now display below the Lock's mana and health bars, similar to the way a death knight's rune's display. There will be 3 shards with the possibility of a fourth for demonology locks. You can consume a shard by activating Soul Burn. Soul Burn will increase the power of your next spell. Depending on the spell you will have a different effect. Shards will not regenerate in combat except over long fights or perhaps they will be adding a Drain Life = lock evocation for shards ability.

Hunters no longer have a mana bar! Big news for hunters! Instead you will have a focus bar similar to rogues that will regenerate at a similar rate. This change should help improve shot rotations as all cooldowns will be removed from your shots and stings. You will simply need to have enough focus to shoot your spells. Aspect of the Viper will likely be removed since there is no more need for mana. Additionally, there are still plans to make hunter Ammo an item, not a consumable but no further details are available yet.

Items were next on the menu with some giant changes coming to Stats on items. In an effort to simply and 'streamline' stats, Blizzard is sending many stats to the chopping block. As each one was announced, you could hear the panic attacks in the audience. All the stats that are being removed are listed below.

MP5 - To be replaced by Spirit. Spirit will be getting a rework but details or not available yet. All healers will be getting a talent in their trees similar to a priest's Meditation, allowing in combat regen. Caster DPS classes will not have to worry about mana regen. Ever.

Spellpower - Intellect will now give you all your mana and spellpower needs.

Attack Power - Agility will now = AP for rogues/hunters/shaman the way that Strength = AP for warriors, DKs and Paladins.

Defense - Goodbye juggling around the defense cap so you can stay crit immune! All tanks will be getting talents like druids to give them all the defense they need to remain defense capped.

Armor Penetration - It was too mathy and complicated. It's being replaced with 'Mastery'. More information on what 'Mastery' is will be released on Saturday. It makes you better at what you do is all they would say.

Block Value - Block is being redesigned to be more like dodge in it's damage mitigation abilities.

More stats will be changing as well. Listed below are some of those changes

Haste - Haste will now increase teh rate you regen energy, rage, runes, mana ect.

Stamina - More stam for everyone! Because of all the other changes, all items will get stam boosts. All classes should be equal in their health pools. No more plate wearers and bears have more stam than ALL.

All classes will be having their talent trees 'pruned' in light of all the stat changes.

Shadowmourne will be the next legendary item available in Icecrown Citadel. It is a 2H Axe!

The profession tracking system is going to be revamped in order to allow for multiple profession tracking. Multiple gains will be added to to game for all professions. You will be able to gain multiple skill ups from making a higher quality item. For example; you can make 5 green bracers for 5 points. Or one blue breastplate for 5 points. Lastly, in Cataclysm professions will increase again by another 75 points.

The newest profession will be Archaeology. It's a secondary profession that will be available to all classes like cooking, fishing, and first aid. This profession will allow players to collect artifacts and research from ruins nodes. Artifacts will make your character more powerful by unlocking rewards. It's possible the unlocking will be like a mini game. It will offer rewards like vanity pets, instant travel to certain dungeons, titles, and unique recipes for the other professions. The Archaeology interface will be in it's own panel as a 'journal' to track your discoveries and artifacts.

Reforging will be a new ability offered to Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Jewelcrafting, and Engineering. Reforging an item will reduce the one of the stats of the item by half and in return you will be able to put those points into another stat on the item. With limits! You cannot take a STR/STA item, reduce the STA and add to the STR. You can only add a stat to the item that isn't already on it. So you can reduce the STA in order to at Hit rating.

The final profession announcement for this panel was that there were 'big fishing changes coming' but no information could be given at the time.

linky

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This actually has me kinda interested again.. I "ALMOST" want to reactivate my account when this comes out. I mean sure they are dumbing the game down even more, but they are doing it in a pretty decent way..

Although if this thing is scheduled for a Nov 2010 release, then sorry ToR>WoW anyday now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And once again Blizzard proves to me they are no longer a game developer but a whorehouse for WoW fans.

As they say sometimes on the official Wow forums:

Obvious troll is obvious.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This actually has me kinda interested again.. I "ALMOST" want to reactivate my account when this comes out. I mean sure they are dumbing the game down even more, but they are doing it in a pretty decent way..

Although if this thing is scheduled for a Nov 2010 release, then sorry ToR>WoW anyday now.

why do you say ToR>wow anyday? the game could suck you know? look at warhammer, age of conan, darkfall, countless other games that where *wow* killers

dont judge a game till its out. regardless of who is making it

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As they say sometimes on the official Wow forums:

Obvious troll is obvious.

Or maybe I wanted more news about Diablo or Starcraft or even a new ip? Instead I get **** because Blizzard only caters to WoW because they can ###### themselves out with less effort for more money. God forbid they do any actual work on a new game at Blizzard, only part of the world's largest gaming conglomerate in the world yet they still don't have the resources to produce anything but WoW expansions because they are cheap to make and they can bleed 11 million customers out of their money by feeding a worthless addiction.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As they say sometimes on the official Wow forums:

Obvious troll is obvious.

Just because he isn't sucking this down through a straw doesn't make him a troll. Most World of Warcraft players are too addicted to even care about quality! The lore changes are so cheap and the changes to the game overall are even cheaper. The only thing that deserves some respect is how they changed Azeroth and possibly made leveling fresh again but that's just to accommodate the fact they pretty much made every Race / Class combo available now which is part of the "cheap" factor.

World of Warcraft was a great MMO but after the first expansion it went downhill very fast and now it's as stale as month old bread but the fanbase is like zombies and are willing to eat that bread, every last crumb.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

World of Warcraft was a great MMO but after the first expansion it went downhill very fast and now it's as stale as month old bread but the fanbase is like zombies and are willing to eat that bread, every last crumb.

my fiancee and i were talking about this the other day. we agreed that WoW died the day they change the requirement for heroics from revered to honoured. all the green machines tried to do heroics and they couldn't.... so they QQ moar and Blizzard got out the nerf bats. and now the game is in it's current casual friendly world where everytime you log in Blizzard gives you a ticket for a new free epic so you can try to be cool like all the raiders.

/sigh

oh well

everytime i read about a change Blizzard wants to make to WoW i lose a little more respect for them

at the rate they're going at i don't even think i'll want to play SC2 much less their next MMO

if all they're going to do is cater their games to casuals then they can have all the casuals and their constant QQ of how hard everything is because they can't take 10 minutes out of their day to read the theorycraft or how to do an encounter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For WoW, I kinda like these new changes. I was thinking a while back Azeroth should evolve. I was more thinking of zones progressing like Decolace did, but I do like the Cataclysm idea too. I think they should have made it so you can choose old Azeroth or new Azeroth though.

As for Blizzard Whoring themselves out, WoW is their biggest franchise right now. Lot of more people play Blizzard because of Warcraft than the other games so thats why they put a big focus on WoW on the first day of Blizzcon, but its a 2 day event. So I expect they will give some love to their other games on the 2nd day. I am actually more interested in seeing something on their new IP than I am on WoW. So hopefully they discuss that.

Also since this is a Blizzcon thread and not just WoW thread, they unveiled the 4th playable class in Diablo 3 The Monk during the opening ceremony too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree, making most content available to most of the people has proven to be a terrible idea :rolleyes:

I still don't see a reason why making content easier is such a terrible mistake, the worst thing in vanilla wow were the abnormal large of people needed so to enjoy the high-end content.

if all they're going to do is cater their games to casuals then they can have all the casuals and their constant QQ of how hard everything is because they can't take 10 minutes out of their day to read the theorycraft or how to do an encounter.
Stop crying before telling the rest of the world to do it, thank you.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

my fiancee and i were talking about this the other day. we agreed that WoW died the day they change the requirement for heroics from revered to honoured. all the green machines tried to do heroics and they couldn't.... so they QQ moar and Blizzard got out the nerf bats. and now the game is in it's current casual friendly world where everytime you log in Blizzard gives you a ticket for a new free epic so you can try to be cool like all the raiders.

/sigh

oh well

everytime i read about a change Blizzard wants to make to WoW i lose a little more respect for them

at the rate they're going at i don't even think i'll want to play SC2 much less their next MMO

if all they're going to do is cater their games to casuals then they can have all the casuals and their constant QQ of how hard everything is because they can't take 10 minutes out of their day to read the theorycraft or how to do an encounter.

While this is true, you have to think of it from Blizzard's point of view, which is in $. If the majority of their userbase is casual, then they will most likely try and make it more fun for casuals. I think early on in the game, it was mostly hard-core players, which is why the old game used to be harder and more challenging. But, ever since the first expansion, as you've said, things have gotten easier and easier, and now it's just to the point where the game isn't as challenging.

I do have to hand it to Blizzard though. I mean to have that many people playing one game is a huge feat in itself, and the fact they are STILL making people excited for new content, whether or not it is just easy mode, is pretty remarkable.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While this is true, you have to think of it from Blizzard's point of view, which is in $.

That's the problem here, we really aren't supposed to. Yes, we all know dollars is what counts and what runs the world but that doesn't mean we can't disagree or voice our opinions on where those dollars take us. Blizzard aren't trying to bring the utmost quality to their fanbase, they are trying to hit the lowest standard they can achieve to please the fanbase and still cash in big time - Makes sense from their point of view, yes but from our point of view and a morality point of view it's sickening.

They could do so many things with World of Warcraft to improve the game but they constantly take the cheapest, fastest and most profitable route.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While this is true, you have to think of it from Blizzard's point of view, which is in $. If the majority of their userbase is casual, then they will most likely try and make it more fun for casuals. I think early on in the game, it was mostly hard-core players, which is why the old game used to be harder and more challenging. But, ever since the first expansion, as you've said, things have gotten easier and easier, and now it's just to the point where the game isn't as challenging.

I do have to hand it to Blizzard though. I mean to have that many people playing one game is a huge feat in itself, and the fact they are STILL making people excited for new content, whether or not it is just easy mode, is pretty remarkable.

I play a lot but casually. I just like leveling up toons. Not into the group/raids, and usually I only ever see dungeons after I get to a level I can solo it: like my lvl 80 Palidan can solo the early Burning Crusade dungeons.

As a non-raider, even I agree that raiders should have exclusive to top rate gear as reward for the time/effort/skill they have to put into it like in Original WoW. In the future they should reserve Epics for the hardcore and to appease casual players create nice looking superior (blue) sets. That or create a category between Epic and Legendary for raiders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

and now it's just to the point where the game isn't as challenging.

Algalon says hi.

and now the game is in it's current casual friendly world where everytime you log in Blizzard gives you a ticket for a new free epic so you can try to be cool like all the raiders.

5 man ToC Heroic

25 man ToC Normal

So yeah only 134 SP difference... But if you measure dick size by colour I can see why you'd have an issue. :)

Edit: I'll make a point out of all this so you don't accuse me of trolling. Having played since release. The game has changed, not always for the better. I quit 2-3 times in the TBC expansion the instances were boring, buggy, excessively difficult with little to no learning curve.

WoTLK from 3.0 to 3.1 was much easier than SWP but now Ulduar and ToC has arrived, it's still just as difficult. If you want to the hard modes will happily kick your arse around the room then spit on your corpse. Some have been nerfed, rightfully so in some cases. But I can still count the amount of guilds that have a Ironbound Proto Drake on my realm with one hand.

You can get epics from little to no work but the true rewards (4 piece bonuses, BiS items & 310% drakes) will only come if you know how to play and (like vanilla & TBC before it) are willing to put in the time and effort. What I'm trying to say is there is still big rewards for raiders over casuals. The colours maybe the same but the ilevel is totally diffrent.

Edited by Spookie
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find it kind of odd that Blizzard needs its own conference. There are plenty of gaming conferences: E3, GC, TGS. It seems a bit arrogant that they snub the conferences that every other major developer attends and needs a personal stage just for themselves.

I also find it completely ridiculous that they?re charging for video streams of what amounts to advertisement for their products.

That?s just my 2 cents.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find it kind of odd that Blizzard needs its own conference. There are plenty of gaming conferences: E3, GC, TGS. It seems a bit arrogant that they snub the conferences that every other major developer attends and needs a personal stage just for themselves.

I also find it completely ridiculous that they're charging for video streams of what amounts to advertisement for their products.

That's just my 2 cents.

Everything is sold out in an amazingly small amount of time, and people still buy the livestreams. The more money Blizzard can squeeze out of you, the faster they'll do it.

I like the new expansion ideas though! I'm a casual player, and in Lich King I've been able to keep up to the highest tier (minus hardmodes) with 3 months of gametime every year (January, July, August). For Cataclysm, I might be able to finally level another character just to see how much every zone changed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So what's this November 2010 everyone keeps mentioning?. I'm either not paying attention very well or you all know something i don't lol.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.