Build of the Month
Recent Blue Posts
Limited PvP -> PvE Free Character Transfers
Feedback: Hunter Updates
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WoW as Free to Play in the model of Hearthstone
New Card Reveal: Poisonous Swamp OozePatch 7.1.5 - Private Groups
Patch 7.1.5 adds the ability to list private groups. Only friends and guild members of people already in this group will see it.
Patch 7.1.5 - WoW Token to Battle.Net Balance
Patch 7.1.5 adds strings that suggest players will be able to redeem WoW Tokens for Battle.Net balance. This would allow you to purchase character services, pets, mounts, and other things for Blizzard games. Keep in mind that there hasn't been any official announcement yet, though this was mentioned at BlizzCon as being something they wanted to do.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
- TOKEN_COMPLETE_BALANCE_DESCRIPTION (New) - %s will be added to your Battle.net Balance. You will receive a confirmation email shortly.
- TOKEN_CONFIRM_BALANCE_DESCRIPTION (New) - %s will be added to your Battle.net Balance.
- TOKEN_CONSUMABLE_DESCRIPTION_30_DAYS_BALANCE (New) - Use: Adds 30 days of game time to your World of Warcraft account or %s to your Battle.net Balance.
- TOKEN_FILTER_LABEL -
Game TimeWoW Token - TOKEN_REDEEM_BALANCE_BUTTON_LABEL (New) - %s Battle.net Balance
- TOKEN_REDEEM_BALANCE_DESCRIPTION (New) - Add %s to your Battle.net Balance?
- TOKEN_REDEEM_BALANCE_ERROR_CAP_FORMAT (New) - |cffff2020You can't choose this option because your Battle.net Balance (%s) is near or at the maximum.|r
- TOKEN_REDEEM_BALANCE_FORMAT (New) - Current Balance: |cffffffff%s|r|nNew Balance: |cffffffff%s|r
- TOKEN_REDEEM_BALANCE_TITLE (New) - Battle.net Balance
- TUTORIAL_TOKEN_GAME_TIME_STEP_2 - 2. Redeem it for 30 days of
game|n time.game|ntime. - TUTORIAL_TOKEN_GAME_TIME_STEP_2_BALANCE (New) - 2. Redeem it for 30 days of game|ntime (or %s of Battle.net Balance).
Chris Metzen Interview
Scott Johnson has a great interview with Chris Metzen about the events leading up to his retirement. A recap can't really do it justice, but we left some rough notes below to give you an idea of what was covered.
- Leaving Blizzard was an incredibly difficult thing to do. Metzen had been there since he was a kid and it was his whole life, his identity, all consuming. Blizzard allowed him to realize all of the dreams he had when he was younger.
- The years working on Titan were very frustrating.
- There was lots of stress and fear. What if the next game or project isn't perfect? What if people hate it? What if he dishonors the company or himself by not performing well enough?
- There was a vicious loop of performing well and then expectation to perform well for the next thing.
- It doesn't matter if your game is a hit and people love your work, you have to outdo it the next time.
- When the Titan project was cancelled, Metzen was at a very low place, very frustrated and unsure that he wanted to keep doing it.
- After Titan the team came up with the Overwatch idea.
- Metzen wasn't sure if he could be a Creative Director and leader, getting everyone fired up and held together.
- In his mind he romanticized it as one last charge at the wall, motivated by his love for Blizzard and his friends.
- He felt like his friends and Blizzard needed him, which is a very powerful emotion. He wanted to do right by all of his people.
- Titan was so heartbreaking in many ways. Too many people were protecting their own visions and instincts for what it should be. People stopped communicating and developing together. The team fractured.
- Overwatch was a gift and blessing. It reminded everyone of where they were strongest. The fact that it did well is just icing on the cake.
- What Metzen will remember when he is 80 is the joy of getting to build Overwatch with that team and what it felt like to pull each other up again.
- Metzen had wanted to do solo cinematics that could stand alone for years and being able to do so for Overwatch was very fun.
- He started having panic attacks and anxiety during the year or two leading up to his retirement. He didn't know they were panic attacks originally and ended up in urgent care where they couldn't find anything wrong with him.
- He is somewhat introverted and enjoys being in familiar and comfortable situations. He doesn't go out a lot and doesn't have a lot of friends outside of Blizzard after all of these years. He is doing better about that now, reaching out to people now that he has more energy to do so.
- Metzen told his kids that they would go to BlizzCon for a few hours this year to see Weird Al. The panic started coming back right before BlizzCon, so he didn't go.
- At one point he was in a state of constant panic for several days. His wife told him that it wasn't something he was just going to walk off and he went and got help. Deep down he knew he wanted to be done, but he didn't know how to accept it. He would have never let go of Blizzard or what he felt was his obligation to all of the people there if this hadn't happened.
- Blizzard is a great group of people and they would be fine without him, he wouldn't be failing anyone by leaving. It's almost like he needed someone to tell him that he had done well and it is was okay to rest now.
- Being home with his family has been amazing. The only thing he really misses is his friends.
- There is action in the day as a creative leader, interacting with people you love to jam with on fun ideas. Then there is the part that is actually building it, having to account for all of the people and the project, the politics, being the boss, having the pressure of having lives and careers in your hands. He misses talking about cool ideas with friends.
- Metzen may have work in the years to come, but struggles to imagine joining a corporation again or becoming a corporate officer again.
- He will want to tell stories again, but in a far more limited capacity.
- Maybe eventually he will work on something with Christie Golden.
- Metzen doesn't want to leap back in to the creative arena before he is ready to do so. He needs to consider why he is doing it and only do it if it is because it brings him joy. If it is for any other reason, such as keeping his swords sharp, avoiding being forgotten, or proving that he still has it, then it would be a mistake to do it.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
12th Anniversary Event
We gave away a Molten Corgi (a pun on the name of the Molten Core raid) for logging in during the 10th anniversary. We received a lot of positive feedback about how cute the little pup was, so like most pet families in the game, a few more variants have been added.
So, for the 12th anniversary you have the option to buy another cute Corgi pup with the 200 Timewalking Badges you're given simply for logging in during the event. You can also get an extra 25 badges per day just by testing your lore knowledge via the daily quest which is available for the duration of the anniversary event.
Of course, should you prefer, you could instead spend those badges on previous anniversary items like the Inflatable Thunderfury (did someone say....?) or Van Cleef Costume.
Or, you could simply hold onto the badges and put them toward something sold by the Timewalking vendors during a Timewalking Dungeon bonus week.
We've definitely heard that some people were disappointed by the Corgi, the cuteness isn't for everyone, and we'll forward that feedback on.
All that being said:
Happy 12th anniversary everyone! Thanks for being a part of the World of Warcraft! ❤️ (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Patch 7.1.5 Class Changes
I did leave notes in multiple class forums that 7.1.5 is very much in flux, and that's basically what I did in the mage forum. These other comments came later in the day, near to when I was leaving the office, so I didn't have time to dive into conversations with Warlocks, for example.
We have notes for other specs that we will be sharing throughout the length of the 7.1.5 PTR, but we are not necessarily ready to talk about the state of every spec at this time - Fire is just in a more solid place. I do plan on sharing more 7.1.5 information today and tomorrow as stuff comes to me that is more set-in-stone. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.1.5 Fire Changes
As a quick example of the "in flux" status of 7.1.5, we are currently testing a change to the Marquee Bindings that would bring the damage down to 250% instead of 200% (down from 300% on live).
With ice flows, that is reasonable[/i]
Noticed. I've passed the feedback along that Ice Flows is one of the the things that player's feel are hurting the spec. As said, we are still iterating, so I'll update you guys as things come to me. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We gave away a Molten Corgi (a pun on the name of the Molten Core raid) for logging in during the 10th anniversary. We received a lot of positive feedback about how cute the little pup was, so like most pet families in the game, a few more variants have been added.
So, for the 12th anniversary you have the option to buy another cute Corgi pup with the 200 Timewalking Badges you're given simply for logging in during the event. You can also get an extra 25 badges per day just by testing your lore knowledge via the daily quest which is available for the duration of the anniversary event.
Of course, should you prefer, you could instead spend those badges on previous anniversary items like the Inflatable Thunderfury (did someone say....?) or Van Cleef Costume.
Or, you could simply hold onto the badges and put them toward something sold by the Timewalking vendors during a Timewalking Dungeon bonus week.
We've definitely heard that some people were disappointed by the Corgi, the cuteness isn't for everyone, and we'll forward that feedback on.
All that being said:
Happy 12th anniversary everyone! Thanks for being a part of the World of Warcraft! ❤️ (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Patch 7.1.5 Class Changes
I did leave notes in multiple class forums that 7.1.5 is very much in flux, and that's basically what I did in the mage forum. These other comments came later in the day, near to when I was leaving the office, so I didn't have time to dive into conversations with Warlocks, for example.
We have notes for other specs that we will be sharing throughout the length of the 7.1.5 PTR, but we are not necessarily ready to talk about the state of every spec at this time - Fire is just in a more solid place. I do plan on sharing more 7.1.5 information today and tomorrow as stuff comes to me that is more set-in-stone. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Patch 7.1.5 Fire Changes
As a quick example of the "in flux" status of 7.1.5, we are currently testing a change to the Marquee Bindings that would bring the damage down to 250% instead of 200% (down from 300% on live).
With ice flows, that is reasonable[/i]
Noticed. I've passed the feedback along that Ice Flows is one of the the things that player's feel are hurting the spec. As said, we are still iterating, so I'll update you guys as things come to me. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
If it’s not problematic for you to do so, would you mind talking to us a bit about the original WoW Death Knight that you were part of designing in Wrath of the Lich King? I’m very curious about how it was built from the ground up, what sorts of challenges you faced and what it ended up becoming.I could talk about this for days, probably. At the high level, there were a few goals:
1) Create another plate-using class with different abilities and feel than the warrior or paladin. Runes were already conceived before I joined the team as a way to avoid rage or mana (or energy). We hit upon diseases as the primary driver of the rotation: apply a disease, do damage, remove the disease with a finisher. Obviously the rotations have evolved enormously since then.
2) Experiment with having spec not strictly tied to role. We tried letting Blood, Frost and Unholy all tank and all DPS or PvP (with slightly different builds). This meant coming up with separate but ideally equal tanking cooldowns for example, and ideas such as Bladed Armor to let DKs benefit from the natural defenses on their DPs-oriented gear.
3) Deliver on expectations from Arthas and the Warcraft RTS about how a death knight would play. Example: Death and Decay was an iconic DK ability that WoW had given to the Warlocks. Pets felt like something we needed to deal with. Healing had to be really kit-appropriate.
4) Make a viable class. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it was a challenge back in the BC era. Early on, some of the hardcore raiders at Blizzard said they couldn’t fit a DK into their raid roster because the parties were so static (e.g. you need a shaman with the rouges for WF, so where was the DK going to fit?). This led to a lot of rethinking about raid buffs, including raid options for who brought what, party vs raid-wide buffs, and whether it was okay to have specs who were only useful for buffing.
5) Because I didn’t know the WoW spell system very well from a technical perspective, I came up with a lot of new ideas. The upside of this was that they were new idea that pushed the team a little to implement new things. The downside was that it caused a lot of bugs (particularly with Shadow of Death, or whatever the talent that let you come back to life). Even with the “hero class” concept, we know we had to present an argument to players over why they should pick the DK as their new main. We knew we had to do something different. Death Grip (which was mostly Xelnath) was key in this regard.
6) I think a lot of the DK success had to do with Acherus and the quest experience, which was mostly Afrasiabi. I helped with that, but I was more focused on abilities and talents. Just wanted to call that out.
7) It was also really important to me to involve the community. The only way I knew how to develop (from my decade working on Age of Empires) was to constantly ask players what was working and what needed work. The early DK community was awesome. They were overall really level-headed, open-minded and defaulted to trust, and I think this experience led to them feeling some level of ownership over the class rather than it strictly being something we passed down to them.
Some issues I am remembering (or misremembering):
There was a point where you could build a DK with something like 16 different diseases, which were all just generic, though there were abilities that scaled with disease count. Somewhere along the way we had the idea to just compress those down to two (Frost Fever and Blood Plague) and try and theme them more strongly.
We struggled a ton with Chains of Ice, since it was iconic, but also dropping speed so dramatically was really powerful in PvP, especially for a tanky melee class with a lot of ranged spells.
Originally, the intent was that Blood was the more melee focused and easy to play spec. Frost was more for min/maxxers who wanted to obsess over secondary stats, with a bit of casting thrown in. Unholy was originally more of a pet class (which was always super niche) and morphed into being more about spells and debuffing.
We spent way too much effort trying to make the DK-specific enchants a thing, but we never balanced them well, and there was just a right answer most of the time. Go figure. Maybe it was worth it for the flavor, but I am kind of skeptical. (Do these still exist in WoW? Not sure.)
I have mixed feeling about retreating from the idea that there was no dedicated tanking spec. I agreed with the decision (and might have suggested it for all I know), but a lot of that was because we were developing dual-spec at the same time, which made it much easier for someone to say swap to offtanking for just one fight. The class team was starting to feel like we were developing 6 specs of DK (Frost dps, Frost tank, etc.) and that is even ignoring things like DW vs 2H weapons, PvP and so on.
Wow, that was quite the text dump. I hadn’t thought about this in while. If I am misremembering things, I apologize. (Source)
BlizzCon Cosplay
There is a nice album of Blizzcon cosplay on the Eurobeat Kasumi Photography page. You can see Cynthia Hall (3rd Place) and Lynesta pictured below.
Final Boss #122
This week Preach, Ghost, and Nobbel talked about Legion and BlizzCon things!
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