Patch 4.2 Date, Patch 4.2 Notes Update, Dev Cooler, Blue Posts, TCG Art

General

• New Daily Quests Available
  
  • A large assortment of all-new daily quests and rewards are now available in Hyjal, where players can help the Guardians of Hyjal push back the allies of Ragnaros and establish a forward operating base in the Firelands. In order to partake in the Regrowth and Molten Front daily quests, players must have at least completed up to and including the quest Aessina's Miracle. Once this quest has been completed, players should speak with Matoclaw in the Sanctuary of Malorne to take part in the Regrowth efforts.
• All existing Valor Points in the Currency tab have been converted to Justice Points. Any points above the Justice Point cap will be converted into gold at a rate of 47 silver per point and mailed to characters.

Raids & Dungeons
Zul'Gurub

• All cauldron buffs are now usable while mounted.
• High Priest Kilnara's death now turns off the flaming tiki mask gauntlet.
• High Priest Venoxis's death now removes the poison from the plants at the start of the dungeon.

Professions
Engineering

• D.E.H.T.A. has recently placed a great number of critters under their protection, especially rabbits and squirrels. Because of this, Flintlocke's Woodchucker has been re-fitted to use wild chickens until an "agreement" can be reached.

Player vs. Player
Battlegrounds

• Warsong Gulch has been added back into the Rated Battleground rotation.

Gladiator Weapons

• Season 10 Conquest Point weapons will only be purchasable once a required minimum sum of Conquest Points has been reached during the current season. For example, Ruthless Gladiator's Pike costs 3400 Conquest Points to purchase. However, players must first earn a total of 11650 Conquest Points during Season 10 before they are able to purchase it.
• Season 9 Honor Point weapons will only be purchasable once a required minimum sum of Honor Points has been reached during the current season. For example, Vicious Gladiator's Pike costs 3400 Honor Points to purchase. However, players must first earn a total of 18500 Honor Points during Season 10 before they are able to purchase it.
• Once the minimum sum of points required to purchase weapons is reached, all available weapons can be purchased for their listed costs. The point requirement is not reset once a purchase is made.
• Weapon tooltips from the vendor will let players know how many more Conquest or Honor Points must be earned in the current season before the item can be purchased.

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Frost

• Might of the Frozen Wastes now increases two-handed weapon damage by 3/7/10%, down from 4/8/12%.

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Druid Bug Fixes

• It is no longer possible in some encounters to use Feral Charge when closer than its minimum range.

Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Survival

• Black Arrow damage done has been increased by roughly 40%.

Pets

• 8 10 new rare tamable beasts have been added, each of which provides a unique taming challenge.

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Glyphs

• Glyph of Soul Swap now applies a 30-second cooldown to Soul Swap, up from 15 seconds.

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Warrior Bug Fixes

• It is no longer possible in some encounters to use Charge when closer than its minimum range.

As this is my first Coffe with the Devs, I thought some introductions would be in order. I’m the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, but many of you may already be familiar with my writing and webcomics under the pen-name Fargo from years past. To all my new and old friends: Hello! I hope to have the opportunity for more chats like this in between cramming our game full of epic experiences capable of melting your frontal lobes with pure liquefied awesome. (It says that on my business card.)

I’m 85. Now What?

World of Warcraft has a pretty big footprint: we try to create a world that appeals to casual and hardcore players alike. There’s a whole body of players - be they casual or solo gamers or serious gamers with time constraints - who gravitate toward questing. It’s the most accessible part of the game. Quests move you through cool locations, allow you to play through epic stories, and continually reward you without requiring a lot of practice or commitment. Not everyone has the time to raid, and not everyone wants to; for many players, quests are the whole game. A major thrust of the Cataclysm expansion, obviously, was to recreate much of the world to give players a more consistent, satisfying, epic questing experience as they level up.

But there’s a problem with level-up questing, and it keeps me up at night. It has an end. When you hit max level, the rewards slow to a trickle. You don’t get a comforting Ding! every couple of hours. You stop learning new abilities. From a solo progression standpoint, your character is in many ways “done,” and you turn your attention to the other parts of the game (like crafting.)

For many players, the end is just the beginning. We’ve done a lot to provide serious players with ongoing progression in the form of dungeons, raids, and accumulating high-end gear for fighting bosses or PvP. But what about the player who just wants to keep questing?

Keeping the Rewards Coming

In the absence of gaining levels, there are still ways to reward players who want to continue questing or playing through quest-like experiences. Here are some things (there may be more) that might encourage players like this to stick around:

• Participation in an epic story
• A sense of progress
• Discovery of something new or unexpected each day
• Earning character customization (including cool mounts!)
• Earning fun toys
• Making your character more powerful

I didn’t list gold as a reward, because even though it’s fun to hoard gold, the usual reason you want to do so is for one of the reasons listed above. I also hesitated to add “making your character more powerful” to the list. Even though it’s fun and rewarding, I think it has a limit. It’s mostly relevant only if you’ve got powerful stuff to fight. And if you’re not interested in raids, getting powerful just for the sake of power isn’t always compelling.

We’ve grappled with this problem before, and we’ll continue to tinker with solutions. The Isle of Quel’Danas provided people with a great sense of progression, at least on a realm-wide level, and it sure felt epic. The Argent Tournament definitely gave players a sense of personal progress, as well as lots of fun toys.

But for patch 4.2, we really wanted to give players something. Something big!

Fight for the Firelands!

The Guardians of Hyjal are getting smart in patch 4.2. They’re not just assaulting the Firelands with hardcore raiding guilds… they’re attacking that place with everything they’ve got. That includes you, solo players! We’ve created a whole zone dedicated to daily questing. There are some 60 new quests in total -- that’s about half a zone’s worth of quest content. While the raiders are concentrating on taking down the likes of Ragnaros, you’ll be securing the rest of his fiery domain.

There’s also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses - over the course of weeks - across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves. Along the way, major characters are going to get rocked, you’ll meet (and destroy) a few new villains, and you’ll earn yourself a small heap of nice rewards. The druids are establishing a beachhead in a hostile world, starting with little more than a pile of rocks and ultimately erecting an enormous otherworldly base.

The progression is personal: you won’t see it happen until you make it happen.

We want to keep that sense of progression going, not just over the course of weeks but on a daily basis. As you begin to unlock and upgrade your hub in the Firelands, more quests will become available, and you’ll be able to slowly push your way forward every day. Extensive randomization means your quest flow will be a little different one day to the next. You’ll also have choices to make as to how the battle progresses.

The Firelands daily area hits a lot of the high points on my list above. And, for good measure, players can also earn a lot of gold and player-power enhancing items as well.

Beyond the Firelands…

Problem solved? Far from it -- to be clear, we don’t think the Firelands questing arc is &lquot;the answer.&rquot; But I’ll come out and say I think it’s pretty sweet. I’d love to hear your feedback -- it’s been up and running on the Public Test Realm for a couple of weeks now. Personally, I’ve fought my way into the Firelands and I’m nearly ready to select my first major upgrade to the quest hub… do I go with the Druids of the Talon or do I recruit the Shadow Wardens? Decisions, decisions! My choice will impact the next couple weeks of questing.

Still, we’re building towards something, and we’re constantly watching players to see what works and what doesn’t. I can’t wait to see the Guardians of Hyjal stage their assault on the live servers.

In the meantime, even as we speak, our Top Men and Women (and I want you to imagine that we’re wearing lab coats) are scheming up ways to push these ideas even farther in future World of Warcraft updates. Players shouldn’t feel like max level is the end of their experience. We want everyone to participate in something epic, no matter what their playstyle.

Dave “Fargo” Kosak is the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft. Each morning by the first light of dawn his forearms are ritually shaved, followed by twenty minutes of cardio on one of those playground spring-horses.

Price Changes
Anything that costs Valor will cost Justice. Anything that costs Conquest will cost Honor. Nothing else changes. If the piece required an item token before, it will require one after. You'll have to down those bosses and win the tokens to purchase those pieces. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Justice/Valor Points Conversion/Reset
No, Justice isn't removed. You'd want to spend Valor before 4.2 hits if you're going to convert over the 4k cap. We have a blog post planned that goes into it a bit more we'll be posting this week.

So... you're going to get JP over the 4k cap?
No. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The 2011 World of Warcraft Arena Pass has now entered its Ranked Ladder phase.

Ranked 3v3 matches that count toward the pet and title rewards start with this phase, and will end July 4, 2011. Please keep in mind that in order to stay eligible for your rewards, you must remain on a team in which you earned the rewards. If you are not on an eligible team at the end of the second Ranked Ladder phase on July 4, 2011, you will not receive your prizes.

If you haven’t signed up for the Arena Pass yet, hurry up! Only two weeks remain to register for the Arena Pass, with four weeks left for you to rise above the competition.

If you’re interested in signing up but haven’t found any teammates to play with, visit the Arena Pass forums to team up with like-minded competitors in your quest for glory.

Be sure to check out the Arena Pass FAQ for any questions that you might have about the service.

Click here to register.

Just a reminder for those interested in attending this year's BlizzCon Benefit Dinner: An additional handful of tickets have become available and are going on sale Wednesday, June 8 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. Tickets are priced at $500 USD each (price includes BlizzCon admission), and the proceeds will benefit Children's Hospital of Orange County. Quantities will be extremely limited, so keep your eye on the ticket sales page on Wednesday evening for a chance to get yours. For more information on the BlizzCon Benefit Dinner, visit the official BlizzCon website at www.blizzcon.com.

Click here to go to the BlizzCon Charity Dinner ticket sales page.

Itemization and "niche" items
This kind of itemization isn't that unusual, nor is it peculiar to this situation. As others have pointed out, there are slow off-hands available which aren't broadly useful.

There's enough room in itemization for some flexibility, and that allows us to create niche items like slow off-hands or 1-handed swords with agility on occasion. Of course, if a particular item has a comparatively narrow niche, then it's more likely that fewer of those items will be introduced. Or, perhaps we'll place an item like Stormwake, the Tempest's Reach which potentially appeals to several different classes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Itemization in raids and in the Firelands
Upon re-reading, I should have been more clear, no question. What I was getting at is that that there's enough room to itemize for everyone, even if we’re designing items that aren’t 100% efficient. I'll clarify further, though.

Generally speaking, we don't set out to provide perfect itemization for every spec in the game for every tier of content (though we don't want to leave anyone totally out in the cold, either). Sometimes the item a particular class or spec wants is going to be a bit tougher to get. While that’s not an ideal situation and some specs are more prone to the effect than others, it is the kind of thing that is going to happen sometimes - otherwise every desirable weapon would be sitting on the first boss of every dungeon. We like to put weapons on end bosses because they feel exciting. I know some of you are frustrated about where it ended up, but we particularly wanted to put the axe on Nef because he also dropped one in Blackwing Lair.

We work very hard to keep itemization, including loot tables, from feeling too formulaic. We don’t want shaman to use swords for the same reason we don’t want druids using swords. Itemization would certainly be easier on us if every player could use every weapon in the game, but we also think it would be a lot less interesting. We've done some stat streamlining to make things easier, but we don't want to do so much that every weapon in a tier seems to be the same item with a different model.

With an eye to the future, we're looking forward to two weapons suitable for Enhancement in Firelands that do not require killing Ragnaros. One of these weapons can drop from multiple bosses, so you can hold out hope that even if the first boss doesn’t drop what you're looking for, the next one might. There are also no agility swords this time around to take up those one-hander slots.

Finally, some of you may be relieved to hear that the Shatterskull Bonecrusher was fixed to be 2.60 speed some time ago. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Is there anything to be excited about in Patch 4.2?
I'd say the new daily quest areas are pretty darn exciting. Ditto for the upcoming Firelands raid. They both have that sexy fire theme and introduce quite a bit of new content for players to experience.

I mean, on the one end, you've the daily quests. There's over 60 of them spread between the Regrowth and the Molten Front, and the hubs are designed to offer as much questing variety as possible (a lot of the quests are randomized, which means you won't get the same ones every day). You also get to unlock new vendors with cool items to buy, watch the world change right before your eyes, and kick some hot Druid of the Flame boo-tay. A lot of the quests are loads of fun to play through, too, so I wouldn't write anything off as "a grind" just yet.

On the other, you've got the Firelands featuring seven brand new bosses with some epic mechanics and a whole new tier of gear. Currently available raids are also having their overall difficulty reduced, which we hope will open up the content to players who've not yet had the chance to experience it (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2580598159). And if you're a collector, there's a variety of new pets, mounts, and vanity items being introduced with the patch to hunt down and hoard.

So, while I wouldn't say "there's something for everyone," because that's a bit of a broad sweep, there's definitely a lot of different things to do -- and, for a large portion of players, that in and of itself is exciting. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 4.2 Daily Quests
Over 60 new quests were created for the Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing areas, but they won't all be available at once. Instead, a lot of quests will be randomized into smaller groups. So, while there might be 10 possible quests available from one cluster of NPCs, only 2 to 3 of those quests would be available on any given day.

[...] You can unlock both sets of dailies -- the Druid of the Talon dailies and the Shadow Warden dailies -- with a little time and effort. After you have both sets unlocked, though, you can only complete one per day.

While both sets are positively epic (OMGFIRESPIDERS, FLAMEWAKERSPEWPEW), we like the idea of players getting to choose which group of allies they're going to assist each day. It feels strategic, and -- perhaps more on point with your concern -- will help keep your daily quest load to a much more manageable level.

(Just FYI, once everything is unlocked, you'll be able to pick up 17-18 quests in total from the new daily hubs.) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 4.2 Raid Content
Well, quite a lot of people do raid so I don't think that's a fair assessment. You do not appear to have thus far, but with the balance changes in 4.2 I think you should absolutely be able to pug the Cataclysm raids. That's a lot of content you haven't seen yet. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)