The Daily Blues
Each day, WoW Insider takes you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From the latest posts from Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) to the lowdown on StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, we'll keep you informed.
Banter banter banter.
Table of contents
Ghostcrawler
I think you'd have been better off just giving the standard beta response about not worrying about numbers yet since they're not balanced/aren't necessarily what we'll actually be seeing when cata goes live and so on.
You shouldn't worry about the numbers yet. I thought the poster asked a perfectly reasonable question of whether we wanted as much use of the efficient heal as he was doing. I said no. That either means he wasn't healing as well as he could have been, or more likely in this case, the numbers aren't yet tuned correctly.
I really fail to see why you guys thought it would be good design to introduce the 'auto attack' heal to force healers to be spamming 100% of the time. I enjoy healing because it is reactive/triage oriented -- if I wanted to be predictive/spam a rotation I would play DPS.
We don't want healers to be spamming one heal 100% of the time. I'm not sure how you could be following Cataclysm news and think that. The reactive / triage feel is what we're going for. But that means that there needs to be room for weaker heals that you use when nobody is in immediate danger. That's triage -- "Oh, this guy's not going to die in the next few seconds, so a Heal is all he needs."
Other
Patch 4.0.1 will launch several weeks before Cataclysm ships, similar to 2.0.1 and 3.0.2. It will include:
- New launcher
- Class changes
- Stat changes
- Talent tree overhaul
- Glyph changes
- Reforging?
- Mastery? (although it might not be useful until Cataclysm)
Patch 4.0.3 will launch shortly before Cataclysm ships. Based on what Tom Chilton and others have said, this will include (without purchase of Cataclysm):
- Cataclysm intro cinematic and login screen
- Revamped classic Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor zones
- New race/class combinations for existing races
- Graphics improvements (water, etc)
- Guild leveling system?
Cataclysm will ship shortly afterwards and buying it will unlock:
- Level 85 level cap
- 525 Profession skill caps
- Goblins and Worgen, and their starter zones
- New Level 80+ zones, dungeons, heroics, raids
- New battlegrounds
- Rated battlegrounds
- Flying mounts in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor
- Archaeology
- 310% speed flying mounts?
Please correct anything I got wrong or missed
That looks almost right. Guild Advancement/Achievements should go under Cataclysm launch though and mount speed changes should be moved up to 4.0.1.
Blizzard
