More World of Warcraft

[Kalbear]

Interesting. At first I thought they meant spending points on must have talents was wasteful which seemed odd. But the key word is "abilities." So if I'm reading this right, they are saying we won't have to spend points to get things like Earth Shield, etc.? Everything in the talent trees will be buffs and passive stuff?

I don't think so. I think it's more like that if you spend 5 points in talent x and 5 in talent y, you also get some passive stat bonus. So (for example) if you pick lightwell + 20 points in higher priest skills + test of faith, all your CoHs cost 5% less.

Basically think of gaining similar bonuses to what sets and glyphs get you, but entirely based on how you picked your talents.

[Not another Stark]

Yeah I think the guy who runs MMOC can officially walk around telling people to suck it now. I had my doubts when he posted that stuff and he got laughed at by quite a few.

I'm waiting for the "Garrosh kills Cairne and Thrall is no more Warchief but Guardian of Tirisfal" stuff. As well as the "Thousand Needles got totally flooded" - which doesn't exactly seems to be the case. It's more of a massive eruption / lava flow than a massive tidal wave, so far ;)

But all the stuff related to the gameplay was spot on.

I don't think any date has been set yet. There's a report that some Bliz guy at the con said Bliz only has plans for two releases in 2010, it's assumed these are SC2 and either D3 or Cataclysm. The popular guess is that D3 will be out first and Cataclsym won't be out till early 2011.

Not sure about that. Don't forget that SC2 means just the first solo campaign, and there are 2 expansions after that - SC2 being released February/March 2010 probably. They won't wait 15 months before releasing them, more something like 6 months each, in my opinion - unless they just don't give a damn anymore about SC story. I would rather suppose they release SC and the expansions, then release D3. And Cataclysm looked far more advanaced than BC or WOTLK were when they were announced. I think it's clear it'll be released before 2010 is over, a Summer 2010 release is actually possible.

I mean, they said they wanted to release one expansion each year, it took them more than 2 years to make BC, nearly 2 years to make WOTLK, they can't justify waiting more than 2 years, or even 2 years and half, before releasing the 3rd one. Particularly when the content will be obviously lesser than for BC or WOTLK.

If there was any doubts this was a player friendly expansion that about solves that. People have been joking about heroic deadmines since heroics were first mentioned. I'd ask for Heroic BRD but it's already Heroic lol.

This is gonna be like WoW2 with the old world changes.

Indeed. They just never undestood that the Heroic Deadmines was a joke... We want new instances that are as cool, not the same stuff with a few new mobs and boss abilities. This is a friggin new expansion, not a celebratory "Onyxia lvl80" free patch.

As I mentioned just before, I have the bad feeling that many devs are already on their new MMO and that WOW is now being done on the cheap, with fewer resources.

I mean, the last patch is fine, but it's basically a joke, content-wise. Nice, a couple of new roomes with a few bosses few trash mobs, requiring barely any design work - compared to something like Naxxramas, AQ 20/40, Quel'Danas or Black Temple? And a good deal of the expansion will just be Azeroth revamped so you can fly, with stuff trashed here and there. It's all fine, but they could've done most of this as secondary work and side-stuff of a true expansion that would add real new zones with massive questing and exploring involved.