In this thread, please let us know anything and everything you thought about the announcements and revelations made for World of Warcraft during the opening of BlizzCon.
This is also the place to discuss BlizzCon itself, if you have any topics related to the show overall.
Thank you!
I really enjoyed the Warcraft showing, and stating we have 3 expansions to look forward too. Though, like many, I am a little concerned on what the pacing will look like and if the game could possibly suffer from this increased pace. Not saying it will, but it possibly could.
I am looking forward to “The War Within”, and am looking forward to the deep dive to further explain and go into detail about the new expansions features and can’t wait to see the new expansions website.
World of Warcraft looks like it can have a very strong future.
As for Blizzcon itself, I am quite saddened that an entire genre of your Retinue was blatantly ignored entirely within the opening ceremony. There was absolutely nothing about the greatest RTS that exists, Starcraft. (Heck, it wasn’t even acknowledged in the opening comments and it took a person in the crowd yelling “What about Starcraft”… and even then it wasn’t.) I wish it would have at least been mentioned. Something. Anything. instead you have millions of players who like the Starcraft universe feeling very unloved, especially since its not even on the Blizzcon schedule whatsoever.
Short Review on the Expansion Panel for Retail
Overall Perception
The three-expansion plan is overall good - the narrative seems to be finally going into a bigger scale, which I like a lot. Nerubian was something I would liked to be seen since Wotlk Days. Mostly a W with one bad taste.
Business Model of the Expansion
Sadly I’ve to mention how disconnected the Epic Edition is now. 90 Dollar/Euro for 3 days of early access and Beta Invitation guaranteed is against most principles of what WoW has as identity. For some Players it is an escape of their reality IRL - may it be a not so stable financial background or other Problems. A 90 Dollar/Euro Pricetag doesn’t help that. In any Guild that participate in a competitive raid enviroment (mythic raiding mostly) the 90 Dollar/Euro Edition is a must buy and therefore very predatory (not to mention the beta access coming with it). It also splits the customers in 1st class and 2nd class which is toxic in itself.
Some examples of a headstart advantage:
- Control the Auction Market Day-1
- Exploits (that never get punished) you can parttake (Repgrind - Wrathion Respawn Downstairs f.e. )
- Gearing and prep for Raidweek (esp. advantage for mythic raiders)
I will speak out against this - till it is changed for good (except a thread coming these days). Only way this is fair to the general playerbase is by limit it to the first zone of the new expansion and limit profressions and leveling to level 72 for the 3 day period.
For games like Diablo IV that might be okay since there is no leaderboard yet.Hero Talents
Really excited overall for it. What I fear here is that it might be not maintained enough within the expansions duration - The Talent Tree Revamp in DF sadly didn’t showed enough support for all 39 Class Specs in the Game. Therefore I expect more regular updates to the talent trees if Hero Talents become a thing.
Short Review on the Expansion Panel for Classic and Cata Classic
Overall Perception Cata Classic
As someone that missed out on Cata - I like this for sure. I’m looking forward to it but I hope some stuff about Cata will be changed (f.e. the Dragon Soul Encounter of Deathwing). Kinda fear this will seperate the community as some ppl still want to play Wrath.
Overall Perception Classic Season of Discory
Not a big Classic - Classic Enthusiat on my end but I believe from what I’ve read the couple of days on the forums and what my own wish would be this is not what players really wanted. Overall the Idea of enhancing new playstyles feels great and having new Raids is good but I rather would have seen them put at max level (60) and extend it to a tier 4 for classic (with the new additions).
I’m really hyped for the so called Warbands and the most important part of it:
… Additionally, a new change to transmog collection will let players learn the appearance of any gear type, even if they cannot equip it!
Quite worried about the price of the expansions if we’re going forward with one release per year 
Wait, has this been confirmed? Or was it just speculation? I’m unable to access the livestream at the moment so I have to depend on reports from other people…
At this time, it has not been confirmed as far as I know.
I might have misunderstood. But it feels weird if they announced 6 years of content, compared to 3 years.
Not really… they HAVE been working on letting us know more of their plans – after all, they’ve been giving us a road map for DF! So this seemed like a logical development to me. Road map for current expansion → brief introduction to the next few expansions.
Also, I almost forgot but the Season of Discovery is looking sick. Really looking forward to playing it at november 30!
Biggest screams from opening ceremony:
)My entire high elf community is SO excited, words cannot express it. I hope there is more information from the QnA. Quel’thalas! A Quel’Danil Lodge with actual quel’dorei architecture, high elf customization? Oh my!
A lot of folks seem very intrigued by the Classic Season, it is such a unique and cool concept. I hope it becomes more than a season as it could really make an entire new style of game much like Hardcore.
The hero talents look mega cool. I hope it will provide lots of options so we are not constantly serving one meta everyone plays for that class/spec, respectively.
Amazing Opening Ceremony and happy to be here!
With all due respect and sincerity, I found the beginning of this year’s Blizzcon presentations to be one of the most boring to watch to date. Overwatch 2 is not a game that excites me or generates more interest.
The announcement of the Diablo 4 expansion in the way it was done was better not to have been announced at all as has happened in other editions with other games.
Hearthstone also doesn’t generate as much interest as it did at the beginning and Warcraft Rumble, despite the fun cinematic, is not a game genre that I like to play on cell phones, I prefer turn-based RPG games.
Cataclysm Classic
I have to be fair, the cinematics with the game’s characters were very good. Unfortunately, this expansion never really pleased me, but I’m sure it will please those who will have the opportunity to play it for the first time. I think the big problem with this expansion was that it was the successor to the Lich King expansion and had a boring final raid patch.
The War Within
The announcements for World of Warcraft have been overwhelmingly positive. It was good to see Cris Metzen again in charge of directing the game’s story and announcing three expansions, which left me with the feeling that we now have a captain to guide us through the sea of stories that will be presented.
Hero Talents
I love any talent tree system that allows me to change how a certain class plays and this option has me very interested but I prefer to test it first.
Dynamic Flight
I’ll love it if the Hivemind mount is included.
I would like a three-player flying mount that is easier to obtain than the hivemind being available in the game.
Dive into Deves/Forge Your Warband
First impression I liked solo content with decent rewards equivalent to endgame content for groups but I need to test it. I have a long-standing criticism of the World of Warcraft Follower System: I hate that I can’t carry followers from Legion, WoD, and BfA to the other expansions. It would be a lot of fun to be able to do missions around the world, raids and old dungeons accompanied with them. I hope that one day this can become a reality.
It looks like fun but I’m not going to create expectations ahead of time.
Transmog
I loved the option that we can finally learn what any equipment looks like with any character. My Lifetime sent thanks to the game team for this.
Cinematics to Excite Players
Look at the difference from one expansion to the next.
Boring Cinematics to Watch
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I’m not frustrated or excited about the content that was presented. The first impression was positive but I prefer to wait for more information and test the new features in the beta.
Really enjoyed almost all the new information about the direction of Retail WoW. The one thing that I’m not a huge fan of is the Early Access paywall. I understand that Blizzard is trying to run a business and has to generate income and whatnot, but I think this just stuck out as really egregious. Looking at Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and other socials, there are tons of people that have an issue with it as well.
I love WoW and Metzen had me super hyped during the entire presentation, but that Early Access paywall was a huge damper on what was otherwise phenomenal news for the future of WoW.
I had an idea to throw in the ring as far as Warband Reputations go. In the Warcraft Wiki interview with Morgan Day (https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Forum:BlizzCon_2023_Q%26A#Interview_notes) it was mentioned that The War Within reputations/renown would be account wide- but prior expansion reputations are still being decided on.
I think the issue with it being fully account wide at all times is that it incentivizes having more alts to farm the rep quicker if every point counts. Obviously this would suck.
So there are 2 options from my perspective. #1) you count which character has amassed the most reputation and give all characters that level, or at the end of each week you snapshot the reputation to the highest character on the account and move all other characters up to that level - doing this would mean that doing weekly quests on multiple characters would not assist, but that a different character could be used week in and week out to gain reputation at the same speed as someone using the same character the whole time.
Been looking through all the info I can on Wowhead and the one thing that really has me scratching my head is the 3 day early access to The War Within expansion. The thing a lot players including myself love about the release of an expansion is everyone jumping into it at the same time. I understand this has tech problems that inevitably happen with every expansion release but seeing how busy and chaotic it is, is the best part about a release.
It was really good to see blizzard lay out the next 3 expansions, I was not expecting that.
What I now find myself saying is there wasn’t that much there in regards to features, yes there was quality of life stuff that is really good but outside of raid and M+ there is no substantive thing thing to sink time into. Yes it’s early days and something may come but outside the announcement of the story, direction and QOL stuff there was nothing. The principle of evergreen was mentioned and it would have been great to see a substantive feature added with the principle of evergreen taking it forward, say with something like player or guild housing/halls.
I love the idea of hero talents and having sub specs, what baffled me was the comment from the dev on the follow up pannel, when talking about the talents whilst looking at them in the UI they said you will get all of them anyway. If that’s true then what is the point of adding this system? Could it be clarified if we get all the talents within the sub specs plz. If it is the case then I question why? We don’t have a choice other than two pre defined sub specs that will play the way devs want and not how we choose.
One thing I’ve heard from many is the concern over expansion pricing, increased frequency of expansion launches and the fact we still have a sub on top of that. I think bliz need to clarify the speed at which things are going to come out.
So far so good.
Everything seems to be goin the the right direction as long as what Chris said will come true.
We want a better story.-
We want to say wowwww once again.
But there is? They announced delves which is supposed to be an evergreen open world alternative to m+/raid/rated pvp. They’re even adding a new row in the vault specifically for world content (based on these delves). While the information is a bit low at the moment, this sounds like a step up from the events we had in Dragonflight.
It was also mentioned that the hero talents included a number of choice nodes, so that is where the decision making factor comes in I presume.
Not really, as you said, it’s an alternative to M+ or raid and looks to be focused on thoes who mainly do world content.
As as i clearly said, a feature along the lines of player housing/guild halls, not specifically thoes but something we can build and grow on going forward, a thing we can develop and collect for.
Delves just are not that from what we saw and heard, we may find out differently today but we’ll have to see.
I hope so as choices and decisions on builds is infinitely more interesting than a situation similar to what we had with artifact weapons.