Blizzcon 2008 QA Panel  

Saturday October 11th, 1:30pm PST

I had an opportunity to sit in on a free for all QA session with the blizzard team between my other covered panels today and it was a full house, even by panel standards. Players wishing to talk to the Blizz team and ask specific class, PvP or other questions lined up and had the opportunity to interact directly with Blizzard like never before today.

Given the time constraints, not everyone had an opportunity to ask the questions nearest and dearest to their hearts but here is a recap of some of the more interesting ones I managed to catch. For brevity's sake, I have summarized the questions itself and they are being listed in order of questions asked.

Player Questions

1. It has been wondered if the dailies will be implemented after release like the previous expansion? The game will ship complete with daily quests unlike TBC, where they were added after several patches. There will be plenty of solo content and even some 5-man Arthas interaction at some point.
2. Why are the Pandaren not a playable or NPC race in Wrath? When they tossed around the idea of adding the pandaren, there were some concerns from China and their culture's perception of Pandas. Blizzard has evaluated this and it is felt that adding them in to the game had the potential to cause unintentional offense to some of their international players. They may develop fishing or other quests around them in the future however but at this time, nothing is in the works.
3. Is there any plan to add resilience or other means of defending against PvP geared players while in PvE gear in BGs? The Blizzard team stated the want to encourage interactivity and gear cross overs for both PvP and PvE so with the release of Wrath, there will be an ability to turn in the new tokens for pvp gear as well as PvE gear.
4. Indoor movement is extremely limited, with no mounting or shapeshifting inside. What changes are there going to be for this with Wrath? Blizzard stated that, exclusively here, all ground mounts will NO LONGER dismount in water and will now swim. They didn't elaborate on swim speed or anything but this was met with much cheering and clapping. I guess all those puddles finally taught mounts how to swim.
5. For warlocks, they have always had very specialized pets, any chance of making them more generalized to be more in line with hunter pets? Blizzard's feeling is that Warlocks shift their pets situationally and have several to work with so so warlock pets are set up more for utility and "on the fly" requirements than as a "always out" general use pet.
6. Dispel magic system seems a little out of balance where some players have massively expensive buffs that can be dispelled by much cheaper instant cast spell. Can we expect changes toward this? Blizzard has stated that they are not happy with how the dispel system is set up atm, so they have been talking about completely redoing the spell system with Wrath. However, overall, they prefer to leave dispel so that you can use it on yourself but have limited effectiveness when used on other players. It is felt that this would cause a drop in overall play enjoyment.
7. For Arms warriors, is there any possibility of combining weapon specs so that warriors who are specced Arms do not have to respec all the time? It is felt that Warriors do not change out weaponry as often as gear sets. Because of this, the burden of a respec is not nearly as critical so no change is going to be made at this time.
8. For Professions, with TBC, crafters ran into the issue of craftable gear being made virtually obsolete with the new expansion and loot system. What changes are being made to keep crafted items viable and prevent obsolesence? Blizzard recognized that this became a serious problem with TBC so they are making an effort to keep crafted gear viable and make it on par with dropped gear to keep it more viable per "crafting tier".
9. We keep hearing about a World of Warcraft movie. Any ifo you can give us on that? Yes, it is confirmed that they are working on a movie and the script is purported to be "really good" but they cannot go into more detail for business reasons, more to come on this.
10. For Holy Paladins. There is a relationship between talents and classes, where damage is tied in to the talents chosen and the weapons reflect that. However, with the holy spec, the class itself is a melee class but the talents are not. what is being done to bring these two disparate issues in line? While they did not give specifics, they did say that they plan to look at the healing tree for paladins to see what, if anything, does need to be changed.
11. Will druids and shaman be given any class specific iconic abilities? It was stated that while every class wants this and that added to be move viable as well as unique, there is a fine line between homogenization and unique skills so they have to evaluate each class and decide if a unique talent will cause balance issues with the other classes.
12. For Paladins, currently, Hammer of Righteousness has a 3 target taunt attached to it, is there going to be any change to single point talents to modify this to a single target taunt? The idea behind the talent is that you don't want to rely on it every fight or use it every fight so this falls under the category of "how similar do classes need to be to make them viable?". Right now it has not been looked at or changed but if they do move it, they want to make sure it's not making the paladin too similar to a Death Knight or a pure Warrior.
13. For Holy Priests, why do I need to put 13 pts in discipline for my mana regen, why is the mana regen based in the discipline tree? The talent trees are designed to be an option for players, not a sub class area. They don't want you to have to do this to get your mana regen, so this type of issue falls into the buff revamp that is coming with Wrath.
14. As it becomes easier to be a hybrid, how do you protect the viability of the "pure" dps classes, such as hunters, rogues and mages? Blizzard states that they going in that as they made hybrid more viable that would hit their utility. Warlocks, hunters, mages and rogues were hardest hit by this since they are designed for DPS so additional utility has been given to them. Bear in mind that these classes are still designed for damage and will always do more damage than a hybrid to some degree. For example, a good rogue should almost always be up near the top of the damage charts.
15. There are many encounters where there is a time delay after interacting with the NPC while he goes through a dialogue. Are there any more encounters where waiting is required before quest activation (5 min dialogue issues and such)?, The Blizz team did run through some of these things in the beta and after seeing it firsthand themselves, they are trying to give additional options to speed up some quest dialogue.
16. Will there be a point where tiered epics are available for achievement points? The Blizz team gave an emphatic no on this rumor. They have no plans for this now, or ever. All rewards for Achievement points will be set for cosmetic types of items.
17. For Rogues, how will the combat tree be fleshed out for sword rogues? With Wrath, there are several things have been boosted in the tree for increased vitality, damage etc. The suspicion at Blizzard is that the tree scales better so they are testing it to see before they make any further changes.
18. Many players feel that the dailies for 70s are extremely boring and repetitive, are there any plans to break this up? this was done to a limited extent in TBC with the fishing and cooking dailies so they are thinking about randomizing them in Wrath the same way. In addition, on their to do list is something to revamp the entire quest interface in order to make it much clearer to players.
19. For Hunters, can you change the Global Cooldown and aspects? They wont rule it out at this point but they are still evaluating it. (There is more to come on this one apparently)
20. For Warriors, is there any chance that some of the new talents etc can shave off some of the additional damage drawbacks? The current talent and damage system is set up to take the type of weapon etc into account and they don't have a system to "shave off" and percentage of the damage from a specific weapon on a specific character. What they have done is scale incoming and outgoing damage to compensate.
21. Where is the Death Knight set to scale in terms of tanking order in comparison to the other tank classes? Blizzard seems them in the same range as a Prot spec warrior or a prot paladin. The downside to that is that they have to take points to improve tanking at the expense of damage.

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