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Category: Heroes of the Storm

News Recap 27/01 – 31/01

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The week’s nearly over and there have been a few interesting things over the past 2 weeks from blizzard. Starting with blizzard coming out with many numerical facts about World of Warcraft. Such as that there have been 100 Million WoW accounts created of the past 9 years. Click on the image for the full details!

The folks over at ReadyCheck Podcast got to talk to some developers, from which you can find the full transcript of the interview here. One of the more interesting questions/answeres, however was the following:

Moldran:
Going back to Burning Crusade, one thing that I really liked about it was the difficulty of the heroic 5-mans. Recently I was playing Mists of Pandaria 5-mans and they were laughably easily. Are there any plans to reintroduce difficult 5-mans, or will it just be challenge modes?

Quote from: Blizzard
Ion Hazzikostas:
To some extent we’re looking to make heroic dungeons in Warlords of Draenor more difficult than they were in Mists. They aren’t going to be as difficult as they were in Burning Crusade, but we want to have a more robust tier of normal dungeons at max level for people who just want to casually queue up get some more or less guaranteed loot without too much of a challenge. We like heroic dungeons to require a bit more coordination, but we do recognise that there is this audience for really hardcore Burning Crusade-style or Challenge Mode-style dungeons. However, in Challenge Mode right now, the focus is so much on speed you don’t get that feeling of having to go through and mark your CC, polymorph that, sap that, for example. But we’re actually exploring the possibility of having Challenge Modes, as well as the speed component, also offer a chance at some gear rewards, LFR quality perhaps, so someone who doesn’t want to do LFR can do some hard content with friends and get epics that way. Further down the line, we have this new Mythic raid difficulty – we’re not planning on Mythic dungeons at launch, but that’s something that we could do. If we wanted to have an additional tier of difficulty, that option is open to us. It’s not a really good fit for random matchmaking, which is something we learned quickly at the start of Cataclysm, since there would be a lot of frustration. We do recognise that there is a lot of really cool play there, a lot of interesting MMO co-ordination in a smaller group, so we want to find a way to do it.
* NB: To clarify, Ion was indicating that they would like to offer rewards for completing hard dungeons with a deliberate pace, utilising CC etc., as opposed to speed runs through Challenge Modes. Apologies for the lack of clarity.

Continuing on to last week, Hearthstone is now officially in Open Beta and they also released a pretty cool intro trailer for Hearthstone! You can click here for the open beta announcement and here to go to the hearthstone download page.

And then to end our recap, last week the 2nd Heroes of the Storm Developer Q&A as well as a live match took place! Check out the Q&A here and the live match shoutcast by Developer Dustin Browder and Starcraft Caster Day9 here.