Monthly Archives: October 2008

EVE Online: Quantum Rise Multiplies MMO Power

CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, today announced the launch of the ninth free expansion for EVE Online, its popular science fiction massively multi-player online game (MMOG). EVE Online: Quantum Rise offers limitless opportunity to the talented starship pilots of New Eden as the roots of conflict spread deep for their lifeblood.

Players have great things to look forward to in EVE Online: Quantum Rise. Corporations will be able to set their products apart from the rest by building trust in their goods through customizable storefronts. The backbone of EVE’s vibrant economy, industrial ships are being rebalanced and optimized to better suit the needs of haulers and industrialists, including the latest edition to the fleet, a massive capital industrial ship dubbed the Orca. A new certificate system will give a quick and verifiable means to discern a pilot’s skill level in trading, gunnery or countless other professions, providing plenty of bragging rights. Meanwhile, the introduction of a medal system allows corporations to distinguish their most valued pilots and honor them for their achievements.

The staged delivery of EVE Online: Quantum Rise began with the recent implementation of technological breakthroughs such as StacklessIO and EVE64 which upgraded the server hardware and streamlined communication between server and client to severely reduce lag. The reality of thousands of ships simultaneously engaged in adrenaline-charged combat is at hand and several fleet battles have already been fought using this new technology. Emboldened by the significant effects these improvements bring to high-level gameplay, CCP will push forward with a myriad of hardware and server improvements to bring the most massive player vs player experience available, expanding a boundless universe into a limitless one.

“We are very proud to be delivering this expansion, both in terms of features and the sheer performance increases made possible by deep refactoring of selected portions of our network and server code, complimented with the finest hardware we could find,” says Torfi Frans Ólafsson, Senior Producer of EVE Online. “I can’t imagine a better game where you can engage hundreds of people simultaneously in highly immersive tactical combat or simply sit back and make millions off of the conflict via research, manufacturing or logistics. You choose your destiny; that’s the beauty of it.”

Further features also include:

  • Weapon linking to make your onslaught easier
  • Continuations of the massive Trinity graphics update
  • Changes to autopilot routes and avoidance techniques

More to be revealed in the coming weeks

Source: EveOnline.com.

Gamers beware: SONY Online Entertainment opens its bag of tricks to the online community this October

Online Titles to Host Variety of In-Game Halloween Events Including EverQuest® II ‘s Nights of the Dead and First-Ever Star Wars Galaxies™ Galactic Moon Festival.
Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) conjures ghosts, ghouls and goblins for the gamer community in a variety of in-game events themed around Halloween. This October, EverQuest®, EverQuest® II, Star Wars Galaxies, Legends of Norrath™, Vanguard Saga of Heroes™, EverQuest® Online Adventures and The Matrix Online players can celebrate All Hallows Eve by participating in themed quests, donning avatar costumes and masks, and trick-or-treating for loot and candy!

In-game events are as follows:

EverQuest®: The lands of Norrath have been overridden with mystery, magic and mayhem. Help the inhabitants of Greater Faydark weed the Necromancer’s Garden of the horrible sprouting skulls that have taken root there. Assist farmers in West Karana subdue the spooks in a Scarecrow Roundup. Rewards will go to all who succeed in combating these episodes of the supernatural! These events are scheduled to run Oct. 24 through Nov. 7.

EverQuest® II: Nights of the Dead only comes once a year in Norrath, so players take heed! During this ghastly holiday, citizens of Norrath can venture into Qeynos or Freeport to free the spirits trapped in the haunted houses, combat evil in the haunted mansion missions, trick-or-treat with NPC’s in the cities for something especially sweet or participate in Ponchy the Halfling’s petrifying quest series! Nights of the Dead is scheduled to run Oct. 22 through Nov. 3.

Star Wars Galaxies: For the first time ever, Naboo and Tatooine will play host to the spooky zones of the Galactic Moon Festival. Oct. 14 through Nov. 7, this foreboding festival will be filled with ghosts, gravestones, spiders, Sith-o-lanterns and other creepy crawlies. Visit the Galactic Moon Festival organizer Z’ozpheratu to obtain the appropriate costume, and then players can taunt costumed NPCs with tricks in exchange for Halloween treats. May the fright be with you!

Legends of Norrath™: Scary creatures lurk in the fields at night this Halloween! Anticipated to run Oct. 22 through Nov. 4, players will face the mysterious and deadly Scarecrow King in an all-new Legends of Norrath scenario created just for Halloween. New and existing players alike are invited to bring their best decks and try this free scenario with Halloween treats, including a powerful promo card and valuable loot cards for EverQuest or EverQuest II for those who manage to slay the monster!

Vanguard Saga of Heroes™: The sinister necromancer Sartok has summoned some of his most fearsome creations yet and will soon unleash them on the inhabitants of Telon during Sartok’s Surprise. Travelers beware, as three terrifying new undead raid encounters will be roaming the lands seeking out adventures both young and old. Any heroes able to best Sartok’s abominable creations will be rewarded with special appearance-altering costumes and magical masks. While adventurers rest between battles, they can complete special new quests to claim additional rewards such as new pets or more magical masks.

EverQuest® Online Adventures: Slated for launch on Oct. 23, EQOA will introduce a special Halloween quest for those who aren’t afraid of a few tricks and possibly a treat. Part of the Halloween quest includes the introduction of the Skeleton King who brings riddles to players who encounter him, but be careful, answer a riddle incorrectly, and you may meet the reaper.

The Matrix Online: Halloween’s massive moon and creepy round-the-clock nighttime set the backdrop for the appearance of seven new disguise masks in The Matrix Online, for a total of 28 collectible disguises of spooky and exotic Matrix characters! With events scheduled to run Oct. 23 through Nov. 6, any Redpill can catch the zombies and jack-o-lanterns that drop lootable masks in the various neighborhoods of the four districts. Be forewarned, a special bite attack from the spawning zombies will render any victim “zombified”; however, players can then use the bite attack to zombify others!

WHEN/WHERE: All throughout the month of October, Halloween-themed events are scheduled to take place in the virtual worlds of your favorite SOE games. Exact dates vary by title.

“World Of Warcraft” Game Director Working On New MMO, Hints At Console Game

It’s no secret that Blizzard is working on a “next-gen MMO,” as evidenced by job listings on their website.

But during BlizzCon this past weekend, “World of Warcraft” game director Jeffrey Kaplan confirmed to MTV Multiplayer that he’s “definitely involved” in the project.

“I think the great part about a new MMO from Blizzard is that it doesn’t have to be ‘WoW’,” he said. “There are a lot of lessons we learned in making ‘World of Warcraft,’ and some of those you can take and do things better than you ever did before.”

I asked if he was concerned about the new MMO potentially cannibalizing “WoW” subscribers. Kaplan said he wasn’t worried at all, and that the company was going to great lengths to make sure that the new game doesn’t directly cannibalize “WoW.”
But with the huge success of “WoW,” and now “Warhammer Online”, I wondered if there was any room for MMOs that weren’t inspired by high fantasy. “Oh yeah,” Kaplan said. “I only think [non-high fantasy MMOs] have a harder time because of the past games that have tried and the game design decisions that they made, not because of the [intellectual property] or the setting that they chose.”

He thought the secret to success was making a game that was both tailored to hardcore players and accessible to a broad audience. “Once people figure that out, your game world is going to attract a lot of people,” he explained. “But a lot of it has to do with art style, too. Are you going for realism or an inviting world? And once you learn those lessons, I think any type of [intellectual property] can survive. I’m shocked we haven’t seen more sci-fi, near-future, post-apocalyptic, historical MMOs; there’s all these completely different fantasy settings beyond the traditional high fantasy ones.”

So is Blizzard’s new MMO going to be sci-fi, near-future, post-apocalyptic or historical? “All of those combined!” he said, laughing.

I also mentioned to Kaplan that I recently spoke with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley, who said that he hopes that the company will become number one in the console MMO space. I asked if he thought Blizzard was behind by not making console MMOs.

“Well, we definitely aren’t adapting ‘World of Warcraft’ to the console at this time,” Kaplan replied. He explained that people think Blizzard developers only play and like PC games, but that’s not the case; the games they chose to make just happened to work better for the PC.

“So I don’t think ‘World of Warcraft’ would really work that well on the console,” he continued, “but that’s not to say that other MMOs couldn’t. And we have a pretty savvy group of console developers — a lot of the guys we inherited from Swingin’ Ape really know what they’re doing on next-gen consoles. So we might have a few tricks up our sleeves in that regard.”

Kaplan also added that the next-gen MMO is very early in development and, like all Blizzard titles, it’s “going to be a while” before we see it.

Source: multiplayerblog.mtv.com.

Voyage Century: Abundant Captivating Quests

Today the folks at Voyage Century are going to talk to players about the abundant captivating quests available.
Voyage Century is a 3D MMORPG from IGG that prides itself on its real world geography, historical design, and eye-catching graphics, that features an amazing selection of fun quests for players.

In Voyage Century, characters themselves don’t have levels to rate their character’s, however, there are 17 skills that allows each character to stand out. The 4 basic skills out of the 17 are Eloquence, Sea battle, Bare hands, and Voyage. The rest of the skills define who a player is in game. Whether this is a businessman, a warrior or a Handicraftsman depends on these skills. Based on them, most of the quests are categorized into Merchant Guild quests, Warrior Alliance quests, Guild quests, and Skill quests. Business skills are closely related to Merchant Guild quests, battle skills are closely related to Warrior Alliance quests, and handicraft skills are closely related to guild quests. Apart from the 4 basic skills, the rest of the skills can be improved through quests.

Here are the 4 main kinds of quests?

Merchant Guild Quests: Money and Experience
There are merchant guilds in almost every city, and the rewards for many merchant guild quests are extremely large. Millions and sometimes even tens of millions of silver coins and abundant experience are the rewards for a simple quest, no wonder so many players have been doing business quests.
Warrior Alliance Quests: Abundant and various Skill Experience Rewards
Warrior Alliance Quests are relatively difficult to complete, so the rewards of various amounts of skill experience are quite decent. The 3 basic skills, sea battle, voyage, and bare hands can be improved through these kinds of quests. In addition, players have the chance to obtain many advanced potions and books this way.

Guild Quests: Eternal Glory
When it comes to Guild Quests, “too difficult” may be the first 2 words that come to players’ minds. It usually takes a lot of effort to complete a Guild quest, however once it’s been completed, players are awarded a unique title that will make them look very special. So there are still many players who strive to complete these quests.

Land Battle Skill quests: Easy leveling, Easy rewards
There are hundreds of easy quests with big rewards (abundant experience, prizes, etc.) for players to experience. Also, these quests can be done repeatedly, which means players can do a quest with big rewards as many times as they want. Doesn’t it sound great?

Chart your own course to adventure with Voyage Century!

Gladius 2 Review

Rick Charbs

Gladius 2 is a browser based MMORPG that has been newly introduced to ONRPG. It features “action packed battles” in historical arenas. The game is a 2D/3D mix with various maps and environments to battle in. You may chose from one of three gladiators to bring with you in the ring, and you have a fair choice of weapons to use. If you pay for a premium user account, you will even be given the option to use the arena editor feature. This feature allows you to create and customize your very own arenas for you and your friends to battle in! This game is one of the very few browser based MMORPGS based in flash that allows full screen expansion. This way you can really get immersed in the game.

My time in this game was rather short and sweet. I am personally a big fan of classical history; therefore I understood the concepts and lore very well. It’s great to see an original theme for MMO’s developed like this, with plenty of details to the old Roman world. There is no way of making your character unique, you can only pick from three cookie cutter characters. Once I had picked my character and logged in, I couldn’t tell if I was the only gladiator in the arena. Whether they were NPCS or players did not cross my mind, however I did not enjoy the fighting experience. The combat was extremely slow and somewhat uneventful, and the game’s sounds are not pleasant at all. The missions were quite amusing though. They consist in fighting animals or completing certain tasks in the arena. The graphics were bland and very colorless. I found it more or less difficult to use the controls and navigate through the menus (that were beautiful mind you). It was enjoyable enough for a mini-game though, and it –was- browser based, so there is nothing holding you back from pressing the big red X button. Gladius 2 is only in testing, so I suggest you give them some feedback if you decide to give it a shot.

There you have it, a Roman themed browser based MMORPG featuring gladiator arena fights with real time combat! Something finally unique on the horizon for browser based games. The system matches you up with player opponents quickly preventing any wait time, so you can get in the action right away. There are many players online, roughly 1.5k at a time, and lots of battles to be won. Enjoy!

RuneScape: 15 October 2008 – PvP Worlds

PvP worlds have arrived! Are you ready to pit your combat skills against other players in the halls of the White Knights’ Castle? Are you prepared to fight to the death in the fields of Lumbridge? Well, now is your chance.

To get started, load up the game like normal (click here to read about the changes to the log-in system we’ve also released today), and then choose ‘World Select’ on the title screen. Then pick a world which has a tick in the ‘skull’ column to choose a PvP world. To avoid nasty accidents, if you let the game choose a world for you automatically it will never select a PvP world. Also note that you require a Combat level of at least 20 (not including Summoning) to get into a PvP world.

Before you are logged in, you will be warned that you are entering a PvP world which is a dangerous place: you will lose your items on death and you will not get a gravestone. Upon entering the world for the first time, you’ll be teleported to Lumbridge and given a manual to explain the finer points of PvP worlds.

Here’s a quick run-down of the features:

* Fight players (within your level range) anywhere on the map, except in a few safe areas.
* Safe areas include banks, respawn points and some guilds.
* Level ranges are 10% of your Combat level, plus 5 levels. If you are fighting inside the Wilderness, the Wilderness level is added to this total. Your current attack range is shown on your screen at all times. (The 10% is measured from the higher of the two combatants’ levels.)
* Skulling is back – same rules apply. If you initiate combat, you are skulled and on death you will lose all items, with the Protect Item prayer saving one item as normal.
* Teleport Block is back in the normal spellbook.
* Some minigames are available to play, others are not – please see the Game Guide for more details.
* Death drops are back – new rules apply. Drops will be a mixture of items from the defeated opponent’s inventory and items from drop tables specific to PvP worlds. See below for details.

The quality of the drops you get when you PK someone depends on several different factors:

* To get a reward from a kill, you also have to risk some items yourself!
* To accumulate a possible reward, you have to risk a minimum of 75k of items on a members’ world, or a minimum of 25k of items on a free world.
* Note that your three most valuable items won’t count as being risked unless you’ve been skulled, as you wouldn’t lose them.
* The longer you spend on a PvP world (outside a safe area) with the required amount of items at risk, the better your possible rewards might become, to reward you for your risk.
* The possible reward increases even faster and goes to a higher maximum if you go into a ‘hot zone’.
* Note, however, that risking more than the minimum won’t improve your rewards faster, so it’s a good idea to take relatively cheap and useful items that won’t cost you too much to replace if you die.

When you get a successful kill, the exact reward you can claim depends on a number of other factors, including the level difference between you and the value of the items items lost by the dying player. Any unclaimed loot is saved for the next kills, so you don’t have to worry about it being lost if you kill a low level player.

Don’t despair if you are dying a lot and losing a lot of items. The game will detect this and improve your chance of getting decent rewards when you do eventually get a good kill.

The above is a simplified description of how it all works. To prevent cheating there are various other factors taken into account. We’ve calculated the rewards and rates very carefully, so that a successful PKer should be able to get a good income, and PKers who get lucky might find themselves with a good drop. Higher level players may also get higher rewards to reflect their increased earning ability when not PKing, such that PKing is still worthwhile for them. The aim is to make PKing a fun alternative (albeit very high risk) way of earning money in the game.
Included in the PvP-specific drop tables is a wide range of new combat equipment and XP-boosting gloves. Members will get access to level 78 items for all three corners of the combat triangle, including armour as well as weapons, and a new set of Ancient Magick spells. Non-members will get access to corrupt dragon equipment.
Source: posted on the RuneScape website.

NHN USA acquires rights to anime action-based online game Lunia

Six Million-Strong ijji.com Game Portal to Host Renowned MMORPG

NHN USA, a leading free-to-play online interactive entertainment publisher, today announced that they have acquired the rights to Lunia, a unique, anime-influenced action massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Lunia is now available to play on NHN USA’s renowned gaming portal ijji.com.

Lunia differs from most MMORPGs available today with an extremely detailed combo system of action controls for movement and attacks that users control via their keyboard, rather than being restrained by the non-adaptable “click/command” style. In addition, users can create custom movements and attack skills to personalize their controls. The game has highly advanced player vs. player elements, enabling users to compete against each other to become the best PvP player in both ongoing rankings and periodic tournaments. Users can also join forces with friends and fellow players to attack monsters and raid bosses in force.

“Lunia has an extremely strong community of dedicated gamers and we are thrilled to have them join ijji.com’s existing six million users,” said Philip Yun, CEO, NHN USA. “The game’s unique action controls enable players to conduct intense gaming sessions, and help set the game apart from some of the more traditional MMORPG’s that require players to endure hours-long marathon sessions. Online gamers everywhere are sure to love Lunia’s thrilling mix of customizable attack moves and anime-based story elements.”
Developed by leading Korean digital media company Allm Co.,Ltd., Lunia revolves around a detailed plot and storyline comprising various episodes, meaning new content is always appearing. The game has a very unique anime-influenced feel, with cell shaded animation in the style of Japanese Manga comics. Players battle monsters and each other over the course of multiple, increasingly difficult episodes of the overall plot. They often have to accomplish specific missions in order to advance to the next level.

Originally launched by CDC Games, current Lunia players are invited to migrate their characters over to ijji.com from now until January 2009. All items, skills and levels will transfer over during this period. Previous qualifying in-game cash purchases will also be converted to NHN’s G Coins, ijji.com’s in-game currency. In addition, current and future players can acquire in-game wealth by creating a shop and selling goods to other players.

Tales of Pirates: Head Gear Forging Release

Tales of Pirates will add Head Gear Forging content to recent updates! With the launch of the Head Gear Forging system, all classes of players now have the chance to own head gear that was exclusively available to the Ami class before. The system will also offer relevant services, like Gem Forging, Fusing, and gear enhancing and so on. It’s another great system for players who love to forge cool gear.

Players can buy hats from the Weird Hat Seller at Argent City (2240?2770) who has many different kinds of hats for Lance, Phyllis and Carsise characters. These hats can be improved into head gear and fused with other parts of apparel of the same type, and then have up to 110% enhancement effect.

Of course, specific gems will be supplied for players who want to forge higher head gear. Players can go to the ironsmith at Shaitan city to have their hat slotted, and then forge the gems they want. Gems are also available from the Item Mall.
Generally there are 3 types of gems for Head Gear Forging:

Red Jade: +200 Maximal HP
Yellow Jade: +10 DEF
Green Jade: +200 Maximal SP


The gems listed above can be compounded and refined as usual, and have no special differences with other gems. These make improving head gear very easy for players. The gems can be also applied to enhance Ami’s hats.

Angels Online: Halloween Event on Its Way

Since Halloween is fast approaching, Angels Online team has prepared some special surprise for all players.

New Suits Release
From the server maintenance on October 30th until the server maintenance on November 6th, fashionable suits such as the Killer Suit and other items will be released in the Angels Item Mall.

Make-up to be a Ghost
More than that, players may obtain a Tricky Panocha which helps them shapeshift into a ghost by killing level 21+ monsters or collecting level 21+ materials, or even by buying a Lucky Bag from the Item Mall.

Event Duration
After the server maintenance on October 23rd until the server maintenance on November 6th.

Event Targets
All Angels are welcome.

Event Content
1. Fashionable suits will be released in the Item Mall.
Killer suits and other items will be released in the Item Mall again for a week. Hurry up to buy what you want and become the most fashionable ghost of the festival.

2. Tricky Panocha
Ghosts have dropped many Tricky Panochas which help players become various ghosts during the event in Eden and in the Angels Item Mall. Except from the instances or the mysterious areas, players can obtain a Tricky Panocha by killing level 21+ monsters or collecting level 21+ materials. Even the Lucky Bags in the Item Mall offer players a chance to obtain one. All Angels are welcome to take part in the event.

Source: Angels Online.

BlizzCon 2008: World of Warcraft Class Panel

ANAHEIM, California–Class diversity plays a major role in World of Warcraft. Whether you rolled a druid and ended up becoming your guild’s primary HoT (Heal over Time) healer, clawing your way up the threat meter in cat, or keeping the squishies down back alive in bear form, yesterday’s class panel showed just how much thought and testing goes into all aspects of WOW’s class balancing act. Tom Chilton and Greg Street chaired the panel and did a class-by-class walkthrough of all currently planned changes in the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which we’ve summarized below.

The session opened with a look at the death knight, the first new class to be added since the game went live in late 2004. Not surprisingly the class went through quite a few iterations of progression in the lead-up to its introduction to the game. Both Chilton and Street commented on the evolution of the rune system and explained the development team’s desire to use runes as a resource rather than inject another class into the gameworld with a formulaic series of button presses. Having six runes split across three trees–blood, frost, and unholy–means that you need to manage three separate cooldown (CD) timers rather than a single global cooldown timer (GCD). The two hosts also stressed the importance of context-specific diseases for the DK class, with some 12 afflictions originally on the cards but being reduced to three or four essential abilities. These debuffs serve to deal additional damage when the target is struck with melee weapons, heal the player, or spread disease between multiple enemies. Though the class still forces you to pick your path and spend talent points according to whether you’d prefer additional melee damage and healing, burst damage and target control, or additional proficiency in diseases and minions, each tree will still let you fill the role of a tank, or if you wish, a melee-damage class such as a fury warrior or rogue.

Hunters are due to receive a complete pet overhaul in WOTLK to address confusion about which pets are best, where to find them, and to stop you from needing to tame pets for skills and temporarily house them in your stables. Rather than need to look up a guide on which pet has claw rank nine, you’ll now be able to train the skill as your pet levels. Hunters will also receive additional pet slots at their stables to keep their beasts when not in use. Shot rotations are a huge part of maximizing hunter damage, but until now it has been quite complex to avoid clipping your shots–timing shots so they don’t overlap. Blizzard doesn’t expect hunters to have to resort to user-interface mods to do this, and so the company’s working to clean up the shot system and make it a more natural system for players. Hunters will also receive a new ability at level 80 called freezing shot, which is a projectile-based version of the current freezing trap. It’s being introduced to speed up trapping, particularly in instances (which we didn’t think was that hard before), given that there’s no need to pull the intended mob to your placed trap to freeze them in place.

Priests seem to play a huge role in the class overhauls. The big focus is on making all healing classes a little stronger on the DPS side and DPS classes a little better on the healing side. That’s not to say that rogues or mages are going to replace priests in raids, but the move to a unified gear system under “spell power” rather than bonus damage or healing should level the playing field and make talent specialisation more important. Blizzard also wants priests to step out of the support role in shadow form and become viable damage-dealers alongside mages and locks. Considering that, particularly at the higher levels of gear, priests aren’t constantly spamming their highest rank of heal, there are times when no one needs much more than a quick top-up. For times like this, Blizzard is giving priests a new ability called mind seer to help deal damage. Though it wasn’t discussed, this could also be a useful PVP ability.

Blizzard is concerned that mages are turning into food table and portal machines, despite the class’s strong legacy as a high direct-damage dealing class. For this reason, the developers are looking into introducing either three or four viable DPS specs alongside the new abilities at level 80. To help mix up the static fire and frost tree combos, the team is adding frostfire bolt, a combination attack that draws bonuses from multiple talents and gives those playing the class a new damage skill in their repertoire. Another new inclusion is mirror image, a (currently in beta) three-minute cooldown spell that will let your mage create three physically identical copies of that character and deal damage for 30 seconds before they die. Apparently the ability confuses the heck out of the healers, so this one should be fun in raids.

Druids as a hybrid class have always been both spec- and gear-dependent, but the upcoming planned changes only amplify this concept further. Each tree will receive specific revamping with what looks to be some tempting talents to avoid point splits. That’s not to say that as a tank you won’t be able to put points into improving your resto tree, but expect to do it at the expense of specific bear skills. Balance will finally receive real crowd control because the dev team plan to allow for tangling roots to be used indoors. Resto druids receive both a new flash heal in nourish, and a group heal in wild growth. Feral is split down the middle and will require you to spend either more on cat or bear depending on which role you envisage yourself filling more regularly. Both panelists confirmed that bear tanks will be able to handle all WOTLK raid content as main tanks, but they’ll have to do so at the loss of some of the more fun DPS abilities that cats will have at their disposal.

Shaman seem to have too many totems, and Blizz is working hard to consolidate them. What form that will take remains to be seen. The team is also interested in mixing up the casting rotations for those playing elemental shammies with the introduction of a new lava burst spell as an alternative to lightning bolt. Resto will see a new instant direct heal with a small HoT component that increases the effect of the next chain heal and consumes the HoT. The big new addition for Shaman is hex, a legitimate form of crowd control that will transform the target into a random creature for a short period of time.

Rogues have always been a single-target class (with the obvious exception of blade flurry), and as a result, they’ve had a hard time dealing with groups of targets. Fan of knives is a new area effect (AE) skill that will throw out daggers and damage multiple targets simultaneously. Sap is also getting a buff and will soon be able to be used against a wider variety of targets than just humanoids, and will better aid rogue crowd control in five-man dungeons. Blizzard is also keen to get rogues back into daggers and poisons, and may possibly let the latter be used for boss encounters.

Some would say warriors have fallen out of favour as the tanks of choice over time, given the flexibility of druids and protection paladins in a raiding situation. The devs are committed to putting some of the fun back in tanking and are juggling talents for core prot abilities to free up points for some more of the fun toys. Arms warriors should start seeing more battle-stance-focused abilities, and both rend and overpower have been upped considerably. New talents bladestorm and sudden death (executed when the target is over 10% HP) should both add some fun and burn a little rage. Fury warriors will receive titan’s grip, a beefy new skill that allows for dual-wielding two-handed weapons, but comes with associated penalties including reducing your chance to hit to keep DPS in line with other classes.

Warlocks are due to get some love in the destruction talent tree by having their shadow bolt spam reduced and a more interesting rotation put in its place. The dev team is also working hard to reintroduce affliction as a viable talent spec for high-end raiding. Pet diversity is another issue on the table, and though no specific examples were given on how Blizzard plans to help with the range of available demons, work is apparently being done to avoid relying on just the imp or succubus for PVE and the felpup in PVP. New skill demonic circle will be used as a quick location-change mechanic not unlike a mini-, instant hearthstone. Metamorphosis will let you shift into demon form and control not only your normal spells, but also the specific ones that come with the talent: shooting shadow bolts in multiple directions and pulling aggro long enough to regain control when a tank goes down and it all goes to pot.

Paladins were last, but certainly won’t be receiving less attention than their fellow classes. Seals and judgements will be receiving overhauls, and Blizzard would like to see pallies stop rolling on DPS caster swords for tanking and will be implementing tanking weapons more tailored to tanking needs. On the holy front, work is being done around the sedentary nature of pally healing. Holy shock, beacon of light, and retribution of light are being tweaked to help with mobility and for use in PVP. The retribution tree is working as intended, and though there will be ongoing monitoring and perhaps a nerf or two to manage DPS, don’t expect too much reduction if it does happen because the team is happy with how the class is tracking on the damage meters.

The last part of the panel session dealt with changing raid dynamics. The key message here focused on downplaying the need for consumable and buff stacking to succeed in PVE, instead relying more on player skill and raid utility for all classes. Dual talent spec was also touched on briefly, and though the mechanics are yet to be finalised at this early stage, they may work by flipping a switch and changing roles. The move would allow classes to cycle jobs as required and switch from a protection tank to a damage-dealing class from boss to boss if an encounter had no threat table. Blizzard devs are also looking at dynamic glyphs and action bars that would reflect the abilities related to your spec to stop players from having to rearrange icons between fights.

Source: Gamespot.