What will happen with all the current Daily Quests when the Expansion is released?
The existing quests will still be in the game, I don’t anticipate players will do them a lot, although we’ll be adding a whole bunch of new daily quests for level 80 content.
Will the current daily quests continue to reward gold, or experience instead, or both?
The idea is that they will reward experience at that point, although it’s possible the experience reward might not be as high as what you might expect for how much gold you’re getting right now.
How many times will players be able to change their hairstyle, and how much will it be?
So far, we’re planning to just have a cost in terms of money. The cost will scale depending on what level character you are, but we don’t plan to put a cooldown on it just yet, we’ll see if that’s necessary, if it turns out the cost is balanced very low then we might end up putting a cooldown on it. But hopefully we’ll just be able to cost it to where players have freedom to do what they want to do. I think even if you allowed them to change it every day, not necessarily everybody would go out there and change their hair every day.
Any plans on adding PvE content to the Armory?
Well it’s certainly something that we want to be doing, we would like to have PvE ladders or accomplishments where ever possible, but I don’t have any details that I can share with you just yet.
Many players were unhappy with the progress on Sunwell Isle on PvP servers. What have you learned from this?
Well there’s always a worse-case scenario fall-back for at least when the gates will open for progress within the Sunwell itself, but as far as guild progression within the 25 man instance, it varies a lot from server to server. Some guilds where PvE is important to them, they’ve been progressing relatively quickly, but on others it’s much slower, but I don’t know that there’s anything we would do to change that. I’m not sure specifically what the question is though.
People kill each other while doing the quests on PvP servers, so the going forward is very slow
Ah, so people are slower to do all the turn-ins to advance the stage that it’s in? That’s a valid concern, although even now it seems most the servers have progressed pretty much all the way at this point.
Will there be a similar event prior to Wrath of the Lich King for opening the way to Northrend?
Not really similar in that respect, as soon as the expansion goes live on that day, people will be able to go to Northrend, much like it was with the Burning Crusade event, where a couple of weeks in advance there might be some additional quests that are happening, but the actual event for when you will be able to cross into Northrend will be the day we launch the expansion.
What will happen to the Scourge after Arthas is killed?
We’ll have to see, it’s too early to tell you that now. There are a lot of different possibilities, initially the Lich King inhabited the body of Ner’zhul and then he moved himself over to inhabiting the body of Arthas - that could change, maybe he could go away, all kind of different possibilities.
Can you give us one or two examples of the new spells of abilities for one of the the current classes past level 70?
Unfortunately I can’t, that’s content we’re saving for later, that’s stuff you’ll be seeing over the next couple of months, but there’s a lot of stuff that is really powerful and exciting. Our main goal is for people to look at their 51 point talents and get excited about that, or their new spells and abilities. We’re trying to make sure we don’t hamstring ourselves too much by existing game balance, because the goal isn’t for classes to feel the same as they feel today at level 70, the goal is for every class to get a lot of new exciting powerful things all the way up to level 80, and as long as level 80 balance still feels good, then it’ll be different balance but will hopefully still feel pretty good.
Maybe at the WWI in Paris?
Yes, very likely that we’ll be able to talk more about some of the spells and abilities by then.
Any news on Grim Batol?
Nope, no news for you right now on Grim Batol.
The Death Knight can be a damage dealer and a tank, so he can play a lot of roles. Are you concerned that WoW will be over crowded by Death Knights, and players will only play their Death Knights?
I do think that a lot of people when it first comes out will want to try out the Death Knight, I think the first couple of weeks we’ll see a ton of players trying it out to see if it’s for them, although the Death Knight certainly hasn’t been designed to be more powerful than other classes, it should be equivalently powerful. Maybe it’s cool in it’s own right, and even if we ended up with more Death Knights than other character classes, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, as long as its still a reasonable sort of balance between those. I think in some ways, the fact that they start at level 55 works in our favor, in that it is kind of a barrier to some players, that if they already have a level 70 character, on day one when the expansion comes out, they might take a look at the Death Knight, but at the same time they’re going to know, well, my existing character is already level 70, I can go to level 80 with him right now, versus taking a step back in terms of levels and having to start over at level 55. So we’ll probably see a lot of Death Knights in the first weeks, but I expect it to even out somewhat, like the Burning Crusade, when we first launched it there were a lot of Horde Paladins or Alliance Shamans, because it was the new thing that everyone wanted to see and do for a little bit, but then it evened out.
Is there going to be an instance in Dalaran, or associated with Dalaran?
I don’t think I can talk about that yet - maybe.
What will be the changes in the graphic engine?
With Lich King we’re just making incremental improvements to the graphics engine, I do think that in a lot of ways when you look at our new zones, you see that we’re really pushing the envelope as far as the look for WoW. I think our new zones probably look better than any of our previous zones, the same might even be said for the dungeons etc. It’s still a possibility that some day in the future we might do a major graphics engine overhaul, but that’s not going to happen for Lich King.
And the system requirements for Lich King will be the same?
Most likely going to be staying the same. It’s still to be finalized, but it should probably be about the same.
Would Blizzard include optional higher textures for players with better systems?
That would definitely be a possibility for us, it does imply a whole lot of going back and creating new textures, or touching up existing textures, so not something that we’re doing just yet, but it’s a possibility for the future.
Are the Death Knights going to start in Stratholme, or be associated with Stratholme at all?
Not directly associated with Stratholme, although they will have some quests that are related to it. We are doing a Caverns of Time version of Stratholme, but the Death Knight is actually going to be starting in a Necropolis that is floating over Eastern Plaguelands, and there’s actually a new section of Eastern Plaguelands that we’re building that’s specifically designed for quests for the Death Knight, I don’t think we have a name for it yet, I’m just calling it the Far Eastern Plaguelands, but it’s this new area east of Tyr’s Hand and East of the Noxious Glade where a lot of this stuff takes place, so the Death Knight does a lot of quests there, it’ll also do a lot of quests in the Eastern Plaguelands, and hopefully going through all that it’ll then flow into the existing content.
Do you still plan to have a bonus fight, a new boss or hidden rooms in Heroic mode instances?
Not currently planning to do that, sometimes we do those as world events, like Halloween or whatever with the Headless Horseman showing up, that kind of thing, but right now between the normal and heroic mode, they should stay the same, but the difficulty goes up very significantly.
Is the corrupted Ashbringer still going to be in Naxxramas?
That’s a really good point, and you’ll have to wait and see on that.
Players can earn a lot of money with daily quests now. Don’t you think that there is a big difference between the rich players and the poor players?
Yes definitely, there is a big gap between players that are doing a lot of daily quests and players that don’t, and we do have plans to introduce some additional things to the game that players might want to spend their money on, spend excess gold on. The daily quests are very cool, they give players a relatively casual way to get money so that they can get things like the epic mount etc, but even before Lich King comes out we are hoping to introduce some things that have potential to sink some money out of the economy, and they’re targeted towards players who have a whole load of gold and don’t know what to do with it.
Are there any UI addons that you are going to add the the game?
There is definitely a lot of UI improvement that we plan to do to the game in general, for example we plan to make the talent repsec process a little bit smoother, for example it might remember how your action bars were set up etc, if you change talents back and forth that you don’t have to go through all the hoops of changing out your macros or changing out your action bars etc. So there’s that, there are other things like there are a couple of popular add ons that give you targeting information inside of Arenas, there’s Proximo and Arena Master, there’s a couple of different ones out there that do that. We plan to integrate that functionality into the client in a slightly more clean smooth way that works a little better, and a variety of other UI features that we’ll talk about more as time goes on.
When will players be able to use their flying mounts in Northrend?
Level 77. And they will be able to use their existing flying mounts at that point, we’ll also have new flying mounts that you’ll be able to buy that are exclusive to Link King, they will probably be a little bit faster, more like the speed of the Pheonix Mount or the Armored Netherdrake. One of the things we’re talking about right now, it’s not finalized, but we’re talking about the ability for those mounts to carry a passenger, so if your friend doesn’t have an epic flying mount or if they are a lower level or whatever, they’d be able to jump on your mount and off you go.
Maybe you could fight from the mount, when you’re a passenger on the horse?
Yup, that would be very cool.
Are you planning to do anything in Outland to keep it popular?
Generally the way we keep old content popular is making sure that it’s still fun to re-roll as a different class, I think that it’s likely to stay at least as alive as any other zone in World of Warcraft. As far as the existing Outland raid zones etc. probably not going to see a lot of action once the expansion comes out but we’re kind of prepared to accept that, the same was the case with pre-Burning Crusade, but eventually, like with Lich King, we brought back Naxxramas. There’s always the possibility in the future that we’ll bring back an old popular bit of content to revisit.
Many people would love to see Heroic versions of the old 5 person instances, do you plan to introduce them?
Well it is something that we hope to do at some point, we don’t have any that are on the list right now for the release of Northrend, although it’s still a possibility for later on down the line. A lot of that just comes down to how much of a need there is for that kind of content, and it’s very likely that at some point after the release of Lich King, we’ll want to be able to add new 5 man content, and that’s one way that we can go about doing that.
Are you introducing another profession?
Yes, Inscription as we’ve already announced, but no others beyond that.
Will there be a Collector’s Edition?
I don’t think we’re announcing anything about a Collector’s Edition just yet, but stay tuned.
