MMO-Champion Feed - Before the Storm Delayed, Developer Interviews, Blue Tweets, DLC #607

[MMO-Champion]

Card Design Competition Season 6 - The Grand Finale!

Christie Golden's Before the Storm Delayed
Christie Golden's upcoming novel Before the Storm has been delayed until June 12, 2018. It was originally scheduled to release on May 15, 2018.

Amazon doesn't have the official cover art yet, but it was posted on Twitter. The book description was updated, but you can see the original description here.

Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

An all-new, official prequel novel to The Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard Entertainment’s next expansion to the critically acclaimed World of Warcraft.

In Before the Storm, Anduin Wrynn, king of Stormwind, and Sylvanas Windrunner, warchief of the Horde, are new to their positions of power, both ascending before they were truly prepared. As the Alliance and the Horde struggle to recover from the devastating war with the demonic Burning Legion, a terrible discovery will test both leaders, threatening to reignite the bitter enmity between their factions and shake the very foundations of the world of Azeroth.

Developer Interviews
We're continuing to take a look at new information from the BlizzCon developer interviews. Automatic Jak talked to Sigma at Blizzcon 2017.

• The team went into Legion knowing that they might have to revisit some of the classes that received major changes once player feedback was collected.
• There most likely will not be complete class revamps again any time soon.
• Mythic dungeons are a great way to show off each class’s unique toolkit.
• The team likes classes having unique abilities.
• Going forward a big question is what unique abilities each class should have.
• The team wants to spread out class strength and weaknesses more.
• Utility will be spread out and balanced more in the future.
• Everyone should feel like they have some sort of cooldown to help them survive.
• The best thing the team can do to help showcase unique abilities is to have more variety in dungeon encounters.
• Talent tweaks and the future of the class artifact abilities are being looked at moving forward.
• The passive health increase on Artifact Weapons was essentially to also help healers heal into a set of players with higher health pools who take more damage that stays balanced with the amount of healing done.
• Thorns and other design elements are being experimented with more to counter the issue of healing getting boring as players get stronger.
• The team is pretty happy with where raid cooldowns are at now.
• Steady damage is important to the design of healing in encounters.

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Vol'jin status: still dead, not letting that stop him (Muffinus)

Thanks all for another incredible BlizzCon full of excitement and hugs. I love this community so much! (Celestalon)
Was talking back stage with one of the convention organizers, who works on several big conventions... he said something that made me think. (Celestalon)
"You look at big cons like ComicCon, E3, GamesCom, ChinaJoy... those are for hundreds of games/things. BlizzCon is for 5 games [franchises]" (Celestalon)
"BlizzCon matches them in scale (with the new North Hall), with just 5 games. It's incredible.", he said. (Celestalon)
It really is incredible. It's because of the people. The community. The FAMILY. I am so honored to have the privilege to contribute to it. (Celestalon)

In a creative industry, it's valuable to let your creatives take some time every cycle to work on whatever they're passionate about. (Muffinus)
WoW's level designers took on crafting the oceans of Broken Isles as a fun project once pencils were down for most of the world. (Muffinus)
I'd encourage everyone to take a swim, you'll find all kinds of cool little moments, and giant pearls, and salty krakens, and passion/love. (Muffinus)
Plus it drives the Secret Finding Discord nuts so, bonus (Muffinus)

I would consider everyone a creative - designers, artists, engineers can be creative, even producers with their multi-colored spreadsheets! (Muffinus)
Did you know that Gull Rock in Stormheim was created by a producer that wanted to see what would happen if he learned to add seagulls? (Muffinus)
The result was a LOT of seagulls, who were then eaten by Falcosaurs. Never forget the look he gave me when I told him they ate his seagulls (Muffinus)
A combination of unfathomable sadness and "did you have time for that, let me consult my spreadsheet" (Muffinus)

Dark Legacy Comics #607
DLC #607 has been released.

View the full article