BlizzCon 2013/WoW Q & A About Almost Everything panel

This page is a summary of the World of Warcraft Q and A about almost everything panel.

Questions and Answers

Blizzard Developer Panel: J. Allen Brack (JAB), Tom Chilton (TC), Ion Hazzikostas (IH), Dave Kosak (DK), Cory Stockton (CS), Greg Street (GS); WoWWiki: Tankingmage

Part 1

1. Fan says: Will Garrisons be in the wow armoury app?
   Tom Chilton (TC): No current plans, it's not ruled out though.
2. Fan says: How many people can be in your Garrison, are there any plans for friends to access your Garrison whilst your offline?
   TC: No mechanics for friends to be their whilst offline. No plans right now, it's a nice idea. We are planning for co-operative gameplay.
3. Fan says: How many friends can be there?
   TC: Raids, 40 or whatever (sorry server programmers!)
4. Fan says: Is anything happening with Magni?
   Dave Kosak (DK): Maybe, we're focussing on Moira, and the council of three hammers, there will be some more Dark Iron's in the next expansion. A little taste of dwarves (delicious, delicious dwarves)
5. Fan says: Pre Mists of Pandaria, you said Garrosh is the last boss, do you know who the last boss is in Warlords of Draenor? Can you tell us please?
   TC: Grommash Hellscream
   DK: Whaaaat? :O
6. Fan says: So we can kick both Hellscream's ass? :D 
   TC: That's right
7. Fan says: There are several zones where you meet Garrosh Hellscream, as he isn't warchief anymore will he be updated to Vol'Jin? Also is there an Emerald Dream on Draenor and other planets?
   DK: 2 Good Questions. Emerald Dream is an Azeroth creation, as for updating old content that's pretty resource intensive, we'll leave that how it is. You're really playing the game as it was in Cataclysm and experiencing those events. In other expansions we move the content forward. 
   Ion Hazzikostas (IH): You're playing each expansion as it was then, in their own time bubble. We want to keep that intact, for people to play through as it always was.
8. Fan says: In Duskwood there's an area called Beggar's haunt, it's also called Night's hollow in the artbook, there's a lot of art for it, was it meant for anything?
   DK: We don't have any plans to use it for that, we often create a lot of awesome art, we don't always get to use it much, it's a cool area, but we don't have plans for it
9. Fan says: Are there going to be any major pet battles system?
   Cory Stockton (CS): Adding more new pets in Draenor, new trainers to battle against, pet stables in garrisons (unique trainers there with epic pet battles?)

Part 2

1. Fan says: What is the likelihood of adding more character customizations?
   Chris Robinson (CR): It's a comparison of cost and reward, we'll definitely be looking at it in the future
2. Fan says: Are we going to see Wration in WoD?
   DK: I love Wrathion, do you like Wrathion? (mild cheering) I think he played a great role in Pandaria, he might take a break, he might have a cameo, but not as big of a role as he had in MoP.
3. Fan says: So he won't be the final boss?
   DK: Grommash will ride him into battle! (Audience laughs)
4. Fan says: Will healing be less smart healing focussed, like it was in The Burning Crusade? Especially with the reduction of 25 to 20 man raids.
   IH: Smart healing has got out of hands to an extent, we want to keep some place for those. We're exploring making smart healers a little less smart, whilst keeping functionality.
5. Fan says: So that's a yes?
   IH: Yes!
   TC: That's an Ian yes
6. Fan says: 10 man raiding, you've changed it to 20 man, that's not necessarily a problem. Is there any solutions you can give me? What options do I have and what hope do I have? Recruit or find a new guild? What solutions?
   IH: It can happen over time, as players resub/gear. (Long term interests). Do we keep 10 or 25 man, or focus more on making the content?
   TC: Plus the group finder will find you 10 new best friends).
7. Fan says: How do you plan to keep players from getting too much of one stat. For example 25% speed increase gives advantages on raiding.
   Greg Street (GS): They won't be easily farmable, you'll have to farm for a long time.
   TC: It's similar to war forge I don't think that players have the expectation that they're going to get that.
8. Fan says: with the addition of these, will you remove war forge gear? 
   TC: No.
   IH: The odds of seeing armour with a better tertiary stat will be more interesting overall with more ways to interact with your items.
9. Fan says: For people with many alts can they have them as followers for their garrisons?
   CS: We haven't thought about this, but it sounds cool! We need a solution to deal with the fact that garrisons are unique and not account wide, we need something to help you make a garrison on your alt. We're not far enough along the development stage to talk about that yet. However we could include something like their name and gear, it could be awesome.
10. Fan says: I've always found the Titan's story very fascinating. Can you say anything about that? Will we see this in the next expansion, or will it have it's own expansion?
    DK: It's an interesting storyline, the Titan's went to Draenor, but they weren't there for long, they didn't leave a huge mark. There won't be much Titan lore next expansion, but they're the opposite of the Burning Legion, so we will see more Titan stuff in the future.
11. Fan says: I love your cutting the extras, but how am I supposed to feel rewarded when I have to go back and get a heroic gemmed warforged weapon? 
    GS: The plan is to give it a long tale. You'll get a basic item, and upgrade it.
12. Fan says: Thanks for the fire! (asks about balancing through racials)
    IH: There is balancing to be done there, we want players to choose races they like, not because of damage output.

Part 3

1. Fan says: I love how much Draenei lore there will be in the next expansion, but the question is when will we see the same for gnomes?
   DK: We can't win! You guys have been saying Where's the Draenei stuff, and we give you the Draenei stuff, and then it's about where's the gnomes. What about Chromie we gave you Chromie? We had Gnomeregan in Cataclysm, but maybe next.
   TC: Many of us are fans of gnomes, it's about getting the right time.
   GS: Blood Gnomes confirmed
2. Fan says: How many healers are you expecting to be running in the new format?
   IH?: 18! 6 healers is considered a baseline for 25 man raid, and you'll probably see 5 with 20 man. You may see 3 or 4 in cutting edge mythic progression kills where you need as much dps as possible. One of the advantages of having a fixed raid size is implementing mechanics that we may have had to discard because they couldn't scale down. Anything that requires a class specific ability such as Enslave Demon or Spellsteal we couldn't use as we couldn't assume you had the class but in 20 man mode there are a lot more possibilities.
3. Fan says: Will there be more events throughout the old world such as 'hey look there's a barn on fire let's see if I can help'? 
   DK: We love dynamic content, it would be awesome to put that in the old world, we need to juggle our old content. Not in the immediate future. 
   TC: Any hour spent on the old stuff is another hour longer to give you the new stuff.
4. Fan says: I play a mage, can I change the colour of my evocation, a glyph or something? 
   IH: No specific plans, but it's the kind of thing we've done and certainly a cool idea for us to use in the future.
5. Fan says: Are bonus roles continuing in 6.0?
   TC: Yes, we're still figuring out what you're going to need to do to get the bonus roles, we generally like the idea of having some control of saying 'I want an extra shot of loot on this boss'
6. Fan says: As a follow up, how does the bonus role actually work right now? 
   IH: (Jokingly) We have a guy in an office that pushes a button when you get an extra roll. He just pushes no all the time, he has a drinking bird on the button for when he goes to take a break. We have a system in place, we don't want to give too many of the details. If you get more in LFR, it doesn't hurt your chances of getting heroic loot. If someone says I used 15 bonus rolls in a role on the forum and didn't get any bonus loot they're officially lying. They're lying trust me.
   TC: Exaggerating!
   IH: Lying!
7. Fan says: Will we get pet battles on mobile devices?
   CS: We've put some thought into that, as to how we'd let pvp battles happen on a mobile device. We've got some ideas, it's certainly a desire.
   GS: Half life 3 confirmed
8. Fan says: Have you thought about adding servers for previous expansions as they were then?
   J. Allen Brack: No! And you don't want that either, you think you do, but you don't. Remember when you had to spam cities saying need a tank need a tank need a tank in the burning crusade days? Now you just push a button that says go to the dungeon. Remember that one bug that really pissed you off two years ago? Still there in the past.
9. Fan says: What's with celestial dragons? They're not celestial, they're not dragons. They show up, what's going on there? 
   DK: That's an excellent question, what are celestial dragons? I think the Titan's showed up and did something there.
   Developer: We need to get you a red shirt (laughs)
   DK: I don't think we have any official lore about them, they are tools that the Titan's were using. Honestly, primarily they look really bitchin', that's the main reason they're there, well done Chris.

Part 4

1. Fan says: With reforging gone, who will replace the reforger?
   Developer: That question came up almost immediately, we just talked about that, one idea was 'transmog'. 
   JAB?: Were you guys designing at BlizzCon? Please don't do that!
   GS: we were pretty sober
   JAB: you say that now
   CS: For a short period
   IH: It was over lunch 2 hours ago
   GS: What do you want on the yacht?
   Audience: Various suggestions, incoherent.
   JAB: You know what you sound like? (Gibberish)
   TC: I think they said a flask vendor
   GS: Vanilla servers on the yacht? That's what I heard confirmed
2. Fan says: The Alliance and Horde crest, the Alliance crest is a lion but there are no lions in the eartern kingdoms whatsoever. So where did they come up with that?
   TC: Well Uther Pendragon's crest had lions and there were none of those in England were there? (cheeky grin) Burn.
   TC: Now Tom needs the red shirt
3. Fan says: The other thing was about the horde crest, is it a naaru?
   CS: We'd need to ask Chris
   CR: We need a bucket of red shirts to hand out to everybody
4. Fan says: With tertiary and secondary stats, will these morph when I spec change, if I like to play multiple roles?
   TC: We're still experimenting with this stuff, there's a long way to go before we finalize. A lot of the details, we'll probably morph some before its goes live. It's a very legit concern.
5. Tankingmage (WoWWiki) says: (A wild female Orc with purple hair and engineering glasses appears! <3 ~Tankingmage).
   With warlords of draenor bringing up the past again, would you possibly consider the old warcraft games being available to play again on a modern computer?
   Audience: (applauses)
   CR: We have a few guys on our team working to do something like that, in some form or fashion. We're fans of Warcraft 1/2/3 and we'd like to replay those games for sure.
6. Fan says: So I was wondering about the garrisons, will they be in pre determined locations? In one slide I noticed the dance studio.
   Developers: (Denying it while smirking and laughing.) That's ridiculous!
   CS: The garrisons will be in pre determined locations. Within the pre determined area you can move the buildings to how you want them. We have the positions in really awesome locations. If we allowed players to choose any position players would put it say at the entrance to Blackrock Foundry.
7. Fan says: When the Dark Portal turns red how do you get from Draenor to old Outland? 
   TC: You're trapped there forever. So if you want to get to Outland. We've talked about that, one way may be to go through the caverns of time. We will give you a way to go there
8. Fan says: In Dawn of the Aspects we saw a great variety of proto drakes and their abilities. (Asks about current state of Dragons and their brethren?)
   DK: The evolution hasn't been ironed out. I believe we have a printed book coming out that will go into more detail on that.
9. Fan says: Mr. Greg Street, on behalf of the entire hunter community. Where is eyes of the beast? It was the coolest feature!
   GS: Confusing players etc, the code was removed so it would take a lot of work to put it back in. Great question, there has been a lot of want for that from the hunter community.
10. Fan says: Why would you want to pay to realm transfer anymore? 
    CR: Increase player interactivity between realms, still maintaining community feel.
    TC: Being in the same guild
11. Fan says: The Horde took a pretty big hit, lore wise...
    Developer: Lore hit? (laughs)

Part 5

1. Fan says: So are you going to do to even that out? The Alliance is super strong. What are the Horde going to do to get back to that level? Maybe absorb some of the Iron Horde after we're done with them.
   TC: They can faction change to Alliance. 
   JAB?: That sounds like a good thing to be on the back of the yacht, they can faction change to Alliance.
   DK: The Horde is going to go back and really redefine itself. I think the Horde is going to come back from this with a stronger core, we'll see this over the course of Draenor.
2. Fan says: (Asks about community feel in 10 man)
   IH: We have settled on 20 player content. We understand that it will be a difficult transition. (Apologises).
   TC: You could also get really slow computers and just play heroic
3. Fan says: World PvP aspect has gone down, you have massively highly populated servers in Horde and Alliance. I understand you're doing the sandbox, but what about the whole World PvP aspect.
   TC: There were no battlegrounds and the old days, we put in the honor system, there was no where else to do it, so World PvP happened. We're going to focus on the world pvp zone that we're creating, and making it a fun place to go where you want to have world pvp action. I don't think we can get the Southshore/Tarren Mill aspect back.
4. Fan says: Will you make any new hairstyles with the model changes?
   CR: We do have a backlog of hairstyles, we will add these things.
5. Fan says: There wasn't a lot with the ones you showed up yesterday, so are there any more than that?
   CR: Every single hair style is going to be redone. Someone ask about quivers and stuff please, I've got an answer for you.
6. Fan says: The garrisons kind of satisfy to secondary production profession, however what are the limits of that? I build a black smith shop, can he make me epic weapons?
   CS: We're planning on letting you find recipes through the missions. You can send your Blacksmith on black smithing weapons. It's just a matter of trying to balance that out, we need to make sure that the Blacksmith still feels valued outside your Garrison.
7. Fan says: Any chance we could get a more Diablo like transmog system, where you can use it across all your characters and don't keep the item in the bank anymore? 
   TC: It's something we'd like to do, we have an idea for a collection system. We probably won't be able to finish this for the time Warlords of Draenor comes out, but it is on our minds.
8. Fan says: Are we going to be seeing Alleria Windrunner and Turalyon again? 
   DK: They're not on Draenor right now, but we do have plans for them. You'll definitely see them again. 
   GS: Final boss confirmed (jokingly)
   Audience: (laughs)
   DK: On the yacht!
9. Fan says: Do you plan on increasing the cap for Real ID?
   CR: Are you saying you have hundreds of friends?
   Fan says: Yeah, I'm always being added on RealID. If the WoW armoury app has a way of contacting those friends so that we can meet up with them for BlizzCon.
10. Developers: Thanks everyone!

See also

• BlizzCon 2013: WoWWiki's interview with John LaGrave