Monday Morning Musings - World of Warcraft - Blizzcon 2011 Wishlist/Predictions

It is currently late Wednesday night and there are only two days left until Blizzcon. This is the biggest news day of the year if you are a Blizzard game fan and this year is setting up to be a big one. I have a brand new Astro A40 Gaming Headset to warm my ears and a Blue Stuffed Murloc Plushie, from my wonderful GM Matticus (@Matticus), to warm my soul and I am finally ready to sit down and delve into what I think the weekend has in store for us. I wasn't originally going to do any predictions since I have been known to go way outside the box and think of things that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. But with my entire guild, being Padagi (@mjwood), Lodur (@LodurZJ), Matticus (@Matticus), LoganW (@Loganowitz) and Morynne (@morynne) away in Anaheim and me all alone at home I figured I might as well waste some time.

There will be two parts to this post. The first one will be the Wishlist. The Wishlist is the part of the post where I will tell you guys what I WANT. This part is all about ME. I don't care whether it is canon or even do-able. But I want it so it better happen. And the second part of the post will be what I think will actually happen. With me using stupid logic and stuff. World of Warcraft will probably be the only one who will actually have a part in both sides. Starcraft 2 doesn't really have much new news to talk about except for the three new Multiplayer units and the two tournaments. And I don't play enough Diablo 3 to comment too much.

Wishlist

World of Warcraft

• The new expansion is something that absolutely has to be announced at this years Blizzcon. Not only is this something on my Wishlist but deductive reasoning from the things Blizzard has told us already would lead to this conclusion. Blizzard has said that Patch 4.3 is their last big patch of the Cataclysm expansion. And they have also said that they want to push out expansions in a quicker rate than they have in the past. Even though I still think that Patch 4.3 will come out sometime around Christmas so the sales will be highest and then 4.3 will last us a year like every other final expansion patch has, they can't wait a year and announce the new expansion, go through the Beta process and then release a new expansion. I expect the next expansion details to be released at Blizzcon paired with a lot of 4.3 news, have a Patch 4.3 release sometime mid December, have a new expansion PTR around May, and have a new expansion ready around November/December give a take a few weeks in any direction.
• The Emerald Dream is something that we have been dreaming about as a player base for a really long time. Ever since Burning Crusade came out we have wanted to go into the Emerald Dream and explore basically the entire world backwards. This world is centered around Druids so of course I want an expansion all about me. Draenei/Blood Elves, Death Knights and Shamans got their expansions (Thrall counts as a Shaman, deal with it) and now it is time for the Druids to have theirs. Not only that but it seems like it would be a good fit to the backwards theme that Blizzard tends to go with.
• Vanilla: Fighting on our own world while each race and faction tries to get into their own.
• Burning Crusade: We go off of our world to go fight an evil in outer space on a different world.
• Wrath of the Lich King: Come back from outer space to find a random new continent covered in ice and dead things.
• Cataclysm: Go back to the old continents covered in fire from some pissed off dragon.
• Emerald Dream: Go into a new world covered in flowers and regrowth!
• Something I think Blizzard should do is give us a new Primary profession of some kind. I don't know exactly what they could do. Maybe a Farming skill where you can plant two or three different kinds of herbs and they can be turned into new special herbs that can be used for epic crafting recipes or Glyphs. Or maybe give us the ability to have another Primary Profession, giving us a grand total of three. I would love to add Alchemy to my Jewelcrafting/Enchanting and have all 3 with me. Archaeology is something that kind of fell through. No one ever did it and the people who did do it hated it for the most part. They said it would be something that they could expand onto in the future but that has yet to happen yet.
• I would really love some form of guild housing. It can be a phasing area in a new land where you go to this deserted island somewhere and there is a house that only you and your guildies can see. Inside there can be a guild bank with extra storage areas. Just a general place for you and your guild to hang out if you want to be away from trade or have frame rate issues. You obviously can't put auction houses and trade chat in these areas or else people would never leave but a place to stash alts or whatever would be kind of cool.
• Raids are something that I think they need to concentrate on in this expansion. The raids were an okay difficulty this time around. I feel like they could have been a tad easier on Normal mode and a tad harder on Heroic mode and have no nerfs at all. If you can't manage to get through it then you can't manage to get through it. People don't care if they see the content if it's nerfed to the ground when they do. The leveling experience and the alt leveling was the big thing of Cataclysm, end time raiding needs to be the feature of this upcoming expansion.
• I want level 100. They did 10 levels for two expansions and then 5 for this last one. I want them to give us 15 new levels to grind through! Just because I want the nice round number. Not for any other reason really. I hate leveling and only having 5 levels in Cataclysm was really nice. But I spent a good 3 months having nothing to do in-game before the expansion. And when it finally dropped I was leveled and geared in 6 days. Getting through the leveling process in the new expansions are always some of the most fun times you will have with a group of friends/guilds.
• I want a new Hero class. I would really like it if it were a healer. I generally only play healers and I would like a new healer. Maybe another tank healer so we don't always NEED to have a Holy Paladin in a raid and no offense to Disc Priests but you're just not as good as an H-Pally. So having  3 raid healers and 1 and 1/2 tank healers makes me want to have another tank healer. And the Emerald Dream would be the perfect place to have a new healing class emerge from.
• I have some specific Druid changes in mind for this new expansion.
• I want an actual Tank cool down as our new spell. We didn't get a new healing spell in Cataclysm and I IRL sad faced. We have Nature Swiftness which can be used as a really quick 50% increased Healing Touch for a low tank but we have no spell that decreases the incoming damage a tank is taking. Blizzard was pushing to have all healing classes be able to tank and raid heal effectively and Druids are still pretty weak tank healers compared to other classes.
• This is the expansion where I hope they will fix healing as a whole. Blizzard had this idea when they finished with Wrath. The healing model was too easy and they wanted to make it more difficult in Cataclysm. Healers were chewing through their mana and people were supposed to not be getting hit by avoidable damage. Yet they turned around and gave us this...
• Blizzard: "Hey guys, we're going to make healing a little bit harder on the healers. But don't worry, all of the damage is supposed to be avoidable so you should have no problems! ^.^
• *Releases Chimeron and Nefarion*
• Healers: "But... there's massive amounts of damage that is unavoidable at all..."
• Blizzard: "Oh well, good luck!"
• Healers: ...
• DPS: *stand in all the things* *dies* "What the hell healers, heal me!!!1"
• Healers: ...
• I agree with the making healing harder part. Wrath was definitely not what anyone wanted because it was FAR too easy. But Cataclysm personally turned out to be the same way after we got through Tier 11. As a Druid who is obviously ridiculously overpowered right now we heal through massive amounts of damage hardly ever going out of mana anymore and still top all of the meters. We obviously learned how to use our spells more effectively but I was Regrowth spamming in Heroic Bethtilac the other night and was doing reasonably well on mana. Once again, that's massive unavoidable damage Blizzard said they weren't going to do but still... Praying for a massive healing look through again.
• Oh and Blizzard. Since you took away Tree Form because you wanted the Druid tier to be represented by someone and you've now made it so transmoging will cover up all the tier you make in the future anyway... can we have that back now? Kay thanks.

Reality

World of Warcraft

• It's time to be real here.
• We are getting Mists of Pandaria. There is no way to get around it anymore. Mists of Pandaria is the only name they have trademarked in the last few months and they can't make an announcement of a new brand name without having the name copy-righted to them first for obvious legal reasons. And we all know full well that there would be no way for Blizzard to trademark a name and not have anyone find out about it. If they managed to pull it off... well congratulations to them but it is just not likely.
• We are getting either a new class or a new race. Possibly both with the new class being exclusive to that race only and having the Pandaren being available to both Horde and Alliance. We may get neither but I would find it hard for them to have a sales pitch of "look! We have Pandas! You can't play them though. You can only look at them as NPCs." They might do this obviously, but I highly doubt it.
• I want to say that they will give us a Monk/Brewmaster Hero class but Blizzard was not at all happy with the way Death Knights turned out and I am not so sure they are ready to tackle that hurdle so soon.
• Last but not least, the talent trees need to be redone or we will not be getting any new talents. They can't give us another 3 to 5 talents without some classes being able to dip into other specs signature/important spells. This obviously isn't like that with every single spec but it is important enough to note that they would need to revamp these specs so that didn't happen or just not give us anymore talent points to spend.

Starcraft 2

• The new expansions for Starcraft 2 have already been announced with each race having one of each for themselves. Heart of the Swarm continues on where Wings of Liberty left off. Sarah Kerrigan is human (kind of) again and she is joining Jim Raynor in his quest to save the world from Arcturus Mengsk and his Terran Dominion while turning the Zerg into something other than mindless eating machines. 
• There's only one thing that competitive Starcraft 2 players are going to care about in the new expansion. And that is the new units coming out. And Blizzard has been kind enough to give us silhouette's of the three new designs they have in mind for the new game.

  

                   

                  Heart of the Swarm, Terran Unit Teaser

•  NERF TERRAN!!1 *Clears throat*
• There are a few key features on this unit just from the picture. Terran are a little bit easier to figure out since they are primarily human so their structures tend to look a little more familiar to us. The head of the structure could be one of two things. It can either be a scanner or it can be a rocket launcher/laser beam/generic ranged upgrade. I'm going to go with the later since an observer that can run with your ground army that is also good in combat doesn't seem to be very balanced.
• The left arm seems to be carrying a shield and he seems to be rather bulky so I'm going to guess he is some kind of armored unit.
• The right hand seems to be an armored type of gun similar to the Marauder style gun attached to the suit type deal.
• He also seems to have a bulky upgrade on his legs. Maybe rocket boot upgrade that might give him a speed buff or the ability to jump into the air for a while and attack air units.

                  

                 Heart of the Swarm, Zerg Unit Teaser

                     Spider Demon from "the Mist" by Stephen King
                 

• Am I the only one who sees the similarities between these two?
• The first thing that I noticed after I thought for 20 minutes about what it was reminding me of (see picture above for result of that) is that it looks like it has a launcher of some kind on its back. And then I had this thought... wouldn't it be awesome if that thing shot Banelings into the air so that Banelings could hit air units! (Liquid Tyler on State of  the Game thought the same thing so I must not be crazy here!)
• However, a more sane idea is that it is a zerg ground unit that can attack air units that doesn't take six million buildings and a ton of gas make. Which is kind of what I am hoping this is. It may be similar to the Siege Tanks Terran have where it can only attack air units when it is stuck in place. Zerg have a distinct issue with Terran/Protoss that rush immediately to air units. Corrupters, Infesters, Mutalisks and Hydralisks are the only units in the Zerg army that can attack air units. And all of these take massive amounts of tech structures and minerals/gas/supply to produce. Having a cheap equability to Marines/Stalkers would be awesome but I doubt these new units will be Tier 1 units.         

                 

                 Heart of the Swarm, Protoss Unit Teaser

• Protoss seem to be getting another air unit, because they obviously need more of those.
• The pincers in the front might have the ability to pick up ground units or hold other air units in place. Maybe a stun with those electric prongs in the middle.
• Protoss is the race I know the least about of the three so I honestly have no idea what they need. Another Phoenix carbon copy seems kind of boring though.
• This months GSL (awesome Korean based monthly tournament if you didn't know over at www.GomTV.net) will be hosted live at Blizzcon! I am super excited about this since most of the time you don't get to see Koreans outside of Korea unless it is an MLG event. IM.MVP will face off against the "Little Emperor" SlayerS_MMA. I personally hope with all of my heart that the SlayerS BoxeR trained MMA will be able to pull the upset and defeat MVP but when it comes to the Koreans anything can happen. And maybe since both of them are traveling around the world for this championship, they will both be so jet-lagged that it will actually go more than 4 rounds this time! Who knows!
• Blizzard is also holding their own championship called the Blizzard Invitational where there were qualifiers held all over the world to get the best of the best from every country to compete. A lot of people are betting on MVP to take this one. Nestea would have been a contender until the map pools were announced and the extremely biased towards Terran maps were revealed. Any Terran facing a Zerg will have a sudden advantage since they are not using MLG/GSL altered maps and guess what MVP is a Terran and Nestea is a Zerg!
• All in all, a lot of the story line has already been all over Team Liquid for months. All they can give us at this point is a demo/beta and a release date for this bad boy.
• Oh and one more thing. Remember that document leaked a few months ago that told us when Blizzard wanted to release all their stuff for the next three to four years? On there was a thing called Starcraft 2: Phoenix... Blizzard better tell us what that is at Blizzcon or I am holding so many baby murlocs captive they're gonna need a quest to get them back.

And last and personally for me least is Diablo 3. Sadly, Diablo 3 is probably going to be Blizzcon's primary focus this year. Their beta seemed to be a big success among the press streams that I got to watch and all of their classes have been announced. They said that it was going to have Arena PvP and I like PvP so that may be one thing that will actually draw me to try out the game but I know little of it other than that. But Murkablo is a clear indication that they will probably be giving us a release date at Blizzcon and they want the hype to be on Diablo 3.

All in all, this Blizzcon, no matter what, is more than likely going to be extremely epic. Last year was a dud but this year all three of their franchises are ending in their current tiers and are ready to move on to new expansions. And I will be watching it all right here!

Follow me at @CQElaina on Twitter as I will be sure to Tweet about the big announcements as well as Liveblogging initial reactions on Days 1 and 2 right here!