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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51490 Posts
![[image loading]](https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/blog/images/17596-world-of-warcraft-shadowlands-is-the-next-wow-expansion.jpg)
Release Date - 23rd November 2020
5 New Zones
- Bastion - Ruled by Kyrian Covenant
- Maldraxxus - Ruled by Necrolord Covenant
- Ardenweald - Ruled by Night Fae Covenant
- Revendreth - Ruled by Venthyr Covenant
- Oribos - City predates memory, home of The Arbiter. Will be the main player hub.
Covenants
The four powers of the shadowlands are Kyrian, Necrolords, Night Fae and Venthyr's. Each seeks your aid and each offers powers as a reward.
Two abilities are rewarded, one is universal and other is class specific.
Endgame progression system will be Soulbinds which is basically the end game version of the heart etc, but there will NOT BE AN ARTIFACT GRIND! This will be a wide array of cosmetic rewards. The system is designed to not hinder you or make you feel like you are letting raid team mates down if you didn't grind for a week etc. Rewards are like new gear and features like a transformation into travel form to move around the map faster.
Expansion Structure
Scourge invasion will happen in a pre patch! We journey to Icecrown and speak with Bolvar to understand what is happening and are sent to the Maw. Then you will work your way through the 4 new zones. Each covenant will give you rewards but at max level you can only choose one! That is how it happens on your first character...but with ALTS where you can choose a Covenant straight away and level in any zone you want and earn end game rewards straight away. Meaning when your alt is max level you will be ready to play end game content.
Maw
Max level zone with no hearthstone or innkeeper who will sell you water etc. More to come in future panels, but this is an open world zone where you are fighting all the time with no safe place. Home to Toghast the tower of the damned. This is a tower you can enter solo or bring up to 4 friends which is PvE content. Each run changes on every visit and enhances your powers the further up you go.
Dungeons & Raid
8 Dungeons in addition to the tower. 4 Level up dungeons and 4 max level dungeons. The Necrotic Wake - Plaguefall - Mists of Tirna Scithe - Halls of Atonement - Spires of Ascension - Theater of Pain - The Other Side - Sanguine Depths.
Raid - Castle Natharia - 10 boss raid on expansion launch.
Systems & Rewards
- Focus on player agency, Profession updates so you can craft an item with stats you want first try by adding a crit and haste gem to get those stats. This is just an example of how they want to change professions.
- Weekly loot chests; changed to a list of 5 items that you can choose from instead of a complete random piece.
- Legendaries return....won't be randomly obtained you will be working towards crafting them in the new zone. Working towards a specific legendary you want and then going to the next.
- Return to class identity as opposed to spec!!! Giving abilities back to classes and stopping the class.
Leveling Updates
- YOU START AT LEVEL 50!!!
- Leveling from 50-60 in The Shadowlands
- A better pace for content but also for skills. So every level now gives you something!
- This means if you want to level 0-50 in Mists of Panda you can get to level 50 just in that zone and then go to The Shadowlands
Character Custimization
You can now change the way you look even more, for examples trolls can change their colours and add tattoos etc and make yourself look more unique to your ideas. Undead can not have bones showing. Humans can now be all races and a normal human can be Asian, Black, Old or Young! Much more updates to come
Death Knights are now playable by ANY RACE!
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The dramatic squish is blowing my mind kinda, might be enough on its own to get me to play.
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Still can't wrap my head around lvl squish: so you can level 1-50 whatever the expansion zone you want and jump straight to current content? I had 10+ lvl 60 XP locked chars so I can play old zones and will be really sad if this squishing will fuck it up.
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Looks good so far except for the story, but i dont really care too much about the story. Seems to be shaping up to literally be legion mk2. Hopefully characters will be fun to play again and some good m+ dungeons, thats all i need.
Surprisingly there's no word on whether they abandon or keep faction divide, so that's got me worried that they keep it.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
Alright back to WoW I go I suppose.
the Maw "Tower" seems like a version of Randominzed Dungeon Crawlers?
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Yea this isn't enough to draw me away from FF14. Not unless they do something good with classes cause Dragoon is waaay more fun then anything I have played lately in WoW.
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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51490 Posts
I will update again today because they are going into even more indepth on the features today. Hoping we get a currency grind for gear again and then give me back talent trees and decent classes!
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50389 Posts
all I've heard so far is good, but class design is probably the biggest key here, hopefully today's deep dive will shed some light
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Do we know how the level squish affects our ability to do old content at max level? I typically play solo and like to go back to old content to get achievements, rep, and so on. I'm wondering if that would no longer be possible?
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On November 02 2019 23:00 SaTiN wrote:
Do we know how the level squish affects our ability to do old content at max level? I typically play solo and like to go back to old content to get achievements, rep, and so on. I'm wondering if that would no longer be possible? I would assume that will still be possible.
They tried to preserve that during previous squishes, don't see why they won't this time.
Might come up during a Q&A
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50389 Posts
killed old retail wow thread, now this the new wow retail thread.
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28090 Posts
That seems premature considering we still have an entire raid tier/season left in BFA. If people are fine discussing that here then I guess it’s fine.
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On November 02 2019 12:13 Warri wrote:
Looks good so far except for the story, but i dont really care too much about the story. Seems to be shaping up to literally be legion mk2. Hopefully characters will be fun to play again and some good m+ dungeons, thats all i need.
Surprisingly there's no word on whether they abandon or keep faction divide, so that's got me worried that they keep it.
I can confirm from the Q&A that faction merging is not on the menu and probably never will be.
On November 02 2019 23:03 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2019 23:00 SaTiN wrote:
Do we know how the level squish affects our ability to do old content at max level? I typically play solo and like to go back to old content to get achievements, rep, and so on. I'm wondering if that would no longer be possible? I would assume that will still be possible. They tried to preserve that during previous squishes, don't see why they won't this time. Might come up during a Q&A
It will be possible, everything will scale, confirmed in the deep dive.
Literally the only thing that is happening is that your max lvl goes down. You power levels relative to current and old world content remain the same.
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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51490 Posts
I need more information on loot and class changes before im fully sold. The base they have provided here looks good and intriguing but if they still don't fix class design and change things a lot then it will still be "boring" to an extent, but at least they seem to be addressing that. Then on loot,i want to know how they will change that, what will be the "grind" to get gear, will it be farming dungeons for a currency or will it still all be based around M+ and then into raids with the tower providing the grind each week to get additional loot (which i like).
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On November 04 2019 01:46 Rebs wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2019 12:13 Warri wrote:
Looks good so far except for the story, but i dont really care too much about the story. Seems to be shaping up to literally be legion mk2. Hopefully characters will be fun to play again and some good m+ dungeons, thats all i need.
Surprisingly there's no word on whether they abandon or keep faction divide, so that's got me worried that they keep it. I can confirm from the Q&A that faction merging is not on the menu and probably never will be.
Man that's really disappointing. So shadowlands will be the "we gotta finally work together guys" and then 10.0 will yet again be "back to the roots this time for real alliance vs horde conflict guys". This stupid repeating circle is just annoying at this point, let me play with my friends blizzard.
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Yeah, no cross faction PvE is my biggest disappointment about Shadowlands.
So much for 'Breaking the cycle'.
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28090 Posts
He said something along the lines that the faction split/war is the core of what makes WoW the game it is. In all honesty I would be surprised that at this point if the majority of the playerbase didn't think otherwise. It's weird that it seems like they are starting to listen to the community in some aspects, but on other things like this they're clearly not listening or willing to budge...
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You can't claim the faction war is at the core of WoW while also putting aside the faction war every single expansion to fight the big bad guy and have important NPC's from both sides regularly work together while players have to remain hostile to one another.
The whole story of Legion was the Class orders uniting the fight the Burning Legion because the Horde and Alliance were to busy squabbling.
It goes all the way back to Vanilla where Horde and Alliance stood together against the Qiraj invasion as the Might of Kalimdor.
In TBC we united to storm the Black Temple and the Sunwell
In Wotlk we united to storm ICC under the Argent Crusade and before that at the Wrathgate
In MoP we work together to storm Orgrimmar
In WoD we work together as the Iron Horde invades
ect.
The cinametics around the rebellion in BfA repeatedly make the point that this time will be different.
Only to immediately go back to the same cold war status quo of the last 15 years, ready for 10.0 "bringing the War back to Warcraft.... Yet Again".
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You can have faction war and still let people play together. There is so much potential in different settings. It doesnt have to be open war every other expansion and "unite vs bad guy" in between. EVE does it best, where officially the races are at peace and have basically INTERPOL guarding highsec from transgressions, meanwhile each faction hiring contractors underhand and fighting a somewhat hidden war in lowsec. You could do something similar in WoW, basically a cold war.
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It's silly that because there are still tensions that we can't group up for PvE content, when there are clear and obvious close friends between faction leaders (Jaina/Thrall, Anduin/Baine) and every faction conflict story is about how working towards peace is a noble goal that we should strive for.
And in a non-story perspective, which is far more important: There's a serious brain drain from Alliance to Horde in the past couple expansions that is just going to snowball unless they give Alliance something overpowered that will make raiding guilds/M+ transfer back. The hall of fame isn't a good enough reason for people to stick it out on Alliance when the recruiting pool is so small. No one wants to leave all their Horde friends behind AND spend the extra money on a faction change to move to an Alliance guild, especially because if they ever stop raiding with that guild for any reason (that guild dies, they get kicked, they want to leave) they have to spend that extra money again to transfer back to Horde.
It's going to be one of those things where in an expansion or two they realize they should do something about it, and at that point the mob is going to say "finally, they should have done this 4 years ago after BFA" when they'd get a lot more good will if they just did it now.
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