A pair of World of Warcraft developer Q&As have shown up on the official website. The first deals with the newly announced Battlegrounds and the second with the upcoming changes to the Mage.

Battlegrounds:

Community Team: Joining us today to discuss the future of World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, including the upcoming epic siege-style Battleground, Isle of Conquest, is Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton. First, let's discuss Battleground participation during the leveling process.

As it's something that has been discussed at length for some time now within the community, where are we at with allowing for players to obtain experience through Player vs. Player (PvP) combat and Battlegrounds?

Cory Stockton: We plan to implement this in patch 3.2.0. We have wanted to allow players to earn experience through Battlegrounds for a long time now and it's great to be able to finally deliver this feature to players. Experience will be granted based on honor gain from actions, not kills. For example, if you capture a flag in Warsong Hold, you would gain experience, but killing a player would not grant experience.

Read the rest of the interview HERE.

Mage Change:

Community Team: Joining us today to shed some light on the many questions we've fielded from players within the mage community is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, Ghostcrawler, who has enlisted the assistance of several members of our class design team to provide the most thorough answers possible. We'd like to begin by exploring the perceived role of the mage class. A lot has changed since the days when the "glass cannon" description was applied.

Where do mages fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward?

Ghostcrawler: The mage is the iconic caster -- a ranged class that wants to stay at range in order to focus on dealing damage. They can do single-target damage, area of effect damage (AoE), or crowd control. Every group should want a mage because they are reliable, powerful and flexible. Most of the mage's spells have a cast time and a lot of the gameplay involved in improving your mage revolves around minimizing the limitations of the cast time, whether it's lowering cast time through talents and gear, getting away from enemies so you have an opportunity to cast, or using the occasional ability to make a spell instant. While all three of the mage talent trees focus on dealing damage, we are pleased with the different feel between Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Arguably mages even have a fourth potential style now that focuses around Frostfire Bolt. We know the stylistic differences work because there are Frost mages who just love Frost and want to see it work in Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Fire mages who want to play Fire in Player vs. Player (PvP). They prefer a play style within the same class over a different play style that would be arguably more effective within a particular aspect of the game. While understandably frustrating for those players, it also points out a success in the class design. We used to call the mage the master of AoE damage, but we've since decided that's not a great niche for anyone. The "AoE class" feels mandatory in situations where you do have large crowds of enemies to contend with, but then the AoE class gets bored when everyone else is maximizing their single-target damage on a boss. Now we try and give AoE tools to all damage-dealing specializations (specs), though we will always make extra effort to make sure mages stay good in that department. Players sometimes wonder why the mage class has seen fewer changes than some of the other classes during Lich King. We think that's because by and large, the class works. That's not to say there aren't areas we can improve, but we think the mage has all the right tools to live up to its reputation.

Read the rest of this interview HERE.