Those investing time in professions in World of Warcraft can look forward to better created items over the course of the next year, as Blizzard designers explained they hope to give every profession the ability to create some of the “best in slot” items, typically as a crafter-only item.
The aptly named John LeCraft said that before players could experience the approximately 650 new recipes in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion — including the new inscription profession — a number of changes and tweaks would be coming to the current game:
- Alchemists will soon be able to create potions only they can use.
- All crafters will be able to build gear better — and sometimes the best — for leveling up to the level cap.
- New recipes will be added to fill gaps in the current game’s itemization, both those left by accident and those created by Blizzard explicitly to be filled by crafters.
“Engineering is going to get some love,” LeCraft replied to calls from the audience: The portable mailbox schematic may be coming back to engineering, if Blizzard can keep it from being too badly exploited. More engineering schematics that benefit other people will also be added.
He acknowledged that Blizzard had made some mistakes in the past.
“We have some bad transmutes. I don’t know anyone transmuting primal fire to earth,” he said, and was greeted with roars of laughter. Transmutes will be switching from a precisely 24 hour refresh to being available every day when the server clock resets in the early morning.
The developers like the discovery process introduced for several tradeskills, but are going to switch the discoveries to cover non-core recipes. Rather, these rare recipes will be the rare, fun ones.
Vendor camping will soon be coming to an end, when all vendors of a certain type will share the same table of rare goods, meaning more chances to find a rare recipe, but a more random schedule.
“It’s not a lot of fun to camp a vendor,” LeCraft said.
He briefly touched on what the new inscription profession in Wrath of the Lich King might include, although he warned attendees not to hold their breaths for the knockback addition to spells that another developer had hypothesized at a panel on Friday.
Instead, spells and abilities could get additional damage, more critical hits and the like. He compared inscription modifications to abilities to each ability having its own talent point.
Inscribers will also be able to create a new sort of item, but he did not say what.
Before that happens, though, there are a number of changes coming in patches 2.2 and 2.3:
- Daily quests will soon include profession quests, beginning with a cooking one.
- Crafter-only gear (intended to be “best in slot” items) will be added to jewelcrafting and alchemy next.
- Once the crafting endgame, skill-ups from 275 to 300 will be made smoother and easier.
- Zul’Aman will include a new enchantment, Execution, which will require 375 skill and add 840 points of armor penetration to a weapon, which what LeCraft says will be a “visual effect at least as cool as Mongoose.”
- Three epic jewelcrafter-only gem recipes will be added through the reputation system.
- The new Steady Talasite jewelcrafting recipe (350 skill, +4 resilience, +6 stamina) will be available for four Halaa research tokens.
- Random cooking recipes — presumably available through the discovery system — will be available soon, including Storm Chops, a lightning-based upgrade to Dragonsbreath Chili that will have special effects in the rain.
On the itemization front, resilience will soon ameliorate damage over time effects.
All items that add to healing will soon add a great deal of additional spell damage, so that high-end healing gear is more versatile.
There will be a legendary ranged weapon in the raid zone after Zul’Aman. (Probably a 25-man Sunwell zone, based on comments on Friday.)
Enchantments may finally be switched over to a system that can work with the auction house: Scrolls or something else created by enchanters will be the method of improving gear, so that enchanters aren’t stuck in a city, spamming the Trade channel to sell their wares. (Inscription will work off of items, right from the beginning.)
More and better ore nodes will be showing up in dungeons.
The much-maligned Spirit stat will be made interesting in the Wrath of the Lich King, they promise.
And, in response to a completely random question at an items and professions panel, it was revealed that death knights would likely get a special mount, the deathcharger.
Saturday saw a second, rowdier, round of class discussion. While the panel’s presentation was identical, the questions asked by the audience were different. And this time, the questions were accompanied by catcalls from other players, shouts of “L2P” and “reroll!”
Despite this, new questions managed to be answered:
Hunters’ Misdirection ability is currently bugged. (How, Tom Chilton did not say.)
The mana issues faced by both the hunter and moonkin druid are of concern to Blizzard and are currently being looked at. Likewise, shamans’ manastream totem will be improved. (Other totems are also being looked at.)
Hunters will see a number of changes in the 2.3 patch, in an attempt to make them more useful and viable in arena PVP.
The bane of all grouping and raiding mages — the massive summonings of food and water — will be addressed by a new spell. Mages will summon a feast table and some sort of water dispensing object that other players can click on to grab their own food and water.
Blizzard’s dungeon, raid and encounter designers shared some of their tricks of the trade Friday at Blizzcon.
The first, and perhaps biggest, was to plan more than they end up building. Zones are planned out, discussed, changed and discarded.
Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan showed an early list of the original dungeons for the basic World of Warcraft game, which had at the time was to run from levels 1-70 and featured the Caverns of Time, other expansion dungeons and something called the Dragon Isles as a raid zone.
Prior to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Kaplan promised a new 25-man raid dungeons with six bosses, harder than the Black Temple. (Probably the Sunwell, although he said he wasn’t allowed to say so.)
A new five-person dungeon is also a possibility before the expansion.
Zul’Aman will feature more heroic badge loot, including lots of gear for atypical class builds.
The excessive amount of trash NPCs in Gnomeregan was a mistake, the team acknowledges, and at some point, they’ll get the chance to go back and thin things out.
In an upcoming patch, the Mount Hyjal Caverns of Time zone will have its trash changed to drop loot and give faction (3 points per kill). Likewise, the monstrous kaliri of Skettis will drop loot and grant faction in the near future.
There are eight single-group instances planned for Northrend, although, “I can almost guarantee this is going to change,” he said.
Given the overwhelming popularity of Kharazan in The Burning Crusade, look for many more 10-person raid zones in the new expansion, as well as dungeons and raids set in the “old world.”
Instead of keying or attunement, some dungeons will be unlocked as the Ahn’Qiraj dungeons were, “minus the linen.”
To further make keying and back-flagging less painful, the team is considering guild flags or having whole accounts flagged once a single character completes a flagging quest.
Naxxramas, which few players got to experience prior to the release of Burning Crusade, fits into Northrend so well that the team is considering flying it over to the new continent and retuning it so it is roughly comparable to Molten Core in difficulty, but for level 80 characters.
Although nothing has been done yet, Kaplan hopes to see the siege engines and destructible buildings featured in PvE raid content.
And all that resistance and specialized gear used on raids? The core UI will soon make dealing with it easier, as the functionality of Item Rack and Outfitter is incorporated into the basic system, but with a twist, since being part of the official UI means it can have “real space to store the extra junk.”
A threat meter also might be incorporated into the core UI.
Class discussion at Blizzcon was the subject of two separate panels, Friday and Saturday, with different questions answered each day.
From Friday’s panel:
Designer Tom Chilton said the team is committed to doing more for the less-popular specializations, including with better gear in upcoming content. Look for improvements to retribution paladins in the 2.3 and 2.4 patches.
For priests, Light Well and Improved Death are also being worked on, as is the entire discipline tree. To improve holy priests, there will be lots of little changes made to the spells and abilities of several healing classes.
Shamans do not scale well in melee combat after the early 50s, which will be addressed this year.
Druids will soon be able to cast more spells while in tree from.
All gear had too many offensive stats and not enough defensive stats, which made PvP too often a matter of who attacked first, and little more – part of the reason gear was rethought prior to the release of The Burning Crusade expansion.
Abilities do not function differently in PvE and PvP, for the most part, because “we really wanted the world to feel cohesive,� Chilton said.
On the damage front, developer Kevin Jordan said, mages are intended to be the kings of AoE damage, while rogues are intended to be the kings of single-target damage.
The second panel held Friday at Blizzcon was all-WoW, all the time, and was the first in-depth preview of the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
“Our goal is not to have an expansion that just takes place in the snow,” Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan said, showing images of the arctic continent of Northrend, including grassy fjords, snowy forests and glacial canyons.
Since the new expansion won’t require starting zones for new races, Wrath of the Lich King will feature more high-level zones than The Burning Crusade had. And while The Burning Crusade’s final boss, Illidan Stormrage, made his presence felt periodically from the beginning of the expansion, Wrath of the Lich King will make Arthas Menethil a much more prominent part of the experience for all players.
“It’s not just an endgame raid,� Kaplan said. “Everyone will have a chance to interact with Arthas.
“He’s really bad about breaking [crowd control], so you won’t want to group with him.�
The new profession, inscriptions, will allow players to customize their spells and abilities instead of just their gear. And new haircuts will also be offered, with the option of changing haircuts on existing characters. Characters faces and skin tones, however, players are stuck with.
“Plastic surgery will probably be the next expansion,� Kaplan joked.
Designer Cory Stockton walked attendees through the first few zones in Northrend.
Unlike Outland’s single entry point of the Hellfire Peninsula, Northrend will feature two: The Borean Tundra in the west and the Howling Fjord in the southeast, both of a comparable level, allowing the player base to spread out.
The Howling Fjord is the home to the giant Viking-like warriors known as the Vrykul, whom Stockton described as “13-foot tall badasses.�
The first single-group dungeon instance, Utgarde Keep, is filled with angry Vrykul.
In the west, the Borean Tundra is the home of the gentle Tuskarr, whom Stockton described as “transient, walrus-looking fishermen.�
But the Tuskarr are not alone: The naga are melting the tundra’s snow, exposing sickly yellowish grassland in the western end of the zone.
The zone also features Easter Island-like walrus-head statues, the Horde outpost of Warsong Hold, a gnome town with airstrips and more.
West of the Howling Fjord are the Grizzly Hills, home of the furbolgs, who live in the city of Grizzlemaw. The dwarf city of Thormadan is also found in the Grizzly Hills. And much of the zone is covered with a forest of redwood trees.
“We’ve never done anything that looks exactly like this,� Stockton said.
In the southern central portion of the continent is the frozen zone of Dragonblight, where dragons go to die and home of the Wyrmrest Temple, where the various dragonflights meet. The zone, one of the largest in Northrend, is also the entrance to the ancient city of Azul-Nerub, home of the villainous spider-folk. The zone features a massive ice canyon riddled with ice caverns in each wall. The subtle blues and whites of the canyon and caves are created using new shading software.
North of Dragonblight is the expansion’s capital city, which is a familiar one: The Kirin-Tor wizards have flown the wizarding city of Dalaran to Northrend, to take the fight against the blue dragonflight to them on their own territory. The city hovers over the continent.
Designer Tom Chilton outlined another new zone, Lake Wintergrasp, which will be an outdoor PvP-only zone, even on PvE servers. The outdoor zone will feature siege weaponry and destructible buildings, as will a new instanced battleground that will feature 15-on-15 play.
The death knight hero class will be a DPS/tanking class, similar to the warrior. Unlike the warrior, he’ll do it with a two-handed weapon or a weapon in each hand, not a shield. (But they will still wear plate.)
Knights may carry runeblades, but others could carry runeaxes. The runes are significant: Instead of using mana or focus or rage, death knights will carve up to six runes on their blade while out of combat, and their abilities in combat will work based on what mix of blood, frost and unholy runes are carved there.
Although the class will use spells, they’ll feel less like warrior abilities or paladin spells, and more like a traditional spellcaster, other than the method in which they’re cast.
The game’s first– but definitely not the last – hero class will also not be starting at level 1. The starting level has not been set yet, but Chilton said the developers are considering level 55, 60 or 70 as a starting point.
“We felt it would be silly to be running around Elwynn Forest as a level 1 death knight,� Chilton said.
Players will need to get a character to level 80 and complete a quest chain comparable to the warlock epic mount quest to gain the ability to make a new death knight character. Any race can be a death knight.
But even without starting the death knight at a higher level, creating alternate characters will be less painful in the future: Even prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King, Chilton said leveling from 1-60 (and perhaps higher) will be made faster.
There will also be another Caverns of Time instance before Wrath comes out, more daily quests in the next patch (including a dungeon, a battleground and a cooking quest).
Old raid content is unlikely to get revised any time soon.
“It had its time,� Chilton said, “We’re OK with moving on.�
Likewise, the development team doesn’t want to spend the time necessary to revise the old world so that flying mounts will work there.
As for a release date … well, it’s Blizzard.
“It’ll come out when it’s ready,� Chilton said.
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