which means you’ll be plowing through Outland again

I approve. One new metal will be Cobalt. The new cloth is Frostweave, but we knew that already. Lake Wintergrasp (the outdoor PvP area) will have daily quests, a continent-wide buff, and probably something like today’s Spirit Shards. I plan to stay well clear of it, but hopefully the world PvP fans will have something to keep themselves entertained. Chamber of Aspects will initially be a short Onyxia-like raid, and they may use that area to expand with other aspects later if they want to. Another raid, in the Nexus, will allow players to ride on the back of drakes and use their abilities during the fight. This sounds quite chaotic and also pretty cool. The devs think they didn’t reward PvE enough in BC, and will try to reward it more in Wrath. I tentatively agree; PvP seems to be an easier way to epics for many players. We may see PvE ladders on the Armory, so we don’t have to resort to WowJutsu. Honestly I like Jutsu, so we’ll have to see what the Armory brings to the table. They want changing runes, for DKs, to be somewhere in between as difficult as respeccing and easy enough to do it between fights. Reset at inns, perhaps. Or anywhere, but with a 60 second cast time. DKs can use maces, as well as swords and axes. For some reason I thought maces weren’t going to be allowed, but I guess swords and axes would be pretty limiting, and would also restrict Blizz’s itemization potential. Blizz plans on introducing some more money sinks prior to Wrath, so we don’t all go into the expansion with several thousand gold. Good luck making them attractive, guys — I didn’t fall for your silly “”of the Shattered Hand,”" so you’ll have to do better than that. ” “As we were promised, the latest Blizzcast episode talked some about the Badge of Justice system, and where they want to take it in Wrath of the Lich King.

Blizzard interviews itself on Sunwell

wow gold Specifically, Tigole said the following: Badges will definitely be back in Wrath, in some form. Like how it’s ended up in BC, they want badges to appear in both Heroics and raids. However, they want to stratify it more, so it’s not just one gigantic pool of items. (They also want to spread the vendors around the world, so it’s not just “”one dude in Shattrath and one dude out on the Isle of Quel’Danas”"; this sounds like an annoyance to me, and at any rate will not make a real difference in how the system works.) Proposed stratification options include: “”A token from different levels of content”" as well as badges that would need to be turned in for the different levels of items Different kinds of badges I’m glad to hear all of this (except maybe the spreading vendors around part). I think badges are one of the best ideas they had in BC, since it means that as long as you kill a boss, you walk away with something, even if the item you wanted off that boss didn’t drop and/or you didn’t win the roll. wow gold Reputation does this as well, but not all instances have reputation (like Zul’Aman), once you get to Exalted there’s no gain, and there are typically not many items you want from a given faction. Badges avoid all these problems: all heroic and raid bosses drop badges, you can always use more badges, and there’s always something to spend them on – even if you’re kitted out in T6 or equivalent, you can at least buy epic gems or Nether Vortices to sell on the AH. I’m a little ambivalent on the stratifying idea, actually. Currently, someone running heroics or Karazhan can, eventually, get best-in-slot or near-best-in-slot items like the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes or the Adorned Supernal Leggings, although it might take them a month or two. wow However, if it was the case that you needed a Mystic Widget from the Tier 9 raids, or special badges from same, to get the T9-equivalent badge gear, it would be completely inaccessible to players on the lower rungs of raiding, no matter how long they kept at it. BitterCupOJoe and darian, in comments on the Blizzcast post, neatly addressed this issue through a simple mechanism: exchange rates. Let’s say there are four types of badges; we’ll call them A, B, C, and D for simplicity. We know (from this same Blizzcast interview) that they want the 10-man and the 25-man versions of the same raids to be separated by about a tier in terms of item quality. wow gold Therefore, it would make sense if: Naxxramas, the tier 7 raid, drops A-Badges on 10-man and B-Badges on 25-man. Ulduar, the t8 raid, drops B-Badges on 10-man and C-Badges on 25-man. Whatever the t9 raid turns out to be drops C-Badges on 10-man and D-Badges on 25-man. mp3 player And so on, if they add more raids. Then, you just allow players to exchange badges up at a rate of two-to-one: two As get you a B, and so forth. This allows Blizzard to make it clear that certain gear is “”meant for”" certain levels of play, and to make it easier to get the appropriate gear at the appropriate levels, while still making it possible for the dedicated t7 raider to get top-quality gear eventually. Now you may be asking at this point: if you can easily exchange badges, why bother having multiple kinds. Instead of one D-Badge, just give players eight A-Badges. wow gold There are two problems with this. First, the number of badges could quickly become intimidatingly large; 150 BoJs for a weapon already is in my opinion.