Today has been an EXCITING day to be a World of WarCraft fan! An absolute plethora of information about the forthcoming expansion, The Burning Crusade, has been released!
Medievaldragon already posted about the Joystiq interview with Tigole which is right below this post. In addition to that interview, three of the big gaming sites have all released some important information about the expansion! Gamespot, 1UP, and GameSpy all have editorials that went up today unveiling all sorts of new content and other goodies coming out soon!The highlights that really stuck with me were:
1UP.COM (about the Paladin Class):
The Paladin class will see a class-defining ability of its own in an ability to pull aggressive creatures off of classes with a "snap-aggro" ability. That ability, Chilton explains as the equivalent of an AOE taunt, but instead of being cast on the enemies, instead, true to the Paladin's role of buffing and supporting players, it is castable buff on a party member. At that point, the mobs that were attacking the party member within an Area of Effect range will then turn and attack the Paladin. It continues to reinforce Blizzard's desire to turn the Paladin into a secondary tank and a healer, instead of the simple healer the class has been relegated to.
Reworking the roles of these two classes is vital considering the reduced raid sizes. 40-player raids often included five to six Warriors, the class most suited for tanking (Druid-tanking has been improved during the last several months). However, with just 25 players in a raid, there will be fewer Warriors and the ability of other classes to tank mobs will allow Blizzard more flexibility with designing complicated encounters.
"In the same sense, we're going to pushing the Shaman toward a more DPS and healing hybrid. We're going to make sure that we focus on their ability to do DPS and perform their healing duties. I think that these kind of crossovers are very important in the sense that, in the expansion, I think that in some ways, we need more of these classes that are hybridized to become true hybrids," Chilton says.
Gamespot.com - Scaling Raid Dungeons (Molten Core COULD be scaled in items and difficulty as you level!)
In addition, Burning Crusade's raid dungeons will offer multiple difficulty settings based on your character's level, and may actually offer some replay value after you've finished them. For instance, the rampart section of the Hellfire Citadel dungeon, which lies beyond the Dark Portal (the same swirling gate flanked by two menacing statues that appears at the original game's login screen) will be well-suited for players of level 60-62. However, once you've finished the dungeon in your early 60s and climbed all the way to level 70, you'll be able to return to the area, set it to level 70 difficulty, and have a new experience in the same dungeon against tougher monsters who carry more-powerful loot. Currently, Blizzard plans to use the scaled-down raid party size and the multiple difficulty settings only for Burning Crusade's dungeons, though the team is considering the possibility of adding these features to some of the dungeon areas in the original game at some point in the future.
There is a lot of game changing information coming out now! We'll try our best to sort through and figure out what is going on, but for now I reccomend you read up on all these sites! There are exciting times!
Links
Gamespot - Source
1UP - Source
GameSpy - Source
