BlizzCast: Metzen on Blizzard's lore, Chilton on PvP tank spec viability and more
, and the listening time doubles in length over the previous episode. Still no update on Blizzard's plans to offer a video version, but there's plenty of juicy information to mull over. My favorite part is where CM Kevin "Karune" Yui interviews Chris Metzen, Blizzard VP of Creative Development, and taps into his thoughts about story-telling and creative lore process.
This is the best interview with Metzen I've listened to in regards to Blizzard's lore. It's so good, I read the interview too. If you're fan you can't miss what one of the creative masterminds behind the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo universes has to say. Maybe I'm a groovy fanboi, but I highly recommend it. There's even a small tidbit about the Death Knight lore in WotlK.
The World of Warcraft segments feature WoW CM Nethaera interviewing Geoff Goodman, WoW Designer, regarding the Magtheridon encounter. The other World of Warcraft portion focuses on a question and answer with CA Bornakk and Tom "Kalgan Chilton, WoW Lead Designer. Highlights include:
Magetheridon
The overall difficulty has been reduced
Expect more visual cues before debris falls
Drops: significant increase in cash, bag of gems including uncut epic, 20 slot bag.
PvP
There will be one new battleground in the expansion that features siege weapons and destructible buildings. Devs are considering allowing players to pick and choose a battleground objective that would put them in a random map that featured that gameplay and those goals. (Instead of picking a specific battleground players would pick an objective.) The downside is that the more maps are added more segmentation will occur, which is frowned upon, but they do want to add more maps, and this system seems like the best solution to keep that segmentation down to a minimum.
Taunt will remain useless in PvP because the devs don't want another form of crowd control. In regards to tanking specs in PvP, not all specs are meant to be power a house in PvP. Chilton believes that tanking specs make great defenders and flag runners.
PvP rewards will be attainable via PvE reputations. Players will also be able to exchange set items tokens for PvP Gear. The gear will scale given the difficulty of the PvE content. (Example: Exchanging Tier 4 tokens will net you Season One PvP gear.) This system will be introduced in the 2.4 patch, and WotlK will experience a similar itemization system.
Respeccing needs better functionality. The developers want to make the process more cohesive. Chilton hinted at maybe making respeccing between both PvP and PvE more graceful, but they don't want players respeccing every other match.
Itemization
The devs want different specs and different classes to use similar types of gear. (Example: war/paladin will share the same gear). They don't want different gear types for every spec in the game.
Good news for rogues. Daggers aren't very viable atm. Rogues can expect improvements to daggers across the board that will make combat dagger builds viable again.
