Here are my predictions and plans for Blizzcon. I mentioned some of them on the last Monk Meditation show.
Predictions for next expansion
- I really hope we return to alien planets, like Draenor/Outland. I love the far-out impossible imagery, bright weapons, and fighting the Legion. I think MoP was a good chance to take us away from a big villain and explore, but I’d like to focus on a big bad again.
Items - More dynamic and free-form zones like Timeless Isle and Northern Barrens. These areas showed a lot of promise, though they’re not quite there yet. I think Blizzard will be able to greatly improve on these areas for the next expansion.
- New race or class? I expect that a new race is likely, but not a new class. It’s also possible that we’ll just get upgraded models (which I am all for). I wouldn’t be against some alien or demon races. I love the draenei for being so untraditional so more in that vein would be nice.
Predictions for Mechanics Changes
- Changes to capped stats (hit, exp). I don’t know what, but I think something will happen.
- Changes or removal of dodge and parry. Personally, I don’t think dodge and parry need to be removed, but they need to have non-passive effects, and even better if those effects are specialization-unique. For example, crit is exciting for Brewmasters not only because of the first effect, increasing your damage by increasing your chance to crit, but is also exciting because it gives us procs of Elusive Brew. Those secondary effects make you feel smart for gearing for them, and I think dodge and parry could benefit from those. I also expect all tanks to move closer to the dps-tank paradigm, at least as far as gearing goes.
- There have been some hints at changing the upgrade process, especially reforging. I hope they don’t remove reforging totally because I love being able to customize my gear on a fight-by-fight basis. Most specs don’t have the option of choosing between multiple gearing strategies like Brewmasters do, though.
- Wish list: Meaningful tradeoff between damage and active mitigation. Current “trade off” is the choice of using Blackout Kick / Purify or Breath of Fire, which only ever becomes an interesting decision in AoE situations. This goes for all tanks, where a skill was initially designed to be a resource-dump and dps tradeoff but it never really took off.
- Wish list: Moving away from “dps” tanks. In my perfect world, I’d like tanks to contribute only a little dps and to focus on survival first. Though that’s not an opinion shared by most so I don’t expect much.
- Some possible pruning of our skills: No more Avert Harm, Clash, etc.
Blizzcon Itself
- I will be an excellent wallflower at the WoWInsider party, though I’m not sure about other parties. Maybe if I have extra spoons.
- I’ll be at all the WoW panels, likely by myself (my boyfriend will patiently sit next to me for the first one or two WoW things before getting bored and finding the Diablo stuff) and wearing my spirit animal hoodie (it’s a bear with sunglasses).
- I have blue and purple hair. In normal company, this makes me stand out. But this is a gaming con, where every woman and her dog have colorful locks so I don’t expect anyone to recognize me in that manner.
