User:Kaydeethree/BlizzCon 2009

Kaydeethree's BlizzCon 2009 writeup.

Day zero
Badge pickup uneventful. UI community dinner rocked. Go Cairenn and WoWI.

Day one
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm! I can finally talk about it, yay! Deathwing coming back from the Elemental Plane shatters the waking world. Revamping pretty much every zone from vanilla WoW, like Barrens getting split in two and Azshara getting retuned into a 15-20 level-up zone. Destruction and chaos everywhere. Flying mounts in the old world! Yay!

Goblin and Worgen! I guess that means Bibi isn't going to be running naked in the streets of Paris after all...

Mount Hyjal, Grim Batol, Uldum, Gilneas all finally getting added to the game!

Major class changes: The death of spell power, attack power, defense, armor penetration, block value, and MP5... Hunters no longer using mana. Warlocks redoing Soul Shards.

Bunch of new race-class options: gnome priest, tauren paladin, dwarf shaman, blood elf warrior, human hunter, etc...

Starting experience summaries
Both new starting zones (worgen and goblin) are heavily phased, much like the Scarlet Enclave. We started at level 6 at BlizzCon to hide the surprises from lv1-5.

Where we join the Worgen starting experience, we wake up in stocks about to get killed. Genn Greymane stops that and orders a strong enough dose of something to kill a horse to try and solve our 'condition' because he knows us too well. It works (to a point). The Forsaken are attacking and we need to fend them off. Killing captains, then finally the ranger under Sylvanas' control, we head back to the storm shelter when the cataclysm happens. Massive earthquake, big boom, and the water level rises like 20 feet, completely wiping out the Forsaken beach landing. Now we need to deal with that fallout, rescue the scouts who were caught in it and are about to drown, spread the evacuation command to other low-lying areas. The quest chain ended at that point, but more's obviously coming.

A level 6 goblin wakes up on some flotsam off the Lost Isles after fleeing Kezan and getting blown out of the water by some Alliance ships. After getting zapped back into coherence, our first task is to get our fellow goblins out of the escape capsules floating helplessly in the water, then making a beachhead against bomb-throwing monkeys and raptors. We come across an orcish journal ("Orcs can write?") that sends us toward the Horde camp. They too were attacked by the Alliance and lost some "special cargo". First task is clearing out the bushes in the way, then dealing with 7 rogues, then finally recovering the special cargo, who turns out to be Thrall! After heading back to camp, we cut in line of all of the other goblins waiting their turn to use the slingshot to get blasted to the other island on a slingshot-launched rocket.

Day 2
Game systems panel quite, quite informative. Lots of info about new tech like Mastery, Guild advancement, Rated battlegrounds, Paths of the Titans...

D&R panel covered layouts of cataclysm dungeons, ICC, cataclysm raids.

Class/profs panel round 2 was a repeat of round 1.