BlizzCon Day 1

Wow. Today was huge. For starters, the new expansion was officially announced. All the rumors were true: a huge Cataclysm is coming to Azeroth. Essentially, while everyone has been up in Northrend fighting Arthas, Deathwing of the Black Dragonflight has been freed from Deephome, which is on a separate plane of existance from the rest of the world. He basically tears a hole into Azeroth from the Elemental Plane, as it’s called, thus causing the Cataclysm. It’s been shown that most every zone in the old world will be somehow affected. Some changes will be huge, like the Barrens being torn in two, or Desolace becoming green. Others will likely be smaller, but still reworked. That’s because Blizzard’s finally letting us use flying mounts in Azeroth! That’s the good news. Bad news is, it probably won’t be until the level cap, which is 85 this time around. A good chunk of the information was leaked about a week ago, so I’ll just list it off really quick. Two new playable races: goblins for Horde and worgen for Alliance. The new goblins are of a completely different faction than the current goblins, so most of the neutral cities should remain the same, if also affected by the Cataclysm. This is one of the things I’m really excited about. The goblins have some really cool racial abilities like a utility belt that can launch you ahead and into the air, and a personal servant that can be called to perform duties like mailbox and vendor. Worgen can change form from human to worgen out of combat whenever they want to, and are worgen all the time while in combat. There are new race/class combos, and a new secondary profession called Archaeology. Not much is known about the new profession, except that you find artifacts and record them in a sort of log book, and that this helps you with a new feature called Path of the Titans. Not much is known about that either, except that it offers another level of customization to your character, which most of us are all in favour of. There are going to be seven new zones in old world, in addition to all the changes Blizzard is making to the old zones. There’s the Lost Isles, Gilneas, Mount Hyjal, Uldum, Deephome, Twilight Highlands, and the Sunken City of Vashj’ir. The Sunken City is underwater, and appears to be where the Maelstrom is on the map today. There’s also a new PvP/daily quest zone and rated battlegrounds. The rated battlegrounds are really appealing to me because I really want to get into PvP more, but I’m really bad at arenas. This way you’ll have access to the newest and best PvP gear without getting my ass handed to me over and over again. That pretty much covers the new content revealed today. There were lots more little tidbits they gave away. The most significant of these was probably the revelation that Blizzard’s doing away with a whole bunch of stats, or consolidating them with others. For starters, hunters will no longer use mana; instead they use focus. Also, attack power is gone, spell power is gone (O.O), mp5 is gone, armor penatration is gone, defense is gone, and block value is gone. Haste apparently now increases your regeneration rate of mana/rage/runes/focus/energy. And finally, Stamina is now more level across the board. Clothies with more health = good. I think Blizzard is just going through and trying to make the whole stat system more lightweight and simple. The only drawback I see is that it makes the stats leftover more complicated and multi-faceted. For example, your Intellect now you mana pool, crit rating, and spell power.  Just one of those things we’ll have to get used to. In the long run, I think this is a good change. Last thing I wanted to mention was timeline. Blizzard hasn’t talked about release dates yet, but fresh speculation is flying. The the size and scope of the expansion and how far they seem to be right now, estimates are ranging from summer to winter of next year. I personally think another November launch is fairly likely. However, this presents a bit of a problem. Right now, we’re on patch 3.2. We know the next content patch is patch 3.2.2, which will have the redone Onyxia encounter in it to celebrate WoW’s fifth birthday. Since that occurs in November, it’s reasonable to think that 3.2.2 will come in November, or at the earliest, late October. Patch 3.3 and Icecrown will thus come around January. That timeline creates a time gap between the supposed last patch of Wrath and the expansion of seven to ten months, give or take. That probably wouldn’t be acceptable for Blizzard. Thus, I think there will probably be one or even two more major patches in Wrath. I have two ideas as to what these could be. First, Icecrown may not be all one big patch. It’s altogether possible that it could be split into two patches. One could be released in January, the next in March or April, and the expansion could come out in late summer or fall. The second is that there could be a patch just leading up to Cataclysm.  I doubt that it will occur that we wake up one morning in Northrend farming Arthas and wake up the next (after installing the expansion) with Azeroth split into pieces and totally altered. It seems that the Cataclysm expansion will not start with the event itself, but with the event already having occured. I’m not sure if there will be an entire patch or a big world event similar to the one that occured before the release of Wrath, but there will be something to the effect of Deathwing rising from a different dimension sometime before the expansion actually hits. Finally, to end on a note not rending apart the world as we know it, there was a little mage talk today during a Q&A panel. One brave mage stood up and asked if mages were going to get any more utility value, as we’re essentially warlocks who can make strudel and so forth. To this, Ghostcrawler replied, “I want a pony.” I’d bet my shoe that GC plays a warlock or something. Ah, and one of the other little things revealed was that there will be a caster dps legendary weapon up for grabs… in the first raid of Cataclysm. At least we know when it’s coming. More tomorrow with what I’m sure will be lots of interesting little tidbits from the panels.