Blizzard Panel Participants:

Chris Robinson: WoW Art Director

J Allen Brack - WoW Production Director

Tom Chilton - Wow Game Director

Chris Metzen - Senior VP, Story & Franchise Development

Greg Street - WoW Lead Systems Designer

Cory Stockton - Lead Content Designer

Player: As a ten men raider, there's a lot of disparity between the 25 men raids and 10 men raids to a point that 10 men raids almost feel a lot easier, but there's a lot of hardcore players that still raid 10 men we just dont need 15 extra people to do it, when heroic magmar came out 25 men raiders couldnt do it on 10 men on heroic, when can we expect to see the difficulty raised for 10 men?

Greg: Over  in Korea the hard core guilds are considered to be the 10 player guilds, whereas in the west its the 25. So I don't think its a blanket statement that 10 men raids are easier then 25. Definately hard to balance together. when only 10 players its hard to kill players and take them out of the action. Hard to know what raid buffs and utility they have. Its definately our goal to make them the same

Player: Is there a chance you will go to a ten vs twenty men just to make the balance between the two easier?

Greg: It's pretty hard every time we change raid size, taking 25 down to 20 is asking a guild to kick 5 people which is pretty brutal to ask. I honestly don't think this would make it any easier we would still have problems.

Player:  Thanks for the Real ID Dungeon thing, it's awesome. Do you have any plans to implement and what are the obstacles to implementing spectator mode for raids or battlegrounds.

Tom: That would be sweet. We have wanted this for a long time. I would love to have replays. Just a matter of getting to it. Someday, I hope.

Player: Do you have any plans on adding more options to the guild leaders UI so I can give more options to my Banker or different officers since I am the only one that can turn guild repairs on and off I'm the only one who can do certain things in a guild and its hard when I am away for a weekend. Nobody can do anything for the guild. I have good officers and would like to give some options to the guild.

Cory: Its a matter of how much control we want to give to people other then the guild leader.

Player: Wouldn't that be the guild leader's decision not yours?

Cory:  It is, but when things go wrong, it comes back to us to fix.

Player: With the upcoming expansions, are all the purples you get from the firelands going to be replaced by greens on the first day?

Greg: Green is the new purple every expansion. We want players who worked hard to get the best gear to get a head start. But we don't want it to last too long so we don't cheat players out of their leveling experience.

Player: Am really excited about Alliance and Horde getting the Monk class. Are you going to throw them in as if they were always there?

Christ: Yes, just throw it in.

Player: Hunters and Crowd Control. Wyvern string having the DOT it makes it difficult to quickly wyvern sting and trap the thing after, before cataclysm we had the option of removing a DOT with the scorpion sting but then that was removed. is there going to be some way of removing that DOT going forward?

Greg: Its probably not going to happen in 4.3, and 5.0  is such a big reset for class abilities and talents. WE dont want everyone DOTting up the target before they do crowd control and then damage is ticking away and we dont want crowd control to always break on damage, definately a problem and we will fix everything in 5.0

Player: Thank you for finally addressing the enhancement shaman AOE issues. Windshear - in the 4.3 blog you said the change wouldnt affect the dps shaman since they all take reacer, but most pvp and pve dont take reaver. so instead of nerfing resto pvp you've caused enhancement pve to take a deep hit to get the utility we already have, and you caused enhancement pvp to no longer be able to subspec resto taking a pretty big survivability hit. Do you have any plans to address that?

Greg: We are not worried about it for 4.3, even in 10 player raid we have lots of people who can do the interrupting. In pvp we see a lot of shaman with that talent spec anyway.

Player:  Please bring back Illidian Stormrage. Do you guys hate enhancement shamans? they are always sub optimal. they are not relevant in pvp especially in arena and 2v2. DPS is always suboptimal.

Greg: We try to make sure that the classes have options. Maybe Frost and PVE isnt that awesome but you can go fire arcane and feel you are doing the same thing. On the pvp front theres uptime and melee, interrupt, all those stuff we want to address in 5.0. In pve they are just doing fine and we hope some of the changes we have in 4.3 to the AOE will make them feel better.

Player: Combat Rogues - now that Haze gives energy back and we have restless blades we kind of want to do everything real quick. Do you guys like combat using their cooldowns more often or do you want them to do the cyclical things, hold off till the 30% buffs so they can use all their cooldowns. Restless blades wants you to use everything on cooldown when its off

Greg: I would say restless blades option.

Player: Wondering if the guild name change service will be in 4.3 or 5.0?

Brack: One day we will unleash dance studio into the world but not today. In less then 2 weeks we will be releasing all the guild services.

Player: Do you plan to bring same kind of challenges that heroic rag brought or are we going to be seeing more of a neutral raiding standpoint?

Panel: The heroic modes are always going to be very challenging

Player: Healers in Mist of Pandoria - are you going to bring more healers in 25 man raids? because there is a new healing class and the guilds will have 2 people for a class so are you going to design the raids to bring more healers

Greg:  We wont change the number of healers we expect players to bring, we will just see more variety.