Posts with tag wod

Yesterday evening the Warcraft twitter feed posted a sneak-peak of what appears to be a new mount in Warlords of Draenor. It looks an awful lot like the old ravagers from The Burning Crusade, so that's my bet -- it's a ravager mount from the homeland of the ravagers themselves, just spruced up a bit. However, for the moment Blizzard seems devoid of any comment on the mount beside this particular image, so the question of how it will be obtained remains a mystery. Is it available to both factions? Is it a PvE reward? PvP reward? It looks like a ground mount from the picture, perhaps it's some kind of reward for being unable to fly in early Warlords? I guess we'll just have to wait and find out!

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I was lucky enough to head over to Blizzard Campus this week to talk to Technical Game Designer Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig. Chadd is a huge part of the class design team, key to a lot of the changes we saw in the recent Warlords of Draenor patch notes, which is just what we discussed. We were also joined by Senior Community Representatives Zarhym and Lore. You can also find a much-abbreviated summary on Wowhead.

Olivia: First up, is there anything you really wanted to clarify and get out there?

Celestalon: I've tweeted about pretty much everything. This was the first version of the patch notes, there have been more changes since then, those patch notes are about a week old or so?

Zarhym: Yeah it's like, tons of changes. [Rygarius] said he had a huge list of changes.

Celestalon: There's another five thousand words that aren't up there yet, which [Rygarius] is working on now.

There have been different amounts of patch notes released for different classes. Paladins have been complaining that they haven't got enough, rogues have been really happy that not much has changed. Is it safe to assume there's more to come? This is just step one?

There's definitely more coming. Like, for example, paladins had relatively few patch notes, and a lot of that is we were relatively happy with how things played out, at least for ret and prot, with the exception of a few things we can solve with tuning – changing numbers. So a lot of what you see in the patch notes now is what we call design changes, so the mechanics that we want to change so we can get to some design that we like.

So much information is continuing to flow in about Warlords of Draenor. Since BlizzCon, we've seen the new Forsaken female models. We've also learned that spirit will be a secondary stat and won't show up on armor. The fact that flight in WoD won't be available until 6.1 and will probably require a quest chain to acquire it is a controversial topic. Not everyone is happy with everything.

My biggest disappointment is the lack of female participation in the story on the Horde side of things. There's been a lot of discussion on this topic already, and I don't mean to start it up again, but it is my answer to this week's Community Blog Topic: "What's your biggest disappointment with Warlords of Draenor?"

My other disappointment is a minor one. I wish that garrisons were account-bound instead of restricted to each character. It's minor because I love everything else about this feature.

What about you? Are you at all disappointed about any of the announced features of WoD? What are you looking least forward to? Or are you going to wait until the details are more flushed out before making up your mind?

Blog about your answer and link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a World of Warcraft related blog, respond to the topic in the comments. We'll spotlight some of the responses next week.

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The dust has finally settled from the BlizzCon newstravaganza, which means it's time for us more casual players to figure out just what's going on with World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Here's the basics:

• Where's the expansion set? Draenor, before it became Outland. Yep, we're heading back in time for this expansion.
• What's the new level cap? 100. But don't panic if you haven't even reached the Mists level cap yet, because Blizzard is going to boost one of your characters to level 90 so you can play in Draenor.
• What can I do in Draenor? In addition to the standard leveling, questing, dungeoning, and raiding, the expansion will have garrisons for you to build. Think of them as a seriously amped up version of the farms in Mists, letting build your own in-game city.
• What new classes or races are coming? None -- however, all of the current classes are getting new models. It may not sound like much, but it makes the original WoW races look brand new.
• When will I be able to play? We don't know yet. But as with most Blizzard games, we suspect it will be out "when it's ready."

So that's what the next expansion has in store for us. But there are some upcoming gameplay changes that will definitely help low-level or more casual players find their footing and get through the game -- if that means you, read on for 7 things you'll want to know about the next expansion.

I'm sure by now you've heard of the strange splash screen that has appeared on Blizzard's major websites, and seen the progression from day 1 to day 2, and read our report on it here at WoW Insider. As expected, a new splash screen has just appeared on Blizzard's main site.

This time, a large chunk of the ice in the middle of the picture seems to have broken away. Unfortunately, we still can't make out much of anything through the ice, though we've already had a tipster or two comment to say that it may be the night sky. If so, does that mean we're inside some sort of icy tomb or cavern looking out? There's also a new rune located in the bottom left hand corner of the breaking ice. The meaning of the new rune is still up in the air. Diabloii.net points out that it looks a lot like a Protoss symbol found on the official Starcraft 2 site.

You can see the image, as well as the newest piece of that strange purple monster image, in our splash screen gallery below.