Blizzcon 09: WOW Class Panel - Everything Old Is New Again
Well, today's Class and Item Panel yielded some changes coming to the classes in WOW, some drastic changes to itemization, and some details on professions. Hunters and warlocks, you'll want to pay attention. Everyone else, you've got some surprises in store, too.
Hunters:
No more Mana! You will use Focus now! No more intellect! This will allow the devs to reduce or remove a lot of cooldowns. In addition, they plan to make Steady Shot increase focus regen.
Oh, and no more ammo bag. Instead, your ammunition will be a single item instead of a consumable.
Join me after the jump for more.
Warlocks:
Soul shard bags will no longer be necessary, as you will now only have THREE shards, which will display underneath the mana bar, and replenish over time. Summons no longer take shards. Shards will be spent on a spell called Soul Burn, which gives bonuses to the warlocks next spell. Most spells anyway.
The effect varies:
- Empowered Searing Pain : Next 3 Searing Pains crit
- Empowered Summon Demon : Instant Cast
- Empowered Soulfire : Instant Cast
- Empowered Fear : Instant Cast
- Empowered Death Coil : Longer Horror, more healing received
Those are the only major class changes revealed, but we did learn quite a bit more on how stats are changing. The following changes are being made to stats.
- Attack Power - Gone, will instead be gained from Agility for Leather and Mail classes, Plate wearers will use strength.
- Spell Power - Gone, casters will get it from Intellect.
- MP5 - Gone. Mana regen will come directly from spirit.
- Defense - Gone. Tanks will all get their anti-crit from talents like Survival of the Fittest
- Block - Block value is gone, and blocking will instead mitigate a certain percentage of incoming damage.
- Haste - Haste will now increase the regen rate of Mana, Focus, Rage, and Runes.
A definite simplification of stats across the board. In fact, it seems to me that it brings the game very close to the way stats were balanced in vanilla WOW. A little, anyway. Somewhat ftting with the changes to Azeroth coming in Cataclysm.
Professions! Lots of changes to existing professions were discussed. For example, Multi-gains. When you create a higher level item, you can get multiple skillups, instead of having to make tons of lower level items. Fishing will get some changes, but no details. Engineering will get love similar to patch 3.2, lots of neat utility items.
Also mentioned, Re-forging. With reforging, professions like blacksmithing, leathworking, tailoring, jewelcrafting, and engineering will be able to rejigger stats on items. Leatherworkers for leather items, blacksmiths for plate and weapons, etc... An example, reducing an items Stamina by half and putting those stat points into a stat the item doesn't have already (like hit or crit, etc...)
A LOT of big changes! More details as we get them!
Sgt. Sausagepants
Posted to MMOs, Video Games on 21 August 2009
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: blizzard, blizzcon 09, MMO, WOW
Wow, those are some big changes. Re-forging sounds like it could be very useful.
I can finally get rid of my frigging soul shard pouch and replace it with a Haris Pilton!! Whoop de doo.
Sounds like maybe they are going to lessen some of the heavy math that go into some of the ideas, like AP or SP. I did college calculus in high school and I still can never figure out whether my feral druid would be better off with 1 AP or 2 agility or whatever, with all the level caps and class differences and all that stuff.
THANK GOD..no more buying arrows and wasting space storing them. Makes so much more sense to have arrows be a single item...then hopefully they'll introduce various types of arrows with different stat's so you can switch them out. FUN!
And when will that be released?