WotLK Cinematic Trailer, New Icecrown Details, Blue Posts

Wrath of the Lich King Opening Cinematic Unveiled

Title says it all, the Wrath of the Lich King Opening Cinematic is out. You can watch and download the High-Res version on the official site.

Mirrors:

• Filefront
• RapidShare

In Icecrown there is a large hole in the ground where a blue dragon Sindragosa was raised and it seems like that could be it as the entire area looks exactly like the cinematic. (src)

Games Convention: New Icecrown Details revealed

Today we got another interview via GetBuffed, focused on the Icecrown Glacier. Brack & Chilton are sharing some cool info about this upcoming zone.

• The Alliance and Horde quest hubs in that zone will be flying gun ships. The idea behind it is that Icecrown Glacier is so full of the Scourge that Alliance and Horde have not been able to set up a stronghold, so they dediced to use gnomish & goblin engineering to create flying vehilces that would act as their base in Icecrown Glacier.
• There will be an event at the Wrath Gate upon entering into the Icecrown Glacier zone, in which players will be able to see something exciting and interact with major lore characters.

BlizzCon 2008 Ticket Drawing Opt-In Begins

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

The BlizzCon 2008 Ticket Drawing opt-in is now live. People with eligible Blizzard Accounts who wish to enter the drawing can now do so by logging in to Blizzard Account Management. The opt-in period will last until 11:59 p.m. PDT on Sunday, August 24. After it ends, we will select 1,500 people from the opt-in pool and offer them a chance to purchase up to two tickets to BlizzCon 2008.

This is a random drawing -- everyone with an eligible Blizzard Account who opts in any time during the opt-in period will have the same chance to win. Please make sure your Blizzard Account contact information (email and phone number) is up to date. For more information, including eligibility requirements, click here or read the FAQ.

Original statement from Mike Morhaime.

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Tanking in WotLK & Blessing of Salvation
One change we made recently is baking in the old bonus from Blessing of Salvation into tanking forms. Up until now you were pretty much just doing without the old Salv because there was no way to replace it, and many raiding guilds will tell you that buff is (was) mandatory. Now you get it for free.

That obviously won't help survival much, but it will affect threat enormously. (src)

Raid Spots
The overall goal is that you should want to bring raiders because they are your friends or because they are very good players, not because their buff is so awesome that you can't live without it. We would like you to be able to get all of the big buffs and still have some remaining slots that you can fill how you want (you know assuming you have enough healers and CC or whatever). We would like to get things to where no single spec always justifies a raid spot because their buff is impossible to replace or live without. (src)

Inscription - Major & Minor Glyphs, Scrolls, Tarot Cards
The core of the profession is the ability to make glyphs. Glyphs are what you apply to your spells and abilities to enhance them in different ways. We have two categories, we have major and minor glyphs. The major ones are all very core, substantive glyphs that affect the power of your class in one way or another. The minor glyphs are intended more for flavor or convenience. Players are able to use up to three major glyphs and a few minor glyphs, so they get to pick and choose from all the glyphs that are available for their class…so it's really just another form of character customization. Other than that the profession has some other auxiliary components such as the ability to make scrolls [that] provide buffs for other characters. Also they are able to create these tarot cards that are used as quest turn-ins that return random items. (src)

Druid
Armor / Health Pool / No Tanking Gear
Druids won't be popular tanks if everyone knows them as the OOM tank. When I say "big health pool" I'm not talking about 30% more than a warrior, and I'm not even sure that's the route we'll go. But since the "big health" idea generates a lot of discussion, I'll walk you through our thought process.

Druids are going to have a harder time hitting the armor cap in Lich King largely because there is no leather tanking gear, and virtually no bonus armor at all (except on a few pieces like rings and necks). Now we can't just make druids do without armor, or they won't compete with other tanks. We can't just bake the armor into Dire Bear Form though, or we risk making resto druids even better in PvP. So when I have mentioned big health pools, that is partially because we're trying to solve the problem where druids need armor but can't get it. Big health is a way to do with less armor, but it's not a total fix for the situation, it definitely has drawbacks, and it doesn't mean 30% more health and 30% less armor. If I had to guess, all of the tanks will end up having pretty similar endgame stats, minus obvious things like block.

Keep in mind how good a well-geared druid tank would be in live if we hadn't added Sunwell Radiance. It is surprisingly easy to make bears too good or not good enough. We have to tread carefully.

But we haven't changed the design of wanting bears to be able to MT. And that doesn't mean technically they can MT but all the healers complain and as soon as the warrior logs on, you eagerly swap him back in. MT means MT. (src)

Tools to compensate for the lack of leather tanking gear
We *will* give you the tools to do it. We just might not give you those tools the same way another class gets them. There are no two-handed tanking weapons, yet I suspect 50% or more of DKs will use two-handed weapons. Neither DKs nor druids have shields. Druids need defense less than other tanks because they can achieve crit immunity. We can do something similar for your damage reduction (bake it into bear form, or put it in a talent are two obvious choices). Now, when you get your leather though, we are assuming you gem and enchant it as a tank would. (src)

Hunter
Furious Howl range
I'm not sure why Furious Howl had such a low range. My suspicion is it just hadn't been touched in a long time. It's 40 now. (src)

Boars & Charge #2
It's not a game balance issue really. We wanted to make the tanking pets feel different from the DPS pets by having one Charge and one Intervene.

It might make sense to swap Dash / Dive with Charge / Swoop though for tanking pets. They might have to be on the same cooldown....

We'll think about it. (src)

Tenacity pets + Roar of Sacrifice make the hunter immune to damage
Obviously Roar of Sacrifice is a bug. (src)

Pet survability
The burst issue is one worth more discussion. We have hesitated giving resilience to pets because to some extent we do want them to be killable. When you're the other team all ganging up to kill a pet while enduring tons of damage from the hunter, it can feel like a long time, and then the hunter just turns around and brings the pet back.

One thing we're not crazy about is the pet-as-guided-missile strategy that some hunters seem to employ (send your pet in, then ignore it the rest of the fight.) You should want to heal your pet and otherwise try to keep it alive and not just use it as a delaying tactic.

Now I'm not saying pets are already too tough, just that we don't want to get them that way, which is why we haven't gone the resilience route yet. But I would be interested in hearing more discussion about how much more health a pet would need to feel like they weren't getting one-shotted. Alternately, maybe talents that affected chance to be crit (or granted something on being crit) would be more appropriate. If in the end you think resilience is the only thing that will keep the pet alive, let us know that too. (src)

Pet mobility talents
We have been trying to find more uses for the once-a-fight abilities like Prowl and Warp. More discussion on this topic is really useful. (src)

Acid Spit stutter step
Would love to get this fixed. (src)

Mage
Mage DPS is too high
One thing that we've found is that some of the talents aren't as usable as we'd like them to be. [Mages] have their 51 point talents in all the different trees are like living bombs of fire tree, deep freeze tree, the arcane barrage for the arcane tree, and we're going to be massaging a lot of those. We're doing some of our early DPS testing and we're finding that the class does way more damage than we anticipated it would do like by a factor of two. So we'll be looking into why that's happening and making some adjustments based on that. (src)

Paladin
I'm sorry we are neglecting paladins on the forums. None of the tanking trees are very far along yet, and ironically the DK ones are probably the most stable. The paladin ones may be the least stable since the class changed so much, so it's hard to offer a lot of comment on specific talents right now. (src)

Blessing of Salvation changes
One change we made recently is baking in the old bonus from Blessing of Salvation into tanking forms. Up until now you were pretty much just doing without the old Salv because there was no way to replace it, and many raiding guilds will tell you that buff is (was) mandatory. Now you get it for free.

That obviously won't help survival much, but it will affect threat enormously. (src)

Warrior
The Arms and Fury warriors recently got some really nice work done on them, so hopefully Prot will follow. But again I stress we won't know if the talent trees offer all of the threat, mitigation, survivability and tools they need to until we compare endgame tanking more. (src)

Death Knight
DK and Tanking
No class should need an awesome set of tank gear for a L76 dungeon. Once you get close to 80 and start to talk about heroics, then you absolutely need some good blue tanking gear, and that kind of stuff is available as drops and quest rewards.

Our early tests suggest DK mitigation, avoidance and health aren't far below other tanks (assuming those tanks are using similar gear and aren't coming in with Sunwell epics). Their avoidance tends to be a little higher and stamina a little lower, but not significantly (and I should stress that these are very preliminary tests). It could be that the mobs just hit too hard. (src)

Heart Strike's debuff & Improved Icy Touch
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Heart Strike's debuff wasn't working correctly.
There was also a bug with Improved Icy Touch increasing haste instead of decreasing it. (src)

Scourge Strike upgrade #2
I am personally not convinced Annihilation is mandatory. If you remove diseases with Obliterate, you can reapply them again with Icy Touch and Plague Strike. The only time it feels really necessary is if you are Frost and want to get two Oblits in a row, or you are in a raid sitation where you can't afford to let Ebon Plague fall off.

At this point, we are leaning towards Scourge Strike as an Obliterate replacer that hits for Shadow damage and doesn't remove diseases. With it, you wouldn't need Annihilation as Unholy so that point is moot. You would still have Plague Strike (and Blood Plague in general) for the hot removal effect.

Desecration would be changed to work off Plague Strike, since the compulsion is to open with it anyway. All other talents that currently affect Plague Strike and Scourge Strike would continue to do so.

Then we'd add a talent that converts Blood Runes used in Blood Boil to Death Runes. Blood Boil's AE damage feels good for Unholy. It has already been changed to a non-taunt with no cooldown, so it is basically an AE Blood Strike.

With this new talent you could do:

Icy Touch (F) -> Plague Strike (U) -> Scourge Strike (FU) -> Scourge Strike (FU)

That one is a little like Frost. But with Epidemic, you could sometimes do:

Scourge Strike (FU) x3

And if you had Corpse Explosion and / or Bone Armor, you could sometimes do:

Icy Touch (F) -> Plague Strike (U) -> U -> U -> Scourge Strike (FU)

The Unholy Blight idea is interesting too, but we finally got the current version in a place where it feels fun, so we are inclined to keep it there. (src)

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