Warlords of Draenor Systems Panel: What We Learned

by JR Cook - 12 years ago     show comments

The Warlords of Draenor systems panel has just wrapped up, and covered raiding, questing, garrisons and more. Check out some of the key points below.

Raid content

• Blackstone Foundry capstone raid content will open a few weeks into the expansion
• 10 boss raid with non-linear layout
• The raid will have 3 wings
• Tear down the Iron Horde War Machine
• Face off against Warlord Blackhand
• Feels like a place that was designed as a function place, rather than a “raid zone”
• There will be some scope to start later in the instance eg. once you’ve cleared certain bosses a number of times you might be able to forge a key that allows you to start further in the instance

Raid structure

• New Normal is equivalent is current Flex
• Today’s Normal guilds will find new Heroic equivalent
• Mythic will provide challenge to today’s Heroic guilds
• Calling something Flex didn’t make sense
• Normal and Heroic raids will be cross server
• Mythic won’t be cross server because of realm first etc
• Each difficulty has its own lockout
• Loot-based lockouts so you can jump in a raid even if you’ve killed the boss (even Mythic?)
• Raid Finder is the only queued content
• Normal and Heroic will still drop loot on the boss (no personal loot) but scale based on the number of eligible players
• Want to avoid breakpoints and magic numbers for loot and boss fight mechanics eg. 15th person adds an extra person to get targeted by Shadow Word: Bane
• Where they can, they will try to average these mechanics out, but won’t necessarily work in every situation

Quests

• Key storylines will draw attention to big questlines
• More optional content so you can follow the storyline quests if you want or explore and pick up extra quests
• Dynamic events and treasures like Timeless Isle
• Multi-stage events and wandering raid bosses
• Events will be mixed in during levelling, but also at max level
• Treasures to encourage exploring the world eg. find a path that leads up a mountain but you don’t have a quest for it, follow it and you might find something cool
• Treasures will be quite frequent to encourage players to explore
• Quest rewards will have a chance to “spike” to rare/epic rather than always green
• Quest UI updates include progress indicator for the zone
• Key storylines that you abandoned or haven’t picked up will show up on map
• More dynamic world, some experiments worked out, others were called Golden Lotus

Max-level World Content

• More things to do at max level
• Little if any daily quests (big cheer)
• Long-term chapter-based quests like Dominance Offensive will be merged with open ended content like Timeless Isle
• Environmental gameplay

Garrisons

• Town Hall, Mine, Farm and Fishing Shack will be your starting buildings
• Town Hall is your main building where you send followers out on missions
• Once you’ve got those you can build small buildings, which include professions buildings
• Medium buildings are the next step up from small
• One building is called the Pet Stable which will offer a lot of pet battle things to do
• Large buildings have the best bonuses eg. barracks increase amount of followers
• Buildings have level upgrades and look different as they level up
• Some upgrades will be purchasable through currency, others will be found via Blueprints which are new recipe items that you can find across the world
• Garrison UI shows you where recipe item will drop or how else you will acquire it
• Specializations are available at level 3 buildings that offer customizations
• Followers can be assigned to buildings
• Followers can mine and provide ore to you even while offline
• Garrison has overall levels too, which provides more plots
• To level up the garrison you need to fill all the plots with buildings
• Missions have a number of activities they can do – quests, scenarios, dungeons and raids, and harder missions take longer and need more followers
• Missions will have characteristics that you will want to match up with strengths of your followers

Systems

• Social philosophy of WoW: A game you play with friends
• Warlords wants to encourage you to play with friends, but also make new friends
• Random matchmaking as a last resort
• Raid Finder will feel like tourist mode
• Group Finder will be able to create a group or browse for a group, and will be cross realm enabled
• Similar to some current mods and services out there, but they think WoW needs it
• Bonus valor if you queue with friends
• Matchmade groups that re-queue count as friends

Leveling

• Leveling from 90 to 100 to feel exciting with no real feeling of rewards as you level in new talent paradigm
• Upgrades to core spells as you level up
• Some introduce class changes, others will be passive bonuses (like old school spell ranks)
• Don’t expect a ton of class changes

Itemization

• Getting items should be exciting
• Too much modding when you get an item – gem, enchant, reforge, valor
• Hit and expertise don’t feel like a bonus
• Avoidance is cool for tanks, but not as a stat on items
• We’re also cleaning up bag space
• Hit and expertise GONE
• Dodge and parry GONE
• Reforging GONE
• Enchants will affect fewer items, but more choice in enchants for those items
• Gem sockets will be rare but gems will be more powerful, no socket bonuses or meta gems
• Sockets will also be a bonus and won’t count as part of item budge
• No strength plate vs intellect plate on armor
• All armor items will be usable by all players (eg. plate users can use all plate, mail users can use all mail)
• Primary stat will change based on spec eg. ret paladin switched to holy and the strength will change to int
• This change will include set bonuses so one tier set per class
• Jewelry, cloak, trinkets and weapons will still be role focused
• Spirit for healers and Armor for tanks
• Bonus tertiary stats that don’t count against budget that can drop like lifesteal, avoidance (absorb AE damage), sturdiness (no dura loss), speed (movement), cleave (AE damage)
• Item Squish is back on the agenda
• Most inflation comes from previous raid tiers
• Flattening big jumps in things like level 60, 70, 80 and 85 raid tiers
• Your relative power will not change
• Relative power of 5.4 gear will not change
• If it takes you 5s to kill a gulp frog, it will still take you 5s to kill gulp frog
• Soloing old content will still be possible