Shadowlands Season 4

Community WoW Community Council
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So Shadowlands season 4 was just announced (Coming Later This Year: Shadowlands Season 4), which seems neat - something to do while waiting for the next expansion to release. I think it’s really cool that it’s going to bring some old dungeons, Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination back into relevence, even if I’m probably not going to get much out of that myself - unless LFR also gets brought along to be actually worthwhile to play!

I have a couple of questions, and I’m sure others have questions too.

  • Is it just group content that’s going to see updates in season 4, or will we get some updates to world content as well?
  • The post says season 4 starts “after the current season has run for a typical duration”, is this also when 9.2.5 is releasing with cross-faction play or is that separate?
  • Is Torghast going to see some updates as well?
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I am very excited about what this can look like.

A few thoughts:

  • Please don’t make the raid affix annoying to deal with. Make it a kiss/curse affix like we’ve seen with things like Prideful etc. Although as long as we don’t get something like Bolstering on Anduin, I’ll probably survive.
  • I assume this will be a thing, but please make sure we can still run the raids without the affixes for the same loot we get now
  • Will the other SL dungeons just be over? No M+ for them at all? Will M0s scale any higher to compensate? Will that loot table be available in the great vault?
  • Will the great vault have loot from all 3 raids? I think if it can it would be best to make it so that only loot from bosses you kill in the week to unlock the vault have their loot tables available for the vault. With such a massive loot table it will be essentially impossible to target certain loot.

Same question

  • It will be very cool to see affixes in old WoD dungeons, im very excited for that
  • How much scaling are we talking about? Will the new season gear be equal to, lesser than, or stronger than current mythic raid tier? How will old raid gear scaling work, and will any of the issues of previous seasons (Edge of Night, OWS, A’lar Trinket) be addressed?

… I’m sure there are more questions to come. I’m looking forward to getting some more answers soon!

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I think this is a great idea to keep the players engaged while they work on the new expansion. I hope they do not rush the release of the next one as we’ve all seen how that plays out. I’m extremely curious how the Race to World First will go with all three raids being re-released with new affixes or if they’ll even have them :joy:

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I think it’s good to have content to do during a lull between the last patch and the next expansion. With that said, it leaves very little to do for someone like me that doesn’t do much hardcore raiding or Mythic+ dungeons.

I love collecting toys, mounts, pets, transmogs, doing outdoor content, maybe some light LFR here and there. To me, this sounds like it’ll be geared more towards a smaller portion of the player base than gravitating towards every one as a whole.

I get that there is lots of old content to do in the game, lots of old raids and dungeons. I do all of that, but that content is available right now, it doesn’t give me any thing to look forward to in regards to patch 9.2.5.

I feel that it should be aimed towards the entire player base as a whole. Give something for every one to do. Aim towards a wider gap of play styles.

It also tells me that patch 10.0 is probably much further down the pipeline than I first anticipated. I don’t mind them taking their time to develop new content, but what’s being offered in season 4, patch 9.2.5, it’s not aimed towards someone like me. That disappoints me.

How do I think they could have improved to aim more content towards me? I honestly don’t know, but I know that season 4 definitely isn’t it.

They (Blizzard) have been doing a better job of communicating and listening. However, Season 4 tells me that they aren’t always listening.

Just my opinion, I’m not laying claim to be right or that what I say is right and every one else is wrong. I’m just saying how it makes me feel as a much more, “casual” type of player.

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I posted my thoughts in the General Discussion thread, but to parrot them here:

  1. Grimrail Depot should not have been added to the poll, like at all. Until they fix the problem that it causes motion sickness in people, it should really not be used in anything max level. I’m still annoyed they added it to timewalking, because I’m forced to take a 30 minute deserter debuff if I don’t want to be physically sick. At the very least, if they add Grimrail M+, we need a way to black out the background or something.
  2. They should have let people vote on all 8 dungeons. They somehow managed to choose the 3 dungeons that most people hated in Mythic+. (I’m well aware there are people who loved Mechagon, Karazhan, and Tazavesh, but the amount of runs those have compared to others speaks volumes) Hell, people avoid Tazavesh NOW and they chose that one for Shadowlands? Lol.
  3. The raid change can’t go live how they announced it. It just can’t. If you have all 31 bosses being relevant, then guilds who want to min/max will try to do all 31. And those that don’t? They’ll be split. Hunters will want Sanctum for the bow, tanks will want Nathria for the trinkets, etc. This will tear guilds apart. Not to mention, if this is extended to LFR players, that’d be twelve wings to split the population of players. I for one don’t want 3 hour queues.
  4. If for some reason the raids DO go live how they suggest, do not bring back Domination Shards. Even Blizzard admitted that was a failed system, and most of us have destroyed our shards.

I posted a suggestion in that thread: Make a new raid with existing bosses and assets. We have a very good way to make this type of raid make sense: The Kyrian Path of Ascension.

Simply say Mikanikos managed to capture images of “fearsome targets.” Then have those targets be like 3 bosses from each SL raid, for 9 total.

Then have the fights take place in the Kyrian Arena. Most of the fights would work perfectly fine in that arena as it’s plenty big for a raid fight. Only a few (like Sludgefist, Sylvanas, etc.) wouldn’t.

This allows you to make a new raid, with existing assets, but also tune the gear to be higher than the existing raids, without making guilds feel like they have to run 3 raids a week. It would also help make the affixes you mentioned work better, as with every fight being in the same arena, you could design the affixes around that. Like, an affix where being in line of sight of the boss does something, so you have to dance around the pillars to avoid it.

You could also essentially hand pick which items from each raid would drop from the bosses, so people aren’t chasing a single item that only drops from 1 of 31 bosses.

This would also allow you to extend this “new raid” to LFR players without submitting us to 12 wings.

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I had an idea about this just now that I would like to hear some feedback on, specifically related to the raiding scene in Season 4.

There has been 1 recurring theme I have seen since this announcement - a question of "Will we have to farm 31 bosses each week in season 4 to be “optimal”?

In addition to that… people don’t like killing trash.

Here is my proposition.

Make a new portal in Oribos - that one upstairs that isn’t used? That would be perfect for this - for the “new” raid.

This “new raid” will randomly select a boss from one of the three Shadowlands raids based on their positions, so when you enter the portal in Oribos, it will teleport you to the first boss of one of the three raids, at random. Once you kill that boss, another portal spawns taking you to the second boss of one of the three raids. This is your “higher level, with affixes” raid content for the week, on a separate lockout from the base raids as they are right now, with the same difficultly and loot level to allow them to be farmed for achievements and transmogs etc.

The CE and AOTC achievements will require you to kill all 3 end bosses on their new difficulties.

The effect this would have is brilliant, IMO.

No trash, only 10 bosses per week (we’ll have to find a spot for the 11th in SOFO) - in a set order so RNG doesn’t keep you from a boss more than once per 3 weeks, and maybe the vault can still have loot from any boss, or maybe even only bosses you DIDN’T kill during the week?

Would love to hear some thoughts on this!! I think it could keep raid fresh for people who just don’t have time for 31 bosses every week.

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Part of what I’d love to see as part of the “Season 4” patch is to take advantage of this long break in major patch rollouts and go back into the legacy parts of the game and fix a few of the long standing “broken” or “wonky” items that never seem to get prioritized (for obvious reasons).

Letholas’ QoL thread should get some attention and is a good place to start.

This post from Haelsing has always stood out to me:

Adding items to the toybox and currencies needs some love too:

My personal holy grail here is to make a post visions, “pretty” version of Vale of Eternal Blossoms the current timeline in the game and Zidormi’s options updated accordingly :slight_smile:

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I agree, this is a really good opportunity to fix much of the existing content and make it friendlier to use. Some of the things listed in the thread might have to wait until next expansion, but there’s plenty that could easily be added in without too much work!

I think what 9.2.5 really needs for players that don’t do endgame group content (raids, pvp, m+) is having world content spruced up a little bit. Some initial thoughts I had that could be great to play with:

  • Double all Shadowlands reputation gains! Reputation is really slow in Shadowlands, and now that we’re in pre-expansion mode, it’s hard to say there’s a good reason for it to be slow anymore. This would also allow us to much more easily catch up on reputation on alts, perhaps there could even be new rewards added to rep vendors?
  • Make all world content relevant again, just like the raids. Make ilevels from all world quests in the four main zones, the Maw, Korthia and Zereth Mortis scale up to a higher item level than they do right now, perhaps capping it at season 4’s equivalent of normal raiding. This could be done by simply adding new items that can drop from rares, treasures and world/daily quests in any of the zones, that can be upgradable with some sort of currency also rewarded from the same sources.
  • Give us covenant cosmetic catchup. The anima-touched weapon fragments is by far the most egregious example (750 fragments that have a really low drop rate plus 30k anima!?) but there are other things as well; why aren’t soulshapes or construct cosmetics account-wide, for example?
  • Covenant sanctum catchup: another thing people tend to do at the end of an expansion is starting to fire up their alts, and it currently takes tens of thousands of anima to fully upgrade your covenant sanctum. Even with more abundant anima than in 9.0, this is going to take a really long time to achieve. I suggest adding an item that lets you upgrade your sanctums fully if you already have upgraded it fully on another character in the same covenant.
  • Add a vendor where we can buy items for soul ash, soul cinders and cosmic flux. These currencies are by far the worst currencies to exist in Shadowlands, and they are one of the key factors behind the wasted potential of Torghast. Simply adding a way for us to spend these can encourage players to play Torghast to earn some fun cosmetics, and actually get rid of the tens of thousands of useless currencies.
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I never thought I’d say this but the last time I had a bunch of fun in WoW was probably in the Ny’alotha patch.

The early progression whilst getting your corruptions wasn’t maybe that fun since it was complete rng if you would get corruption aswell as what effect - but when we reached the point that the vendor came out and you had a clear goal to farm for it worked really well. In end of Ny’alotha you could acquire your best piece of gear and then add a socket to it aswell as add the best corruption through vendor. It worked well and I think alot of us enjoyed it.

I’d love to see a insane power spike with Season 4 again - such as or inspired by the corruptions. Having the level 3 vers amps on every single piece as a tank being able to tank everything and do huge pulls or playing warlock with full haste amps having incredibly fast cast times. People maybe remember Ineffable Truth for hpals being able to basically end up having 100% up time on Wings. It’s fun being strong. It’s also the end of the expansion with no new content really coming up, this will give us an additional reason to continue playing until 10.0.

Maybe with the excess cosmic flux people are getting we could be able to use that currency for it and get those type of effects on our gear.

I’m not sure how this would work in PvP but for PvE (M+ & Raids) it was insanely fun.

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Now that we know that the raids will rotate weekly in Season 4 (which is a great compromise and prevents raiders from feeling like having to do 3 raids a week), I have a simple question:

Will this be applied to LFR? Or are LFR raiders doomed to run Sepulcher until 10.0 with an even higher ilvl gap?

Likewise, will there be a new way for outdoor players upgrade cypher gear to compete with the new ilvl of season 4 raids/m+ for outdoor players?

Also, can we get confirmation that Shards of Domination/Domination Sockets will or won’t be back? And will Sylvanas’s Bow be brought back at a new ilvl? And if so, will it drop ilvl upgrades for the new level for those who already have it?

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It looks from this Icy-Veins post that it’s built into the raid finder.

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Assuming the Fated affix goes live as it currently is, I think it’s going to be incredibly annoying to deal with from a loot standpoint.

You will only be able to get higher ilvl loot from each raid on a 3 week rotation. Didn’t get a Jaithys or Gavel? Have fun waiting for 3 weeks for another chance. This kind of idea works fine for dungeons because there are tons of keystones for each dungeon in circulation and you can use Valor to boost a lower ilvl item up.

But, unless they re-think the weekly loot lockout on raid bosses, even the Valor mechanic isn’t going to make a dent in frustrations because you’ll only get 4 chances to loot a Fated item each week.

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In terms of higher rewards ilvl take the items shown in the profession update (with a grain of salt). Those were epic at ilvl 371. Now we look at Nyalotha mythic (BFA last raid, highest ilvl) ending at 140 while Castle Nathria in SL starts at ilvl 187 with the epic quality. So there should be a lot of room above the current 285 from Jailer mythic towards S4 (maybe another 30 on top, 315 top ilvl in SL) and also towards Dragonflight S1 epics.

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It occurs to me reading both of these comments that the three week rotation would exist solely so that “hard core” raiders don’t need to feel “pressure” to do 31 bosses a week.

The question that raises for me is, how fair is that to the rest of the player base who would never in a million years even consider doing 31 bosses in a week? Why should they be prevented from targeting the bosses they are really interested in?

It also appears from the information releases that the system is accessible from the raid finder tab. I’ve been running LFR on 11 toons, one of each class except rogue. I’ve been killing 8 bosses on each to max out the vault (I do it for transmog collecting). So that’s 88 boss kills a week in LFR, which while it sounds like a lot of time, which I suppose for a lot it is, I still work a full time job 10hrs a day, have a family, do family stuff and hang out with my kids when they are actually around and not with their friends and go out in the outdoor world and do other things. So for me 31 LFR bosses a week is a Wednesday and Thursday evening in regular LFR. The Fated bosses are empowered so I assume it will take more time in LFR to do. Even if it takes twice as long it’s still 3-4 evenings likely on a main. Most people would do less because they will be targeting a much narrower set of bosses for their individual needs as iLvL will be their primary goal and will be looking optimize their 15-16 gear slots. Once those slots are down to 2-3 a 2 week forced break from a target boss will be very painful.

I noticed that there doesn’t currently seem to be a min iLvL for the Fated affix. There should also be an option to run the regular LFR and not the Fated affix LFR. Personally I still have a lot of transmog to collect and don’t want to lose the raid for that purpose once every three weeks.

Unless the Fated gear acquisition is just intentionally being throttled down and gated, I’m not at all convinced that a 3 week rotation is really necessary or even a good solution for the vast majority of players. Give people as many options as you can and let them figure out what their limit is.

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I’m guessing this is what the vendors that were datamined on the PTR (and are not at the usual spots PTR-testing-purpose-vendors usually are) will be for. I think a good compromise for that would be having Season 4 raids drop tokens and you just purchase gear from the raid you want to aim for from these vendors.

Really hoping this is the solution they are going for.

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So the slime cat mount has been datamined as a reward for completing all the raids with the new affix attached to them in season 4! There are also other achievements specifically for heroic and mythic (granting a title and raid teleports respectively), so does that mean that the slime cat is obtainable through any difficulty, including LFR?

Edit: I was looking through the rest of the forum for a better place to put something else and didn’t want to make an entire thread about it, but came up short! It was also recently stated in this week’s PTR build that covenant achievements were going to be shared across all covenants (still requiring you to be within the covenant to earn them), and I was wondering if this means we also get account-wide progress on some of them? They’re a pain to grind out over and over again.

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Wowhead has reported that we’ll get cypher equipment weapons in 9.2.5, which is great news! Now the question remains, will we get to see further ranks for our cypher equipment or will we be stuck at 252 for the rest of the expansion, while all the others get a new season of ilevel boosts?

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This is what worries me, because for those who missed it, the new ilvls of the season will be: (From Icy Veins)

Which means outdoor players… will have no gear progression and essentially be locked out of all other content because they can’t get higher than 252 gear.

Mythic0s will drop 10 ilvls higher than any gear outdoor player scan get. LFR will be 13-20 ilvls higher.

The World Bosses aren’t being updated either (Why not have them have the Fated Affix too?) so that’s a big chunk of outdoor player gear that will no longer be relevant.

As Ion said here:

Outdoor players still deserve gear progression, and as it stands on the 9.2.5 PTR currently, they do not have it. They are capped at their 9.2 levels and will be left behind.

I am hoping this is fixed before Season 4 goes live.

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A very cool idea and will be excited to do all 3 difficulties of it. My only “concern” is the reward from completing Mythic is very underwhelming. A portal to an old raid doesn’t really offer much or feel fun since it’s the final months of the expansion. A different color of one of the sets from any of the raids would be an awesome reward and incentivize more people to participate in the Mythic version at least once.

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I really hope this statement didn’t get missed by anyone.

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