Class Discussion

The class discussion, conducted by Greg Street (Ghost Crawler) and Tom Chilton, for the World of Warcraft started with Death Knights. Some explanation about where the class has evolved from and touching upon runes and runic power. The starting zone for Death Knights will be a zone worth playing through just for the experience, even if you don't want to level all the way to 80. Something that was very interesting is that the talent trees are less task specific. Apparently you can use any tree for either DPS or tanking.

Greg then started to go through some changes to the classes. There were some excellent explanations about how and why they had made certain changes; i'm not going to detail everything as there was a lot of information. He touched upon shadow priest DPS, discipline healing ability in raids and the removal of racial talents for priests. Mind sear is apparently a popular new ability among Blizzard staff. Moonkin were covered, discussing mana and crowd control and DPS issues. This brought a smile to Alassiel's face. There was a huge reaction to Paladins by the audience; in fact they got their own slide in the presentation.


Warriors have been the main tank for a long time, they wanted to make sure that warriors were still desired, but not the exclusive tank, after the removal of crushing blows. They also wanted to make sure that there were “fun things” to take in the protection tree in addition to the mitigation abilities. A desire was expressed by the designed to maintain a very clear difference between the different tanking classes while ensuring they all have the tools they need.

In terms of groups, flexibility was addressed. Ensuring that more different class/talents were viable in raids, focusing on the idea that you were bringing the player not the class. They didn't want the game to be about buffs and potions but gear and skill. Player skill will be the most important reason to chose someone for a group. The implementation of spell power will make life easier for healers when soloing. The same goes for threat generation based more on damage, for tanks, as opposed to high threat abilities.

Yes, they are working on a dual spec system. They want you do be able to swap talent spec mid raid but they don't seem to have too many details yet. Obviously not a system where you can swap from arms to prot and back again I the middle of an arena battle but they don't want you to have to head into town every time you need to swap. On top of that they want to improve the UI to support different gear sets. Implementing something like outfitter or item rack where switching gear sets easily while still keeping these sets in your bags.

Mages, rogues and warlocks were the source of the most questions. Lots of points were mentioned, I started tuneing out sorry, making mages do more DPS isn't at the top of my priority list. Sadly no questions were asked about warriors or priests.