The Blizzcon Thread: Let there be PandasFollow

I just got home from work, stayed an hour late and paid no attention to anything wow related all day so I am just absorbing it all right now.

The expac trailer was lame. There were a couple shots where the scale looked amazing, like the mountains around Ulduar big which was nice but the asian theme didn't feel "Warcraft". Everytime they have tried to make things less complicated and more "fun" they have raped the game of the depth it used to have that made it so amazing back in the day, and frankly I wouldn't play through another "Cataclysm" level rebalance.


I rather shell out the simoleans for DIII and put WoW to rest. Who wants my gold?

Okay, I've slept on it and I've decided that this expansion is silly.

Yes, Pandaren are cool, but I don't think an entire expansion dedicated to them was the right thing. Maybe if they had included them in an Emerald Dream expansion. They could have easily snuck them in there without having to go the Mists of Pandaria route.

One of the themes on the O-boards from people that are supporting the new expansion is that Blizzard only did what players have been asking for for years. This is odd really.

Had they announced an "Emerald Dream" expansion (something a lot of players want) there wouldn't of been the uproar quite like there is now.

Why does Ghostcrawler hate paladins?
A ret paladin killed his parents.

Shadow Priests: The wording on the new Shadow Orbs suggests that they're going to be based on a resource, is that true?
We're still working on the details but yeah, it will be a secondary resource kind of mechanic, take out the RNG aspect maybe. The idea currently is that Mind Blast will cost shadow orbs and have no cooldown

Are you satisfied by healing in PvP?
Balancing PvE and PvP healing is kind of a big challenge. Its something we talk about all the time, I dont think we have solved the problem yet and its something we are still working on. We've seen a lot of dual caster comps in the blizzcon tournament and we've buffed Mortal Strike and healing reduction in 4.3 and hopefully you'll be able to bring back warriors and rogues in PvP.

How do the old debuff talents work with new talent tree and tanking model?
We want tanks to do more of the active things to keep themselves alive rather than relying on the healers

My classes are about classes that have a 100 cap on a resource. Currently there are talents that increase these resource, are there any plans for the new talent trees to do that?
It's going to vary on class by class basis, its something that does not really fit into the current talent system as it is currently designed.

I have 10 characters, will you add an 11th slot so we can have all 11 classes?
Not sure just yet, might keep the current character cap but let you have them on any realm, so you can have many many charaters on one realm

For event items like the Scourge Invasion or the Vengeful PvP set, can we get those for transmog account-wide?
We want to make sure that all the times you remember from the good old days are available for transmog. Im happy you brought up the vengeful set, and in Area 52 there are vendors where can you buy these items. Regarding accountwide event items we have to watch out on our side as its kind of resource expensive. We could certainly look into that.

Can feral druids have two fist weapons? / As an enchanter we never got any good drops, are we getting new enchanting item drops?
Nope, working the talents to support it would make a mess. Monk tanks will use staff or polearm. / No plans on enchanting item drops to change.

I was wondering since this next expansion coming out is going to be so faction focused, if we could see faction specific legendaries for maybe a shield like Might of the Alliance or for the horde a Fist of the horde that are completely badass
Legendaries are something we look at on case to case bases, if the stories supports it and we find a cool item possibility. Everything is always possible. (GC loves the idea)

Death Knight tanks are bad right now, stats and talents need some changes. Set bonus is based on us being at low health, which shouldn't happen. What changes will fix these problems?
Death Knights get some love in 4.3 to fix survivability, Blood presence armor bonus is going to 55% from 30%. We don't want Death Knights to get killed in one GCD, but we don't want them to be the best tank by far

A balance druid can be really low on the damage and then theres the problem of sitting on solar when we need to do AoE, is there anything you guys are planning on doing to adress that like the DK ability that generates unholy power
In 5.0 Hurricane will have a new arcane function to make sure you can use it whenever you have to.

Any plans to improve the Death Knight gargoyle melee attack?
Nope, it is designed to work at range, There are no plans to change Death Knight stat weights during this expansion, maybe some balancing in MoP.

I have been playing since vanilla and one of my fav items i have been using up to today is noggaholic elixier, and i am wondering why we cant mount while skeleton
Our animation system does not have animations for some costume models that can be on a mount so we decided to completely disallow mounting while transformed to make it consistent, it was the only way to fix hundred of bugs.

Is there any plan to make solo Holy Priest DPS better? Running daily quests take a lot of time in Holy.
Nope, we have dual spec, it isn't a priority for us to make it viable for raiding or fast daily quests. We have to keep it balanced for PvP as well. In the Firelands some of the daily quests are designed to be actually easier for healers.

I'm a rogue so thanks for the legendary! Regarding the new introduction of the Windwalker monk class and also the formalization of cat druids as an official spec, with all these new melee DPS hybrids what doyou guys have planned as rogues to be competitive as a utilitiy class?
Everyone brings a little bit of everything, reasons to get a rogue now are things like poisons, interrupts and stuns. These will stay important during encounters.

New talents will still be cookie cutter, how is this new?
Most give utility choices rather than damage, this can't be number crunched. We will continue to balance them to make them hard choices.

Quick followup to the noggenfogger elixir question, there have been other places where you get onto something when you lose a transformation and then get it back later
One of the things that make consumables fun is that they are consumables. They can go away. If they were permanent things you are going to lose the impact of what a transformation really is. Fundamentally we want these to be fun things that arent everywhere. Ideally we would have it make an error message if you are near to doing this.

Archeology has been ignored as far as i can tell other than a few things here and there, are we gonna see lower than max level items on max variety?
The archeology items are all over the place, I use the vrykul helm always because I like being bigger than everyone else. We are looking into ways to sex it up and take out the grindy nature of it.

Tanking as a druid, I can go cat and do decent DPS when I am not getting hit. Is the new druid 4-specs model going to let me do that?
Other tanks can't do that and you won't be able to do that anymore, talents are set up this way to keep both seperate for PvP and PvE.

Resto druids have pretty decent single target rotation for healing, but when we want to AoE heal we go back to mindlessly spamming buttons. Are we getting more options for this in the next expansion?
There is one new ability plan like the wild mushroom to detonate to heal people. A lot of druids enjoy that kind of playstyle. When we did try to tone down the HoTs we got a lot of push back there. Some of the healing you mentioned is also needed in an encounter and we will try to not do this as much.

The 4pc bear T13 bonus, you don't want cats to get it but it's also impacting utility for bears?
You can swap to bear, press it, go back. We can't let cats use it because it would just force them to add it their rotation and stack them in raid, we'd just have to change the bonus completely.

Are we getting new spells at like 86, 88 and 90? If so, what are the new mage spells?
We are adding a lot of new spells to fill out the talent trees. One plan we have talked about is to get one new spell at level 87. Pretty sure we are not going to be able to get 3 more spells along the way. We dont know yet what the mage one will be. In the past we said 5-8 new abilties while they level up. Some classes however might get more than one new ability.

Can we have another tank legendary
Legendary needs a story to go with it, we aren't taking turns with the classes or specs, we put them in where they fit in the story. If there is an opportunity you will get one! A legendary shield would be great.

Regarding arcane mage mastery, it created the possibility for really deep gameplay for managing your resource. But we were promised this toolkit to manage our mana and all we got was Arcane Blast and clearing our Arcane Blast stacks. Are we gonna get anything else to help us not be 2 button wonders and make it deeper?
We are really not happy with the role of Arcane Barrage, we have some plans to make arcane more deeper. We would like to redesign so that Arcane Missiles barrage and explosion all have an equal role in the arcane role.

Can we have some shadowform tweaks so that you can see the gear?
We have a glyph in 4.3 coming to tweak the alpha of shadowform

Where is the Death Knight tier 13?
Its really awesome and you will see it soon

What about new Death Knight gear for transmog? Other classes can go back farther.
That is really expensive art to do. For us its a metter of budget, if we ask for certain armor sets we have to delay patches or expansions to get them. We have to make hard choices sometimes and it's not a matter of just throwing money at the problem, it just takes more time and delays things further.

Can we have strength polearms?
They are awkward right now, we want all Strength classes to be able to use them. Maybe in MoP with the hunter tweaks it will be possible.

Back in vanilla you had the hunter epic questline with Rok'delar and I was wondering if you guys are going to bring that back at all
It's something we are looking at and are considering, if we do something like that it has to be on our level of quality. It's also worth noting that that feel of solo quest/gameplay is something we've tried to re-introduce in 4.2 and 4.3 with the new legendary staff and legendary dagger.

Engineers got cool stuff in the past, can we have more powerful versions or something new and cool?
Yes, we can make powerful and cool stuff but it has to have downsides. We can add some new stuff with restrictions on where you can actually use it, not PvP, so that it is still balanced.

Regarding hunters; you are eliminating the use for melee weapons, are we still going to be able to equip it? Can we also get some mace love?
There are not any plans for that now, we are probably not going to let you equip melee. If it makes you feel better, the rogues wont be able to equip the orange legendary bow either. We do want to change hunters so you can see quivers and or ammo pouches, potentially customize them, etc.

What happened to engineering, you make it very cool once and then added something useless every once in a while. Goggles were very cool, but there are no upgrades, so they are worthless now. Archaeology gives almost as many pets as engineering.
We made engineering too good, then it was not so good. We are trying to make sure it offers cool stuff this time. Post your suggestions on the forums!

How is monk healing going to work? When I played yesterday you had chi and light and dark power. Is it going to be like I choose healing spec and you get a mana bar or something?
When you switch to healing stance you will get a mana bar, and regarding healing, the monk will be less target based and more proximity based. And there is also this mechanics where you can put statues in the raid, and when you melee the boss they give out healing for example. We are challenging ourselves into new ways to look at this.

One of the things WoW doesn't have right now is a melee cloth class. When you announced the monk yesterday I was super excited and I was wondering if there was any discussion to make them a cloth class to make them have a better monk feel?
The main concern was that if we introduce a melee cloth healer, we'd need a whole new kind of item drops in the loot table and you'd have to wait for your specific gear to drop. That's why we went for an already existing loot archetype, you already have the leather agi and leather int/spirit and it was the best way to go without having to create new armor types.

Since we're going to be able to name companion pet, is there any chance we'll be able to name warlock pets?
You're just grabbing a demon for your own use from the Twisting Nether, use it, and then get rid of it, it's not the same emotional attachment as a companion pet or hunter pet. Something we did talk about is a way to reset the name of your pets, for when you get a pet and really don't like the name.

I know that removing the min range for hunters is a great key, but for melee this means we are losing some stats too
Everyone is losing some stats with the ranged slots, relics, etc ... going away. Your range weapon will have stats so you wont lose more stats than everyone else.

JCing and Inscription selling is hard because of constant undercutting from others or gold farmers. Can we have perfect cuts back so that we have something not mass produced to sell?
That is how an open market works. Perfect gem cuts are problematic because nobody would use the regular blue ones. BoP Chaos Orbs help for some professions, maybe we should do something like that for Jewelcrafting.

I got to play the monk, and the play of it feels amazing. Can we expect the removal of auto attack on other classes? If so, hunters will be really confused.
The monk not having auto attack was controversial around the office too, we are not even 100% sure the monk will keep it. And removing auto attack for other classes will just feel like a huge change. We do crazy things on new stuff, not on old stuff. There are some downsides too - if a monkey has 5hp left they have to wait to push a button again were as a Rogue would just kill it with its auto attack.