New Info Straight From Tigole at Leipzig

We had a chance to talk with Tigole a bit this afternoon at the Leipzig Games Convention and he provided quite a bit of new information. We have a video in the process of being uploaded now, but unfortunately Nimloth is uploading it from his hotel in Germany, so it's a bit slow. In the meantime, we have some details from the interview to satiate everyone's hunger for details.

We first asked about Utgarde Keep, located in Howling Fjord. It's going to be a winged dungeon with two instances. One is a level 70 instance for players to level up in and the other - called "Utgarde Pinnacle" - will be for level 80 players. Both instances will of course have Normal and Heroic versions.

A bit later we asked if he could go into more details about the Inscription profession. It's being approached in a different manner than previous professions because the team doesn't want it to become a balancing necessity like "add 100 more spell damage" - something they quickly ran into with Alchemy in The Burning Crusade. Instead, they're leaning toward things such as Frost Nova having a wider radius, or the root portion lasting a bit longer(both examples which may not go in). Inscription will of course also work on melee abilities.

And of course, the reduced leveling curse topic which everyone has been so frantic about over the past few days; Tigole gladly explained it a bit more. Levels between 20 and 60 are going to have the experience required per-level reduced. Not only that, though - the experience rewarded by quests is being increased by around 30%.

From there we asked him two questions directly related to Hunters, since the class has been somewhat neglected in recent interviews and discussions. Hunters rejoice; we asked about the possibility of the Woodworking profession being added to create arrows, and he says that it's an idea that they're seriously tossing around and it may see the light of day in the future.

Finally, Blizzard realizes that Hunters are a bit weak in arenas, especially in 5v5 when compared to other classes, so they're toying around with ideas of ways to improve their desirability. One idea is to give them a Mortal Strike-like shot that will reduce healing effectiveness on the target of the shot.