Cataclysm: More info unveiled

By
Wildchild
– June 19, 2010Posted in: General

Blizzard has arranged Press conference for their official fan sites a while ago. I’m gonna highlight just some of the changes, if you haven’t seen them already. If you wan’t  to read more about it, hop over to the wowhead blog as the press coverage was written by Malgayne of wowhead, and it’s the source of this information.

Path of the Titans: Removed!

Blizzard has scrapped the entire Path of the Titans progression system. As it is, it may be coming back—but not likely.

Tom Chilton explained that Blizzard had spent a long time working on the Path of the Titans system, trying to balance making it complicated enough to be interesting, but simple enough to be understandable. At the end of the day, they realized that they had ripped it all down until it resembled an upgrade to the glyph system. Simultaneously, they felt that the Glyph system wasn’t as much of a game-changer in WotLK as they had originally wanted it to be, so they’ve decided instead to scrap the Path of the Titans concept, and instead focus on making the glyph system into the feature they had originally wanted.

Glyph System Changes

To accomplish this, they’ve added a new tier of glyphs: Medium Glyphs. Tom explained that in Wrath, people were really powergaming their glyph choices—that glyphs, like talents, had gotten to a point where everyone agreed on what the “best” glyphs were for each class and spec, and anyone who chose otherwise was dumb. With medium glyphs, they’re trying to break that system up a bit—major glyphs are still critical, but minor and medium glyphs have more flexibility.

There was also talk about making glyphs permanent rather than consumable—so that as soon as you used a glyph for the first time, it was added to your “list”, and thereafter you could rearrange your glyphs later on as you chose.

Guild Reputation

Firstly, the whole guild currency idea has been scrapped. The rewards that they had originally had in mind for that system, like special guild tabards and mounts (with your guild insignia on them and everything!) are now unlocked by guild achievements. Rather than buying them with guild currency, you buy them with simple gold—but which rewards you can buy is restricted by your guild reputation.

You farm guild rep by doing four things:

  • Completing quests
  • Doing rated Battlegrounds
  • Killing raid bosses (to get credit, the raid that downs the boss must be mostly comprised of guild members—7/10 for 10-mans, and 20/25 for 25-mans)
  • Earning guild achievements

Basically, you’ll be farming rep with your guild in exactly the same way you would farm any endgame rep—and the rewards will (presumably) be similar. A final decision hasn’t been made yet about how guild reputation will transfer (if at all) between alts, but they did say that leaving a guild won’t immediately wipe your guild reputation—though joining a new guild probably will.

Guild Achievements

Some examples of possible guild achievements were offered:

  • 10,000 total quests completed
  • Having a max-rank of every profession
  • Having an 85 of every class
  • etc.

In addition, some of the existing achievements (like the classic raiding meta) are being converted into guild achievements, to give players a reason to go back and do them. This allows players to farm achievements to help their guild’s rank and their guild reputation, even if they already have them all.

As it stands now, guild achievements will be retained by the guild, even if all the members of the guild who were present when the achievement was earned have left the guild. The guild achievement pane actually lists the guild members who were present at the time the achievement was originally earned.

Guild Leveling

The whole guild talents idea has been scrapped as well. Tom Chilton talked for a while about the issues they faced—Can only the guild leader pick the talents? Do you have respecs? Who pays for them? How do you make all the players feel involved? Do you min-max builds, so that all guilds feel the same? Instead, they’ve altered it to a simpler system: each guild progresses normally from level 1 to level 25, and gains a new perk at each level—just like a character learning new spells. The guild menu will now show you what your existing perks are, and what the perks will be come the next guild level. No information was given about how exactly guilds would progress, but it’s easy to guess at possible methods—raiding, group pvp, guild achievements, etc.

New Guild Interface

Another thing I was frustrated not to be able to photograph, guilds now have a fully revamped interface with a lot of long-awaited features.

First of all, there’s a new guild landing page, with a news feed—something broadly similar to the character feed for individual characters on the Armory, but for the entire guild—listing recent successes in raiding, new characters hitting max level, etc. You can also flag items as “sticky”, in case you want to make sure the Message of the Day stays up there, or you’re exceptionally proud of a recent kill.

In addition, the guild roster is now filterable. You can now see the professions of your guild members from the guild menu—and sort players by profession. This enables you to do things like searching for a crafter in your guild who can make the item you need, so you can easily contact them—a HUGE time-saver.

Raids

10-Mans and 25-Mans

You guys already know that Blizzard is planning to consolidate 10-man and 25-man raiding into less of a difficulty setting and more of a playstyle choice. This means that 10-man and 25-man encounters will be designed to have roughly the same difficulty level, and will drop items from the same loot table. To compensate for the additional logistical hassle of getting 25 players online rather than 10, Blizzard will be giving out more loot per player in 25-mans—specifically, about 50% more. It was strongly hinted that this extra loot would come in the form of Emblems.

What they hadn’t announced previously is the ability to “downshift” your raid. Imagine if you do a 25-man run of a new instance, get about halfway through, and call it a night. The next day you get back together to do another run, but—big surprise—only 20 people show up. Well, now you can “downshift” your raid into two separate 10-man groups, and just keep right on going. The maximum number of 10-mans you can make out of one 25-man is three—meaning, if the remaining five guys show up the next day, they can swap down to a 10-man as well and keep right on going.

Blizzard is not allowing players to “upshift”. They explained that they felt this would cause a lot of pressure on guild to pull some really unpleasant maneuvers—for instance, stripping out the bottom 15 players to do some particularly difficult encounter, and then inviting them all back in for trash. They figured the legitimate use-cases for upshifting a raid were much more rare.
h2 id=”raids”>Raid Lockouts

Here’s another big change—they’ve added a great deal of flexibility to raid lockouts. Rather than being locked into a particular raid ID, you can now join any raid, as long as it doesn’t have any bosses up that you have already killed. Basically, as long as you’re not killing the same boss twice in one lockout period—you have total freedom.

For the end

There are more interesting information about cataclysm changes written there, mostly about new zones, changes of the old ones and some random, exciting info, like “There will be more Algalon-style encounters—ultra-hard optional bosses for hardcore players only” etc. Link to this press coverage can be found at the top of this post.

Huh.  All i have to do now, is to mentally prepare for leveling (again), cause i really dislike it. I hope it will be fun as Blizzard promissed.

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