With the release of the pre-orders today and the finding out of the expected fall release date we got together for an extra podcast to discuss the news.
#Warlords of Draenor launches this fall! Pre-purchase the expansion NOW & boost to level 90: http://t.co/NHgOZp7ph8 http://t.co/PMOWe9kw42
— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) March 10, 2014
Good news everyone! You can now pre-order Warlords of Draenor! The normal version costs $50(€45) and deluxe edition costs $70(€60). When you pre-order now the mount, pet and free boost will already become available to you! The pricing is higher than before. To compare the Mists of Pandaria normal version cost $39.99, €34.99/£29.99 and the digital deluxe edition cost $59.99, €49.99/£39.99.
Now onto the not so great news. On the advertisement on the US Warcraft Site when you first visit it you’ll get to see that the expected release for WoD is Fall 2014. Which means we’re looking at a year or more of Siege of Orgrimmar. The placeholder date says 20th of December 2014. Ion Hazzikostas clarified that date saying it was the technical last day of the Fall (as winter doesn’t officially start until 21 December). Which gives some more validity to the expectancy of a Fall release date.
@Tanned_ @Abrosiabi @Celestalon @holinka That is the technical definition of the last day of fall. It’s not a release date.
— Watcher (@WatcherDev) March 10, 2014
And then finally, the option to purchase an extra lvl 90 boost has also become available. The price for the US is still $60. For the EU it’s €50 (Currently that converts to roughly $69, which I’m sure we’ll discuss on the next podcast).
Gnomes finally get their moment of glory in the trailer Blizzard has released to promote the pre-order of Warlords of Draenor and the related level 90 boost. As of the posting of this item, it is not possible yet to actually pre-order Warlords of Draenor but expect it to be soonTM. We’ll keep you updated when it does become available! For now, check out the trailer below:
It’s Saturday again which means a new podcast! This week we talk about the changes coming to healers, the stat squish, ability clean up, racial abilities and PvE Currencies!
In the last couple of days Blizzard has come out with previews of the hero’s per game that they originate from. Although there wasn’t really information about abilities it’s always nice to get a more direct overview about which hero’s we’re dealing with and from which universe. So check out the previews below!
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As promised Blizzard has come out with a new Watercooler post about health, resilience, battle fatique and healing.
The high amount of base Resilience and Battle Fatigue in Mists of Pandaria currently causes characters to feel much weaker in PvP than they do in PvE. To address this disparity, we’re approaching Warlords of Draenor with the goal of shrinking that gap as much as possible. To reduce dependence on Resilience, we needed to increase player survivability against other players, and we chose to do this by essentially doubling (post-squish) player health.
On its own, that increase in health would make players more survivable in the world at large, so we’re also increasing creature damage and the effectiveness of healing spells to balance things out. The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player’s health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE won’t be affected.
Doubling player health gave us room to reduce Resilience and Battle Fatigue, but our goal was to be able to remove them entirely. In order to achieve that, we’re also reducing PvP spike damage across the board by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals to 150% of their normal effect (down from 200%).
Our hope is that these changes allow us to reduce Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to 0%. It’s possible that we’ll still find a need for some minor amount of Base Resilience and/or Battle Fatigue, and we’ll be testing these changes extensively and adjusting as needed.
Retuning Healing Spells
One of our goals for healing in Warlords of Draenor is to tone down the raw throughput of healers relative to the size of player health pools. Currently, as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player’s health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them. Ideally, we want players to spend some time below full health without having healers feel like the players they’re responsible for are in danger of dying at any moment. We also think that healer gameplay would be more varied, interesting, and skillful if your allies spent more time between 0% and 100%, rather than just getting damaged quickly to low health, forcing the healer to then scramble to get them back to 100% as quickly as possible.
To that end, we’re buffing heals less than we’re increasing creature damage. Heals will be deliberately less potent compared to health pools than before the item squish. Additionally, as gear improves, the scaling rates of health and healing will now be very similar, so the relative power of any given healing spell shouldn’t climb so much over the course of this expansion. For those concerned about what this means for raiding, don’t worry—we’re taking all of these changes into account when designing Raid content for Warlords of Draenor.
It’s also important to note that spells that heal based on a percentage of maximum health are being effectively buffed by the massive increase to player health pools, so we’re lowering those percentages to offset the effect. That may make them appear to have been nerfed—however, the net result is that those percentage-based heals stay about the same as before relative to other heals.
All of these changes apply to damage-absorption shields as well. Additionally, we’re toning down the power of absorbs in general. When they get too strong, absorption effects are often used in place of direct healing instead of as a way to supplement it. We will, of course, take these changes into account when tuning specializations that rely heavily on absorbs, such as Discipline Priests.
We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called “smart” heals). We want healers to care about who they’re targeting and which heals they’re using, because that makes healer gameplay more interactive and fun. To that end, we’re reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course.
Another of our goals for healing in this expansion is to strike a better balance between single-target and multi-target healing spells. We’ve taken a close look at the mana efficiency of our multi-target heals, and in many cases, we’re reducing their efficiency, usually by reducing the amount they heal. Sometimes, but more rarely, raising their mana cost was a better decision. We want players to use multi-target heals, but they should only be better than their single-target equivalents when they heal more than two players without any overhealing. This way, players will face an interesting choice between whether to use a single-target heal or a multi-target heal based on the situation.
Finally, we’re removing the low-throughput, low-mana-cost heals like Nourish, Holy Light, Heal, and Healing Wave, because we think that while they do add complexity, they don’t truly add depth to healing gameplay. (We’re also renaming some spells to re-use those names. For example, Greater Healing Wave is being redubbed Healing Wave.) However, we still want healers to think about their mana when deciding which heal to cast, and so the mana costs and throughputs of many spells are being altered to give players a choice between spells with lower throughput and lower cost versus spells with higher throughput and higher costs. Here are some examples from each healer class:
Druid Higher Efficiency: Healing Touch, Rejuvenation, Efflorescence
Druid Higher Throughput: Regrowth, Wild Growth
Monk Higher Efficiency: Soothing Mist, Renewing Mist
Monk Higher Throughput: Surging Mist, Spinning Crane Kick
Paladin Higher Efficiency: Holy Light, Holy Shock, Word of Glory, Light of Dawn
Paladin Higher Throughput: Flash of Light, Holy Radiance
Priest Higher Efficiency: Greater Heal, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Holy Nova (new Discipline-only version), Penance
Priest Higher Throughput: Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing
Shaman Higher Efficiency: Healing Wave, Riptide, Healing Rain
Shaman Higher Throughput: Healing Surge, Chain Heal
All of this discussion of efficiency may cause most healers to start worrying about mana regeneration and their mana pool. To allay those concerns, we’ve increased base mana regen a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels. This will make all of these changes play well even in early content such as Heroic Dungeons and the first tier of Raid content, and also play well in the final Raid tier without mana and efficiency becoming irrelevant due to extremely high regeneration values.
That’s a lot of big changes for healers: reduced throughput, more triage, less powerful “smart” heals, weaker absorbs, fewer spells, and a new focus on efficiency decisions. We’re confident that we can apply lessons learned from previous expansions to make this the best healer experience yet: more dynamic, engaging, non-punishing, and frankly a lot more fun.
Instant-Cast Heals
Over time, healers have gained a bigger and bigger arsenal of heals that they can cast while on the move, which removes the inherent cost that movement is intended to have for them, while also limiting players’ ability to counter healing in PvP. This left silences and crowd control (which we’re trying to curb—see “Pruning the Garden of War”) as the only ways to actually limit an enemy player’s healing output. We’re still preserving the option to instantly heal, but are reducing the number of instant-cast healing abilities overall. Here are some examples:
Druid
Monk
Paladin
Priest
All of these changes taken together are intended to make gameplay more consistent between PvE and PvP, and invigorate healers with more dynamic gameplay.
These are only some of the many changes that you’ll be seeing as we continue development, and what we’ve shared so far is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. We hope that as we share more with you here, on the official site, the forums, and on Twitter, you’ll get a good understanding of what’s to come in Warlords of Draenor and the direction we’re working toward. As always, keep in mind that any of this information could change over the course of the testing process. We look forward to seeing your constructive feedback!
Some great news from Blizzard last night. Heroes of the Storm will soon be going into Technical Alpha. Check out the full details here
While Heroes of the Storm is playable and much of the core experience is present, it’s still very much in the early stages of development. Work is ongoing and we’re far from considering the game in a polished or finalized state, but after a period of extensive internal testing, we’re ready to crack open the Nexus for the very first time and invite some players to step inside.
This initial testing phase is intended to help us better examine how our infrastructure and tech will function across a much broader spectrum of machines and connection types. What’s more, inviting external Alpha testers will allow us to take a closer look at our hardware needs so that we can be absolutely sure we’re able to support the entire Heroes population as the community grows.
Since we’re focusing on our support systems for Heroes of the Storm right now, we’ve dubbed this testing phase the “Technical Alpha” or Tech Alpha, for short.
Once again, we’d like to remind you that Heroes is still a work in progress. Please keep in mind that invitees may encounter bugs and game features that are not yet implemented, as well as temporary sounds, user interface elements, and graphics. We will continue to iterate on Heroes of the Storm throughout each testing phase, so don’t be surprised if you see many aspects of the game start to level-up in the weeks and months that lie ahead.
We’re going to kick off this initial Tech Alpha phase with a very limited number of participants and continue to expand the pool of invited players as our testing needs evolve and grow over time.
Since our current focus is set on determining how we can further develop our tech to serve a growing population, Alpha access will be limited to players in the United States. While we’re not quite sure when we’ll be ready to extend access to the rest of the world, we are going to invite a few international press sites and Blizzard community contributors so that players from all of our global communities can keep up with the latest Heroes developments. Please know that we’re working hard to ensure the Heroes experience will be great for all of our players before we expand access to additional regions in the future.
Contrary to popular belief, surrounding yourself with lit candles and shouting “Tech Alpha” into the mirror three times will not grant Alpha access, but it may amuse your family members. No, the only way into the Nexus is through an official email invitation from Blizzard Entertainment.
In order to give yourself the best chance at gaining access to testing in the future, you’ll want to make sure you’ve opted in to Heroes of the Storm testing using the Beta Profile page found within your Battle.net Account. When prompted, you’ll need to download and run the System Check tool in order to attach your computer’s specifications to your profile and then check the Heroes of the Storm opt-in box, as pictured below.
As always, be extra mindful of shady characters who wish to steal your login credentials through phishing attempts, which are often disguised by falsified emails and websites. What’s more, Alpha keys are not necessary and are not being given out during this testing phase. Please be warned that any key generators or other offers for a Tech Alpha key are most certainly suspicious.
The best way to ensure an invite is the real deal is to avoid clicking any links. Instead, log in to your Battle.net account and check the Summary section to see if a Heroes of the Storm license has been added to your account.
As mentioned previously, however, this initial testing phase will include a very limited pool of players. While a few participants may be selected from opt-ins during this time, we will likely wait until the closed beta phase before we begin granting access to a larger number of players who have opted in via Battle.net.
As mentioned previously, we’ve been testing Heroes of the Storm internally for some time now and, over the past few days, you may have seen a few forum threads and conversations spring up from players who managed to access an early version of this client through various means. While you should feel free to discuss the content you’ve seen thus far, we’d like to remind you that accessing and posting these files is a violation of the Battle.net End User License. As such, we’re kindly requesting that you refrain from streaming or posting videos of the Heroes of the Storm client until we begin sending out Tech Alpha invites.
Once the Tech Alpha arrives, there will be no NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), which means that you’ll likely begin to see many new Heroes of the Storm streams, screenshots, blogs, and more once we start sending out invitations. If you do receive an invitation to the Tech Alpha, we want you to know that it’s totally fine to share your thoughts about the game with others through any medium you please at that time.
We’ll be adding a ton of content to Heroes of the Storm in the coming months and hope you’re as excited as we are to embark on this journey together. Stay tuned, because we’ll have plenty more details about Heroes to share with you soon! In the meantime, you can check out our Frequently Asked Questions blog if you’d like more information.
