No Realms, Horizontal Progression & Reitemization?! WoW Forever Deep Dive

Now to get us started, please help me welcome to the stage someone who needs very little introduction to this show. Our senior designer and narrative point of WoW Forever, Josh Greenfield, or as you know him, >> woo, >> a one of the good ones. That's one of the good ones right there. That's one of the good ones. >> Hello, Blizzcon. Did you guys have a great day one? >> We did. >> I know I did. All right. I don't know about you guys, but I'm super excited to get to talk to you about some of the fine details on how some of the systems in WoW Forever are going to work. So, let's jump right into it. Picture this. You're adventuring in the wilderness and run into another player in your on your factions. This is an encounter you should be happy to have. Sure, sometimes that other player may beat you to an herb node or mining node or maybe attack the same mob you're about to attack. But a core foundation of WoW Forever is serendipitous interactions. Serendipitous interactions are the foundations of making friends in online games. So, how do we make meeting strangers serendipitous? In WoW Forever, we've reimagined the simple cooking fire to support these types of interactions. Your cooking fire has now become the basic campfire. Placing a campfire creates a camp site. >> I don't know who >> that allows you and other players to rest and gain benefits such as vendors, repairs, trade skill workspaces, and most importantly, buffs that last one out. Sometimes it's important to just slow down a bit and just take it easy. So, in order to gain your buffs, you'll need to slash sit by the campfire for a few moments until you're ready for adventure. A basic campfire allows up to three special crafted objects to be placed at the camp by players. Each player can place one object, and each trade skill has different objects they can place for a unique buff or utility learned at different skill levels. For example, blacksmiths can place a sharpening wheel that increases strength. Tailor can place a faction banner that increases spirit. And herbalists can place an incense candle that increases intellect. All of these are variants of and exclusive with buffs provided normally by classes such as a paladin's blessing of might or a mage's arcane intellect. The first objects are learned at only 20 skill points. More advanced objects can be learned via blueprint recipes you'll need to find in your adventures. All of these objects add more depth and purpose to trade skills in WoW forever. >> Overall, we've been having a ton of fun with camping as we've been testing internally and we can't wait to arrive in Elwin Forest or Durar and see people sitting around the fire getting ready for battle. So, on the topic of trade, this is an area that has been given a massive amount of love in wild forever. >> Even outside of what I just described with the camping edition, there are over 600 new recipes across all professions and level ranges. >> Wow. Okay. >> Okay. In addition, many existing recipes have been overhauled in some way. Even at low levels, you will feel the impact of your profession choice in a meaningful way, and you'll be excited to continue to level your professions as you go. >> As a compliment to camping, cooking and food have also received a substantial overhaul. Almost all crafted food will give some form of a of a stat boost as well as a small XPa. This means you'll always want to go into battle >> well prepared and wellfed. >> We want trade skills to become an important part of your progression in WoW forever. And we are planning to continually add new recipes, materials, and crafted items to the game as the game continues to evolve. So next let's talk about transmogrification. As Clay said, not controversial at all. >> So not question. >> Trans hog is an important tool for those who want to show off their accomplishments or express their character in a particular way. However, we recognize that this system is not for everyone. Many players appreciate seeing their gear progression and others reflected in how they actually appear. So, we've done a lot of work to allow you to engage with the system as little or as much as you'd like. Thus, we're allowing you to choose to opt out of the system in a few different ways. >> The first is simply speaking to an NPC and disabling transmog. >> You put it on vendor syndrome. What I say? Additionally, when you log into the game for the first time, you'll be left with a mode selector, and that has a a preset of a handful of settings, any of which you can reconfigure later. But if you select the classic mode, the visibility of other players transmod will be disabled as soon as you enter the game. The goal here is to allow you to play the game as if transmod does not exist at all, and you should be able to do just that. YEAH. >> SO, while giving you the ability to opt out of the system is a good first step, >> we do recognize that the collection aspect of transbond has an impact on the behavior of clicking what needed. >> Right? So, one thing we asked ourselves when designing this system is what happens if I go to Strathol and the mask of the unforgiven drops? It's It's a sweet looking leather helmet. It looks like a bandit mask. Anybody would be stoked to have it in their transm collection, right? Do I have to worry about someone who doesn't need that as an upgrade, but just wants it for the mod to roll against me? >> The short answer is no. Any bind on pickup uncommon or rare gear that drops in dungeons will grant its appearance to all eligible looters when it's quick. No, actually that is a good thing. So don't so don't pull your [ __ ] >> Actually that is a good thing. That is good. >> So this means that I was louder than mine. That's why >> never be worried that worried that that warrior is just going to roll for the mob. >> So there's no need to roll against anybody. Everybody just gets it. Everybody walks away happy. Um, >> for epic drops and raids, we do expect groups to have an organized system, but that's been the case in WoW for years. So, the appearance for epic items will be granted to the person who looted and binds the item only to preserve the uniqueness and prestige of epic appearances. So, for those who do want to fully engage with the system, the basic functionality should look pretty familiar if you've played WoW Midnight, uh, but with a few slightly more classic modifications and restrictions. Firstly, you may only transmog your gear to an item of the same type, so plate to plate or cloth to cloth. If you're a healer paladin and you're wearing like the robes of the exalted, you'll need another trans another cloth chest to transmog over that. However, to support this, we're adding the ability to select different armor appearance types per slot. So, you can customize a single saved outfit to have both, say, a pair of leather and male gloves in that outfit in case you get an upgrade out in the field that doesn't match what you're currently wearing. You will not be able to transmog highle items as a low-level player either. We want your silhouette to be relative to your level. Once you hit max level, however, all level restrictions are removed and any item in your collection that is valid to be used on your equipped items will be transmodled. The primary exception to this rule is the case of items like PvP gear that require certain conditions to be met such as rank. So you will need to have the rank required to transmog that item over your exist your equipped items. If you have the system itself disabled, you'll still be able to configure and display your own transmog just in case you want to do something like enable or disable your helm slot or your cloak. And additionally, if you have the system disabled, helm andcloak visibility of other players is not affected. This preserves the original WOW functionality of being able to hide your helm and cloak for yourself and others, regardless of if either party is opted out of the system or not. While we love transmob, it was important to us to make sure to be respectful to those who do not enjoy it and make its inclusion have as minimal impact as possible on the way they play and see the game. So, there is actually a lot more to transmog and this was just part of an overview of the system. We'll be talking about this more in the coming days and weeks and blog posts and other communications leading up to our launch. And so with that, I am going to hand it over to Anna Rosendez to talk about some of our server infrastructure and how you'll be playing with your friends in WoW Forever. And is great, too. She's one of the good ones, too. She is. She's one of the good ones. She's one of the good ones. >> Hi, everyone. I'm so honored to be here with you. I I I cannot even describe the feeling. This is a dream for me come true. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. Let's start with it. I am Anna Rosendez, lead software engineer for the W forever team and I'm here to talk to you about the new legacy system and some server updates. So, let's start with the legacy system. When Harker came out, we love the fact that there were so many people constantly leveling, going through the journey over and over again. The team got inspired by how lively the world felt and wanted to find new ways to reward you for going again in the journey, maybe without them facing the consequences of the daily like of so deadly of it. So, the legacy system was created as a way to make leveling outs more exciting to emphasize the journey over the destination. With this new system, you get to have new challenges you can complete to earn points for all of your characters. Each character can use these points to unlock new rewards in different and exciting ways, making each of your characters journeys more unique. So, let's first talk about the legacy points. You can earn points by completing legacy challenges across several categories that you can see on the screen back here. So let's look at a couple examples. For example, leveling a specific class. You have different milestones from level 25, 45, and 60. Another example is reaching a particular skill set like artisan engineering. So the goal of the earning these points isn't to force you to do something out of the ordinary, you know, like killing an enemy player while singing happy birthday or something like this. Yeah. The idea is that the system complements your existing journey and rewards the way that you already enjoy playing the game while maybe adding new challenges along the way. Okay, but what do I do with these points? Okay, let me introduce you the legacy trees. The starting trees are three uh professions, adventures, and resourcefulness. As you earn points, you'll be able to shape your journey through these trees and choose the path that best fits your play style. Let's look at an example of each of the different trees so you can get some idea. So, in the adventure tree, as you can see, we have well-rested. is uh quick increases how quickly you can rent race experience and increases the cap of the rested experience bar. Excellent for leveling all of your outs. An example in the professions tree you can see the path to full harvest that increases how many scarce materials you get from mining hering or skinning. And depending on the path you take, you can unlock some pretty exciting perks such as this perk. In the resource tree, you can find reagent economy where your class abilities no longer require reagents to make buffing easier. >> I think I think that's okay. >> Stay with me. Some of some of the more powerful perks like these ones are very deep in the trees. So, you're going to have to make some very tough choices. But you you have to have so many. >> What makes this system truly unique is that the points you earn are shared across all of your arts. Each character you have will be able to spend the same number of points in their own trees. Whether if you want to create lots of arts to earn as many points as possible or you really want to dive and maximize that particular character that you love, the choice is yours. So, at launch, the number of points are going to be capped, so you're only going to have 16 points to spend on your legacy trees. We didn't want people to feel pressure to have to do absolutely all of the challenges or for new players to feel like they have a very long way to catch up. That said, the number of points is cap, but to begin with, you can earn up to 65 points. um um even beyond that limit. But what do you do with those 65 points? Well, there's uh introducing now the legacy reward track um where here after you continue to create and get all of these challenges, you will be able to get some rewards like this one. This very cute little bear. I really want to get it. So, >> we're going to we're going to edit these. rewards are intended to be cosmetic or prestigebased and should not provide a competitive gameplay advantage at all. >> I do want to add another note about mounts in Burning Crusade. The offront cost of getting your mount shifted to the trainer cost and in Gu forever we are also making this change. >> Yeah. >> Um >> I think I think some of the legacy level stuff is okay. So, in the future, we're going to continue to add new challenges and new perks you can spend your points on, and you can imagine seeing things like maybe new perks in the existing trees >> or maybe completely new trees in the future. >> So, we can wait for you to get your hands on this system and discover all of the different ways to play with it. I know I already have some idea cooking and I will definitely have an army of als to help me shape my journey. So now moving up to the next topic something I'm really really excited about as an engineer especially uh server infrastructure. So I want to start with the story. Yes, let's go. you know, you know, passionate. But I want to start to share uh the first time that I played World of Warcraft. Uh I was really excited to start playing. I got this battle chest. I don't know if anyone also got that battle chest, but I was so excited. I come in. Yeah. I come into my house after a mountain of CDs and just like waiting for all of the updates to finish. I was finally in and ready to play. And the first thing I saw logging in was this realm by realm. I spent a good amount of me time trying to decide which realm to pick. I didn't want to make the wrong choice. Back then I was like what's artist? Who's that? I know better now. But luckily, I knew I wanted to play with my friends, and me being from Mexico, it narrowed our options down pretty quickly to Draari and Ragnaros. So, I called my friends and asked them, "Okay, where are we going?" And we decided to roll characters in Draari. I do want to do a quick shout out to all of my original Draari players. >> Who in the crowd? >> I hear you. Yes. Yeah. So, anyways, I jumped into the game. Um, I probably spent like 30 minutes perfecting my character's appearance and it took me less than 5 minutes to die. But you know what? That's a story for a different time. A few days later though, I was talking to another group of friends IRL and I told them, "Hey, I started playing well. Let's play together." And they told me they played in Ragnaros. So that was it. Infrastructure is a very good thing. It was not the same. So >> last feel weird. >> As we approach the development forever, we didn't just look at our own experiences. We look at the experiences of countless of other players like you. >> One of the trends we noticed in classic was that players naturally gravitated towards the same realms, creating these massive realms and potentially long cues. We get it. In big realms, you always have people to group up with a healthy economy. Someone that has the recipe for that item you really want at any time of the day. The challenge is that back in 2004, the same the game simply couldn't handle enormous numbers of players all logged in into the same realm at the same time. Since then, thanks to the incredible work of our engineering teams, we made huge improvements to the technology. And today, we can support far more players on a single realm than ever before. With that in mind, and living in a world that is more connected than ever, we decided to invest even further into helping players connect and play with each other. So, in Gu forever, you won't select the realm anymore because we're going round this. >> Wait, this wasn't announced yet. Oh, >> technology. We're doing it. >> This actually a huge change. Okay, that's actually super impressive. >> This is one of the things that this is one of the things that we're not putting everyone in one giant world. To start, instead of choosing a realm, you choose from one of the following rule sets. >> You know, it's very similar to the current classic offerings. You might want to choose normal or PVE as referred to in classic or some players. >> There's also >> in here you can focus on exploration and only fight others when you choose to. So, let's do a live survey. Any takers for normal? So, let's do it. >> Um, if you're the kind of player who wants every trip into contested territory to come with a little bit of danger and a lot of excitement, then player versus player or PVP is for you. Do we have any PVP? >> YEAH. Or perhaps you really want to dive into the fantasy of the game and look for other likeminded players, in which case role playing might be for you. Any RP enjoyers in the crowd? >> Yes. And finally, 4 is available for launch. If you're looking for the ultimate challenge, where every decision matters and death has real consequences, hardcore is your choice. So, let me hear it. Who's excited for hardcore? >> You're so brave. Like, literally, you're so brave to go into hardcore. While Gu forever makes it easier than ever to play with your friends, there's still some restrictions. Think about each rule set like a mega roll. Here's how it works. Factions are still separate. If your core, my personal favorites. Yeah. You won't be able to group up with the Alliance players. >> Alliance, too. Okay. Alliance. Okay. Yeah. >> So, you will only be able to group up to dungeons and raids with the people of your same rule set. And if you choose hardcore, you will be completely enclosed ecosystem. However, if your character dies, you'll be able to transfer to another game room set >> and now for the first time be able to transfer to PvP. YEAH, >> that's actually I I will literally play I I that's the biggest reason I would play. >> And the system I just talked about legacy system are still accountwide and will be across rule sets except parkour. The things that you earn in parkour will be available in the other game rule sets but not the other way around. >> Yes. >> Um >> so I'm like chat one react. I also want to add uh another note as part of the server updates. Your characters will now have two names. So you think about it, you can think about it like maybe a first name and a last name and here in the US we're referring to. And now that names are going to be unique per region. We wanted you to be able to create original names like Anna forever. So now you have the choice of getting two last name two names instead of just one. So Going back to my personal story, I have very fond memories of my time on Rakari. Those are some original screenshots, by the way, of like back 2009. Um, and we recognize that there are certain benefits and experiences that come from being part of our realm. Wow. Forever is a reflection of seven years of learning for our WOW team. As I mentioned before, players gravitates towards bigger realms. I I still think it's at the same time they really care about community and sense of belonging. >> So we ask ourselves >> why not both and the result is something we're incredibly and creatively excited about. We have updated the infrastructure to give you the benefits of large realms with the goal of capturing the essence of the realm. So when well you notice this is when you're out in the world leveling, questing or exploring, you may cross path with the same players again and again. Maybe you help each other complete a quest >> race for the same mining node or simply at each other as you pass by, maybe throw a buff or something like that and the next day you might see the same player again and recognize their name. Over time, strangers become familiar faces and familiar faces become part of your community. Or then think about it like wanted to group up for an elite. As you're coordinating with your guild, we want you to encounter your guild mates out in the world even before you have grouped up. So, one crucial thing for me was joining a server that spoke Spanish like I do. And for what? forever you will get that choice for your language preference too and you will encounter other players who share that same preference. I also want to address faction balance. It is very important for our PP rule set. So we will have mechanisms in place to shoot for a core and alliance faction balance just as we introduced for season of discovery. So with all these changes, we don't want you to have to make the choice between potentially longer cues at launch or what would not be your forever run. So our goal is to give you the best of both worlds, the benefits of a large realm while preserving the sense of community. We're really excited for new communities to be born and also for you to bring your own. >> Can't wait to see you in Azeroth. And now to talk about the core of the game, combat, items, classes, and talents. I'll have things over the 21 veteran of World of Warcraft, Chris. >> Okay, here we go. This is for me. This is the juice. >> Yeah, this is for me. This is my >> lift. >> Woo. Yeah. >> So, it's been 2 years since we stopped work on Season of Discovery. What have the class and item designers been up to since then? We're going to need to move quickly. I'm going to talk about our combat philosophy, exciting changes to our itemization, new racial abilities, and finally, anybody here playing Paladin? >> YEAH. a deep dive look at all of our class and talent changes for the paladin class to illustrate all the class design across the game. >> First, let's talk about how combat works >> in World of Warcraft Forever. Our team loves the feel and pacing of combat in World of Warcraft Classic. >> So funny. >> It's important to us that we do not change how that combat feels. And that leads to some very important design decisions. First, keep our classes simple but with surprising depth. Keep our classes distinct with each having unique strengths and weaknesses. No homogenization. >> This ping is a little takes you about 15 seconds to kill a creature on your own. And dungeon gameplay is tactical. That means crowd control matters. You need a polymorph vanish to keep control your healer from getting killed and keeps the tank from being overrun from too much damage. >> And threat matters. >> Our tanks can only do threat on three or four targets at once. You can't pull a whole dungeon all at once. >> This is good. This is actually good. Moving on to stats. One of the things we wanted to do in World of Warcraft forever was unsolve the game. >> We've all been playing classic 22 years and we know everything. We know what to do. We know those perfect paths of what items to get. >> Expertise. >> What if all that changed? >> What if you got to solve it again? >> To that end, we made a ton of changes to itemization throughout the game. >> Yes. And we love having you different choices how to cure your character with different stats and those choices changing based on which class you're playing, what combat you're in, where you go. >> So, we're keeping all of the stats for Wild Classic and with a few changes, and also adding more that came in some of the future expansions. Although, I'll say we're not adding resilience. >> Woo! >> First, let's talk about myself. In World of Warcraft Classic, hit it was separate from melee, ranged, and spells. And that was kind of awkward enhancement shaman or a rep paladin or even a warrior who wants your taunts to land. So, we've unified hit is for all types of attacks at once, which doesn't just benefit their paladins, >> the red paladin buff, >> but also nodes landing their poisons, hunters landing their traps, warriors landing their taunts. And we've done the exact same thing with your chance to critical strike that is also all merged in the same way. >> Now, weapon skill was probably the strongest step, especially for melee in World of Warcraft Classic, but it was a little too easy to get and a little too strong. So, you may recall in Burning Crusade, we removed it. >> We want to keep it. So, we've rebalanced it. You can't get quite as much on a single item as you used to, but you can get it. It still works. It's still very valuable. For our healing classes, one of their problems was you go to next round, you get an amazing set of gear, you go out questing, and you can't kill anything, right? So, we've adopted and changed that all of our healing items also come with bonus damage, so our healers can enjoy the whole game as well. >> There you go. >> Just like Burning Crusade. >> Also adding many new stats that didn't exist. Show them those boots from AQ and the chance to attack the PC version of this. It would be amazing. >> Does double duty. >> Spellcaster oriented weapons now grant bonus spell damage and healing all the way down to level 10. >> Spell casters will now care about their weapons as much as warriors and rogues who. Everyone gets to have a more fun game the whole way along. One big area of change was trinkets. We want trinkets to be a more variety and more different ways to solve problems. So they're all much more specialized and targeted specific situations. You got a magnet full of tricks you're pulling out for different encounters in different situations. The war main talisman here being a great example. We also added two whole new classes of effects on items. Some that only work or work better in certain areas, mountains or deserts or cities or caverns, and others that have bonus effects against different species like Excalibur here does bonus damage against undead and swine, whatever that is. We've done a massive reemization across the entire game. Every single dungeon boss has had their loot re-examined. Everything is upgraded to rare quality. Many new items have been added and old items that maybe weren't up to snuff are better, but the old favorites, the really standout items are also still there. >> New quest rewards have been added across the board. A very famous quest is well known to alliance players. In Duskwood, you get a quest to go kill the undead soldier Moratim. You're super excited about this. You get a group together. You kill him and maybe your mage or shaman or priest, whatever. At the end of the quest, you get a two of the sword. That's great if you're a warrior or a paladin. What about everybody else? So now let him also hand you back his heirloom family ring, which is a fantastic spell power ring. Another great example. and you finish all of Hen Hemmet Nessing's quests in Stranglethorn, he would give you a master hunter's bow or master hunter's crossbow. He now also has a master hunter's wand and this master hunter spell sword specifically designed for red paladins to do has strength and spell damage on it together. >> And there's much more itemization for all of those hybrid specs across the game than there ever was before. We've gone through all of our world drop epics and they've all been revisited. >> When you see an epic drop, it's an exciting moment. Oh my god, I made an epic. And they're often really disappointing. They weren't that great, actually. So, we've gone through them all and made them all much stronger, much more useful. So, you may see one of these drop, you'll know you want to use it or give it to a friend or maybe sell it in the auction house. and even added a few ones like this ranged weapon here, throw weapon here. All right, next up, racial abilities. One of the things that we like about racial abilities in Wild Classic is they give you a reason to make a new character, play a new class, play a new race, see the game through new eyes. So, we decided to make our racial abilities stronger and more different than they ever were before. >> They're way too strong. We also added six new race class combinations. Gnome priests, human hunters, dwarf shaman, >> warp mages and troll warlocks, and of course, the undead palad planned to come in future content. >> That would be cool. Each race now has two active abilities and two passive abilities and an equal similar amount of offensive power and signature utility and survivability. I'm going to share details of dwarves and undead because of our new options with shamans and paladins. Stone form is mostly unchanged, but you might recall say you were dwarf priest. There were a lot of those. It increased your armor and who cares? You had no more armor. It wasn't doing anything. So now it reduces physical damage. It doesn't care how much armor you have. >> Flying treasure was a useful racial ability, but it conflicted with finding herbs, tracking beasts, finding minerals. >> So now flying treasure can be active at the same time as any other tracking ability. >> So you can look for iron nodes and treasure at the same time. >> That's cool. That's good. That's good. Inspired by him at Nestingwary, dwarves now have big game hunter, giving 5% increased damage to beasts. We really like abilities like this because they give each different character in your party or raid a chance to shine on a different encounter. There might be a fight where you're fighting humanoids and the and the rogue is the best. You're fighting undead and paladin the best and you're fighting a beast. The dwarfs are going to get a chance to shine. So, there's a reason to bring everybody. Everybody gets their moment in the sun. Finally, mace specialization is a good example of how we changed weapon skill. So, weapon skill used to be only good for melee and a little too strong, but now while a dwarf has any kind of mace equipped, they get 1% increased crit chance to their spells, melee, and ranged abilities. So, those shamans and priests will now care about having a base crit and benefits from this ratio. Let's move on to the undead. Well, of Forsaken was a little bit too strong. It gave you immunity to these effects. Now it simply breaks them, but we've made up for it by giving them a lot of new stuff. Cannibalize now doesn't just give you health back. It gives you mana back fantastic for those paladins. Underwater breathing is as it always was. But remember in Wild Classic that that breath bar is really short. So that increased amount of time underwater, it makes you able to do a lot more. And finally, the big one, touch of the grave. This new ratio for the undead gives them the increased damage and survival that they never had before. Each of your attacks and spells has a chance to drain health from the target, doing extra damage and also healing you and keeping you alive. That's just a taste of our racial. Don't play down the wall. >> They sounded like the most reluctant clap. All the grumbles, they're like, "Dude, >> let's talk about classes." You turn into talents. >> The first I want to talk about are philosophy on talents. >> Okay. Okay. >> All classes still have three talent trees. They still have seven rows. They still have those onepoint talents at 11, 21, 31. The gold medal talents we call them. We've even added a fourth gold medal talent at the 16 mark in every single one of the talent trees. Many talents are exactly the same as they were, unchanged. from 2006. >> Look at how similar this shape is. >> But many have been updated and improved and new have been added. >> In particular, there were a lot of talents that gave you better buffs, improved battles shout, divine spirit, busting of kings, improve, they're all gone. >> All of those bonuses are now baseline to the entire class. I >> agree. This is this challenge. It's >> a good challenge. >> And what's great about that is it makes room for more cool stuff. Our goal is to make sure that every single one of our 27 talent trees is a viable option to bring to your dungeon or raid group. >> Every class, every spec is worthy to come, >> but no class is so strong or spec is so strong that you want to stack them. And they're they're not equal. They all have different distinct strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the group. >> So, we don't have time to look at every class. So, let's take a deep dive look at Paladin. >> Not all. >> First, what changed for the whole class? I don't know how many people here played the 2004 beta. Probably a few. I did. But, Palad is back then an ability called Holy Strike that got cut before the game was shipped. We brought it back. All paladins learn holy strike, giving a little bit more melee damage, doing holy damage based on their weapon to the target. >> The 12c cool down. And every one of the three paladin trees has ways to improve >> my crusader strike implementation. >> Judgment no longer consumes your seal. >> People don't understand. They don't play. >> It's not good. >> You have better things to do. We've added a new seal called seal fury retail players. >> It is our answer to tanking paladins. And yes, you can tank as a paladin. Does three things. First, every time you swing, just like with seal of righteousness, it does damage to the target, but it doesn't matter how fast your weapon is. So, the faster your weapon you use, the more damage it'll do and more effective. It grants a small absorb shield to the paladin, helping them stay alive a little bit. But most importantly, judgment of fury is your new taunt. Taunts the target. And this is particularly interesting because Growl and Taunt have a 5 yard range and judgment has a 10 yard range. So Pal's got a little bit more reach to reach out and grab something and brace the fight than the other tanks have. Finally, >> we have to make some changes to consecration. >> Those of you who play know that paladin consecration team can dominate damage tanking runs >> and we want to maintain that tactical I was talking about where you can't just build the whole dungeon at >> I see it. Even the base damage is not >> consecration now does light damage to every target that is the consecration and heavy damage to the first four. So, you're going to have enough threat on those first four targets, but not all the rest. And everybody has to keep respecting your threat and your ability to control and not pull the whole whole room. All right, let's move on to talents. Starting with holy paladin talents. As I mentioned, everybody has improvements. The holy strike, the very first row of holy has improved holy strike, reducing its cool down. Probably every paladin's going to take this one. Voice of Truth is their new 11point gold medal talent, giving some immunity to silence and interrupts. Reverence, however, is a big change for Paladins. Yes, Paladins will now care about spirit and get regen from it while in combat. >> In fact, all of our classes that do damage and healing via mana will have talents or abilities that give them mana back based on their spirit. So, spirit is worth having on here. That includes espresso paladins and resto. And finally, divine power used to be a little deeper in the tree. Used to be at 21. It's moved to 61. 16, sorry, to make room for more stuff, but basically the same as it ever was. Moving on. Infusion of light. It's a new talent that solves a problem that holy paladins have across multiple expansions where either they're casting flash of light all the time and nothing else or holy light all the time and nothing else. It's how encouraging you to mix those spells together and use your whole toolkit. Holy shock used to be the 31 point talent and is now at 21 points in the talent tree which makes it in reach of a lot of hybrid PvP builds in particular and its cool down has been reduced to 10 seconds. You can use it a lot more often. is going to be key for some another ability I'm about to talk about. Consecrated ground plays into the whole shocketing fantasy for holy. >> While targets are standing your consecration, they take more holy damage from your attacks. And finally, lights vigil solves several problems for paladins. The biggest one is they have no way to heal a whole party at once. >> Wait, wait, the same as priests and church and how they can do that, but Tom is a change. >> Just keep it full cam because the YouTube video puts vigil on the target. uh just >> one of your friends and the next time the entire t party of that tart will be healed >> and holy shock's cool down will be reset >> if you're really smart put visual up on multiple parties and then it's holy shock holy shock holy shock holy shock and your whole raid group is back to a place where they can survive the big class >> similarly you can use it on enemies to do increased damage and again set the cool down of holy shock to support that shock window >> yeah I like >> moving On to protection paladin talents. Their new 11point talent is improved seal of fury which gives them mana back when seal of fury blocks damage. And shield specialization combines with it to give them enough mana to sustain combat for the entire boss. So every time you block, you're getting mana back. And the more things you're blocking, the more mana you're getting. Swift judgment solves a problem that all our tanks have. It's their new 16point talent. What do you do when your taunt misses? >> If you're a warrior, you hit mocking blow. You hit challenging shout. If you're dr, you hit challenging roar. >> If you're a paladin, swift judgment resets the cool down of judgment and lets you use it again to taunt the target again and get a second chance. >> Or maybe use it creatively on the pull to get more judgment debuffs up on the target quickly. Templars's Bullwark is their new 21 point talent that plays with their uh system for forbearance. It triggers forbbearance. It's prevented by forbearance, but it also grants you an absorb shield equal to 100% of your health, making you a lot more survivable, but it's a hard choice up against things like divine shield. Brecking is an old favorite. It's not going anywhere, but it's been improved. Like tanks are supposed to be incredible, right? So reckoning now has a chance to trigger every time you block. And if you're tanking more things, you're blocking more things, getting more extra attacks. >> Finally, iron grade is a deep talent in prot when you use your holy strike reduces your damage you take for a few seconds by 10%. So a very careful paladin can help their healers keep them alive those critical moments by timing their holy strike. All right. Finally, retribution. >> Vindication's an old talent that everybody skipped. >> Well, well, >> what it did was reduce the targets strength and agility, but in DVDE, it had basically no effect. We've reworked it. It now works like demoralizing shout and demoralizing roar, reducing the targets attack power. And by the way, all three of those are used by the same amount. Sacred Arbiter is a unique paladin utility. When paladins judge a target, the way they have to maintain it is staying close to judge again or meleeing that target. But now with Sacred Arbiter, a red paladin can keep the judgments up for all of the other paladins in their party or ring. So you can benefit from light and wisdom and crusader at the same time. Champion of the light is a new ability deep in the tree that gives increase spell damage and healing based on your intellect. So now those items that increase your mana pool, maybe you don't want to skip those. Maybe you want those combined with with strength or attack power card to do the most damage. Instrument of the law solves two problems. One, it makes hammer wrath instant retribution paladins. And second, now that their damage is as good as everyone else, they need a little threat reduction. Finally, Twist of Light is our answer to seal twisting, which you know you love. >> At least some of you do. >> So now each time you replace one of your damaging seals with another seal, you get an echo to replace >> be excited about this, but this doesn't work. >> And your swing from both seals at the same time. If you alternate seal command and seal righteousness, every swing will benefit from both seals. But I do know some people do not like seal twisting. So using that increased spell card from champion light, drop this talent, go 21 points down holy and use holy shock for a shotgun and build on retribution instead. >> Yeah man. >> So he gave paladins some neutrals care about but the stuff holes in their toolkit. We don't want to homogenize our classes. I've had a great time up here on stage with you today. Have a great time, everybody. >> I'm sitting I'm like writing notes on my phone. Oh, I have a lot to say, Chad. I have a lot to say. So, here are kind of like my thoughts on the whole talk as a whole. First and first, mostly the talk itself was great. The presentation was great. I think all the people that you had up there speaking were like they presented everything really good. My interest, you guys know me, I'm like I'm a gameplay first guy. lore and all that stuff. I I it's all great, but for me, it's about the meat is in the gameplay, the class design, itemization, all the stuff that I always talk about, right? And uh that's the thing that I've probably been the most I'll say vigilant about like giving feedback on on like what my opinions are and kind of relaying what I think the sentiments of a lot of like the classic WoW community is and like hey, these are like the OG classic players. What do people think about this? Giving some things of like perspective of a lot of Paladin players and classic and all this. So, with all that being said, I feel really, really, really good about the direction of the Paladin talent changes. Uh, you can even go back and look at my own Paladin talent tree video that I posted right before BlizzCon. It's it's I would say 75% of what they have here. Now, I wasn't a Seal of Fury or a Holy Strike guy. I would have liked to see them actually put Crusader Strike in the red tree and uh implement the version of Crusader Strike from the beginning of Burning Crusade with some minor change to it. I think it was a 10-second cool down at first. Uh maybe reduce the cool down a little bit and make it holy damage. And then at that point, you can modify the numbers and stuff and then this would have made it something that is this would have made it something that if you wanted to do a tri-spec or anything like that, I think as far as retribution goes, there's a lot of gameplay there. Holy Strike right now does not feel very good. Uh, Holy Strike just it feels like I have less buttons to press with Holy Strike. What they're doing with the direction of the Paladin class. I think it's conceptually pretty good. I just think some of the implementation is a little off. I think Seal of Fury could be really good. I wasn't really thinking about Sea of Fury and like the way they reimplemented steel fury, but I think that it actually could be pretty good. My main sticking points right now are like I have less buttons to press in classic plus. I have less buttons to press than I feel like I have to press in TBC or like when I'm typically playing in vanilla if that makes sense. Well, even not having to recast my seal. A lot of people who like don't understand like the tactility and even like the the RP element of the vanilla paladin. really hard to explain because I think it even sounds stupid saying out loud cuz you you seal judge you take that holy energy and and like you're imbued with like you know you're imbued with the the power of the light and then you expel that energy into your enemy from a roleplay standpoint it's really cool it makes sense you know I'm empowered whenever I have the seal act from the the way that it's implemented now it's good that judgment is not on the global that's nice that judgment is still not on the global however you end up having to recast to steal anyway or you don't. And then there's a lot of just weird like lag time. I played two specs of Rhett that I just kind of came up with and the in the talents for what was available at level 38 plus five talent points uh with the legacy system. Seal twisting sucked. It did not feel good. Just just brutally honest outright. Let's say you go all the way down in red. The 31 point is a seal twist talent. Like this is what this is what activates like this is what unlocks the class in order to be able to seal twist. I think that's fine. Now, that's not my preferred, it's really not my 100% preferred way of doing it, but I think if they can do it right, that's fine. The problem, I don't know if it can be done right after seeing what I saw in the demo. I saw a lot of people in like different discords, a lot of paladins who like, "Bro, this sucks. This is it feels sloppy. It it takes away all the dopamine of like hitting a seal twist the timing and I'm like, man, if we're talking about gameplay first, we're talking about all this gameplay stuff and people that really care about gameplay and and and this is like the the identity of their class. They're absolutely right. When I was playing and I was seal twisting, it just I I felt like sloppy. The best analogy I can make is like, but let's say you're playing sports. And when you're playing sports, you're it's very important to be like boom, like you're running and like you you need to do certain things a certain way. like you want to cut, you want to you want to break down, you want to cut hard into a route, all this stuff. It's almost like the new seal twist is like you're running and it's like a and it's okay >> when it's not cuz you're not ever going to actually run away from anybody. It's like you got a participation trophy anyway. And not having that dopamine hit of like doing a proper seal twist in the timing window, it changes the way that you like feel about the game. like just it was a super sloppy and and I think the intention is this is the biggest argument I see in seal twisting I see two one it's oh well you need an add-on to seal twist technically you don't but I agree it's it's like a night and day difference now the add-on that you need is simply a weapon swing timer you don't need a specific add-on you don't need sledge timer you don't need this you don't need that that's those are all conveniences but you need a weapon swing timer and I I would actually agree with that now here's my thing I should have played the game in 2004 I played and vanilla and burning crusade. I quit whenever wrath came out and you know I did the whole like what's going on for for years and yada yada yada but vanilla and burning crusade like that's my jam I played rat I did all this stuff I played paladin pro rat holy I've done everything when you start playing the game I was when I started first playing the game I was first introduced to add add-ons I played darker camel we didn't have add-ons anything you need to download these mods CT mod you know all yada yada yada weapon swing timer like within the first month of me playing it was almost immediately I've played with a weapon swing hammer since I started playing the game. From my understanding, if you play a melee, especially in classic WoW, when all classes, a big portion of your damage is that melee auto attack damage. It's important to know when you're going to hit. It's important to know, you know, if your swings connect, whatever. This is something that I think is insane that Blizzard has not already implemented in the There's a cast bar. It's the same as a cast bar. It's the melee version of a cast bar. Why is that not in the UI built in anyway? So, while I agree Blizzard should just dude, you have somebody that can write up a weapon swing timer in a week a 5 minutes, there's no way that they can't implement it into the settings in I I don't know. It's got to be like this. It's so easy. It has to be like I mean I just and I get like there's a lot of things in development that the layman, the the average player, me, whoever, we don't understand, right? We're not devs. We're not this, but it can't be that hard to add a swing timer. It just can't. And that's like the biggest thing for that. The other thing is like, dude, just get an add-on. Now, the next part of it is people saying, "Oh, well, I don't think it's good good gameplay to look at your swing timer uh the whole time." Like, bro, what? You don't stare at it the whole time. You pace it out. You know, I know that I'm swinging every 3.8 seconds. I got a corpse maker, right? I'm swinging every 3.8 seconds, right? Okay. Look, I'm not counting 3.8 seconds in my head, but I'm counting three. Counting three and a half, you know? And you can feel it. There's a degree of that that's like it's you got to understand it's skill issue. Not everything is handed to you. So a lot of the biggest arguments that I see against seal twisting and and I know that's not nice and I know that's going to make trigger people whatever but it's like it's skill issue and that's exactly what the concept of the the the twist of light. The easy I call it the easy twist is. You get an echo. It's a buff that stays on you. Conceptually it's good. It gives you a two-way twist instead of a one-way twist. But man is it sloppy. And it it is not even good. Why? Because the implementation of all the seals is not the exact same. I don't know if seal of command is still seven procs per minute. I I I'm actually need to ask Chris. I need to ask them and just find out because the seal of righteousness is not the same as it is in Burning Crusade. It might not even be the same as it is in vanilla cuz I had my combat log up and I was doing some demo testing the other day, yesterday, and somebody said, "I think I just saw your seal of righteousness crit during the demo and I was like, wait, what?" So, there's a lot like I'm still going to be there like pushing for, hey, like let's get the best version of the Paladin we can. Uh, that's that's right. It's balanced. It feels good. It not only is like, hey, I I still have like the way that I play the game as like a classic Paladin player. I can still play my game and I can still feel like I'm playing my class, but also enabling like some new play styles that that feel like emergent for people that maybe want to either be experimental and try something new or like like supplementing shocket in big. I'm a big believer in that. I think they they I think the shocket and stuff is great, right? I also think holy holy shock at 21 point all that. I'm all about all that. I I think there's still a long ways to go and like I said, it's what I would think and what they think is like probably 70 75% or so like the same. But u after doing the implementation, I think even for me, I'm like, man, I think the seal twisting talent is just not the way to go. And they just need to make it like Burning Crusade, the the Burning Crusade seal mechanics. They they got to figure something else out and work on the rebalancing a little bit. These are my thoughts overall them talking about horizontal progression, reitemizing the whole game, uh showing a lot of like flavor text and some of the stuff. I think the rest of the stuff was really good and it's a lot of stuff I'm a very firm believer in. Uh I think when it comes to the the class talents and that that kind of stuff. And by the way, this isn't just for Paladin. I'm kind of like digging into Paladin specifically because of the talk was was Paladin related and me I'm the Paladin, you know, I'm the Paladin guy. I I was taking a look at some of the other stuff and it's just like it doesn't seem to hit the mark exactly right in terms of both like power and play style. These are like the three main things with class design that I think is so important for classic forever, WoW forever, classic plus, whatever you want to call it. One, you have to maintain the original play styles of how classic players play their class. The reckoning change, I was like, "Thank you." I'm telling you, that is one that I'm like I was so big on. Yes, they they they basically the original implementation they were going to kill reckoning, right? They came out with a new one that that supports both tanking and r reckoning, holy reckoning, all that all the old builds. Amazing. Thank you. I'm so so thankful for that. Maintain those different ways to play the game. Two, take those underdeveloped, underserved types of play styles like a shakaden for example, and let's enable those. Let's give those some some tools that they can work with. Let's give them some things that they can, hey, I want to be a shocket in hey, let's let's buff this up a little bit and give you some more opportunity. Amazing. I think they've also taken that to heart and they did that. Three, take like that category of specs that we're talking about in two and we need to kind of say, hey, this was an opportunity in vanilla. This was an opportunity in Burning Crusade to come up with emergent new specs that are seemingly, but they're like almost like happy accident type of specs that are experimental and they're they enable the player to be creative with their builds and they play the class, not the spec. Now, I think that they did an okay job of this. Specifically for Paladin, there's some things that I would move around in order to enable this. I think Holy Shield being the 21 point or sorry, the 31 point is a big miss. I think this should be the 11 point. I think the paladin should get that at 21. I think swift judgment is a cool concept and and it's actually it's it's good for tanking because it's like a backup like oh my taunt resisted swift judgment go again for seal of fury but I think that they should take swift judgment and improve seal of fury and combine them in some way cuz that's not something that is I think they should combine the talent somehow and take holy shield and and roll it up to the 11 point and I think they should take the bubble forbbearance thing Templar's bull work they should move it down to the 31 cuz I think to me that sounds really strong, but I I haven't like done extensive testing on it obviously. So I think what needs to happen is there needs to be some kind of new implementation. I said just throw Avenger Shield in there, but I don't think that's actually like the best option. That's just kind of like I can't really come up with anything else. So if you guys have any ideas about that, uh let me know. Or if you guys have any other ideas of like how they could fix Twist of Light cuz it I'm telling you it feels bad. Not having the timing elements even like whenever you don't miss your even like not losing your seal feels bad. feels clunky, slow. It feels unathletic. That's how it feels. And for me, you know, dude, I'm like freaking TBC rep paladin, you know, multi-gladiator, san television, scareboard, grand marshall in one week, the grand crusader, you know, very I I'm sleek, you know, jacked, tan, and etc. Like, dude, I want to feel athletic when I'm playing my retribution paladin, right? Very the the athletic gameplay. Okay, that's what we are. We got we got athletic gameplay when I'm playing in Burning Crusade and and I'm not I'm not feeling that way whenever I played Classic Plus whenever I played Wow Forever. So anyway, that's it. I hope you guys enjoyed the YouTube video. I hope you guys enjoy all the Blizzcon coverage. We do everything here. We do IRL, WoW, GTRP. This is your one-stop shop for everything. I hope you guys enjoy Blizzcon everything else. And I hope you guys enjoy all the content on the channel. YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, Twitch, uh Twitter, uh Tik Tok, uh Facebook, uh Kick, Rumble, now everything is SF TV, Multireaming, all it is, everything. You can always find me. All the VODs are on YouTube. And we'll see you guys next time. Thank you guys for watching. Thank you guys for being so supportive during BlizzCon.