That really is some roguelike gamebreaking item combo stuff. Just wait until he gets Brimstone and Mom’s Knife.
One of greatest things I’ve ever seen related to this game.
I wish it was intended.
Pfft, perfectly balanced.
Does anybody happen to have the blue blood elf underwear texture saved? Just a picture of it.
I swear, I’m going nuts trying to dig it back up.
edit: Simaia got me on twitter. Faked. Gosh. They bamboozled me.
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Streamer having an interview with a Blizz dev, Paul Kubit, on Torghast and the Maw.
Can you access Torghast the week you hit 60?
You should be able to enter the Tower shortly after you hit 60. There’s probably a couple things to do before you can enter like quests but if you want to focus on it, you can access it sooner. One of the things you’ll have to do is pick your Covenant as Torghast Anima Powers affect your Covenant abilities.
What is [PH]Boss Loot going to be?
We don’t actually know yet. You should have things that you want to get in Torghast, it should be compelling to those who like to play, who don’t like to play, who play a lot and who don’t play a lot. Probably not a lot of equippable gear that has an item level in Torghast. Torghast, you will be getting Legendaries and Freed Souls – Souls are very important to your Covenant as well as there’s a drought of Souls right now. Souls are not actually a currency.
How will Torghast affect Weekly Chest Loot?
I don’t know. There is a world where it does and a world where it doesn’t. It currently has Mythic+, Raids and PvP and they’re thinking about World Quests and Torghast. Torghast already has its own reward loop.
What do you get for going higher in Torghast?
Rewards usually come after design. Torghast has been released earlier than normal in the Alpha to test design and things may change. The Legendary Dust that you get from Chests may not take that format. One goal is to make sure that the higher that you climb, the better your rewards.
Is there a cap to the reagents and Legendary Crafting Materials?
Yes, it’ll probably work similar to the Mythic+ system. e.g. If you go past +15, you don’t get much more. There will be a highly tuned maximum reward but you can go past that if you wish. Current thought is your get your first Legendary within the first couple weeks of hitting 60. First Legendary by the time raids come out?
What slots do Legendaries fill?
They play to have Legendaries for every slot about trinkets and weapons. Legendary effects will have a specific slot that they’re tied to.
Legendary Anima Power?
That sounds pretty cool. Nothing to announce at the moment. They might be making some changes to rarity in the future – more commons, less uncommons and rares.
It’s also been awesome to see people take defensive Anima Powers.
Will there be a pause timer in the Tower?
No plans to do a skip in the tower right now. The goal is to make sure that Torghast runs take a normal amount of time. That’s why some of the levels have break levels as well. There’s a world where runs are only 6 floors or 12 floors long.
Why would you be in a group?
It’s so much more fun in a group! Anima Powers are built with the expectation that things are more fun in a group. In the end, the goal is that solo and a group is equal but that’s hard to balance. If they err on one side or the other, they’ll probably lean on the side of groups. You’ll have to enter with a premade, you cannot queue up for Torghast.
Do Tanks and Healers get differently tuned mobs?
Yes, but not with the same numbers. Also, they’ve learned from Horrific Visions that not all DPS specs are tuned the same and have the ability to tune between specs as well. However, there is also a world that, due to Anima Powers, no tuning is needed at all but those tuning knobs are available.
Any plans to have an affix system in Torghats?
Sort of. There may be a need for it. When you scale the tower it adds health and damage. They are considering adding a “soft-timer”. When you play on live servers, things matter so you might wait for Meta every pull or wait for Bloodlust every pull. You can take your time and be methoidcal and it won’t be a strict timer, but something like the Jailer slowly sends increasing waves of mobs against you.
Any plans for keys?
There are plans to have a key to enter Torghast, as that influences the reward design. Kubit is pitching a design and seeing how people react: every 3 days your Covenant gives you a key OR for increasing amounts of currency you can buy keys; in addition, if you want to run more you can run to the Maw and use the Maw currency, Stygia to buy another key (say that takes about 15 minutes). As you stay in the Maw, you get the eye of the Jailer debuff, so you need to go to other zones to pay that off with Anima, which means you can continue the loop to farm more keys. There exists a system to play the Jailer’s Tower as much as you want, but you can’t Just do the Jailer’s Tower, you also have to do other things. In other words, you can play Torghast for a certain amount of your playtime in a week ~35%.
How many Anima Powers can you expect to get?
Probably a few too many Anima Powers right now. There’s typically one on every floor and one from opt-in challenges: Trap Rooms, Rares. But there’s also some that drop from random creatures. So maybe 3 per floor seems about right. There’s tuning to be done there.
Easy, Normal, Hard is that Alpha only?
Yes. The difficulties are Alpha only and for testing purposes only. The entry hall or lobby will be leveling up in the next few weeks.
Procedurally Generated Levels?
They talked to the people on the Diablo team to learn about procedurally generated levels. The level are actually fixed levels, with procedurally generated spawns within some limitations such as creature type or difficulty level in certain locations. There are 6 major ecologies and the 6 subzones. Lots will come from special things like rares or bosses. There still should be a mastery curve, having a fixed number of creatures eventually means you’ll have seen almost everything and you’ll know how to beat it.
Are boss and brokers levels fixed?
Brokers are currently on boss levels and break levels. The Broker’s vendor list is very alpha. A lot of the time, you currently just have more currency than you can buy. An interesting power would be to spawn a Shackled Broker anywhere. Right now, internally they have a thing called the Broke build, where you sacrifice power for Phantasma upgrades.
Boss levels are every 6 currently.
Who are the Souls/NPCs we’re seeing?
The Jailer doesn’t just capture souls, but he has recently been taking other characters. That’s who those quest characters are.
Anyone who has recently died has been going to the Maw, so you may see some important characters inside Torghast as this is where the Jailer keeps his most previous souls.
How will the Tower evolve?
It will evolve. More floors, more legendaries, more themes and ecologies. Torghast will stick around for the expansion.
What am I going to experience in the maw?
It’s an endgame zone – you’ll be there a bit during the leveling experience. Dailies and World quests will be present, but when you start, there will be a very few number of objectives so you know what to focus on. Do I want souls from my Covenant or to kill this rare? There’s a limited amount of time that you can spend in the Maw with the Eye of the Jailer debuff. As you defeat things and spend time, the Jailer will find you and towers will bombard you and chains will slow you, etc.
Once your Eye of the Jailer has ticked to a certain level it lasts for the day. There is counterplay, such as a Shroud that hides from the Jailer in the zone, but you can also spend Anima, collected outside of the Maw, to remove Eye of the Jailer.
-end-
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I hope that this marks the return of the Scarlets. They were always favorable badguy of mine.
Looks like we’re trying to save Kael’thas in the raid.
Dude same. Folks can hate em, but I’ll adore them.
What if we see a Scarlet uprising…in Shadowlands 
They go full on against the Necrolords!
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Excuse me as I breeze through to make another quick snipe at Blizzard.
In fairness, I dunno the context of the interview so it’s an easy offhand remark to bungle because of phrasing. But that’s not gonna stop me from being mean so.
… Like, no duh dps specs end up with wildly different strengths and damage values. You guys do that for a living, that should have beem square one. I guess it’s a little encouraging they acknowledge there were discrepencies but also… Literally everyone could have told you that. And did, as far as I know.
Why should I believe them this time?
But also I’m positive test runs of Torghast are gonna come back with rave reviews so, just let this old pand yell at clouds.
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Sometimes the most compelling villains are the ones who are so convinced of an idea that’s so gloriously wrong that they see no wrong in what they do. At least when it’s done right. Scarlets tend to come off as goonish in a fun way, but at their core have a belief system that has terrifying real world mirrors. They’re convinced they do what their faith wills them to, and have conviction enough to hold a strong bond with the light in doing so. So yeah, I see where the allure of Scarlets come from. The zealot. The self-appointed authority. Archetypes of villainhood that sometimes can only be explained by a misplacement of faith to succeed one’s fading morality.
EDIT: So I’m just like, watching Torghast stuff now and I can’t wait for this. I’m seriously super stoked to scale this tower, it looks like the best thing WoW’s had in…god, ages.
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Am I reading this right that the layout will be the same every time? That’s a little disappointing, I was hoping to have a new layout each time. I guess I understand why that might not be the case, that would be a -lot- of work for each run to generate.
Kind of? One you get the assets created, it’s not horrible to make something randomly generated. Though we don’t know the limitations of the WoW engine.
I wonder if it would be possible to have each level be random in terms of when it appears? Like, instead of generating a new level they have several different layouts/etc that are picked from random when you go to the next floor/level. Idk how hard that would be, I’m not a game designer.
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Hm.
One of the secret mounts had a final stage where the player had to run through a series of randomly-generated Mogu tomb-like rooms, though it’s only differences (that I remember) were which of the 4 doors were open or blocked. So there’s some precedence for randomly generated rooms.
I hope that, even if some areas are the same, there’s still a fair bit of variation and randomness in Torghast levels.
So the Winds of Wisdom has been extended until the end of the expansion.
So now players will get 100% XP gains until SL and also we’ll be getting the 100% reputation bonus starting April 20-May 18th. (only Legion and BFA minus 8.3 reputations are applicable)
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Could also randomize start and end points, I think that would be efficient.
I’m only, like, a year and a half into a CS major but WoW’s engine has always struck me as extremely static. It’s the reason you can’t have bodysliders for characters. So I could see this being a problem for something like this. Though again, I have no idea what’s going on under the hood here.
However, I think they could design rooms and then just kinda tack them onto each other via doors or something.
Literally everyone in my Discord broke into cheers lol.
I mean, people have been randomly generating dungeon floors since literal Rogue. I can’t speak to how hard it would be to implement, but it’s hardly unprecedented.
I kind of hope Winds of Wisdom and an expanded reputation buff become an end-of-expansion tradition. There’s something freeing about Blizzard explicitly saying “there’s no more content in the pipeline, here’s something to make your thumb-twiddling a little more bearable.”
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This would be so so so so sooooooo nice.
Pretty much. They have probably been reformatting their code for a long time, but who knows what could trigger a domino effect. Ex. letting us replace our standard backpack still not being a possibility due to jank code. 
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Yeah, I was thinking that, as well. I’m willing to buy it was just tone deaf, but “we learned that classes do different things” is not so much tone deaf as having one’s ears filled with centipedes.
have you guys seen the scarlet brotherhood stuff? legit raving about conspiracies, cover ups, and basically talking like the alt-right?
blizzard b like “wouldnt it be funny if we had a horrifying analogue to the real world’s problems in our goofy fantasy game?”
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