Or, How I Fell Asleep and Missed It All

So today was Day 2 of BlizzCon 2009. The live Internet Stream schedule claimed that they would be showing only one World of Warcraft panel, the WoW Dungeons and Raids panel, which as you know is not my main interest in this game. *grin* Still, I would have liked to see it, but somehow I slept through my alarm … and some phone calls … and my husband mowing the lawn outside my window … and most of the daylight hours. *cough*

Anyway, there were actually several WoW-related panels today, so I figured I’d troll the web for people who were more on the ball than I was and collect the info that looks most interesting. Again, this is second-hand plus it’s filtered through my own special interest-filter, but I’ll give links to the sources so you can check out anything you like in more detail.

WoW Open Q&A

This was an open question and answer session, so the topics ranged wildly. I’m just going to list some of the most interesting stuff in bullet form.

Hunters:

• Hunters may be getting more specific control of their pets, perhaps through waypoints or a teleport-back-to-you spell.
• Pets will scale of all of your stats and allow buffs from raid encounters to affect them. In addition, pets will be affected by player-cast AoE effects (i.e. in PvP) but not by boss AoE effects. (This is coming in Patch 3.3, I believe.)
• They have been doing some ‘soul searching’ on the idea of letting hunters choose their pets’ talent tree.
• Hunters may be able to tame zhevras in Cataclysm.

Other:

• Northrend will be impacted by the Cataclysm, but not as much as old Azeroth. It sounds like this will be more about quests and less about terrain, so we probably don’t have to worry about losing access to pets from Northrend very much. Outland will not be impacted, of course, although they will add things for Archaeology there. The Burning Crusade starter areas will be impacted, but again not so much on terrain as quests.
• Blizzard will be introducing a race-change option (within a faction) in addition to the faction-change option they have already mentioned.
• As part of Cataclysm, Blizzard will be revamping profession leveling flow as well as the relevancy of old-world faction reputation. Ore and herb nodes are getting re-itemized as well.
• Troll and Worgen druids will be getting unique feral forms, include bear, cat, travel and aquatic forms.
• They are discussing adding more character slots on each realm, but they sound pretty doubtful about it.
• They are considering a mentoring system to let different-leveled friends play together. In addition, they are changing phasing to allow helping other players in different phases.

Sources:

• WoW Insider
• MMO Champion

WoW Systems Panel

I actually caught some of this on the internet stream when they started showing it later in the day. I just wish they’d mentioned it on the schedule so I could have seen the whole thing. Ah, well.

Rated Battlegrounds:

I’ve skipped all the details on rated battlegrounds. The only thing I noted in particular is that you can get titles and epic ground mounts from your battleground rating. (Yay, more mounts I will never bring myself to get! *grin*)

Guild Advancement:

I’ve also skipped the details on guild progression. It’s a neat feature, but I’m already familiar with most of the details from EQ2 guild progression. If you’re into your guild, I suggest reading up on this more. It is a neat feature. Kaliope (link below) in particular has more on the profession-related features.

Mastery:

Talent mastery removes passive bonuses from the talents themselves and instead adds them to the talent tree. The goal is to have more fun non-passive talents to choose from without removing the passive bonuses entirely.

Two examples that were mentioned: the Beastmaster tree may raise passive pet damage while the Marksman tree may raise passive focus regeneration.

There are also mastery buffs on equipment that buff whatever mastery bonuses you happen to have, and shift when you switch specs and such.

Path of the Titans:

Path of the Titans is an alternate advancement path for max-level players. Basically, you use Archaeology to find artifacts and turn artifacts in to new Titan-themed groups around the world in exchange for Ancient Glyphs, a whole new type of glyph. Ancient Glyphs are not associated with the Inscription tradeskill, and are also not specific to any class.

The goal of Path of the Titans is to be accessible to all max-level players, regardless of play style. It may take longer for people like me — a solo player who won’t group or raid, doesn’t do PvP, and doesn’t play that many hours a week — but I will be able to get all my Ancient Glyphs eventually.

Sources:

• Blizzard Write-Up
• MMO Champion
• WoW Insider
• Wowhead Blog
• Kaliope from Crafter’s Tome (see her Archaeology post also)

WoW Raids & Dungeons Panel

As I expected, this panel didn’t have a lot that I personally was interested in. There was, however, one interesting thing: cross-realm LFG and rewards for the leader of a successful pick-up-group (PUG). This should be out in Patch 3.3.

In addition, Blizzard mentioned that the upcoming +310% flying mount from the revamped Onyxia encounter is going to be a very rare drop.

Sources:

• Blizzard Write-Up
• MMO Champion
• WoW Insider

WoW Classes, Items & Professions (Take Two)

The presentation part of this panel was the same as yesterday’s, so I had initially ignored it. But there were different questions asked and answered, and so some different things to learn. I’ve compiled the stuff I found neat into bullets again.

Hunters:

• Blizzard doesn’t want to turn hunters into ranged rogues. The class should be less cooldown-locked and more about choosing your abilities. Aspect of the Viper may not go away (a clarification from yesterday) but will definitely be different. Or maybe all the aspects may go away.
• They’d like to integrate the concepts of the old hunter epic quest line at a lower level (since it will be going away with the changes to Onyxia). Actually they want to add more class quests to Cataclysm in general.
• The notion of hunters taming a mount is cool, says lizzard. Whether that means they would ever consider it or not is an open question.

Other:

• Archaeology will give lots of vanity items, including (jokingly?) a fedora and bullwhip.
• They’d like to change fishing to be more like fishing in Aminal Crossing, but it’s unclear how far along they are in this thinking.
• More fun potions are on the way for alchemy.

Sources:

• WoW Insider – Live Blog and Summary