Day: February 26, 2010

In our thirteenth BlizzCast episode, we focus on the recent start of the StarCraft II beta! An interview with the StarCraft II's production director and game director discusses what beta testers and the overall StarCraft community can expect in the latest multiplayer version of the game. The developers also provide some insight into other topics such as the single player campaign, eSports, and macro mechanics. In our second segment, World of Warcraft and Diablo community managers take you through a Q&A segment sharing exciting information about how the future of those series are shaping up.

Check out BlizzCast 13 now: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/community/blizzcast/archive/episode13.html?rhtml=y

Hey all,

Ever wanted to Pwn a Blizzard employee in WoW PvP? Now's your chance because tomorrow from 4:00PM to 6:30PM (PST) a few of us will be queuing up for BGs via the new Random Battleground Finder on the US realms! Bring your main/alt/premade and show us what you got!

What: Random Battleground Finder
Who: Blizzard Community Team and Blizzard QA
Place: US Servers Broxigar and Anasterian
Time: 4:30 – 6:30 PST
Date: 2-26-2010

(Note: Time/Event is subject to change.)

A photo from us to you. The Blizzard Community Team – http://i616.photobucket.com/albums/tt243/bashiok/CMTeam.jpg (Mirror)

Easy gear in TBC Arenas
We definitely make mistakes, but you are mischaracterizing how we feel about Arena. The problem was that the initial BC Arena gear was so easy to obtain, that it attracted many players to Arenas who really had no business being in there or in fact didn't even enjoy it. They just went where the loot was. In LK, we offered the same or better loot through raiding and lots of people went raiding.

We like Arena. It isn't going anywhere. We just want to reserve it for people who actually like it, not for those who feel like they have to do it. (Source)

AE Healing
True, but many of those spells require targeting. Even PoH requires targeting. I'm not a big fan of the way Wild Growth has turned out either, but at least its hot prevents it from being the "nobody dies from AE" spell. Again, they are good spells, and they have their place. I wish there was more of a decision of when to use them instead of always on cooldown. I realize part of that is encounter design. Part of it may be that they are still too good. (But we aren't nerfing them anytime soon.) (Source)

Mana management and encounters difficulty
Fights are designed to be hard (to a degree). If you have a proposal for how they can be hard in a different vector, please share. Running OOM is a tool that we lost and want to regain, but I suspect that will lead to a lot of "Healing isn't fun anymore" responses. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rake Bug
Right. It's possible that there is server – client disagreement (because of lag) about what's going on, so that you think you can reapply Rake (because it has fallen off) but get the "more powerful aura" error instead.

We did have a similar problem with Immolate at some point, but we fixed it by letting you clip that last tick. I don't think you would want that with Rake because it would be a dps loss when that happened. (Source)

Nature's Grasp in 3.3.3
That's a bug. You can only cast one Entangling Roots. You can proc the roots on 3 targets with Nature's Grasp. […] They are two different spells that just look alike.

There is a small ICD to keep a rogue from blowing through all 3 charges quickly. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Lightwell
Lightwell isn't okay either. We don't want to turn it into a totem, because the class already has plenty of spells that require little interaction. We're not entirely sure what we'll do yet, but we still like the basic idea (creating something and it does the healing) so we aren't going to just scrap it. (Source)