Blizzard's Dev Watercooler Gives us a Flood of Warlords Information

Blizzard have released the first in a series of Dev Watercooler posts talking about upcoming expansion Warlords of Dreanor.

Sadly we still don't have any news of a release date for the much awaited expansion but the post does say:

Development on World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is progressing well, and we'll soon be ready to enter the first phases of public testing

- Dev Watercooler

So whilst you cross your fingers and toes for a beta coming soon here are the highlights of the post.

Stat Squish

A graph on the post shows power of creatures and power of players increases in huge jumps at levels 80, 85 and 90. Going forward the scale of stats will be reduced throughout the game. Power will scale more steadily and numbers will be smaller accross both players and mobs. Blizzard have also said that scaling will be brought into place to make old content, such as low level dungeons and raids, even more accessible to higher level players who like to farm for achievements, pets and mounts.

Racial Traits

Several racial traits are being altered to bring the level of power they have in line accross the board. Blizzard employees Celestalon and Holinka took to twitter to explain in more detail the racial changes. There are a huge amount and they have been compiled into a handy list by WoW Insider.

Ability Pruning

Due to the increasing number of abilities given to classes over the years Blizzard have found many are rarely used, others are often macroed together by players and some remain firmly in spellbooks. They state that:

For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that can be merged with other passives or base abilities.

- Dev Watercooler

Crowd Control

There are a lot of changes to crowd control incoming including the removal of disarms, the removal of instant crowd control and a shortening of fears in PvP.

For more detailed information the Dev Watercooler post is here.