BlizzCon: Phat Lewt
Blizzard Entertainment’s Eric Dodd and Scott Mercer discussed two topics near and dear to the hearts of World of Warcraft players — professions and items in general — in a panel Saturday at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
Blizzard won’t be adding item quality to crafting, exactly, on the theory that no one wants a subpar version of an item, and one of their goals is that every crafter should theoretically want to use their item, when at the appropriate level. Instead, they will be adding more recipes with random properties; the items will still all be worth using by someone of the appropriate level, but there will still be an incentive to make multiple versions of an item, to get the “perfect” item.
The 1.9 patch later this year will upgrade fishing dramatically, adding resource nodes for fishing — specifically, schools of certain types of fish and shipwrecks. Players will still be able to fish anywhere, but a fisherman could have a better idea that they would be catching winter squid or a deviate fish if they found a school of them before casting their line. The weekly Stranglethorn fishing contest features these sorts of nodes of spotted tastyfish for the duration of the event and served as a test of the concept.
Enchanters will also be getting an upgrade to their profession in the patch, with the addition of enchating oils and nexus crystals. The oils will produce short-term powerful enchantments and will provide enchanters with an item they can sell in the auction house. (Not having most enchanters’ goods saleable in that way is actually part of the design of the profession, as the developers want players to have a distinctly different experience each time a new character develops with a different profession.) The example shown was Wizard Oil, which adds +24 spell damage to a weapon for 30 minutes. Five doses of Wizard Oil require three illusion dusts and two firebloom herbs.
Nexus crystals will be a new high level component disenchanted from high-end epic raid gear. It was felt that disenchanting extremely nice raid gear and just getting a large brilliant shard wasn’t special enough and was a big let-down compared to someone being able to use the epic loot. New extremely powerful enchantments will require nexus crystals as a component.
The enchanting interface will also be overhauled in either the 1.9 or 1.10 patch.
Cooking will also receive some tweaks in the 1.9 patch, but a substantial overhaul and improvement of the secondary skill is not in the immediate future.
Specializations for tailoring and alchemy will be available next year, probably in the Burning Crusade expansion. Although the specializations are not yet finalized, alchemy at this point is set to get elixer, potion and transmutation specializations.
The new expansion will also add the jewelcrafting profession, which will allow players to make magical rings and necklaces, crowns and jewelcrafter-only trinkets, as well as socketable items and gems that fit into sockets to allow players to customize items, similar to how Diablo II items can be improved or how augments work in EverQuest I.
Sockets do not compete with enchantments, though — although not every item will have a socket, mostly items in the Burning Crusade expansion — it will be an extra “slot” along with the current temporary enchantment and permanent enchantments every weapon and many items can have applied to them.
The bottomless bag recipe — which Mercer stressed is a “world drop” that can drop from nearly any high level NPC, and not just Baron Rivendare in Stratholme — is not likely to become much more common, but at some point, more large bags will be entering the game, including some bigger than the current 18 slot limit.
Mercer and Dodd also gave some hints about the two new Ahn’Qiraj dungeons in Silithus, which will be added in the 1.9 patch: Zul’Gurub style armor quests, with multiple drops being useful for multiple classes, will be present for both zones and there will be upgrades to existing spells available in one or both of the dungeons.
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Nice reporting. Thank you for making this information available to those who weren’t able to attend. This is the first place I have seen some of this information.
Comment by William — October 31, 2005 @ 9:08