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Scattered Shots: Mining Celestalon's tweets for hunter information
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing new stats and the potential for hunter spec differentiation. We're still patiently waiting for the Warlords of Draenor beta to get some more concrete information on hunters, but in the meantime we've had Celestalon to poke and prod on Twitter. Celestalon is a Technical Game Designer on WoW and has been very forthcoming with technical information regarding classes and the new gearing system in Warlords. We've learned a few new bits of information such as how new secondary stats will work and some vague plans for their intentions with the hunter class. If you missed the BlizzCon hunter recap post, be sure to check it out before we dive into the newer stuff. The replacements for hit and expertise You may have heard how hit and expertise are being removed from the game in Warlords of Draenor. I was very happy when I heard about this, but at the same time wondered if gear was going to get too simple since they're also removing reforging, and having less gems and enchants on gear. The good news is, those two wholly uninteresting stats are being replaced by 3 new ones, and if you've been raiding Siege of Orgrimmar their functionality may already be familiar to you.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: To be the gladiator
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. With the departure of Ghostcrawler (Goodbye, Doctor Street, and may your next regeneration find you well) we now shift to obsessively watching Celestalon's twitter feed and picking apart anything he says about warriors like demented jackdaws. Everyone be nice and say hi. Anyway, he had some interesting things to say recently about warriors, one of which I've been saying all expansion (and, in fact, I also said in Wrath and Cataclysm) - namely, that haste is terrible for us. @aequitas_7007 Yes. Haste for Warriors is one of the biggest outliers in terms of stat value. Definitely planning to improve, substantially. - Celestalon (@Celestalon) November 28, 2013 I'm keen on seeing how they plan on improving it, of course. The spec where it really, sincerely needs that improvement and yesterday is protection, especially moving forward into the new gearing paradigm - when all stats are good for all specs and one set of gear will be intended to adapt when you switch specializations, having haste be worthless for protection warriors (as it currently is) is simply unacceptable. Frankly, the reason haste is so terrible for protection right now is that it makes effectively no contribution at all to protection's rage generation - prot gets rage from Shield Slam and Revenge, and a dribble from defensive stance (1 rage every 3 seconds) and that's it. Well, okay, we get some rage from Charge and whenever Sword and Board procs. None of that gets anything from haste.
Class balance questions answered by WoW developers
In just a few moments, Blizzard's second developer Q&A hosted via CoverItLive will begin. Last time around, players were invited to ask questions about all things Mists of Pandaria, and it really went quite well. This afternoon, in a session timed to fit European players' schedules, the Q&A will sharpen its focus and discuss class balance and design. The Q&A will be hosted and moderated by Blizzard Entertainment community managers Zarhym and Bashiok with developers Celestalon, Ghostcrawler, Koraa, Watcher, Wradyx, and Xelnath in attendance as panelists. If you wish to attend the event, the CoverItLive client has been embedded behind the cut below. To participate, you can log into CoverItLive with your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or OpenID credentials. If you don't want to use any of those, you are allowed to sign in as a guest. If you're unable to attend to event at all, don't fret: we'll have a transcript for you right here on WoW Insider once the panel has concluded. Update: The Q&A is now live! Update #2: The Q&A has ended and our transcript will be available shortly. Update #3: Here's our transcript!
Class design and balance Q&A session coming this Wednesday
Hot off the heels of its wildly successful Mists of Pandaria live Q&A, the WoW dev team plans to hold another online Q&A, this time on the subject of class design and balance. Community Manager Zarhym's just announced that it will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 9, from 10:45 a.m. to noon PST. The chat will be held on CoverItLive, hosted by Bashiok and Zarhym. Answering questions will be Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street along with Celestalon, Koraa, Watcher, Wradyx, and Xelnath. As with the last Q&A, the chat will use the CoverItLive system, so make sure you're signed up and familiar with it if you want to ask a question. Check after the break for the text of the announcement.
