BlizzCon: Rob Pardo talks WoW classes, up to level 70
Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo presented an overview of the classes in the World of Warcraft, addressed questions about what raising the level cap to 70 in the Burning Crusade expansion would mean for characters and fielded audience questions Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
For starters, he noted that on “normal” servers, players with level 60 characters respecced their talents an average of 2.8 times. On player-versus-player servers, the average was 3.6 times.
With the understanding that talents are important to players, Pardo said that they would be extending the talent trees up 10 points, so that players would have to choose between putting their additional 10 points in previously available talents, or going after new 41 point abilities.
But those won’t be the only new abilities player characters will be getting: Look for new types of abilities or spells between 60 and 70 — “probably four or five new spells, per character class” — and in time, the team would be going back and adding more new abilities between 40 and 60.
Also look for more racial differentiation within a class, similar to how priests have a special spell based on their race.
Paladins wanting a break from buffing, buffing, buffing on raids will be able to buff all the members of a class at once on a raid in the 1.9 patch.
Fire mages concerned about the high fire resistance on many current raid targets (although Pardo said fire resistance wouldn’t be an issue in the next two raid dungeons added to the game, the Ruins of Ahn’Quiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj) have some help coming in the form of the Spell Penetration ability on equipment, which will allow a spellcaster a better chance of penetrating an enemy’s spell resistances.
And Invisibilty, a spell that was removed from mages during the beta test, will be coming back in a significantly altered form as a post-60 spell in the Burning Crusade expansion.
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Nothing more specific about the paladins? 🙂
Comment by Lomai — October 30, 2005 @ 20:35
He said that they were designed as one of the easiest classes to get into, since the holy warrior archetype would be appealing to Warcraft III fans, they assumed.
This has, of course, turned into “ha ha, you play the easy class” on the forums, but he really meant it more as it wasn’t as complicated as, say, warlocks. Different styles of play for different players and all that.
Comment by Beau — October 30, 2005 @ 20:41