gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

Just a quick post for now. It is late for me (eastern time zone attendee at a western time zone con) and I have to get up early to buy Gillderon a talking murloc plush.

All in all BlizzCon is a lot of fun and a lot of things are better than last year, not that last year was bad by any means. It is also a lot bigger. I knew the crowd would be bigger. It was 8,000 last year and 15,000 this year. However I was not prepared for the size and scope of the lines. Thursday’s registration line took my group almost 5 minutes to get from the front door to the end of the line. The line itself was faster than last year, but was quite intimidating and still over an hour long. Today wasn’t much better.

We arrived 20 minutes before the doors opened and waited for an hour to get in. We then immediately got in line for the Blizzard store. Three hours later we finally checked out, having watched the opening ceremony and Diablo Class Design panel from the line. For those who haven’t read up on BlizzCon at all yet, no major announcements this year. Getting in line when we did was a good call. When we got out the line had extended a good distance, and later in the day it was snaking around the convention center before hitting the coral area, and the coral area is what took us 3 hours to clear.

After that we were done with lines for the day. We sat in on the WoW Class Discussion panel. Nothing really new there, mostly an overview of what they saw and wanted in terms of class design and function. The use of death knight talent trees were officially confirmed against what a lot of us in beta had concluded:

Blood – melee and self healing
Frost – burst damage and controlled fights (direct comparison with frost mages made)
Unholy – diseases and minions

We also did the Diablo III Gameplay panel, which was less a play demo and more a “this is what we’re thinking of doing design wise and why.” Diablo III is going to cause some raids to loose some sign ups when it comes out I think, but that probably won’t be an issue until 2010. I’m still looking more toward StarCraft II, and the BlizzCon beta keys this year are for StarCraft II so that’ll be fun for me… though maybe not so much for my guild leader or this blog.

Tomorrow will hopefully just have the line for the murloc plush, and that mitigated by going straight there in the morning. WoW Dungeon and Raids and WoW Q&A are on my to do list for panels. There’s still plenty of the floor to see, including the Frostmourne replica, and of course the concert. Expecting another tiring but fun day.