I'm going to be in Denver, Co for DrupalConColorado and need a place to crash for a few nights.  I'll take a cab/bus to get to the actual convention site here.

So, any couches available out there?  I has beer money!

Hahaha, no not really :P  But it got you to read this post didn't it?

Actually, I'm actually quite happy at the upcoming Illumination "nerf" because of the other healing mechanic changes involved.  Check it out: http://www.worldofraids.com/news/679.html

A quick summary of 3.2 Paladin changes:

• Beacon now works on overhealing.  If I overheal someone 100%, all that potential healing goes to my Beacon target.  Yes! This is something Holy pallies have been asking about sine the release of Wrath.  This allows me to heal a raid AND keep a tank up. Also, multiple Beacons may be allowed on a singl target, meaning multiple Paladins can heal a raid WHILE keeping the tank up.  
• Flash of Light now HoTs a target who has our Sacred Shield.  Woot! More, free healing and I get a legitimate HoT!
• Illumination nerf.  We all knew this was coming ;) And, no, I'm not going to flip out about this.  I think this provides an excellent opportunity for us to really have to put skill into who/when we heal.  No more "LOLHOLYLIGHT" for 10 straight minutes. 
• MP5 buff. The hallowed "mp5 buff" looks like its really just "put more mp5 on gear".  MP5 is great in massive amounts, of course, but right now all the gear we're passing up becaues of MP5 has much too little of it.  If that amount DOUBLED the pieces would be amazing.  Here's to hoping they double it ;)

To summarize: I'm really excited.  If they dropped Illumination down to only 40-50% I'd still be poop-my-pants excited.  Holy Pallies: This is incredible opportunity for us to step up as healers, but requires a tremendous amount more work and decision making skills. Can our pallies handle that?

Pulled this off of WoR quoting Ghostcrawler:

The WoW Design Team

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

There are different types of designers. Some work on quests, encounters, world events or zones. My team works on classes, items, tradeskills, UI, PvP, combat and pretty much most of the crunchy bits of WoW. It's a great team of very talented players and they don't get the recognition they deserve. This is partially because some of them wish to remain anonymous. (Shameless plug: we are hiring an item designer. Check the hiring portion of the site for more details.)

Within our team, nobody owns a particular class. We all work on them together and nobody make a change (at least a serious change) without getting consensus from everyone else. We draw on our own experiences, community feedback, internal testing, data collected from the live game, and correspondence with friends, guildies and other players whose opinions we've grown to respect.

We also interact a lot with the other designers, because they all play the game too and many have a great deal of raiding or PvP experience. They come to our meetings or just drop by with an idea or a piece of feedback. That goes for the rest of the WoW team, and in fact all of Blizzard. We are extremely collaborative and not particularly hierarchical.

Our designers tend to be fairly technical as the industry goes, and some of us know a little programming, but typically we aren't writing actual code though we do write scripts and make data queries if you understand the distinction.

The programmers are a separate but equal department. They do write code and they are extremely talented, sometimes intimidatingly so. We ask them for new features or code changes that would improve the game and they tell us what is feasible, what is risky, and suggest alternative ways to get what we want. They are all gamers too so it's really a back and forth process as we work on an idea together until we come up with something we are happy with.

The process is similar for interacting with artists, or really any other component of the team. The big secret of WoW's success is that Blizzard just manages to hire very, very good people who "get it."

 

This is a very a insightful look into the team at Blizzard.  Think you've got what it takes to hang at Blizzard? Go check out that item designer position :)

testing auto line break converts 1

Testing auto line break converts 2
tersting auto line break converst 3

The site is finally getting the video treatment.  I need you all to dig deep and scrounge up all the videos we made over the years.  I have a way to finally get them on the site in super high quality. 

Reply here if you've got some lying around and I'll PM you with how to upload them.