[World of Warcraft] Blizzard has just released volume 2 of their battleplan. I must have missed volume 1. In it, they promise a few things and certainly do their job of hyping you up. You can find the whole post here. It’s much too long to post, but I will list quotes of what I find most important in a list form, not in any particular order.
1.) For this Battle Plan, we want to take the opportunity to look ahead to what our players can expect in the coming months leading up to BlizzCon and the expansion announcement.
2.) One feature we’re excited about is the addition of mid-sized raid dungeons.
3.) In addition to those new areas, we’ll also be adding some outright terrifying world raid encounters. Along with Azuregos and Lord Kazzak, the names of four green dragons—Ysondre, Lethon, Emeriss, and Taerar—will come to be feared throughout Azeroth.
4.) To this end, we’re focused on launching new world events and expanding on some of the ones already available.
5.) That aspect is something we definitely want to keep in Alterac, but we also want to make it more accessible by lowering the launch requirement from 30 players per side to 20. We also plan to shorten the length of time required to complete a game of Alterac Valley. Some of the changes we’ll be implementing to accomplish this goal are balancing out the terrain, slightly decreasing the landmass, and improving the queue to ensure balanced teams for each game.
6.) We want to bring back the hectic action of mass PvP, but with some improvements. One idea on the table is to place a capturable objective in the exterior environment. With something like this, we can encourage outdoor PvP again while centralizing the action to a designated location.
7.) We’re currently in the process of improving underused talents for all classes.
8.) Another feature of the Web site we’ll be implementing is fee-based character transfers. This is a feature that’s been very frequently requested and one which we want to provide for players as soon as we can. We’ll offer character transfers from one realm to another, as well as allow players to move characters from one account to another. While we want to offer this service as a convenience, we also want to prevent its use for exploitive reasons, so there will be a time restriction to limit the frequency that a character can be moved.
I’m personally most excited about the improvements to out-of-BG PvP as well as character transfers. By the time I got within town raiding level, BGs were coming out and almost all forms of non-BG and ganking PvP were dead. I missed the days before BGs where I would group up with other faction members and hunt down Alliance. It was even more fun when we met another group of Alliance that were doing the same thing, except they were killing Horde. I’m also excited about character transfers because I might be able to obtain my level 57 Shaman and put him on my new account.
Honorable mentions would be the new outdoor raid bosses and talent fixes. Hopefully this will more evenly distribute people wanting to participate in these outdoor raids, rather than limiting it to only two, which is what it is currently, which means you run into more bottlenecking between guilds and factions wanting to kill these bosses. As for talents, I hope Blizzard does this well. In the case of my Shaman, there were some talents that no one would EVER use no matter what spec you were. It seems that is true for my Mage as well. Blizzard said that some classes, such as Warlock, are complete in terms of talents. I’m curious to you Warlocks out there, are there still talents a Warlock will never take no matter what spec they choose (or was there ever)? If so, I hope Blizzard doesn’t consider that complete, because it certainly isn’t. It’d be nice in a perfect WoW world for all talents on the same level tier to be equal in usefulness. I know as a Shaman I would never take Improved Stoneskin Totem as a second tier talent, especially when TS, ImpGW, and ImpLS are on the same tier!
I’m a bit iffy about the world events. If you read the full post you will notice that there isn’t much said. In fact, they really only mention one new event. Events are something I would love having but neither FFXI or WoW have really done them the way I would like them to happen, especially WoW.
It’s also a bit disappointing to see another “look to the future” news report and still no sight of Hero Classes. Oh well, maybe next time. Hopefully they’re keeping it a secret for the expansion reveal.
.:lufia22:.
Yes it’s almost that time again. “