We’re back with the podcast to discuss most of what happend at Blizzcon this year and the lack of Warcraft news. Be sure to catch our live podcast on wednesday evening when we celebrate a year’s worth of podcasts and we discuss Warlords of Draenor as we approach midnight and level all through the night!
The documentary Looking for Group premiered late last night at Blizzcon! Check it out below.
We’ll we liveblogging the WoW Q&A here which starts at roughly 00:30 CEST!
- Faction restrictions on toys you already have will possibly be removed.
- A tri-spec (having 3 different spec tabs) is not currently on the table
- Sargeras is still the big bad in the end lorewise and not the old gods
- A guild garrison or housing type is something the dev team will continue to talk about in the future, as well as more future garrison features
- Guild achievements are something the devs will want to continue with, but they do need to be something worth making. It has to be a fun achievement.
- Collision detection will continue to improve in the future. If players encounter something their mounts collide with and shouldn’t then the player should give that feedback.
- The fire kitty feral look will not become a glyph.
- When evolving the talent tree they look at the data they have on the usage of talents and multiple factors such as which ones are used and which ones are not. If a certain talent is the only one used in a talent tier it might need changing, just like if one isn’t being used at all.
- Doing /roar while in druid shapeshift form might use the actual animal roars in the future.
- For battle pets they view it as a expanding the content and not the levels, new things to collect.
- Race and gender changes will not be added to the barbershop like the face changes were because they have much more meaning.
- If there’s a legendary weapon in WoD it might get restricted in arena play.
- They might consider a pvp legendary if there’s a pve one to counterbalance it.
- World of Warcraft is the simulationtool the dev team uses with bots. They get their data from the bots literally playing the game. (Other than data from the players playing the game)
- Portal roulette isn’t fun for not-mages. Which is why it was removed.
- Beards disappear when wearing open helmets because of a bug with the big visual changes. They’re working on it. If you come across a helmet that does that, report it.
- New armor archetypes and silhouettes are something they’re talking about.
- Trade Prince Gallywax could eventually be brought back.
- They could make it happen to be able to cook your own bacon ingame.
- Events like the opening of the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj are great but they crashed servers. Such social events are still things they want to do.
- The home of the zandalari trolls might be visited some day.
- The zone Farahlon in Draenor might not be visited.
- The worgen were removed from Shadowmoon Valley in early beta because they felt out of place and they wanted to focus on the Draenei.
- The smelting interface will be brought over to milling and prospecting.
- To be able to get a shot at mythic rewards from garrison missions you as a character already need to be an active player, you’ll need to have heroic gear to have a chance at mythic gear from a rare garrison raid mission.
- For world pvp you should mainly go to Ashran.
- Tom Chilton would love to be able to store addons in a could storage so you could log in anywhere and have your same idea. Whether or not that is possible for one day is up in the air.
- Whether Khadgar is the new guardian (as he has the staff of Atiesh) remains to be seen.
- The summon random favorite mount button might be split into 2 buttons: ground and flying.
- The dragon aspects will be used in the future again.
- There will be characters brought back to life that died in our original timeline, who are alive in the alternate timeline.
It’s been a long day full of panels and excitement here’s an overview of our coverage of day 1 of blizzcon!
Here’s a summary of the Heroes of the Storm panel!
- A lot of people are getting invites now
- Closed beta starts on january 13th
- Draft mode is coming soon
- Works like standard MOBAs
- No duplicate heroes
- Battleground known before heroes are selected
- All ranked modes will use draft
- Coinflip to start picking
- Picking order goes
- team 1 picks 1 hero
- team 2 picks 2 heroes
- team 1 picks 2 heroes
- team 2 picks 2 heroes
- team 1 picks 2 heroes
- team 2 picks 1 hero
- No hero bans
- To keep games shorter
- To keep amount of heroes you need to own low
- Ranked play
- 5-man premades will be high-end ranked
- Two ranked leagues, one for groups under 5 (Hero league) and the other for 5-man premades (Team League)
- Ranking system based on Hearthstone
- Win to get points, losing loses you points
- 50 ranks, 50 to 1 (top)
- MMR affects point gain, playing against better opponents gives more points
- Season based
- Like HS, you gain points for the next season based on rank
- Personal skill rating used for MMR, carries over from season to season
- Hero league fills team based on skill rating
- Will try to match you based on premade size. A 3-man premade will be matched against another 3-man premade
- Will only use person skill ranking
- Player level 30 needed to queue in hero league
- Team league requires you to make a team with a team name, akin to Arena
- Up to 9 players on each team
- Can join 3 teams per account
- Uses team skill rating, not personal
- Must be hero level 40 to queue for team league
- Tons of stats available for teams
- On the subject of leavers
- Stripping people of game rewards didn’t motivate people to stay
- Leavers will get flagged if they leave too often
- Flagged leavers will be matched with other flagged leavers
- Flag will be removed if you play enough games without leaving
- Might not be final implementation
- New heroes
- Jaina
- Ice mage, looks a lot like War3
- Water Elemental – Ultimate
- Frost ring
- Blizzard
- Thrall
- Bursty DPS
- chain lightning
- Sylvanas announced
- Curses, can shut down enemy minions and towers
- Ultimate, mind control
- The Lost Vikings
- Fans demanded them every time they talked to blizzard
- 3 heroes at once
- Can be controlled at the same time or seperately
- Each hero can complete objectives by himself
- Very difficult character
- Ultimate is a ship
- Jaina
- New Battlegrounds
- Sky temple
- Capture the 3 temples
- Fight temple guardians to capture them
- They shoot beams of death at your enemies
- A desesrt in the sky, lots of water and trees as well
- It’s all about the magic
- Egyptian themed buildings, mercs and minions
- Tomb of the spider queen
- Collect gems to summon queen
- Underworld
- Diablo stage
- Heaven, good vs evil
- Half map angelic, half diabolic
- Sky temple
This is the liveblog for the WoW Class Changes panel, it will be updated as the panel happens
- Goals for class design in WoD
- Re-evaluate what makes classes fun
- Strike a better balance between class and encounter mechanics
- Stop the PvP arms race (crowd control)
- Reduce frantic pace of healing
- Make numbers easier to understand
- Class Changes
- Item squish and numerical retuning (patch 6.0), you were still meant to kill content at the same pace you could before
- Class Ability Pruning (patch 6.0)
- Crowd control has been reduced
- Healing gameplay has been changed, the pace has slowed down
- They’re talking about what makes an ability fun?
- Strong Fantasy
- Awesome visuals and sounds
- Cool gameplay effects
- They’re Powerful
- They’re interactive
- They have a clear purpose
- And what makes an ability not fun?
- Redundant (frostbolt, frostfirebolt)
- Inconsistend fantasy, inquisition is an example of this
- Too situational, such as nourish
- Balanced to mediocrity, such as mortal strike it was “a wet noodle button”
- Lack of feedback, there’s no notification if it having done anything
- Unreliable abilities, feral druids are given as an example (shred position)
- Too complicated, symbiosis is given as an example
- In 2004 restoration druids had 21 core abilities.
- In total you had 39 abilities
- In patch 1.12 you had 46 abilities.
- In the burning crusade 51 abilities
- In WotLK 57 abilities
- In Cataclysm 57 abilities, despite a talent system squish
- In MoP 57 abilities, more useless buttons were gone
- In Warlords they have 41 abilites, close to the 39 in original WoW
- Healing gameplay changes
- Why was it not fun?
- “Health bar whiplash”, healthbars were going from full to nearly empty constantly
- Smart heals were too smart
- The healing rotation was big
- Mana scaled too much
- Solutions
- The health of players was doubled
- This means monsters take twice as long to kill you, giving you time to think of which heal you should use
- Smart heals just pick injured players instead of most injured
- Mana regen has been increased
- Spirit will not be available as much, to not make mana trivial anymore
- What does this mean?
- Healing should be more tactical and less reactive
- There’s a slower pace
- You have more decision making to do as you can’t top people off quickly
- Why was it not fun?
- Itemization Changes in WoD
- Getting your gear wearable took a lot of work: gems, upgrades, reforging
- They want the philosophy Kill Loot Equip
- Raid set tokens directly convert into items like the timeless isle tokens
- The stats such as hit and expertise were removed
- Reforging was removed
- Item upgrading is removed in Warlords
- You won’t see gem slots much because they’ll be one of the random bonuses to items
- Gem slots are all prismatic so you won’t have to color match
- Caps and breakpoints have been removed so you won’t have to worry about balancing stats
- Cooking, JC and enchanting will be used for you to choose which additional stats you want
- They use secondary stats (such as crit and multistrike)
- A goal is to make loot more useful for your group
- Main armor slots have dual stats, such as mail will have both agility and intellect
- Separate role items from armor type (no spirit leather gear anymore, instead just on things like rings)
- Dodge and Parry are now just bonus armor, all tanks will want it
- Set bonuses swap based on spec (so no matter what spec you are if you have the gear, you’ll have the set bonuses)
- They want more variety in loot
- There will be more sources for loot, e.g. quests, garrison missions, apexis crystals, dungeons, etc
- Quest items can upgrade to be rare or epic
- Chance at bonus effects in dungeons and raids
- Gem slots
- Warforged
- Tertiary stats (such as avoidance and leech)
- New stats: Versatility and Multistrike
- Q&A
- Gladiator’s resolve is a talent because it changed just a few things. If it had changed more then it would have had to be a 4th spec.
- In orgrimmar holy for priests wasn’t bad it was just that discipline was too good
- There is still depth in the game despite some simplifications. The basics should be relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean there’s not depth to the system.
- To some extent tanks with good self healing will be able to solo more than other classes. If all classes had that it would erode the distinctions between the classes. It might take more gear but eventually all classes will be able to solo things.
- It’s a longterm process to make more special visual effects for class abilities.
- The mana gem was eaten… It wasn’t interesting gameplay, so it was cut. And it was done for all mana regen abilities.
- Once again, simulations are not accurate. In actual raid encounters damage per class/spec is a lot different.
- There are no profession crafted greens, they didn’t like that professions made a lot of items that noone used.
- They will keep their eye on how easily draenic dust is gotten.
This is the blog where we will be updating for the HS Fireside Chat once it starts at 00:30!
- Statistics about hearthstone today, to be taken with a grain (or more) of salt:
- The worst card: Magma Rager, Chance to win if drawn: 29%
- Angry chicken: if drawn 47% chance to win
- Defender of Argus 49.8% chance to win when drawn, but if played 52.6%chance to win
- The best “warrior” card during a period in october: Baron geddon. When drawn 56% chance to win. If played 60% chance. During this time it was mostly used in control warrior.
- Curse of naxxramas stats:
- It took an average of 2 attempts per boss to win on normal.
- It took an average of 9 attempts per boss to win on heroic. Up to 45 on heroic Kel’thuzad
- RNG is the least enjoyed part by players of Hearthstone
- Eric Dodds comes to the stage to talk about Goblins vs Gnomes
- It will be about the giant ridiculous inventions of destruction of these two races
- They wanted to do something different to the naxxrammas theme
- Goblins are focused on making an invention and then blowing the enemy up
- Gnomes are about accidentally turning things into other things and other accidents
- New minion type: Mech
- Harvest Golem will now be considered a Mech type card, along with other old cards that would make sense to be a mech type card
- Another concept: Piloted Mechs
- When the mechanical minion dies the pilot should come out
- Example: Deathrattle: Summon a random 2-cost minion.
- Another concept: Spare parts
- Deathrattle: add a spare card to your hand
- Such as whirling blades, give a minion +1 attack
- There are 7 spare parts in total
- Yong Woo takes the stage
- Spectator mode comes with the expansion!
- Players can choose to make their games invite only for spectator mode
- You can spectate both players at the same time!
