For The Paladin

Hey guys, I’ve been really busy with finals and such and haven’t gotten around to playing/blogging for a while, but with the semester over I will be back to my normal routine. Sorry for the lack of posts this week.

Ghostcrawler (WoW’s Lead System’s Designer) recently talked about Cataclysm’s overall leveling improvements:

1. The gain is every level. You don’t have to reach certain milestones for your Shadow Bolt damage to increase. One of the scaling problems we have currently is that any spell without a level 80 rank starts to fall behind. Imagine Shadow Bolt just has 85 (free and automatic) ranks.

2. We changed the level at which you get abilities, in some cases dramatically. Currently, you get showered with abilities at low level, many of which aren’t even useful when soloing. By sliding these around we have every class to where you get an ability about every odd level. There are still some dry spells for some classes, but then you have talents and other things that fill in some blanks.

3. Related, the spell book tells you at what level you will get future abilities so you can plan accordingly. In addition, when you ding, the UI tells you not only about newly available spells, but also systems and mechanics not tied to your class trainer, such as the ability to train riding, dual spec or use Dungeon Finder. It’s pretty sweet. Our UI team is kicking some major booty for Cataclysm. Source

Personally, I’ve given up on leveling characters for a while. I thought that I was going to be able to level my warlock (who’s 68 at the moment) before the summer came around, but for me it’s getting way too boring. Hopefully these improvements will at the very least create a new experience when it comes to leveling in World of Warcraft.

Blizzard stated today that in the new expansion; Cataclysm, raid lockouts for 10 and 25 man raids will be the same. What exactly does this mean?

Quote from: Nethaera (Source)
We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the 10 man or the 25 man of a raid, the item difference is between the normal and heroic versions of the raid. Personally, I think this is a great way to separate the casual raiders from the hardcore raiders and allows the hardcore to keep getting the best of the best gear while still keeping content open for those who don’t have the time to raid more than once or twice a week.

How do you feel about this upcoming change? Do you think that this will help or hurt the game?