World of Warcraft Cataclysm released on December 7th

[Ualaa]

Pretty sure Blizzard will follow the same model as Everquest. The battlechest will cost about the same as it does now, and will include everything except the most recent expansion.

So a new customer will buy the battlechest plus whatever the current expansion is.

[blade0236]

Am I the only one here who's not completely happy about Cataclysm?? Sure there are loads of new things which look great, and 4.0.1 so far has brought a lot of them... but the talent trees are now defunct!

You have to choose to be locked into 1 talent twig, and there's one spec per twig, Blizzard might as well have had them automatically fill out! There's no choice after the initial talent twig selection.

And removing filler talents?? I've found a few already, you know.. those +5% crit type talents that Blizz said they wanted to remove.

Don't get me wrong, Cataclysm will be awesome in most things, it's completely revamped. (I've played beta for a while now, so I'm not talking out of my.. *ahem) It's just that Blizzard decided to dumb it down too much, by removing what was a fun aspect of the game.

On another note, I have (after some playing around) managed to somewhat get back to multiboxing since 4.0.1, and have begun testing addons. I use Game Commander Pro to box, because it does everything I want it to, and it's in game addon seems to be working. Jamba partly works, though the quest window addon shows empty all the time.

If anyone is interested I can report back with a few more popular addon tests, and I might consider some requests too.

(First post here btw, but I've been boxing for a while, and reading these forums. Hi everyone!)

[Tim]

When WoW first came out, people felt unique, knew their experience was highly customizable.

Then Blizzard decided to start the downhill slide, where all characters became gradually closer to the same. It all started when Blizzard removed the Shaman being Horde only, and Paladin being Alliance only. Now that individual talent trees control is gone, we move yet even more closer to non-unique characters.

So basically, Blizzard is making their MMO less and less unique to players, and more and more cookie cutter.

I'm not sure who is making these decisions, but I'm pretty sure that these types of decision are ultimately going to be one of the strongest deciding factor for people leaving WoW.

[Longshot17]

You gotta think it's cheaper/easier to support maintain the product, by doing stuff like trimming down talent trees, less variations in talents etc.

However I do like not having to buy arrows/bullets. Though my BM Hunter seems to do much less damage then my shamans now, I've got a rotation that I could potentially keep up forever... like a rogue, due to having focus instead of mana, which is pretty cool.

I'm a sucker for the story/lore part of the game, so I'm looking forward to that, and seeing what happens to places like the old AQ's etc.

Must do a Classic AQ40 raid one of these weekends before Cata comes out!

Oh, also being able to deck out my Pally in all T10 (almost) gear is cool, though the pants are a dress!!! total bummer...

[Ualaa]

If the game was entirely PvE or entirely PvP, it would be a lot easier to balance. Unfortunately, if one is balanced then the other is not; or you can go Blizzard's route and try for a happy medium, which is not too far off of balanced for either aspect. It is not perfect, nor is it easy.

I'm not happy with the move towards everything being androgynous; I miss the diversity of the original game, things like hunters having unique pets each with vastly different abilities. I understand why they make the changes that they do, but prefer the original game.

I would have preferred additional faction specific classes over giving shamans to the alliance and paladins to the horde. Again from a balance point of view, both factions have the same tools, so in particular PvE encounters are that much easier to design in such a way that you can assume any given raid will have the same tools to combat it.

The new talents are neat. They open a lot of options, which is cool. There are still balancing issues, as there always will be. But I definitely see some fun combos that will be quite interesting.

At the same time, every <Insert Spec> of <Insert Class> is going to be 90% the same as every other same class/spec combination. We'll have a very small variation on the remaining 10 points -- some classes have two secondary trees to choose between, plus spending more points in the parent tree, while others have only one extra tree which looks even remotely useful to their spec.

Again, from a balance point of view, it is easier to have every Boomkin Druid, Protection Paladin or Affliction Warlock be essentially the same as every other. I was really looking forward to having enough points to go 51 (main tree) and 21 (secondary tree), with a few points left over... but this would be even harder to balance.