Maybe its because I just had a frustrating 10 minute pvp 'battle' with a resto druid that just ran around in circles on top of an AV tower, but, there is not enough negative rep in the world for your clever acronym of 'learn to play"

I was responsible for the Muffin Factory Question (same guy as the "The Next Raid is the Sunwell" question);

Kind of sad that the other questions I got to ask were duds, but hey;
No new skill books from Zul'Aman or other dungeons pre-expansion (like AQ20)
Hoping for Epic Crafted Wands / Belt Enchants / Other slots for Enchanting
Griping about the balance of the Kael Staff vs the Season II Staff itemization choices (ilvl 138 on Kael Staff, 136 on Season II staff) - PVP Staff and PVP Mainhand are both budgetted superior for PVE; the respective PVE items (Fang of the Leviathan/Kael Staff) have retarded amounts of Stamina and crappy budget; they confirmed that Season III Weapons at least will likely require a Rating to Buy, but hey...

Still, I had a blast at the con (and I did get further confirmation that it is the Sunwell for 2.4/2.5 by asking a few leading questions to some Blizzard folk on the side).

I've posted further information based on notes from Day Two on my ongoing thread of 'semi-official' announcements from BlizzCon:

Virtuous Forums-viewtopic-BlizzCon 2007 Info



If you have any questions that aren't answered by the notes I've already posted, please let me know, as I'm sure my quick notes may have missed some details.



Also, I wanted to throw in that Tom Chilton is a very cool guy.

Hmmm, i never got the impression that Arthas had gone insane. Mad for power, yes.

Illidan, on the other hand, completely deluded himself into thinking that he has slain Arthas, and deluded himself into thinking that the Legion (and/or 25 nobodies) wouldn't be able to take him out.

You tricky bastard you! So I guess that puts it out like........4-5 months and the expansion......a year away. I hope I'm not giving them too much credit in their dev cycles.

He does seem like a pretty cool guy. Though I'm still a little irked about how he blew my question off in the stratics chat back in may ><

I would love this.

Wow would that solve so many composition problems.

if you increased the group size to seven, you would run into glaring balance issues.

3 mages, 1 elemental shaman, 3 s.priests

7 elemental shaman (wrath of air totem stacks I heard)

tank, tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, lock

all group buffs in wow are based around only buffing 5 people, otherwise everything would just be "all friendly targets in range" but that's another argument altogether.

I've always found it irritating that the aura buffs provided by a player are based on what party you're in, which is ultimately an arbitrary structure in game organisation. I think the possibilities for encounter design would be much more interesting if buffs were based on placement, e.g. Blood Pact increases stamina by <x> to a maximum of <y> players within <z> yards of the imp. I'm not sure if it'd be possible to make this change within the game as it stands, but I dislike that encounter strategy is based on the click-drag of the raid leader rather than proper positioning of the players.

I've put together the pictures I took at the Blizzcon...

There are some screens that I took while playtesting the new expansion of the new content. I also included a lot of other fun cool stuff that you probably wouldn't have seen through live streaming! I hope you enjoy

Reckoning - View topic - The Blitz, Day 1

This replaces the "Two-Handed Axe and Maces" talent, are shamans going to have 2H by default ?

Look, the reality is, Blizzard screwed up with attunements in BC.

As a discussion in guild chat, we looked back on Naxx. Our guild never really bothered with the instance due to lack of player interest vs. time commitment. We are primarily a PVP guild with a passing interest in PVE content. Nefarian and a few attempts on C'Thun were about as far as we got pre-BC. But at least we got to step foot inside Naxx. Players had a chance to SEE the content, even if it kicked our asses.

A recent look at survey of (I think) nearly 13,000 U.S guilds had just under 2% killing anything in Hyjal and something like 1.3% in Black Temple. Being newer instances, I have to ask: Will those numbers change much unless they dramatically nerf SSC/TK or change the keying process of BT altogether? I'm not sure it will. I've been reading the rumormill for Sunwell and people in our guild just sigh. We realize the need to feed players who are in the top 1-2% of raiding guilds worldwide, but it seems pretty silly to design something as beautiful as the Black Temple and then 2% of Warcraft's playerbase ever zone in. I don't like BC's attunement bottlenecks.

Actually, a good example or comparison might be my server, Lightninghoof. We have several guilds who, when they removed keying requirements for SSC/TK immediately killed Voidreaver and then haven't downed a single boss in either instance since. Why was there a keying process in the first place? It's not like those guilds belong in either of those instances anyway. One or two nights and they go right back to recruiting and clearing Karazhan. As it should be. Player skill and gear ought to determine for guilds which instances they belong in. Let the overall difficulty and demand for DPS/Tanks and so forth dictate who kills what.

Also, please.. more 10-mans. We don't care how hard they are. I'm not sure how many of you can relate to this statement, but we are sick of dragging the same 5-10 people into our 25-man content and carrying them. Anything they design in the 10-man range we just decimate with players who are geared and skilled for the content. Love love love smaller content.

My guild is actually pretty casual as far as raid guilds go- We have some mega hardcore players, mostly moderate players, and a few super casual players, but even then we're breezing through SSC. Honestly Magtheridon is the most difficult encounter so far, just because one minor screw up on a cube wipes the raid. Honestly SSC, is very reasonable. Void Reaver was cake too. I hear Kael is a bitch, but as a whole things seem very reasonable.

I've done Naxxramas at 70 a fair few times.

Easy:

Anub'Rekhan - You still need to kite him though! So if you have never done that before as a warrior/hunter, hmm it might cause some trouble)
Grand Widow Faerlina - Tank her through the enrage, easy.
Maexxna - Basicly falls over, no need to shield wall at enrage + web spray
Noth - You can survive one tick of the curse, but two ticks and you're in trouble.
Heigan the Unclean - Can take one tick of the splashes. Two is possible. Three is lethal. Tunnel still kills you.
Loatheb - Yeah... easy.
Patchwerk - Basicly falls over.
Grobbulus - Same. We just tanked him in the clouds, cause our tank wanted rage.
Instructor Razuvious - Easy as long as you have priests that can do the mind control. You still can't tank him.
Gothik - AoE the mobs. This is as easy as it gets.

Hard:

Gluth - Decimate and kiting. Fear. Mortal Wound. Requires coordination.
Thaddius - Expect to wipe if people have never done this. You still lag like fuck. Loads of damage if people don't move correctly (of course) but the chain lightning doesn't hurt as much.
Four Horsemen - You can do it with 5 tanks now if you know how to do this. Still requires coordination and some tank stacking. Due to higher DPS it is less of a endurance test, though. Mograine dies kind of fast.
Sapphiron - Don't even try it without enough decursers and frost resistance.
Kel'Thuzad - Phase 1 easy. Phase 2 however... Frost Blast kills people *fast*. It scales with your HP and damn, that hurts. If you don't have enough healers, it will be hard.

I would say these four are as hard as Maulgar coordination wise. Of course, you don't need as good gear for them because they were tuned for level 60 content, but if you bring all new people to these fights, don't expect to breeze through them.

Back on topic, however - The Sunwell as new instance sounds kind of cool, how does it fit in the lore though? What villain could possibly be there? o.o

Anyone that read the Sunwell Trilogy can elaborate maybe?

That reminds me when they changed 40 to 25 and it was same "great now we can kick those X slackers we were carrying".

But I agree, I would love to see more 10 mans, challenging *cough* with good loot. No DKP needed, no class stacking (1 melee group, 1 caster group), faster learning (easier to teach 10 people that 25), less place for mistakes, much less problems with rotations/recruit etc.

For expansion, I think too that it is one year away unless they release it too fast like TBC but then I just show them middle finger and won't wait for "3.1" that will fix game. Anyhow if one year will be true then there is big chance that WAR will be sooner and if it will be good (God please let it be good!) I doubt players that switch will come back to check out some nothing-new-in-it expansion for WoW.

City of Heroes (as previously mentioned) introduced an Epic Archetype concept which seems incredibly analogous to this. The premise was pretty good - the class could basically do everything, however, it only had 1/2 spells of "anything," each of with had a fairly lengthy cooldown. So without that little detail, of course they sound ridiculously overpowered - "What? They can tank, DPS, heal AND CC?" But walk through that again - if you can do any one of those things once every 10 seconds, what are you doing the other 8 seconds? Insert jokes about a warrior who tanks only with taunt here.

(The major failing which was the "final straw" for me to un-sub, by the by, was that practically every mob pack was given a new creature type mixed in among them that seemed to have 2x aggro range, 4x damage, and ignored normal rules of aggro on epic ATs - a bizarre mistake I find difficulty imaging Blizzard repeating, but then again, it's such a bizarre mistake I have difficulty even imagining it in the first place)

It worked really well - especially as they had a buff that was based on group composition, so they were super group facilitators (and they stacked fairly well with themselves). Think about it now - if you're going to run an instance and you've got a tank, 2 dps/cc, and one healer, if the instance has a few harsh tanking moments (2x Monk or 2x Mrymadon (sp)), or a few harsh healing moments (yes, I know the DK is not a healing hybrid, I'm over on the CoH side of the analogy), then rather then suffer someone being off a lot (shadow priest healing?), it's just their natural role.

I am curious how (if) they're going to avoid the "How is this not what fury warriors want to be innately?" thing - 2H tanking cool DPS yay - but even if they don't, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world. Quasi-dismantling the "holy trinity" by breaking everyone into pairings just addresses one of my axes to grind - if you take five random people who want to run an instance, can they?

This makes me smile

A really good idea. I didn't really like the idea of being rewarded, even if you lost most of your matches.

The sunwell plateau, if it is going to be the next instance, will probably end the Burning Legion Storyline by having us kill Kil'Jaeden. When you complete the Kael'Thalas' head quest and give the sphere to A'dal, he warns that Kil'Jaeden is coming, but not to Outlands, and he points to Azeroth.

I know its useless theory crafting, but I could see death knights tanking through debuffs. Basically, since they don't have a shield, and don't mitigate damage like a warrior or a bear tank, they have to tank mobs by debuffing the hell out of them and limiting the damage to the point where basically a dps warrior can tank them. This way, deathknights tank 'differently' than warriors, but do not supplant them in role. Also certain raid mobs could be immune to a deathknights debuffs, forcing other classes to handle them, while other raid mobs could be so strong as to require a deathknight's debuffing style of tanking.

Deathknights will become the ultimate single target tank. Druids will maintain a role as an excellent multi-mob tank, while warriors remain the best all around tank. This would continue TBC's style of raiding where, yes, you could raid with 3-4 prot warriors, but it would be much easier on you to throw in some feral druids (or paly tanks if they ever make the paly offspecs worth something, or overcome the negative class bias on letting them do anything but heal).

That sounds sensible.

If that were the case, i can see raid bosses having some kind of limit, making death knights inviable for that role. Sounds like they will make good off tanks if this is the case.

It has to be self buff or specific debuffs that will only apply to DK's. Otherwise why wouldn't a DK just debuff the mob and have a warrior step in?

Personaly i think DK's will use absorption / thorn shield's, something along the lines of a Power Word:Shield that goes up when a Rune is used which will take majority of the damage while the DK takes a smaller % [think Soul Link Warlocks]

Hey let's all post pure speculation about things that no information has been released? Isn't that fun?

... oh wait, didn't Beef and Kaubel state several times not to do that already?

No, actually, they said speculation in the name of bitching was forbidden. Speculation in the name of enthusiasm or gee-whiz-thats-sweet! is fine. If you don't like it, don't piss on the parade.