You’d be surprised how much non-BlizzCon WoW news you miss out on while at BlizzCon. Well that’s what MMO-Champion and WoW Insider are for, right? Well while I catch up on the additional news and see about getting my mods in line for tomorrow’s patch here’s a wrap up of the major news from BlizzCon that I heard.

World of Warcraft

Patch 3.0.2 is currently 1.17GB in size. If you haven’t downloaded that much of it then it is strong suggested that you run the Background Downloader the night before the patch (i.e. tonight). There will be a minor patch one week after patch 3.0.2.

WotLK has gone gold master and is being produced. Final touches done from here on will likely be put out as a minor patch either on release day or one week after release.

Three content patches are planned for WotLK. Dual-spec system and the dance studio will be added in these patches. Guild ratings for raid and PvP standings may also be added.

Patch 3.1: Will include Ulduar raid instance.
Patch 3.2: Will add a new, unknown raid instance.
Patch 3.3: Will add Icecrown Citadel and will resolve the Ashbringer storyline.

Dual-spec system will allow you to switch specs between fights in raids (i.e. death knights can swap from tank to pure DPS) but it won’t work in the middle of an Arena match. They are looking at keybindings, glyphs, and possibly an ItemRack-like system for gear swaps to be included.

Dance studio will not only allow you to add new dances, but it will let you combine dance moves to create a more unique dance. That is, until the guys at Elitist Jerks min/max dancing and then everyone does the same thing.

Most class changes are to facilitate group flexibility, similar to the reasons behind the buff revamps. Again the developers stated they want you to bring the player (cause of friendship or skill), not the class. Questions reguarding paladins, especially of a “buff us” nature, were the most booed. There were almost no death knight questions asked.

Two /silly contest winners had class based jokes:

What class do girls like the most in WoW?
Male Enhancment Shaman

What’s the difference between a Restro Druid and Superman?
Superman has a weakness.

Battlegrounds will see some future overhauls. XP rewards will be added for leveling PvPers, daily quests added, BG and Arena queuing from anywhere, BG rating system with possibly a guild rating system, Strand of the Ancients (new WotLK BG) is being changed from 10 vs 10 to 15 vs 15 and getting double the number of vehicles.

The WoW movie is still being worked on. They do have a draft of the script. Ozzy Osbourne will be doing the next WoW commercial.

Work has begun on the next WoW expansion.

StarCraft II

The single player campaign in SC2 will be a trilogy of games, one for each race. SC2 will feature Jim Raynor and the terrans. Two expansions will be released to continue the story, one with Kerrigan and the zerg and one with the protoss. This will allow for more missions (26 to 30 per game), more meaningful choices for the player, and more cinematics.

Diablo III

Third class revealed: the wizard, young and headstrong, they use magic to both obliterate their enemies and control their environment, including teleport and slowing time.

Skill system is evolving to something more complex. Respecs will be available. You will focus skills on one or two abilities to make them super powerful and your core abilities.

More random drops, most of it remaining unbound to enable the extensive trading network Diablo II had. A new rune system will be included with drops, allowing you to customize skills with new effects. Health globes that drop will heal your entire group when one person picks it up. Wizard can spec to have mana globes also drop. Little to no downtime is the goal of the developers.

Combat is large-scale and epic. The player’s character is ridiculously powerful compared to the world’s normal inhabitants. Monsters will include a range of attacks players can react to. Example given is a very powerful melee attack that builds up, allowing the player to step back. Another was a skeleton shield carrier, who acts as a major health shield for rows of ranged attackers behind them.

Q: “Will there be a secret cow level?”
A: “That’s a secret!”

Blizzard

No plans for a BlizzCon east coast.

Blizzard’s fourth, unknown project is confirmed to be a new MMO in a brand new universe. No details are expected for quite a while. Keep in mind we’ll likely see StarCraft II released next year, Diablo III and the next WoW expansion the year after that, so Blizzard probably won’t be done with their current announced projects until 2011.

BlizzCon is over, it has been a good ride.

We were able to avoid lines most of today, but that isn’t to say there were none. We had to skip on the game demos and talking murlocs (sorry Gill), but StarCraft II beta is expected “soon” and Jinx will have the murlocs available online around mid to late November so it is just a delay, not a loss.

Two bits of death knight news from the panels I sat in today. One, Blizzard confirmed that death knights come with the WotLK expansion and will not be appearing in the upcoming 3.0.2 patch. Not surprising, but good to put down those rumors. Two, Blizzard commented on the expected DPS placement of death knights. Assuming equal gear and player skill a death knight who is tanking should rank alongside a protection warrior or paladin. Personally I think we’ll be at the top of that list of three. Likewise a DPS specced death knight will rank with other melee DPS, feral druids and rogues being the listed examples. Should rogues and pure cat druids be ahead of us? Probably for the rogue, maybe for the cat, but good to know we won’t be putting out “good enough” damage if we’re focused on DPS.

I’ll see about getting my BlizzCon photos up and those of my group linked. Starting on Monday look for Preparing for Your Death Knight posts, going over things you can do now to get a jump on leveling up your death knight.

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.

I was one of the lucky few who managed to brave Blizzard’s online ticket purchase and come away with a ticket. Many gnomes died to bring us that uptime…

So I’m here in Anaheim, CA now with badge in hand and waiting for the convention center doors to open tomorrow morning. The in game bear mount isn’t implemented yet. However there are some nice things in the goodie bag. The big surprise is a BlizzCon edition Blizzard Authenticator. The “LOL, that’s awesome!” came from the box of tissues they gave us, with “QQ n00b” on them. Given the art on the box I think you will appreciate why. There’s also an add for talking murloc plushies

For those of you wanting to watch BlizzCon but don’t have DirecTV might I suggest you check out WoW Radio. They will be here and doing both live streams of events and panels and hosting podcasts of the same. All the details will be on their front page. It is mostly audio only (see WoW Radio) but it is free and they’ve done broadcasting from BlizzCon before so I expect the quality will be pretty good.

I won’t be doing any live blogging myself, but certainly check back for updates later concerning death knights. I doubt we’ll hear anything radical, like death knights coming in patch 3.0.2, but I’m sure there will be some news. They don’t have their own panel, but I’ll be at the class panel.