Raid & Dungeon Panel

<h2>WoW Class Panel</h2>
The World of Warcraft Class panel on Friday was lead by Rob Pardo, Tom Chilton, Kevin Jordan and Cory Stockman.

They stated that with the death knight class they are trying to do something new and different.  They did not want to implement hero classes by 
adding three new sub-classes for each class because this would lead to a crazy ballooning of character clases, and lead to overlap of abilities 
between classes.  This is against one of their core concepts of 'concentrated coolness' in each class.

Some of the other core intentions for classes in World of Warcraft, is that every class can solo to max level, have a role to play in a five person
party, have an important role in group raids, and are competitive in PvP.

Tom Chilton overviewed some of the recent changes that they have made to classes in WoW since the last BlizzCon, such as focusing on what they 
considered alternativespecs for classes, such as the shadow priest, and improving the tanking ability of feral druids.  They also have stated
that they like to deal with itemization for off-specs through the token system, and by targetted boss drops.

Other accomplishments they highlighted since the last convention:
The upgrading of damage and healing over time spells through the addition of +damage/healing stats in order to address the lack of scalability.
Removing the downranking of spells in order to resolve what they saw as an issue with people not wanting the higher level spells.
They increased the amount of stamina they give you on the item budgets and added new types of stats such as resilience. (PvP isn't fun if it's too short)

Tom Chilton mentioned that it was incredibly hard to balance the game for raid play, solo play, grouping and PvP all at once.  A lot of people have
asked for them to simply resolve balance issues by having spells act differently in PvP from they do in PvE.  They want WoW to be a cohesive 
experience, with the rules not totally changing on you.  <i>Cob's note: However, this doesn't seem to be the case with CC spells in PvP, with them
only lasting ten seconds max now.</i>

They stated that they want to improve the PvP and solo play for protection spec warriors.

A lot of times players find their own solutions to class balance problems over time, and Blizzard is very careful serious changes to the system,
since they want to 'avoid shocks to the system'. 

Tom then turned the panel over to Kevin Jordan for a quick review of the classes.

<strong>Druids</strong>
Feral and Balance specs didn't realy mix, so they shifted talents for feral to balance resto.?
No matter how you spec you still want to be able to heal sometimes.

<strong>Hunter</strong>
They changed the game to allow traps in combat, so that feign death was usable as it was intended as a threat wipe.
Pet scaling was improved.
They added misdirection to increase the group and raid utility of hunters.

<strong>Mage</strong>
DPS King (single target vs AoE)
Added the water elemental as a talent, rather than an ingraned ability.
Added spell steal and invisiblity.
With the mage, they like to add odd things that they don't do with the other classes.

<strong>Paladin</strong>
Added them to the horde!
Role of tank and DPS. <i>The audience laughed at this last part.</i>
They stated they have some work to do on the retribution front, and there will changes in patch 2.3 to reflect this.
They also noted that there are still a lot of retribution itemization pitfalls.

<strong>Priest</strong>
With the priest they noted that they had the holy trinity (lolwell, improved dying and something else) of bad talents, and that the
discipline tree had a real lack of focus other than being a supporting tree for shadow and holy builds.  They stated that they have
some plans for the expansion in resolving this.

<strong>Shaman</strong>
With the shaman class, there was some boos and some applause from the audience at the same time.
With the shaman and paladin class being available to both the alliance and horde they had to make sure that both totems and blessings
would stack together and that there was still a reason to bring both to the raid.

<strong>Rogue</strong>
Surprisingly, unlike last BlizzCon where my class of choice was openly booed by the audience, there was a lot of applause when this slide
came up.  
The rogue was stated to be the best single target DPS class, and over time they have worked to improve the utility of the rogue by doing
things like giving away the improved sap for free.  Regarding the swords vs. daggers issue, it is an ongoing issue for them to balance
them so that they are both viable for raiding and have their unique draws.
Regarding stunlock issues in PvP, by increasing peoples stamina in The Burning Crusade it stopped people from being stunlocked from 100 to 0,
which made PvP a lot more fun for the victim, but what they found was that the rogue often would die regardless of having an 80% head start.

<strong>Warlock</strong>
With the warlock, their reliance on fear has been a neverending struggle for Blizzard.  The warlock is the best dueling class in the game, 
but WoW isn't a dueling game.  Blizzard is fairly happy with them in their 5v5 performance, but their stigma from being more successful in
the smaller format arenas has carried over to the 5v5.

<strong>Warrior</strong>
They've found that how fast a warrior is gaining rage is directly proportional to the amount of fun they're having playing their class.
This has been another ongoing issue for Blizzard.

<h2>HERO CLASSES</h2>
The hero clases were not necessarily intended to be more powerful than the base classes, but different.  They again stated that they didn't
want to split classes up into multiple watered down classes.   Multiclassing as a secondary class (I.e. level 80 mage, level 5 death knight) would 
water down each class, but it didn't feel right as some of the class combinations didn't make sense, for example the druid/death knight.

Another discussed option was character morphing, but this would mean giving up your toon, and you could potentially end up with buyers remorse.

<h2>QUESTION &AMP; ANSWERS</h2>
Also known as, the yearly airing of grievances, where the fun and games of the forums come directly to the developers.

<i>Are there any plans to add any sort of CC abilities to the shaman?</i>
We'll see for levels 71-80.  There will be no crowd control abilities for the shaman at level 70.  They are very measured about CC.

<i>What's up with druid treeform?  It's too limited, and only good for a backup healer.</i>
They are looking at adding decurse or at least depoisoning to druid tree form, and are still evaluating the drawbacks.  They are really looking 
at it as something that you do on the fly if you want to emphasise a particular spellset.

<i>What's up with holy priests in PvP, and they aren't even brought on raids by the guild Death &amp; Taxes.</i>
They are looking at fixing the priest problem areas, such as lightwell and circle of healing.  They currently recognize that the shadow tree 
is the current bailout for most priests.  The current raid game places a lot of emphasis on healing efficiency.

<i>Hero class spells and abilities?</i>
They usually look for them in Warcraft III, a lot of them don't carry over directly.

<i>What are you doing to address the ret paladin problem, the community is shrinking.</i>
They are looking to add DPS to them on the raid front, but they have to be careful to not put PvP balance out of whack.

<i>With healers base seemingly shrinking, and the death knight class coming in, how are there going to be any raid spots left for DPSers?</i>
Tom noted that with the shrinking raid size in The Burning Crusade, this is what really put the crunch on classes.  Adding a new class won't 
really affect this in the same way, because our pool of players will still be the same.

<i>As talent trees deepen, hybrid classes are suffering.  How are you going to address this in Wrath of the Lich King?</i>
By adding talents that benefit hybrid play as you go down a talent tree.  What they've found is that people will tend to overspecialize 
themselves, and they address this by packaging perks that assist hybrid specialization in with other talents.

<i>What are you going to do to address the new availability of multiple key gold metal abilities?</i>
Tom replied that this is the same worry that people had with The Burning Crusade, and it wasn't an issue.

<i>Are paladins going to be able to tank better?</i>
They will address this with deeper protection talents.

<i>Fear Ward?</i>
They will be spreading this around a little bit more in the expansion.


<h1>Raid &amp Dungeon Panel</h1>
The raid and dungeon panel was lead by Jeff Kaplin, Lee Sparks, Scottmercer, Jeff Goodman.

Tigole opened up the panel by saying that this was for people that earned their epics.  "No free PvP welfare epics."   
There was a lot of applause from the audience on this, but being a part-time pvper myself, I put in some hearty boos.

<h2>Why they create dungeons.</h2>
The first reason why they create a dungeon are for lore originations, such as the deadmines.

The second reason is to fill gaps in level availability.  They added mauradon because there was nothing available at that level, and
to finally give people a reason to go out to Desolace.   Ragefire Chasm was added because they had put the Stormwind Stockades in, and there
was no comparable alternative for the Horde.

They are adding ZulAman in the next major content patch in order to fill the lack of 10 person raids.

The third reason they add a dungeon is for location.  For example the Wailing Caverns was placed for this reason.

The final (overiding) reason is because 'Metzen wanted it'.  (Because VP Chris Metzen comes into meetings with 'GUYS I HAVE THE MOST AWESOMEST IDEA!)

<h2>Philosophy</h2>
The original plan for the original WoW release was level 70 and to include Northrend.  They showed a list of the dungeons originaly planned for
the initial launch, and then the dungeons they actually implemented.  Overall, it was the same amount of dungeon content.

They have one more unannounced (very difficult) raid zone prior to the release of Northrend.
Blizzard is planning on having more ten man dungeons in Northrend and future expansions.  
Northrend will have just as many levelup dungeons as Burning Crusade.

<h2>Progression</h2>
Progression adds challenge to the game, and without progression through dungeons the game would feel very static.  It also allows them to 
properly escalate difficulty.

The attunent and keying process forces you to go through the backstory for the content, and for those of you doing pick-up groups, you know that
if someone is heroic keyed, they've at least done the dungeon a few times.  

For Northrend, a lot of the content is unlocked in a manner similar to the AQ gates.

1. Trash mobs in dungeons is used for pacing, and it also allows class abilities (such as stuns, polymorphs and banishes) to come into play that
they couldn't allow to be used on a raid boss.

Sometimes they do realize they have too many trash creatures in an area, for example Gnomeregan has too much trash.  Other examples were 
Mount Hyjal getting the number of waves reduced, and the Scholomance 1.0 which had 'more trash than rest of the entire game'.

2. Kill time on mobs.