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World of Warcraft: What’s Next
[QUOTE]
Shadowlands
This isn’t one of those expansions that gets on a ship and sails off to a new continent.
We are going to another plane of existence, the afterlife!
Deep dive tomorrow on features and systems.
Six primal forces - Light, Shadow, Order, Disorder, Life, Death.
Souls cross the veil between life and death.
Souls come before the ancient entity, the Arbiter.
Soul comes before Arbiter and she sees all of the deeds and misdeeds, thoughts, aspirations, triumphs, failures.
Arbiter sends that soul off to one of many realms, each ruled over by a powerful Covenant.
Each soul brings anima with them. Great souls have more, more humble lives have less.
Anima is the mana of the Shadowlands, source that is drawn upon to conduct the magic of death.
We focus on four realms, Oribos (central city), and The Maw.
Bastion
Ruled by Kyrian - Forebearers of Spirit Healers and Valykir
Ordered and purposeful, called to service
Souls shed their past burdens and seek virtue
Lots of meditation and reflection
Uther ended up here and we’ll see him again
Bastion is the BlizzCon demo zone.
Maldraxxus
Rules by Necrolord Covenant
Heart of the Shadowland’s military might
Forces that were called upon by the Lich King
Survival of the fittest, not strictly evil
Power can be used for evil, but it’s more about an unrelenting spirit, inward and outward strength
Draka ended up here.
Think of Legion as the old Burning Crusade style turned up to 11, Maldraxxus is Eastern Plaguelands turned up to 11.
Ardenweald
Enchanted fairy forrest
Ruled by the Night Fae
Emerald Dream’s dark mirror.
A place of rest, death, and preparation for rebirth.
Spirits of nature called here.
Cenarius ended up here.
Magical ancient trees, Drust forest.
Revendreth
Creepy Gothic zone, soaring castles, horrors around every corner
Ruled by Venthyr
Isn’t the place you want to go as a soul
Souls sent here have a flaw or were prideful, sent here to atone for their sins.
Kael’thas ended up here.
Light has broken through clouds in some areas, searing the earth.
Exposure to the light does horrible things to the souls in this land.
Covenant
Ruling power of the Shadowlands, four of them.
This is the major feature of Shadowlands. BfA had fewer smaller features.
Integrated into every part of the game.
Each Covenant will seek your aid and offer power and rewards.
There is a full endgame narrative campaign. BfA had Horde and Alliance campaigns, now there are four!
Each covenant has two active abilities, one being class specific. Will change your gameplay.
Endgame progression system - Soulbind. Bind your soul to a denizen of the Shadowlands, customization, more. It builds upon lessons learned from Heart of Azeroth.
No Artifact Power to grind this time around.
Lots of cosmetic rewards for each Covenant, armor sets and more.
Each Covenant has a Sanctum to restore to glory, similar to Suramar or Class Halls.
Spear of Bastion - 25 yd range, instant, 1 min CD. Throw a spear doing damage, DoT. Enemies are tethered to location for duration. Generates Rage.
Unburden - 1 sec cast, 2 min CD.
Covenant Cloaks - Each will have cloak replacements or back attachments. Get wings, a halo, or more!
Oribos, the Eternal City. Old city, Arbiter at the core, gathering point for brokers and soul traders. Politics of entire dimension centered around this city. It will be the main player city in this expansion.
The Maw isn’t a Covenant, horrific prison for worst souls, a mystery even to natives. Jailer’s domain from which nothing has ever escaped.
Jailer is almost a boogeyman, nothing is known about him.
Death
Death itself is broken.
Instead of coming before the Arbiter, souls are pouring directly into the Maw, causing it to grow and become stronger.
Other realms are starved of Anima, the Shadowlands wither.
Sylvanas has taken actions to cause the maximum amount of death possible.
The Jailer isn’t Sylvanas’s master, they are working together. Eventually we’ll discover their common goal.
How did Sylvanas grow so powerful in recent years? As the Maw’s power grew, so did hers.
Expansion
Pre-patch - Scourge are marauding across Azeroth. Scourge invasion 2.0.
Azeroth’s heroes make for Icecrown, trying to attack the source of this evil.
Bolvar isn’t dead, just defeated. He is a key figure in this fight. He has one foot in each realm and understands them both.
Head into the Maw!
We have a unique bond to Azeroth, allowing us to escape the Maw. Not everyone will be able to escape, including some great champions of Azeroth.
We move on to Oribos, level through four zones in order.
The team wants to have a strong narrative arc, going through the zones, working with them and gaining their trust. Allowed to borrow their powers, previewing what you can choose later.
Eventually you make the big choice at Level 60, which Covenant will you choose.
You pick one, have their power permanently, and work on the campaign.
Alts will be able to pick a Covenant immediately! Level up through any zones in any order, do world quests, and more.
Alts can earn endgame progression while leveling. Unlock powers with your Soulbinds, and more.
Your alts will be meaningfully ahead of where your main was when it hit level 60.
The Maw
Max-level fearsome zone.
This area wants to kill you at every turn, matching the fantasy of the space.
The center of the Maw is Torghast, Tower of the Damned. This is the second main feature of the expansion.
Torghast is a ever-changing dungeon. Endless halls, environment constantly changes.
You can do Torghast solo or with up to 4 friends.
Endgame progression that is solo or group focused.
Earn permanent upgrades over time, absorb anima that will upgrade or transform your powers.
Anima choice - Increase crit damage/healing by 10%, Flame Shock lasts forever, or Fire Elemental lasts forever, but you can’t cast Frost spells.
Dungeons and Raids
8 dungeons in addition to Torghast - 4 level up and 4 max-level.
The Other Side - Dungeon that is a pocket dimension with Bwonsamdi
Castle Nathria - 10 boss raid in Revendreth
Come in the front door, ascend the castle, face the lord of the castle.
Systems and Rewards
Team wants to increase player agency.
Professions - Currently if you want to make some armor, you have a few stats you want. Crit/Haste? Make pants over and over until you get the ones you want. What if you could take a Crit and Haste gem, add them as optional materials, and be guaranteed the pants you want.
Armor crafting professions should be more relevant at endgame.
Weekly loot chest - Giant loot pool, plus some RNG. Usually walking away disappointed after the first few weeks. Randomness has gone too far!
Chest replaced with 5 or 6 options to choose from, system takes into account all the activities you did. Will be a universal fallback option.
Legion legendary items were super fun, people didn’t like how they were obtained.
Shadowlands legendaries are worked towards crafting through work in Torghast. Earn access to powers and then work towards building the legendary that suits your goal. Repeat for the next.
Shadowlands will return to class identity as opposed to spec identity.
Return abilities that have been taken away and make some spec specific ones class specific again.
Holinka the Unpruner will talk about this more tomorrow.
Streamlined leveling experience, level from 50 to 60 in Shadowlands.
Level squish is going to allow for a better pace for content and granting skills.
Every level should unlock something. This is an RPG and that is what levels should do.
Modern new player zone, can play through any expansion in its entirety to get 1-50.
Character Customization
Improving customization to existing races.
More options than ever before.
Trolls are getting full body tattoos, tusk shapes, skin colors, eye colors separate from face.
Dwarves are getting a wildhammer look, hair and skin colors, and more.
Undead are getting the option to hide the bones.
Humans are getting new races, skin colors, hair, eyes, and more.
Everyone can be a Death Knight in Shadowlands![/QUOTE]
BlizzCon 2019 - Developer Interview
[QUOTE]Flying
Flying will work similar to previous expansions, with a variation of Pathfinder.
PvP
The team is still deciding on changes to the PvP Honor system and rewards.
The zones scaling for your alts that level out of order presents an interesting challenge when it comes to PvP and War Mode on. The team is working on making it fun and interesting.
Leveling
The team is working hard to make sure the flow of the new leveling experience makes sense.
Between the new player zone and Battle for Azeroth, the team is adding an interstitial experience. A new player might learn how to navigate a city, find flight masters, choose your spec, and getting a mount.
If you’re going to be sending new and existing players into Battle for Azeroth, it makes a lot of sense for them to have a mount.
The team is still talking about what level getting Mage Portals is appropriate. It doesn’t make sense for players to be suddenly restricted from things they used to be able to do.
If you aren’t in Chromie time, zones will only scale up to the cap for that expansion. You can still level that way though!
If you want to go back to Pandaria and farm for transmog or rares, you wouldn’t want the zone scaling, so you need Chromie Time to scale it.
Players will be scaled down in level in a natural way, keeping in mind the expansion milestones, such as being level 100 at the end of Warlords.
There will not be a stat squish. It’s very important that players feel just as powerful when they log in to play the expansion.
Covenants
It will be expensive to change Covenants. They aren’t sharing the details at this time, but it’s intended to be a significant choice. This is why you get to experience each Covenant. You’ll probably be starting over from the beginning.
The team isn’t sure if the transmog and mounts from Covenants will be restricted to the character that earned it or if alts can use it yet.
As the expansion progresses, there will be probably be other Covenant rewards.
Covenant abilities might get other cosmetic choices, similar to the fox one.
There will be reputations, but it might be in a different form.
Covenants won’t operate the way you are used to reputations operating. There won’t be a bar to fill to Exalted, it’ll be a much more involved process. You are forming a relationship with this Covenant and individual characters in it to use the Soulbinding system.
Weekly Loot Chest
There will be a tremendous number of factors that influence the weekly loot choice.
Factors include how far you made it in a tower run, what Mythics did you do, what dungeons did you run, what World Quests did you do, what did you do in PvP, and many more.
Customization
The team sat down to talk about what would be cool for Shadowlands and the theme of player agency came up as the cool idea.
Covenants, loot chest, and new leveling system were all features for that idea. This time they took the art team time that would have gone towards a new race or class and spent it on character customization.
There will be a tremendous breadth of choices available for most, if not all, of the other races.
The team could have added more skin colors long ago, but representing more of humanity for Humans took subtle face changes and time from the art team to do right.
All races will get some cosmetic features, not just Humans.
The team started by asking what additional options they would like to see in the existing races. Lots of discussion internally about customization options that people wanted.
Allied Races had a story, “Why is this group joining us?”
Dark Iron dwarves look different, but there are other Dwarves that we haven’t seen much of yet, and we should have because they are all Dwarves.
Engine and Data
The engine team is working on taking advantage of RTX.
The team strongly believes that the more machines that can run WoW, the better. At the same time they want to embrace modern technologies such as ray tracing, multi threading, and DX12.
The team’s focus isn’t to make it hard to datamine, their focus is to make the game as efficient as possible. Strings are big and numbers are small.
The team went to great lengths to make sure addon authors had access to things they needed. You can look up sounds by name and such. They did trip up a couple of times, but will fix it.
Torghast, the Maw, and Alts
Torghast is based on your participation. It’ll be influenced by the gear that you get doing it. As you do runs, you will build legendary items. As your gear gets stronger from raids, Mythic+, and other sources, you’ll become more powerful, go deeper in Torghast, and get more stuff.
If your alt hasn’t geared up, you won’t get very far in Torghast.
There may be some things that you can craft for your alts that are meaningful. Being able to target stats when crafting should be helpful.
World Quests will be unlocked at Level 50 for alts.
Covenant campaign starts at 60 for all characters.
There will be outdoor gameplay in the Maw, but not regular story quests like the Suramar campaign.
Anima is used for a lot of things. It will be used to help power your Covenant. It represents the mana behind Shadowlands.
The intent is that the Maw will remain challenging throughout the expansion, you shouldn’t outgear it. One of the things players really liked about Classic is the outdoor challenge. The Maw should have increased challenge and fun!
Torghast is the only source of runes for the legendary items.
Torghast abilities can be tied into your Covenant.
Raids and Titanforging
No big changes to raid structure coming.
The team isn’t sure if Titanforging will be in Shadowlands. They are closely monitoring the Visions of N’zoth system.
Covenants and Soulbinds
You’ll go to the Covenant sanctum to interact with your Soulbinds. Spend anima to improve your relationship with them and increase their power. Covenants will be a great source of cosmetics.
In Legion, you built up the area in Suramar from a empty, hollow, lifeless space, to one filled with people and hope. The same kind of change will be reflected in your Covenant.
You can change the Soulbind you are bound to and the talents in their tree.
The Soulbind has not only a talent tree, but also a socket like choice.
Tier Sets
Will tier sets return? Maybe. The team likes the tier sets a lot, but made the choice to go away from them in Battle for Azeroth because it doesn’t make sense for the story anymore. They were great in Legion because it was such a class focused expansion, but Battle for Azeroth changed to a faction focused expansion, so the armor sets were more faction or raid oriented.
Shadowlands is a Covenant focused expansion, so lots of things will double down on that. It doesn’t mean that they are or are not doing the class tier sets.[/QUOTE]
World of Warcraft: Deep Dive
[QUOTE]
Covenants
Quest through 4 zones, learn about the covenants, make a choice at Level 60.
Kyrians: The denizens of Bastion, these are angelic beings embrace humility and service to their order.
Necrolords: Comprised of liches, warlords, and spies, the Necrolord Covenant calls Maldraxxus home. They make up the army that defends the Shadowlands.
Night Fae: Guardians of nature, the Night Fae inhabit Ardenweald and shepherd beings through the cycle of life and death. It was through their aid that the demigod Cenarius was able to make his return to Azeroth during the events of the Cataclsym.
Venthyr: Making their home in Revendreth, the vampiric Venthyr are the punishers of the unworthy, seeking to rehabilitate the sinful souls sent to them by the Arbiter.
Covenant Sanctum - Similar to your Order Hall, you’ll spend a lot of time here.
Covenant Ability - Everyone learns one ability, not a direct combat ability.
Soul Shape (Night Fae) - Turns you into a Spirit Fox, giving 30% movement speed and causing enemies to ignore you. Lasts 10 seconds, or until cancelled while in a rest area, 1.5 min CD. Customization with different creatures.
Unburden (Kyrian) - 1 min CD, 1 sec cast. Dissolve into pure anima, increasing your movement speed to 300%, slowing your falling speed, and propelling you forward for 4 seconds. Greatly reduces the radius at which enemies will detect you.
Transcend the Flesh (Necrolord) - Instant, 3 min CD. Separate your soul from your body for 20 seconds. Your soul is invisible and untargetable, though your body remains vulnerable. This effect will end early if you move further than 60 yards from your body. When Transcend the Flesh ends or is cancelled, your body rejoins your soul.
Door of Shadows (Venthyr) - 40 yd range, 2 sec cast, 2 min CD. Wend through the shadows, appearing at the targeted location.
Covenant Class Ability - Solve problem by fighting it.
Radiant Spark (Kyrian) - 2,000 mana, 40 yd range, 1.3 sec cast, 30 sec CD. Conjure a radiant spark that causes 4,854 Arcane damage instantly, and an additional 1,892 damage over 8 seconds. Your next 4 direct damage abilities that hit targets affected by Radiant Spark deal 25% increased damage, up to 100% damage.
Shifting Power (Night Fae) - 15 yd range, 45 sec CD, channeled. Draw from the ground beneath you for 3 seconds, dealing 5,500 Nature damage to nearby enemies over the duration. Every second spent channeling increases your Haste by 5% for 15 seconds.
Contagion Bolt (Necrolord) - 40 yd range, 2 sec cast, 1.5 min CD. Deal 5,000 Shadow damage to the target enemy. For the next 8 seconds, your single target spells cast on the affected enemy cause the disease to splash to nearby enemies dealing 3,000 Shadow damage.
Mirrors of Torment (Venthyr) - 40 yd range, 2 sec cast, 2 min CD. Conjure 3 mirrors that rotate around the targeted enemy for 6 seconds. Whenever they cast an ability or spell they take 7,000 Shadow damage and are rooted for 1.5 seconds.
Soulbinds - When you reach max level and join a Covenant, you’ll be able to bind your soul one of several such powerful beings. Gain powers.
Theotar, the Mad Duke grants Arrogance - You have 5% increased critical strike chance against targets whose current health percentage is lower than yours.
Nadjia, The Mistblade grants Deflecting Flourish - Your Parry is increased by 6%. If you are normally unable, Nadjia will teach you how to parry.
Unlock new powers, filling out Soulbind ability tree with Conduits gained during your adventures through the Shadowlands.
See slides for some examples.
Choose Soulbind that best suits you, switch Soulbinds when strategy demands, uncover your soulbind’s backstory.
Easy to switch soulbinds, similar to talents, pop a tome.
These are not bodyguards, they won’t follow you all the time.
Covenants will grant backpack style cloaks, weapons and armor, upgradeable mount, world benefits, covenant campaign.
Build an abomination that will follow you around as a bodyguard in that zone.
You can change your Covenant, but it’ll take some time to build up trust with your new allies.
Leveling
Leveling currently takes too long
Not every level is rewarding
Confusing timelines and stories when you level
Leveling the first time is special, but when you are leveling an alt it isn’t as exciting, you want to go and play with your friends.
There are 120 levels right now, so you gain levels very quickly and they don’t feel special.
Who is the Warchief? The Warchief shuffle is a thing.
Most players that choose Pandaria to level in get through Jade Forest and half of the next zone, not doing justice to the story there.
Goals: Streamline leveling, choose the story you want, make every level rewarding, and modernize the intro to Azeroth.
Adding a new starting zone and keeping all of the existing ones.
New level range is 1-60 and every level should unlock something.
60-70% faster to level 1-50 in Shadowlands.
Pick any expansion to level 10-50
New starting zone, Exile’s Reach
Level 120 becomes 50, some simple formula to match levels between 1 and 50.
Character power won’t change, you’ll still be able to solo old content as you do now.
Death Knight and Demon Hunter zones will be scaled 1-10
New players can only start in Exile’s Reach. Faction learned of uncharted island, sent expedition there, hasn’t returned. You are going to find out what is going on there.
Zone has big mountains, vistas, waterfalls, dark forest, harpies, quilboar, ogres.
Ogre has captured your forces, going to sacrifice them to bring a dragon back from the dead.
Island ends in a mini dungeon, scales to match the party you have. Will introduce people to the concept of dungeons.
Killing the ogre captures the attention of your faction leader, move on to capital city.
Brand new players have to level up 10-50 in Battle for Azeroth. Most recent expansion
Existing players can choose Exile’s Reach or the old starting zones.
Chrome reaches out to existing players to help them choose one of the existing expansions.
You can still wander around all of the expansions if you want, you don’t have to stick to one.
Allied Races start at 10, can pick the expansion they want.
Classes
Holinka went to work on another project, but he’s back now!
Around Mists people started complaining that their action bars were getting full.
In Warlords the team removed some abilities that they thought would be okay to remove.
In Legion, the Artifact system was great, every spec had a theme. Lots what a class meant and what a spec meant.
In Shadowlands, we have Covenants that will give you cool class abilities.
Team is listening to feedback from the past few expansions and is going to try and fix it.
“Fix it” tells the team you aren’t happy, still useful, not as useful as specific feedback.
The team has to gauge how disruptive they want to be. When you head into Shadowlands they don’t want you to have to re-learn how to ride a bike. Disruption should be worth it to the players.
Is this more fun for the player, or we just doing this to fix something that bothers us as designers?
Not as big class changes as Legion, mostly going to add things.
Returning to Class from Spec.
If you change specs right now, it’s almost like you change classes with how much some specs change.
Classes are made up of elements from each spec, then the spec doubles down on it.
All Paladins can use the light, execute their enemies with divine judgement.
Class defining mechanics - Spells that have a unique hook and help to deliver class fantasy.
Paladin Auras told you that a Paladin is with you.
Shamans still have totems, but persistent totems are coming back. Healing Stream!
Poisons are coming back, class wide, to Rogues.
Curses are coming back to Warlocks. Curses used to be an important choice, one Curse only.
Mages will get Frostbolt, Fire Blast, Arcane Explosion! Mages are master of elements.
All Priests can tap into the light to heal their friends and harness the Shadow to destroy their enemies. Holy Priest can cast Shadow Word: Death. Shadow Priest can use Flash Heal.
Shaman starts with Mace and Shield. Primal Strike.
Warrior can Shield Block.
Iconic Class Abilities - Raise Dead, Frost Shock, Consecration, Ursol’s Vortex, Shiv, Death Coil.
Talents and Honor Talents - Demonic Circle, Summon Gargoyle, Hunter’s Mark, Hammer of Wrath, Cyclone, Anti-magic Zone
Long Lost Friends - Shattering Throw, Kill Shot, Ritual of Doom, Challenging Shout, Eyes of the Beast
Torghast and the Maw
The Maw is a zone, access point to Torghast, home of the Jailer, prison for the vilest souls.
The Maw is also an unjust prison for millions of others. Fourth War and Teldrassil casualties go here.
You are a Maw Walker, can enter and leave at will. No one has ever been able to do that before, which is why Covenants are so interested in you.
Rules by torment and terror. Not a friendly place. Much more deadly creatures, environments, and mechanics.
Releasing spirit - The Jailer has noticed you. Ire of the Jailer.
Any action you take in the Maw increases the Ire of the Jailer.
More adds will start coming to get you, then kill squads, and more and more deadly.
Be surgical, careful, get in, get out, don’t die too often.
Torghast - Center of the Maw. Home of the Jailer and his dangerous forces and prisoners.
Does not obey the normal constraints of reality.
Dungeon scales, 1-5 players. Roles don’t matter.
Both you and enemies get stronger as you climb the tower. Earn powers are you progress.
First few floors are a standard dungeon crawl. Higher up there are traps, puzzles, locked doors, dangerous minions.
Layout and enemies change. Floors are built to encourage exploration.
Torghast is not a timed mode. Always be exploring before you go up to the next floor.
Anima in the Maw allows you to choose between powers, choose between Obleron Endurance, which increases your maximum health by 10%, or Obleron Talisman which increases your mastery by 5%.
You could find Corruption Antenna, which gives your attacks a chance to curse your target, dealing 35,440 Shadow damage to your target over 8 seconds. Later, you might find Shadowed Iris, which makes it so when you deal Shadow damage, it has a chance to blind the target, reducing their chance to hit by 75% for 12 seconds. These abilities could work well together, creating a synergy that makes your attacks more effective.
Golden Idol - Epic Power. Grants the ability to see which enemies are carrying Anima Cells.
Ardent Endurance - Increase duration of Soulshape by 50%.
Bloating Fodder - You cause Mawrats to explode on death, dealing 10k Plague damage to nearby enemies.
Heavyhoof Sandals - While in Soulshape, you instantly kill Mawrats that you pass through.
After a few weeks of expansion, The Beasts of Prodigum event where Jailer floods Maw with different creature type. Changes powers that you can pick from as well:
Chain of Command - Summon Shade Hound that stuns individual enemies and draws attention.
Shade Essence-Lure- Summons Valloc, a powerful Soul Eater that can inflict area damage and silence enemies.
Collect runes, take to runeforge, Runesage helps you forge legendary items, learn about Frostmourne and Helm of Domination.
Choose legendary slot, secondary stat, powers. Lots of determination by players.[/QUOTE]
