Monday, October 5, 2009

Belated Blizzcon Thoughts

I haven't posted in quite a while. Between looking for a job and playing the auction house game I haven't had much time/interest in updating anything on here. But I felt like dropping a line here on Blizzcon after having a few weeks to think on it. I'll present it as a brief pro/con of Cataclysm.

Pro
-Interesting story idea. I love the idea of going back to old school Azeroth/Kalimdor.
-Path of the Titans sounds like a lot of fun. It's like picking an auxiliary talent tree from a shared pool. I'm very curious to see the bonuses/abilities that are gained from the specific paths.
-The Mastery system seems like a slick way to re-package the talent trees and add more fun talents. If most of the damage/healing/mitigation throughput talents are consolidated into passive bonuses for simply putting points into each tree it will open up room for more fun/playstyle altering talents, which would seem to create more "true" choice for players when picking out talents. That being said I think the best feature of this system is the fact that the developers can easily tweak the mastery bonuses to fine tune balance much more easily than they could otherwise.
-Stat consolidation. I really like it. Int has never been a very desirable stat for most casters, attack power is redundant with Agi/Str, etc. Streamlined is good.


Con
-Due to so much focus being spent on the 1-60 leveling up experience I'm worried that there won't be as much 80-85 content as there might be otherwise.
-No new tiers to the talent trees is somewhat disappointing. These have got to be one of my favorite aspects of new expansion is playing with the new talent derived abilities, adapting my playstyle to accomodate changes, etc.

I'll post more as I think of them.

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