Here’s the full mail set of Castle Nathria set
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Still holding out for lady beards in the future.
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Enjoying aspects of the mail sets revealed so far.
Tauren customization is incredible, hope we get some new faces and hair styles as Tauren women are in dire need of some love there.
I understand why they’re putting a soft timer on the tower; other rogue-like games have something in place to avoid one staying on a floor too long (In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, wind starts blowing you out of the stage… in Risk of Rain 2 it throws hordes of enemies at you until you’re forced to leave the floor) but I am going to watch previews of it carefully.
Soft timers are not a bad thing, kind of needed one otherwise people would just wait for lust to be up every pull, but they could definitely do it wrong.
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i’m 60 years late but beardless dwarf men and blonde tauren are kind of cursed
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That mail set is making it really hard for me to pick if I want my Worgen or Void Elf hunter to be the one I do content on.
Interview with Ion:
Torghast Time Commitment
- The long term goal for Torghast is not multiple hour runs.
- Torghast is still in early development as they wanted to get it up early for feedback.
- They haven’t put much time into the meta progression just yet. They don’t mind having a build come together in the middle and make that portion easy, but it shouldn’t continue infinitely.
- They’re looking to condense the runs where you get your build together, you get to crush some floors but the runs don’t take a long time.
Torghast Achievements
- There will definitely be a full suite of achievements for Torghast.
- Achievements are generally one of the last things to develop as they want to understand the system.
- Milestones, Beating different bosses, personal challenges and more!
Torghast Two-Week Events
- Torghast is being built with events in mind.
- A certain event might take over a section of the tower, but that’s more of a long term goal to keep Torghast feeling fresh.
Legendary Item Crafting
- It’s not available in alpha just yet, but it will hopefully be up in a few weeks.
- It’ll hopefully be unlocked early in Torghast.
- There will likely be an extra room that you can enter in the lobby of Torghast where you can head into where you find the Runesmith who originally crafted Frostmourne.
- As you explore Torghast, you can find scraps that you can turn in to the Runesmith to add the Legendary effect.
- Unlocking and learning the legendaries as well as the crafting materials will last the entire expansion.
Time Passing in the Shadowlands
- It’s complicated.
- There isn’t a fixed amount of time like 3x or 10x faster like in a sci-fi movie. It’s more chaotic.
- What does that mean for the player? We’ll have to see when we come out the other end.
Covenants Ability Choice
- It’s a design challenge.
- It’s essential for the RPG aspect of the game to have choices with consequences and choices that shape the strengths and weaknesses of your characters.
- They understand the community in the current World of Warcraft climate and don’t want players to feel like they’re letting their guildmates or group down.
- Covenants are a full package deal, which includes Soulbinds, and they’re planning on continuing to balance and update Covenant abilities on the Alpha in order to try to make sure that there’s no wrong choice.
Class Trainers
- Class Trainers are new the end of the new player experience as where it teaches you about choosing a spec.
- Players no longer start with a spec in Shadowlands which leads to the focus on class identity rather than spec identity.
- No plans to made players go back to Class Trainers, but they would love to find a way to make Class Trainer relevant again.
Lordaeron and Teldrassil
- There are big unresolved elements there.
- There’s a piece of the story with Tyrande in Ardenweald.
- We may encounter many who fell in Battle for Azeroth in Shadowlands.
- Finding a new home for the Night Elves and Forsaken isn’t a great fit for the Shadowlands but they know that it’s unresolved and it will be addressed in the future and they are already thinking of ideas.
Heritage Armor
- Heritage Armor will continue until all races have them.
- They want to continue doing them in Shadowlands patches, usually in X.5 patches.
Adventure System - New Mission Table
- Should be on alpha next month.
- They want to have a system that represents the fantasy of WoW’s combat.
- They want to evolve the mission table system to add more depth.
Legendaries and Professions
- Current plan is only special items can be turned into Legendaries.
- They need to made with certain items so they have the latent power that can be turned into Legendaries.
- This means that you’ll need items made from Tailors, Blacksmiths and Leatherworkers.
Legendary Catch Up and Alts
- It’s likely that there will be some catch up eventually.
- But unlike Legion, you can immediately work towards the Legendary that you want.
- Whereever possible, make the recipes that you earn account-wide.
Crafting an Item
- They want to introduce the Shadowlands system to previous profession levels but it’s not a top priority.
- You can craft without the additional components and it’ll roll with random stats, but you can craft with additional components and guarantee a specific stat.
Graphics and Raytracing
- No plans to drastically raise minimum requirements.
Class Armor Sets and Tier
- Set bonuses are the piece that they’re still trying to figure out.
- Bonuses is why they pulled back class sets – raiding isn’t the only end game system and there’s more loot in the game.
- They’re currently focused on covenant armor when Shadowlands launches.
PvP
- No plans on PvP only stats so the system will be like BFA.
- Imagine when you fill your conquest bar, instead of getting a specific piece you get a token which you can turn in for a choice from a long list.
Covenant Transmog Restrictions
- Current thought is in order to use the Covenant transmogs, your character must be a member of that Covenant.
- If you have multiple characters in the same Covenant, those transmog should be account-wide.
Pre-Expansion Patch Duration
- They’re still working on the pre-expansion event and that event can only go out when Shadowlands is complete.
- They know that players are excited for Shadowlands and are looking for new things to do in Visions of N’Zoth but they don’t want to sacrifice quality of the expansion to release it earlier.
War Mode
- They’ve learned a lot from BFA on War Mode.
- Battle for Nazjatar had a lot of factional imbalance but factional assaults created a lot of natural World PvP.
- There will probably be some FFA areas similar to Legion.
- They’re also thinking about potentially some Covenant vs Covenant action. Covenants are not naturally enemies but there’s probably some spaces where there can be some challenges between the factions.
Reputation Buff on Live
- The experience buff was open ended and you can never have too many alts.
- The reputation buff has allowed players to unlock allied races or new rewards and will not be extended
- There’s another buff coming out after the reputation buff that will help players with alts catch up.
- “How do I get the corruption I want” and Legendary Cloak getting caught up was mentioned.
CGI Cinematics
- There’s a range of storytelling options – from the Warbringers pieces to the ingame cinematics to the pre-rendered movie quality cinematics.
- They use each of them when it makes sense for the story to tell.
- They will continue to see all of those types of videos to support the Shadowlands story.
Faction Leaders in the Shadowlands
- Can’t say much more due to spoilers.
Important Names in the Shadowlands
- Arthas is somewhere in the Shadowlands right?
- They want to be careful with that character and you’ll be learning about the power that shaped the Lich King but they also want to be respectful about one of the great characters of Warcraft Lore.
- You probably won’t be running around with him, but you will be learning some things about him.
Oribos and Covenant Sanctum Features
- Oribos should be on the alpha within the next week.
- Oribos and the Covenant Sanctums have a lot of parallels to the way Dalaran and the Class Halls worked.
Loading Screens in Torghast
- It’s an unfortunate tech limitation due to the dynamic nature of Torghast.
- They agree it’s a little immersion breaking.
- They may explore a different loading screen effect instead of the blue bar.
Traveling Between Shadowlands
- Bolvar will serve as a bridge between Azeroth and Shadowlands, providing valuable insights as we quest.
Bolvar Pre-Expansion
- Chances are high. He survived the confrontation with Sylvanas.
Think we’re getting a timeskip after Shadowlands y’all.
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Good. Fast forward us to the ending of Warcraft already, Blizzard.
New thought, what if we went backwards? When someone says Chaotic, it means going in many directions. PC becoming infinite dragonflight?
I have a lot to say about them and WarMode but I’ll save that for after my workout.
After the last time based expansion, I’m not confident in them achieving this.
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Fair enough.
I may be in the minority here, but I don’t like this. Not the non-answer, that’s actually pretty appropriate given it’s alpha, but the idea of a timeskip.
We’re all painfully aware of how loopy warcraft’s timeline is, and I’ll admit to being hard pressed to suggest that getting zucked into am alternate dimension / plane isn’t a fitting narrative opportunity to have one… But I just don’t like the application. It seems almost too convenient, and also frustratingly detatched and impersonal. The world is gonna go on and these sweeping changes might occur and we’re just not going to get to interact with them or experience them in a living world. It seems antithetical to the purpose of having an mmo if every time something important happens it’s already history and we don’t actually participate.
But maybe that’s just me. On to the lols.
Made an entire new building and questline. Immediately become worthleas. Absolutely classic.
So give dungeon sets different bonuses? We keep walking on eggshells around the big question of exactly how to reward effort / difficulty without stepping on raiders toes. How about we do something about raiding instead? It doesn’t have to reward the best loot in the game, you’re allowed to have comparable gameplay avenues contrary to what the community may scream.
Edit; I’ve caught a bit of discussion about this and I guess I under valued some things, between how powerful the bonuses could be and how much apparently the community hates being “locked in” to bis pieces. I don’t know why given that’s like, the whole point. I loosely recall the whinging about it back before they removed them and I get it in theory but remain kinda middling about it all. It sucked that the bonuses overwrote any non set gear even from higher difficulties. But it hasn’t stopped Artifacts, or Azerite, or Soulbinds and Covenants, or legendaries so, I dunno man, I feel like we can achieve a better middle ground.
Full disclosure, I’m not wholly against this. It’s actually probably one of the least offensive examples of a transmog restriction. But you’re still struggling with the gameplay part and I feel like maybe we should be more concerned with covenant abilities not feeling like raid / dungeon pigeon holes first.
Another thing I don’t disagree with in principle but in practice maybe we could just make rep grinds not feel like garbage?
It would be neat if we timeskip like 50+ years and come back to a completely changed Azeroth.
- Grandaddy Anduin and his life partner Wrathion still rule Stormwind but Anduin spends his days yelling at clouds.
- Gnomes still haven’t taken back Gnomregan
- Nightelves and Worgan are still without a city.
- Blizzard forgets to do anything with the Draenei or Exodar
- The Horde Council/Warchief is still a game of musical chairs. Dumass now rules for some reason.
- The Undercity fart cloud has supposedly evaporated but players still die when entering the city. Has to be hotfixed.
- No new Pandaren lore or leaders. Current Pandaren Horde/Alliance leaders are the same and haven’t aged at all and say maybe five words next expansion.
- Mechagnomes still haven’t grasped the concept of wearing pants. Diapers ensue
- Stormwind Park district is now back on fire again for another 5+ years. Teldrassil is still on fire.
- Night Elves and Forsaken still can’t be paladins but Goblins can for some reason.
- High Elves become an allied race but players must have Exalted reputation with Hydraxian Waterlords and one of those old Centaur tribes from Desolace to unlock.
- Sargeras’ sword is still in Azeroth’s butt. It is never addressed again.
- Ogrimmar still has no grasp on chair technology. Adds more spikes.
- Sylvanas is still around Mary Sue-ing her way out of any form of accountability or punishment.
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You’re creating the darkest of timelines lmao.
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Please, please don’t let the draenei heritage set be more crystal junk.
what a relief to hear a mission table system is coming wouldn’t want to see that widely beloved feature go by the wayside
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I’m wondering with these customization options for Tauren why highmountain are even a separate race. They have so few options. It’s annoying that its the first race I managed to cap.
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LFD and HMT were test runs to see how far Blizzard could get away with making customizations a ‘race’.
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The new human customization options are up in the wowhead beta dressing room btw, so you can play around with them yourself
https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/dressing-room#qz0z0zJ89c8a8t8s8z8q8znk8b8zxE8d8ztH8k58zdi8sc8zya87Q
The age of the pineapple beard has ended
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This is quite interesting to me. I’m reminded of an idea I had once when leveling a Monk; to give every class a little class hub like Peak of Serenity, where trainers would give challenges that teach how to use the class’ abilities and mechanics. Frankly I’m slightly surprised such a thing hasn’t happened already.
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