Blizzcon 2010 - Open Q&A

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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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 (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
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.