New Expansion! Positive Impacts!

New Expansion Announced!
It is that exciting time, again! Blizzard has announced that there will be no 5.5 and that all their staff are focused on the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, or version 6.0. With the proposed changes come several that impact our way of play (in a positive way) for which we will prepare for in advance.


Gear swaps stats with spec swap!
Blizzard has announced that gear (excepting trinkets, cloaks, and jewelry) will be spec-agnostic and that the stats on the gear will change according to the spec that you are in - including tier sets and set bonuses. Obviously, this is a huge boon for gearing up much faster for all of your chosen specs. ie. as soon as you have gathered the main gear slots in one spec, you will by definition have gathered all of gear for your other chosen specs' main gear slots leaving only the trinkets, cloak, and jewelry of those specs to gather.

The impact is that we will have more time to focus on the skills required for a progression fight in the new expansion because it will take less time to gather the gear that enables us to get to that progression fight sooner. ie. we will spend less time on the earlier bosses gathering gear (as ostensibly every piece of gear would be useful to the spec you are primarily in, and most of the gear will be useful to your offspec, too!)

Flexible-sized Raids was a Success and is now expanded!
It has been announced that LFR difficulty will be a flexible-sized raid (10-25), as will be Normal difficulty and Heroic difficulty. In addition, present LFR will be named LFR in the expansion, Flex will be named Normal, and Normal will be named Heroic. Presently named Heroic difficulty will be named Mythical in the expansion and will be restricted to exactly a 20-man size.

This has several implications to us:

• we will be able to do LFR difficulty together, if we so choose to schedule it rather than do it individually with the masses, and not have to endure the Sunday Night Madness that is LFR today (and ostensibly, the quality of the player base in LFR will drop significantly since the better players/guilds will LFR together without the unwashed masses.)
• we will be able to do Normal difficulty together today the same way we do Flex together, and it appears that we will then be able to do 'Normal' difficulty and still have the benefit of being able to include our friends from other servers.
• we will be able to do Heroic difficulty (once we get comfortable with the content on Normal difficulty) with a group that is 10-25 in size making early entry easier and overall making it more inclusive of an activity for our guild.

Free Insta-90!
Blizzard announced that it will be including in the 6.0 expansion a free character boost to level 90. The new cap is 100 however they have been very clear that this will not be a long, boring slog like 60-70. This does mean that if you were ever thinking of leveling something that you just didn't want to have to level through all 90 levels, this would certainly be the key to snap out that 90 and then cruise on up to 100! Leveling [mages] 10 levels instead of 90 has its attractions, I am sure!

The impact to us is that we may see people that have traditionally played one class, play a different one. As we draw closer to release, if you suspect you are going to have a significant raid role change, just keep us apprised in advance!

All in all, the new expansion looks awesome and I to see you all there!