wow Battle for Azeroth Live Q/A from BlizzCon 2017

[Stan 5,240]

Live coverage of World of Warcraft Q/A panel from BlizzCon 2017.

Allied Races

• Void Elves have a Voidform. The team doesn't want you to be voided all the time, more adjustments to come in the beta.
• Heritage Armor is the essence of an Allied Race's identity. It cannot be used for transmog on other races.
• Race class matrix is available on the official website. Dwarves & Zandalari Trolls are TBA.

Artifacts

• Each piece of Azerite Armor gives you more progression and more choices to make.
• Azerite is used to level up the medallion (The Heart of Azeroth), there are no millions of AP!
• There's only one legendary amulet instead of Artifact weapons for each specialization.

Battle.net App

• The friend limit will be increased at some point.

Bag Space

• Backpack size will be slightly increased. They want to incentivize the Authenticator.
• If you have an Authenticator attached to your Battle.net account, your backpack size will increase.

Character Customization

• Customization feels lackluster. They're looking at options to customize characters, but they wanted to wait before Allied Races get introduced.
• We'll be able to choose between a hunched / upright Orc in the Barber Shop.

Character Slots

• We'll have six more character slots in the new expansion.

Classic Servers

• The implementation will take longer than expected.
• They want to recreate the level 1 - 60 experience as you remember it (how things worked at that points).
• UBRS was a 5 / 10 player instance. What's the right version of Classic? A lot of questions need to be answered first.

Communities

• No plans for a cross-faction chat, you can do that via Battle.net Groups.
• Blizzard's hoping that communities will bolster guild recruiting.

Flying in Battle for Azeroth

• There's no flying on Argus, because of how the zones were built (they're not next to each other).
• Flying will be introduced at the same time as in Legion (later in the expansion).

Goblin & Worgen Models

• The new models won't be ready for Patch 8.0, but they're actively working on them.
• Worgen will be given more facial features to make them look more fierce.

Legendary Items

• Azerite Armor does what Legendaries did in Legion, so Legendaries won't be released in their current form in 8.0.

Legion Companion App

• Blizzard is focusing on a singular experience (there are too many apps at the moment).

Level Scaling

• Rather than nerfing Heirlooms, Blizzard will adjust scaling curves (mob health / damage) to make leveling more sane.
• Mobs will drop the same items.

Lore

• Anduin is a Priest, 100% not a Paladin. He's a Hero character and those can do some cool stuff.
• Jaina is not evil, she is conflicted and that's something they want to explore.
• The Horde will burn down Teldrassil and the Alliance will attack Lordaeron. No plans to change starting zones.
• Demon Hunters will continue being Demon Hunters after the expansion. One day, we may see demons again.

Mythic Dungeons

• Timewalking Keystones (for old dungeons) would be a cool idea.

Stat Squish

• Blizzard's doing another squish. The point is to decrease numbers. Item levels are also affected by the squish.

PvP Templates

• It's hard to put them into the outdoor world. Activation and power gaps are a huge problem and cause balance issues.

Reputations

• Reputation won't be account-wide, but Blizzard would like to look into why you'd grind rep on your alts. What is it about the reps that you need them on all alts? Access to content is always made account-wide, e.g. improved Flighted Whistle on Argus or Suramar.

Quest Log

• When you have 25 quests in your log it's overwhelming and hard to keep track on. No plans to increase the quest log size.

Warfronts

• Warfronts will have a downtime, just like Invasion Points.
• Rewards are still being worked out.
• Warfronts are PvE and reward faction-based sets.

Timewalking

• Warlords Timewalking will be added at some point in Battle for Azeroth.
• They don't want to make all Timewalking dungeons available at once, but incorporate the outdoor world into the event (Timewalking raids).

Titanforging

• In Battle for Azeroth, they won't be making fundamental changes to Titanforging.
• The goal is to have variability in rewards to create moments of excitement.
• There's a value of having moments of potential surprise, even though the spikes of randomness aren't that great.
• Azerite Armor (Helm / Shoulders / Chests) has plenty of complexity and won't titanforge.

[SMOrcMan 76]

1 hour ago, Stan said:

We'll be able to choose between a hunched / upright Orc in the Barber Shop.

Finally, more options for the greatest race

[Dejo93 1,023]

38 minutes ago, SMOrcMan said:

Finally, more options for the greatest race

 

[alleraz 11]

It all looks meh to me. Not at all impressed. Kinda let down to be honest. Also saying that Anduin is 100% not a pally and yet he can do pally things is kinda of a wrong answer. He is a hero character so he can do pretty much do what he wants and shouldnt be classified as 1 spec/class if he can just break it at will.

Edited November 5, 2017 by alleraz

[SMOrcMan 76]

1 hour ago, alleraz said:

It all looks meh to me. Not at all impressed. Kinda let down to be honest. Also saying that Anduin is 100% not a pally and yet he can do pally things is kinda of a wrong answer. He is a hero character so he can do pretty much do what he wants and shouldnt be classified as 1 spec/class if he can just break it at will.

While I do agree there is nothing ground breaking, I think whether the expansion is good or not depends on how fun the raids/dungeons are, since that's where most of us will spend our time. I personally like the idea of subraces, but I must admit I'm disappointed there is not a subrace for all races

[alleraz 11]

23 minutes ago, SMOrcMan said:

While I do agree there is nothing ground breaking, I think whether the expansion is good or not depends on how fun the raids/dungeons are, since that's where most of us will spend our time. I personally like the idea of subraces, but I must admit I'm disappointed there is not a subrace for all races

The outside content also has to be good or we will see WoD happen again (WoD had good raids but outside content was lacking/crap). The new areas are Pirate/troll themed and I just find those themes ugly, they honestly look worse than whats in legion and even WoD.

Also the warfronts would have been a cool PvP mode but it's not... The cinematic to the game makes it look like its gonna be a heavy PvP focused xpac but yet it barley has anything new PvP wise, granted I shouldn't really care since I dont like PvP but it is misleading.

Overall the reveal was very underwhelming and it just looks like Blizz took a few steps back and not forward.

Edited November 5, 2017 by alleraz

[Syktris 36]

6 hours ago, Stan said:

Flying will be introduced at the same time as in Legion (later in the expansion).

Oh please, not again.

[SMOrcMan 76]

1 hour ago, alleraz said:

The outside content also has to be good or we will see WoD happen again (WoD had good raids but outside content was lacking/crap). The new areas are Pirate/troll themed and I just find those themes ugly, they honestly look worse than whats in legion and even WoD.

Also the warfronts would have been a cool PvP mode but it's not... The cinematic to the game makes it look like its gonna be a heavy PvP focused xpac but yet it barley has anything new PvP wise, granted I shouldn't really care since I dont like PvP but it is misleading.

Overall the reveal was very underwhelming and it just looks like Blizz took a few steps back and not forward.

I hope you're wrong about the PvP focus. I do understand that there is a number of people who play PvP but honestly if I want to do PvP I personally think there is better MMOs for that

[alleraz 11]

22 minutes ago, SMOrcMan said:

I hope you're wrong about the PvP focus. I do understand that there is a number of people who play PvP but honestly if I want to do PvP I personally think there is better MMOs for that

That is what I'm saying, it's not PvP focused and yet it seems like it will be. Many of my friends actually where excited thinking it would be PvP focused and where disappointed that it's not. I personally dont care about PvP but the cinematic made it seem very PvP focused,

The cinematic was really well done but unlike cinematics before it gave no real context. Looking at the overview of what the Xpac has to offer it looks very meh.

[Amateurpeeweeeeh 37]

I simply do not understand why they not implement flying as soon as you have visited every place on the map.

For the players who say: "I don't need flying" - don't fly then.

But why not implement it right away. It's not a good aspect of the game if I need to travel for the 1/2 of expansion 5min to each worldquest, when it could be done in 1minute (because of fuckin horrible terrain and speed).

 

I don't get it.

[Erialis 22]

9 hours ago, Stan said:

• Reputation won't be account-wide, but Blizzard would like to look into why you'd grind rep on your alts. What is it about the reps that you need them on all alts? Access to content is always made account-wide, e.g. improved Flighted Whistle on Argus or Suramar.

Quest Log

They really don't see all that threads on forums that speak about alot of transmog items locked behind reps? For example i have 40+ tabard designs discovered by reps and can use only less than 1/3 of them without rep grind. It's idiotic that i can use Argent Crusader tabard for achiev where you need to fight on tournament for all faction reps and get exalted with them but can't use damn tabards from Cata that need friendly rep...

I don't even wanna start about some specific single items in each expansion that are locked behind some rep that are pain to farm on every new char where you want to use that look.

[Valhalen 1,484]

15 hours ago, Stan said:

Worgen will be given more facial features to make them look more fierce.

I wish they'd also polish some of the Worgen animations. For instance, the Male Worgen looks really stupid in his running animation.

Edited November 5, 2017 by Valhalen

[Valks 2,375]

On 11/5/2017 at 6:14 AM, alleraz said:

That is what I'm saying, it's not PvP focused and yet it seems like it will be. Many of my friends actually where excited thinking it would be PvP focused and where disappointed that it's not. I personally dont care about PvP but the cinematic made it seem very PvP focused,

The cinematic was really well done but unlike cinematics before it gave no real context. Looking at the overview of what the Xpac has to offer it looks very meh.

I think it's a very deceiving cinematic. They want us to focus so much on H vs A, but I bet it'll be so much more as later patches emerge. Doesn't make sense for a PvP expansion to have us face Azshara at some point.

[alleraz 11]

39 minutes ago, Blainie said:

I think it's a very deceiving cinematic. They want us to focus so much on H vs A, but I bet it'll be so much more as later patches emerge. Doesn't make sense for a PvP expansion to have us face Azshara at some point.

It has to be alot more, specially if Anduin is actually fighting. He's generally a passive person so something very major must have happened. Just wish the new areas weren't pirate/troll themed though.

[Valks 2,375]

On 11/6/2017 at 8:58 PM, alleraz said:

It has to be alot more, specially if Anduin is actually fighting. He's generally a passive person so something very major must have happened. Just wish the new areas weren't pirate/troll themed though.

I've always liked the whole troll vibe tbh - I like their architecture a lot, I loved Zul'Drak :p