The best thing to do is probably gonna be to put everything in chronological order, except for…
GRUNTY THE MURLOC MARINE IS AMAZING. Seriously, he’s unbelievably cute.
Moving on, we got in line for entrance at around 7:30 on Friday, so we had 2 1/2 hours to burn in line. Hit the store early, which turned out to be a good idea – got the merchandise early and was able to take it back to the hotel later on. We got out of the store line just in time to find some seats for the opening ceremony – where they hit us with some amazing news. There was a wonderfully funny moment when the first encounter with Onyxia was referred to as “merely a setback” – in fact, there were great in-jokes throughout the con, ranging from ret paladin nerfs to Ghostcrawler’s famous “31 bosses in Icecrown Citadel” post.
Chris Metzen made the big announcements at the opening ceremony, though, unveiling the Monk class in Diablo III (the trailer for that was amazing) as well as giving us the Cataclysm trailer. Which was probably one of the most epic trailers I’ve ever seen. Azeroth is getting redone, Deathwing is back, goblins and worgen were confirmed as playable (and were playable at the con! I’ll get to that later), flying is available everywhere, we’re getting Heroic Shadowfang Keep (which I’ve been joking about since forever), there’s a guild progression system, a sunken city, a new secondary profession, and a new way to progress level-capped characters. I’ll go a little more in depth on most of this later in my blog, but suffice to say that this was one of the best trailers I’ve seen to date. The only thing that could have made it better was if Blizzard’s cinematic team had done it instead of using game-quality graphics. (Which is not to say game-quality graphics aren’t good; the new water effect is unbelievable, for one, from what I saw in the trailer.)
After the opening ceremony ended, I headed to the back of the hall to meet up with my friend and guildie Valantin, and we watched the WoW Preview Panel. They gave us some pretty amazing details on some features of the next expansion – for starters, despite there only being 5 new levels, there’s a lot of new endgame and leveling content. According to a later panel, there are going to be 4 raids and 8 instances, plus H-Deadmines and H-SFK, when the expansion ships. Pretty awesome. In addition to the new endgame stuff, there’s going to be 7 new zones as well – including Hyjal, which I’ve been waiting for since I began playing, and Uldum, as well as some other awesome ones. Every zone is getting revamped, with updated terrain, quests, items, etc. The whole leveling path is changing, too.
Another big feature mentioned in this panel was phased terrain – such as a coastline getting pushed back over time, which is pretty epic. They also expanded a little bit on stuff like Archaeology, but it’s going to be a little more logical if I talk about that later in the post.
As far as flying goes, it was confirmed that we’ll be able to fly ANYWHERE – really looking forward to being able to fly old-world, although I’m concerned about lowbies getting ganked from above now. We’ll have to see what happens, I suppose.
The revamping of zones is a bit different between zone and zone though – for example, Elwynn is just getting quest chains and so forth revamped, while something like the Barrens gets cleaved in half and split into two zones, or Desolace becomes a very….green zone. Much different than what it is now, hehe. It’s official now, too, by the way – Naralex succeeded in regrowing the Barrens, so it’s very green now as well.
The preview panelists showed us a picture of the Horde Zoram Strand outpost – it’s much more fortified now. They also essentially said that Garrosh was going to play a HUGE role in the military strategy of the Horde when they said that he was responsible for the fortification of this and other areas. Org’s totally changed, it’s much more fortified too – but Undercity has, IMO, the biggest change. They completely revamped it so it’s flyable now, which is AWESOME.
One of the new zones – the Sunken City of Vashj’ir – is completely underwater. However, although this may
not seem particularly awesome, they said that it’s going to be like land movement when you’re not in
combat, which should be nice. Underwater mounts were also mentioned. I’m not going to go into detail on the other zones – suffice to say that they’re rather awesome, and I’m looking forward to questing in ‘em. Malfurion’s awoken from the Emerald Dream, too, so that’s great.
After the preview panel, I met up with Michelle, Rauly, Tril, DJ, Kyle, and everyone else – we talked for a bit, then I disappeared to go to the “The Guild” panel. Felicia Day is definitely a great ambassador for gaming, and it was great to watch the cast interact on stage -they all work so well together.
Next up was the Classes, Items, and Professions panel – right off the bat, they gave us the new Goblin and Worgen racials.
Goblin:
-20 yard jump OR belt rockets fired at enemy on a shared 2 minute cooldown
-Bank access from anywhere every 30 minutes
-1% passive haste
-Alchemy +15 and more bonus from Healing/Mana potions
-Best reputation discount for repairs no matter what
Worgen:
-70% increased movement speed for 6 seconds (10 in demo) – 3 minute CD
-1% passive damage
-Curse/Disease duration reduced by 15%
-Skinning +15, don’t need skinning knife, skins quickly
-Worgen form – cosmetic only, forced into it while in combat
Neither goblins or worgen can roll paladin; goblins can’t have druids; and worgen can’t have shamen. That said, there were a lot of new class/race combinations added in, such as Tauren Paladins/Priests (“holy cows”), Orc Mages, Night Elf Mages, and Blood Elf Warriors, among others.
This is just part one of my notes on BlizzCon – I’ll continue on about the class panel tomorrow, but I fly out of LAX tomorrow and I’m a bit tired. More on the way tomorrow!
It’s wonderful! I’m up over 100000 effective health self-buffed now.
Most Recent Comments