Mists of Pandaria PvP Recap, Diablo 3 System Changes, Blue Posts, Fan Art

Diablo 3 - System Changes (Many new changes!)

Mists of Pandaria: PvP Recap
According to the recent blue posts, Mists of Pandaria information is finally on the way. While we are waiting for new announcements we can review the new PvP changes that are coming in Mists of Pandaria using a dedicated thread in our Mists of Pandaria forum.

Previous Coverage:



Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
New Character Models
It's absolutely not a "too bad" situation, Sutei. I know the concept of us having near unlimited resources to throw at whatever we want to is intriguing, but it's just not the case. We don't have an army of artists on layaway that we can transfer onto a project.

Just the same, we don't necessarily want to exponentially expand the head count of the art team to ensure a specific project gets done. There's a synergy we strive for on each of our development teams. In fact, we go to pretty great lengths to vet applicants whenever hiring for a new position. We need to know our iterative design philosophy and our core values are shared. So, if we were to hire several new artists to get this project finished, you certainly wouldn't see the results of that "right this moment."

Right now it's just difficult to give any sort of estimate on when new models might be available. Whenever a new expansion is in development there are many, many requests for new art assets. We're elbow deep in designing new gear sets, fleshing out the environments, finishing up several new creature models, etc.

If all of this makes you feel that much further away from ever seeing new character models, I can say the project is still a regular topic of discussion for us. We want to figure out the best way to introduce such a feature without shocking a huge chunk of the playerbase that doesn't really think about how their character's features could be improved every time they log into the game. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

New Character Models
Nothing about the forums being down and characters being stuck with silhouettes earlier has anything to do with some sort of preparation for an announcement.

We haven't teased anything on Twitter. Bashiok and I confirmed on our accounts this week that we'd have an update on the status of Diablo III from Jay Wilson going up today (which happened this morning).

I did mention on my feed yesterday that I had just gotten out of a meeting with Greg Street and Cory Stockton (same as every Wednesday), and that they've made a ton of progress on Mists of Pandaria since we last spoke -- the ball is rolling. Cory also echoed my statement on his feed by saying it's rolling very fast now. But... we're not quite ready to reveal our work just yet. Right now we're locking down the plan of action for releasing new information.

I'm confident it's going to be a fun ride. Just sit tight while we plot the course. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Dragon Soul Trash
If I had to choose which trash I'd get rid of or change, the drake event before Ultraxion would be my first choice.
That would probably be ours as well. We're considering it. I doubt we'd remove it entirely [...](Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Ask The Devs
They switched to the live Q&A, but then stopped doing those too for some reason.
This is sort of correct. We feel that the CoverItLive platform we used for two developer Q&As post-BlizzCon is a better format. The methods for choosing questions are never perfect -- especially when there are so many -- but CoverItLive allows us to answer more questions much more quickly than we did with "Ask the Devs," not to mention it takes up way less time for our developers.

We haven't stopped doing the CoverItLive developer Q&As. There are a couple of reasons we haven't done this in a while. For one, there are only so many questions we can field regarding future content (in this case Mists of Pandaria) before we have to step back and say, "wait until we have these things more fleshed out so we can put the upcoming features in a contextual preview." Also, we really want to make sure there isn't an expectation that these Q&As will be done at regular intervals. We'll host them when we feel they'll appropriately compliment new information that's gone out.

We are in the initial planning stages of the next Q&A for World of Warcraft, but its timing is still contingent upon a lot of other things. It just doesn't make sense to host another one right now when we haven't really released further previews of the next expansion since BlizzCon.

That said, our goal is to try and cover as much ground with CoverItLive as possible. We want to expose you to different development teams at appropriate times (whether it be class designers, UI designers, the art team, etc.) so you really get a feel for all of the work that goes into everything we do. At the same time we want to make sure we get these kicked off for our other franchises as well. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Diablo 3 System Changes
Some major changes have been made in Diablo 3, including changes to the core character attributes. For the full changes post and the follow-up by Bashiok, see the news post by our friends at Diablofans.


  • Scrolls of Identification are gone - players can now identify rares/legendary items without them.
  • Button '5' is now dedicated to potions.
  • The Mystic artisan has now been removed from the game.
  • The Cauldron of Jordan and Nephalem Cube have been removed.
  • The Stone of Recall is now a button at the bottom and has been renamed "Town Portal".
  • The Blacksmith is now responsible for salvaging players'
  • Common (white colored) items are no longer salvageable.
  • Character Attributes have been changed. We're changing core character attributes to Strength, Dexterity, Intellect, and Vitality...
  • Character stats are now placed in the same place as the inventory panel and the old dedicated stats panel has been removed.



New Warcraft Fan Art
The World of Warcraft Fan Art Section has been updated with five new pieces of fan artwork.


This article was originally published in forum thread: Mists of Pandaria PvP Recap, Diablo 3 System Changes, Blue Posts, Fan Art started by chaud View original post
Published on 2012-01-20 04:24 AM
74 Comments
Comments 75 Comments
  1. Dragonwing's Avatar
    Grand theft auto artwork, rofl.

    I'm wondering what this MoP info will be o_o

    Oh, and first XD
  1. Zatheyll's Avatar
    Definitely looking forward to PVP in Mists, I hope it turns out to be a lot more open world, seeing the structure of Pandaria and what they are doing. The battlegrounds look really interesting also, not rehashes of others.
  1. Ixias's Avatar
    Interesting Diablo changes.
  1. Caiada's Avatar
    I really don't like the D3 attribute changes. Rest is ok. TPs being back is a nice flavor change.

    That figure fan art is amazing. Probably the best piece I've ever seen in their gallery.

    The new BGs sound nice, rest doesn't really interest me.
  1. GennGreymane's Avatar
    i like the gta art
  1. Lightfist's Avatar
    New Models? Nope, Pet Battles!
  1. good diu bro's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zatheyll View Post
    Definitely looking forward to PVP in Mists, I hope it turns out to be a lot more open world, seeing the structure of Pandaria and what they are doing. The battlegrounds look really interesting also, not rehashes of others.
    Well, they offer this to us before


    Lets hope it wont become the "new" battle of gilneas V2
  1. Lightfist's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by good diu bro View Post
    Well, they offer this to us before


    Lets hope it wont become the "new" battle of gilneas V2
    I love how the Call to Arms still says the Forsaken are trying to take it 'street by bloody street'.

    Yeah...
  1. Konics's Avatar
    those statues are incredible....
  1. Sentess's Avatar
    The only thing that concerns me about new models would be, if they wouldn't allow us to recustomize them. (Just the race we had picked)Don't want to be sat in stone with something they maybe have changed too much in my own opinion.
  1. coldviper18's Avatar
    No new models eh... Man did a faction change the other day from worgen to undead... I was just like what the *&^#!... Looks so bad and outdated. New models are really something that should be pushed. Especially with how long the games been going. I rarely want to play the old races just because the models look so bad compared to the new ones.
  1. Kaleredar's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by good diu bro View Post
    Well, they offer this to us before


    Lets hope it wont become the "new" battle of gilneas V2
    It's not really the same thing. With the old Battle of Gilneas, Blizzard didn't construct an entirely new battleground terrain map and then scrap it all together. If anything, they had the "idea" of a battleground based on a location already completely fledged out in game, decided it wasn't feasible, and then INSTEAD created an entirely new terrain map for a new battleground.
  1. rockdontroll's Avatar
    enough with the "synergy" bullshit, who cares what the employee's design philosophy is, you can't expect us to be satisfied with "cause we don't feel like it" argument for not hiring an appropriate number of staff to handle the work behind the biggest MMO in the world?
  1. Sensa's Avatar
    well sorry you can't have new models because the few artists we have working on MoP are creating too many new high textures pets so the 12 yr olds can have pokemon

    since blue repeated the mantra of limited resources means choices have to be made, yet again, let's hope the pet battle defenders will finally admit that pokemon is actually taking away from other in game advancements and/or activities that the majority of subscribers would prefer and have been demanding forever....

    go pokemon
  1. Kaleredar's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sensa View Post
    well sorry you can't have new models because the few artists we have working on MoP are creating too many new high textures pets so the 12 yr olds can have pokemon

    since blue repeated the mantra of limited resources means choices have to be made, yet again, let's hope the pet battle defenders will finally admit that pokemon is actually taking away from other in game advancements and/or activities that the majority of subscribers would prefer and have been demanding forever....

    go pokemon
    I'll admit that if I see that the number of new pets in MoP surpasses the number of new pets introduced in any previous expansion (and if said pet models aren't used anywhere else in the game world at all,) and if Blizzard comes out and says that they for some reason put Art department people on a project that requires work from the UI and Programming departments.

    You know what they say about assuming, now don't you?
  1. rudydimacali's Avatar
    So excited to finally have new game types in battlegrounds...
  1. mmoc80ea7ba33a's Avatar
    Better put on my tinfoil hat because a shit storm is heading our way!
  1. greyghost's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by rockdontroll View Post
    enough with the "synergy" bullshit, who cares what the employee's design philosophy is, you can't expect us to be satisfied with "cause we don't feel like it" argument for not hiring an appropriate number of staff to handle the work behind the biggest MMO in the world?
    Okay, how about this.

    Blizzard hires 5 more artists for the explicit purpose of updating character models.

    How much 'training' and art review is it going to take to make sure that they produce work that meshes well with the rest of the game?

    What do they do after they're done with their highly specialized task?

    Also, familiarize yourself with this saying: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/too_ma...poil_the_broth

    Computer games don't really need a lot of people to make them. Increasing the art team beyond the 12 people they have now will suddenly give a lot of people not a lot of things to do at work. Not to mention that having too many people attempting to do the same projects at once will likely result in a lot of iteration errors and conflicts (hence, the linked proverb above). Too many people doing too many disparate (as in, many seperate) things will result in artwork that lacks the feel of cohesion. ANY animation studio will tell you this.
  1. Zoma's Avatar
    Just looking at the GTA: Cata fan art was enough to get the San Andreas theme stuck in my head.
  1. good diu bro's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaleredar View Post
    It's not really the same thing. With the old Battle of Gilneas, Blizzard didn't construct an entirely new battleground terrain map and then scrap it all together. If anything, they had the "idea" of a battleground based on a location already completely fledged out in game, decided it wasn't feasible, and then INSTEAD created an entirely new terrain map for a new battleground.
    Yes, it would be easier to test as the area is already in the openworld map.
    However that "idea" has already been incorporated and entered testing phase in the alpha version.
    So if anything, Battle of gilneas would be more solid than the MoP plans we have now, and the risk of the current plans to be scrapped is even worse.
    (Think of the delayed Firelands and the cancelled Abyssal maw in Bliz con 2010)
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