They started by talking about the design process that goes into the creation of recipes for professions. They are adding a lot more recipes for the next expansion, at least as many as were introduced for Burning Crusade. They are very careful to balance materials and complexity on the quality of an item created from each recipe. They have worked hard to improve certain mechanics such as discovery rates for recipes and the number of mats you are able to procure for harder recipes.
Discussed in some length was the new profession knows as Inscription. This is not enchanting or alchemy. It is designed to provide a way to customize and improve your spells and abilities much like enchants do for items and armor now. Things you may see are more crits for backstab, or fireballs with knockback. They are also going to be able to do soemthing with items, but they weren't able to tell us much about it due to it being too early in the design process.
They discussed some changes and new additions being added or changed for the game both before and after the expansion. Some of these are as follows:
- Profession daily quests. You may see recipes obtained through these that are random and only available via daily quests.
- They plan to add more crafter-only items and gear. Things like jewelrycrafting gems that only a jewelrycrafter can make and use.
- They are planning to smooth out progression in many professions to eliminate sticking points in the mid 200-300 range.
- New enchantcalled Executioner that will be an armor penetration proc. They expect to have a visual graphic as cool as Mongoose.
Item discussion began with an idea of how itemization is being handled going forward. They mentioned that they will have something like twice the number of current epics when the expansion comes out. Something they are also working on is making PvP players not feel like they need to raid and being able to focus on what they enjoy doing. PvP gear and Raid gear will be equal but separate in terms of progression. They are also trying to better evaluate stat distribution on items for specific class and talent builds. They mentioned how the new token system came to be and why they put multiple classes on a single token while still having multiple tokens. This allowed more choices on a single token while not making some classes feel like they would never get that item. They also addressed the problem of classes having multiple roles and needing to have multiple choices on gear.
They moved on to things to come for the game.
- Free Spell Damage for healers. This allows healers to be able to go kill things when not healing, but not necessarily be as effective as a damage dealer.
- Hunters should be getting a legendary ranged weapon.
- New items in Zul'Aman that should give players gear that can handle 25 man raids.
The audience was allowed to ask questions, and some of the questions posed were as follows:
- When asked why enchanting doesn't have items that can be auctioned they mentioned that they had originally designed it to be more of a player interactive profession. They have been talking about going to an item based enchanting system though to allow for auctioning.
- When asked why JC, BS, and Engineering all have to compete for ore they said that they like to try to share materials because it keeps the demand high. They don't have any plans to alleviate mining except maybe more mining nodes or faster respawns.
- When asked if inscriptionists would be able to inscribe other player's spells/skills they mentioned it would be an item based like a scroll you read that would let other players improve their spells or skills with your inscription.
- When asked if they plan to allow for dying or armor they mentioned that identification of armor is currently part of being able to identify a player and their skillset, so there are no current plans to allow that form of customization.
- When asked if they plan to add shield patterns for higher level blacksmiths they said yes, but they don't know how soon.
- When asked if Leatherworking will be getting better craftable epics to better match those for Blacksmiths and Tailors they said that they don't plan to make those items top-end highest quality items. It was meant to be a gap filler between quested gear and end-game gear.
- When asked if there were plans to upgrade legendaries that are already in the game they said that they do not plan to do this. They were intended to be long-lasting items that took longer to replace, but not meant to be ultimate weapons that everyone wants.
- When asked if some tier sets would see additional sets added like some of the other classes do, they do not plan to add more sets, but they will be balancing tokens to be more organized so that each token has more desire for those tokens.
- When asked if spirit would ever become more worthwhile to casters, they said they are looking at improving it somehow to make it a more desirable stat.
Link to the YouTube video can be found here.