So speculate how long until MOP? June, August, October, December or ?

[chaos5061]

Wowhead J. Allen Brack Interview Pt.1

From Wowhead:
Question: So a lot of the stuff we’ve seen so far with Mists of Pandaria, with the focus on “getting the War back into Warcraft” etc, it seems like PvP is becoming a major focus. Is that accurate, or is that just the storyline that the game is taking?
J. Allen Brack: I don’t think it’s accurate that we’re focusing more on PvP as to exclude PvE. I think there are definitely PvP elements that we’re introducing, but I think it’s much more about the story and the tone that we’re gonna have with the expansion as opposed to any kind of specific content or system decision.
Q: The Annual Pass was extremely successful. Are there any plans for a future Annual Pass after the 1-year term is up on the current one?
We haven’t talked about that. I think the WoW Annual Pass came out of just sort of thinking about the opportunity for Diablo coming out, and thinking there’s gonna be a lot of loyal WoW players who want to play Diablo and thinking about how to make that a compelling offer. Will we do something like that in the future? I’m sure we will. What is it? I have no idea. We haven’t really even started thinking about what that would be like.

I think people might say “Hey, we need to do a Starcraft and WoW [annual pass]”. I don’t know that that makes too much sense. I think the venn diagram of overlap between Starcraft players and WoW players may be a little bit smaller than Diablo.
Q: World of Warcraft has been out for 7 ½ years now, and obviously in development even before that, but still extremely successful. How does the game having been around for so long, and so established at this point, affect the sort of design changes and direction you need to take the game?
I think that kind of goes back to how we ended up with Mists of Pandaria as this expansion. We’ve done three expansions in a row where there’s been a focus on a huge, malevolent evil -- a huge bad guy who wants to do terrible, terrible things to the player. We wanted to change the tone of that, and say “Hey, we’re not gonna focus on this bad guy as the ‘big uber’”. We’re going to focus on a new land, and it’s about exploration, and it’s about adventuring in this new land. It’s about “what’s over the next hill, in this new continent I’ve never seen before?” with the background story of “we need to claim this territory, and we need to harvest resources from it, because we need to fuel our war machine back in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.” So that’s kind of going back to your first question about the PvP aspect of the storyline. It’s much more about the land grab, and if you sort of think back to colonial times with the discovery of the new world and what happened there, that’s the kind of pieces we’re thinking about.
Q: One of the things that was mentioned during the presentation earlier, Chris Metzen was talking about how the “box product” was going to basically be the theme that’s been talked about so far with the voyage to Pandaria, and then content patches would be furthering the story beyond that. What kind of release timeline do you think that would be along the lines of? One of the things that had been talked about around patch 4.1 was the idea of “smaller patches, more frequently” and that kind of fell by the wayside with Dragon Soul and so on. Is that something you guys want to get back into?
It’s definitely something that we’re interested in. I would love for us to be doing patches significantly more often. Right now we’re averaging about every 4 months. I would love for us to do more frequent patches than that. I think it’s kind of hard for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that we’ve got a lot of history of WoW, and there’s a player expectation and a community expectation of “What does it mean to release a patch?”, but I’m very interested in changing that dynamic and changing that expectation so that we can have big patches, we can have small patches, and we can have medium sized patches which we don’t really do right now.
Q: And then obviously when you have a smaller patch people go “Is this all that was in this patch?” and then you have a big patch and they’re like “Why did you wait so long?” I’ve been around the community a couple times myself, I know exactly what they do.
Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of feedback we get.
Q: So PvE scenarios were talked about a little bit. I’m still a little unclear on the idea. When they were originally announced it sounded almost like a public quest sort of thing, like out in the world you’d come across these and have to do something, but from the presentation it sounds like they’re going to be instanced.
Yeah, they’re going to be queued. You’ll queue up for them and they’ll be instanced. The difference is, when you think about dungeons, sometimes we’ll have a dungeon that’s just a very small hole in the ground, and then you go in and you’re in the dungeon. Our thought right now is that you won’t have very many dungeon-type things -- you’ll actually have this area in the world that you’ll learn and have a quest from and maybe it becomes a scenario for you later on, or something in that area becomes a scenario for you later on. But you will queue and you will be matchmade with various players in order to complete scenarios.

The idea is that it’s a very small, kind of 20-minute little adventure that happens irrespective of role. So there’s no real consideration for tank, or dps, or healer. It’s just “are there 3 people who want to do this? Great!” and they’re on their way to the scenario.
Q: So it’s more of a drop in/drop out, sort of instant “I’ve just logged in to World of Warcraft and would like to play” sort of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Q: Along those same lines it was mentioned that there was going to be a relationship between the scenarios and the Brewmasters, like finding Brewmasters out in the world.
So that’s an example of a specific scenario, where you have that Brewmaster who’s trying to make the special ale. That’s just one specific scenario. But there’s a lot of different ideas that we have for scenarios. The thing that we talked about back in the day was like “What if there’s an invasion of Goldshire, and the gnolls are invading and you have to save the children while the gnolls invade” in this little Goldshire scenario. That’s something we could definitely do. That doesn’t really have anything to do necessarily with... like, whatever comes up that makes sense from a story perspective for a scenario and is going to be a fun adventure for players, we can do that with that system.
Q: It does seem like something that you guys can put together a lot quicker and easier in certain situations, so you guys can put them out more often. That’s the impression I got.
Yeah, I think that’s something that we’d love to do, is to figure out how to release scenarios a lot more frequently.
Q: It was mentioned in the presentation earlier that there would be 3 raid instances and 14 bosses, which is a very nice number I’m personally very happy with as a raider. Is there anything more you can tell us about that? It seemed like it kind of got glossed over in the presentation.
Yeah, that’s because we haven’t done a lot of the work yet, and so we’re reluctant to commit to a whole bunch because things may change for us, but we’re working on spawning out the dungeons, we’re working on spawning out the various raids, and building those out. Those take many, many, many months to be built out from an artist’s perspective. Then we’ve got all the itemization, and all the character art that has to happen, from weapons, and armor, and bosses, and trash mobs that we have to make and dress up in order to make that happen.

We also have a new raiding philosophy that we haven’t finished designing yet and haven’t really talked about. How lockouts are gonna work, how are valor point caps going to work, that type of stuff. We haven’t really spent all the time we need to really figure out what that’s going to be for this expansion yet.
Q: So you are in discussions about possibly changing how the raid lockouts work?
Sure. I think we’re gonna look at how the 10/25 person lockout worked as a shared cooldown. Was that the right decision, or do we want to do something different? I don’t really know what the right answer is yet. We haven’t decided.
Q: You also mentioned that you’re doing LFR right out of the gate.
Yeah, so that was something that we thought would be really successful with 4.3. We’re really happy with the performance of it. We’re really happy with the idea of having this easier mode that you can just kind of get in, and be matchmade automatically, and go on and be successful with. And then having the normal mode for players to do and then the ultra heroic for the hardcore guys, and have special rewards for those and those type of achievements.
Q: Awesome. Yeah, just as a side note, tier 11 was one of my favorite tiers of raiding ever, and I actually think that it would have been completely perfect if there had been that LFR mode also because that would have given the more casual players a lot more to do.
Totally.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead J. Allen Brack Interview Pt.2

Q: So everything looks to be at least mostly along in development. One thing mentioned during the presentation was that 4 or 5 of the zones are already fully quested out. Does that mean we could be looking at a beta sometime soon?
It does, yeah. We’re still trying to figure out when the beta is actually going to happen, what the rules for that’s going to be, how we’re going to invite all the people that are going to be invited into the beta, but it is something that we’re interested in getting into players’ hands as soon as possible. We’ve got zones that are fully quested out and we feel like we’ve got a couple in the pipe at this point. We’re starting to think about “when can beta be, what can be the timeframe for that? What do we need to do in order to get ready?”
Q: That brings up another question. Like I mentioned earlier, there was like a million people who signed up for the annual pass. How does that go into beta?
<grinning> Uhh, I don’t know today... <laughs> but I will be smarter later as we figure that out and kind of decide and discuss exactly how we’re going to do that. It’s definitely going to be the largest beta we’ve ever done for any Warcraft expansion, so on one hand that’s very exciting, on the other hand... how do we get a million people in? I have no idea right now, so that’s definitely something we’re talking about. We’ll figure it out.

Q: It’s almost like, “How would you like to launch World of Warcraft again?”
Yeah, it’s a pretty challenging prospect actually to think about that many people all wanting to play at once.
Q: One thing that a few of us have been talking about is the idea of World of Warcraft as an esport, especially since Starcraft 2 has been so immensely successful as an esport. Is that a direction that you see the game moving in at some point, or trying to help facilitate?
I think we do try to help facilitate it, and we do try to help have it grow. It’s challenging because, from a design standpoint, we are not in the same league as Starcraft in terms of competitive [play]. There’s a lot more dials in Starcraft in terms of competitive tuning and that being what that game is about than there are in our game. So I think Starcraft will probably be a superior esport, but we definitely have interest in WoW as an esport. We do have the Blizzcon finals every year, we do have the qualifying tournaments, and we do have the WoW arena pass which allows players to instantly compete in a pure, even skill type basis for that stuff. So, it’s definitely something we’re excited about and try to invest time and energy into.
Q: Has there possibly been any thought along the lines of putting like a... well, now we have cross-realm matchmaking especially with the BattleTags system coming into place. Has there been any thought into putting in like a spectator mode in that sort of situation?
We have. It’s challenging to do, and then it opens up all kinds of questions like “How many spectators can you have? How does that work? How do you control yourself? Are you just a floating camera?” So there’s a lot of things that come up as ideas for what the potential challenges for that are. But yeah, we definitely would like to do that. It’s something that Starcraft does better than most games out there. The replay system is incredible.
Q: Yeah, I actually cast Starcraft matches myself from time to time, so it’s something that for the record, I’d love to push World of Warcraft in the esport direction.
Yeah, so I mean... like right now we have the videos as really the only way to do it because we really don’t have the ability to kind of capture footage, and capture stuff in the way that Starcraft does, because Starcraft was engineered from the very beginning to have that. WoW was not, and so the technical hurdle on a replay-type system in the vein of Starcraft is crazy challenging.
Q: So the female Pandaren model looks great. Actually, the first thing I thought when I saw it was “Well, that looks like a female Pandaren” which I’m pretty sure is what everybody was going for with making a female Pandaren, so...
That’s great to hear. It’s one of those things where you talk about it and debate a lot in terms of where that right kind of balance is. I’m super happy with the model as well. I think it turned out fantastically. There’s definitely a subjective element to it, if you think about “What does a female Pandaren look like?” That’s kind of a weird question to think about from an artistic perspective, so yeah. I’m really happy.
Q: Is there any possibility of maybe the pre-Cataclysm player models getting some updates?
That is something that’s been on our list and the list of the art director for many years. We would love to do that, because if you look at like the Cataclysm, or even the Burning Crusade -- the blood elf and the draenei models -- they’re just so much better than the original models. So we would definitely like to figure out a way to have the time to do that. One of the problems is our character models are probably one of the hardest things for us to do, because they’re your player, so everyone has a lot of opinions. Some of them are subjective, some of them are objective, and it just requires some of our most skilled artists that we have to do it.
Q: Yeah I actually played an orc back when there was the orc shoulder model bug, so there was like two months where I was like...
Sad panda.
Q: It just looked so incredibly wrong.
Sad panda has a whole new meaning now...
Q: You can actually play a sad panda if you want.
Yeah.
Q: Speaking of pandas actually, I had a level 85 Pandaren Monk that I was playing around on earlier, and I noticed that there was still a lot of like “what is this world, where have we come to” when I was questing around... as a Pandaren, who presumably would know what Pandaria was. Is that something that is just going to kind of happen, and is just kind of weird, and we kind of have to deal with?
Yeah, it is, because the idea that we have for the starting Pandaren is that they start their life, and they grew up on the turtle, and then they migrate to Pandaria. So native Pandarens, who are on Pandaria, will obviously have knowledge of the world, but you, as a new Pandaren, coming from having lived on the back of a turtle your entire life, don’t have any knowledge of that traditional home.
Q: Is there anything new coming for the World of Warcraft Remote in the future? Personally I was looking at the Pet Battle system and going, “I would love to play that on my iPhone” or something like that.
I think that’s a good idea. It’s something that we definitely have talked about and I would love to do someday. We did introduce the guild chat as the most recent feature we’ve introduced to that. Pet Battle is definitely something we’ve talked about.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Greg Street Interview Pt.1

From Wowhead:
Question: I think I asked you about this last time I interviewed you several months ago, about tanking changes that are coming up. There’s been a whole lot of talk about reworking the tanking rotation to be more focused on the defensive. Are there any sort of updates along those lines?
Greg Street: Yeah, you can kind of figure it out from the last talent calculator that we released, but to talk about the Protection Paladin specifically, there’s Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory, which are both off the global cooldown, and a lot of ways to generate Holy Power, so Judgement generates Holy Power now, and they can use the Holy Power to heal themselves if that’s the most appropriate thing, or if they want to improve their block, they do Shield of the Righteous instead. So, almost all the Holy Power will be used for survivability for Protection, because there aren’t a lot of damage abilities they have that consume Holy Power. So all the generation should be targetted towards survivability that way.
Q: There was a blogpost you did recently where you were talking about stat changes, and in terms of block capping and mastery, and all that stuff that’s going on like block moving to a two-roll system. Are we going to see more things in the tanking rotation that have to hit? Like, should tanks be looking to get expertise and hit back on their gear again?
Yeah, in fact that was part of the point of moving towards a more active role in self-defense. Previously, tanks would say “You know what, threat is not an issue for me, I don’t care if I hit or not, I just want to be able to hit my cooldowns.” But, using Protection as an example again, you want Holy Power, but you need to hit to get the Holy Power. So we’re hoping that hit and expertise become more attractive stats to tanks, which then lets us put them onto gear, so that the gear doesn’t always look like “Stamina plus Dodge or Parry” and then we can do some more things with that. We changed it to make it a little easier hit those caps, and we talked about it in the blog that we put up, so that it shouldn’t be totally unreasonable to try to get there.
Q: So it should be possible through like spells and abilities to still hit the block cap?
No, I’m sorry, to be able to get hit and expertise capped. The block cap will be almost impossible to hit unless like you have two mastery trinkets and they both go off at the same time or something like that.
Q: So I was playing the Monk a little bit, and I noticed a couple things that were different from Blizzcon. There’s no more dark Chi.
<some debate about how to actually pronounce “Chi”>
Q: So there’s no more dark Chi...
Dark balls.
Q: There’s no more dark balls, yeah. What prompted that sort of change?
It was a couple of things. Originally, the way we designed the Monk was they had a fairly involved resource system and very simple abilities, and as we got deeper into design we were having a lot of fun kind of going crazy with the abilities. So the Monk doesn’t have many, like, “hits for 10% weapon damage and that’s it.” Almost all of them do something else crazy. Even their basic attacks, there’s one that does more damage above 50% health and one that does more damage below 50% health of the targets, so even that basic attack they want to switch around, and when you start to look at some of the tanking and healing abilities they can be quite involved.

So we thought, philosophically, maybe it’s more fun to have all of the depth and interest and complexity be in the abilities, and not in the resource system. As we were playtesting and we were trying out the Monk, players were often telling us, “I don’t understand. Am I supposed to build up light and dark? And am I supposed to have abilities that cost light force and dark force?” And we felt like we were making the system complex just for the sake of having something different. With the Death Knight, we iterated a lot on the resource system before we found something we were really happy with, and even today players want parts of it improved and changed and stuff like that.

So we went back to a system we understood pretty well, which is they have energy -- and the reason we like energy is otherwise the attacks have to be on a cooldown, but with energy they can cool it a little bit -- and then that delivers just one type of Chi, but then we have some abilities cost 1, some cost 2, some cost 3, some cost 4, and then weaving those together is what gives them an interesting rotation. You might start with a 3, and then a 2, then a 1, then another 1, then a 2, then a 3, and that chaining together should help it feel different as opposed to like a Rogue or a Paladin that’s like, “build up to max, and then do a finisher, and then build up to max, and then do a finisher.”
Q: Yeah, that was actually something that I’d noticed, now that you mention it, when I was playing at Blizzcon last year. I kind of looked at it and went, “well alright, I’m just going to look up what some theorycrafter says on how to do this because I can’t figure this out right now.”
Exactly. If a guy like you, it isn’t intuitive, then we’re doomed.
Q: Well, that’s what I do with everything anyway because I prefer to not have to think <laughs> but yeah, I definitely was noticing that it felt a lot smoother. I also noticed that the Monk has regained the ability to punch things without me pushing buttons.
Autoattack. Yeah. So, we tried it without autoattack, and it sucked, and so we said we’re not going to keep it just for the sake of being different. It was weird for a couple of reasons. One of the very first quests in the Pandaren starting area says, “Go up to this target dummy and attack it.” So you’d go up and click on the target dummy, and as a World of Warcraft player you expect him to hit the target, but he goes up and he does this. <pantomiming a fighting stance> And he sits there. And if you left for 15 minutes to get a beer, and came back, he’d still be doing this. And that feels really weird.

It was kind of lame, when you were fighting a target, and you’d have it down to like 10 health, and you couldn’t kill it. And now you have to blow a special attack and lots of resources just to hit for 10 damage, whereas a Warrior’s just going to autoattack the thing down once it wass wounded. So that felt weird.

Those are the main reasons. We were kind of relieved, from a balance point of view. I don’t want to make it sound like the balance concerns were driving it in this case, but autoattack damage for melee classes is something like 30-40% of their damage, which means that we know that the worst player in the world will at least do 30-40% of the best player in the world. Once the skilled player’s doing 100%, and the worst player’s doing like 1%, it makes it really hard for us to balance the class. In addition, when there’s no auto attack, it means that that 30-40% needs to all get baked into the special attacks, which means that a Monk would hit for like 400% weapon damage, which you can see could have PvP ramifications. So, it’s just a safer place now.
Q: That makes a lot of sense.
And nobody misses it. No one who’s tried it is like, “Man, the Monk was so cool without autoattack.” They’re like, “Yeah, this feels natural now.”
Q: Yeah. I actually had to point it out to one of the guys who’d been playing a Monk the whole time. He was just like, “Oh. You’re right, I actually am autoattacking. Interesting.”

Glyphs was one system I was looking at and trying to wrap my head around the changes. I think you guys had said something about this somewhere, but prime glyphs are basically gone now.
Yeah. We apologize for prime glyphs. They were a bad idea. At the time, we were worried that, say, a Paladin who didn’t have a glyph for Crusader Strike would be like, “What the hell? This is my most important ability! I need to glyph Crusader Strike! I don’t want to glyph... I don’t know, Turn Evil or something like that, because I want a glyph for Crusader Strike.” So we did that, and it ended up just complicating everything because now we have to imagine that, “Oh yeah, everyone has stupid prime glyphs that give them 5% damage or crit or something like that.”

Since we were pulling out a lot of the passive talents, we were like, “Lets just get rid of the prime glyphs at the same time.” It allowed us to focus a lot more on the major and minor glyphs. Paladins had like 10 minor glyphs, and I think 9 of them were, “And it costs less mana!” Which was terrible. We apologize for that too. The new Paladin minor glyphs I think are pretty cool. There’s some actual interesting stuff in there. Again, minor glyphs are all about cosmetic things. You’re not going to find a lot of power in there, but there’s some legitimately interesting things. I think players will be like, “Oh, this is a fun glyph.” And then we did the same thing with the majors. Rather than just taking the prime glyphs out and having fewer glyphs, we converted all the old prime glyphs to major glyphs, so everyone... I think the Paladin has like 26 majors and 10 minors. And, you know, Prot doesn’t want the glyph of Holy Shock and stuff like that but there still should be some real game changers. I think we’re closer to delivering what we originally said glyphs would do.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Greg Street Interview Pt.2

Q: Yeah, I noticed that a lot of at least the major glyphs I was looking at when I was poking around on the Hunter I had were things that used to be talents that you might take as well.
Yeah, that was another source of... when we had talents that we thought were interesting, but weren’t solid enough to just be core class spells, we made them glyphs. I think I mentioned once before that we now have a Glyph of Rude Interruption, which on a Warrior, increases your damage when you successfully Pummel. That feels like a fun glyph. You have to give up one of your three major slots to get it, it theoretically can increase your damage if you’re like an interrupting machine, but it didn’t feel like they should just always be rewarded for interrupting without making a choice there. So, that’s cool.

I’m trying to think of some of the Paladin glyphs, since you didn’t get to actually see them, but I think there’s some decent stuff in there... Oh, okay, one of the ones that I really like is the Glyph of Consecrate. So, Consecrate now is Protection only. Ret and Holy don’t need it and don’t have it, and it’s very much down to a core rotation ability now because it has a 9 second cooldown and a 9 second duration. So they’re hitting it fairly often. The Glyph of Consecrate allows you to target it. So, it gives you a targetting reticle and you can just Consecrate wherever you want. So you can see, that feels like a real game changer, but do you want to give up a glyph to have that?

Q: <grinning> See the grin on my face?
<laughs> The Glyph of Divine Plea, which Divine Plea is Holy only now, changes it from a “for the next X seconds you’re a bad healer” to a cast time, and then at the end of that cast time you get all the mana right away. So you have to pay the cast time, and while you’re casting you’re not doing anything, but at the end of the cast time you get all the mana and there’s no self Mortal Strike that a lot of Paladins hate.
Q: Almost like the actual original implementation back in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. I remember it was something that you used to like, you kneeled down on the ground and you channeled it for a few seconds.
Yeah.
Q: Theoretical question. What would you say the differences are now between the talent and glyph systems? What sort of defines each system as being its own thing instead of almost like two takes on the same general idea?
I think they are two takes on the same general idea. The biggest difference is the talents are bigger and more important. They actually do provide a lot of core functionality. You can do really powerful things. We’d never give you crowd control as a glyph, for example. We actually talked about an implementation where there were major talents: and minor talents, and we’d just turn all the glyphs into minor talents, because that’s kind of how they felt. The main reason we didn’t do that is we didn’t know what the hell to do with the Inscription profession then. <laughs> We’d have to come up with entirely new content, or just remove it from the game.

But it does really feel like that. You get six major talents:, and then three major glyphs, which are kind of like minor talents, and then the minor glyphs which are very trivial. Glyph of Righteous Retreat is one that I’m very happy with. That decreases the cast time of Hearthstone when you have Divine Shield up.
Q: Legendaries have been a hot topic for basically forever. I have several questions regarding them. The first one is, do we know when we might see the first legendary in Mists of Pandaria, and what sort of theme it might be around?
We won’t do it in 5.0 and the initial launch, because we figure that’s just... you know, players are getting used to everything, we don’t need to spice things up at that point because everything’s so new. We might do one in the first raid after that. We haven’t completely decided yet, and don’t know what it could be yet.
Q: They’ve been kind of, especially with Dragonwrath, mostly because everybody and their cousin had one... the joke on Eredar is, “oh, nobody got a Dragonwrath today.”
<laughs> There’s no dragon sitting in Stormwind or Orgrimmar
Q: Yeah. But even with the Fangs of the Father... I love the Fangs of the Father questline, I got to do the first part on my Rogue. Just the first part, because I’m not cool enough to get legendaries, but I got to go through the whole sneaking around thing, and that was really fun, and that class-focused thing felt really cool. But what do you think about the effect that it tends to have on like, over-reliance on one class in a raid group? Like, especially in a 10-man where maybe you don’t have a Rogue, and then the 10-man feels gimped. Even if it doesn’t end up making a huge difference in the long run, they just feel like, “Well, we’re not working on a Rogue legendary right now.” Especially if you guys are going to be looking towards more focused legendaries in the future.
I think part of that is because almost every raiding Rogue had an expectation of getting a legendary. That’s something I’ve talked about a little bit recently. So, one dark secret that players have probably all figured out by now is that Blizzard designers tend to careen from one extreme to the other, and so, when we decide something doesn’t work out, we go to the complete opposite, illogical extreme, and then we reel it back in a little bit. So, we were kind of reacting against the Warglaives model where, “You have a tiny percent chance of getting a legendary! Congrats!” to trying to make it a little more predictable, and the way we did that was with the style where you need so many parts, and the parts have a fairly predictable droprate, and eventually you’ll have your legendary, which then led to the opposite problem of they’re super predictable, people could point to a calendar day and say, “April 20th! That’s when I get my legendary!”

So, the model I think we’re going to try next is a compromise between the two where you can imagine, instead of it just being a Warglaive or a binding, you need 10 pieces, but the 10 pieces have a very low drop rate. So, some guilds will get all ten and they’ll be happy, some guilds will get five, and they’ll be unhappy, but the legendaries will be a lot more rare. They won’t be entirely RNG, but they won’t be entirely grindy either.
Q: How do you feel about the advantage that would give to the lucky guilds in terms of raid progression?
They would be lucky. <grins>
Q: Well, I guess that’s a fair answer. Has there been any consideration, especially now that the transmogrification feature is in place, of maybe making it not an extremely better item, maybe a little bit better, but something you can transmog into so you can say, “I went through this heroic, awesome questline” and have it as more of a badge of honor than anything else?
We might allow transmogrification of legendaries at some point. We wanted to start that feature off super conservative and open it up later. We thought that one of the things that made the legendaries so cool was that you didn’t see them all the time, and we thought that once everyone was running around with Hand of Ragnaros, or Warglaives, legendaries start to feel a little cheaper. So that’s why we haven’t done it. I know a lot of players want to see us do it, and maybe we will.

The other part of that, I feel is kind of arguing “Should we have Legendaries at all?” and I think you could make the case, “No, we shouldn’t.” But, if you just take them out, just for balance considerations, I feel like a little bit of the game is lost. We sacrifice so much in the name of balance that it would be sad to think we could no longer make orange weapons because they’re so hard to balance, and by their nature they’re going to be impossible to balance. To ever say, “here’s a super powerful weapon that a small percentage of people can have” is inherently a balance problem, and at the same time, to make legendaries gimped or just barely better than epic weapons, I feel is sad, and I think ultimately the game would feel a little smaller if we had to go that route.
Q: That’s definitely an argument that I myself have been making, that they should be.
Yeah, I see the other side of it too. It’s not cut and dry at all.
Q: I totally get it.
I could tell you how looting works. I want to make sure someone gets it who understands it. So I could tell you that while you think of the next [question].

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Greg Street Interview Pt.3

Q: Go for it.
So a couple of things we’re doing that are a little different this time is, in Raid Finder and for the world bosses, we are not having loot rolls. We’re having per-player loot. So what this means is, the game will decide that X number of players, say it’s 3 to 6 in a raid, are going to get loot this time, and then it gives them loot that’s appropriate for their current spec, whether that’s their main spec or offspec. We feel like loot works really well in organized groups who can sit there and decide who’s gonna get the item, and when you’re with your guild or group of friends, even if you don’t get the item and they do, you know that still helps your progression ultimately.

None of that happens in Raid Finder, and there’s a lot of drama, a lot of hard feelings, like, “He just needed that item because he could! He’s not going to use it! I could use it, it was a huge upgrade for me!” So we feel like just going to per-player loot, almost in a Diablo sense, will help with that, because then, if you get a sword, I don’t get mad that you got the sword instead of me. Maybe we both get the sword. Maybe neither of us did.
Q: Or maybe you just say, “Well he got lucky, and I didn’t, but it’s not that got it instead of me.”
Yeah, he didn’t take my weapon away. So that’s one big change we’re making. Another one is, we have this idea of the “bonus roll”, and the way the bonus roll works is, of the Pandaren factions -- I think there’s 7 or 8 of them -- some of them earn a currency called Elder Tokens, because they’re like the more serious and important factions. And then some of them earn Craftsman Tokens. These are the guys like the tillers and the fishermen. The Craftsman Tokens are used typically to purchase fun, flavor items that aren’t very powerful, and then the Elder Tokens are actually what you use to purchase your epic items that players expect to see on faction vendors.

However, the other thing you can purchase with Elder Tokens, for say, 25 tokens, you can buy a Charm of Good Fortune. The Charm of Good Fortune you take with you into a raid -- raid finder, normal, or heroic -- and when you kill a boss, it pops up a little window and says, “Do you want to use your charm?” If you use your charm, it gives you an additional chance to get loot off of that boss. So the way it works is, you always win something. The kind of booby prize is you always get gold. It could be a lot of gold, but it’s still just gold. Maybe you’ll win a gem, maybe a flask, something like that, but you might also get an extra loot off that boss. And again, if you win the loot, it’s not hurting anyone else’s chances. It’s just bonus loot.

So backing up a bit, hardcore raiders tell us two things. They say, “Man, I used to like it when I had to go out and prepare for a raid instead of logging in, doing my raid, and then logging off.” but then they also say, “Please don’t ever go back to farming consumables, because that was not a lot of fun. It gave me something to do, but it wasn’t a fun thing to do.” So the idea behind this is, someone who wants to can go out and earn this chance for extra loot, and a lot of very progressive-oriented players are going to feel like they need to do that in order to get that loot, but there’s still a little bit of a game there of, “Do I use the roll on the first boss? Do I save it for the last boss, because he probably has better stuff? Do I want to use it now and have a chance of getting progressed a little faster?” Yes, we’ll be asking some hardcore raiders to go out there and do a few daily quests but I feel like that will be much more fun than going out there and farming mats for consumables.
Q: As long as I’m not flying around Terokkar for four hours before raid time trying to get enough for flasks, then I’m down. That was the extreme that I didn’t like, but I’m fine with doing a little bit of extra stuff outside. That’s actually pretty cool.
And you theoretically could show up to your hardcore raid without that at all, because you could have it and you might just win gold off of it. It’ll slow down your progression a little bit in the sense that not everyone in the group is getting geared up, but it wouldn’t slow down your progression as much as, “You don’t have a flask for the heroic boss.”
Q: And that works in normal and heroic as well, you said?
Yep. Raid finder, normal, and heroic.
Q: So does it have a chance to give you extra heroic drops?
Yep.
Q: Interesting. So you did a blog post a while ago about the “Great Item Squish (Or Not) of Mists of Pandaria.” I noticed that the combat text was popping up and saying things like “14K” instead of 14,000 or whatever. Is that the route you decided to go with, like the “mega damage” approach?
Yeah, we went with the “not.” Mega Damage, here to stay. So we had this all in and working. We squished everything, and it was working. We had the whole thing implemented, and we sat down and tried it out, and, you know, Mortal Strike hit for 200, and Fireball hit for 150, and we were like, “This feels wrong.” We knew exactly how it would feel like, and we knew that our damage as a percentage didn’t go down, but it felt terrible. And we were like, “Okay, this is now super risky”, because we’re going to change talent trees on players, and even though we think it’s a great design, and we think players will love it, it’s a hard sell. And to do that, and have them hit really wimpy, I think even if players understood why we did it, deep down they wouldn’t like it.

So we decided to back off of that. We’re trying the solution with commas, and K’s, and M’s, and to be honest, it helps a lot, and our hope is, by 6.0 or 7.0, players are demanding the item squish, and by then it’s not controversial at all. It’s like a celebration when we finally do it.

[chaos5061]

MoP Beta Starting Soon

From Blizzard:
We’re very close to beginning beta testing for World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™! Over the course of the beta test, we’ll be inviting Annual Pass holders, press, fansites, friends and family, and opt-in beta testers to participate. As there’s no NDA for this test, you’re likely to start seeing lots of screenshots and new video around the web.*Please keep in mind that the game is still in development, and what you’ll see during the beta test is not necessarily representative of the final game.

If you’re wondering how you can help us test Mists of Pandaria, or how the test works, look no further than the paragraphs directly below this one.


How do I opt-in?
Once you’ve set up a Battle.net®*account and have attached at least one Blizzard game, you can choose to opt in to our beta tests from the Beta Profile page. You’ll need to select which franchises you’d be interested in helping test, as well as download and run the System Check tool to attach your computer’s specifications to your beta profile. Once that’s complete it’s simply a matter of waiting for an invite.

How will I know if I’m selected?
We’ll send you an email letting you know when you’re selected, but please be aware of phishing attempts. Some unscrupulous individuals send out falsified emails purporting to be from Blizzard, but are in fact meant to steal your login credentials. For more information on how to identify these emails please refer to our*Battle.net Security site. One easy way to ensure your invite is legit is to avoid clicking on links in any invite emails you receive, and instead log in to*your Battle.net account*and see if you have a Mists of Pandaria beta license attached. If there’s no license, you can be sure the email you received was not from Blizzard.

I am participating in the World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion; when do I begin testing?
We’re inviting Annual Pass holders in waves over the course of the beta test, and will be ramping up the number of invites we send as quickly as possible. We’ll be inviting Annual Pass holders based on several factors, including how long your World of Warcraft account has been active and when you signed up for the Annual Pass. Keep an eye on your Battle.net account and email for your invite to join the beta test.

How many players do you plan to invite to the beta test?
Our primary focus will be ensuring that all of the players who signed up for the Annual Pass are invited over the course of the beta test. The number of additional players we invite will be based on our testing needs. If during the course of testing we determine we need more players to participate, we’ll invite more.

Is there an NDA?
There is no Non-Disclosure Agreement for the Mists of Pandaria beta test. Those invited to play are free to take screenshots, movies, or stream the game content. Please be aware that the game is very much still a work in progress, and we appreciate your understanding when you encounter bugs, graphical errors, or other issues.

How long will the beta test last?
We have not determined an exact date for the end of the beta test. We’ll post a notice when the beta test is nearing completion.

[chaos5061]

So I wonder when I'll get in the beta? I started playing WoW the December before the Fall of the Lich King patch and I signed up for the Annual Pass about a hour after it was announced at BlizzCon.

[cabby]

You're allowed to get in right after me.

[chaos5061]

LOL you get a Annual Pass cabby? Or you going to get in by Opt-In?

And yes since no NDA I will be streaming MoP as soon as I get in.

Unless they do this around the time D3 comes out then my heads going to explode trying to decide what to play.

[cabby]

Double coverage, opt-in and annual pass.

[chaos5061]

During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of March 26, the “Power of the Aspects” spell will grow more powerful, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the Dragon Soul raid by 15%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Raid Finder difficulty.

Don’t need the help of the Dragon Aspects? The spell can be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.

[chaos5061]

Female Pandaren: There will be many more options for her hairstyle, face, and features. There will also be options to have a long tail, or a more traditional pandaren stub tail.
Archaeology: Can teleport to dig sites after finding an artifact, and can dig more times at a single digsite.
Inscription: Players can level by making staves and wands now.
Factions: Craftsman tokens from new faction currencies allow you to buy items like fun toys or pets.
Elder Tokens: Allow players to purchase new items, convert to Valor, or buy Charms of Good Fortune--allowing players to buy another go at a boss' loot table
Proving Grounds: A solo instance that allows players to try out their new rotations while getting achievements.

[chaos5061]

Teach me to go play video games

MOP BETA STARTS TONIGHT MMO CHAMPION REPORTS!!!!!!!!!!!

[chaos5061]

Remember if you get a MoP Beta email to go to your battle.net account page. Don't click any link in the email. If you get in the beta your account page will look something like this:

[chaos5061]

From WoW Insider:
Looks like the new ores in Mists of Pandaria are probably "ghost iron" and "manticyte"