Did you not get a chance to go to Blizzcon but still have a question for the developers? They’re going to do another livestream on wednesday and you’ll be able to submit questions!
This Wednesday, I’ll be joining World of Warcraft Lead Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas and Lead Class Designer Kris Zierhut to answer your questions live on Twitch.TV! With Warlords of Draenor’s launch only a couple of days away, we’re sure there’s plenty of questions we weren’t able to answer at BlizzCon, and now is your chance to ask them!
When: Wednesday, November 12th, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time (see this handy tool to find when that is in your local time!) Where: The World of Warcraft channel on Twitch.TV/WoW
There are two ways to submit questions. If you’re using Twitter, simply tweet your question using the hashtag #WarlordsQA. You can also ask it as a reply to this forum thread; however, as we’d like to get to as many questions as possible, we will only consider questions using 40 words or less. Make them count! In order to be considered, your question must be submitted before 12:01 AM PST on Wednesday, November 12th.
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!
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.
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
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.
