I’ve never been a fan of the first two games. Conceptually speaking they were awesome, but in execution they fell way short of expectation. Fable 3 however has me pretty much in its death grip right now and I don’t see myself stopping for at least another two weeks or gameplay.

The graphics are gorgeous which is saying a lot since the game does not go for the photo-realistic look and instead keeps this same Fable art style which is really nice to look at. My one complaint is that there’s stuttering almost always when things get too crazy on the screen and in this day and age that’s unacceptable of any console game. Thankfully the times this happens is pretty rare and truly only when there’s about 20 some enemies on screen using flashy attacks and moves and while I too am firing flaming laser beams from my fingertips at them. Oh, and whenever I try a mini-game for gold (the Lute Hero ones).

The writing is amazing and a lot of fun. I’m having a blast and laughing regularly at the conversations. The voice over work is the most varied, constant, and best I’ve heard in a long time and will more than likely be better than anything else coming out anytime in the reasonable future (I’m looking at you SWTOR).

The combat is fun. It’s simple (easy) but complicated (you can do some sick looking combos and later on in the game shit gets real when you’re up against packs of Balvarines, Sand Furries, and spellcasting/summoning mini-boss types) and the weapon upgrade/customization is pretty solid. Nothing too deep but just deep enough to make a difference.

Overall I’m very skeptical of spending $60.00 on a single player game with a finite amount of real content (clothing pack DLC doesn’t fucking count as content). But the ability to have other players join your game world and play with you is great, the NPC and player interaction is awesome, and if you take your time to explore and do quests and generally play the game other than rush through the main story-arc you can easily milk a month out of this baby (not taking into consideration any possible future DLC areas/quests/missions/etc).

If you like good games, you’ll like Fable 3.

Paid faction and race changes will be available immediately once Cataclysm is released. There are no restrictions on race/faction change to goblin or worgen.

And cue the crybaby butt-hurt whiners complaining for no reason in three, two…

Here’s a badass new login screen. I’ll have another post for this long rant about Goblins and Worgen and some gripes about the way things are being implamented.

We’ve seen over the years the overarching dangers etc, it has been getting bigger bigger and bigger. Are there any plans to take some more bigger things down? Will we take down Alexstrazsa for example?
She’s the Aspect of Life man, can you really punk her down for long? A careful way to answer this question is, obviously Deathwing is the bad guy and in the subsequent patches similar to how WotLK worked, ultimately when we develop the final combat with Deathwing to put him down, there is really good money on the fact the family will get involved. Their greatest and most horrible hour, the will perform the function they were created for. It’s probably best to let the specifics breath at this point. Deathwing is so gnarly, how do you defeat something undefeatable? Can he be defeated by any martial mean? How will the family (AND THRALL) pull this off?

Oh I just have to say it, you know Thrall is a shaman now. So what Aspect is missing from the family? Neltharion is out, the family has been broken for 10,000 years, what of the 5 aspects are you missing? Earth. So I’m just saying. Maybe that’s a way Thrall can distinguish himself helping the family back together for a big win.

Can you give any spoilers of a location of an Old God in this expansion. and elaborate on the theory that if all old gods are gone the world would explode?
OR IS IT? You haven’t seen who pays Deathwing’s bills. Have you played any Cataclysm? … like where the world blows up? Have we publically announced the…? You might see it’s name uttered in a few places in Cataclysm… Nezoth/Ni’zoth? He has was the creature responsible for the spark of the Emerald Nightmare, and he has all sorts of weird shit going on.

What are you guys doing with Kalecgos and the blue dragons?
- Metzen: Something amazing. (To Alex) Should I tell them..?
- Alex: Do it.
- Metzen: Kalecgos will be the new blue aspect. And just in time.

When we first met Garrosh Hellscream he was kind of an annoying kid? Now he’s the leader of the Horde. Are we going to get a Warchief out of this guy?
We know that the whole Garrosh thing is “contentious” and it’s part of a much larger storyline involving Thrall. Thrall is the most important person on Azeroth, the Garrosh storyline has a lot to do with Thrall. Thrall is a Clark Kent type character who doesn’t really know his true strength, he was pushed into leadership very young and Garrosh is used as a counterpoint to Thrall. He’s a hothead against someone who thinks a lot. Ultimately the story isn’t about Garrosh, it’s going to be some of the best storytelling that WoW has ever done.

Regarding Thrall, are Thrall and Jaina ever getting together and have a family?
Think Jaina got green fever going on? I don’t want to spoil it, I dont mean this in a marketing way at all. Thrall is meeting a nice girl from Nagrand and gonna have little brown babies. Let’s put it to bed. Funny choice of words there.

Will we ever see a redemption or resurrection of Illidan as a Character?
BOY DO I WANT TO DO THAT. That’d be badass. I don’t think anyone at all has ever talked about that. But I love that shit. I’m a sucker for a good redemption story. Except Arthas. Not Arthas. He’s dead.

Is there any update of the wow movie?
Metzen: You didnt get the memo? Kiefer Sutherland. I like Kiefer Sutherland. (/joke) Like a month ago we had a session with Sam Riami at which we kicked the shit out the story. It’s really great, we are waiting for the green light seeing Riami’s got multiple projects going on at the moment, but we broke through a very serious wall. We showed him what we had, it was like a geek cyclone.

Are we going to see another caster legendary weapon that isn’t a mace?
- Metzen: What do you want? What would make you happy?
- A big stick.
- Metzen: A Staff, it’s coming!

We are almost 2 expansions past outland, are we ever gonna find out what happened to High General Turalyon
We have every intention to deal with that character in a very important and epic way. no plan yet. you’re gonna love it though.” /sarcasm

Is there going to be anything in Cataclysm about CoT or the Bronze Dragonflight?
You can count on it. AND IT’S SO BADASS!

I’m a big fan of the Saurfangs but I never knew what kind of clan they’re from.
- Metzen: Blackrock.
- You sure?
- Metzen: 80%

Did the philosophy behind the Burning Legion change, and did Kil’jaeden shape it for his own personal gain?
The philosophy hasn’t shifted. (Really long and complicated question/answer, might go back to this one)

After the battle of Andorhal when our favorite Death Knight gets Chain Hooked back to us for Reeudcation is there going to be any revisiting to that?
The forsaken storyline is a complex one, you will definitely see that somewhere.

What happened to Kul Tiras?
We have to save something for the future patches, not now. We will deal with Kul Tiras in the future.

So for the story contest i wrote what might have happened to Kael’thas what happened between tbc and the bt
Actually a number of years ago, one of our lead writers wrote a 80 page novel about that, and its bitching, we’ve been struggling where to put it out, i would like to put it out at some time.

About Legendary caster weapons earlier, are you adding Medivh’s staff back into the game?
No.

Will we see a reuniting of Sylvanas, Vereesa and Alleria?
We’ll have that wrapped up along with the Turalyon storyline…. in Stromgarde… with Atiesh. TWO YEARS AGO! (sarcasm)

Will we see more lore about the Eredar and the Draenei in the future?
You know, we haven’t really explained it all that well. We had it in the War3 book where Sargeras came across the Eredar and they were this bad race. Then I wanted to revamp it with TBC and the Draenei to where the Eredar corrupted him. That went over as well as a fart in church. But I still stand by the new story.

How are Trolls related to Moonkin at all?
We’ve developed a lot of the Troll Druid lore in-house. I’m not sure if we’re going to release all of that with Cataclysm, but it will be explained.

Will legendaries from the past scale to be useful at 85?
Yeah we don’t have that planned. We don’t want to make items that last forever. I won’t say never, you may see Atiesh at some point, but we don’t really have it planned.

[...] missed a couple of questions there, will update in a few.

In Burning Crusade Illidan didnt seem very involved in quests, Arthas on the other hand was everywhere in Wrath of the Lich King, how about Cataclysm?
In WotLK we might have cartooned Arthas out a bit, with Deathwing its a little harder for him to show up and not just kill you. What does happen that when you see Deathwing, he will kill you 99% of the time. His name ain’t Socialwing for a reason!

In the book Stormrage serious stuff happens which in my opinion is a little more intense than cataclysm, is everyone going to forget what happened to them in cataclysm? Regarding the nightmare taking over the world.
So the question would be: do we reference the events of Stormrage in Cataclysm? A there are things in our literature that are harder to pull off than other, that’s one of them, especially in a expansion in which you destroy the world things get cluttered, it will be softly touched upon but nothing big. We will be talking about it.

I’m an old school tabletop roleplayer, I can assume you are too, I’m in a guild of an rp server, we absolutely love storytelling, will there be any tools implemented into the game for Roleplaying?
Yes. You mean sort of a character story panel? I wouldn’t rule it out, we don’t really discuss it but we can bring it up again.

There’s a lot of lore with deathwing in the old RTS games and is there going to be any connection to the Demon Soul or anything like that? In Outland there was a hint that the Netherwing might be related to Deathwing, will the relationship be clarified?
Yes. can’t really too much bout it, but you’ll see something (soon). Metzen: SOMETHING AWESOME

I know that the Paladins got a lot of attention, Silver Hand, Argent crusade etc, EPL and WPL being rebuilt etc, are the Paladins still playing a big part in cata?
The Argent Crusade is cleaning up atm, the Plaguelands was their base of operations. Theyr’e spreading out with the Cenarion Circle cleansing the lands. Will there be a dungeon? No nothing planned.

In WotLK, it seemed in endgame raiding content from Ulduar to Coliseum to Lich King wasn’t very coherent. In Cataclysm is there going to be more cohesion?
Yes. That’s a tricky question isn’t it? interesting. Lich King’s raiding there actually was a story there, was it pulled off as masterly as it should have been? No, I dont think so. I definitely think that in this expansion there will be a lot more.

Nerz’hul/Bolvar storyline; is it finished or whats going on..?
Yes, uh.. yeah Nerz’hul is done. The lich king idea is the ultimate expression, Nerz’hul is done. Relative to Bolvar its kinda weird, where my instinct goes regarding storyline, but seeing were not building a new Northrend expansion anymore its kind of an issue with the present day like we dont have any outland stuff either. Bolvar is keeping a lid on the scourge, we are unlikely to chase that for the next little while

I hear all this stuff about Caster DPS and Ranged DPS Legendary Items, but what about Tank DPS?
You are preaching to the quire here, I want one. Yeah! So you said it right, when we do a legendary it covers a role, unfortunately the tank role is smaller than dps role, maybe even than healer role. So not out of the question we’re gonna do that staff (from earlier) first.

GC promised us a moose. WHERE IS OUR MOOSE?
Yeah. He did. Damn that guy. We gonna find him. and ask him. Yourself. No damn idea. I want a moose, Chris (Metzen) wants a moose. Muhh. Where is it? No idea?

About Ragnaros, I remember back in the Molten Core days when you woke him up, and he just one shot everyone is he gonna do that again?
Yeah… yeah.. you want him to do that? Like three guys.. five? seven? MORE DEATH. Firey glorious death

Now that Arthas is dead how or will you be able to make Worgen or Goblins or any other race Death Knights?
There is actually a story here, so when you play the DK area Arthas still exists. So why is he still alive? It’s a different pocket of time. The Worgens back then are probably minions of Arugal something, Goblins are already around so no problem regarding that. Metzen: Necromancy is not exclusive to the lich king, it existed before nerzhul changed to the lich king. It’s not a new thing, really.

Enhanced Maps

• The 2D maps for each dungeon was the first step.
• Detailed boss info will be added to the map, including loot, lore, and abilities! (Yep, in-game AtlasLoot)
• You won’t have to pull a boss and die anymore to find out what he does.
• “We’re not going to tell you how the boss works, but we want you to have an idea of what you’re getting into.”
• 3D Portrait of the bosses will be available.
• It will work in both Dungeons and Raids.

Patch 4.1.0 Preview – Firelands Raid

• The Firelands are on the Elemental Plane of Fire. Lava is all over the place.
• Ragnaros encounter will be completely different. They want to give you an idea of his true power.
• The instance will have 7 bosses
• Plane of Fire is an outdoor area similar to the Hyjal Raid (the layout, not the terrible waves upon waves)
• To the north is Sulfuron Keep, you’ll go indoors here to fight Ragnaros. Sulfuron Keep looks very similar to the area in Cataclysm’s Hyjal levelup zone.

Patch 4.1 – Abyssal Maw 5-Man Dungeon

• Blizzard wants to release a 5-man Dungeon with each content patch to make sure that nobody feels left out.
• It will be a continuation of the story players are going through in Vashj’ir and Throne of the Tides.
• Abyssal Maw is the Elemental Plane of Water.
• “Nothing like The Oculus”
• The dungeon has 4 bosses.
• “Risen areas” where you fight and then travel to the next

Classic Heroics (Heroic SFK / Deadmines)

• New quests and encounters are now available in the dungeons.
• All dungeons in Cataclysm now have their quests inside the dungeon right at the front. They no longer are part of huge quest chains outside of the instance.
• The instances have been updated and completely revamped, they are not like Naxxramas in WotLK and you can expect a brand new instance. Normal difficulty is also updated.

Classic Dungeons

• Classic dungeons have been revamped to be made shorter and less confusing. Dungeons such as Maraudon or Uldaman were really really long to get through.
• For example dungeons can be split into multiple wings. Uldaman will be broken up into 2 wings. Ironaya will be the final boss of the first wing for the Dungeon Finder.
• Maraudon will also be broken up into 2 wings as well. The dungeon now has a “living” section, and a lower section where Princess Theradras is.
• Other dungeons will be trimmed. The top portion of the Sunken Temple has been removed and only the bottom floor remains.
• Wailing Caverns’s maze has been removed and bosses have been moved around to just make the instance smaller. Moving bosses wasn’t hard because bosses didn’t really have their own rooms.

Raid Philosophy

• Tons of new mechanics have been added to the game, “Try to be as quiet as possible so this big blind dragon doesn’t kill you.” , “Players flying through the air during the fight.”
• These mechanics are added to the game in bite-sized chunks to make sure that players aren’t overwhelmed.
• One of the most important goal is to have content for everyone, the normal/heroic mode system worked out great in WotLK and they will keep doing it.

Flexible Raid Locks / Difficulty

• Ulduar Heroic encounters worked fine, Blizzard decided that they could just make the whole instance Heroic (Trial of the Crusader). They decided to make the difficulty dynamic in Icecrown Citadel because ToC was just a pain in the ass.
• With the new system, you can join multiple raids of either size but you can only defeat each boss once per week.
• Heroic Difficulty works just like it in Wrath of the Lich King – Once you kill a heroic boss, you’re locked to that raid group with that raid ID. However, if heroic bosses get too hard you can kill normal mode bosses with other people. (You can’t do the same boss on Heroic and Normal in a week)

Raids & Dungeons Q&A
Q: Will there be a better system to prevent “ninja” looting on the LFG system?
There are a couple of improvements in Cataclysm. The loot system is more strict and people aren’t able to roll on something they cannot wear.

Now that 10 and 25-man raids have the same difficulty, how do you balance them and make them the same difficulty?
Balancing is very hard but it’s also a very high priority, encounters should be roughly the same difficulty. It might take some time but developers will get them to the same difficulty.

With the flexible raid lock system, is there anything to prevent people from leaving the group as soon as something bad happens?
It will get better over time, as player gets better and get used to the new system you will most likely end up getting a much better PuG experience.

Legendary weapons, with 10 and 25 man lockouts being combined in cataclysm are there any plans to go back to Ulduar and Icecrown citadel in regards of Shadowmourne and Val’anyr
Are we going to go back and change the way fragments drop? That’s a good point, will bring that up in the office on monday. It’s a great suggestion.

Are you changing BRD as well in Cataclysm?
I’ve done a pass on most of the old dungeons, trimming a lot of the suck. Things like 20 seconds sleep and 10 seconds disarms and things really really obnoxious. Unfortunately breaking up BRD is very tricky, so what we did do is put up some teleporters, there’s a teleport past the bar, in the city, etc … There are also teleports in Cataclysm dungeons such as Shadowfang Keep, Deadmines. Graveyards are also super close now, all dungeon graveyards are right outside the portal now. Developers want you to do the encounters, not run so much.

I’m concered about encounter mechanics like more hard stuff, my main concern is that the binary sort of thing that certain mechanics are big and flashy or something really subtle or obvious but it wont kill you immediately. Is there any middle ground there?
We talk about that quite a lot, and it’s actually a pretty nasty design problem. Tanks and healers have a lot of things on their hands, if you are taking a little bit of damage you’re probably going to blame the healer. We’re trying to make things more visual and hopefully you won’t have to look at a buff stacking for an encounter, one of the new things we have in Cataclysm are meters that the dungeon guys can script to make some of the mechanics more visual and make sure players know why they die. The blind dragon (Atramedes) for example needs you to be quiet, that’s visually indicated with a sound bar.

Is there any plan to make a legendary weapon guild bound due to achievements
It’s not something we’re looking into, there’s an achievement for it but we have no plans to make a guild wide legendary. It’s an idea that came up but there are a lots of design problems with that, it was more complicated than what it was worth. For the time being, in the future legendaries will be for one person.

A New Feel for Classic Dungeons

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, many classic dungeons will be updated to reflect our ever-evolving design philosophy, and the reworked Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep should serve as two good examples of how classic dungeons can be greatly improved without losing their “classic”; feel. Even after players have long memorized every last corner of a dungeon, classic dungeons can be made to feel fresh again by adding new quests, new encounters, and interesting lore lead-ins from their respective zones (in this case, Westfall and Silverpine Forest). This subtle approach helps revitalize classic dungeons for low-level characters and provides meaningful content for level-85 characters through Heroic versions, while still retaining the spirit of what made the dungeon popular in the first place.

One exciting new change that Stockton announced was that all key dungeon quest givers will now be located just inside the dungeon entrance. You will no longer have to beg your party to share their quests with you, or make your way to a dungeon only to find you haven’t completed a mandatory quest chain.

The primary goal for touching up any classic dungeon is to make them less confusing, shorter (in the case of the most sprawling crawls), and — overall — more fun. One way to accomplish this is to tweak the layouts and divide larger dungeons into separate wings. Come Cataclysm, players will see this philosophy in action in places like Uldaman and Maraudon, now separated into wings that are easier to navigate. Other dungeons are better served by trimming away the excess, as in certain sections of Sunken Temple and the maze-like portion of Wailing Caverns.

Raid Philosophy

One of the first things level-85 raiders will notice in Cataclysm is that more raid dungeons will be accessible right off the bat, in the form of multiple, smaller-scale raid dungeons. Our goal is to provide a dynamic and wide range of raid content that offers a little something for everyone.

Ever since Ulduar, our philosophies for Heroic raid dungeons and lockout systems have been steadily evolving. Ulduar presented players with the first-ever opportunity to toggle the difficulty of a raid boss for a greater challenge and access to better loot — but the system was somewhat confusing, requiring players to know how to trigger Heroic difficulties through specific gameplay mechanics that varied by encounter. In Trial of the Crusader, players were granted the ability to toggle Heroic difficulty directly through UI, but could only change it for the entire dungeon at once. In Icecrown Citadel, we melded the mechanics of Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader to give players the flexibility to choose between normal and Heroic difficulties via the UI on a boss-by-boss basis… and we’re still making tweaks to give players even more options.

Patch 4.0.1 introduced the flexible raid lock system, which will be used in Cataclysm raids. While the Heroic raid lockouts will function the same as they did in Wrath of the Lich King, normal raids will lock players to specific boss kills each week, rather than to entire dungeons. This system is designed to give players with fluctuating schedules more flexibility to progress through content, to help keep players from being locked out of raiding for a week if an emergency comes up, and to give raid leaders more options when scheduling raids and maintaining a raid roster.

Patch 4.1

The panel closed with a first look at the Firelands, an all-new raid coming in patch 4.1. Continuing the quest to save Hyjal from an elemental invasion, players will be called upon to enter the Elemental Plane of fire and extinguish seven unique bosses… including Ragnaros himself. Too soon?

Also coming in patch 4.1 is the five-player Abyssal Maw dungeon, which takes players into the Elemental Plane of water to challenge four new bosses…and while it’s technically an underwater dungeon, the designers promise that the layout and mechanics are nothing like those in the Oculus.

Another major feature of patch 4.1 will be enhanced dungeon and raid maps. While dungeon maps currently show the dungeon layout and locations of bosses, 4.1 will allow players to find a host of new information for each boss, including 3D boss portraits, the lore behind the encounter, a full loot list, and a breakdown of boss abilities (by phase, if applicable).

At this point the audience was shown video footage of two new raid zones being introduced in Cataclysm, Bastion of Twlight and Throne of the Four Winds. That’s all from the World of Warcraft Dungeons & Raid panel. Thanks for reading!

Currently in the game you can use the dungeon finder to put together 5 man teams within a battlegroup, is there any possibility you can revisit that for making raids?
The way we tune our raids demands the players use several compositions, buffs and debuffs represented and it gets pretty hard to apply there, you may not always have the best players with you.

I was wondering if there are plans in the future to make races look apart more, when you place the same armor on either of them they pretty much look the same
Currently there aren’t any solid plans for this but we are tossing around some stuff.

Any plans of adding a guild merging system?
We don’t have any plans for a feature, but merging a guild is easier to do in Cataclysm due to the new guild interface.

I love what you guys have done with WoW, I love that there’s a lot of strong female chars, though I wonder if we can have some that didnt look like they came out of a Victoria’s Secrets catalogue?
Which catalogue would you like them step out of then? We feel ya, we want to vary our female chars more in the future. So yeah we’ll pick different catalogues.

With the talent tree overhaul, are you guys planning to do more passive talents?
We’re still in phase 1 of the balance and those are currently going live, so we’ll tweak them over time especially in 4.1.

In PvP, some people can be crowd controlled up to 20 seconds consecutively. Switch to PvE, one target can be CC’d for 1 minute. Not much skill to that.
Seems like more of a statement than a question.

Sorry, what’s your philosophy with CC now and what might change in Cata?
It’s a different answer depending on PvE or PvP. In PvE we want people to use more CC than they did in Lich King. We want stuff to be as CCable as possible. Any time we make something immune there’s a lot of consideration. Do we really have to do this?

As it relates to PvP, the approach we’re taking right now is to slow down the pace of combat. Any time you slow it down then CC has less of an impact.

Lich King has a lot of really cool abilities DKs could use. Have you given any thought into giving us Defile or Infest?
Level 90 abilities right there! Thanks.

Are there any plans to add a legendary dps dagger?
Not really. We don’t make legendaries often, so we try to make them useful for a lot more people. We decided on a staff yesterday by the way.

Will I be able to get my warglaives (and other legendaries) in Cataclysm?
Yep, everything except Atiesh. Because teleporting to Karazhan is important at 85.

With all of the specs being viable now, can arenas finally be balanced around comp instead of the viability of each class?
I think we’ll still have arenas balanced around viability, but we’re always looking at changes. One change coming up for beta is that Mortal Strike — the effect — will only reduce heals by 10%.

Did you not add a moose mount because you hate Canada?
Well we discussed it, we wanted one. But you can’t always get what you want.

Are we ever going to see the Emerald Dream again aside from a phase?
You can count on it, it’s just a question of when. But you’ll definitely see the Dream again, and the Nightmare.

Theres a lot of great mounts coming out, I was wondering about profession crafted multi-passenger mounts, if so engineering needs mini-van
Heard about the new alchemy mount? It’ll be fun to see who gets that first. Who doesn’t want to mount their friend? I mean..

Will the new legendary be available in both 10 and 25 man, and will it scale similar to the way Val’anyr did?
At this stage we want it to be available to both 10 and 25 man. We want legendaries to last longer than normal items, it’s always hard to balance these expansion wise.

Basically, I originally liked the idea you had about lowering the talents, but now I really hate the fact there is no uniqueness anymore, everyone is the same number/combo of talents atm are you ever going to extend it again for more options?
Do you think the specs in the deeper trees were very different from each other? They weren’t. It’s a new design, the last 10 points are the most exciting ones to spend, we’ll see what specs develop. hopefully we can tweak things. There were cookie cutter specs before this change, and there probably will be some for this as well.

Do you intend to make anything except heirlooms account bound? Pets, Achievements, etc?
Sure we would like doing that, things that are not char power oriented will have a higher chance of being account bound in the future, it’s something we’ll like to do in the future. Most of the archaeology items and the new guild mount are account bound already.

I would like to ask for a closet, we get all this awesome stuff from events but have no place to put them!
We actually hoped to do that for cataclysm, there’s still some issues with that that we need to resolve.

The horde curently has two very good battlecry’s, can you give some characters somewhere to shout back (alliance)?
“Have mercy!”. We’ve experimented with a amount of battlecry’s for the alliance, but none of them match up with “For the Horde!”. We’ll keep trying to find one. “We’ll keep trying” is not the battle cry though. (laughs)

You stated that you want mastery to dynamically change up your gameplay but some of them are just flat damage bonuses and aren’t very exciting
Crit makes you hit harder, Haste lets you do more things, Mastery generally makes you better at what you do, particularly for mages haste does a pretty good job at that already but the goal isn’t necessarily to modify your rotations.

I’m working on insane in the membrane, with all the changes to Dire Maul north will I still be able to achieve this achievement?
The biggest problem are the changes to the bloodsail buccaneers, that kinda put a bullet in that feat of strength for now. It’s fun to do painful things in WoW. If there’s a huge outcry for it we’ll try to put something equally brute in the game.

With the existance of Pandarens being hinted at, are Pandarens still being excluded away?
I don’t see them flying out of the cracks.. we’ll see. They’re a super cool race and an awesome concept, maybe we’ll see them in the future. We’ll see.

In terms of voice acting, I noticed that I Metzen is missing from the panel. Every new major character sounds like Thrall, are you guys willing to open auditions for players?
Deathwing is actually not Metzen. We have a process (believe it or not), we’ve had a lot of talented actors, not just Chris (he has a lovely voice), and we’ll keep adhering to that process in the future.

I’m desperate for another character slot, give us some more room!
Do you need 12 for your 12 step program? I can offer you another 10 slots for 15 bucks a month! It is something we’ve talked about just right now its not what we are going to do, we’ll have to wait and see.

Regarding Cataclysm Raiding. What is the incentive to do a 25 man since the gear is the same in 10 man?
Something you might enjoy more? It’s something we are focusing on, it’s a daunting task but we’re working on it.

I have a lot of low level friends, are you planning something for me to quest with them, without them being penalized?
It’s one of our philosophies to let people play together as much as we can, we’ve talked about a sidekick system, where your char would play as a low level char something we’d like to do in the future.

People love legendaries, maybe trade them in for a heirloom version so they can level with it?
That’d be awesome, but we dont want people feeling that they need to going back to old content to get legendaries.

When are we getting a tabard tab?
We would like to do it, the only reason why we didn’t do it yet is because we have click on-use tabards. We kinda want a dropdown or something out of which you can choose a tabard from. Something like the title dropdown.

Any better plans to integrate the TBC races into the lore?
We’ve kinda failed at bringing Draenei into the wow culture, we tried to do it more in Cataclysm. We’re not there yet but it’s better.

About the balance between horde and alliance characters, now I have to level up all my chars, it’s gonna be 20 vs 100 horde fighting
We just need a better battlecry for the alliance, its definitely something we are keeping an eye on, it’s just the psychology of the coolness of the horde that makes them more popular, making the allies be proud of them being allies is a thing to solve in the long run.

Could you make the heroic training dummy more interactive, could you change the stats or give it buffs/debuffs, built in recount?
We’d like to do more with the dummies, just a question of time and priority at the moment.

Are you going to implement the dance studio?
Yeah well you got goblin and worgen dances who are pretty awesome, we’ve been doing some work on that, we just want to see when to introduce it, we need to make sure to add a LOT of new dances, whenever the animators have free time we make them make new dances. We wanted it to be a cool feature too, there wasn’t much gameplay in the barbershop for example, we want to add more gameplay.

Are you going to add more alchemy research-ish things for old content recipes?
It’s always a good question on how much to support the older raids, its something we should take more seriously.

Blood Elves weren’t a large part in WotLK, and is Lor’themar actually going to be a leader instead of just a reagent?
In cata we have a new faction, they counter to the explorers league. Lor’themar is absolutely being developed to a more leadership-ish position. we absolutely want to put him in the front.

Will there be predictable high damage phases where healers and tanks can plan their cooldowns together?
We have planned areas in some bosses where you need to coordinate your cooldowns.

Death Knight
Has anybody given a thought to changing the glow on DK eyes to blue, red, green depending on their spec or what presence they’re in?
No, we haven’t. It might get a little to christmas-tree-y. I mean the current glow, it gives the feeling of “death”. We like the way the glow represents the feel right now. Generally we use red to represent demonic, blue for Scourge influence, etc.

Druid
Are there any plans for female druid forms?
I might have seen concept for something like that yesterday, we’ll do what we can.

Hunter
I like the dog pet a lot (Gilnean dog pet) any plans on making it more ferocious?
Maybe we can make them a little meaner, give them rabies or something.

Mage
Blade’s Edge arena, I’m on a bridge as a mage and blink, and I blink backwards. I mean what the hell?
Well when you blink, make sure you’re facing the right way. Any time we find bugs with that we obviously try to fix that. The geometry especially, like Blade’s Edge. Things don’t line up correctly and it causes a hiccup. We try to fix that.

Any chance for mage water elementals to get new abilities?
We don’t have plans right now, we’ll have to see for the future. We have to see how the permanent water elemental works out. It’s something we’ll probably consider for a future expansion.

Paladin
Can you move the interrupt from HoJ to something else for prot paladins?
Yeah we’ve talked about that. We would like to eventually move the interrupt to something else so they have a more consistent interrupt.

If you decided to cut out abilities for prot or ret paladins due to rotations being too complex, what would they be?
We’ve been looking, we probably could take out Avenging Wrath and bake that into Zealotry. Same thing with Inquisition, we could move that somewhere else.

Priest
Why did you remove the support role of the Shadowpriest?
Players didn’t want to be there to make everyone else awesome, they wanted to be awesome themselves.

Rogue
Shadow Dance has turned into more of an energy increasing ability instead of a DPs increasing ability. Was that the intent?
The challenge with Subtlety is we want that to be the spec where the rogue feels sneaky. The problem is that if you pull it off, they’re dead — that’s great. If you screw it up, you’re dead. We’ll have to see how it plays out at 85 in PvP since we haven’t seen a lot of that. We didn’t try to change the core function of it.

Shaman
For enhancement, burst vs abilities that need to ramp up, is there any consideration of addressing the problem in PvE where it’s hard to ramp up during an encounter?
We’ve given a lot of considering to mix things up so that every spec has to adapt and have tried to add ramp up abilities to every spec. That way you can sometimes have the quick burst, or may need to ramp things up depending on the encounter.

At 85 it works really well.

Warrior
Are there any plans for making fury good in pvp?
Fury did get some love in cataclysm because we changed the talent trees around, short heroic leap gives them a little more tools compared to before. We also expect players to play a lot more in Rated Battlegrounds and things will be different there, Arenas will still be around but we expect the focus to shift to Rated Battlegrounds during the next year.

Got it for download too if anybody wants it. If there’s enough demand in the comments then I’ll upload it and post the link for download.

They are the D. They are the D. They are the D. They are the D…

IRVINE, CA. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that the greatest band in the world*, Tenacious D, will perform at the closing concert during this year’s sold-out BlizzCon®. Taking place October 22-23 at the Anaheim Convention Center, BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft®, Diablo®, and StarCraft® game universes. While tickets to the convention are currently sold out, viewers can watch at home by ordering a BlizzCon Virtual Ticket, offering over 50 hours of event coverage (including Tenacious D’s performance) globally over the Internet and also on DIRECTV® in the United States.

Tenacious D is made up of musical visionaries Jack Black and Kyle Gass. After forming in 1994, the duo rose to rock god-dom following the release of the HBO cult-hit series Tenacious D: The Greatest Band on Earth. Since then, Tenacious D has released two albums and a pair of live DVDs, sold out arenas around the world, and starred in their own feature-length movie, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. At the BlizzCon closing ceremony on October 23, the band will perform an earth-shattering set that includes the debut of new, soon-to-be-legendary songs.

“The best way to wrap up two days of epic entertainment is with an epic rock concert—and few bands fit the bill like Tenacious D,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re looking forward to a great show and can’t wait to see what Jack and Kyle have in store for everyone attending BlizzCon and watching from home.”

In addition to serving as a gathering place for the Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, BlizzCon will have an array of activities, including discussion panels, competitive and casual tournaments, contests, hands-on playtime with current and upcoming Blizzard Entertainment games, and more. Viewers at home can order a BlizzCon Virtual Ticket for $39.95 USD, available as a multi-channel Internet stream around the world (pricing and availability may vary by region) and also via DIRECTV in the United States. Visit www.blizzcon.com for more details and ordering information.

To keep pace with the continued growth of World of Warcraft as well as development on other Blizzard Entertainment games, the company is currently hiring for numerous open positions. More information on available career opportunities can be found at us.blizzard.com/jobs. As BlizzCon draws closer, further details about the show will be announced at www.blizzcon.com.

Current gaming loadout is:

• Halo: Reach
• Cataclysm Beta (and soon retail in December)
• Darksiders
• Left 4 Dead 2
• StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
• Monday Night Combat
• Mass Effect 2 (on my 8th playthrough of both ME1 & ME2)

On deck:

• The Witcher 1 (enhanced holy shit edition)
• Castlevania (upon release)
• Battlefield Bad Company 2 (when I eventually get forced to pick it up by co-workers)
• WoW (I log on once a day for some AH trolling since the Lich King was killed and I “beat the game”)

Family is doing awesome and growing by the way, we’re also looking for a new house (buying instead of renting which is a big deal in a good way). Super Secret Projekt was scrapped since Cataclysm’s beta became very very unstable. The footage I have is pretty much useless now and outdated. The project was a topographical time lapse video where I followed a path through a zone, then that exact past in Cataclysm’s version of the zone. Sadly the zones change so goddamn much that I had to re-film constantly. Conclusion; it was a pain in the ass and it fell by the wayside.

Being part of the greater WoW community or the gaming “Blogosphere” is the last thing I want to do anymore. I still like writing mind you, and will be better at bringing more news and WoW type stuff as well as other shit that’s interesting. But honestly, the infinite circle jerk of wannabe journalists and video game gurus is repulsive. Also I’m not doing any writing ever for any other website in any capacity. That counts for podcasts or video blogs too. That shit storm of egos and butt-fucking is too theatrical and dramatic for me. In other words I don’t play well with others when the others are pussies (that is not a blanket statement mind you, a lot of really cool people out there. Just sucks they get overshadowed so often).

Most of the comments I get will be about the image used.

• No Auction House of any kind, if you want to buy something you MUST buy from other player characters and navigating each person one by one with no search function or plausible UI is a very drawn out and boring task.
• Can’t type more than a single sentence before you have to start a new line.
• Crafting is shit right now – Breaking lvl 1 synths at lvl 10 is beyond me. Nothing at all changed from FFXI except it’s been made even more tedious and the game’s item progression is 100% crafting.
• No recipe list (you have to write everything down). You won’t know what materials make what by looking at the game or UI. You have to visit a 3rd party website.
• DROP DOWN MENUS EVERYWHERE!
• It takes an hour to sell 80/80 inventory.
• Massive lag everywhere, but not exactly video card lag or server lag. Things just don’t “render” at all in any way you can say is quick. In other words, walk 4 steps then wait about 15-45 seconds for things to appear on your screen. It’s clunky.
• Crafting is bullshit – most recipes require items 5 or even 10 levels above the recipe you want to do and most require mats from 3-6 different crafting classes to craft some piece of shit gear you’re going to replace in 5 levels. Absolutely no incentive to spend so much time on that.
• No reply button so you have to type in the entire name (2 names) to talk in private.
• No global linkpearl invite – it has to be in person.
• No banks.

Combat works like this:

Select target > move yourself into range of target > activate “Active” mode > select an attack > attack with the attack > do those last 2 a few times > if the target dies then go into “Passive” mode > wait for you to go into passive mode > you are now in passive mode regaining health > select target…

It’s the most garbage dog-shit convoluted piece of crap excuse for combat I have ever seen since FFXI.

Installing the game is a bitch, setting up your account is too, once inside the game is utter crap where you feel lost half the time and bored to hell the other half. The pacifists and ass-kissing fanatics will come to the defense of their precious game and say “WoW is for babies, this game doesn’t babysit you with quests through the content.” Let me stop you right there xXxxSephirothscockxxXx, I judged this game on the merits of modern MMO tropes, mechanics, and offerings.

FFXIV when pitted against everything else out there and what today’s bar is set at, fails utterly. The game is shit. It’s something from 2003 with the graphics of 2009. Once again I am completely confident in my position that Square Enix and the Final Fantasy franchise is done since they haven’t released anything worth the plastic it’s burned on in about a decade.

On the side, I’m also working on a little something by myself for you all still reading and visiting here.

In real life news, I got a great job that eats my time from 9am-7pm on weekdays and then there’s gym time, kid time, wife time. Family is doing much better as well and a big thank you for the kind words and prayers and good wishes. I’m hustling double-time right now to bring you readers something sweet from the Beta test too since by some miracle of God I got into it with the first wave.

PS: Spoonwolf on Lost Isles (US-PvE) Beta Test Realm if any of you are in the beta and want to /poke the Lv.32 Worgen.

WoW: Cataclysm

• It’s the chemo to the growing cancer of Warcraft. A complete and radical change of the entire game only Outlands and Northrend will be unscathed.
• The leveling dynamic has been changed dramatically. Game mechanics and stats have been removed or altered significantly. Faction and lore changes are are very sweeping pretty much refacing the entire Warcraft universe from it’s Warcraft III template – (No more Thrall warchief, no more Arthas, no more Illidan, only Malfurion left for the most part and some other elements)
• It will be the same shit as we’ve seen for the past few years in regards to end game progression. Tier 11 > 12 > 13 and so forth most likely just going back to a single digit system.
• It’s the same playerbase that we all love to hate.
• Massive use of phasing is going to make the game world feel more alive. Basically this is not doing away with, but cleaning up as much as possible that feeling in an MMO where you do something and the world isn’t affected by it. Examples of changes, the bridge in Redridge is fixed, the Western Plaguelands are healthy and green again with no plague, Westfall gets destroyed and Sentinel Hill gets burned to the ground, the Zoramgor outpost in Ashenvale is now a fortified Horde port instead of three huts and a flight master.
• The combat is the same though mechanics and player UI for certain classes will be different. In the end though it’s still pretty much more of the same we’ve been getting, which is actually pretty fun and well written gaming that somehow always manages to entertain and soak hours of play time.

Bottom Line: Cataclysm is going to be a huge success. With the experience and new tech that’s been gained over the past half decade the developers are going back to the original game and essentially relaunching the damn thing. Some of the zones I have personally seen are jaw dropping.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

• The different planets look fucking incredible, the environments are stunning and the colors are great.The time line is also damn solid as it takes place significantly earlier than the movies (Ep.1) and the concept itself is really exciting.
• The Star Wars franchise alone pretty much means it’s going to be entertaining with replay value and as always the mega-nerds and unkempt losers of the world are going to take umbrage at certain details but hey, it’s fucking Star Wars what do you expect.
• The playable classes look great and the art direction is really cool. The Bioware guys have this amazing company with incredible talent and EA is feeding them money through an IV non stop to make this game a success.
• Being given the chance to actually grow and develop a character in the Star Wars universe is really awesome. That’s pretty much what made KOTOR so awesome and it’s a formula that still works really well.

However.

I’ve watched all the interviews and devblogs because I really want the game to succeed, but I’m starting to feel some doubt.

We still have n0 idea what kind of game SWTOR is going to be outside of an mmo. The one liner we keep hearing left and right is: You’ll be able to make your character live out a grand story that’s unique to everyone! Outside from one or two combat demos, no significant details of the game have been revealed. We know we get ships instead of traditional mounts or player housing but according to E3 reports and interviews, the ships will be exactly like the Normandy from Mass Effect 2.

So you can talk to the NPC characters in your party… so instead of just humans playing with me I’ll have a crew/squad of NPCs I have to wrangle too. This feels a lot like a single player RPG with multiplayer co-op built in. We know that each class will have at least two different talent trees so specialize into one of two different sub-classes but no real details or roles exist so far.

• Is it going to be PvP or PvE focused, or both?
• What does the end game look like?
• Is there going to be some sort of raiding scene?
• Will PvP be restricted only to the warzones spoken about during E3?
• Are there actually any space battles?
• How will players interact? If we’re “Crafting our own unique grand story!” will we even need to intract with players? Will it be a single player quest-grind?
• Just how much of the galaxy are we going to explore? How extensive is each planet?

Seriously if I can complete the entire story and all the different variations and branches in the story with any character class and such all by myself then what’s the point of the MM in MMO? I mean, the story itself is the big hook from what they’ve been saying since day one. Nothing about gear. Nothing about faction controlling sectors and planets in the war setting, nothing about toppling the Sith or crushing the Jedi.

These aren’t minor mechanic questions – these are questions that shape the ENTIRE GAME. Now if somebody wants to chime in with a link to an interview where one of these questions have been answered, be my guess and I’ll look like a moron. But as it stands, this game has been floating around for a while and we don’t know jack shit other than “YAY STORY!” and classes.

Bottom Line: I am still very excited for the game but in all honesty I’ll probably play a demo before I invest any real time and money into the title. I want this game to succeed greatly I want to experience a true MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER experience in the Star Wars universe. As it stands right now I am very nervous because the details released are extremely vague and what little has been released doesn’t point to an MMO and more towards something like Diablo 2 with Star Wars and a dash of KOTOR.