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Well that got me thinking what other new features will be in the next expansion for WOW. After many years of playing one MMO or another and always coming back to WOW their have been a few things which i think you will see in WOW in the next expansion.

The first of these is something, which I would bet a very large sum of money, will be in the next expansion of wow PUBLIC QUESTS. What is a public quest you ask. Well let me tell you its a quest which is on a timer and can be run multiple times back to back. Which you can do solo or with a group and is in a area of a zone and when you walk into it you are part of the quest and when you walk out you are not part of the quest. The end result of being part of these public quests is the game has you working with other players without you knowing it adding to the social aspect of the game also giving you a chance to gear up without instances or raids. Its the future. Trust me!

The second of the new features which I believe you will see in WoW are 2 new professions now a lot of people think that wood working or something to do with wood will be a new profession. Sounds like they have a problem to me, but here is my take on it a Rune Tattoo profession. Matched with a gathering profession, Rune Tatooing would add new looks to your character and also give a buff to the stats of your character. Wait a minute their you say! “We already have enchanting in the game to buff our gear stats.” Well this is true but this new profession would buff the character directly and not the gear.

The third and final of these new items I think we will see in a new expansion is more customization of our characters. If Blizzard continues the trend of all gear looking the same as you level, and all of the gear looks the same, they should have to add the ability for us as the player base the change the color composition of the gear so it gives us the chance to look a little different from everyone.

In closing, this is all speculation, but some of these are features already incorporated in other games. Blizzard seems to be trending towards catering to the cutesy, unique, social, fun and casual. And, changes like these would do more to foster the trend we are already seeing.

Vars

Many tanks defend their class at all costs. There has always been unwritten competition among the tanking classes. Tanks all take their jobs very seriously and because there is only one main tank per raid, they are highly respected positions. The other day when WoW.com posted on the ridiculous upcoming PVE competition between Ensidia and Method whose picture did they use? It was Kungen’s, the tank of Ensidia. The same tank who Michael Sacco commented on in the podcast just a few weeks ago.

Now though the lines are a bit more blurred. There are many different ways to distinguish the tanks, but the easiest is shield or no shield. Like most druids, The Big Bear Butt is notorious for saying, “I tank with my face.” Druids have always been robbed of avoidance stats like parry and additional mitigation stats like block. Because of this, they were great off tanks in TBC but unable to tank boss encounters without praying the RNG didn’t hit them with consecutive crushing blows. The introduction of the death knight and the removal of crushes leveled the tanking playing field for all 4 classes, but the shield bearers were left behind because the one mechanic they used to their advantage, block, was deemed practically obsolete.

Warriors, after their golden age of TBC, were left out. Paladins could still keep up because in the new age of AoE, no other tank, not even the death knight could hold quite so many mobs with so little effort as the paladin and their beloved Consecration. We do know death knights and druids are the hard mode tanks because of the massive health pools though.

Warriors and paladins have now found a new alliance with each other. Their glorious shields which were the physical embodiment of the shielding they performed as tanks have become trash and little more than cosmetic additions to their in game appearance. Sure they provide stats and boost your armor, but as GC has noted before, block is epic phail in its current state.

Today in the Warrior Q&A, we were given a little more insight into the direction of block.

The overall message is block sucks. Block is going to see improvements. Block is likely to end up with a percentage reduction and not a value reduction, and warriors and paladins better not expect to block (as in the number of blows that are blocked) as much as they do now.

This is a good direction. Strength can still be tied to block, but it can be seen as a more valuable tanking stat than it is now. I don’t know much about warriors, but I don’t believe they are able to boost their threat stats with a survivability stat like a paladin does through Touched by the Light, so any attempt to allow a stat to boost threat and not compromise a tanks main focus of staying alive would be a welcome change for them.

I have commented not once, not twice, but three times on improving strength for all of the plate wearers and I hope that for the sake of shield bearers across all the realms, they start with how it impacts block.

The first reason is stupid and/or cosmetic. I like the way a tree looks when it casts. A little tree running with all those buffoons throwing his hands up in the air to heal them because they are too dumb not to get hurt illustrates the healer mentality in ways only a healer can understand. We all know that when dealing with arrogant DPS who can’t avoid unnecessary splash damage, we all respond the same way, “hey, look, I can’t heal stupid.” Have any doubts? Hop over to plusheal and read the signatures of the players who swarm that site. Every good healer revels in their own ability because it’s often the only glory we get. Some of us are so confident in our ability, we often blame the entire raid for wipes when our gear is broken and heals are hitting for pathetically sad amounts, just ask Stompalina.

From a lore perspective, I have never understood why a druid can call upon the forces of nature to turn himself into a tree, but can’t use that same power while a tree to pop a wrath in someone’s ass. I don’t think ToL druids are asking for an entire arsenal of damage spells while in tree form. What I do think is druids are asking for an ability or 2 to serve as filler when we are healing and there are downtimes. Please understand we are talking about 5 mans, or when the raid is on farm. Keeping up HoTs, allowing lifeblooms to explode, and maintaining the overall feel of druid healing is not the complaint of the community; we like those things and if we didn’t, we’d roll a shaman or priest or paladin. We just want to be able to defend ourselves in Violet Hold when we draw Zuramat and happen to get void shifted. I am hoping that the GC response doesn’t mean they are planning on changing the overall feel of ToL.

Remember that healers aren’t setting up DPS rotations. In a PVE environment, druids are looking to do things like shock the boss, make a judgement every now and then, or spout a word and bring the pain. Don’t make the ToL problem bigger than it already is. Let druids use their balance spells while in ToL. They aren’t going to hit as hard because they aren’t propped up with all the talents a balance druid has at their disposal. Is it really so game changing to allow a tree cast a moonfire or starfire during healing downtime?

Please GC, don’t make the ToL solution more complex than the problem.

Eric Heimburg has an excellent post on who’s running WoW and what it means for the community over at eldergame, and though I agree with him on many of the points, when you examine his perspective on working on the B team and the current state of WoW, I am positive the game is better off for it.

His comments on the “human equation” are dead on. When I first started playing a paladin, about halfway through TBC, I found that gearing up for endgame was not for the feint of heart. It required balancing your spellpower with your defense all the while boosting your avoidance to stay uncrushable and then finding every possible way to sneak in some stamina.

I have always thought good paladins in TBC were self deprecating mathematicians in real life. As a paladin, you wanted to prove you could reach all of your numbers and you wanted to do it smugly while every warrior with a shield and prot spec could basically jump into endgame. Sites like maintankadin, tankadin, and tankspot are all indispensable resources for the paladin now, but they were required in TBC.

The great irony here though is that once a paladin geared up, tanking was the notorious “ZOMFG EZMODE” other tanks often scoff at. We could practically run through shattered halls rounding up pack after pack and as long as you had a good healer, you were indestructible. Compare that to warriors who, as I mentioned before, could jump into endgame on a whim. The best warrior tanks weren’t always in the best gear, sometimes they were just starting out but knew the nuances and mechanics of their class to make them great tanks.

As Heimburg pointed out, many of us wear our class weaknesses like a badge of honor, but those badges do little for the massive player base.

In fact, they tend to hurt the classes that need them because for every 1 person that researched their class, gears up appropriately, and blows some proverbial socks off with their talent, I’d say there are hundreds of people giving the class a bad name.

This is where the now infamous “B Team” has answered the call. Like Heimburg, I don’t think the classes will ever be balanced, and I laugh every time I hear any developer use the term.

Rossi has had some posts recently about the itemization problem for shaman, and he’s right, but the itemization problem is not the itemization nightmare it was in vanilla WoW when the A Team was in charge.

Hybrid was synonymous with heal and the tier sets proved it. Need proof? Look at The Ten Storms, the Judgement Armor, the Stormrage Raiment, or the Vestments of Transcendence. Remember that these were sets that didn’t have tokens so you had to run BWL over and over and over and hope that it was your time for drops. The game has made exponential improvements since vanilla, and though I have serious issues with the great AoE patch of 2008, it wasn’t all bad. Healers weren’t left looking for one specific drop with +healing, paladin tanks weren’t banging their head against the wall for a certain weapon as an upgrade from their starting tank piece, and the Hybrid Tax was ruled unconstitutional by the powers that be.

Are the reactionary issues that Heimburg hit on plaguing Azeroth in ways that the Lich King himself would be jealous? Absolutely! Am I likely to hit on some of them within the next few days? With the Druid Q&A up, you can bet your ass, but like a certain political figure asked in the 1980 presidential race, I will ask you, “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” Unlike 1980, I’m pretty sure most of us can say, without reservation, we are.

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