BlizzCon Professions & Items Panel Information

August 4th, 2007 Posted in Video Games |

Day 2 of Blizzcon is underway and here is the lastest information about the Wrath of the Lich King Expansion for World of Warcraft is out:

Things that the professions team wants to do more of in the future:

  • More “Best In Slot” gear like Blacksmithing weapons, Engineering helms, etc.
    • Alchemist-only potions will be added.
  • Create great leveling gear that is competitive with quest rewards, similar to the TBC crafted armor.
  • Provide what’s missing which fills in itemization gaps whether intentional or not.

Things they want to improve:

  • Transmutes
    • Blizzard is looking at making the cooldown a daily reset similar to raid and heroic instance resets where it occurs at a set time, so you can log on at any time of the day and do your transmute.
  • Discoveries will be looked at to be improved, as Blizzard feels this is a great mechanic to introduce cool recipes.
  • Vendor Recipes
    • It’s not fun at all to have to camp a vendor for a recipe and Blizzard knows this. They’re going to do away with rare spawn and limited quantity recipes as best they can.
    • Vendors in the future will have large lists of rare and epic items so that finding something on a vendor can be as cool as finding it in the rest of the game world.

Inscription

  • Inscription is not like Alchemy or Enchanting. Players will create a tradeable scroll that other players can then use to enhance their spells or abilities.
  • Inscription’s main purpose is to inscribe spells and abilities with additional power. Some examples given were:
    • Backstab could be enhanced to crit more often.
    • Shadowbolt could be enhanced to do additional damage.
    • Fireball could be enhanced to also cause a knockback effect. (This was a player idea that they felt was cool but probably not likely to happen.)
  • Inscription will also allow the player to create completely new items, but this part of the profession isn’t fleshed out enough for Blizzard to talk about just yet.

Coming soon:

  • Profession Daily Quests for Cooking initially in 2.3 and others will follow suit.
    • Players will receive a crate that has a chance to drop rare food recipes, including:
      • +Melee hit food, +Spell crit food and Storm Chops. Storm Chops will cause you to do additional nature damage to your target as well as doing damage to your attackers.
  • New crafter-only gear including Alchemist-only potions and Jewelcrafter-only gems as well as upgrades to current crafter-only gear.
  • Smoothing out the progression from 275-300 for all professions. The progression was intended to be challenging when 300 was the cap, but since this isn’t the case anymore it’s being changed.
  • Enchant: Executioner will be added with the Zul’Aman patch. This enchant is an Armor Penetration proc, and is promised to have a glow at least as cool as Mongoose.
  • Steady Talasite recipe is being added to Halaa in 2.2 for a cost of 4 Research Tokens.

After that we had a chance to listen to the design philosophy behind item creation and itemization, as well as being given some details on upcoming items and changes.

  • TBC doubled the number of uncommon, rare, and epic items in the game.
  • PvP shouldn’t require raiding, and raiding shouldn’t require PvP. Players should be able to focus on what they like, with both choices offering equal but different progression.
  • Resilience was added with the purpose of introducing a new defensive mod that worked against everyone and everything, primarily because crit strings and being insta gibbed aren’t fun.
  • The token system will continue on in Wrath of the Lich King, and some improvements to it will be made.
    • The system made them realize, Hybrid does not mean healer, which then allowed them to introduce different armor sets without penalizing other classes.
    • Tokens allow them to create set bonuses not possible before, including talent-specific bonuses.

Things to come:

  • Free spell damage for healers.
  • Legendary ranged weapon in the next 25-person raid dungeon.
  • Zul’Aman
    • Each class is going to have a full compliment of epics available in the dungeon, some especially tailored for off-spec talent choices.

Q&A Session

Blizzard answered a number of questions about professions and items:

  • They’re talking about going to an item-based enchanting system with all but the most powerful enchants, allowing enchanters to create an item that is then useable by other players.
  • There are no plans to add armor dyes.
  • There are no plans to upgrade older Legendary items through quests or any other means.
  • They’re looking into reworking Spirit for the expansion, possibly by adding in a secondary effect to make it desirable by all classes, not just Priests.
  • More Engineering recipes are coming that allow engineers to make items for other players.

Curse and World of Raids have more information, so head on over!

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