A Look Inside the Blizzard of 2009

Bashiok gave us the run down on the day's agenda and immediately fired up Diablo 3 to show us what the Male Wizards are capable of. It took place in a desert canyon that somewhat resembles Act II, but more confined. Some details below.

There's a new status view above your spell list. It shows your active spells, such as Ice Armor, their duration remaining, and when the spell expires, the icon shows up over your head and turns red to remind you it has expired and you should probably recast it!
Mana globes are out. Instead of having multiple types of orbs drop, mana dependent builds can now take a skill that causes health orbs to also regenerate a set number of mana as well. This leads me to believe they'll be ineffective later, but time will tell!
Potion cooldowns are in, but potion healing is instant. Knowing when to fight and when to be patient is going to be key to surviving.
Inventory system is somewhat back. The basic inventory workspace is 5x8. All items are either 1 or 2 spaces, no more gigantic shields it seems.
Pants! There's now a pants armor slot! Now you can finally be stylin'.

Whew, that was a lot. With that demo down, we got a good look at the real offices, where the work behind the scenes is done to give us that glossy finished product. Without going into any details for sake of the individuals, they have great taste and line the walls with their favorites. Perhaps it's to give them inspiration to go the extra mile. Whatever the case may be, it's certainly working. And the Frostmourne replicas are a great touch. If that wasn't enough, the new Blizzard Library that just opened gives them access to a wealth of development tools for all aspects of their jobs... as well as access to some of the finest fantasy materials around in Dungeons and Dragons, Wheel of Time, Tolkein, and even graphic novels. Oh, and they can check out games from there too. I could certainly use some of that inspiration.

Before I lost myself in that wealth of knowledge and entertainment, thankfully, it was time to head to the cafeteria for lunch. Much of my time was spent with Alex Tsang, the Tools Producer for the game and a bit of a connoisseur of PvP. Seeing as this man knows how to report to the powers that be, we got to talk about a lot of important things.

Hunters
Beast Mastery is being looked at. Pet Scaling has been considered but isn't a real option due to it being, well, boring. He did have a good laugh about it being entirely worthless in PVP at the moment since the pet can be slaughtered by any DPS and that instantly cuts the hunter's total output by 50%.
Explosive shot got what it deserved and probably still isn't fully balanced yet.
More people need to realize the power of the 90% AoE Reduction of Snake Trap Snakes in PVP since it forces multiple cooldowns to be used typically rather than one instant. All which aren't aimed at you.
The Rise to the Top
WoW started as a 12 man project. It was originally planned for 24 servers with 24 more to come by the year's end. Unfortunately, someone big called them the day after it went on sale and said "Put them up. Now." And the rest is history.

WoW and Warcraft 3 were originally designed to run under the exact same engine. But as each game evolved it became quickly apparently that each one had far different needs and WoW was rebuilt, and eventually, that engine formed those legendary alpha Warcraft 3 screenshots.

They dream about breaking the healer, tank, DPS archetypes.

Lastly, we had a brief panel on the future of contact with the company at the moment, and it's Twitter! Head on over to /starcraft, /warcraft, or /diablo and you'll see that they're serious about their fans with up to the date info and contests. At the moment they're handing out 500 beta keys, so they're serious about making it a major part of the Blizzard fan experience. Might be time to make an account if you haven't already! After all, you won't get a tour quite like this one without making yourself known as their number one fan or player!