During the holidays I will take the time to highlight most of the features added to the game with the upcoming expansion. Most of the information was released during the Blizzcon and I don't think anyone had the time to process everything during the event, the blue poster activity will calm down for a week or two and it should leave you with plenty of time to discuss each feature.
I might add a Cataclysm menu when I'm done with that. (Yes, I do realize that I'm starting to have a lot of menus here. I'm sure I'll eventually figure something out)
Cataclysm Alpha/Beta Test
Let's start with a small reminder: The Alpha/Beta Test of the expansion didn't start and anything saying otherwise is a scam from people trying to steal your account. Trust me, when an Alpha version of Cataclysm is available, you'll know about it.
Cataclysm Release Date
The 2nd most popular question on my list, what's the release date of the expansion? We don't know. The only thing we know at this point is that Cataclysm should be released in 2010 but Blizzard didn't announce the exact date for the moment. Of course it never hurts to Preorder Cataclysm on Amazon.com or anywhere else.
Cataclysm - Guild Improvements
Wrath of the Lich King made guilds slightly less useful, a decent PUG can complete a lot of the raid content and finding people to run an heroic dungeon has never been so easy. Cataclysm will change that and make guilds more interesting than ever!
Guild Levels and Talents
Your guild can now gain experience and levels, the maximum level being 20. Your guild will gain experience through different ways :
•Playing with your guildmates and killing a raid boss or winning an arena match where more than 75% of the group is from your guild.
•Playing alone also helps your guild, leveling your character, your professions, or even your reputations will increase the level of your guild as well!
You won't be able to level fast just by recruiting a hundred of members, guild leveling is restricted and only the top 20 earners each week will increase the experience of the guild.
Each level will reward you with a guild talent point, they can be spent to make your life easier in the game and will give you bonuses and abilities such as :
•Remove reagent costs from raid buffs.
•Reduce the cost of repairs.
•Increased gold drops from monsters or players that reward experience or honor.
•Summon your entire raid to a place.
•Resurrect your entire raid after a wipe. (30 min cooldown)
•Reduce the amount of rare reagents needed for professions. (Like reducing the amount of Frozen Orbs to craft a weapon)
•Automatically transfer a % of the gold dropped by monsters and bosses to the guild bank.
This is only a small preview of the talents and it already looks like a good reason to stick with your guild, but wait there is more!
Guild Items and Guild Currency
Guild experience will also be converted in a guild "currency" used to buy special items. These items are bound to the guild and you will have to stay in the guild to keep them, if someone leaves with a guild item it will just be returned to the guild bank.
You can expect various item rewards from this system:
•Heirlooms
•Mounts and pets
•Professions Plans (Leaving the guild will unlearn them)
•Potions and Rare Reagents
•Guild Banners
•Guild Bank Tabs and Guild Talents Respecs
Guild Achievements
Cataclysm will also add achievements for your guild, the mechanics are the same as guild leveling you will need a minimum ratio of guild members in the group to complete them. They will be very similar to player achievements and you can expect things like :
•Completing a raid instance with your guild
•Crafting one (or more!) legendary items
•Become a Grand Master in every profession
•Become Exalted with all Northrend factions
Looking for Guild
Cataclysm will also make the management of your guild much easier. A new "Looking for Guild" interface will be added, it will give players an easy way to find a guild and give leaders an easy way to find new members. This new feature will let you recruit people based on a few filters based on various requirements.
Improved Guild Interface
Tracking what's going on in your guild will also be made easier with a new interface.
•The Guild News will let you check everything that happened in your guild: boss kills, members achievements, new item loot, profession leveling ... It will come with different filters to let you find specific information.
•A new Roster tab will give you more information on your guildmates, you can see the professions of everyone in the guild and even check the list of their recipes to see if they can craft an item.
•The calendar will also let you invite other guilds to your guild events.
Blizzard Store Delivering
For the moment, this message was only posted on the european website.
Quote from: Blizzard (Source)The Blizzard Store is open for ordering. However, deliveries of physical products will be on hold from December 24th to January 4th, included. Deliveries will resume on January 5th. This does not affect digital products, like games or pets. We wish you happy holidays!
Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staffRemoving Oculus from the random dungeons
There are no plans to remove Oculus from the random dungeon/heroic selection. We know some players have some issues with this dungeon, but everybody I know who has tried it since the 3.3 nerfs has felt that it is a fairly easy dungeon just maybe a bit long. (Source)
Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Dual-Wield as a Death Knight
The death knight was always conceived as using both large two-handed weapons and dual-wielding one-handed weapons. The earliest notes we made on death knights had just a few requirements: wears plate, must have a tanking build, uses runes as a resource, controls undead minions, and has two-handed and dual-wielding trees. That has just always been our vision for the class.
Yes, Arthas uses Frostmourne, but there are also characters like Thassarian who dual-wield. Some players prefer the faster swings of dual-wielding; and from an itemization standpoint it's nice for someone to use one-handed swords besides rogues. There aren't exactly a great number of dual-wielding classes. The rogue class is dedicated to dual-wielding, as is one shaman specialization. That's really it. Hunters rarely use their melee weapons and pretty much go for whatever gives the best stats, which is often the two-handed weapons. Fury warriors use the same two-handed weapons that Arms warriors do.
We can't always make promises to those who defend a specific play style as their favorite that we'll make sacrifices to keep it viable. With as many players as we have there will always be someone who likes something a certain way and doesn't want to see it changed. There are still shamans out there who picked their class for its (now defunct) tanking niche. Some hunters liked Survival because it was the melee hunter.
We wanted death knights to dual-wield. Making every tree have a dual-wield build wasn't working. One tree had to become dedicated and we thought Frost made the most sense. (Source)
Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Spirit Beast / Wolf pets
I know some of you were reading into my comments a bit much so I'll try and explain things a little more.
The wolf is overpowered when compared to the other available pets, mostly because it buffs the master. Buffing all of the pets to that level would require a number of different changes to different pets and the chance that one of those buffs would be too much or not enough is reasonably high. When you have say 10 or more things all roughly equal and then one that is outside of that group, the one that’s outside is called an outlier. Defining it as the new normal isn’t smart game design and just like we do with classes, we are likely to nerf the single thing at the top than buff all the others.
It might not be possible to ever get the pets completely identical (see comments below), so very competitive raiders will probably still only take the best one. But if the best one is only slightly ahead of the others, then it will feel more acceptable to some players to run with the pet they like. For most players, improving their own game will have a larger effect than picking the “best in slot” pet if they are comparable.
As far as the Spirit Beasts are concerned, there are several reasons why they would make a bad “best” pet. There are not very many options to choose from and all of them require “farming”; a rare spawn that is more of a testament to blind luck than any kind of player skill. As we said before, there is no advantage to having a wider spectrum of pets to choose from if there is only one right choice.
We have talked about literally making all the pet families identical and letting the player just pick one based on looks. That certainly homogenizes the game quite a bit, which is why we haven’t done it, but it would ultimately allow pet choice to be cosmetic.
In the end, yes, we do want to get BM competitive with Survival and Marks. We even did some buffs in 3.3 to help them get there but the reason for my comments earlier is that we’d rather have two viable raiding specs than just one so Hunters as a whole are not in terrible shape. Eventually we do plan to get all 3 there. Just remember that when players obsess about 1% differences in dps you can understand why that task is pretty gigantic. There are probably more raiding BM hunters in 3.3 than in 3.2 and probably a lot more than there are Subtlety rogues (sorry for the example rogues, but you/we know it's true). It’s far from a dead spec. (Source)
Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Discipline Priest
It's definitely one of the strong points of the Discipline tree to be able to use shields for absorption, but players shouldn't view shields as the answer to every problem encountered. Discipline priests are still priests and have many other spells available to them. The absorbs aren't meant to totally replace the need to heal completely, and one shouldn't compare the amount a Discipline priest can absorb to the amount another healing class (or holy priest) can heal. Power Word: Shield is very powerful, not just due to its absorption effect but also due to the many benefits gained -- primarily through various talents.
Greater Heal, Flash Heal and even Penance should still be cast as needed.
In raids, we also think that far too many players want to put the healing classes into two "big buckets" -- tank healers (Holy paladin & Discipline priest), and raid healers (Holy priests, Restoration shaman & druids).
We simply do not think that's granular enough.
Discipline priests aren't supposed to be Holy paladins that rely exclusively on their absorptions instead of their heals any more than hunters aren't supposed to be rogues who simply stand at range.
We think Discipline priests are in a pretty good place at the moment.
As a side note, one thing we'd like to do is make changes to the game that allow healing meters to be able to properly identify absorptions. (Source)
Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:55 pm
