Hey beautiful people, ckknight here.
Got into Anaheim this morning. This'll be my first year going to BlizzCon and I'm hoping for a good time.
Kaelten's also here, though he's been here a few times before.
I'm gonna try to keep you all posted if there are any UI-based changes on the horizon that come out of the con. For general speculation and non-UI info, I'm sure World of Raids, Arena Junkies, or Curse.com will have info.
Also, if anyone else is here at BlizzCon, feel free to make a comment. It's kind of hard telling who everyone is without names floating above their heads.
Went to the UI Dinner at Bubba Gump's, jointly sponsored by Curse and WoWInterface, and had a good time. My birthday's on Saturday, so someone had the nerve to get all the waitstaff to sing a birthday song. I was very confused during it, which I blame partially on the lack of clarity by the main waiter, and also due to the Bacardi 151 I had downed a few minutes prior. A lot of authors came out to it, which was definitely cool.
Saw the opening ceremony and the WoW Cataclysm discussion, here's some various UI-related points:
- New classes with existing races, this shouldn't really affect UI too much.
- New races: Worgen (Alliance) and Goblin (Horde).
- New zones and revamps for existing zones. This will probably affect map mods. The revamps to the existing zones will probably affect questing addons (e.g. TourGuide or QuestHelper).
- Terrain phasing. I'm not sure if this will affect the map, but it might. I can see it at least affect some quest-related addons.
- Guild leveling/talents/achievements. I can see a lot of potential mods pertaining to this.
- Secondary profession, Archaeology, and Path of the titans, an alternate progression system. Also a lot of potential here.
From the SC2 + Battle.net panel:
- They talked about cross-character achievements and cross-game achievements.
- Map publishing directly to Battle.net, which kinda defeats the user distribution from SC2Mapster, so we're just gonna refocus it to be dev-oriented. Focus more on the wiki, forums, and project management rather than direct user distribution.
- Premium maps. Allowing certain maps to be pay-for. This could be a good thing, but I think that the majority of maps are going to be free anyway. I know I'm going to be making free maps and I don't have any plans to make for-pay maps.
Some more points, after seeing the class panel:
- mp5, defense, armor penetration, attack power, and spell power are going away, and they're emphasizing the primary stats more.
- Archaeology is a gathering spec that all classes can take. Once you get enough of a certain type of item, you can go through some process (a minigame was hinted) to combine them to get an item, a recipe, or even an instant dungeon portal.
- Warlock soul shard mechanism is changing. Shards are generated automatically outside of combat (it seemed like). Only one spell requires soul shards, called Soul Burn, that made your next cast more powerful. e.g. instant cast or more powerful or better in some way. This seemed to be similar to DK runes in that you can only have 3 (hinted at 4 with a talent) and they regenerate. Something for unit frames to work with.
- Hunters are losing mana and instead getting focus. If anyone remembers WoW Alpha, this might bring back some memories.
- Skill ranks are going away. Instead of getting new ranks of skills, each level after gaining a skill, it becomes slightly more powerful.
- Talent UI is becoming 3-paned.
- Glyph UI is changing drastically. Mostly additions for the path of the titans.
- Guild UI is changing drastically.
- Looking for guild. This means a new interface for guild leaders as well as people looking for guilds.
- Cross-server LFG. This is meant for PUGs.
- Rated battlegrounds mean a new PvP frame.
- Achievement frame now has guild achievements. When getting a guild achievement, it looks different from a regular achievement, too.
- Guild currency. As a guild gets XP, it's immediately converted to currency, which can be spent on recipes, heirlooms, etc. I can see a lot of potential addons for tracking this kind of stuff.