Cataclysm: More info unveiled
Written by Wildchild.
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.
28 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
28 
9
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
39 
34
Still not liking the look of the 10/25 raid changes much, except being able to do a raid any number of times as long as you don’t do a boss more then once. That’ll be nice if say, your guild didn’t need you for the first wing of a raid but did need you for the next wing, you could pug the first wing and not lose any badges for the week. Or if you got a fail pug that only got the first boss down, you could do another pug that’s part way into the raid.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
20 
14
That means that in your 2 piece in a 10-man scenario (2 pieces / 10 player = 0.2 pieces / player) a 25-man would drop 1.5(0.2 pieces / player)25 players = 7.5 pieces. I’m assuming this would be implemented as a 7 regular pieces and 1 piece wearable only by gnomes or goblins type setup.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
32 
12
“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.”
Although like everything, this is not set in stone, but I would take this to mean the same number of drops would occur in 25m (in proportion to 10 man) meaning if there were 2 pieces in 10m there would be 5 pieces in 25m. The 50% more will come in the form of gold/emblems.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
24 
5
You sir are correct in my rush to nerd rage at Lolivertwist for implying that less loot per person would be available in 25-mans I did not completely re-read the article.
However my point still stands that 25-man will be the way to go in order to gear ASAP. With the same ratio we have been using of 2 pieces in a 10-man. That would mean 25-man would drop 5 pieces of gear plus an additional 2.5 pieces worth of badges or .1 pieces/person. Using current gear as an example it takes 60-95 badges for a piece of gear. Using 70 bages as a mean (as there are more pieces available for 60 than 95 and 70 is nicely divisable by 10) that would be 7 additional bages. And since badges are now “gear” the extra 50% should apply to them making an additonal badge so thats (2+7+1) 10 badges in addition to the same ratio of drops.
Sign me up for 25 everything imo. Not hitting any harder or having any extra abilities just having a proporionaly larger health pool. With the extra tank and heals spots that are open for dps to take thier place 25 should acualy be easier once you get past the hassal of putting together the group and gives the same gear ratio and 8 free badges.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
20 
11
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
4 
30
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
8 
35
“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.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
17 
8
Well yes but you dont get it that obviously the 16 dps arent rolling for the same gear
Spellcasters
Melee Strength
Melee Agility
Enhance Shaman / Hunter Gear
Lots of Different Types of gear so nothing to worry about there
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
17 
12
Hot debate. What do you think?
10 
8
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
19 
9
Right now you only got two options:
a) you schedule your whole life around the game to be able to raid at the times decided by your guild, you have to do the ironic thing of taking a game seriously and kind of turn it into a second job, which i think is just ridiculous
b) you play only when you feel like playing, which means you have to look for pugs, which 90% of the time SUCK, you go and kill a couple of bosses, people suck, they start leaving your group and that’s it, you’re saved and screwed and you can’t raid no more until the next week
this change will make it easy to be a casual player but still advance in the game, it’s great, best thing would be if you could also form a raid group cross realms.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
33 
5
It will be far easier to obtain gear in 10m, because if you raid with the same group – eventually everyone will get what they want, much quicker.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
12 
7
But on the other hand, I also recognize the benefit of simply dropping a concept rather that pushing it past the quality assesment when the final product would likely detract from the enjoyment of the game.
It’s a fragile ballance between them.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
10 
5
Hot debate. What do you think?
6 
7
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
14 
8
I really like the guild levelling system idea, It’s yet another way for everyone to work together for the betterment of the guild.
Oh, and imo, Say goodbye to 25m’s. Kiranii made a very good point. If you are on a dedicated raid team, Everyone will be gearing alot quicker, and alot more effectively than in 25m’s.
The beneficial part is, the flexibility they are adding to the lockouts, You can raid with your guild, and raid with your friends, or you jump into a fail pug, and you can pick it back up with you guild, at a time that better suits you.
Thumbs up blizz, looking forward to Cata.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
11 
5
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
5 
13
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
3 
15
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
4 
7
I think, with the way it was worded, you have the “option” do downscale. Therefore, it’s not a shared lockout, but you have the option to do that if you only have 10 people on instead of 25.
I’m personally probably not gonna buy the xpac (Depending on when it’s released), but if I were to, I personally will stick with 10m instead of 25m as I have in this xpac. Only reason for 25m raids for me was for the better gear, and even then, they just aren’t very fun for me, so I never did them regularly.
On the flip side, lots of people love 25m but dislike 10m for various reasons. Because of this, 25m will not die like a lot of people think, but it will likely dwindle as people more like myself will stick to 10m since it doesn’t make a difference.
Then again, the “woe is me” song has been sung in both the previous expansions. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
9 
3
1. BOA inscriptions for the same crap we get as inscriptor.
2. Burn thru tons of mats for low value materials.
3. Same glyphs are offered by all the other inscriptors for the cost of paper.
4. Out dated and low value darkmoon cards and trinkets that no endgamer would use.
Now everyone gets permanent glyphs????
Blizz needs to beef up this craft!!! Why ANYONE would want to be inscriber except for enchanting vellum / scrolls of fortitude, after more swings with the nerf bat this craft is really no where close to worth bothering.
Suggestions:
Inscribers get more glyphs than the average toon, this would give them similar benifits like BS or JC with extra slots or big gems.
Inscribe Off hand with some benifit. Enchanters can’t enchant off hands except shields. So, if and inscription could be added to an off hand held item (book, orb, flowers, etc.) This would be on par with enchanting scrolls.
Same with Trinkets or neck pieces:
Suggestion: [Inscribe Neck Greater Defense] for tanks
[Inscribe Neck Attack Power] melee/ranged dps
[Inscribe Neck Casters Bonus] caster class
[Inscribe Neck Healing Bonus or Regen Bonus] for healing classes
Alchemy vs. Inscription
Hands down you can cash in on Alchemy hands down over inscription.
Please keep the buzz going on asking Blizz to get this profession to be worth doing.
Hot debate. What do you think?
13 
11
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
10 
18
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
1 
5
codes http://dsony4ub.ACEHARDWAREE.INFO/tag/codes+control+remote/ : control…
remote…
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Buy:Levitra.Soma.Tramadol.Super Active ED Pack.Viagra Professional.Propecia.Maxaman.Viagra.Viagra Soft Tabs.VPXL.Cialis Professional.Viagra Super Force.Cialis Super Active+.Viagra Super Active+.Cialis Soft Tabs.Cialis.Zithromax….
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Buy:Lumigan.Mega Hoodia.Petcam (Metacam) Oral Suspension.100% Pure Okinawan Coral Calcium.Synthroid.Zyban.Arimidex.Accutane.Retin-A.Actos.Human Growth Hormone.Nexium.Zovirax.Prednisolone.Prevacid.Valtrex….
Like or Dislike:
0 
0