Day: April 28, 2010

After years in exile, the Darkspear trolls are preparing to invade the Echo Isles and reclaim the land once bestowed to them by Thrall. Led by Vol'jin, a wise and highly regarded Darkspear, the tribe's bravest warriors will set out from Orgrimmar and Sen'jin Village, seeking to bring about Zalazane's fall and begin the process of rebuilding their homes and villages on the Echo Isles. In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, new troll adventurers will begin their journey on these tiny islands off the coast of Durotar, where they'll be able to experience this time of trial and transition firsthand.

Though the Darkspears may once again have their land, the tribe's turmoil is far from over. The impending cataclysm will spark rivalry among the Horde leadership, and after years of running from a seemingly endless string of conflicts to preserve the Darkspear nation, Vol'jin is done fleeing. The Darkspears have reclaimed their islands and have no intention of settling elsewhere. Of course, as an untested member of the tribe, you'll have some training to do before tackling the Darkspears' larger matters.

Every great hero starts somewhere. As a troll of the Echo Isles, the journey begins with safeguarding your people's well-being. Early in your adventures, you'll be charged with protecting the local Bloodtalon raptors and hatchlings from the sorcery of a nearby sea witch, slaying the beasts that feast upon the Darkspears' primary food sources, and assaulting the naga who've overrun the northern isle. But it won't be long before Vol'jin trusts you with vital — and potentially dangerous — information about the political struggles plaguing the Horde and, ultimately, the fellow members of your tribe.

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, you'll face these trials and more in the trolls' new and enhanced introductory questing experience (level 1 to 5). Be steadfast and honorable, and your actions will help usher in a new era of Darkspear perseverance in a time of ultimate peril.

This is exactly what we are working on implementing with Battle.net and real-life friends. You'll be able to add friends at the Battle.net account level and talk to them while in-game whether they're on the opposing faction, a different realm, or another Blizzard game entirely. This is coming prior to Cataclysm.

[…] No one outside of your faction on your realm will be able to communicate with you unless you accept their friend request, or they accept yours. You will still have your normal World of Warcraft Friends list, but we'll be adding in the ability to have Battle.net players on your Friends list as well. The characters on your Friends list will allow the same communication functionality which exists today. It's only when you've confirmed someone as a Battle.net friend that you can take advantage of the additional communication features.

We'll get more into that soon, but it's safe to say in advance that you shouldn't accept a Battle.net friend request from anyone you don't know, similar to Facebook or other social networking media.

Along those lines, will it be possible to un-friend people from this list? Just because I accepted them as a friend at one point doesn't mean I'm interested in giving them info on me for the rest of my time with Blizzard.
Definitely.

I'll probably have to wait until then for an answer, but just in case: Does the Battle.net communication methods include private chat rooms with several friends at once? (And, even more specifically, persistent ones that will be autojoined upon logging in?)
Private chat rooms are something to consider for the future of the system. Initially you will be able to invite up to five friends into a conversation.

Please add the option to ignore someone's entire Battle.net account as well. I for one am sick and tired of ignore listing someone only to get bombarded with "f**k u" tells from 5-10 level 1 alts.
We would like to do this in the future, but it likely won't be ready at release. You can block a Battle.net account, but that won't block all characters on that account's World of Warcraft license from messaging you. It's a technical limitation between the two systems which we'd like to overcome in time.

Here are some clarifications to some common concerns we're seeing:

So this means that at some point I'm encouraged to stop playing because I know my current valor will convert to hero and I'll have a huge stockpile of points which I can then just use to buy the set I'd be after anyway.
Our basic model throughout Wrath of the Lich King has been that you can get the shiny hotness now, or wait until it “goes on sale” next tier. In this example the set one would be after would be the old set and everyone else would be pursuing the new set.

People should have to progress through more than just two tiers!
They will, just not at the 4.0 stage. All we’re really doing with the badges is removing the need to keep adding new types every tier, which proved confusing.

What is the valor total cap? (a little more than double the highest item point cost?)
We haven’t made that determination yet. It will be something in line with how Honor works today; that is you can save up for expensive things but can’t have so many points that you can just rush out and get everything all at once and be done.

What is the valor weekly cap?
We haven’t made that determination yet. We want to pick a number such that you don’t feel compelled to complete all of the content every week just for points if you choose not to.

What's the system/time between when a new raid is released and points are converted?
Probably almost simultaneously. The points will be converted before new loot appears on the vendors.

Why are rating requirements being removed?
The current system has a touch of the rich-get-richer syndrome where players who lack the ratings can’t get the most competitive gear and feel like they have no hope of competing. Better players will still gear up much more quickly because they will have more points to spend. Rating requirements on, for example, weapons was pretty unpopular in the community.

And won't this bring back the issues of people gearing weapons through PvP for raiding?
PvP equipment spends a chunk of its budget on resilience so it’s always going to be sub-optimal for PvE compared to equivalent raiding gear. We don’t mind players using PvP gear in PvE (or vice versa) as long as it’s a stepping stone towards getting more appropriate gear.

Why not have a 'heroic' equivalent for PvP gear?
We are still tweaking item levels, but the basic concept is that there is the current season and there is the previous season. In this first season there is no previous season, so we also have to provide the “Honor gear.” That is supposed to be roughly equivalent to the pre-raiding tier that you’ll want for PvE before you begin raiding.

Essentially all of the PvE changes together seem aimed to disincentivize 25s, is there some reasoning as to why 25s are no longer being encouraged?
Our goal through Wrath of the Lich King was that players could choose 10 or 25 as a personal preference. We think we missed that mark though. Because 25s still provided more powerful rewards, it felt like that was the “real” raiding, and 10s were what you did on off-nights, or if you just couldn’t stomach the logistics of recruiting or pugging 10 more players. We know there are a lot of players out there who just prefer to raid 10s but felt like we didn’t deliver on our promise to let them just raid 10s. The Cataclysm model is to let players raid 10s or 25s as they see fit. There are advantages and disadvantages to both raid sizes. The larger raids can feel more epic, yet the smaller ones tend to have less loot drama because there is less competition per item that drops. The smaller raids in some sense are more hardcore, because there are fewer opportunities to include novice raiders or folks who just aren’t carrying their weight.

We understand that changes like this can cause social upheaval and we didn’t make the decision lightly. The community was similarly concerned when we removed 40-player raids (and we literally did remove those; today we’re just offering an alternative to the larger raids). We think there is a non-trivial audience of players who prefer the 25-player raids and we’re going to continue to support them. We tried many different raiding models in Wrath of the Lich King with regard to Heroic modes and lockouts, and rest assured that if we don’t like how the 4.0 raiding game evolves that we will revisit it for 4.1.

The term 'points' is not RP enough for PvE
This is a legitimate concern and something we struggled with. On the other hand, one of the problems we kept running into with the current badges was granularity — you can’t offer half a badge the way you can offer 1, 3 or 5 points. Depending on your perspective, you can argue that your character “earning”; valor for defeating an enemy makes more sense in the game world than the dragon having all of these badges on its corpse.

AE'ing your way through instances
Right. You shouldn't be AE'ing every pull in the Cataclysm version of Naxxramas, at least until the Cataclysm version of Ulduar is available.

Players were wiping in the heroic dungeons more, up until they had all of their easy Naxx loot, at which point they could blast through the heroics.

There will still be some AE pulls. AE pulls are fun and they give you a chance to use some different abilities. But what we want is variety so that you actually stop to think about whether the next pull requires single-target, CC or AE (or some mix) rather than doing the same thing every time. (Source)

Healing Spells
Spells need to be distinct in order to have a reason for players to cast them. If spell A healed the same and cost the same as spell B, then what is the point of B? Spells without cooldowns generally can't be as powerful as spells with cooldowns, or else you would never have a reason to use the latter. It would be easy to make a 1 min cooldown heal that was overpowered. It would also be easy to make a 1 min cooldown heal that was useless. The challenge is in making that spell something you're happy to cast when available, and ideally not the second it's available but when it's the most useful.

I know some players can't see beyond "nerf!" and there's not much I'm going to be able to do to change their minds. Other healers will hopefully understand that the goal is to make healing more interesting and fun for them by letting them choose which of their many heals to use instead of having one heal that can solve so many different problems. Sometimes you literally need to heal 5 or 6 pla…