Mists of Pandaria

[luckton]

It is fun to review all of this stuff, but for the first time, I'm no where near as ecstatic for a WoW expansion as I have in the past.  I guess finally wrapping up all of the story threads from the Warcraft RTS's will do that.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Apparently all ranged slots are disappearing. Hunters bows etc will become main hand for them and wands will also become main hand weapons.

[luckton]

Apparently all ranged slots are disappearing. Hunters bows etc will become main hand for them and wands will also become main hand weapons.

Way to kill the "Everything is a Hunter weapon" meme 

Although I'm glad we don't have to worry about stat-sticks anymore.  Too much overhead and mucking up loot drops.

[Rendakor]

I'm actually much more excited for MoP than Cata, although it's the features that are selling me and not the "content".

[caladein]

Mostly tradition at this point. Thematically, it would be quite a blow to say "sorry mages, you can't be fire anymore" or whatever. People are very attached to their spec identities for good or for ill.

It's not so much but that the specs manage to provide different playstyles.  Marks has this cadence and planted feel because of Improved Steady Shot and Aimed Shot.  Survival is very different where you're resolving long cooldowns with short cooldowns and how AOE and single-target damage modes interact.  Beast Mastery has its pets and its shorter, slightly conflicting cooldowns.

The two Priest healing specs have been very different this expansion, as are the Rogue specs to a lesser extent.  And they seem to be going forward with that with all three of the Warlock specs having their own resource mechanics.

[Lakov_Sanite]

They aren't getting red of fire/arcane/frost though.  You still pick of of the three at level 10 and get abilities/buffs according to your choice.  It's less of say frost spec, than it is frost specialist.

[VainEldritch]

It's less of say frost spec, than it is frost specialist.

That's a good way of looking at it - though after watching Greg's presentation on "Talents 2" I am less worried that this is complete deconstruction of the talent system - it appears to more moving the good bits around, cutting more fluff and adding a few interesting new talents. Some look very OP, but at least Ret gets a snare... 

[Sjofn]

Similarly boned are pallies who now have to choose between Ardent Defender and Sacred Shield.  Oh wait, that's not really a choice as a tank you're going to take AD but lose all possibility of acces to SS.  Fantastic.

You already can't get them both as a paladin. Sacred shield is fairly deep in ret. Hell, I'm glad I can pick sacred shield instead of AD, I like how SS works better. :P

[Merusk]

I must be thinking of something else then. Hrm.


Anywho; Q&A covered the old models and their lack of animation.  They're working on moving the old races into the new model skeletons used by worgen, goblin & pandarans but don't have a roll-out plan or date yet.

[caladein]

I must be thinking of something else then. Hrm.

Holy Shield perhaps?

[Rendakor]

I'm upset that they're not making Divine Guardian accessible to all specs again.

[Ginaz]

Good lord.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fukHoLqoP28&feature=related

[K9]

I don't know what it is about paladin players, something about the class makes so many people froth and go all "DERP SPEC IS THE ONLY TRUE PALADIN HERP!", seriously, I never see Druid players ranting about how feral is the only true druid spec and such.

On the talent trees, if this had been in at Cataclysm as an AA system or as part of a grand overhaul it would have kept me interested, as it is, the halfway house and all the other bullshit killed my interest. It is a shame, since this looks like it could be really fun. That said, from a mechanistic point of view, making it three abilities per tier for all classes is going to result in classes with more spec types having fewer choices. Rogues and hunters are going to be DPSing irregardless, so for them, their three choices are going to be genuine choices. For other classes there are going to be a lot of dead abilities in the tree. It might have been better to have a mix of spec-unique, and generic abilities in each tier for hybrid classes, and then let people mix and match.

As for the Shaman tiers, it's basically a list of how many crap totems could we dream up in five minutes before the show...

Seriously, there are next to no interesting new abilities in there.

Compare Shaman Tier 1, to Priest or Mage.

T1 Priest: Void Tendrils (AoE root, but this just sounds fucking awesome) or Psyfiemd (A pet that fears enemies) or Psychic Scream (Always useful, a great ability).

T1 Mage: Ring of Frost (Awesome ability), Cone of Cold (Great ability, a classic),  or Frostjaw (combined silence or root)

All of these abilities either sound awesome, or have proven usefulness and appeal. Then there is the shaman

T1 Shaman: Frozen Power (A root on a shock spell nobody really uses), Earthgrab Totem (A situationally useful sidegrade to earthbind totem), or Repulsion Totem (A knockback totem? Seriously...)

And the trend continues. Shaman T2 is three highly situational abilities, all of which are pretty much useless in PvE. Ditto for T3 (although tranquil mind is probably a somewhat decent PvE totem, assuming Wrath of Air totem is removed....), T4 is three healing-related abilities. T6 is the first tier without a totem ability, and it is the first one with some vaguely interesting spells. T7 is somewhat interesting, but again very totem focused. There isn't a single offensive spell in the whole tree, nor a single functional heal. There are 7+ totem spells though, most of which are situationally useless.

If I was still playing, and I was playing my shaman, this would underwhelm me significantly.

[Selby]

If I was still playing, and I was playing my shaman, this would underwhelm me significantly.

There's been a lot of that for the Shaman class for a while.  Nothing exactly new ;-)

[Lakov_Sanite]

Repulsion Totem (A knockback totem? Seriously...)

If you don't know why knockback is awesome, you've clearly never sent someone off a cliff.

[sinij]

I'm upset that they're not making Divine Guardian accessible to all specs again.

Didn't they rework this ability like 6 times and could never agree what it suppose to do?

[sinij]

Repulsion Totem (A knockback totem? Seriously...)

If you don't know why knockback is awesome, you've clearly never sent someone off a cliff.

I can't start imagining how annoying this going to be in PvP. Knockback = interrupt for both melee, healing and casted nukes; imagine this pulsing consistently while not taking GCDs to do so.

[Rendakor]

It's been a raidwide damage reduction cooldown since at least LK; back then, it was a 10p prot talent so you could spec into it as ret and holy. I'm sure they've fucked with the numbers on it (and the name, it used to be Divine Sacrifice) but it's function hasn't changed.

[Ingmar]

Repulsion totem has not been described as knockback, rather the devs said it "stops people from coming towards you". Not clear what that will entail exactly yet.

[koro]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1hGj9gHs00

Pandaren animations. Note that Metzen has confirmed that no old models will be getting similar updates this expansion (though race-specific monk animations have been added).

[Ingmar]

The art guy said in the general Q&A that he is working on the old race models personally right now, but couldn't give a timeframe for when they might actually go live.

[Evildrider]

The art guy said in the general Q&A that he is working on the old race models personally right now, but couldn't give a timeframe for when they might actually go live.

With the Abyssal Maw patch probably.

[Setanta]

If I was still playing, and I was playing my shaman, this would underwhelm me significantly.

There's been a lot of that for the Shaman class for a while.  Nothing exactly new ;-)

Ever since WF procs off WF procs was nerfed for me. I died a little when we lost 2H viability and this even though Stormstrike and 2x1H was cool, I miss the days of clothie-tears.

[Ratman_tf]

Blizzcon page from Wowhead.

I thought this thread was full of steamy shit speculation.

Jesus fuck. Blizzard just keeps getting back in line for another whack from the retarted stick.

[Ironwood]

Warlocks will now have a unique resource for each spec. Affliction - Soul Shards. Demonology - Demonic Fury. Destruction - Infernal Embers.

What ?  Why

[DLRiley]

Oh ahahah you even get a super badass looking horse mount for the annual pass thing.

Just hire an army of hookers to send to people's houses if they resub to WoW Blizzard, because that's what you're going to need to get back the people you utterly burnt out with Cataclysm. You told the more casual players to fuck off for most of a year and they're not only gone, but they're apparently not interested in coming back regardless of all the bones you've thrown at them in the last few months of Cataclysm. Only the aspergers crowd that will never unsub anyway will drop $120 or so for a mount and free access to a game they were going to buy anyway.

Cata timeline:

I think wows decline has less to do with cataclysm crazyness and more to do with dozens of free2play games nipping at the heels with less and less gamers growing up with subscriptions as the preferred model. wow used to be the coming of age game for many pc gamers, its not anymore.

[Simond]

The art guy said in the general Q&A that he is working on the old race models personally right now, but couldn't give a timeframe for when they might actually go live.

With the Abyssal Maw patch probably.

Blizzard has been quietly hiring people to work on new player models for a while now. I suspect it's not listed as an expansion bullet-point purely because they don't think they'll be done in time (assuming that MoP is Summer '12 as rumoured). Hell, look at Illidan/Tyrande/etc. models in the 4.3 dungeon and tell me that they don't look like the starting point for new NE models. The important thing is that Blizzard simply cannot afford to fuck new player models up. Just ask SOE about their mongoloid poser-esque soulless SoL player model 'upgrade' for an example.

Warlocks will now have a unique resource for each spec. Affliction - Soul Shards. Demonology - Demonic Fury. Destruction - Infernal Embers.

What ?  Why

I think the official answer was along the lines of "Warlocks play too much like mages with slightly different spells, so we're going to change them up and make them their own class".


E:
On player models - http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3424794612?page=5#86

Art Director Chris Robinson spoke on this just moments ago at the BlizzCon Open Q&A panel. It was in reply to an attendee who brought up that, in the art panel, it was explained that the pandaren model has 10 times the bone structures of the classic races, allowing for many more facial animations.

To paraphrase his statement -- which isn't too different from what I've said here on the forums before -- we absolutely plan on updating the existing models. As Chris mentioned, we want to make sure we preserve the look and feel of the original models players have come to know and love, while vastly improving their model and animation quality to be more in-line with the newer races.

We're not going to hide behind the statement that too many players will get mad if we tamper with their models, but it's a concern -- not a concern that's going to stop us from doing it, however.  I want to stress as well that it's a massive undertaking to go back and do this. And to a lot of people it's something that won't be considered shiny new content. But not only do we hear the masses of players calling for this update, we really feel it's time to bring them up to par with newer models as well.

The game continues to age, but as we have no plans of slowing down on development any time in the near future, we want to keep updating and polishing it to stand the test of time (again, without sacrificing the look and feel which has brought players in over the years).

So yeah. New models.

[koro]

I've played Warlock off and on over the years, and while I've never quite gotten one to max level, at no point did I ever think "Man, this feels like my Mage but with a pet and a second resource system."

I can certainly understand Blizzard's line of thinking with the addition of spec-specific resources for Warlocks, but I question how much of it is necessity and how much is change for change's sake.

[Ironwood]

But they expended so much blood, tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth to get rid of Soul Shards.

And now we're having 3 types of resources ?

Fucking Lame.  I also agree that I've never felt like I played like a Mage.

[Rendakor]

My destro lock always felt like my fire mage, back when I played them both in LK.

[Tannhauser]

First they have shards, then they don't, then they do again and now they will have three.  Is the mechanic that important?  If so, then why no Mage stones?  All the stones do is add tedium and inventory management.  Maybe they have a way of making managing stones fun and useful? 

I think they are just trying to change Cata lock, stock and barrel. 

[apocrypha]

Pandas? Really?

Cock off.

[Paelos]

The starter zone has a quest when you have to jump over 10 sharks to get to the island.

[Tannhauser]

If that's not true then it should be.  I lawled!

[Threash]

I gotta admit those animations are so far superior to what is currently in game that i am more excited for the update than for the expansion.