Category: wow news

With development on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm well underway, the Screenshot of the Day section on http://www.worldofwarcraft.com will now display unique Cataclysm screenshots every day! We’re capturing images of our favorite new World of Warcraft creatures, characters, and environments, and are eager to share them with you. Be sure to stop by each day for the latest look behind the veil of the expansion’s development progress.

Yesterday Bornakk and I were in lead world designer Alex Afrasiabi's office going over more Cataclysm information to share with you lovely folks. As we were getting into the discussion, former World of Warcraft game director Jeff Kaplan stopped by to let us know he's still available for Westfall development advice if needed. As many of you are aware, Jeff did a great deal of the original design of Westfall, so his offer was quite funny to us.

As we laughed he asked Alex, "is there even a Westfall anymore after the Cataclysm?"

"Eastfall, Jeff. It's Eastfall now."

I hope your day is going well.

Population Balancing
Keep in mind Tol Barad is still deep in development, but we do have plans to implement more stringent faction balancing measures than those which exist for Wintergrasp today. We want to have the queue system try to create a battle with as close to a 1:1 team ratio as possible. In other words, if 40 Horde and 150 Alliance players are in the queue, it's going to make the battle somewhere close to 40 vs. 40. There will be a maximum cap of players allowed on each side as there is with Wintergrasp, but there will also be a minimum cap as well. Since the system will be looking for a 1:1 team ratio, the minimum cap will be designed to ensure a battle can't be thrown by a faction if no one shows up. So, say if the minimum cap is 25, there is a chance the battle could be 25 vs. 5.

Because of this new design, it'll be much more beneficial to play on a realm where the faction balance is roughly equivalent rather than seeking a realm where your faction dominates. For this reason we'll continue to monitor faction balance on all realms and work to ensure players enjoy the best gaming experience possible.

[…] Right now the issue with Wintergrasp is it actually encourages the behavior of selecting a realm where your faction dominates. If the reverse becomes true for Tol Barad, that only serves to help improve faction balance rather than further impact it. In Cataclysm it will be more beneficial to be on a realm where your faction is underpopulated (which will lead to a natural trend of balancing out the population), or be on a high-population realm where the maximum Tol Barad cap is reached, or close to reached for each battle.

I hate to ask, but would you explain again how the maximum and minimum caps work, or shall I say how you think they are going to work? I'm a bit confused. 😡
The maximum cap will essentially work the same as it does in Wintergrasp. If there are hundreds of players in the queue for Tol Barad on both sides, the system is not going to overcrowd the zone and make it unplayable. It will create an even match with up to a certain number of players on each side.

The minimum cap is intended to prevent griefing from factions which are extremely underpopulated. For example, if it's 3 in the morning and the Alliance have a very low population on a realm, a single Alliance guild could decide to boycott Tol Barad. If there were no minimum cap with the 1:1 ratio queuing system, this could lead to a situation where Tol Barad ends up being a, say, 3 vs. 3 battle leaving many Horde players locked out. So if we set the minimum cap to 25, it means in this scenario that it would be 3 Alliance vs. 25 Horde. In other words, the underpopulated faction on an imbalanced realm can't fully dictate the battle size of Tol Barad all the way down to 0 participants on either side.

Does this apply to Wintergrasp too?

I just got word that we are planning on implementing this new balancing mechanism for Wintergrasp sometimes shortly after the next Wrath of the Lich King minor content patch. So you'll get a chance to see it in action and provide us with feedback prior to the launch of Cataclysm!

So in cliff note form: With the minimum cap is 25, if 25 Horde que and 150 alliance que, the battle will be 25 vs 25.
And if 25 Horde que, and 10 alliance que, will it then just 10 v 10 or 25 v 10?

Your first example is correct. For your second example, the battle would be 25 Horde vs. 10 Alliance.

1) Will Tol'Barad flag players between battles on PvE servers? Please say yes!
2) Will flying mounts be disabled in the zone when the battle isn't taking place?

The current plan is for Tol Barad to function like Wintergrasp with regard to your questions. So it will be a PvP zone at all times and flight will be disabled once the battle begins.

As an update to the original announcement, there will be two tiers of PvP weapons in Cataclysm. The lower tier weapons will correspond in quality to items found in the latest raid tier on normal difficulty and cost only Conquest Points. The higher tier weapons will correspond in quality to items found in the latest raid tier on Heroic difficulty and will have a minimum personal rating requirement in addition to costing Conquest Points. All of the highest-stat PvP armor, including shoulder and head pieces, will cost only Conquest Points and have no rating requirements. We have updated our original announcement text to reflect this clarification.

To ensure all participants in the Arena Tournament have the best experience possible, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for any inappropriate character or Arena team names created on the Arena Tournament realm.

Characters with inappropriate names will be deleted. This means that you will need to customize another template from scratch and re-earn all personal and hidden ratings. Keep in mind that in a later phase of the Arena Tournament team rosters will be locked down. If your character is deleted during this time, no exceptions will be made and your team will need to use whoever is left on that roster in order to continue competing.

Arena teams with names deemed inappropriate will be dissolved. This means that you will need to create another charter for your team and climb back up from a rating of zero.

Please think twice before naming your characters and Arena teams!

Buff Homogenization
We really don't want the buffs and debuffs you bring to be the reason you get a spot in the raid. We hate the thought of kicking a good player for a bad player because the latter provides so much of a dps increase to everyone else. We hate the thought of not being able to raid with your friends because playing raid buff Tetris is more important to your success.

Raid buffs and debuffs exist for two main reasons:

1) They encourage you to bring a diversity of classes and specs rather than stacking whatever is highest dps at the moment.
2) They make you feel more powerful in a group than when you're solo. For an MMO, WoW is pretty soloable, so we like for it to feel really awesome when you're in a group.

Whenever we read "Without my buff, there is no reason for a group to take me," our typical response is: awesome. You'll have to figure out another reason why they should take you. Whenever we read that a particular buff is the driving decisions behind why you took one player over another, then we know we still have some work to do.

There will be more buff / debuff consolidation in Cataclysm. I look forward to the day when the raid buff everyone brings dominates less of the forum discussion. (Source)

Personal Rating removal on PvP Weapons in Cataclysm
This is the kind of thing that we're likely to iterate on a lot before Cataclysm and the new PvP season go live, but it will probably be something like those PvP weapons the same ilevel as raid weapons will require no rating but a lot of Conquest points, while those PvP weapons the same ilevel as the HEROIC raid weapons will require a rating of some kind.

We want everyone who is interested in PvP to have a reasonable shot of getting decent gear so they can actually compete. We also want to still offer rewards to those players who are the best of the best at PvP. We don't want everyone just dying their way to the most powerful weapons in the game.

When we've settled on and are ready to talk about ilevels, then it will be easier to have a discussion about actual numbers and not just goals. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Spamming Wild Growth
I addressed this with my first post in this thread (I think). We could just make the mana cost so high that it's prohibitive to spam. What could very well happen though is healers spam it anyway, run out of mana, and then say there's no way for them to heal without using the spell and that the mana cost is just too high. You can argue that's still the right answer anyway. I concede that that might be the way we go.

In the case of say Flash Heal vs. Heal, there's a pretty clear alternative. There isn't a clear alternative to Wild Growth other than just tab targeting Rejuv on several different people. Nor are we crazy about giving druids yet another heal to be the fast, inefficient AE so WG can be the efficient AE. We think it's better just to design an environment in which you don't need to AE heal as often and get a chance to use your other heals in the meantime.

To those players who say they don't want to cast a lot of different spells, I'm a little perplexed as to what you thought you were getting into with the Resto druid. Surely you thought there would come a day when we'd try to make those other spells attractive again or else cut them. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Hunter rotations
Yeah, I would describe the Feral "rotation" as more of a prioritization. Instead of the player just hitting 123123, they have to make the best decision for their resources at that moment. Feral druids are rarely "starved for resources" unless it's an unusual fight like Vezax. There is almost always a button they can push and the decision is whether to push a cheaper button now or wait a sec or two to push a stronger button.

That's more of how we see the hunter playing. If hunters don't use about the same number of shot that they do now, then we've failed. What will feel different is that you won't hit long stretches of being out of mana.

It's definitely possible that the long term cooldown abilities won't cost any focus. You shouldn't have to bank part of your bar for emergencies.

My apologies if you just really liked mana as a mechanic. For us, and for plenty of hunters — because they told us constantly — mana just never fit the hunter class. You're firing arrows, not winding up big spells. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Warrior AE Tanking
For me it comes down to whether warriors can AE tank or not. The impression I'm getting from a lot of these posts (though not yours) is a lot of warriors can AE tank okay but just want it to be easier. "Easier" is something you have to be very careful about. If you're making it easier because it's currently frustrating then it might be a good change. If you're making it easier because it's currently challenging, then it might be a bad change. Those aren't easy conditions to untangle though, because for some players any failure to win (or sometimes even a failure to be efficient) is frustrating.

Regardless, as I said before, given that we don't expect tanks to be doing a lot of AE tanking, we're not sure they need a ton of abilities solely devoted to AE tanking. If warriors truly can't AE tank, then we'd rather make the tools they have work rather than trying to add Whirlwind as yet another button on your tanking bar.

Given that warriors generally seem to be able to AE tank fine today (and in fact could AE tank fine back in BC when the tools were even less AE-friendly) and given that there will be fewer oppo…