Category Archives: hero-class

The Queue: Digital aspirin

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Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

As I write this, it's 1:00 a.m., it's hailing outside, and I'm awake with a skull-shattering headache. I could be asleep, but I love all of you too much to leave you Queueless. So here I am.

Today we'll discuss love, hero classes, WoW Insider raiders, and more.

Rai asked:

What is love?

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The Queue: Digital aspirin originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Queue: Hard mode is hard

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mat McCurley will be your host today.

Ow. Ow, ow, ow. The pain, oh, the pain of it all. Heroics, my friends, are hard. Trash is hard, the bosses are hard, and my spirit was jostled from its happy Wrath of the Lich King foundations. Images of Shadow Labs darted through my mind. Heroic Mechanar called to me. Remember me, it spoke, remember me and weep the tears of a thousand failed runs. You are mine, it would proclaim. You have returned to the unhappy peninsula of the soul.

No, really, heroics are hard. I expect some tuning, but on the whole, there are challenges ahead for us in Cataclysm. On the one hand, I'm excited. I like challenge! On the other hand, I will never use the dungeon finder tool again. No offense.

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The Queue: Hard mode is hard originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Will WoW ever have a ‘DPS to heal’ model?

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We were just talking about it on today's podcast (thrill to the sound of three people barely awake trying to coherently discuss World of Warcraft) and hey, look, Ghostcrawler reads my mind from across the interwebs. Well, okay, no, he responded to a forum thread, but it's still interesting. Yes, interesting enough that I'm going to replicate the post here before discussing it. I am out of control, a renegade, I should hand in my posting badge and keyboard.

Ghostcrawler - Re: What's wrong with an Active Mana Regen Model?
I'm not sure we'd ever do a "deal damage to heal" model. It might work for new classes, but feels like a big change to existing classes that players know and love.

Having choices to get mana back is good. Standing around to regen mana is bad.

However, we still ultimately need a way that healers who are playing badly, trying to keep alive an undergeared / underskilled tank, or just tackling content that they're not yet ready for, can run out of mana to the extent that the encounter is over.


Personally, I hope that 'it might work for new classes' statement means we'll finally get something like a Warhammer Warrior Priest. I'm still jazzed from seeing Diablo III's version of the Monk and I'd be thrilled if they created a cloth wearing, staff wielding, spirit and intellect utilizing melee healer. I'm sad that they've ruled it out for any current classes (man, it would rock for paladins in my opinion and would single handedly make me like that class) but I'm very hopeful we'll be monking it up in an expansion or two.

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Will WoW ever have a 'DPS to heal' model? originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tom Chilton retrospective interview on Wrath of the Lich King

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There's an excellent interview with Tom Chilton, the World of Warcraft lead game designer, up on GameInformer. Lots of stuff we've heard before, but there are some interesting talking points. For example:
  • They are looking into extending the dungeon finder to 10-man content.
  • Chilton hinted that we may see a new boss in the Ruby Sanctum before Cataclysm launches
  • They have a "general philosophical approach of getting the hybrids to where they're close to the DPS classes when it comes to DPS roles. Otherwise, those specs just turn into joke specs."
  • They feel warlocks could use a boost to their DPS.
  • Tol Barad, the Cataclysm equivalent to Wintergrasp, will be more of a Isle of Quel'Danas style daily quest hub instead of a farming zone.
  • Before settling on death knights for Wrath of the Lich King's hero class, they specifically debated necromancers and rune-masters.
  • They feel that with all the accessibility work they did on end game PvE in Wrath, end game PvP has become harder to get into by comparison.
It's a three page interview, so click through to read the whole thing! What really struck me reading this was that comment about hybrid DPS compared to pure. This "hybrid tax" concept has been harped on by posters on the official forums for a long time now, and this is a fairly straightforward way of putting it.

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Tom Chilton retrospective interview on Wrath of the Lich King originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Queue: Puppies

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

Puppies. Puppies.


Aliceness asked ...

"Where might Blizzard go in terms of (maybe) implementing a new class for the next expansion? What kind of class haven't we seen?"

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The Queue: Puppies originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Cataclysm were to include a new class, what would it be?

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This morning I want to play the hypothetical game a bit and talk about what would happen if Cataclysm included a new class. Not only what it would be, but how it would fit into the overall balance of WoW. And just to be clear, there won't be a new class in Cataclysm. Numerous Blizzard employees have stated that doing one new class an expansion would be too much work (paraphrased, don't go complain to your favorite blue that this was a direct quote).

The Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King was the first class introduced to WoW, and it's inclusion in the game has had mixed reviews. Most folks agree that the class provided a great new element to play in the game, however its balance in raids and PvP is something that is constantly under the microscope. Ghostcrawler has mentioned numerous times that the Death Knight has taken up more time to balance in Wrath than any other class. This is problematic for numerous reasons, but has been able to be handled nicely by the designers and programmers (I'm sure there'll be some who disagree, however show some restraint in your disagreement).

So now for the hypothetical part -- if Blizzard were to introduce a new class in Cataclysm, I would suspect that it would be the healing counterpart to the Death Knight. Mechanics of the class would probably operate similar to the Death Knight's rune system: each small heal or heal over time would be castable based on an available rune, which would in turn generate runic power for larger heals. The class would rely less on spam type heals (such as the Paladin, to some extent), and more on preventative heals (such as the Druid, to some extent).

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If Cataclysm were to include a new class, what would it be? originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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