All Quiet on the WoWstern Front

Please excuse my WWI humor.  Things have been exceptionally quiet on the World of Warcraft scene for the last week, but that is all going to change starting Friday, when Blizzcon finally kicks off.  This close to the con Blizzard has been pretty tight lipped about any announcements or game changes because they prefer to just do it all at the convention.  I just have a couple bits of news to drop today, be sure to check back on Friday and again on Monday to find out what went down over the weekend at Blizzcon.  (hint: Cataclysm)


Ghostcrawler teased some Warlock soul shard changes that will be announced at Blizzcon:

I don’t make many promises because even when I say “there is a very slight chance we may eventually consider changing this at some point in the future” that then becomes “promised us next patch.”

But we are excited about the shard system and we think warlocks will view it as a cool component to their class instead of a hassle they have to put up with.

I wouldn’t view it as a “buff.” I’m not sure your dps really needs a buff at the moment if that’s what you mean. If you mean taking something kind of marginal and perhaps annoying and making it cool, then that’s what we intend to to.

Too often our recent design has just been to marginalize shards more and more. That isn’t the direction we want for the class though. We want shards to be one of the main things you think about as a lock, but that includes rewarding you when you use them well.

And he also had some to say about Warrior rage mechanics:

We’d like to fix rage and we have a plan. However it’s clear from the OP that he or she shares the view that a lot of warriors do, specifically that you don’t have enough rage until you get epics at which point it finally “feels right.” The implication is that our fix for rage should be that you always have the same rage you do in epics, or more to the point that you should always generally have enough rage to do what you want to do and lack of it never really holds you back.

If we changed rage to normalize it more, then it would mean that you would have say 60% of rage all the time instead of having 20% in green gear and 100% in purple gear (to use made up numbers).

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