f13.net

As posted on MMO-champion, I'll edit out the parts that run out to be false.  I will say I'm not sure about re-doing lots of old content, doing molten core again with updated loot, even if a thousand times easier is not something i find interesting at all.

I can see this.  Thrall's a bit too nice now that Wrynn is in the picture.  This way, Thrall still gets to be awesome, and the Horde and Alliance can (lore-wise) really go at it.

Still mostly a 'wait and see'.

More alleged big spoilers:

The number of changes that also are supposed to be in the upcoming patch lead me to believe that stupid fuckers are writing up their fantasies as patch notes again.

I hope the guild misses me when I defect to the Horde.  :heart:

Welcome to the right side of the game.

I'll be over here rolling my TAUREN PRIEST

YEAH

Troll druid mon, we got da real mojo.

I had a whole lot of bitching all typed out, then I realized, who am I kidding, I'll end up buying it eventually, whether it is like this or not. :cry:

After I got my tauren druid to 80 and raid geared!

While most of those changes do seem quite probable, I will wait and see when it's finally released.

But seriously, fuck garrosh....right in the ass.  If saurfang doesn't eventually shove an arcanite reaper down his throat i will be pissed.

For Gnomeregan!

Oh, lord, I hope that stuff's inaccurate.

They're making it very easy for me to quit after I pwn Arthas and wait out SWTOR while playing some freerealms...

 :uhrr: 

I think it's a great idea if it's true.  The old world has gotten stale and boring.  Hasn't pretty much every person posting in the WoW forum here has complained about how awful it is to level because they've already seen everything so often already?  Well, now everything will be new again!

Yeah, it'd make an awesome patch.

But recycling content as an expansion?

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm actually interested in revamping old zones, not sure if ill like the phasing if i have to do the same quests on every single alt i have....(maybe having to do quests to unphase the capitol cities is meant to help curtail goldspammers?)


it's the lore im not liking.....FUCK garrosh, it's enough to make me roll worgen.

Putting a Hellscream in charge sounds like a terrific idea. Thrall really is a tactical genius.

The game needs this. I have no idea how Blizzard keeps getting new subs with its current old-world content - as a newcomer to the game less than a year ago, I was only able to stomach 1-60 because of RAF. Trying to level a second character, after my triple experience ran out, was terrible, and part of why I quit. A leveling revamp would add to the game's playability and stickiness immensely. Assuming they don't fuck it up, of course. If this is just their way of getting vehicles into the old world... well.

And yeah, generally I don't give a shit about lore, but... Cairne's son? Because TB really needed a less high-profile leader?

It's been painfully obvious that Thrall was on the way out and Garrosh on the way in ever since their little scuffle during the WOTLK lead-in. Noise about Saurfang was never anything but fanboy wanking over a character who has been more or less invisible throughout the entire expansion.

And it's about fucking time.

That "Horde and Alliance have to put aside their differences and cooperate against (raid boss) or the world is doomed!" shit wore the fuck out years ago.


Only difference is that they're putting Thrall out to pasture in a Tirion sort of role rather than killing him off.

The biggest problem is the sheer amount of "go here, now run across the continent and 5 zones to turn something in, then go BACK to another continent and zone to get the actual quest" that was present in the old world.  Flying across Kalimdor and Old Kingdoms is just flat out painful in the time consumption aspect.  If quests were more centralized and actually gave loot that was... you know, itemized well for your class (the sheer amount of +spirit only cloth items or mail with strength only is just unreal) then there would be a reason to do the quests and enjoy.  As it is now, most of the stuff is passable until you get to outlands where itemization improves so much more that it almost becomes trivial.  A revamp of the old world in that nature is really all that is needed, although massive changes as described sure are interesting to think about.  Good thing I already did Loremaster =P

Dunno as they'll really mess with the engine a whole lot or how close they'll come to 200 person battles that actually work all right, but I basically called it. Except for the fact that I immediately followed this up with "Aw, but they'll never do all THAT!"

I'll believe this shit when I actually see it announced rather than relying entirely upon people speculating in a Something Awful thread (yes that's where all of this came from).

This is officially the "all our best guys are working on the new mmo" expansion, but looks to have been planned quite well.

Not going to get me playing, but it should do enough to keep the world ticking over. Flying everywhere, if true, would be very awesome.

If this turns out to be accurate, and were I still playing WoW, I'd be borderline insulted. The folks who made WoW the money printing monster that it is deserve better.

This is a glorified content patch, not a retail expansion.

It also reeks of fucking Goon.  But nobody is letting that bother them.

The problem is, there IS always a bigger threat which makes the Horde vs. Alliance slapfight look completely retarded.  I mean, all this crap between Garosh and King Humanguy looks completely asinine with The Lich King about to roll over the entire planet.  In theory, anyway, in practice, I suspect it'll take something around ten guys to put an end to his plans for global domination, but I'm getting off track...

If Blizz wants to escalate things, fine.  Do it as a PvP expansion, though.  And I don't think that's what this is, or we wouldn't have all this junk with Azshara and whoever else.  Shouting "WE'RE AT WAR, AAAAARGH" while everyone continues to collect ten rat tails to unlock Azshara's secret base is all kinds of stupid. What's the point of saying the Horde and the Alliance are at War if the players can't do anything about it?  And I don't see any real player involvement in a war in Warcraft as feasable, given how everything has been balanced around static, repeatable content and 5-man arenas for however many years now.

I'm with you on that, Kail. Part of the reason King Chin the Douchebag irritates me is because it's so forced. His hating the Horde is forced, his being an asshat about it is forced, and him refusing to settle down and realise the Lich King is the Bigger Problem Right Now is also forced. It's all contrived to make it seem like the Alliance and the Horde are on TEH BRINK OF REAL WAR AGAIN - but we ALL KNOW that will never ever ever happen on the PvE servers, so it's stupid and pointless.

My only issues with the leaks (I am assuming they're all true for the sake of my posts, I've taken most of this with the required shakers of salt) thus far are the lore ones. But given Blizzard's lore is in the hands of a bunch of glorified fanfic writers anyway, I'm not really surprised or disappointed by it. I'll just roll my eyes like I always do.

Redoing the world, if it's anywhere near the scope of what it sounds like, is awesome. It's NOT a glorified content patch, because it sounds like they're basically rebuilding the main world (they HAVE to if they let us fly across it). You'd have to be crazy to expect that in a patch.

Why would RAAR KILL WARRIOR KILL horde dude have someone secretly assassinated. Even if you follow the lollore plot here, that's completely out of character.

Real or fake, I think this sounds pretty good. I've stated many times my willingness to pay for the ability to fly in the old world. If a major revamp is what it takes, so be it. The lorelol lives up to everything we've gotten since, well, WoW launched, so I'm not really disappointed there.

Two new races, more race/class combos allowed, at least 3 new zones and a revamp of the entire world...that's just a content patch? Really?

I'm going to go 95% that they are making this shit up. It's horrible business if they aren't. I'm not going to pay for an entire expansion where I go back to the same continent I spent the first year on, rerunning the same shit I did with new skins. That's Trials of Atlantis level stupid.

Nah, ToA level stupid requires you to level your pants again.

If they make me get level 60 MC gear and have to grind it to 80, then we're ToA.

If you're willing to pay a retail price for that feature list, more power to ya. I think it's shit on a stick considering the amount of rehashed drivel that list drips with. Also, don't make those new race / class combos out to be something glorious. Those are a no shame cash in on faction transfers.


Edit: Again, if this list is accurate. I'm far from sold that it is.

I'm sorry, were people sleeping when wotlk came out? Now, I've got reservations but if this patch can come anywhere near the scope of wotlk was at release it's worth the money.  Redesigning entire zones is a lot different from re-texturing and isn't a changing game world exactly what people want? 

Now I know that I and anyone else wants to experience new content but new content != new landmass.  If they do this right I'm betting the cut the levelling zones in half and turn the other half into post 80 zones.

also, what happens to mankirks wife? that's the real issue.

She stood in the fire.

Not sold on what I'm seeing here so far. It'll really all hinge for me on how Goblins are implemented.  Another 5 levels (if done well) is worth a box purchase and a month's sub for me.

I always kind of wanted to make a gnome priest, heh.

Emphasis mine. Rather than every expansion just add some new dimension or continent or whatever the fuck, I would prefer the world gradually evolve. I want things to happen TO the world, not just new places appear for us to quest in. That's fucking silly. This is a perfect opportunity to advance the quests we've been grinding out for the last 5 years.

If this info is true, this is the perfect answer to everyone's cry of "let me start at 55/65/75." I wouldn't mind leveling another character if I didn't have to do the same quests for the 10th time.

Bet Mankrik's wife will replace Baron Rivendare in Naxx 3.0

Let me put it this way. They MIGHT redesign the old shit. However, there has to be a new world introduced. It doesn't even have to be huge. To do anything less is simply lazy and will divide the player base.

Example: TBC - new fucking island, Wrath - new fucking island, Cataclysm - new zones on the same...island...with stuff...and goblins...yeah.

God, I'm so fucking sick of even hearing this. Fuck whatever stupid raid boss (that I'll never see) who's totally going to come out of his instance and destroy the world if 25 poopsocks don't heroically farm him to death first. Fuck that shit right in the ear. I'm tired of the Warchief in Warcraft being some fucking fruitloop who hates war.

Give me some war, give me some new battlegrounds and Wintergrasp type shit to fight over, and let me kill the fucking Horde. I don't care if they stroke the PVE players with a bunch of "Foozle the Lootbag is totally going to take over the universe!" nonsense, because that's what half the game is about. But quit fagging up my half with scene after scene of Thrall and Jaina blowing kisses at each other while everyone learns to just get along.

God damnit WUA we're trying to have a content slap / hair pulling / earring yanking fight here. Lore nerd gayery goes over there ---->

I'll just go back to my original point. WoW players deserve better. I'm not part of that community anymore, but Blizzard can do better than drive people back through "classic" content on expansion #3. Changing the old world is a good thing, but it sure as hell shouldn't be the core tenet of a retail expansion.

WUA's gonna fag up everything over lore. He's got NOVELS.  :why_so_serious:

I think a lot of the "RAWR WAR" stuff will end up being like the PvE quests at the east end of Ashenvale, those lumber related ones and etc.



There are also tons of unused zones they could use for the expansion, not counting anything they rebuild. Just look at the map and all the little 'sections' we can't access currently.

Oh hell, novels? Alright everyone, fall back and we'll reassess the situation once we've regrouped. We're gonna need much heavier artillery to win this fight.

Yeah. Between never-finished shit like Grim Batol and Hyjal, and abandoned zones like Winterspring and Silithus, there's easily room for a healthy expansion's worth of content if they feel like giving it to us. Even if they don't put it on an island. Or they could be lazy about it and just reskin some bullshit.

And since nothing about this approach really tells us anything either way, let's fight about lore instead! And how I shall bathe myself in the tears of "Horde are really the good guys!" fanboys as they come under the yoke of puppy-kickin' Garrosh Hellscream!

Edit: Please, I've never bought a WoW novel in my life. I just keep up with my fellow lorefags enough to know what happens in them.

Horde should be eating kids, not doing diplomacy sessions. THERE CAN WE GO NOW?!?!

Borrowing novels from your friends counts there, Bucko.

I've never even borrowed one. As soon as they come out, lorefags post about them all over this thing called the internet.

WUA is basically the guy at work that bums smokes off 10 different people every day, yet never buys any so he can still try and claim to be a non smoker.

The concept makes sense, because it's a pretty good way to make getting into Grim Batol/Uldum/Hyjal/etc logical instead of borderline stupid like Zul'Aman. ZA was a fun instance and you got to fight a cool lore character but it made no fucking sense in the overall narrative coming at 80. Kinda the same deal with Karazhan.

"WE WOULD LIKE TO INTERRUPT YOUR TOUR THROUGH THE OUTLANDS AND SPACEGOATS TO ASK YOU TO...GO BACK TO AZEROTH AND KILL AN OLD ONE-ARMED TROLL AND CHECK OUT THIS DUSTY TOWER MAYBE."

I just don't believe Blizzard will put the work required into making a major remake of Azeroth work into a semi-coherent narrative.

Unless they make 1-80 possible in the old world, detours into Outlands and Northrend will make no fucking sense whatsoever.

"okay yeah I know you're kinda pissed about that worldwide flood that destroyed your civilization and yeah Deathwing and Azshara and Cthulu summoned Sargeras and they're having a big gay tea party right now but I need you to go through the Dark Portal and fight Illidan since for you to have a reason to go there he needs to not be dead, also after that you need to take a boat to Northrend and kill Arthas too since we really didn't get around to that thanks"

Retooling the world for flying would be a MASSIVE overhaul. Everything is piece by piece loaded, and when you actually fly around you see that cities aren't even one piece at all. They are several weird sections that make you fall through the floor.

Am I the only one who likes the old world content as is? With the low level mounts now travel is a non issue and heck just chop the exp if leveling is too slow.  There's some really good stories and flushed out content there.

Same as Merusk, I'll be done and finish up with WoW. That's not to say like meth addicts people be there getting a fix as other mmo's flop.

I've worked it all out in chart form.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/SRSBZNS.png)

I like the old world fine, but "just chop the XP required to level" only gets you so far. In fact, it gets those really good stories and shit skipped, because nine times out of ten, the quests with the interesting story are also the quests that make you go from one ass end of the continent to the other, and pretty much no one does those after they've done them the first time. If they cut the "fetch me ten boar asses" quests and steamline the Hey There Is A Narrative Here quests so you don't have to run all over god's creation to fed ex your mcguffin to get your lore pellet, then the old world will flow better and you can still have the interesting stories. And you might even have people DO them!

Technically, an old-world retool wouldn't be part of the expansion, it would be part of WoW patch 4.0. Obviously, players without Cataclysm have to be able to access it, or else where will they level up? This means that Cataclysm itself is going to have to reveal new content in order for there to be something for people to pay for.

By that logic, going into Outlands - or any of the 1-60 leveling zones - already makes no sense. WUA said it way better though.

Come on now, let's not drive this thread into semantics already on page two. We just got a chart so this bastard is here for the long haul.

Anyways, the new shit will probably rely heavily on phasing so it may be a moot point.

He makes a good point though. If you expansion overhaul current zones, WTF stops ppl from not paying for it? We're going to phase every damn zone now? That's how stupid the business model is with this supposed "design".

IE - It's horseshit.

Sorry, wasn't trying to nitpick semantics, just pointing out that even if the revamp is the "core tenet" of Cataclysm, that doesn't mean there won't be other stuff to do - sort of like how storming Icecrown and killing Arthas was the core tenet of Wrath, but instead we've mostly been traipsing around forests, collecting swords from young maidens and causing a ruckus among the local gigantic viking populations.

THE REVAMP ISN'T REAL

Jesus, it's caps, he's serious.

Speak my good man, let us in on this nugget of knowledge.

I just like caps. I gives me a good quote to come back to and shove it in the face of people who were wrong. If I'm wrong it's just silly, but I live on the edge.

Seriously though, I am as hardcore a financial guy as you'll meet while being a gamer, and to remake old shit in the guise of new shit isn't a business plan. It's a salvage plan.

If this is true, this is pretty much my dream expansion. Seriously, there is not one single tiny thing I don't like about it.


....except Forsaken Hunters.  :awesome_for_real:

So you're lying.

Seems like there's a lot of potential for new content between the Uldum speculation, and the whole let's go figure out what the fuck this Maelstrom is all about.  I know that most of the info is about the re-doing of old content.  But that doesn't exclude new content at all.  After all, it's Blizzard.  I'm gonna be a Goblin mother fuckers.  Of course, my first reaction to this post was 'fake post is fake.'  So a grain of salt until it's official.

Well, bearing in mind that Hyjal and Uldum were explicitly mentioned as "Hey guys remember these zones that we never added?", plus Grim Batol is Deathwing's crib it's a pretty sure bet. Let alone whatever they're going to do to existing zones (Durotar is gone, Barrens split into two zones with a fucking volcano erupting in the middle, 1K Needles flooding and turning into a thousand islands in the ocean, etc etc).

The way they need to frame that to win over the "But I'm on Thrall's side" people is something along the lines of "Well, we tried over and over and over again to work with the Alliance and they are simply unwilling to side with 'savages', especially since King Wrynn reappeared. So they wanna pick a fight? They're gonna get one. FOR THE HORDE!"

Plus the Forsaken and blood elves should be really, really fucking pissed off with what happens with Gilnean worgen.

It will be that paragraph with a side of "And those fuckers killed Cairne" if this is all true.  Scheming fucking Hellscreams.

The Elves I can see, the Forsaken no so much.  I mean they ARE dead and never really tried to join the Alliance IIRC. Sylvanis just kind of flipped everyone the bird and walked off initially.

The Alliance was originally called the Alliance of Lordaeron. Guess which country most of the Forsaken used to be part of?
"So, wait. Let me get this straight: we get cursed by the Lich King - after saving your pitiful arses in the second war, I might add - and you lot effectively declare war on us for even existing. Genn Greymane and his merry band of leghumpers get cursed by a third-rate archmage after turning their back on the Alliance and you turn around and welcome them with open arms? Fuck. That. Shit. Putress was right all along. Now where did I put those barrels of Blight again?" :awesome_for_real:

All of this plus the faction transfer service coming actually makes me think the tauren might split from the horde.

Initially I bought it, but now I'm not so sure.  Also I was wondering what they would have done with Nazjatar and the Maelstrom and why it wouldn't be included.  It seems like a ridiculous oversight not to include one of the two main zones people are looking forward to - the Emerald Dream or the Maelstrom.

But if they change up the old world, make leveling easier, retool Azeroth to allow flying mounts, include the new class combos, but also add the Maelstrom, Undermine and a few other bits like the Tomb of Sargeras for people that have the expansion, that might make sense.  Azshara as the big end boss would be a big enough payoff, maybe with Deathwing as a speedbump.   And some new dungeons in Nazjatar.

TLDR version I think the leaks might be mostly on target but I bet there's more, unless Blizzard has totally lost their marbles.

I find it hard to believe Blizzard wouldn't include a new continent underneath the Maelstrom. Also, if they add goblins they should add the isle of Kazan as Undermine is there.

I can't imagine the entire world getting a flying mount redesign since that would take more effort than making an entirely new continent.

Flooding some zones and an old world retune would take more effort than I see Blizz putting into anything.

Interesting.  My friend argues that WoW is on cash cow status and whatever Blizzard is focused on it, it is no longer WoW.

The fact that their "A" team programmers, designers, and art team have moved onto other projects after 5 years is a no-brainer. That doesn't mean that "B" team can't come up with new and interesting and cool stuff.

It wouldn't hurt for them to turn WoW into a testbed for future games.  They already do it to some extent through trial and error.  But having a base game that you test then port the successes over to the A title is win all around.

These extra class/race combinations seem like a simple cash grab by the developers to me.

I am not a "lore guy" but the "vision" blizzard has had or implied for certain races is contradicted by many of these combinations.  Undead hunter?  etc.

If the player base likes it that's a good decision - but it turns me off.

I hereby dubb this the Cash Cow game - hopefully we get a peak soon at whatever game has garnered Blizzard's talent from Wow.

I wouldn't exactly expect the next Blizzard game to ignore the Low Hanging Enormous Moneyhats when it works so well for them with WoW.

They just need to release Diablo already. That way I'll have something else to focus on when I'm not raiding.

That way I can stop raiding!

Of course it's a cash grab.  It works on multiple levels.  You get the alt-o-holics loading up the one combination they've always wanted.  You get the min-maxers rolling some new combo they think will rule the day.  And finally, you get a lot more mileage out of your faction transfer service (already mentioned).  The last thing alone will probably buy every dev a new porche.

Undead anything works.  Why is a pulse needed for any job?

Certain class/race restrictions never made any sense to me. The only ones that should probably be restricted are Druids, Paladins, and Shamans for the lore reasons. Stuff like humans not being able to shoot a gun, or dwarves not being able to be offensive spellcasters don't really make any sense.

No Dwarf Mages is probably a carryover from a traditional D&D view of dwarves. All I can say to belf Warrior is fucking finally. Tauren Pally is nice, although I would've prefered undead.

I will be back in for yet another brand new character if they let me be an Orc mage. I like playing different character classes, but I don't really get into it unless they are Orcs. I have a Gnome mage, because they're pretty much the next best race after Orcs. Tauren, Trolls, Dwarves and Draenei are just okay. All the other races suck. Especially elves.

They had dwarf mages in the beta.  I recally they got removed shortly before I got in and there was still a little outcry over it.  The logic for removal at the time was "They're already all these other classes, there's just not room for it as we'd rather have another priest race than another mage race."

I want to know what game/book/whatever people think this is supposed to have happened during, because everyone who loves Forsaken spits it out like it's unquestioned, but as far as I can tell it's a total fabrication. When Alliance forces first came into contact with the Forsaken in WC3, it was Sylvanus who resorted to betrayal.

edit: Anyway yeah, I'm curious how the hell this is supposed to work. WoW has always functioned with the implicit assumption that the "present" is where/whenever your character is. As I'm standing in Grizzly Hills listening to Gryan Stoutmantle tell me how great it was that we saved Westfall, some newb is in Westfall saving it for Gryan Stoutmantle. The same guy exists in multiple places, but it's implied that those different places also represent different times.

So how do you bring Azeroth forward in time while leaving Outland and Northrend alone? "Yeah, after the Lich King died there was this big cataclysm that made the world all fucked up. Anyway now that you're level 68, go to Northrend and do a bunch of quests where you meet the Lich King." Maybe this IS fake.

I really haven't been keeping up with WOW much lately.  Any chance that these new races will be a "third faction" or neutral faction?  That would beat War to the punch there again. 

Forsaken Hunter would work especially well if instead of being able to tame beasts, they could tame undead.  :awesome_for_real:

Gotta say, this whole thing reeks to me and I won't be convinced until I hear it come from Blizzard's gaping maws.  Redoing the entire old world, while an interesting prospect, sounds like a fucking task and a half and a whole lot more work than it took to add Outland or even Northrend with all it's phased zones. They were new, this requires substantial changes. Also, the headache, as Paelos implied, in maintaining the vanilla world for those without the expansion?

Of course, I may be wrong.  If I am then I think it's pretty cool. So many people complain that MMOs are static worlds and that nothing changes but this would be Blizzard making huge and significant changes to their persistent world, moving the story along and changing it. I don't think it's a bad business plan either. Make a change to something people are familiar with will get a lot of people who have left come back just to see the changes.  You say "hey! Did you know they flooded 1k needles, destroyed Orgrimmar and blew up the Barrens?" and old players curiosity will no doubt get the better of them.  Offer them flying mounts in the old world and that 12 million subscribers will skyrocket.  Srsly.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet against this. If Cataclysm is the name of the next expansion then yeah, perhaps it'll be the Maelstrom.  Gilneas may well be a new zone. Azshara might get a relevant makeover. But they'd be more likely to add a new continent in the form of the Maelstrom and the Undermine (which would also make sense of the new playable Goblin race too - if that's more than a rumour). Azshara would obviously be a boss and perhaps Deathwing although I see no relation between the two.

Anyway, if Emerald Dream/Nightmare is intended to be an eventual expansion then there's no way they'll do one expansion as an overhaul of the current world followed by another one which is a copy of the current world.

On the other hand, if someone said, WoW 2 rather than an expansion, I'd be less sceptical.

Even among people who like leveling, the BC/Wrath content is widely considered to be vastly superior to the classic WoW stuff. The constant across-the-board XP increases and introduction of heirloom items indicate that Blizz knows there's a problem with their leveling content, but aren't themselves proper solutions. And old-world flying mounts are one of the most commonly requested features for the game, if not the most commonly.

Again, world revamp != new expansion. It's simply something the game needs, and tying it to the next expansion (which presumably will have plenty of its own new, non-revamped 81-85 content) thematically just makes sense.

I believe it.

Remove them from the 1-85 sequence and then re-use the content to create other shit, like battlegrounds, instances, and starting zones for hero classes and/or appropriate racial/class pairings.  Comparatively speaking retooling the entire old world would take a shitton more work, and landscaping and architecture would be the least part.

But this is all beside the point, because my money is on all you people being trolled by a goon since he saw the Wolvar mask in the PTR files.

Scourge generally: crypt fiends, oozes, maggots, golems, bog fiends, abominations.

The only thing troubling me is the whole question of how Outland and Northrend would fit in. Otherwise I think this would be a god damned brilliant idea, to take the entire original content of WoW and basically chuck it in the trash in favor of a new-and-improved version. Forget that "LOL REUSING ZONES? LAZY!" noise, this would actually be a hell of a lot MORE ambitious than just opening yet another portal to yet another five-zone Awesomeland while letting the old world get even more abandoned and irrelevant. Some of these changes sound pretty goddamned drastic.

We've all heard the "just let every class start at 55" talk. If you don't want to make the original world totally empty by actually letting everyone start at 55, but don't want to keep making people play your shittiest content for the first 55 levels either, then this makes perfect sense. If you have the resources to be able to scrap that much old content.

I will officially be disappointed as fuck if this is all a hoax and we get just another "hop the portal to New Awesomeland and ding to 90 in these 5 zones, only seeing the old world on your bank alt" expansion. I want to take off from Theramore on my epic flyer and cruise west over the Barrens Volcano.

Maybe they've expanded the phasing technology to include terrain? Maybe they'll just Ret-Con the entire old world so the leveling curve will shift into outland/northrend smoothly lore wise.

Clearly the Cataclysm effected time too!  :why_so_serious:



Really, Outland already has this problem, you can do a bunch of crap in Outlands while simultaneously seeing the results of the stuff you haven't done yet. Plenty of Old World stuff also has these issues lore wise. That Un'goro expedition, "halp we are trapped in the jungle!", try the Goblin Griffin master to your left there buddy. They've probably changed the quest text a bit for those, I haven't done them in years.


I think we are just sorta supposed to assume we are fighting the Lich King's remnants, or Illidan's shadow or whatever. Sure, we took out the big bad guys and mostly fixed things, but there are still a jillion zombies and demons to clean out.

So you want to fly from a city built at sea level in a swamp after a giant tsunami rearranges the local geography? Step one: Make sure the city is still there.  :grin:

There is a get-out clause: the Infinite Dragonflight. And Nozdormu. That story-arc, to my knowledge, hasn't been resolved yet.





Did I really just call that a story-arc?

Well, there's ALREADY plot and time holes in wow, it's inevitable when you add new content...I don't like it but if you gave me the options of

1. Redo all the old zones, give them new looks and totally redo all the questlines for wotlk quality(and by doing so make BC and wotlk seem out of time)

or

2. Discover a new planet and/or continent adding 8 entirely new zones.

I'd pick option 1 every single time, I want to see this world change, hell even with my hatred for garrosh(being a whiny and literally backstabbing little man-child) I still want to see what comes next for azeroth.

Oh god I hope not. I hope that Horde-loving cunt Jaina ends up on the bottom of the fucking ocean as fish-food.

Also, have you figured out when this whole "Evil Alliance declares war on peace-loving Forsaken JUST FOR EXISTING! BAAAW!" thing was supposed to have actually taken place yet? Because nobody could tell me last time we did this for pages and pages either and I'm really quite curious.

(http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:und4oUqWncYUhM:http://dcsleez.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nerd-fight_thumb.jpg)

Let's do this! We've got a week of empty wanking to do before Blizzcon anyway!

If Blizzard can phase whole continents, then they could make the post Cataclysm world only visible the the lvl 80 characters that have done the quest. If you want to visit with lower level buddies, a quick portal to the Caverns of Time fixes the problem.

Maybe their next project will go into phasing bigtime, so it is worth the expense of testing it fully in WoW.

I can't really see a reason NOT to use the tech in future projects.  It will probably be considered a standard feature, like a customizable UI, in upcoming MMOs as we go through the years.

All phasing does is limit the visibility of characters/mobs (only) in a certain area of a given zone. Rearranging the entire zone (or anything involving a terrain geometry change) wouldn't be phasing - it would just be a new zone.

Yeah, now I'm arguing semantics but the constant association of "any sort of persistent world change" with "phasing" annoys me.

I thought of the same thing, but that would eliminate the benefits of ditching the moldy old leveling content.

Call it time travel then. Even if it means copying zones wholesale, it would still be worth it to see time actually advance.


They could ditch the old content by letting you start new characters in Dalaran at 70. Then you would have to complete a lvl 80 quest to return to the old world in its post Cataclysm state.

I'd think rather than mess with phasing technology which seems rather pointless in this particular case, it'd be much simpler (relatively speaking) to create separate zones representing "post cataclysm old world" and dump the lvl.85 or whatever players there, with the original version of the world locked to them as from their point on the storyline that version of world no longer exists.

So now we've kept all the "expansion is just a rehash" complaints without any of the "get rid of the crusty old leveling content" benefits but further dividing the playerbase (old-world Orgrimmar is devoid of 80s but and new-world Orcopolis excludes low levels). Plus we have to stretch 5 levels' worth of content across two whole continents, and also the scheme leaves nowhere to shoehorn in that 10-20 Azshara zone.

edit: Oh, and the lore discontinuity still isn't solved because low-level goblins and worgen would be anachronistically stuck in the old world to level.

Yup. MMO business as usual.

(i wouldn't worry much about the stretching 5 levels of content over 2 continents thing, either. It can become much easier when you don't actually have to keep these 2 continents intact or anywhere near their original form/size. Cataclysms can be a handy device to explain changes like that)

The answer is actually simple: Blizzard probably doesn't give a crap about raping their lore to pieces if they want to.

The thing is, WoW is not a world. It's a theme park. (Yes, that's an old point.) But it doesn't make the game very condusive to visiting old content like UO or SWG. We were properly shephereded through those zones in a very specific sequence. Re-visiting them is going "backwards" in the game.

They could have designed the game to have a more broad level range (Imagine SFK having three wings, 20-30, 30-40, and 40-50 level content) but they didn't. And it's kinda too late to take that kind of design back now... it will confuse the players.

That'd be horrible.

It was pretty obvious to me when they yoinked old 40 man Naxx out of thin air, redesigned so cavemen could do it, and put it on a whole new continent that they are about as concerned with lore as I am.  That's not a lot.  It can fly!  Derp.

I know there's a lot of people who will have nostalgia issues, and they've every right.  Won't be too long before those people can roll on gated servers ala EQ Combine to fulfill their nostalgia rub.

Just because WoW has a directed leveling experience doesn't mean that it cannot have a new one with revamped zones.

Doesn't it? Vanillla WoW means 1-60. Putting new high level content in the old zones is a 180 from the current design of 'onwards and upwards!' Kara is an odd-fish and I think a new expansion that puts all of it's raid and dungeon content on Kalimdor or Lorderon is going to feel like more recycling, even if they're new areas of old zones.

Assuming this is all more than fanwank, of course.

These problems already exist in the game.  Doing the Death Knight starter chain, you run into books talking about how the Horde and Alliance are heading home from Outlands after killing everything there.  Then, you finish the starter chain and find out that the Horde and Alliance are just heading out into the Outlands to kill everything there.  Everyone in Shattrath is still all worked up over Kil'Jaeden, who'll be eating the world any day now.  You slaughter the Scarlet Crusade and they retreat to Northrend, but once you're done with the starter chain, they're not beaten anymore, until you get to Northrend, at which point they are again.  Kael'thas is in Tempest Keep and Magister's Terrace at the same time.  Katrana Prestor in the throne room while Onyxia's head hangs over the gates.  Blizzard doesn't care.

I really, strongly disagree with you there. My biggest problem with Outland is that it's such a random ass detour for the Alliance people. You spend 58 levels in Azeroth and then drop everything to go to some world that you really don't have much of a real connection to (it felt a LOT more natural to want to go there as an orc). I would LOVE to do high level content on the "real" world where my characters supposedly make their home. Northrend was a lot better in that regard, in that it was all stuff happening on THAT world with characters we've known since we were level 12 (Old Blanchy in Grizzly Hills, for example!). Having high level content in the parts of Azeroth that never had stuff before wouldn't really be that weird. I've always found zoning into HIGH LEVEL LAND weirder than in vanilla where the high level stuff was just tucked away like Onyxia's Lair. As you level you just know HERE BE DRAGONS and don't go in there until you've got your big girl pants.

I still can't find the reasoning here. To put flying into the old game, you have to redesign the game from scratch. Two entire continents that are already functional would have to be reprogrammed and made into a single mass instead of seperate entities. They would have to fill in every hole and plug every placeholder. They would have to remember what parts they left out and what parts they needed to add on.

It's a ridiculous amount of effort for very little gain. Why not just leave it alone and focus half that effort on something new you can build from the ground up?

If this rumor is true, I just see it as the sequel to wow being passed off as an expansion pack.

Caverns of Time is another counter example, but I see your point. However I don't expect this to be a problem because, if all this shit is true, they'll be old zones in name only. Vocano'd Barrens != Vanilla Barrens.

SirBruce time.


There is no actual reprogramming involved.  It would be strictly terrain work to smooth the edges on the mountains, redo the capital city from above (because they buildings are often roofless and use some culling techniques to optimize framerates), put barriers around the edges of the continent so that players cannot fly off into infinity.  Actually placing the  continents on a single instance server is still not required.


There aren't actually all that many holes.  Seriously, before you spout shit roll a shaman and tour around a little with far sight, or see if the map viewer is still working.  Most of the glaring errors you could fix with a single pass of a smooth brush, they would have a harder time tracking down every instance of "HELP" scrawled across normally unseen sections of Azeroth.


Because what you're describing is called mudflation, and it will be the death of this game.  By scattering the majority of the newbies to the four winds and rendering the game a bland RPG; or possibly by making the game a wall of Grunk level stupidity of the poopsocking type, as a natural conclusion of constantly increasing the level cap; or by making the entire early game an incomprehensible mess by massively lowered experience requirements constantly pushing players into new zones without going through the standard breadcrumb -> meaty stuff -> conclusion -> breadcrumb sequence.  All of these options kill all the fun possible in the game for anyone not leveling an alt who just wants to get to endgame at all costs, several may co-exist, and all of them result from not culling out non-endgame game filler that has since lost it's purpose.

---

Rendakor, Barrens has a volcano right now.

Why would they have to merge the continents? People just fatigue out if they try to fly across the ocean.

Ok, erupted Volcano'd Barrens. Sorry, its 3am and I've been wiping in ToC25 for way too long. (However I just got the awesome tank chest off the Beasts  :drill: )

For the record, I generally dislike any expansion that works like BC and Wrath because it segregates the playerbase into those who have the expansion and those who don't. Granted, most WoW players will have it, but the mindset of leaving areas/zones behind forever rubs me the wrong way. I tolerate it in WoW because that's how it's been designed from the ground up. WoW is doomaged to mudflation, just like EQ and every other DIKU-alike. Leveling boosts like DK's starting at 55, and XP curve boosts are the first signs that things are getting just a bit too top heavy. And the efforts to fix this are going to be band aids. There is no cure, only management of the problem.

If they make the new version of the old continents a purely 80+ experience, the Cataclysm could conveniently cut off large sections they don't have to redo right now. To be revealed in later expansions. Also, the new version could be Emerald Dream ready, saving a lot of tricky work. If rebuilding the old continents gives them space for expansions to 100, then it would be worth the effort.

If they abuse phasing well enough, it could make all the level 1 alts in the wrong version of stormwind and not lag up everyone's clients on loading, too ;)

Issues with running alts through instances, hrm. Kind of curious how they'll make all this revamping of old content and things like phasing of the new horde city work. While I love phasing when used well (Icecrown is Amazing as a zone, and likely their best work to date), it causes logistical issues with helping friends with quests.

If any of this turns out to be true, do you know the best part?  I can finally party with those Trolls in Darkshore.

Phasing it so you only see the new version of Azeroth after you're level 80 would be god damned idiotic. Now all your newbs/alts are still stuck doing your shittiest content for 50+ levels, only they're doing it in a totally abandoned world since EVERYONE who has already done so is never coming back. What the hell would be the point?

If there's a reason to do this, it's because they've been hearing "Let everyone start at 55!" since death knights came along, and they've interpreted it as "The old 1-55 content sucks!" and decided to replace it.

There's actually a way to get to that village by doing some creative terrain jumping in winterspring and then levitating down, it's a 24/7 party.

I want to find the Pandaren settlement in Stonetalon, but it'll be a cold day in hell before they put a single Pandaren NPC in the game.  The risk of pissing off China somehow is simply too great. 

This is true.  Oddly enough, I've flown over Org and ?Undercity (on a private server) and there's nothing there.  Just walls that lead to a big gaping hole.  I assume, that big tunnel at the opening allows them to load the instance for the inside of the city itself.  Hence why Org probably has to go.  From the inside it looks like you should be able to fly in, but it's not actually connected to the outside.

I honestly can't believe any of yall would be excited about the idea of reskinning the original game and calling it an expansion. If it's so easy to program in flight into the old content, why not release it as a feature patch after an expansion? If it's so hard, why not just say fuck it and focus on something else?

Releasing it as content you pay extra for on top of your monthly fee without at least 8 radically new zones open to the public simply isn't worth it.

Paelos I don't see what the problem is. A zone that is completely reskinned with altared geography and all new quests is just as much "new" content as one built from the ground up. The thing with flying is, it was too hard, they said fuck it, and people kept bitching (myself included). If Blizzard wants to abandon the old world, they should have let us start at 55. Instead they're trying to bring new life into the old content, which is a better solution. This is obviously more focused on the casual player (and people who like alts), rather than providing a longer, more intesting level treadmill for those already at 80. However, I have no doubt that there will be raids aplenty, so even that complaint isn't valid.

Yeah.  Redoing the old content would be good. Though with higher experience speed, it could be compressed into a lot less zones. So your new alts do a fast run to 60, pop off through the caverns of time to stop the evil guys undoing history in the Outlands and Northrend, then come back to their current time to do post 80 content in the main world.

I'm a big fan of time travel and alternate worlds, so reskinning old content to show the passage of time is fine with me. Or making it an alternate version of reality in the Emerald Dream is good too. Time gates let every character be the hero who saved the world, if only be stopping the bad guys undo the previous victory.  Its as close as you are going to get in a MMOG to being a significant hero.

My guess is that there's going to be a honking great 4.0 patch that contains all the non-instanced/non-'new' parts of Cataclysm which everyone will get, and the expansion itself will contain the actually-not-in-game-at-all-right-now new content, open the revamped/redone instances*, unlock the new class combos, allow flying, raise the level cap, etc etc.

I also would not be at all surprised if there's a all-in-one expansion pack that also contains TBC & WotLK as well (a la EQ2's expansion) at a slight premium over just the solo expansion.



*For the love of God, if BRD is still around, split it into at least three separate instances!

While I would agree that their levelling situation is outdated, I don't think it deserves an overhaul in the guise of expansion. I also don't alt, so I can't give a flying fuck what they do from 1-55.

You know there are some people who like leveling characters for its own sake? A lot of players get bored with their characters and roll tons of alts long before hitting 80, or even after. I am not one of those people - not by a fucking long shot - but I really don't see what's so bad about throwing them a bone for once instead of focusing 100% on content they don't see or care about.

I don't see a problem with it at all. Let me say it again: "This is not a bad idea, but DON'T CALL IT AN EXPANSION AND MAKE US PAY FOR IT."

EDIT: To me it smacks of, "Hey pay us more money to redo our fuck-ups."

Is this okay with you, then?

Yeah, except it's a total wank. We have no fucking clue if Blizzard reps are sitting in their office laughing their asses off in front of big maps of the Undermine and Maelstrom.

I still want a new island. I always want a new island. Perhaps it's the explorer in me.  :drill:

New content is new content. If you want to bawl from here to infinity because they don't put it behind a big portal with a blinking NEW sign on top, well, whatever.

When Paelos goes shopping for a new car he buys a boat.

I posted this in the "My top Warcraft wants" thread but as it's come up again, so it's probably worth posting again:


There are huge swathes of flat, empty terrain all over the place that would need to be filled. Sure it could be bordered off but that means there's an artificial border over the area north of Stormwind, for example, that you just can't get into.  Seems to me like there would be an expansions worth of changes and new content added just to fill these areas in.

Theramore is going to technically be an island now.  :awesome_for_real:
(http://i27.tinypic.com/24bw0op.jpg)

Background texture is from an Ulduar globe, the 'vector' lines are from a different Ulduar globe. Before and after, anyone?

I would say that was just the ulduar programmers being sloppy with lines but the fact they specifically made an island where there wasn't one smells of easter egg.


edit: Fuck ya, goodbye desolace.

I agree with the above 100%. I don't think they like that people basically leave Azeroth and never come back at level 58. After all, that's been their reasoning behind not putting trainers and auction houses in the new expansion capitals. Essentially rebuilding old zones, with all they've learned the past five years? Yeah, sorry, that IS new content, and I find the hand wringing over how it's just a revamp of the entire fuckin' world hilarious. (Assuming this is all true of course. I hope it is!)

Terraining is actually trivial, an area like the one between Redridge and Burning Steppes could easily be done passably in a day by someone experienced with the tools.  It's only when you start adding small things like little painstakingly decorated campsites and towns built on ground of varying height when world construction takes a lot of work, none of which these empty expanses actually require.

The capital cities being freakish when seen from above is due to culling of some sort, "fixing" it might be as easy as selecting and deleting meshes and scripts that partition the city in the way you see it.  If you want to see something comparable the technique is used extensively in Unreal Tournament with depth-less "sheet" brushes (which are invisible in-game but not in the editor) and zoneinfo actors.

There's a new island on the back of a Giant Turtle!

I think its fucking brilliant.

Adding two new races at level 1 and opening up new race/class combos practically screams re-do.

Besides the obvious - Faster Leveling Curve - I smell a 1-20 pace like the Deathknight; not saying that they are going to custom-story-line the 1-20 curve like the DK, just that the quests and rewards may as well be /Level20.

As for 21-60, I expect them to consolidate zones and kill the useless storylines (sorry lore-whores... it is a cataclysm, after all) and blast the zones with quests a'la LK.

As the game matures, Vanilla (and TBC) have been completely eclipsed by better quest/level/play designs... other than nostalgia, there's nothing in vanilla worth saving.

Cataclysm could offer a fresh start and a way to attract new gamers (it may sound odd, but any well run business always looks to add new customers, not just milk the old).

For those already at endgame, the new content will still be new, the zones fresh and the challenges appropriate... with the added benefit of filling up the gameworld for new, returning or re-rolling gamers; the old model of creating a new zone only serves to further fracture the player base and accentuate the massive distance between me and thee.

Well, as usual, I don't understand how you people like doing the same thing over again even if it's tweaked. The Onyxia thing doesn't sound ragingly awesome to me, for example. Then again, I don't ever alt anything, and the idea of starting a new character doesn't amuse me at all. I have an awesome one now, and I have no desire to hit the reset button for a fucking furry whatever.

This again is all moot, because I don't believe the expansion will be what they are suggesting. Even if it's true, it's missing something large.

Well, if you don't like alts, you don't like alts. Can't argue that. All I can say is that you're in the minority, at least of players I know.

You have a very odd definition of "tweaked."

Also, there are lots and lots and lots and lots AND LOTS of people who never did Onyxia when she was endgame, let alone a bajillion times like you apparently did. Not everyone who raids now raided then. It's not even close.

The old world content may or may not be revamped, that's all speculation, I grant you.

But I guarantee, you'll be doing the same thing over and over again regardless.

I've never done a dungeon beyond Scarlet Monestary.  (Okay, I did go through Onyxia's lair once, tagging along at 55 behind a bunch of 80s.)  As I've had to level pretty much solo my entire way up to 65, it would actually be nice to have a chance to play the game with others at my level.

Kind of like what I've been doing with a Sunday night group that is in the mid-30s Horde side.  It's been a blast.  I'd like more of it.

Hopefully an unannounced feature will be sidekicking/exemplaring people. That is one of the things that's truly, truly lacking in the WoW leveling. Friend played for one afternoon without you? OH WELL GUESS YOU CAN'T LEVEL TOGETHER ANYMORE!

In my guild right now it is me and one other person who ever saw Ony when she was end-game (I say "that's a fucking 50dkp minus" and no one gets it).  And the sheer amount of cockblocking that was required to get attuned and go to her was not something most people put up with or PUG'ed years ago (Molten Core was considerably less, but that place can go freeze in hell).  You had to have a guild or group of friends dedicated to wanting to see the endgame to actually get there (granted, it varies from server to server and the general population, but that is how my server was).  TBC was even worse with the amount of keying, heroics, and questing you had to do to get into raids.  It's nothing like that these days and I am glad.

I still have fond memories of Ony, even if it was just a wipefest most of the time.

I thought you raided.  :oh_i_see:

 :rimshot:

Where's your red name?


Seriously, as a developer/manager, I inwardly groan everytime someone goes off about how "easy" some particular work is, that "it will only take a week" when the real deal ALWAYS takes longer than you expect by at least double if you don't map out each individual task and estimate at that level.

/estimation rant

Took probably 30 minutes.  A couple of points:

1. This is a flyover area, it doesn't need much detail as long as it isn't flat.
2. Blizzard's tools will be scalable to larger sizes easier, I was working with an 8x8 brush on a 256x256 map.
3. This can all be done with a fractal terrain generator, which will spit out an acceptable result in minutes with no artist involvement aside from inputting parameters.
4. I chose Warcraft III because it's a Blizzard product, I can also do this in Morrowind/Oblivion.  I'm unfortunately not experienced with the terrain generator in UT2004.
5. The little red thing in the middle is a human town hall.

Very clever.

I raise an eyebrow that you think Blizzard will just decide not to populate those barren areas with details and leave them as "flyover areas" though. When there's every chance that the explorers are going to land and have a wander around, I very much doubt they wouldn't stick in mobs, resources, perhaps a small quest hub or two and so on. If they'll put stuff in like camps and npcs in areas that you just can't get to but can see from a flight path then how likely is it they'll just make them "flyover areas"?

Also, do you not think that there will be copious amounts of meetings and planning sessions and artwork and pre-design to decide what these areas are going to be and how they're going to look?

Bringing characters closer together instead of further spreading out the playerbase by simply adding another landmass that everyone eventually congregates in is brilliant. They have so much world that is used so little now, I think it's a great idea.

On ATITD, the developers actually built terrain on the live server.  I once bitched on IRC that the patch had broken the ability for me to walk to the river from my camp without taking a huge detour.  Teppy came over and smoothed out the hill right then and there.  The tools were simple enough to use that all of the GMs had the power to world build.

Did you test it by walking every square inch both ways to make sure there are no holes in the geometry that you can fall through or weird clips?  Did you fly every inch of airspace to make sure there are no weird visual issues? Did you go inside the town hall to make sure no hills clip up through the floor?   Did you check it out and into source control and make sure it got into the build OK and everything works? Did you have a meeting or get an assignment as to which section of the world you're responsible for so two people don't mistakenly work on the same part of the world? These are all complexities and timesinks of working on a team that you don't get working solo, and you have to account for them.

To get a little more "polish" which of course Blizzard is known for, is there a backstory or theme to the area? Possibly tied to some obscure lore? Are there some NPCs there? Do they have names? Any livestock? A field? Let alone any pathing NPCs, a mailman to two different farmsteads?  Flavor text?  A forest that makes sense given the local farms?

It all adds up.

Do I really need to add creep spawns to my map? :awesome_for_real:  More seriously, you don't do the fancy work until the major revisions are in place, which is editing height and placing doodads like boulders and trees.  But the vast majority of these transition areas are so small that they can't even realistically hold more than a few spawns of nodes/mobs, like the transition areas in most of the TBC/Wrath zones.  And depending on how Blizzard handles their fancy shit even "detailed" decorating like building bandit camps might be easy, it's largely dependent upon whether they do stuff like package a cluttered table as a single model.

You're also severely overestimating the amount of effort that needs to go into fixing up the edge of a zone.  A single zone is probably not an onerous project for one person if he isn't trying to build a new zone on an area equal to or less than the size of elemental plateau.  So you assign zones to landscapers so that nobody is working on the same area at once, they do a circle of the bounding mountain ranges fixing it up, then you compile the changes and assign the next set.  Eventually you work your way down to one or two zones that need work next to each other.  In which case you do them sequentially; or have the developers hold off on the shared areas until the rest of the zone is done and have a single person do the overlap.

EDIT: There is also every reason to believe they would just leave them as flyover areas.  Why?  Uldum. [/discussion]

---

Jayce, you're missing a crucial bit of information: the vast majority of unfinished spaces are simply inaccesible mountain ranges.  It doesn't need scripting, towns, farms, or anything except a quick pass by someone who isn't fuckstupid.  The other crucial bit your missing is that you don't actually need to check for missing geometry on a heightmap, because they are by design incapable of creating a voided space except in the presence of unpatched editor/engine defects.  The "strange visual errors" I assume are a reference to the way cities display from above, which is actually an intentional performance optimization used only in the cities which effectively cannot be duplicated by accident.

I really don't see how anyone can with straight face claim this kind of work could be done fast, when it's Blizzard that's supposed to be doing it. :why_so_serious:

One question: have you ever done this kind of work in a team environment for commercial or open source release?

Two observations: the whole point of filling in these areas is to allow flying in Azeroth.  So why do you keep saying that they are only flyover areas where no one will ever land?  And second observation: I have a friend who fell through the world in Ashenvale a year or so ago, and about a month ago I fell through the a river in Durotar and wound up in the Hinterlands.  True story.

Wait, are you (sheep) really implying that if they add flying to the old world in WoW, that random generated/NPCless terrain would be acceptable?

This is a playerbase that LOVES going anywhere no matter how stupid and hanging out. It would be massively unprofessional to just coat terrain with nothing. That's not how Blizzard has gotten where they are.

edit: to my memory, Uldum is not an empty wide space you can wander around in. It's never been Finished, but it's not like it's just Ironforge, minus any NPCs.

It just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Far too much effort with too little return, inevitable cries of laziness and losing lots of existing proven content.

I could see them doing enough to fill in the existing gaps, possibly with high level content that both requires and enables flying in the old world zones, but not much more than that. The maelstrom gives them a nice huge canvas for hidden islands, goblin pirates and sunken cities given that was the center of the ancient elven kingdoms.

Thank you. My point exactly, and I wonder WTF they are thinking as well.

Let's put it this way.

NO ONE WILL HAVE TO PAY MONEY FOR REVAMPING AZEROTH.

that's the 4.0 patch, which will be part of the game, for free.

In addition to that...there will be an expansions worth of content, some zones will be on azeroth and some will be underwater, how is that hard to understand?

It's not hard to understand at all. It's the OMG TALK. It's not that fucking exciting. When they release possible talk about expansions, the last thing I expect to hear is that they are gonna rehash shit.

Plus, you don't know. WE don't know. Nobody knows. It's that awesome force of ignorance right before the announcements.

Nothing that's been released, mostly because mapping projects that require more than one person are a complete waste of time because one of the modders is going to turn out to be a complete wanker and give up (so I don't even try beyond submitting a script or what have you).  However, conflicts in map work is handled significantly more smoothly than code is (I presume you are a coder or web developer), due to the nature of heightmaps (terrain data is stored as [x,y,z] and no [x,y] pair can have a duplicate, not can there be two [z] values, ergo you cannot use one to make vertical surfaces, the slope between any grid reference and the adjacent references is easily extrapolated as a real number, and any conflicts result in one set of data being overwritten by the other and the editor simply extrapolating where the two sets of data meet without overlap).  The compile progress is stupid easy for every program I've seen heightmaps used in, you literally just load the files and save it to a third, and in the case of Bethesda's games precedence is determined by date last edited (which can be modified by a hex editor if you want a specific load order).

For these reasons, it is best practice to build the heightmap first and then populate it with doodads.  If you want I could build you a quick example of heightmap conflicts being merged at runtime, however if you've ever played a Fallout, Oblivion, or Morrowind mod which changes the landscape you've already seen it, and it's predictably boring.


Because they don't actually need to be anything other than flyover areas until Blizzard decides that they may want to do something special with it?  Because it's almost as equally trivial to populate it with ore/herb nodes and call it a resource gathering area?  Really, dig out one of Blizzard's world maps and see what kind of area there is left to work with, there isn't much, and the only really large sections remaining are places like Gilneas. (:why_so_serious:)

Also, I've seen my character fall through the world on several different occasions, this does not mean the geometry is at fault (I've only ever seen it occur due to server / client desynchonization, as far as I can tell).  The biggest indicator that it is a collision problem is whether the circumstances of the failure can be reproduced, however this is not necessarily indicative of a problem with the geometry (correlation vs. causation).


Diablo II. :awesome_for_real:

There's a lot of empty places in WoW, you fly over them all the time.  People bitch about them, but they haven't quit yet.

EDIT: I should stop talking, I might inadvertently convince myself that Blizzard is actually ever going to do this.

Anyone who uses the word "Easy" to describe any aspect of game development, let alone MMO development, does not know what they are talking about.

What empty space have I flown over in Northrend or Outlands? There're pretty much something going on within draw distance of everything. I've yet to see "wide open empty field"

You keep missing the "populate with doodads" thing, which I still consider empty, because it's non-interactive.  Just like the vast majority of mountainous shelves that exist in the aforementioned expansions, and the existing flyover areas on the old world flight paths.  Incidentally, the vast majority of the completely untouched flat sections of the old world would be in mountain ranges if they were made into anything (see DraconianOne's video post).


Mythic Entertainment. :awesome_for_real:

Seriously, try modding for yourself, it isn't hard at all if the available tools are good.  Jayce is in fact correct in the assertion that the overhead is often worse than the actual development, I just disagree that the overhead would be onerous in this case.

The comments about the Council of Tirisfal in the few pages of the new World of Warcraft comic seem to confirm part of the story, at least the fact that there's presumably going to be a new Guardian.  This seems pretty likely to be largely accurate, or at least partly accurate, given that.

It's interesting and a somewhat interesting shift in the story, though it comes with it's usual story stupidity as they force the story into ways the characters wouldn't really go.  I agree though that the whole emphasizing the conflict between Alliance and Horde seems stupid since unless they start really expanding pvp areas on all servers (which I don't see them doing and with good reason) any war between the two factions is a stupid backdrop that doesn't penetrate into normal gameplay.

I have no idea if I'm ever going to play WoW again, but although I find some of this content interesting (and I always wanted to make a Night Elf Mage) this doesn't really seem to get me interested in playing at all.  Of course, by the time it releases probably mid to late next year that may or may not have changed.  Although I personally hope I'm not interested at the time cause if I am it means every other game between now and then has failed to hold my interest.  Still, if I wasn't tired of the game itself, a complete revamp of Azeroth would really get me excited.

Unless you do Battlegrounds. Or Wintergrasp. Or want your black war bear. Or are hanging around a capital city when the opposite faction decides it wants black war bears. Or play on a PVP server.

On a PvP server, the world PvP is largely confined to bored overgeared players massing up to gank solos who are fighting mobs.  Sometimes the PvPers even spice it up by going after people who are close to their level, but only if their numbers/class/gear disparity guarantees them a win.  You know, how PvP usually goes in an open environment.

Sometimes you'll see fighting around a summoning stone, but it's largely pointless around raid stones, as a warlock will fly in, make a TV, and start chain summoning the raid.  Very rarely it gets more interesting around 5 man instances, mostly not though.

Not that long ago, maybe a month, an alliance guild "took over" Orgrimar for a few hours.  Nobody on the horde side noticed, or even cared.  Except that one guy who was trying to turn in his quest to Thrall.  He was kind of pissed.

I don't even regard battlegrounds to be PvP, they're mark dispensing mini-games that are then used to convert to honor so I can buy gems.  Oh boy.  Regrettably, I have to rely on my team to get three marks, rather than the usual one.  WG is a big honor dispenser.  Black war bear is largely a PvE event, it only gets interesting in Stormwind/Org.  Sometimes Ironforge.  The rest of the cities are entirely PvE, as no one even is there to put up a fight.

What exactly would you say IS pvp? short of true death it's got just about every flavor of it to some extent.

"I don't know why they would want to put a war in the story. Just because the game has two factions, and organized mini-games dedicated to getting them to kill each other, and rewards them for doing so, and encourages them to kill each other's faction leaders. I mean what the hell. When I signed up for World of Warcraft I expected a game about the Horde and Alliance learning to get along peacefully while teaming up to kill the REAL threat, whatever loot pinata is new this patch cycle!"

Yeah, no.

PvP that matters in some way.  Such as DAoC's relic system.  Yeah, it was flawed, but it mattered.  More importantly, it mattered in a way that didn't cripple the losing side, and gave incentive for the side without relics to try to get them back.  Of course, there were problems with it, mostly population, but it was more meaningful than anything in WoW.

None of the PvP in WoW matters, not a single bit.  At most, it inconveniences a few people because they can't do a quest turn-in to an NPC that's been PvEed down.  Or you have to run back to your corpse, and then possibly wait five minutes for Ganker McJackass to get bored with waiting for you to show back up.

AV is a hilarious example of a "PvP" BG gone utterly wrong.  The "correct" way to play it is to avoid the other side entirely, and turn it into a PvE race of "who can down towers the fastest?"  Since most people are there for rewards (honor, maybe marks) it is actually beneficial to win a mark every 10 minutes, rather than doing some "awesome" PvP turtle that turns into an hour long grind down of reinforcements... and generally ends up in being one mark anyway, if you're horde on Nightfall.

I'm on a PvP server with medium pop.  Nobody cares if Thrall is getting killed, and as for the other cities?  Forget it.  There's maybe a few RPers in Silvermoon, or lowbies in TB or UC, but no one is going to bother to roll out to try to battle it out with roughly 40 enemies who really just want to get an achievement out of the way, and won't hesitate to run you down if your name shows up red to them.

I certainly wouldn't mind WoW becoming more PvP oriented, but so far their Big Ideas have been zone bonuses no one gives a damn about, or control of a zone that gives special currency when you kill heroic bosses, and access to multiple loot pinatas.  Except they messed up and made it the best honor/hour, and everyone wanted in on it as often as possible.

Wintergrasp and to a lesser extent the spirit towers in terrokar introduced tangible benefits to wow pvp. The difference between that and daoc's keep relics? just a matter of which stats get buffed and what those benefits are but it's essentially that same system.  The thing is, in daoc that's about all there was to do and lets face it, the game was never widely popular.  At the end of the day, people just don't care that much about real world objectives and even interesting they'd get boring after a while. 

PvP purity in online games will always be niche because even for people like me who enjoy it, most simply don't want to have to deal with it every single time they log on. Whether in the form of a debuff because another realm owns the foozle or by getting ganked when they just want to finish a quest it tends to annoying after a while.

Now, that said I think wow could use a lot of improvement in their pvp, I actually liked warhammers pvp level system or how about making battlegrounds useful or giving team based objectives that multiply honor.  Maybe make the wintergrasp buff more tangibnle or pvp rewards in general but the basic systems wow already has in place are pretty much all you're ever going to expect from an online game.

You mean like how Wintergrasp opens up a dungeon and provides the side that controls the zone the ability to get extra Stone Keeper Shards which can be turned in for items?

The question is, how could you make things like Wintergrasp and the spirit towers available at all times.  Those actually do work to a certain extend, but you only get them every few hours, it would be (theoretically) nice to be able to log on at any time and have meaningful PvP going on.   I realize the shitty things that come with this idea though, such as whoever can sleep the least, or have people on  in the middle of the night, etc.    I don't expect to see this in WoW, but if someone can manage it, maybe its blizzard.

It also depends on the tools and resources available. Something like Redridge could be done in a couple hours in the Dungeon Siege engine, but I hear WoW's editor (which is different from the WC3 editor) is a bit more cludgey.

I was kind of vague in that post, but I did address this.  Yes, that's sort of nice, but it's only available if you log on when WG is starting or in progress.  Access to VoA is meh, since it's a once a week instance with two loot pinatas.  Stonekeeper shards are either achievement fodder, or currency for pvp items, which is also, at least in my opinion, meh.

Don't get me wrong, I think WG is a good first step, despite my earlier scorn.  I just want there to be -more- PvP.  Although I'm currently a borderline catass raider at the moment, I wouldn't mind having decent PvP options open that weren't BGs that are broadly disorganized PUGs.  (And I could go off on a completely unrelated rant here on how it makes me seethe that BG players can't seem to grasp simple concepts such as "leave one person, at least, at each node in AB" despite repeated requests that someone, anyone, please for the love of god just go guard a node, you useless tools.)

I played DAoC for 5 years, and only did PvE if there were new loots that would benefit me in PvP, or if I was leveling a char to PvP with.  Often as not, my guild would just haul me out to RvR to level up regardless.  It just doesn't feel as possible in WoW, particularly since all PvP, aside from World (which is a complete joke, in my opinion) is very much built around the "carnival ride" model.  Where not only must you be "this tall" to ride, but you have to stand in line just to get on the ride.  I'd much rather PvP be more open to simply joining when I want, rather than sitting in a queue for up to 30 minutes while I wonder if maybe I shouldn't just log off instead.

Apparently, there will be a playable demo of Cataclysm at Blizzcon. Probably one of the two starter zones.

Source?

One of the same people who leaked the whole thing previously.

You mean aside from the time it takes to do the concept art, writing, itemization, quest implementation, QA and all the hours spent in design meetings? And then of course each of those tasks gets atleast two iterations. That's time and money, too. Redridge probably took 500 manhours or more to do and that equates to just 3 guys over a month, which seems really novel in the grand scheme of an MMO. I'm betting a lot more time went into it. WoW as a whole took what, four years to make, with hundreds of team members? Good tools are indeed important (for the sanity of your employees, if nothing else), but they do generally not make or break a deadline.

Also, don't forget a fundamental rule of project management; make an initial time estimation, then double it.

Then add another 20%.

Yes.

Sheepherder says you're wrong.

Anyway, we'll know in 24 hours or something.

You're missing the point, I think.  The problem is that this stuff you're talking about is all already in the game.  The game wherein we are allegedly not at war.  Koyasha's (I think) arguing against using the war as an irrelevent background set piece.  You're arguing "but I can do PvP now," which doesn't really address the problem that if there was a major (presumably) PvP development in the storyline without a major development in the PvP gameplay, a lot of players would see it as a pointless story event at best, and a cop-out at worst.  What would be the point of saying "We're at war" if there's no accompanying change to gameplay?  I get that you like BGs and stuff, but it's not like they'd somehow become different or better because the lore says they matter now.

Personally, I'm not saying that I don't want war in Warcraft.  I'm saying I don't want it as an irrelevant background event, a kind of "Oh, by the way, you guys are at war now, BUT NOW ON TO THE IMPORTANT STUFF: NEW RAID ENCOUNTER ONYXIA XVIII REVENGE OF THE REVENGE OF FIRE DEATH MOUNTAIN: THE REVENGE WILL NOW DROP EPIC FUSCHIA SWORD 2% MORE OFTEN"  So far, PvP has been extremely limited to prevent Horde from dicking around with Alliance levelling.  It would take a pretty major change to have the PvP be anything but this, and I don't see this change coming along as a rider to a major PvE expansion.  I wouldn't mind being proven wrong about that.  What I would mind is expecting people to give a shit about being at war when you can't actually do anything about it in the game.

Blizzard's lore logic is completely ridiculous as background, and I think we all know it. I mean the recent iteration of content makes absolutely no sense.

Jaina: "A huge threat looms in Icecrown. The Lich King could strike us down with his horrible undead armies. Our armies are also depleted after dealing with Yogg-Saron. What should we do to stop the apocalypse and turn the tide against Arthas?

Tirion: "We shall build...A REN-FAIRE!"

Yeah, that's a considerable part of it.  How would they make 'being at war' significantly different than 'not being at war'?  Because if it's not, then the change in the story is meaningless backdrop.  Unless war starts spilling out into the rest of the world regularly, allowing and encouraging people to fight outside of battlegrounds and other ultra-contained locations, then being at war is remarkably similar to not being at war.

WoW would make sense with more pvp, would make sense as a pvp-centric game, but it's not and probably never will be (if they're smart, which they are).  So being 'at war' isn't going to change the gameplay for the vast majority of players one bit, which means it's going to mean squat to people when it comes down to it.  There will still be battlegrounds, still be wintergrasp and whatever comes out of it in the future, and so on, so being at war will be meaningless.  On the upside, at least this expansion won't squeeze Horde and Alliance into the same city, which is one of the most incredibly retarded facets of both existing expansions.

The ren-faire thing is idiotic, but it almost kinda makes sense when you think about how the Lich King specifiically works.  I commented on this myself at one point, but someone made a good point.  When fighting him, you don't want to bring an army, you want to bring those who are least likely to die at all, so you don't have an army that shifts the balance two in favor of the enemy every time one of your soldiers dies.  So yeah, making sure only the strongest and most capable are sent against the Lich King is reasonable, even if they way they're going about it is utterly, completely moronic.

QFT

the time to QA all these changes makes me suspect this isn't real. 

There's gonna be a new battleground or two, and some Wintergraspy type of world objective. If you're looking for more than that, you're playing the wrong game. My point is that if you're going to have those things, trying to paint the two sides as not being at war is flamingly fucking idiotic and has been driving me nuts for years.

It's not actually possible to get any easier than the War III editor.  However, when a developer sacrifices ease of use they normally do it for the sake of other features, namely the ability to do large portions of work at once, or to allow for exceedingly fine detail work.  Shooters generally get the latter treatment, sprawling RPG's generally get the former.  A good example of the first approach is the heightmap import tools in Oblivion, which imports a bitmap and uses it to generate a heightmap; which allows interoperability with a number of fractal terrain generators as well as allowing the use of image manipulation software to generate terrain at a pace much faster than the editor's tools, yet with comparable detail.


Because you don't need concept art, writing, itemization, or quests to flatten a path out from Menethil Harbor to the WIP super-sekret back entrance to Ironforge which I checked out on my private realm.  But how's your day?

EDIT: Former/Latter made no fucking sense, I shouldn't post after a mostly sleepless night of fucking with databases combined with beer.

I agree, this is the wrong game to find more than that.  Thing is, story-wise it sounds like they're painting this as a huge, significant change.  So what I'm saying is that's damn silly, because 'more of the same' doesn't equal 'massive lore changes' and Horde shifting from 'cold war' sort of status to full war.

Why is it so hard to imagine that instead of killing 10 Naga, we'll Kill 10 Horde NPC Invaders?

The amazing thing to me is that as ridiculous as much of the storyline is, they manage to make it simultaneously relevant, compelling and unimportant.  I really get a kick out of the stories told by the lore, and being able to live in the world, while at the same time realizing it would fall apart without the highest level of willing suspension of disbelief I can muster.

That presents two possibillities, neither of which works well.  Either the NPCs are pvp flagged. So killing them triggers your pvp flag, in which case people will complain they can't do their quests without going pvp, or they won't be pvp flagged, and the infuriating occurence of people killing those on your side without you being able to do anything about it becomes a centerpiece.  There's some of that already, like in Ashenvale with unflagged Horde and Alliance NPC's, but that tends to be minimal and marginalized in the current game.  An entire expansion based around it would be annoying to anyone who tries to have a "side identity" whenn they play Horde or Alliance.

I'm not saying it would be hard to imagine, just that it would suck (see also: Warhammer PvE, complaints about).

Draconian, you need to get a new video.  I was screwing around today on my realm, and the wanker who made that missed some of the really fucking extreme shit, you were in fact dead right.  Blizzard quite literally has enough space for several expansions left in the old world.

As a side note, it looks like large sections were simply cut from release, because some of places are quite complete for a couple hundred feet and then just stop in a massive wall created by a flatten brush.  It may be that some work was actually destroyed in the process on the live servers in order to fit raids but still lives in archives (Hyjal, AQ, and ZG show signs of pretty serious but abandoned development, in the latter two cases behind where the instance portal lies).

So we're back to saying that randomly filling in unoccupied space would be acceptable? I thought we had moved past that idea. That's a gain of absolutely nothing, because those that can fly have no real business on the old continents. That's just unnecessary tampering with working content.

You're going to have to explain to me how "filling in unoccupied space" is the least bit objectionable, because you've lost me.  As I recall, that's what expansion do, among other things, none of which are precluded by building in the old world.

Secondly, it does in fact need to get tampered with, because the old world has no actual purpose now except leveling, and that purpose is constantly being eroded as Blizzard needs to nerf leveling time in order to tack on their brand new big cockblocky leveling grind at the end without utterly fucking crushing the souls of everyone who rolls a brand new character because they're friend tossed them an invite.

One guy populating an area equals randomly filling in, because you have no fine control over the collective result. Almost exclusively it gives a biased and uneven result with small hints of personal brilliance. The opposite is a team planning, conceptualizing and then implementing an area to a set standard. The latter takes a lot of time and effort.

I'm beyond using time and effort as a reason not to do something anymore. The people who like the idea simply don't care. The main point now is that's it's stupid. The old world should be shot to shit. We've stomped it into the ground. The game is 5 years old and more popular than any MMO has ever been. The lore is pointless and there's no reason to hang around on some meaningless rock. Don't try to sell me that we can't just invent a new island in 20 minutes with some fun stuff on it that wouldn't be spread into a patchwork of odd redone zones.

What I'm getting from this is: "burn the old world to the motherfucking ground!"

It might just be the alcohol or the building of databases talking, but I like the concept of redoing it.  I fucking loved so much of the level 60 game (and hated a good portion of it, too), but it will never be the same, and pretending like it still has value as level 60 endgame content is just retarded.  However, pretending that we won't appreciate it if it's done well, without all the old circa 2004 cockstab, is going too far.  Really though, the way Blizzard has built their game something has to give, and I'd sooner it be the old world than them deciding we get to shoot out into space and kill more demons again, because the premise of that was pretty fucking stupid when they first came up with it.

Inventing a new island every expansion or yet another undiscovered continent....is fucking EQ stupid.

Azeroth has a moon right?  :grin:

There's potential here

... for a realm-wide 'collect billion ore and shit so the gnomes can build giant cannon that can shoot all way to the moon' quest. :grin:

Upon impact the characters should die, then find out there's no spirit healer on the moon.  It'd be hilarious.

With the announcement expected today, the official site is now listing the Azeroth map as "outdated". :ye_gods:

Cataclysm: So long and thanks for all the fish.

The lore is fucked up beyond reason by this. Isn't Thrall personally responsible for the Taurens being in the Horde? With him leaving, you don't even need the Assassination being public knowledge for them to say "Fuck those warmongers" and be neutral.

Good thing nobody plays for the Lore anymore. They would kill themself!  :awesome_for_real:

I doubt the assassination will be blamed on anyone but the alliance.

So Cairne is called a traitor to the Horde and the Alliance kills him? Plot holes you could ride a Kodo through  :why_so_serious:

Who the fuck is Cairne? I swear you guys are just making this all up.  

tee hee hee

See?!  The Alliance is so treacherous all that talk of 'peace' and 'coexistance' that swayed Cairne was just a trick so they could kill him!  Garrosh was right all along!

We aren't, Blizzard is.

Cairn Bloodhoof is/was the leader of the Tauren faction, the one that befriended Thrall and united the Tauren tribes.

I think you're reading too much into the spoiler. I think it's going to go along the lines of

~Cairne wants peace, starts pushing for it.

~Garrosh being the full-on retard he is goes and calls cairne a traitor(i doubt there will be witnesses)

~Battle ensues, Garrosh wins using his retard strength but needs to keep it a secret or taurens leave the horde.

~Alliance gets blamed for the murder as an excuse for war.

Sheep....

(http://i29.tinypic.com/bhlwd3.jpg)

The rumors were dead spot-on.  Only thing missing was the new progression path and guild leveling.

Yup.  A couple of added tidbits from a live blogging I'm following:

"Guild leveling system. Path of the titans character progression."

But yeah, old world redesign, flying in old world, Goblins to Horde, Worgen to Alliance (because they were attacked by the Forsaken when the Greymane Wall came down, heh), it's all confirmed.

(http://i30.tinypic.com/35bui3d.png)

Oh, apparently there's a new profession coming too: Archeology.  No description given but I'm guessing it'll be related somehow to finding and/or using Titan artifacts.

New Desolace!  Big improvement!

Need more screenshots, but the changes seem to go from 'meh lava' to 'Whee, whole new look!'.  Tanaris and Desolace being the winners in my book.

The most interesting thing to me that I don't think I saw before the confirmation just now is "path of the titans" billed as a new advancement path.  Translation: WoW gets AA abilities, at least from what I can imagine.

Official site is up. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/)
(http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/_images/screenshots/ss1.jpg)
Night Elf:  Well fuck.

Gnome priests.  :awesome_for_real:

Gilneas looks like Sherlock Holmes era rainy/fog London.  Nice.

Oh, and one of the screenshots has a Worgen wearing the Druid T8 set so it's probably safe to say Worgen can be Druids.

I am never going to hear the end of this from my roommate.  He's PM'ing me about how ridiculous it all is. :awesome_for_real:

HEROIC DEADMINES

 :drill:

Godfuckingdammit.

Okay, so you want war, fine.  Not the optimal way, I'd say, but whatever.

But I still hope to God that the shit about Garrosh and Cairne is false.  Don't make me follow that drooling douche into battle.  Don't "Assassinate" Cairne to goad us into war, because we, the players, are going to know what's going on, and being forced to do stupid shit for an asshole we don't like because our characters don't know something that we do... that's fucking annoying in every game I've ever seen try to pull it off.

So far, Thrall is still listed as Warchief.

Also:

And Shadowfang!

There's a faq page up on that Cataclysm page that gives more details on the expansion.  The 'omg I want new zones' people will be happy to see that the Worgen/Goblin starter zones of Gilneas/Lost Islands will be brand new, and have a phasing progression similar to the DK starting area.  We'll also be seeing Uldum, Grim Batol and "the great sunken city of Vashj'ir" and at least one new Wintergrasp type PvP zone.

Oh, hi, you must play Horde.

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3293/2889762438_516ef16d55.jpg)

And the Elemental Planes.

Except for his anime hair, Varian Wrynn is awesome.

Our best hopes (and some people's worst fears) are confirmed, it's going to be pretty much what the rumors say. All I can say is SUH-WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!

http://www.wow.com/2009/08/21/blizzcon-2009-opening-ceremony-live-blog/

Edit: pewp, I'm late again... :heartbreak:

Sure, if your definition of "awesome" is "insane PTSD-ridden ex-gladiator with almost no backstory who starts a war in the middle of an undead invasion", yes, he's totally awesome.

 :heartbreak:

 :mob:

edit: thread going fast

DK style phase-progression starter zones for the new races has you heartbroken and angry...  why?  :headscratch:

So Gamasutra says they announced "Ranked Team Multiplayer"... isn't that Arena?

Apparently rated BGs are coming, too.

Mass resurrection guild ability - interesting.

And they can phase terrain.

Archaeology is a secondary skill, not a profession, and is used in the Path of the Titans AA  system.

No, they announced ranked BGs.
---

From THE EVIL GOON TROLLS,

Best Deals Anywhere, always receive the best possible gold discount, regardless of faction.
Better Living Through Chemistry, Alchemy skill increased by 15.
Pack Hobgoblin, Instant, 30 minute cooldown, Calls in your personal servant, allowing you bank access for 1 min.
Rocket Barrage, 30 yd range, Instant, 2 min cooldown, Launches your belt rockets at an enemy, dealing 30 fire damage.
Rocket Jump, instant, 2 min cooldown, activates your rocket belt to jump forward.
Time is Money, cash in on a 1% increase to attack and casting speed.


Two Forms, instant, 1.5 sec cooldown, Turn into your currently inactive form.
Darkflight, instant, 3 min cooldown, activates your true form increasing movement speed by 70% for 10 sec
Viciousness, passive, increases all damage done by 1%.
Flayer, passive, skinning skill increased by 15 and allows you to skin faster.

---

Fahey:  There will be 20 Guild Levels. With awesome new perks . There will be a guild talent tree.
    Fahey:  Slower durability loss, cheaper repairs, mass ressurection after a wipe. Just an example of Guild talent tree perks. Wow. Impressive.
"Classic world revamp of every zone with updated quests, art and items. Going through the old world with a new character will be a new experience. No more Agility/Spirit boot quest rewards."

Just the ONE TO FIFTEEN part that irks me.

Hopefully 'instead of' rather than 'too'.
Because the Arena is fucking terrible and should never have been added.

Ashenvale going to the Horde is neat. New races, that's cool, new newbie areas sounds fun. Redoing Desolace is NOT. That is my favorite zone, as is, and should not ever never ever be fucked with.

Fuck.

Regarding that "doing stuff for people we don't like," I felt that way shocking baby gorillas for the mean ol' Wolvars just so I could eventually be friends with the happy slappy Oracles. Hated that. I knew how it was going to end, no need to make me pretend to go on some journey of self discovery.

I wish this would go down like the SWG NGE, but alas, not bloody likely.

You are a bad person and possibly a felon.

There's a reason why I'm not a betting man... and all I can say is that I am liking this announcement a lot.

Also, Heroic SFK is fucking awesome.  I love that instance.

Someone liked Desolace?

Desolace is the only zone in the game that doesn't feel like a slip-n-slide theme park where Blizzard grabs you by the scruff of the neck and goes "LEVEL NOW ZOOM K DONE NEXT ZONE."

More interested by this expansion that I was by TBC and WotLK.
Racials seem a bit WAY THE FUCK BETTER than any other racial available, save for heroic presence.


Ya mean like how there's a demonic field smack dab in the middle of nowhere for no proper reason?

Because...demons do that sometimes? For whatever reason, forget the lore, I just want a big open empty space to inhabit.

Night Elves are definitely in a bad way with Darkshore getting flooded out, Astranaar getting destroyed and losing at least a big chunk of Ashenvale to the Horde.  Teldrassil is still corrupted as far as I know.  That doesn't leave them much.

Fuck night elves.

Fuck them hard.

I think you mean the guy who got fed up with the Horde's ever-repeating "Totally valid excuse for why our guys did something horrible to you THIS time!" routine and just decided to say fuck it.

(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.wow.com/media/2009/08/ah082209catmapsmall.jpg)

New map.  

Notable new zones:  Mount Hyjal, Twlight Highlands, Vashjr, Uldum, Deepholm.

1:10PM Southshore has been lost to the Horde. "Nobody was defending it."  HAH!

Anywhere Blizzard feels like putting a group of Shadow Council/Cultists there should basically be a sign that says "Here Be Demons".  Cultists can be any race and exist anywhere without much lore stretching and worshiping the Burning Legion / summoning demons is basically their whole deal.

Hmmm...  Goblin DKs?


I'd play one.

EDIT: This just in - underwater mounts.

Funny, 'cause it was the one zone where I wish it was LEVEL NOW ZOOM K DONE NEXT ZONE.  (Well, it and Nintendo Crater.)

Counterpoint: This then lead directly to Warchief Hellscream and then the Alliance losing Ashenvale and Southshore (and God only knows what else). Garrosh is just as big a cock as Wrynn, but at least he's getting results.

Seriously?  My Engineer's been waiting for that, cool.  

I really really love the direction they have taken this expansion. Significant changes to the old world is something I've hoped to see for a long time. Love the look of the Worgen and their town.

Guess they might be the only way to get to the new underwater zone.

If the race class spoilers (http://www.wow.com/2009/08/21/blizzcon-2009-live-blogging-the-cataclysm-new-starter-zones/) are correct, I'll be making a Worgen Rogue and Goblin Shaman.  Book it.  Done.

Hopefully they'll be increasing character slots too then.

Yeah, it'll just be a totally Horde map with Alliance doing nothing but leveling to 20 in Westfall and quitting. In that same imaginary version of WoW you play where the evil Alliance attacked the Forsaken JUST FOR BEING WHO THEY AAAAARE. Meanwhile in everyone else's game there will presumably be some other territory turnover elsewhere to keep the content more or less balanced.

Enjoy your yiff piles btw

:awesome_for_real:

In other news, new battleground - Battle for Gilneas.  Takes place in streets of the city with the goal of capturing districts.

Whatever the main Inn is for the Worgen starting area will easily replace the Goldshire Inn as the most creepy and disturbing thing in WoW as soon as Cataclysm launches. :cthulu:

Their lore is held together by liberal amounts of duct tape and the occasional use of a shoe horn.

What's ironic about this is the Forsaken are attacking the Worgen just for being who they are.  :-P

You'd attack them on sight too...

(http://www.tailslap.com/furry/rainfurrest0-2007/slides/DSC_1474.JPG)

For the alliance!

Alliance Levelling Path post-expansion:

1-10 Elwynn Forest
11-20 Westfall
21 /ragequit

Alliance will still be 5 years behind the Horde in yiffing.  I'm sure the Tauren will be happy to share tips.

I dunno, something tells me that somehow things will work out such that the two factions still split the world more or less exactly 50/50. Call it a hunch.  :oh_i_see:


Bet they're rerolls.

No Murlocs as a player race. Expansionfail.

This is second-hand info so keep that in mind:

You know I always liked that tauren pic, there was a big stink about it when they took it off the main fanart page and I have to say there's a lot more explicit belf/draenei stuff on there.   Truth is though tauren are not/never have been sexy, as it stands they're maybe the least played horde race still so any appeal they would have to the furry community is small at best.

Worgen on the otherhand...well, I can't say I'll feel sorry, we had to deal with belfs.

False.  Tauren were almost inarguably the best tank race for all of Vanilla and TBC thanks to an AOE stun and more importantly, their bonus health modifier.  They are currently the third most popular after Belfs and Undead.  The least-popular race is by far Troll.

I would be thinking the same choices.  I'll have to think on it some more.  At least I have a name for my Goblin saved already.

*edits previous post to replace merely risque pic with Tauren yiff porn*
*includes innocent "adding NSFW tag, sorry" to explain the edit*
*quotes your post about how you "like that tauren pic" for posterity*

 :oh_i_see:

Oh, and assuming all the leaked new class/race combinations are for real, I'll roll either a human hunter or a goblin... something. Now that they're giving the Horde some testicles again, why not?

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/

Official site is up, from the FAQ:

The combinations are real.  WoW Site (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/features/).

well, wow indeed.  Good for them, huge changes.  Have fun.


Edit: how do you all know this lore?  I mean, folks complain about LotRO (deservedly), but this stuff seems way more complicated (more retcon).

So Varian's warmongering ways will result in no power gain whatsoever?

Also, I can and should say that you were completely correct about what would happen. Bravo.

Of course not. Now we can just frag each other without a lot of fappery about "a tenuous truce" going on in the background.


It's all about who punks who. Garrosh was getting the better of Thrall when they broke it up, but the brief Varian/Garrosh scuffle was carefully devised to give no favor to either one. I had a strong hunch when I saw the first, and knew it when I saw the second.

Fuuuuuuck.

I enjoy wow for the WC3-related bits.  I'll run around, get lots of SSs of the world as-is and then quit after I've killed Arthas, I guess.

AAs in wow? Fuck that noise, half the fun is NOT having to play one character exclusively so you have x# of "required" AA abilities/ points.  I can't see this being a good thing in the end.

The talent changes sound interesting, but they should have realized that 3 years ago when people were complaining about 'required' talents.  At the least they should have done so with the last revamp when they ALSO said they were focusing on trying to remove 'required' talents.

Meh.

Okay, so I just watched the trailer. Funny, I was thinking all these years of playing WoW, I enjoyed so many zones that weren't all filled with lava and craters and chasms and OMG EXTREEM DESTRUCTION. And...okay so they poured lava and craters and chasms into every zone. Makes me sadf. I shall look for player-run classic shards when this happens.

Can I have your stuff?

some of those zones were very purty indeed.  Actually, when you consider the palette and shaders etc. they have to work with many of those zones were/are incredible.

WoW.com is reporting that there are no new character slots.

As for the Path of the Titans stuff I doubt it's very much in the EQ2 vein.

I think most(if not all) of the lava zone shots were the barrens. I believe only three-four of the revamped zones are actually finished.

I saw a human wearing a Top Hat!

No, seriously - when you said that you like Desolace you lost all right to complain about WoW's content.

Have yet to see female worgen models, cause the lowbie preview allows only males, but the concept art was definitely hot, not unattractive like tauren, so I expect them to be more popular by far.

I haven't seen any Female Worgen art either way, where did you see it?

dougwinger.com

No loss there.  That zone can die in a fire.

Although I guess this means my Loremaster titles will be unobtainable on the rest of my characters.  And with no more slots, they want me to get another account >(  Any idea when all of this is supposed to actually be remotely kindasorta close to release?  I know it's Blizzard and all, so I take it with a grain of salt.

I figure sometime mid next-year.  Icecrown should pop up around December, giving a good 5-6 months of farming that before moving on to patch 4.0.

You are wrong for not liking big vacant areas!!!

(http://static.velvetcache.org/pages/2007/5/25/its-a-trap/tarp-30198.jpg)

Um, some minor stat changes in the pipeline.  :why_so_serious:

In the current panel, GC is a nuclear bomb laying motherfucker.

-Arpen, spellpower, attack power, block value, defense, and mp5 are all going away.  Mp5 is all becoming spirit, every tank is getting a -crit talent, attack power is just gone, block value is just gone, int raises your spellpower now, arpen is replaced with 'Mastery'.
-Haste will make melee regen energy etc faster, not attack faster.  Works same as always for casters.
-Hunters are going back to Focus.  No more mana.

There's more at the Usual Sources, but...yeah.  No cow is too sacred.

They'll rework the Achievements for that, I wouldn't worry.




Also, fuck yes to the stat changes.

It's not WoW II, but it's shaping up to be WoW 2.0

Good times.

Glad to see stats that were basically added in as a for-the-hardcore afterthought late in BC (Haste and Armor Pen) are getting a full working-over.

They've been hinting at that for a while now.  What with GC contantly being called on not knowing how it all relates and also saying, "Well shouldn't that stat matter for <class/ spec> as much as <actual required stat>"  pretty often in the last few months. (I.e. arpen on Unholy DKs vs Stacking straight STR and crit)

The stat system was just getting utterly retarded.


My Balance druid has half a dozen talents that convert X stat into Y stat.

There was a brief glimpse of it during the slides they showed when they announced worgen at opening ceremonies.

I think the best thing is that they actually made Worgen furries.  Hilarious.  I can't help but think what that meeting was like.

Technically they're less furry than Tauren, since Worgen can change back into Human form.  :raspberry:

That just makes it worse in the end, since they'll just mix and match.

I now trademark the term wor-cock  :awesome_for_real:

Very happy the rumors are true!  Even though I've always wanted to play a goblin, I am pretty sure I'm going to roll Worgen right off the bat.  I want to see Gilneas (which looks cool as shit so far) and do that whole storyline.  The Lost Island isn't grabbing me, plus it will be chock full of har har Lost TV show references.  OMG I bet there will be a hatch!

Revamped Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep?  Yes please!  I've always wondered why SFK wasn't more popular.  

Strange we are only getting 5 new levels though.  Path of the Titans makes me think 'solo raiding' for some reason. Whatever that means.   Expect cockblocks aplenty!

I'm a bit bummed that Azeroth is changing, I guess I'm one of those guys who enjoys hunting for Mankirk's wife over and over.
But if they allow flying right off the bat it might help me get over it.

Hate to have to join the genocidal Alliance, but what can ya do.   :awesome_for_real:

http://www.wowhead.com/?zone=3711#screenshots:id=113230

I guarantee you that Mankrik's wife will still be lost, and that there will be some new form of that quest. Too famous to lose it. Now you'll just have to rescue her remains from a lava pit or some such.

Oh yeah forgot about that.

It'll be a CoT instance, the Bronze Dragon flight needs you to go back in time and make sure she dies.  :oh_i_see:

It was her sacrifice that inspired a young warrior who will one day bring slay deathwing.

Gah. I bet it's glyphs 2 Electric Bogaloo. Take the required optional stuff to make your character a better tank/dps/heal and then forget about it.

The stat changes are going to make gear some real boring shit.

Basically it's a "we fucking give up trying to itemize. Fuck you"

Armor pen, Mp5 (well this is good, was kinda confusing), spellpower, defense, etc are gone.

So basically it'll be

[generic thing of bad design]
+250 STR
+233 STA

And I guess you just magically get all your stats from that regardless of what you need as a warrior/dk/pally (holy OR ret)/etc.

It was sorely needed for casters, with most caster stats just being 'along for the ride' currently.

Might be boring for the actuaries over at EJ forums, but for the average schmoe there's too many stats and caps to consider when trying to decide if piece A is better than B.  I often enjoy playing the game, but have no desire to spend a ton of time theorycrafting.  It takes away from my experience of the game. 

Hopefully this reigns this in a bit. 

There's still Haste and Critical Strike.  That said, most of the items I look at as a Discipline Priest are:

[contemporary generic thing of bad design]
+100 Stamina
+100 Intellect
+80 Spirit (or +40 MP5)
+120 Spell Power
+50 Critical Strike (or Haste) Rating

All this does is collapse the regen stats into one, and combines Intellect and Spell Power.  Yay for:

[new generic thing of bad design]
+200 Stamina
+160 Intellect
+160 Spirit
+100 Critical Strike (or Haste) Rating

Progress!

Still got to worry about hit, right?  Splendid.  Such a boring stat.

Defense being gone is an extremely good thing.  Unless you go looking outside the game, you will find no indication as to how vitally important defense is to a tank or how the attack table works.

Nor would you have any idea how much defense you would need to begin with, since the 'cap' is so bloody arbitrary.

Holy fuck.  When rumors of Worgen started surfacing I didn't consider the possibility that everyone at Blizzard went completely batshit insane.

EDIT: The defense cap isn't arbitrary, it's directly related to the notion that a level grants 0.2% crit reduction and the base chance to be crit by a mob in melee is 5%.  It's just not listed anywhere in-game.

Everyone ELSE is crazy.   :why_so_serious:

Signs of that were evident when a big glowing pink crystal spaceship loaded with blue people speaking with Russian accents crash landed in a medieval world to battle the forces of evil.

Lead by a giant holy windchime!

Yeah, but after Wrath was mostly sane I figured Metzen had stopped pranking the office by dumping psilocybin in the HVAC unit.

Tauren Priests and Paladins seem to suggest he's back to his old tricks.

If your OK with Forsaken, you should be OK with Worgen. That's all they are in the end.


Well, minus the Yiffing.

Oh come on, the Orcs being from another planet was introduced in Warcraft II's expansion pack at the latest.  Warcraft has always been a little... off.

Now that I've got the stream working for myself I went back and watched the panels.  I missed it if anyone previously mentioned reforging.   Customizing stats on a piece of armor, nice.   They said you can't add stats that are already on, (i.e. no dropping all your hit to max stamina) but if you wanted to drop some stam to add hit, or crit you could.  Fucking nice.

Also I missed the implication that we're getting another BC-like stamina bounce, but this time everyone will be up around the same HPs.  :oh_i_see:

I'm sure the reforging will be no where as awesome as it sounds. Either that, or it will be immensely overpowered and mandatory!


I really, really, REALLY want to see the details about the new resource systems. Hunters finally getting Focus back? DPS Casters not needing regen? Cats and Dogs living together?

It was in the manual for Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.

Spear throwers are gimp, nerf crossbowmen.

What I don't get is, why can't we just have bosses crit? Why can't we have spells and abilities that sometimes miss?  Putting in stats that directly counter randomness like that just kind of makes the game predictable and boring.  Or just boring it out and make everything hit and bosses never crit, but don't waste a stat on it.

I suppose that's why there's so much fire you're not supposed to stand in.

Fake edit: maybe I'm alone in my little crusade against stats like hit, defense caps, etc.  :| 

More details will be revealed at the class panel tomorrow.. including details on this new "Mastery" stat.

On reforging:: All the crafting profs can reforge gear.. (Smith, LW, Engy, Tailor and jeweler) so since at least one of those are "mandatory" for any given class raiding NOW, it's not like they're hurting anyone by making it decent.  Well.. except the people who love to farm mats.

Srsly, why are you guys so excited about yiffing?  :why_so_serious:

Given current trends, it is likely this will be in the soundtrack for Gilneas. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MRu8N2K0NY)

worth the price of expansion if it is.

I don't think Mastery will be an actual stat, more like a side effect of speccing into a Talent Tree.



I haven't really sifted through the info in detail though.

Damn straight, could even toss in some of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIoDVVX58Jc&feature=related) from the "Love at First Bite" disco scene and cancel the WoD MMO.

Also it's gonna suck fighting every fuckwad plate DPSer for tank gear since I can just talent the crits out now. Well, unless they're leaving dodge, parry, block, and block value in on gear.

Middle of fucking nowhere is why.

Yea, getting there as a level appropriate Alliance is pretty much a PitA.

Block Value is going away, blocking is going to be a straight percentage mitigation.  But they said nothing about dodge or parry.  I wouldn't be surprised to see some changes to those, but those are straightforward and understandable for the most part, like hit rating, so they'll probably stay.

By the way, I expect that old items will be going away, so if you want to get a Thunderfury or Sulfuras or some other old doodad like that, it would probably be a good idea to work on it soon, especially since those things have random drops that can mean you can clear MC for months and not get the pieces.

I wonder what's going to happen to the classic raiding achievements..  Turning them into Feats of Strength I imagine.

Goblin mount concept art: http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/august/cataclysmpreviewpanel_020.jpg  :drill:

I'm preparing to go through my normal WoW expansion stuff.

1) See all the changes incoming
2) Think - Meh, most of the changes to game mechanics to make things "simpler" are just going to have to cause me to RELEARN the game mechanics, therefore actually making it more complicated.
3) Say - screw it, I'm not buying this.
4) Eventually buy it anyway.

I am  a little disappointed that they are doing away with so many stats though.  It seems like they want you do be able to see very clearly "this item is better than this item" right away.  My only problem with this is that, well, as it stands items can be good for different things, i.e. BOTH are worth keeping.   Now its just going to be Stack your classes most important stat + stamina and thats it.  I enjoy tweaking my gear slightly to see the results.  I'd also like to add that I haven't raided since about SSC in Burning Crusade, so its not like i'm some hardcore raider who plays this game for theory crafting anymore, but I do like the variety.

Anyway, when you see me in this thread for the next year, it'll be me bitching about the game, right up until I eventually buy it.

Nope, just rewatched the panel. Mastery is a stat meant to replace AP, ARP, etc.  The exact quote was, "It makes you better at what you do.. more damage, better tanking, your pet gets better if you're a hunter.. etc."   They said they'll go into it in more detail at the systems panel at 1:00 today.

My concern with all of this is that it feels like they're trying to go back to vanilla wow with the stats.  It's been 4 years and people seem to have forgotten why they added spellpower, etc in the first place.   Perhaps they've figured it out by now but I'm almost expecting to see the caster whines from the MC days making a return with int stacking and no mana regen worries for anyone but healers.  Making the current stats easier to understand and less mathy is sensible, returning to a system that didn't work and so you changed it, isn't.

It doesn't strike me as a return to that system really.  Now int is going to GIVE spellpower.  It seems designed so a caster can go "Oh, this has higher stats than my last item, therefore its an upgrade" straight up, no decision making, etc.  No more, well, if I take this, I'll have more spell power, but I trade off some other stats, and so forth.  It seems like they are especially doing this for melee.

(http://fohguild.org/news/Jan09Gooder.jpg)

re: confuzzling stats. Actually doesn't the change actually make things easier for (multiclass) itemization: just put STA, {class stat} and Mastery and you're done? Pretty much write a script to apply the fn(#) stats budget for a "Rogue" item @ item level #. Just making less work for themselves. Only 4 rings/necklaces, etc.

Fixed..?

Unless you're a Warlock, then it's just a quick little detour from your run all over the world.  Yay for flight points in zones 15-20 levels above level.

You can say the same about Horde trying to get to Deadmines.

I've done both. As an Alliance paladin I had to get into SFK for part of the Verigan's Fist quest. Boy let me tell you, Alliance pretty much doesn't bother with it. Eventually a high-level paladin took pity on me and ran me in there to grab the widget I needed. Fun instance though, with nice loot, and one I'd make a point of hitting whenever I was helping a lowbie friend level.

As a Horde shaman I was in a guild with a lot of my old UO friends, and I used to run them through a lot of stuff since I was on the higher end of our leveling curve. Everyone wanted to go through Wailing Caverns in their late teens, but Wailing Caverns sucks and I fucking hate running it at any level. So instead I would pack up 4 newbs and have them take the zepplin to Grom'gol in STV, cast water walk on them, and jog across the ocean to Westfall to run Deadmines instead.

Mind you, this whole Horde-in-Deadmines adventure was on a PVP server, and it was STILL way less of a pain in the dick than just running Wailing Caverns. Fuck that instance.

If they said they'd done a heroic WC instead of SFK, I would quit in a heartbeat.

Although that being said, with the Barrens being divided into two zones and part of the advancing story supposedly being that Naralex (http://www.wowwiki.com/Naralex) succeeded in making the Barrens fertile again then I can't help but feel that there's going to be some return to WC.

I recently solo'ed WC as my 80 Mage and it was STILL annoying!

I think before Cataclysm, I'm going to make an alt and try to do as many Barrens quests as I can, just to remind me of the horror.
Plus I'll call everyone 'faggots' in general chat.

The Goblin starter zone looks very generic Horde lumber fort, not very Goblin. I presume that once you sign up to the Horde you have to follow their cultural zoning laws. Worgen look like playful cuddly dogs, not savage slavering wolves. Can't wait to see how that plays out with the perverts. Meh on the artwork generally apart from a couple of weapons on the Goblin side.

I managed to ask about players of widely differing levels playing together, and the answer sounded reasonably positive.  They mentioned having looked into it, and that some of their new systems like the removal of spell ranks and having them scale with level makes it more technically possible.

They're choosing to implement rated BGs in a manner customized to piss off arena players.  You gain rating every time you win, but don't lose any when you lose with a weekly cap on how much rating you can gain.  It doesn't matter if you have a 1:10 win:loss ratio, as long as your team -ever- wins and gets in their weekly matches, you get gear.

It sounds like you'll be able to increase rating as much as you want each week if you play enough, it's points that are capped per week.

With the return of titles, it sounds like being Grand Marshal will still be a matter of playing more than anyone else again.

The simplification of itemization just kind of unearths the perennial discussion of whether it's better to have stats or game mechanics be highly streamlined and transparent to players or whether there's some value to having gameplay be a "black box" where it's not always clear what the exact relationship between action and consequence is.

In a theme park MMO like Warcraft, streamlining and transparency seems to me the way to go, but even there you're going to hit a point where it's not clear why you should have more than three classes and more than three stats--everything is going to seem like unnecessary noise if all it comes down to is "fulfill your role with the greatest efficiency possible". You still have to have trade-offs and decision points in gameplay.

In a more sandbox MMO, I think you need less transparency--after all, in the world as we know it, it's not always clear how our actions relate to the consequences of our actions.

I'm surprised they didn't replace both attack power and spell power with strength, replace crit with agility, and make int/spirit do something useful for mana-less classes so they could stop itemizing spell power/int/MP5 plate for that one class.

Quick question: for melee, is haste now melee haste and energy regen, or just energy regen?  I'd suspect the former if they want it to have parity for casting haste.

Guild leveling introduces something a few people around here have asked for over the years... guild-owned equipment.  Heirloom items a guild profession guy makes and anyone in the guild can wear so long as they're a member.  Interesting.

I believe all the boe epics in naxx and ulduar were for this same purpose, gearing up new recruits.  Now I bet the guild gear won't be awesome but it will probably give new members a footing to compete in raids etc.

/sigh

Once again, I find myself falling victim to trailer, artwork, and the brief lore, but ithis time, after Wrath, I don't know if I want to take the quest grinding and stat min/max the game has become.

Hmm.. little more info on Mastery.  What will happen is with the talent tree revamp (No more passive bonuses) you'll buff 3 aspects with each point in that tree. 

The first aspect is Tank/Heal/Damage based on the tree (with a side comment of "We don't know what we're going to do for Death Knights here...),
The second is something I forget and can't rewatch yet. I want to say it was the passive stat buffs of the tree, like Str/ Stam/ Dodge/ etc.
The 3rd aspect is your "mastery stat"  This is what the mastery points will buff.. the example they gave was Arms warriors got more armor pen.. and more mastery buffed arpen even higher.   

So we can infer that Arpen isn't going away as a Theorycrafting stat, just as an itemization stat. 

Diminishing returns may apply to the talent points buffs of that tree.  So going a full 61 in combat won't buff you much beyond 51 points, encouraging speccing into a secondary tree like the current system.

There's only one way to fix this. Give the forsaken (and by extension the Horde) vampiric allies. :pedobear:

I'm so fucking relieved this expansh doesn't appeal to me.  If it were a pirate-y/islandy/maritimey expansh, or a Emerald Dream expansh, then, maybe.  But a redone Azeroth?  Look, that's a great idea.  It's convenient to fly in old world.  It will help their bottom line through better retention of new custs.  But fuck my ass if I'm going to delve into this game for that and the chance to YET AGAIN level a new race of the same classes that have been available since 5 years ago.

Race change service is coming, so if you want a new race of a class you already have, no problem, just race change.

The new starter zones are both very good, from the little we got to see them (about levels 6 through 8). They've worked little mini cut-scene type things in, etc.

More when I am more awake and stuff.

I played Gilneas more than the goblin zone, but that's not saying much considering I played WoW twice while there, and the first time I split my time between Worgen and Goblin so I could take a look at them both.  I just decided that I had better chances of winning the prizes in single-player games rather than competing with every other person there for the abomination spawns and forsaken pops (or whatever they had in the goblin zone that was equivalent).  I liked Gilneas, it was ok, seemed interesting. Didn't seem to be any worgen NPC's at all, I'm sure that's different in other areas.

Ran into a guy that claimed his friend who works at Blizzard told him what happens in the super seekrit level 1-5 area that they skipped us past.  In Gilneas it's supposed to be kind of a recap of how things progressed since the Scourge and how the curse came about, and in the goblin areas you're supposedly chilling like a pimp goblin when the ground starts shaking and shit and you have to pay almost everything you own in order to book passage on a boat outta there run by the trade baron or something.  Only you didn't read the fine print and you just paid your entire fortune to sell yourself into slavery, but luckily your ship gets wrecked on this other island.  I sorta believe them because I got hints leading toward both of those when I was playing.  Some of the goblins were cursing the trade baron or whatever, and they did mention that the story behind Gilneas was going to be told so that's a no-brainer on that side.

WoW seems pretty good at catching my attention with expansions, since all three now have been quite interesting and gotten me somewhat interested in playing when I'm tired of the game.  EQ, the only other game I've ever consistently gone back to, never did that with expansions specifically - I just tended to drift back of my own accord.

On another note, I find it interesting that patch 3.3 is going to bring in Icecrown  Unless they take even longer than usual between patches (entirely possible), that probably means about 6 to 8 months before patch 4.0, then Cataclysm a month or so later.  They may be further along with Cataclysm development than they're letting on just yet.

We can always have interim patches; if Icecrown is 3.3 it just means that there's no other major content patches until then. I hope it comes fairly soon though, as the Argent Tournament looks to have very very little longevity.

So you think Blizzard is expecting people to level from 80 to 85 by the power of positive thinking? Of course there's new content as well. Hell, the 1-60 revamp is being given to everyone in a patch - expansion not needed.

I've been thinking Icecrown after Christmas and Cataclysm next spring/summer.

While January for Icecrown sounds about typical for Blizz, with the Argent Tournament hardmodes opening up reset after next that's going to be a long four months with very little novel content.

That's been my thinking as well.  We'll get Ony in November (possibly along with the x-server pugs) and  Icecrown shortly after that.  We'll then have the usual 5-6 months of farming that before 4.0.   Blizzard has been maintaining a fairly regular content pace throughout this expansion.

I was under the impression that Onyxia 2.0 was supposed to be timed for the anniversary, which is October(ish) isn't it?

November, and yes. is it just me or when I watched the trailer for Cataclysm right at the start they said something like "While the heroes match on icecrown deathwing returns..."

It would be funny if 3.3 wasn't icecrown.

Firstly, to all those people who didn't believe or scoffed at SA and the leaks - suck it. Everything was confirmed.

For priests, here's what I gleaned from all the blizzcon info:


All healers will be able to dispel (presumably priests will keep mass dispel as a class ability).

Spells will have no ranks and will now automatically scale with level.

Shadow priests will get a nuke with no cooldown - The cast time is unknown but I highly suspect 1.5 or 2.0s and it might address the 'ramp up time on trash' issue (see below)

No more mp/5, no more +Spellpower, all mp/5 will become spirit

Spirit will be the Spellpower stat for disc/holy priests and the "primary" healer stat, since it provides both mana regen and spellpower (but not mana pool, so there could still be balance issues due to replenishment/spells that are based on total mana). All healers will be given a meditation-like ability (regen % of spirit while in combat)

Disc and Holy will have closer best in slot itemization, disc will no longer poach caster DPS items for BiS due to the +sp/spirit changes. It seems as though an 'all the time healer' will be able to switch between disc and holy without much trouble or gear swapping.

There will be no 3rd spec so you can forget your do-it-all shadow/disc/holy priest.

Huge talent changes mean that a lot of passive talents or ones that don't provide new abilities or twists on current abilities are going away - "boring" ones that provide things like +1% crit/level (and thus presumably ones that provide +2% healing and +5% spirit, spellpower, things like that). Since this is almost all of the talents in all our trees and they said "a lot", not "all", continue to expect some filler +healing talents. They specified "body and soul" as a stellar talent that is in the direction they want to take talents.

New caster Legendary in Icecream Citadel that Shadow Priests will presumably want.

Lots of "mathy" stats will vanish (arpen, dodge) but apparently +hit will stay. (Hurr.) You'll use "Reforging" to exchange one stat on an item for another (like +hit) that is not currently on the item. It should be easier for shadow priests (and other casters) to both reach and not exceed the hit cap using this ability.


No real information about healer mechanics or how to make healing more attractive, nothing about the infinite mana problems, nothing about how to balance healing to make it less 'stressful' or how to make it more challenging without raw DPS on tanks. I'm personally surprised how there were NO healing questions at all answered during the entirety of Blizzcon. Either they are keeping something cool under wraps until it's fleshed out or they don't have a good solution for this and are punting.

No real information about shadow priest's overly complex rotation, lowish DPS and extremely high ramp-up time. Possibly the new no-cooldown spell will fix the high ramp-up time by providing an alternate rotation for quick / trash mobs. Since the shadow priest boss rotation is already full, and mind flay is the current filler, the new spell doesn't really fit into boss rotation without making it even more complex. That is, unless things are wildly changed (possible, I guess).

I'm liking the changes so far, though I'm still really REALLY wary of the whole "we're adding an eygpt zone, an underwater zone, and a 10 tier alternate advancement system in the same patch" thing. Part of me just screams NOOOOOOOO, even if they already said the underwater zone totally isn't (fight on the floor, launch up to swim whenever. Sounds like any normal zone with a flying mount to me)

The Worgen starting zone is wonderful, and I want those outfits in an endgame set. CoT Gilneas with those items as epics, please.

I don't expect to see this for another year, but the majority of the changes are pretty solid, once you step back from the "OHGOD they're making the game simpler!" cliff. They said they're going to tweak old racials and bring them up to the new ones, but I'm also thinking that a major revamp will be due for a few of them (+%int/+%spi strike me as being unreasonably well scaling now).

My major oh shit is that Archaeology is looking to be an absolutely required tradeskill now, and should just be considered the new Hodir rep bar. Yeah, in theory you can skip it, but in reality there's no way in hell you can.

It's a secondary skill (like cooking/first aid/fishing), not a tradeskill in itself. It's also gated so that people can't just powerlevel through it which, to me, implies that progress should otherwise be fairly quick.

Not sure I'm understanding the mechanics behind this.

So I take a chestpiece which has only +str and +sta on it, I can split the +str up and give the sword a bit of +hit, right?  But I can't give it any more +sta than it already has, because that stat is already on the item, aye?  But say, later, I decide I want more +hit, or I don't actually want that +hit at all and I want my +str back, I can't actually do anything about it because those stats are now on the item? 

That sounds like a dangerous mechanic to me; "permanently fuck up your highest level items, hope you know for a solid fact that you're going to NEED this 20 points of +hit for the next six months or you'll be farming Deathwing's Outhouse for the next six months to get a replacement, P.S. I hope you weren't planning on using this skill without Elitist Jerks open in another window, or you would have forgotten the precise formula which makes all this crap make sense."

How am I misunderstanding this?

ANYTHING has got to be better than a rep grind.

(http://www.wineberserkers.com/images/smilies/rofl.gif)

You're not.  That's the first hole I saw in it as well. "Well great, I knocked down some stam and agi to give myself more +hit/whatever and now I've got way too much +hit and could really use that stamina back."

I imagine Blizz saw it as well, since it's a HUGE fucking hole in the system.  Perhaps you can reforge an item back to its original stats.

It better, one raid doesn't an MMO make, and WotLK was already shamefully lacking in content.

(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/2/27/Shadowmourne.jpg)
(Obviously a hunter caster weapon.)

The talk about caster legendaries was that they're due for one and it'll probably be top of the list for Cataclysm.  The one from Icecrown is going to be that axe, Shadowmourne.

Also, I didn't hear any specific information saying that Spirit would be +spell power for healers.  It will be mana regen, and it'll only be on healer gear, but I think they still need Int for spell power.

And yeah, I presume you'll be able to reforge an item to remove all previous reforgings, so you can un-fuck an item you've screwed up.  Honestly it didn't even occur to me that you wouldn't be able to.

That'd be one raid doesn't a DIKU make.. and your math is off.

Yep.. but damn it being an axe. Human racial has been worthless this whole expansion. Fucking horde bias!  :why_so_serious:

Yeah they did say int = spellpower now. They explicitly stated spirit will only be healer regen and only on healer gear.  Apparently this is because managing resources 'isn't fun' so they want to get away from making casters manage mana. Other than healers, who are the group that has always bitched in the past that managing mana is one of the fun aspects/ ways of showing off for them so they didn't want to see it go away.

Well, I think they've officially lost their minds. It's back to basics and I have no desire to do that. Someone tell them to put a rush on Diablo 3 already.

Titansteel Destroyer and the poor souls still hitched to one disagree with you.   :awesome_for_real:

Those people don't matter. Real players farm Ulduar.  :drill:

Haha, Blizzard rush? And even if they did, people would probably call the news fake anyway....  :oh_i_see:

But unlike cooking or first aid, it at this point appears to be required for character progression. Hence my note that it may as well be a new rep grind. Think Hodir, but only doable by finding those fucking ice shards. :P

I'm hoping I'm wrong or they figure out how horrible an idea that is. But it's akin to making it so you can only eat food you cooked yourself for the end game, which would make cooking a required secondary skill for any high level play.

Now, all this is moot if someone else can dig up shit you can use to advance your path and it turns into inscription-lite.

From the systems panel summary:

"You earn these ancient glyphs by using the new Archaeology secondary profession to recover and trade in titan artifacts. "

So it sounds like the artifacts will be an AH item. The sockets that the glyphs go in is what your character has to personally open by "various activities". Filling the sockets gives you your new powers.

I watched the panels and I'm pretty sure they said you could re-forge / recover the original item.

4 raids at launch, there will be plenty for people who aren't interested in leveling a new alt.

I took that as those 4 raids will be the raids released over the course of the expansions life cycle (like Naxx, Ulduar, ToC and IC).

Hey, that's my Warrior! I can't take the tedium of raid farming so I never get the good stuff.

From my perspective, the leveling content was gone in a flash and the heroics were ditched in favor of Naxx farming ad nauseam.

I can't be 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure I remember one of them (I think the dungeon designer guy) saying that it would launch with those four raids.

 :headscratch:

Ergo lack of content for me. The guild farmed and my sub lapsed.

You said Raids, not 5-man dungeons, so yes, your math was off and remains so.  However, even on the 5-man front I'd disagree since there's plenty of dungeons to run at 80.  You just wound up on a lousy low pop server or refuse to PUG.  The first I can empathize with, but haven't ever had to deal with.  Mine still had a steady stream of heroics going before the new badge farming upswing.   The second is not their problem to fix.

I think apo is scratching his head because you said you didn't want to farm raids, but seem to want to farm heroics.  There's a disconnect there.

There's much more variation when doing heroics, and a smaller group makes for better social dynamics (relaxed banter vs. herding cats). Also, heroics take much, much less time.

Edit: arg, now I get your point. The thing is, I found the 5-mans also sorely lacking, because of the utter itemization failure. There was no incentive to run them, thus it was all pass-by content.

Well, i sort of understand why you might not need / want hit, because the random chance of missing spells could "liven" things up a bit, but look at the flip side:  A lot of classes now a days in wow have some pretty complex dps rotations.  If you miss a key attack in your rotation, you can seriously fuck up your damage output.  And no one enjoys that.

As to Defense and being defense capped.  That one is kind of mandatory, due mainly to the whole idea that, while sure, sucking up a crit on a boss can add some spice to your healer's job, NO ONE enjoys wiping on a boss because their tank is 10% below the Crit cap and just got instagibbed from 2 parry hasted crits back to back.  Which can happen VERY frequently when many raid bosses hit your tank like the pimp-hand of god.

Hell, I remember specificly an instance where that happened to my guild during Naxx Progression.  We ended up haavng an enraged Grand Widow 1 shot our tank with a crit for something like 200 damage more then his max health because he had JUST equipped an item he got from Anub and put himself about 2 defense under the defense cap, thereby wiping the raid. 

While it was funny for a few seconds at the time, mainly due to the fact that it was a 1 in 10000 chance or so event, having that kind of chance hovering over your head EVERY time you tanked something that hit decently hard would quickly lose its entertainment value.

Remember when Azeroth was attacked by demon meteors?

I think it's no bad thing to use talents and equipment to remove dependence on the RNG.  At the same time you don't want to make everything a set-piece in which there are no random effects to react to. 

Suppose you could never entirely remove crit chance but you could talent into something that gives you total crit immunity for a given period of time after receiving one.  That would keep it interesting but not be a guaranteed raid wipe at the whim of the RNG (assuming your tank can take one full crit's worth of damage).

Given how spikey damage can be already in 10 man dungeons. It would be darn near impossible currently to keep people alive on some fights unless they seriously over geared if if you could still be crit. It seemed like at the start of WOTLK the devs were okay with people going into naxx non crit immune but even without crushing blows  its still not viable to be crit as a tank with the current mechanics.

The devs keep making testy noises about how tanks ignore threat and DPS stats in favor of stam and defenses but with the current mechanics and how hard mobs hit I cannot see myself ever sacrificing survivability stats for threat stats at this time.

If they do a change like removing defense as a stat it would allow tanks to pick some more high dps/threat type items without making themselves excessivly vulnerable to doom.

It's a mentality thing.  I played a tank for a long time, and if I could make up for my healers lack of skill with the addition of defensive stats and my own skill, I'd do it every time.  That's not to say that my healers were that bad, or that I was that good, it's just good sense.  The fact of the matter is that threat, for most of this game's life (yes I know not all), is balanced for people who's threat generation isn't really that good.  So you can get away with sacrificing strength for hp if you know a few tricks.

The devs can cry about it, but the only thing they can really do is tighten the acceptable threat generation, and that really won't fly with the more casual crowd.  I suppose they could change itemization too, but it'd be the same thing.  The cry would be 'catering to the hardcore.'  And they seem to have gotten away from that since Tigole left the project.

Hell back in the vanilla days before Vael, we didn't even know what threat was. I was personally much happier as a tank just having the dps count to three. That being said, the devs can't have it both ways. They make fights that slam tanks into the ground in 2 shots, AND they want you to stack items to hold threat? Sorry it just won't work that way. You can have a fight with average damage output but that requires a quick enrage and thus heavy dps, or you can have slammer fights where the tank stacks up enough defense to just hold out.

There are those rare fights that do actually combine both in the beginning, but they get nerfed fairly quickly when they cockblock the general pop.

I wasn't playing WoW when WotlK was released, did they do the usual nerf of everything difficult shortly after it was released like they do for most content?

Short answer, no. Naxx didn't need to be nerfed much in it's current form because it was designed around being entry-level rehash.

However, all other content releases after that, yes, they followed that pattern. Ulduar came out guns blazing and was progressively nerfed in rather short order. When Crusader finally releases all it's content, I expect they will tune down a couple of fights in there as well for the populace after a month. I doubt they will do that for heroic versions though.

OBV. But it doesn't appeal to me to return primarily for 5 levels of redone zones.  Not enough of a hook.

...


80-85 is the new zones, 1-60 is the revamped stuff.

I think people are having a hard time comprehending just how much is being added/redone here. It's as if there's a disconnect in what they believe a company could release in an expansion vs what blizzard is saying will be in it.

I'm calling a "Restoration of Outlands" in the future.

Outlands now makes absolutely zero sense, that's for sure. No reason to go there, and it is all out of whack with the timeline now. Even new toons will now start "in the time of the Cataclysm", but if you go at 58 to Outland, you'll suddenly be back in a time that precedes the Cataclysm by a very large margin. I assume you'll be able to go up to 68 with new quests in Azeroth anyway, so nobody will bother, in all likelihood.

I still hear people saying that this is the lazy way out, that they just redid a few zones and called it a day.

In fact there are seven new zones* - just like the last two expansions - and in addition they redid all of Azeroth for flying mounts and some of it geographically.

*Uldum, Deepholm, Gilneas, Lost Isles, Vashj'zNaz'tatariaville, Hyjal, Twilight Highlands (Grim Batol)


(Actually I guess that with the two starting areas BC had 9 new zones but they didn't revamp the guild system, stats, remake Azeroth for flying, etc)


Regarding the point of Outland, it will especially look strange to Blood Elves and Draenei whose early stories keep going on about fighting the Burning Legion/finding Kael'thas in Outland when Azeroth seems to have its own trouble.

Outland was already just a giant detour for the Alliance to begin with. The Alliance didn't have the same draw to it the way the Orcs or Elves would.


There's a small moment of "oh hey, those brave souls that stayed behind to seal the gate aren't all dead! hurrah!", followed by a lot of "but most of them ARE, in fact, dead..." 

Put Chromie at the entrance and presto, solved. Time travel fixes EVERYTHING.

Chromie, leader of the shut up about continuity dragonflight.

Yea, I guess there's the usual sandy vag at the end of an expansion cycle atm.  But god damn me to hell if every swinin' dick in this thread doesn't read the inevitable "Just Re-Subbed for Cataclysm/Splooge/Holy Shit" thread and resub themselves.

Goblins, dude.  Mother fucking Goblins.  I rerolled horde already.  Time is money, friend.

If anyone is interested, I did some research yesterday and found that Ghostlands (PvE) is a relatively decent server for Horde.  The battlegroup is apparently favoring Horde.  The server itself is a large pop, which I like for Auction Whoring reasons.  It was something like 15k Horde : 11K Alliance.  So the server PvP Wintergraspy stuff should favor Horde, but still be decent games.  I normally don't like PvE servers, but I have crotchety friends who are tired of gankfests.

There's a ton of "waah oversimplifying stats" "waah LFG changing" "waaah need more zones" and such.

It doesn't really matter though, since they have on the board a fuckton of content, and probably the largest overhaul of a game I've seen in a single expansion. And it all looks pretty solid. As I've said, I have my lingering doubts on a few things, but blizzcon sold me on the expansion as a whole. It looks great.

Hit Options:

1. Fix the rotations to not be retarded.
2. Put the talent tree overhaul to good use and put exceedingly large +hit% modifiers on specific abilities.
3. Give these "vital" abilities a fallback (Overpower-style) that recoups or betters the lost damage, so that a miss can be turned into a DPS gain by someone paying attention.
4. Add abilities to the tree that grant an instant cast of a spell when you miss, like the Destro Warlock's backlash is to being damaged.
5. Remove the chance to miss via talents/the aforementioned passive buff for putting x points into the tree.
6. In the case of melee give out a passive 8% +hit% to cover the specials but not DW auto-attack.

Defense Options:

1. Decrease critical strike damage bonus against attacks that hit you by ~50 - 100% via talents (making crits slightly bigger to the same as normal hits).
2. Remove the damage bonus on mobs critting but give them other benefits (flurry-type buffs?).
3. Make the crit bonus occur as a DoT effect increasing damage as it ticks (for up to the 2x crit modifier worth of damage), possibly removed on the tank reaching >90% health.

Aren't someone of those instances rather than zones?  And if so, the previous expansions had a fuckload more.  Regardless, a redone old world just isn't interesting to me.  Not sure why.  I'm sure it will be cool, but everyone has their breaking point or we'd all still be playing Contra everyday.

I didn't, 'cause they kept saying how half the reason the level cap is only going to 85 is because they want to be able to spend a loooooot more resources on raids. I'm also pretty sure Mr. Raid Man said the current plan was 4 raids at release.

If, and this is a big if, they released 4 smaller raid zones at release then I think people in my boat could gloss over all the "new fuzzy world rehaul" stuff. I'd like to see more varied types of raids with fewer bosses, sort of like how 5 man heroics work now. 5 raids in 5 different areas with an end boss that drops the different token slots would be much better to me than a 15 boss raid zone. Hell, I could even get on board with them having 3 raids of 5 bosses.

I would MUCH prefer a redo of Outlands rather than a redo of Classic. Outlands seemed like such a step backward.

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

The rotations aren't exactly retarded, they're just reliant on prior spell effects. Be it diseases being applied, or tighter things like Conflag not missing (and thus not granting backdraft charges)

Hit is a boring stat, yes. But it's really not that hard to deal with these days. Almost everyone can find hit in their talents, or other people's talents.

As for crits: they're going away for tanks. Why are we discussing ways to make them less obnoxious? Defense is dying, people, because it's a stupid fucking mechanic.

what

That's just because of the weighting of the stats, isn't it?  I mean, you could balance it so that a bonus of +1% hit would be equivalent to a bonus of +X to str, where X is calculated so that the increase in damage for hits makes up for the loss of damage for the misses.  Say your base character will miss 10% of the time, if you could trade your +hit items in for a 12% increase in DPS, wouldn't that be a good trade overall?  

And I don't know why you'd worry about accomodating DPS rotations.  Seeing what's on the boss, what you can apply, and what's on cooldown, and then throwing the spell you think works best seems like a lot more interesting to me than looking up the optimal rotation online and doing the whole "1-2-3-1-4-5-1-2-getoutofthefire-3-1-4-5" dance in every raid for the next year and a half.

It was specifically stated in the panel as 4 raids at release - no idea how many they'll add through the patch cycle, they didn't really talk about that.

I'm sure Kild will come in Math a blazing, but in short, no.

+hit isn't a flat increase like +dmg or +str or whatever.

Those are all full zones.  Some of them sound like they should be instances (Uldum, for example) but they're not.  All of those except for the two starting zones also have announced instances and/or raids within them.

Way too grindy gameplay, and way too irrelevant world. I still don't know why I had to spend ten levels in outer space gaining rep with giant smurfs before I could get back to WoW.

Due to side effects of various spells (or raidwide effects of them), cooldowns, and finally damage, the actual weighting would be ~10% hit = ~25% damage

And even then, you will have a smoother experience of play if you pick the hit. Pulling something off perfectly and then dying due to the RNG instagibbing your tank is some serious gameplay bullshit, as is a string of misses because the RNG is just in a shitty mood and taking you from 7k DPS to 3k DPS because the right spells just aren't landing.

Hit will always be more important than any other stat by a large amount because your enemy in a DIKU pve is randomness. Random is interesting, and random will make people /quit if it's random in the sense of "haha you died because the server rolled a 1"

Ditto. Thankfully now it's basically just a ten-level safari to a place that was noteworthy in the lore, that you take on your way up before getting back to real business in Azeroth.

Truth be told, if we can level up to maximum via Azeroth zones only, they can

(a) Close the portal to Outland.
(b) Let Draenor finish blowing up / floating apart / losing its atmosphere (air).

It's a very quick ten levels.  Having nearly quit several times just trying to reach Outland, I much perfer them trying to make Azeroth, where I spent 60 levels, a more enjoyable experience.  They can fiddle with Outland next content patch/expansion.

I think it would be much better if characters did 1-60 in Old Azeroth and the whole world was phased for the 78+ crowd. That way Outland et. al. still makes sense. I was assuming they were going that way with the phasing. The rewrite described in posts above sounds like wank.

Much of the point is to make the low level experience smooth, like it is in newer expansions, instead of annoying as it was in the old game.  Azeroth was designed with lots of intentional timesinks in the form of quests that want you to go to the other side of the bleeding world just to talk to that one guy and then go back.  Azeroth doesn't "flow."  It's a disconnected experience for new players, and the revamp will allow them to make it a smooth route through the old world, as well as actually changing the world with events.  Some players will make new alts just to see the changed content and quests.  Others will be able to make characters they may have wanted to make for a while, but haven't because of the annoyance of leveling through all that old content.

You didn't "get" the implied premises, did you?  Let's list them:

1. Blizzard wants a random factor in set rotations, or alternatively FIFO rotations (need I prove this?)

Therefore:

2. The random factor could just as easily be instant cast opportunities off of failed casts, rather than procs off of crits, or hits.
3. The opportunities should be a major DPS upgrade if used perfectly, if not then slightly greater than gearing for 17% hit (let's assume 5% increase across the spectrum of players).
4. Following 3, these upgrades are detrimental if used incorrectly (high percentage of skipped opportunities, canceled casts to use opportunity, delayed casts).
5. In case 4, the player still has the option of acquiring hit and being an average DPS consistently.
6. More balanced in pvp, unlike procs off of crits or hits, which significantly inflate burst damage.

Sure, prove to me that blizzard wants a random rotation. Because there is a whole ONE class with any ability that favors a random rotation in the game of World of Warcraft. Every other class/spec has a set rotation.

Beyond this, what you're proposing is a bizarre system in which your damage output is.. completely random. Which is not what they've been going for in PVP at all. In case you've missed it, they've clearly stated such, because random in pvp eliminates skill (plenty of other things could be said to eliminate it as well, but I can state definitively that random in pvp reduces skill in the equation signifigantly)

Why do you think mace stuns were removed? Because, as clearly stated by blizzard, random is not okay. It was either massively overpowered if it happened a lot, or completely useless if it never happened. The same shit is true of any ability used on a miss where it's not a guarantee of greater effect.

Seriously, give me an example of a good "on miss" ability for, say, a warlock in which it's not gimping my damage output, rewards me for understanding it, and does not reward failing to hit. I have Immo up on a target, conflag misses. What spell would possibly reward me for skilled usage of it that would beat 14k damage, a 5s snare, and a 3 shot 30% casting speed buff, but NOT be more powerful simply as a "cast this if you miss and detonate your opponent"

Hit Rating is pretty much the easiest way to solve this. Only better done by eliminating misses from the game entirely, but that doesn't seem to be on the table.

edit: anywho, I "get" your premise, your premise just doesn't make any goddamned sense. Because it's impossible. You add skill to pvp by making complex skills that allow for branching followups based on the situation at hand (you open with a hit. You can now either apply an MS style debuff or a 90% snare, that kind of thing requires you to be aware of the fight and choose the correct option.) Adding in randomness doesn't help shit (hey, if you miss, you have these random options if you use them correctly! That's stupid, because now I'm either praying I miss because it will open doors for me, or even worse my intended move failed and thus the correct debuff I was trying to apply isn't in play, and my "skill" for choosing the right move is being punished by the RNG)

The more you eliminate random, the better the game is. Because random should never, ever decide a fight.

That's fine. Why not do that and then phase the post-Cataclysm stuff on separate from that? Just because they're writing new quests for 1-60 at the same time as writing Cataclysm content, there's no reason that the writers have to make everything post-Cataclysm, especially with phasing. If they obsolete all of TBC, they're morons - with phasing it's too easy to keep it all connected. Just because you have Goblins and Worgen at level 1 they don't have to be post-Cataclysm when they start out. They could actually give people the rather fun experience of leveling up free of faction before the Cataclysm aligns them to one.

Because there's no point in redoing the old world if nobody's going to level in it (again, way too huge for all of it to be 60+ stuff) and allowing access to either version when leveling would be a huge division of the playerbase, which would be batshit insane after putting so much work into making the low-level content popular.


Tell that to a good poker player. I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole, but randomness provides plenty of opportunity for skill - dealing with unexpected situations and having contingency plans for when things go wrong.

Yeah, so they can do twice the work in not only designing a whole new version of the world to level in, but a whole separate version of the world for high-level people on top of that, in the process guaranteeing that everyone leveling will live in an essentially dead world where every player above level 78 (or whatever) might as well have quit the game. Then for extra fun they can develop extensive faction-neutral goblin/worgen leveling paths for... uh... basically no reason whatsoever.

Even if Blizzard has essentially infinite money, I think they want this expansion to come out before 2015.

I sweated the whole time-paradox thing briefly, until someone in this thread pointed out the obvious: The timeline has been fucked since WOTLK launched, with death knights rebelling against the Lich King and then somehow traveling back in time to fight in Outland and level up.

The way it is now is no way remotely how it was when it was released.  It was a grindfest of epic proportions.  8 hours per level in zones that were very hit or miss as to whether you liked them or not (I *hated* HFP and still do).  Then once that was done it was a 150 quest chain to get into the heroics and eventually raids, plus the rep grind to revered or whatever stupid level it was to even be able to get the keys to do heroics to finish up the chains.  Add into this that it was still an epicly bad grind in the 1-60 world with elite mobs all over the place and dungeons with less than stellar loot that you had to run if you ran out of quests to do at your level (of course all of this was in a world that was much less populated now due to all the l33t 70's being Shatt all night long waving e-peens).  WotLK has improved on this so much it isn't funny.  Sure, the hardest of the hardcore may find it a tad easy, but the barrier for entry is such that the average Joe who at least wants to see if raiding and end-game is for him has a chance to at least begin to see it rather than having to grind his way to the chance to get purples.  And the rest of us with jobs and a casual guild can see a decent chunk of it as well.

I did not like TBC when it came out and took some serious time off from the game because of it. 

The timeline issues were raised at Blizzcon.  I'm sure I remembered someone asking how come there be goblin and wolfman DKs if it's all post-Wrath.  Apparently the developers just shrugged their shoulders and moved to the next question. 

Personally I believe that there are two types of players: on the one hand you've got those who are likely to say "the existence of goblin and worgen death knight classes shows an inconsideration on behalf of the developing team towards the established holistic canonicty of the Warcraft universe and the pervasive, sequentilization of character and event lore as ludologically determined in this games forebears c.f. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (and expansion),  Warcraft 2 (and expansion) and Warcraft 3 (and expansion). Thus the meta-paradigm of the very edifices that support the historical imperatives of Azeroth will be rendered inconsistent and illogical."

Then there's the rest: gamers who only speak in exclamation marks and are likely to say simply "Dude! Goblin Death Knights! Ossum!"  I'm in this group.

Anyway, some overview maps of both new and old zones are up on wow.com (http://www.wow.com/2009/08/24/blizzcon-2009-entering-a-brave-new-world/#continued)  Looks like Uldum in particular is actually a zone and will have two 5-man instances in it. Also of note is that some of the old world zones are now geared towards different levels: 1K Needles is 40-45, WPL is 35-40 and EPL is 40-45/45-50.  Looks like they've also reduced the range of levels of zones like Hillsbrad - a zone I liked all but for the constant having to fuck off to somewhere else to level a bit more before doing the next part of the quest chain. Looks like there'll be a neutral port between WPL and Hinterlands too.

If I remember right, the answer was pretty much that they thought about that, but decided it probably wouldn't be fun to limit them (and presumably any future classes) based on that one lore reason alone, but they hadn't given it too much thought and there's the possibility that it might change before release.  But probably not.

There's already goblins and worgen running around Silverpine/ Alterac mts.. just assume any DKs were related to those NPCs.

Quoted from the Blizzard Warrior Q&A.  There's also similar, smaller comments for several other classes (balance druid, mutilate rogue, frost mage) where they want to add or fix up situational abilities in order to break up the rotation.

Also, there's these talents: Rime; Eclipse; Lock and Load; Hot Streak; Brain Freeze; The Art of War; Seal Fate (2-4 Combo points per Mutilate use); Ruthlessness (60% chance for combo point after finisher); Honor Among Thieves (totally fucking berserk combo point generation); Maelstrom Weapon (highly variable, highest priority); Sudden Death; Bloodsurge.

That's ignoring most of the talents that are relatively predictable, require minimal adjustment of rotation, generally fall into a different rotation, or have a low chance of being lost (Rogue energy returns, Taste For Blood, Fingers of Frost, Eradication, Decimation, etc.)  that's ignoring tank specs with random bullshit (Sword & Board).  That's also ignoring the plain fucking freaky rage generation inherent to fury at the moment, between Flurry, and Titan's Grip.


I see...  So what you're saying is that critical strikes occuring entirely at random and then proccing +damage effects is "skillful", as is random % chance procs off of normal hits, but a reactive ability that does a moderate-high amount of damage when otherwise you would do none, or adds an effect that amounts to the same thing, is "bursty."


Did I not already explicitly state that rewarding failure to hit (and subsequent adaptation) was the entire fucking point?  Did I not explicitly state that Blizzard's schema of rotations hinging on single abilities which must not fail to hit was retarded?  Or did you just dismiss that, figuring that a 25% buff to all caster DPS (using your figures) was the perfectly acceptable solution, because otherwise the single ability which defines the destro warlock rotation might miss?

The fuck?  You're justifying the rotations being utter shit for perpetuity, based on the fact that the existing rotations are utter shit?  Correct me if I'm wrong here...

All the DKs that have ever been or ever will be were made just prior to the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel. Some of them just haven't experienced it yet  :oh_i_see:

I think in that quote, what Blizz wants is not random nor a predictable rotation--what they're looking for is situational awareness, with most classes needing to keep abilities that have to be used at particular moments in order to maximize effectiveness. Tanks are already a bit that way, that's what makes tanking a tougher job than just pouring dps on a mob. But I don't know that Blizz can really design a system fully like that back into the game, because it really takes something more like Age of Conan's combat engine, something designed from the bottom up to reward combos, quasi-twitchy ability use, group synergies, and so on.

*handwave*The Dark Portal moves you in time as well as space*handwave*
Gissa job, Metzen. I can do lore.  :awesome_for_real:

Oh, and apparently the F&F alpha for Cataclysm is due to start next month. As in, next week.

I'm justifying the rotations being relatively standard because there's no other real option beyond going into branching style chain systems. At which point you'll still wind up with a DPS chain, because all a chain is would be "the order you use skills in to maximize damage"

Eclipse: probably one of the only abilities on the list which requires you to actually change shit up. You'll also note that changed it around because as it used to be, it was a skill that would HURT your DPS if it procced half the time.

Actually, every ability on your list barring the rogue ones causes you to simply have fall through macros and Boom, skill averted. "attempt to use overpower on every ability, if it's not up, use normal ability" Taste for blood Solved. Decimation isn't at all random, and is calculated into rotations (it's an execute variant, not something to break up your rotation if things light up)

HaT does not alter rotations at all, you still just hit builder until 5, evis/rupture/SnD depending on what isn't up and how fast you're generating CPs (plus, they seem to want to break HaT spec, because it's a really stupid spec.)

Maelstrom is a terrible example, because Enhance shaman aren't doing jack all with GCD locking, so it's just a bonus when it's ready.

And none of this comes down to your amazingly stupid idea of adding "on miss" abilities. Specifically, you couldn't come up with a single example for my missed spell that would make it better, instead wanting, apparently, to burn the entire skill tree to the ground and make WoW2, instead of something sane like accepting that Missing is not part of the high end game of WoW, and if you want something more skill based and interesting, the question would be "why not make two instants I can burn off of Immolate on a shared cooldown, so I have to pick the right thing to use at the right moment"

But hey, whichever one does ~1dps more for the raid is the only one I'll ever fucking hit. Because that's what PVE is: the best order to click buttons in to deal the most damage. And no matter how much you want to try and make the rotation different, all you do is wind up with the priority system DKs use. Which is just as simple as 1-2-3-4, because it's not that hard to say "oh, and if KM procs, hit 4 I guess"

I'm not trying to justify rotations being utter shit, because my premise is that they're not utter shit. But I do agree with you that random crits and proccing +damage abilities is about as low skill as randomly giving me burst damage on a miss. I'm a huge fan of eliminating crit based specs and never letting crit get over 2-5% on anything. Because Crits make for shitty PVP, as show by how much they've been trying to mitigate burst damage on pvp gear. But nobody will ever let us take away their silly 15k crits because the big number is neat.

Let's say this is the case.  Worgen and Goblins were still in existence at the time, so why couldn't they have been made DKs back then?  I imagine they'll be going through the DK tutorial on character creation since they'll be starting at 55 like the other DKs.

I'm going to guess that Worgen and Goblin DKs may not be in at release, but will be unlocked in patch 4.1

I am absolutely certain Goblin and Worgen DKs will not be available at release, the same way Goblin and Worgens will not be on the Race Reroll list at first, either. Blizzard have fairly implicitely said they don't want the new races to be at end game immediately. You know there are levelling cartels out there that mean there'll be at least 50 L80s of each within a week of Cataclysm going gold but they're the mad minority.

4.1 for DKs/Race Rerolls is a good guess.

I do, however, think that Goblin/Worgen DKs completely futz the timeline, but hey - lolore - fun should always prevail.

I am so looking forward to this expansion.  Been playing since open beta, leveled plenty of alts, both sides (mostly Alliance though, Horde only through Outlands). 

Azeroth needs an update badly.  If I was new to the game now, I doubt I'd make it through the old-style leveling without a significant xp boost (a la refer-a-friend).  Too much travel for quests.

I'm disappointed that there won't be more character slots added, though.

I see this expansion as "WoW: Roll A Goblin In Azeroth 2.0" This either excites you or it doesn't.

That's all well and true.  They aren't designing around the game as it was three years ago, they're designing against it as it is now.  That means the 1-60 content is a lot more of a grind than 60-70.  It's also been around longer.  It could use a fresh coat of paint.

I'm not seeing the disconnect either.  Worgen have been in Silverpine since WoW started.  Goblins have been around a lot longer.  Them starting in the DK area "after" WotLK is no different than anyone else starting a new DK at this point.

The leveling experience will change for all new characters.  I'm definitely planning on starting a new Night Elf and Forsaken when the expansion comes out at the very least.  A Gnome and Troll, too.  Possibly even a Human and Tauren, but we'll see.


Just look at the whole DK tutorial as a flashback.  That solves all the Worgen/Goblin DK time issues.

That's an irrational argument. They are redoing the old world. You are assuming that people require the content to be post-Cataclysm in order to want to play it. If they just don't want to do 1-60, they won't. If they want to do 1-60 because they want to level up new characters and experience the new quests, it will not matter whether it is pre- or post-Cataclysm. Again, if they are redoing the old world and do have phasing technology, there is little added overhead in allowing pre-Cataclysm to exist on the same terrain that post-Cataclysm does. Both can even share the bulk of the same quests. Chief Hawkwind is going to want you to kill those quillboars no matter what period of history you're in.

That would be the second half of the thing I said:
Pre- and post-cataclysm sharing terrain makes no sense if you look at any of the announced changes. Barrens is being split into two zones. Thousand Needles is being flooded. I don't know what conception of phasing you have that magically allows both versions to exist in the same place at the same time.

Apparently, Blizzard is in this group too.


Also lolgoblins!11!!!!

Plus who gives a fuck? Why would they WANT to create a whole new pre-cataclysm world as well as a whole new post-cataclysm one? Who gives a shit?

If they phase the old world, how will they sell legacy servers?

 :oh_i_see:

You understand that phasing exists when you're dead and ghost running, right?

For what it's worth, DKs were on the character select screen for both Worgen and Goblins, but greyed out as they wanted us to play the new area obviously. They were also asked about it in a panel and I believe the answer was "yeah, it is a little weird, and we might or might not get rid of DKs for them because of that, but we're not sure it really matters." Or something along those lines.

I thought it was "yeah it makes no sense, and we talked about it a LOT, but we'd rather it be fun and let them be DKs than worry about the logic behind it"

Which seemed to be his (joke or not) idea behind worgen priests as well: "worgen shadow priests would just be cool"

They've painted themselves into a lollore corner no matter what, may as well just aim for fun rather than temporal issues. Chromie can take us back in time and have us do an escort quest that brings a pack of worgen and goblins to the Arthas to be converted into death knights. Chromie fixes everything.

There's lore?

Seriously, arguing about worgen death knights seems akin to arguing about Cobra Commander and Baroness being brother and sister. Surely an issue to some, though I can't fathom why.

WoW gave up on lore when they realized their character base just doesn't care.   A steady line of dinggrats keeps people playing long term.   Even people on gaming sites like this, where the majority of us would probably be considered hardcore just by frequenting a site like this, regardless of what or how much we play, aren't going to quit over it is most cases.  What does blizzard really have to gain by shoe horning themselves into the lore when they can just ignore it and make whatever they want up?

Lore, more often than not, is usually just an excuse.  Some things people just don't like, and they can't really explain it, but the lore contradiction gives them an easy thing to point to.

And then there are some people who cry and moan over time lines and how things should be consistent with how they imagined they should be.  And these people are pretty sad.

Intelligent design at this point might be to slip a few Goblins in DK armor around Ebon Hold places of interest over the next few content patches. Worgen'll be harder to do because of course the NPC and player models are drastically different but if you consider how many times dear old Sylvanas has changed her spots I don't suppose it'd matter much. It's just an atmospheric thing that'd make the Goblin/Worgen DK transition a lot smoother feeling and perhaps satisfy the lore-zealots to some degree.

Or better still, since Goblins are so damn factional/money hungry, there could always be an entire faction of Goblins who submitted to Arthas' will just to secure trade with an endless supply of customers...

Gah!  Do any of the people going 'lollore' actually give a damn about lore?  It's easier to make this work than most of the things they've done in the past.  It just requires enough suspension of disbelief to say "You've simply never crossed paths with one of these guys until now".  They don't have to rewrite or retconn anything.

Why is this even worth discussing?  How about something more important like can I paint my worgen's nails a pretty colour?

Ah, I take it you haven't seen the concept art yet:
(http://i32.tinypic.com/2wdx45j.jpg)

Some of the 'concept' work they showed was blatantly done earlier that morning. The Female Worgen and Worgen Mount are chief suspects.

No, I hadn't seen that.  I like it.

Worgen shouldn't have a mount.  They can use horses or other racial mounts in human form, they should get running otherwise.

Man, that would really cause some Tauren tears.

I don't get the point of rated battlegrounds. I want to get good shit from doing something SOLO, not sign up for a 15v15 arena team.

I think it looks pretty good as well.  What did people expect them to look like?

I would have only played Tauren if they would have given them plains running like originally intended.

The blue response to that sentiment:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/19378794913-rated-bgs-disappointing.html

I tend to think they maybe should offer something a little better for the solo PVPer as well, but there's lots of time left I suppose.

The way it's been presented so far, rated BGs look like they'll be even less popular than Arenas.  It seems to me that if people were that willing to pre-make their own PUGs to PvP, the Arenas would be a lot more popular than they are.

Yeah, although I guess it depends on how much of it is that, and how much of it is a playstyle preference thing. Some people just hate straight deathmatch, and that's what arenas are. BGs support a wider range of specs and team makeups, etc.

I really don't see why they didn't.  Besides slowing down the animation, it seems a lot less technically challenging than making actual Kodo mounts.  And I personally have always hated the Kodo animation. Especially the 100% ones look like they are twinkling along rather than thundering, if that makes sense.

They could fix that issue and add worgen running in one shot here. I hope they do.


Regarding lolore, I love the lore but recognize it takes a back seat to game balance, fun, and all sorts of other things.  It takes a lot of effort at suspending disbelief to enjoy it.  If you're the kind of person who bemoaned LOTR movies because they didn't have Tom Bombadil, you're probably the kind of person who gets ragey about WoW lore.  I'm not.

Plains running died for two reasons: Lots of tauren players in beta begged for a "real" mount, and they couldn't make the plainsrunning thing work in a way they liked. From what I remember, they didn't want you to have to stop and cast to start it up, because that seemed weird, but being able to ramp up into it seemed broken, etc. If they were adding tauren NOW, it might be a different story, but I remember those were the reasons then.

What bugs me about it, honestly, is nothing about the 'sanctity' of the lore or anything Bombadil-ish.

There's just a really obvious timeline discrepancy which they should probably cover up somehow. It isn't a lore problem as much as it just is a 'wtf' problem. See WUA's diagram.

You can't build fall-through macros for damaging abilities as of patch 2.0, but thanks for the tip.  I'll keep it in mind for when they roll back Cataclysm, Wrath, and TBC.

Also, Decimation wasn't in my list, though I included it as a notable exception.


:awesome_for_real:


Ohh, I get it, random is not random when it's easy. :oh_i_see:

And again, what is it about the instant cast nuke that hits approximately as hard as Soulfire, procs a 20% haste buff on your next three casts, and has a 5 second snare that does not immediately strike you as inherently retarded?

However, to thoroughly answer your question, a decent solution would be to have the Conflag snare and haste proc regardless of the miss, have the reaction ability be an instant that has an average DCPT, and then clone the "lost" damage of the last missed spell as a rolling DoT capable of critting that occurs over ~15 seconds.  The cloning mechanism would need some mathy bits so that it carries over +crit modifiers specific to certain spells as +damage coefficients though.

FAKEEDIT: Gilneas inns will be very disturbing indeed.

The Highest rated BG'ers will be 25 man raid guilds that kill Van/Drek with all four war-masters up.

Nah the Tauren beta players whined that everyone else got 100% of their mount speed from the start, but they had to 'warm into it.'  At which point a mob may have aggroed them so they couldn't run, or the distance was so short that by the time they were up to full speed they stopped again.   I also always suspected that when they began planning the PVP (which on Blizzard time scale would have been somewhere in beta)  They realized that Tauren running would have been very broken for the BGs.. even moreso than Druid travel form feels.

Druid Travel form hasn't been a factor in PvP since WotLK.


For 2 out of 3 specs it's suicide and for Resto they don't care anymore.


/watches the tree walk across WSG with 5 people trying to kill it

I suppose so.. but I only do low level BGs anymore.  L80 pvp can stuff it.

Questions: how is this less convoluted and stupid than just "on crit X, spell Y becomes available", because in order to not be a DPS loss on a miss, your rolling dot would need to deal ~30,000 damage over 15 seconds. That would turn PVP into  :drill: in seconds.

But missing isn't needed for what you want. At all. All you want are abilities that light up after X random effect. Which is doable on crit or on non crit. Why reintroduce a horrible mechanic like missing (especially when your solution is to put every effect of the spell onto the target even though I missed. What? We're rewarding failure here..)

That's not even counting opportunity costs of effects. What happens when you miss an interrupt? That can spell a win or a loss immediately if you miss a kick. What, the interrupt happens anyways? That would be silly. Again, doable with less stupidity if you just make new chains available on crits, and keep Missing out of the high end game.

Essentially, the question repeatedly boils down to: what the shit, missing? More over, you want misses with absolutely none of the side effects of missing? (namely, you kept the damage, snare, and self buffs generated by a hit on a miss. So what, exactly, is the point of making it off a miss instead of an extra effect you could press a button for on a crit, exactly?)

It's probably super awesome in the 10-19 WSG, true.




-edit-


My disappointment with the proposed rated BG system, mostly falls under "this is what you were working on and 'holding back' for all those months/years?". Every time they even hinted at it, they made it seem like the BG would somehow gauge each players individual effort and reward them with points or rating accordingly, some kind of magic score keeper technology that would account for how well you could defend that tower, or heal that flag carrier etc.


This, this shouldn't have taken anywhere near this long. This is just Arena++ , with longer Queue's and probably even more absurd team comps.

It seems likely to me they spent all this time trying to figure out different ways and doing internal testing/speculation on various different ways to rate battlegrounds.  This is probably the best they could come up with after all this time that makes sense and is feasible given the technology available to them.

The fact that you don't lose rating when you lose will make it so people aren't hesitant to just pug the battlegrounds if they don't have a solid group of their own, so it should work out.  Maybe.

Queue times are going to kill it before it even starts is my guess.


Think of how long the average Naxx Pug takes to setup. Now factor in you need to wait for another Naxx Pug to also setup and Queue to fight you. Then you have the usual issues with Pugs, people AFKing, leaving randomly, rage quitting etc. Odds are you'll still get stomped to boot  :awesome_for_real:




The only people going to enjoy this are 25 man raid guilds with the ability to essentially form Mega-Arena teams, or the rare, rare cases of a collection of "real" PvP'ers all coordinating a BG night regularly.

You need to explain the reasoning why a 2k DPS DoT over 15s plus instant damage comparable in DPCT to the warlock average as a refund to the cast time lost (~2000 DPS, ~20 000 DPCT - not factoring the instant damage) would be equivalent to a ~10.5k average damage cast occurring every 10 seconds (1050 DPS, 7000 DPCT).  Because now I'm sure you're just talking out your ass.

Second, does the snare/haste applying on a miss bother you?  Because it could just as easily go on the reaction ability (edit: as well as Conflag) with a 5-8s cooldown placed on the appropriate talents to keep things in check.  I just figured you'd like thing the easy way.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that chaining more damage after a crit is probably one of the dumbest concepts imaginable.

In an odd way, I think lore doesn't matter but mood and feel does. Meaning, the art resources, tone of dialogue, rough sense of humor and so on are pretty consistent in their feel or mood across the game, even with oddities like Outlands and Space Goats and all that. Whereas (for example) something like EQ2 felt like an aesthetic dog's breakfast, with very little sense of a mood or feel. Blizzard can do anything they like to the lore, I suspect, but they might run into a problem if they did something to really seriously break the mood or feel of the game. Cataclysm doesn't seem to me to break the mood, whatever extra incoherencies it piles onto the massive pile of lore contradictions that already exist.

Conflag: 15k crit, ~60%+ crit rate. Follow up cast = 12-15k crit, 1.2s cast time, ~40% crit rate.

In order to make up for the miss and the GCD loss for using the follow up, it needs to deal as much damage as both of those landing. ~30k. You want a dot over 15s that is better than missing my conflag and wasting a GCD on the follow up. That would be 30k damage via whatever means.

Unless you want to counter this somehow? Because that's what you're doing with a follow up to a miss that makes missing not matter: making the follow up the damage equivalent of the missed spell and whatever would have followed it. In this case, a conflag followed by a chaos bolt. Make it better. Without being a 20-30k DoT over 15 seconds.

In other words: what you just did in your math was make a miss auto apply a DoT equivalent to the damage of the spell. Which isn't what you've been talking about: you want buttons to press. Which means wasting the cast (missed) and the follow up (burning it on the follow up), so even assuming your followup is instant cast, the GCD cost alone means to make it better than the lock's normal rotation you need to apply all the self buffs/debuffs, AND deal 20-30k damage. Which, by the by, would mean missing Conflag would let me oneshot most players with the followup (even as a 15s dot, anything lacking a heal = dead no matter what)

You're not thinking this through, at all. Rewarding a miss with effects greater than actually hitting is.. stupid. It's a second form of crit at that point. There's no negative effect to missing at that point, so why exactly are you harping on all this nonsensical crap on a miss when what you want is already done by critting, and you just need a button that can be cast after a crit or something.

Because please, explain to me why your follow up to conflag doesn't need to deal 20-30k damage in order to not be a net DPS loss. Because you're ignoring that DPS keeps casting, it doesn't cast one spell and go home. As your follow ups roll into further possible casting time, you need to accomidate that, or it's a net DPS loss for missing. Beyond the silliness of all secondary effects applying to a target even though you freaking missed.

What?  Your Conflag has magically gained a thousand damage in a few posts, your follow up cast (Chaos Bolt) has 20% less crit chance, despite the fact that the difference between the two derived from talents is 25%, and you're magically assuming both will always crit back to back?  Then you get on my case because the completely pulled-out-the-ass-by-you number of 30k damage over 15s is too much compared to your existing figure of 30 000 in 3.04s?   The Fuck?

I'm done, this is retarded.

EDIT: Fixed mathy bit for haste buff.

Ahm, did they change something in the game mechanics to suddenly make conflag hit/crit for more than chaos bolt?

For quite some time, it's hit/crit for ~the same damage. Raid buffed in ~naxx 25 gear, that's ~15k crit for both. Mine tend to max and average within 600 damage of each other.

As for Sheep: You're right. This is retarded. Your entire premise is to call Crits Misses, and somehow make a convoluted senseless system in which all needed effects proc off a miss (even on the target, which is  :uhrr:), and you get a damage boost that makes up for the GCD loss of two abilities(since you need to trigger the follow up on miss skill)

Explain to me how any of that makes any goddamned sense, because the easier method of doing what you in essence want (a skill based situationally aware dps boosting skill) would be "on crit, opens spell X which deals more damage than your usual filler nuke", which leaves a logical reason for all the natural effects of your prior skill to have applied properly (instead of "he missed you! Also, your spell got interrupted because he kicked 5 feet to your left") and allows for a situational increase to damage if you're paying attention. Though really, that already exists for a number of classes (even locks, if you proc pyroclasm, you can technically get a DPS boost by altering your rotation to take advantage of it by prioritizing recasting certain spells to take advantage of the boost)

So yeah, this whole thing is retarded, because you keep trying to implement "Miss", which is a Failure Case, as a beneficial event.

Hence my "ramping up into it seemed broken" statement.

I forgot BlizzCon was this past weekend! Guess I have some reading to do. No new Hero class?  :sad:

The changes in zone terrain will be refreshing.

Fuck Hero Classes!



Seriously, DK's broke the game for a god damn year.

I still haven't played DK, but I've been wanting a Hero-type Healer for a while now.

For me, most of this stuff is good since I haven't even finished slogging through the last expansion yet.

Doesn't really need it's own thread: http://www.wow.com/2009/08/25/grunty-vs-zergling-battle-video/

Already in the game.  They're called "druids".

Apologies to everyone else, but for once the other guy is digging deeper. :awesome_for_real:

I really don't know what the fuck you are arguing about.

He seems to thing there's something inherently wrong with the presumption that you can add a random factor contingent on failed events.  Overpower must have touched him in a bad way.

No I fail to see why this matters, just stop it.

Nobody else does either. They got lost on the way to EJ.

To get this show back on the road: I predict a deluge of goblins with Warhammer names. Mostly Shamans.

Hmm, can goblins be hunters, I need to go look at that chart.  Also, what could I pass off as a squig?

They can, and maybe this?

(http://www.wowhunterpets.info/images/models/fs_jormungarlarva.jpg)

or maybe

(http://www.wowhunterpets.info/images/models/fs_crawlervar2.jpg)

Collections of "real" or even just "enthusiastic and willing to follow orders" PvP'ers were quite common in classic WoW and got together pretty much every day/night, especially before cross server BG ques when real rivalries were abundant on most servers.  There were all kinds of PvP only or PvP first guilds.  I was able to get into one of the best collections on my server on a regular basis and even though I was nowhere near a PvP allstar/hero at that time it was pretty much the most fun I've ever had in the game to this day.

I appreciate blizzards intent if they're trying to bring back those days with this change, but I don't really see it working well for a multitude of reasons.

Excellent point, I agree.

I think it will depend on the Battlegroup, and the time of day - as it always has.  Back in the day when you could queue for the first BG's as a group it was either brutal or lol 15 seconds depending on your server.  I was playing on Akama at the time, and the Horde drastically outnumbered Alliance, which made for insta queues for us.  The Horde had time to literally go farm people in Blackrock Mountain in between games.  Now that they have x-server it takes some of the brutality out of it (literally hours), but it can still be pretty painful if you're on the wrong side of the population imbalance.  But at least Blizz can occasionally move servers in and out of Battlegroups to try and balance it out.

Nah, at EJ Sheepherder would have been banned after his first post, and Kild probably would have been banned for encouraging him.  :oh_i_see:

The biggest hurdle is that there is no incentive for "real" PvP'ers to participate in the new system to a significant degree.  They already dominate Arena play and receive the spoils and any e-peen bragging rights they need from that.  There's no overcoming the fact that it's much easier to work with and coordinate schedules with 1-4 other people instead of 9-39 others, not to mention many of them prefer the strait up death-match style play anyway.

Back in the Pre-BC days BG's were all you had.  Thus the hardcore PvP crowd was always the major driving force for putting pre-mades together.  However, often times they still had several spots/roles that needed to be filled and would pull in raiders who did occasional PvP or skilled/eager players who they may not have bothered to interact with otherwise.

If the hardcore PvP crowd just sticks to Arenas and only does the occasional rated BG for fun or the minimal honor they need for off-set PvP gear, I just don't see the rated BG system getting the interest and participation it needs to succeed.

TankSpot interview with Ghostcrawler (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f64/54708-tankspot-s-interview-w-ghostcrawler.html)

Focuses mostly on tanks of course but some interesting stuff.

I think you may be drastically underestimating the competitiveness of internet dickheads.

The difference between back in the day and now. Is back in the day people formed pre-set groups to roll the other randoms.



Shit, look how long it takes to even get a queue going for 5v5 Arena these days.

5v5 Arenas are a bad example.

Because they suck.  :awesome_for_real:

I think we are going to get a week of super-hyper participation, then the shocking realization that most people will still get curb-stomped, then the remaining time will be the same 5 teams trading wins against each other.

Nah, not all "Real" PVPers enjoy Areans.   I've got three of my server's former GMs in my current guild.  None of them arena because they dislike death matches and enjoy the back and forth of a well-played battleground much more.  One of them still regularly BGs, even though she gets creamed because she doesn't get the uber stam/ resil gear due to her lack of arena play.

I actually have an account in good standing there which I basically don't post on at all. :oh_i_see:

As I recall the only infraction I got was a comment that Blizzard should fix the normalization formula to not favour slow weapons, to limit pvp burst (around the same time Hammer of the Righteous was introduced).  Really, if the rule of this forum was "No neckbeard or we infraction you!" I could probably live with that...  I'd just take it to game design. :why_so_serious:


Back in the pre-BC days BG's were all you had, and so you geared up in raids and then rolled retards.

Personally, I don't see why raid gear and pvp gear should have different stat allocations to keep people from jumping from pvp to raiding and vice versa in the same set, so long as they do something to un-break Burst/CC and bridge the gear differences.  I'm hoping that the news concerning instances will be the harbingers of one massive battlegroup merge and gear-based matching for BG pvp, like Warhammer was supposed to have, and actually had me interested.

If you really want to go "back in the day" the only thing you had was Terran Mill.

And it was goddamn FUN.

Fun for the 60's steamrolling the 20's.

It was only fun for lack of anything else.

Nah, PVE server.  We didn't even push into the town as Alliance because we knew the horde would give up and go away were that the case.  We'd smack guards around until Horde 50s' and 60's started showing up.. then they'd charge us all en masse and the brawl was on for the night, traveling back and forth between southshore and TM for hours on end.  Each side swelling, peaking then ebbing off as the other side grew.   Pointless, but lots of fun.   The only 20's who got killed were those dumb enough to try and pick-off a high level who'd retreated to heal. 

Damn that stupid wandering mushroom seller though.

I've leveled characters past 60 twice now, and the big slowdown, and least favorite part is when I step through that goddamn dark portal. Once I just stopped playing. The second time I gritted my teeth and did it, but hated every step.

They can toss the whole thing out of the game for all I care.

Ratman I've honestly had the exact opposite experience. On my past 3 characters, 50-58 is just a nightmare. After the Hinterlands there are no good questhubs, so you have to bounce around earning half a level here, a level there, etc. Once you get to Hellfire you're back in quest heaven, STV style.

Plaguelands?

Felwood, Winterspring.  I finish up at 60 before even getting more than a quest chain or two into the plaguelands these days.  There is no doubt that there is alot of running around in those zones though.  It's nowhere near the nightmare it used to be of being quested out at 52 and having to endure grinding to get past 55-56 where questing picked up again.

Very true.  They even added in a second flight point into Felwood though (a while ago), so it really cuts down on the running up and down the entire zone that used to happen. 

PVP Server.  You're coming in on the flight path and you see the carnage, but there's no way to stop yourself.  You land.  Dead.  The guards are fighting a Warrior outside of town.  You try to fly out, but the Flight Master was the first to die.  You're rogue raped.  You hide in the church.  Dead again.  You try to run, they mount up and chase you down.  You log.

Fuck Hillsbrad.

I'm not gonna strut it and say my opinion is the only right one. I did do it on a Pally both times, and they're not the quickest levelers in the pack. But Outlands seems so.... slow... compared to vanilla WoW. I did do the second run after the XP/Leveling boost, and that combined with using Jame's leveling guide took me to 60 pretty quickly.

I just did Outland on my poor old abandoned warrior, still wearing MC and level 60 craftable epics.

It did seem slower this time through, but fortunately there is so much quest/xp overkill now that you should never have to do a quest you don't like.  I got tired of Hellfire, moved on to Zangarmarsh, then left for Nagrand (my favorite) at the first chance.  I wasn't able to quite pull 68 out of Nagrand so I did Blade's Edge.  All of Terrokar, Shadowmoon and Netherstorm are still untouched.

Flying at 60 is also incredibly, stupendously convenient.

My eldest just leveled through outland, she doesn't care for HFP at all, but completed enough of the quests there for the achievement.  Zangar got her to 68, and she moved to SMV, where she seems to be having a great old time.  I got to take my ghost seeing helmet out of the bank!

She'll be bugging me to upgrade her account to Wrath this weekend, no doubt. The flying mount (can you send me 200 gold daaaad? sure...why not) was a huge boost for her, so it'll be interesting to see how she handles Northrend.

Once Lich King hit they also lowered the XP curve in Outland to match what they had previously done for 20-60, so if you haven't done it since then, it is much faster. Like, ding 68 in the 2nd or 3rd zone you hit faster.

Neither WPL nor Felwood alone have enough quests to get you even from 50-55. EPL and Winterspring are both to high level to quest in at level 50.

49-53ish is the "urgh this sucks" zone, still. They seem to be working on it with Cataclysm (one of the stated things was moving to an overlapping and smaller level bracket per zone)

Burning Steppes/Searing Gorge? Un'Goro? Dare I say... Azshara? Those are the ones I'd think about in that bracket and haven't seen mentioned yet.

Everyone says that, but I usually burn through Hellfire, Zangar, Nagrand and then I'm at 66/67.  I usually go and finish up in Netherstorm because the quests are so tightly grouped together.

Of course, I usually run out of rested EXP for most of it given just how fast you burn through it.

edit: End of old world for me is usually Un'goro (if there's anything left), Felwood, Winterspring and maybe a bit of the Plaguelands until I hit 58 (then goodbye fuckers, off to space).  Azshara is pretty useless for horde too.  By the time I got to it, there were like 3 quests left for my level.  Blasted Lands is good, but by the time I finish with Un'goro I'm past it.

Azshara is completely useless as a zone for Alliance and I'm glad it's getting blowed up. I like to wander into Silithis once in a while, though, because it's soooooo empty.  :heart:

Searing is green, and Burning and Ungoro are both orange. The problem is that all the zones start or end at 50, and usually have an assumption of you getting a few levels elsewhere. With the XP changes, I found I'd burned all yellow and low orange quests by the time I hit 49, and everything else was a little silly on the difficulty, or effectively grinding greens.

51 gets a lot better, but 51-53 is still a bit obnoxious where you'll run smack into +3 mobs on quests and still lack the massive power boost characters get with TBC gear opening up.

This is just all from my last attempt at leveling. I may level in a really odd pattern.

edit: fuck blowing up Ashzara! I've been waiting for that BG entrance to work longer than you've been waiting on Uldum!

Azshara is useless for everyone, barely has any quests in it as horde. Only good thing about it is killing Azuregos every once in a while, nice gold to it.

Silithus is terrible for leveling, mobs there have more hp and hit harder than everywhere else.

But, but, lolsand!

Plus the cooking recipe from there!  :drillf:

Azshara had only one use for me: Catching fish to level my cooking skill.  I think there is an engineering recipe there for a water breathing helm as well, but it has been a while.

Silithis sucks.  Period.

Dude, hydrocane.

Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge are so far out of the way (horde) that I had totally forgotten about them tbh.

I often top off in Silithus if I'm out of low hanging fruit in the other end-of-50s zones, because there are several quests you can do without having to wander too far from the flight point. Basically I do all the 'easy' quests in all of the high level zones (EPL, Winterspring, Silithus, Burning Steppes) and get myself a drink or whatever when flying to the next one.

The zones I always try hardest to skip if I can, personally, are Un'Goro and Desolace.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Desolace. I'm glad that's getting exploded too.

I kinda like desolace but it was just way the hell to grey. I am glad its getting some love.

Yet another thing I was ignorant of.  Thanks for that.

Yeah, we noticed you hit that leveling brick wall at around 50.  It took you what?  An hour to get from 50 to 60 instead of your more typical pace of 10 minutes or so?  :why_so_serious:

I have a thing for the ambiance of Aszhara, but I agree the quests are few and all involve humping back and forth down that loooong road infested with naga.

For Horde at least the quest giver is more centrally located.

Ah, I was 70 by then.

I love Azshara. Seriously. I used to farm General Fangferror on my hunter alt for kicks. (and his blue sword drop was worth a fair bit of gold on the AH) And there's not as much competition for Thorium there. (Even if it is a bit sparse and spaced out.)

Maybe I liked it because no one went there.  :awesome_for_real:

I liked it because there is a large amount of stuff which just looks like it should have quests associated with it... but don't.  It's like a throwback to an earlier age - a huge zone filled with oddities that you have to hunt out, and no one leading you by the hand to tell you what or where they are.  I liked it because it was an oddity, not because I want to return to the grind.

Badlands is the most pointless zone for alliance really.

Swamp of Sorrows is even worse, really. Badlands is pretty bad, but hey, you get your first shot at a plate BP reward or something there, I seem to recall from my noob warrior days!

Swamp of Sorrows is the worst and most pointless zone for Alliance. It also has the stupidest, longest, most pointless 5 man in the game.

I agree with you on two of those points but in terms of longest you must have blacked out all memories of BRD.

BRD seemed long and pointless at... I forget if I went in there at 70 or 80.

Either way, it was still ridiculously long.

... wasn't that a 5 man instance?  Now the goddamn raids in WoW take less time than vanilla 5 mans.
 :awesome_for_real:

BRD was longer, but it at least had many attunements and could be done in chunks. Clearing the whole damn thing wasn't really the goal usually. With Sunken Temple the quest was at the very end, and it required all those stupid intermediate running around in circles activating shit bothers.

they've mentioned a few times over the years that BRD was one of the first dungeons they designed.  It was intended to be this epic, sprawling place that went on forever and you could spend many levels running around in.  You see this by all the runs you can do.  Ring of Law, The Back doors for the giant, the gate, the fire eles, the salamander dude and the throne room.  Of course, it's way too fucking big and I don't know what made them realize it.

I think  Blackrock Spire with its two distinct experiences via the same entrance came later.  Then, towards the end of beta they designed Scarlet Monastery, and we know how loved that place is based on how every dungeon complex since then has used the hub design.

Swamp of Sorrows is awesome for leveling herbalism. Otherwise yeah, useless for zee Alliance. I like it well enough as Horde, though.

Its the kind of thing that makes a ton of sense when you are designing dungeons around the idea of "hey, this is the evil dwarven city"  instead of "hey, this is going to be 30 minutes of trash and 3 bosses."  The former sounds WAY better on paper.  I can almost imagine them sitting around a table thinking about how awesome it will be to explore this hostile city with a bunch of people.  Come to find out, the MMO audience doesn't actually want to explore a city, they want dinggrats.  oops.

I really liked exploring it quite a lot... the first time. I bet a lot of other people shared that experience, but the problem with MMOs is you can't get away with stuffing your game with a bunch of stuff people will only do once.

Un'goro is awesome.  I only got squashed by a dino once the last time I went.  Although I got mighty sick of the place when leveling mining.  Round and round we go. 

Still, it's a place you can turn in like 15 quests at once as you do a circuit of the entire zone.  Awesome for ding-grats and unintentional comedy (Devilsaur, I choose you!).

So true.  My warlock just got 55 off of that place starting at 52-53ish or so.  Now that the kill counts are reduced and the mobs required are halved, it's a much happier place (still a good example of circuit quest design).

And for Horde, I am 1 bar from 56 and starting Felwood.  All of the quests are green (only the earliest grey out before 59-60 or so), and when turned in I'll be 57, then on to Winterspring for 58, and then back to Felwood to finish it up for 59 and maybe plaguelands if I haven't hit 60 before finishing the last of Winterspring (nothing greys out in Winterspring before 60).  I've done this on 3 different characters in the last few months, so I've got a pretty good system down for breaking through to 60 and hitting Outlands.  I know, everyone loves to hit it at 58, but I've had nothing but trouble when I tried to do that on some of the quests and the frustration at failing at Zeth'gor over and over was just too much to deal with.  Not to mention until recently you didn't get your epic land mount until 60 and trying to do HFP with mobs that can catch you and kill you on a 60% speed mount was no fun either.

I do Azshara as horde as it's good for one level or so if you hit the one quest hub and hit the other goblin for his quests.  Do all of those and you get a pretty decent amount of experience for the time invested.  Lots of running though.  Azshara does have some pretty nifty quests associated with it, but they are so far buried in elite 60 chains with such lousy rewards and time investments that no one ever bothered to do them.

I suppose I can stop skipping Un'goro now that mounts can swim, thinking about it.

I love Azshara!  Fairly high level herbs just a skip away from Orgrimmar.  Plus just a beautiful zone and quiet.

BRD style dungeons would be fine if the trash didn't respawn. They would be better suited as a raid. CoT:BRD would be something I would jump at in a heartbeat.

If they reduced the amount of trash by 85%, sure.

(http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/august/pandarenmonk2.jpg)

"Hey man, can you please run me through ST?"



groaaaaaaaaaaan.....

ST isn't THAT bad, but it does have the problem of having a pretty big level gap which makes it almost impossible to do the end stuff when if you've gone in at the right level for the beginning stuff.

ST is one of those instances that is interesting to do once; like Uldaman.

I always found BRD to be the best instance in WoW, ever. Not design-wise, it was a horrible play experience unless you knew exactly what to do. But the feeling of a sprawling dungeon with multiple paths is unique in WoW. Clearing all of it with a group of five back in Vanilla was a feat, hell just getting to the final boss required some good group coordination. It also had plenty of "fun" quests to complete and secrets (such as the enchantment books, opening of the vaults, several ways to get past the bar etc.). It was an experience, rather then a roller-coaster ride of mobs and bosses.

Ungoro is also, imho, the best old-world zone design-wise. As mentioned, you can do the whole zone in two circuits, and it has plenty of quests that gel well with other zones, such as winterspring and felwood.

As for Cataclysm... I just got a reason to resub, in a year! I think it looks terrific. And I believe that, unless a better alternative presents itself (yeah right), they will probably recoup plenty old and burned-out players.

You'd hate to be the guy releasing another generic diku who has to compete with "WoW rebuilt from level 1 with everything Blizzard learned over 5 years".

Good.  Maybe we'll get some other options then.

Agree. The dungeons and raids have evolved to be more efficient, but lost a lot of character doing it.

Hell, the stupid little gauntlet room in UP seems to trip up PUGs STILL sometimes, imagine if people had to do The Lyceum, ick.

Incidentally, one of my favorite things I did at the end of vanilla when I was overgeared was duoing every boss in BRD with me (druid), and a friend of mine (another druid).

Kara was the last raid with character.

Oh, I don't know, I like Ulduar's character. But I like Titany crap, so that might be part of it.

I do miss Kara, though. Even though I ran it enough to get exalted on multiple characters.  :why_so_serious: That must count for something, rite?

Eh, I actually liked ToC, made sense and fit the setting somewhat well. Hearing the announcer the first time, with the audience and everything, was very good, and as much as we like to bash jousting, the overall performance increased drastically over the course of a few weeks. When it was just released, it was common to see puggers getting dismounted and killed, nowadays it's a rarity.

What I've seen of Ulduar so far I've really liked, it's a sort of mad giant's playground. I don't get much of a feeling of genuine hostility off it as yet, more malfunction - I'd be interested to see exactly how it's been corrupted malignantly by Yogg Saron etc - for now it's massive tinkertoys on the rampage! And X(treme) T(antrum) Toddlerbot is the best of all! No no no NO NO NO NO NO NO! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L9RgU8KB6A)

I also really enjoyed Kara, though I've only been once and at a speed that rendered the details somewhat blurred.

You'd think. Doesn't seem to stop multimillion dollar development teams from sticking their feet in the beartrap and wiggling vigorously on the trigger.

Thinking upon it further, I think PART of what made Karazahn fun for me was the silly little quest line. It totally acknowledged you were going to go in there a jillion times, and I don't mind quest series that take you into a dungeon multiple times if I'm at the level cap, because I AM going to go in there multiple times. WotLK is sorely, sorely lacking in any quests to really tie into the raids (although there will supposedly be one for the three Icecrown five mans, if I remember right), and it does hurt the character of them somewhat, I think.

OS is the very worst offender of this, but I've babbled about that already.

And yes, XT is rad. I love his voice acting. <3

I remember you...

...in the mountains.

Holy shit, that XT song is fantastic.

I like ulduar most because it's got a single coherent storyline that extends from all the things you were doing in storm peaks including even HOL and HOS. Even Algalon is explained in a reasonable way.  Whether you enjoy the actual aesthetic of the dungeon or not, it's got a purpose other than "there's things to kill in here"

It actually took me a second time doing storm peaks quests to realize razorscale was the broodmother you help thorim get.

That's going to be a mandatory listening download and listening party thing for the XT fight.

I also like that the fights mostly have logic to them. As much as I like doing the Heigan dance in Naxx, it doesn't really make any *sense*.

If your friends can't dance then they're no friends of the lich king, obviously.

That's why I hates OS so much in general terms. Yes, apparently the comic explains wtf all that shit is and why we would ever care about it, but in game? There is not even a teeny little peep about it. It's the most blatant "there are things in here to kill for loots" raid, and I guess I prefer to have window dressing for that.  :oh_i_see: