Happy Monday morning everyone! If you're a fan of World of Warcraft, chances are you heard about the big old shindig Blizzard threw in Paris this week. If you didn't a chance to get to Paris this year or catch any of the news over the weekend, you'll want to keep reading. We had a crack team on the convention floor, and more of us watching the live feeds all weekend, all working hard to deliver up to date reports and analysis. What that means for you is that this is the perfect place to catch up on all the WoW news from Paris. This handy list will direct you to exactly where you want to go to get the information you need.
Developer's Class Panel: There's a little something for every class in here. Find out what's coming for your favorite character!
Q&A Grab Bag Panel: See what WWI attendees had on their minds, and how the developers answered.
Dungeons and raids panel: See what's next in the Caverns of Time, Ulduar, and more. Don't forget to check out parts two, three, and four for the whole scoop.
PvP panel: Find out about Lake Winterspring, siege engines, Arenas, Battlegrounds, and pretty much everything except class balance. Includes pictures! Be sure to check parts two, three, and four as well.
The goodie bag: Even in real life, we like our epic loot. Let us show you the swag.
Of course, if the flood of liveblog information makes your head spin, no worries, we have analysis on every angle and every little tidbit discussed during the Invitational. Check them out after the break.
Day 1 of the World Wide Invitational has been filled with exciting news for WoW players, and well as some fascinating displays of entertainment.Blizzard hosted panel discussions with information about changes for each of the classes in Wrath of the Lich King.In case you've missed it, here's the good news for each of the classes:
This past Saturday the WoW Insider Show welcomed Amanda Dean and Adam Holisky on, as well as myself and Turpster, for the 26th episode of our podcast on WoW Radio. Despite some lackluster, if I may say so, email from readers (you can send us some better emails at theshow@wowinsider.com), we charged through and got a lot of good discussion done:
We chatted about Amanda's hacked characters, and what a little name-dropping will get you from Blizzard (not much)
We confronted whether all this new badge loot makes raiding worthless (surprise -- we decided it does not)
We talked about all the new class changes on the PTR, with a special look at Shamans, and the Warlock change to Lifetap.
All in all, good show, and you can listen to it right now over on WoW Radio's website. You can also subscribe to our podcast in iTunes if you so choose, and we'll be back at it again next weekend -- every Saturday at 3:30pm EST. Enjoy the show!
In a thread on the General forums, Nethaera's spoken up to clarify a few issues in regards to the current patch and continued testing. She explains that with all of the major classes changes in 2.3.2, they wanted to see how they played out before adding more. However, they do in fact have more class changes planned for the current patch.
In addition, she states that the patch notes will be the main thing to watch when figuring out when more of the "progressive patching" takes place. She also clarifies that it is not their intention to create huge "undocumented" changes, and that if there are any currently undocumented, they will go into the patch notes soon.
The news that there are more class changes to come should be welcome for classes that feel that Blizzard hasn't been paying enough attention to them lately, especially Shamans. However, since we don't know for sure what the changes will be, and we were told earlier that there won't be any sweeping changes to classes this patch, we may not want to hold our breaths. Either way, with any luck, we'll see our first batch of progressive changes soon, so we can figure out what to expect when the PTRs close and it all goes live.
Nethaera has posted this morning that... no, we aren't getting new patch 2.4 information yet. Not today, and probably not Monday. Disappointing, but as with all posts from Nethaera, there's usually at least a few hints hidden within. Thanks to the bit of relief she brings, the lack of real news isn't all bad.
There's been some doom and gloom hanging over the WoW community about the upcoming arena balancing, but Nethaera assures us there will be no "sweeping class changes." Whether this is a good or a bad thing is really up to you, but being the magical PvE carebear that I am, I'm certainly pleased with that. I'm sure the PvP community thinks otherwise, and would also like to eat me for breakfast.
From my understanding, tree druids are currently able to maintain a high level of healing per second through careful upkeep of Lifebloom on their targets. This is due to the fact that a druid can pop all his trinkets to maximize his +healing and then cast the spell. As long as he keeps refreshing the HoT before it "blooms", it will maintain that maximized level of +healing, thus making for a very efficient and powerful spell. As I understand the new patch notes, this will no longer be possible since the incoming Lifeblooms will overwrite the +healing value of the previous ones. I don't play a tree druid, but I'm sure some of my guild mates will be ranting over this in tonight's raid.