World of Warcraft Updates, Season 7 Begins

Just want to catch up on some general WoW information here today.  First up: Arena Season 7 began following yesterday’s regularly scheduled server maintenance:

Arena Season 7 has now officially begun, and players can immediately begin competing for the new Relentless Gladiator PvP item sets. We have reset all Arena team ratings, Arena points, and personal ratings though players retain their honor points and matchmaking rating going into the season.
Also, to coincide with the launch of Arena Season 7, players who were on the top teams from each battlegroup at the end of season 6 should be receiving their end-of-season rewards today. These include Arena-specific titles until the end of the new season, and for players that have earned the rank of gladiator, a Furious Gladiator’s Frostwyrm.

In addition to the new season starting, Emalon and Archavon have found another roommate in Wintergrasp Fortress:

Coinciding with the launch of Arena Season 7, Koralon the Flame Watcher will be activated in the western wing of Wintergrasp Fortress and awaiting the controlling faction. Koralon will drop loot for slots similar to Emalon, which includes both raiding tier items and PvP gear. Both 10- and 25-player versions will drop Emblems of Triumph as well. See you in Wintergrasp!

Lead Developer Ghostcrawler had an interesting post in response to a question about mages and he gave a hint of some changes that will be coming with the Cataclysm expansion:

There are two slightly entwined problems here. One is Combustion just not keeping up with other mage talents. That’s a problem we want to fix. While there are plenty of examples of talents that aren’t as popular as they should be, we consider Combustion to be a pretty core talent to the Fire mage experience, and thus we consider it a bigger problem. (And no, we aren’t ready to announce a change yet.)

The other is that character stats are much higher than we originally predicted. This is less of a big deal for things like Str and Sta that can just keep growing, but it gets messy with the ratings like crit and avoidance. While more crit is generally always better, you do run into weird scenarios when players can realistically think about 100% crit chances (if not now, perhaps in Icecrown).

The reason the stats got so high is that the Ulduar model of gear (where hard modes offer higher ilevel) was something we added after ship and therefore after the core combat mechanics of Lich King were already in place. We designed the system with lower numbers from gear than we are ultimately going to end up offering. You might be able to guess at the highest ilevels in Icecrown and those are higher than we originally planned on them being. The alternative was that hard modes didn’t offer better loot.

Anyway, we can tweak the combat formulae to some extent, but short of “Icecrown Radiance” that drops your crit by 10%, some of these issues aren’t going to go away until the level cap increases and we can adjust all of the combat ratings again.

I think most players saw this coming.  When classes were hitting 55%-60% crit chances when raid buffed in the first tier of content, the writing was pretty much on the wall.  Blizzard’s decision to increase item levels for hard mode loots made the problem worse, as Ghostcrawler acknowledges.  It’s pretty safe to say that it has played a role in the insta-gib nature of WotLK PvP as well.  Changes to the combat mechanics to lower player stats back into a more normal range will be welcome, but until the expansion it looks like things will continue to increase at a high rate.  Good luck to all you cloth wearers running afoul of Rogues with 100% crit chance in Icecrown Citadel gear in Arenas.

Finally, PAX 2009 attendees will have access to playable versions of Cataclysm, in addition to Blizzard’s other forthcoming games:

Blizzard Entertainment will once again be representing in full force at the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo, taking place this weekend, September 4-6 in Seattle, Washington. PAX attendees will have access to playable versions of Diablo III (including the recently announced Monk class), the earth-shattering World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, and the engrossing StarCraft II single-player campaign. Community managers will also be in attendance to chat with attendees about the past, present, and future of Blizzard Entertainment games. We hope to see you there!

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