Warlords of Draenor - Scouting Report
  • Purchasing Warlords of Draenor will give you one free boost to level 90 right away.
  • Blizzard will be testing allowing you to purchase a character upgrade directly.
  • Warlords of Draenor will be available for pre-purchase digitally Soon™.
  • Both Standard and Digital Deluxe editions will be available, along with a physical collector's edition.
  • Purchasing the Digital Deluxe edition will give you a pet and mount right away.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
It’s the New Year, and 2014 is going to be a big one for World of Warcraft. This November marks the game’s 10-year anniversary and the 20-year anniversary of the entire Warcraft series. We’re looking forward to celebrating these milestones with everyone, but in the meantime, we’ve got a few Warlords of Draenor–related updates to share.

Preparing for Battle
At BlizzCon, we laid out our plans to send you into battle against some of the biggest and baddest enemies in Warcraft history. While the Iron Horde gears up for war on Draenor, back here on earth we’re making preparations for the expansion’s upcoming closed beta test. If you’d like to be considered, now’s a great time to make sure you’re opted in to Warcraft betas and that the hardware specs in your Beta Profile are up to date. (Full instructions can be found here.)


Report from the Front Lines
From the outset, players will find themselves hurled into a chaotic conflict with the Iron Horde at a new Dark Portal on Draenor. The situation for Azeroth is grim, and the war effort needs heroes—from new recruits to retired champions to warriors still tending wounds earned at the Siege of Orgrimmar. To get everyone straight to the action, when you buy the expansion, it will come with a boost to level 90 for one character on your WoW account. We’re getting ready to test the functionality for that on the PTR, and we wanted to provide a quick update on how it will work with the upcoming expansion presales.

Warlords of Draenor will be available for pre-purchase digitally Soon™, and we’re once again planning to have standard digital and Digital Deluxe versions (along with a physical Collector’s Edition—more on that at a later date). This time, if you pre-purchase the Digital Deluxe edition you’ll get your exclusive World of Warcraft pet and mount right away, allowing you to bring a little bit of Draenor past into Azeroth present.

In addition, when you pre-purchase either digital version, we’re going to grant you your level-90 boost at the time of pre-purchase. That’s a little different from the plan we laid out at BlizzCon, but based on the feedback, it’s obvious that many of you would like the chance to get acquainted with a new class before heading into the expansion. This will also give more players the opportunity to experience the current end-game content and the events leading up to Garrosh’s exodus to Draenor. Maybe you’ll get your Legendary cloak from Wrathion and level 90–100 Heirloom weapon in the process.


Bolster the Ranks
We’ve also heard feedback from players that they’d be interested in boosting multiple characters to 90, including alts they play with friends on other factions and realms. We’ve been evaluating ways to make that possible without having players go through roundabout methods (such as purchasing multiple boxes and performing multiple character transfers), and in the near future we’ll be testing out a feature that gives you the option to purchase a character upgrade directly. We’ll have more information to share later—including details on our character-upgrade plans for Asian regions where players don’t buy expansion boxes—but you’ll start seeing pieces of the process soon on the PTR, so keep an eye out.

We’re looking forward to the closed beta test, and we’re excited we’re able to give players their character boost immediately upon pre-purchasing—hopefully that will help tide you over while you’re waiting for the epic battle for Draenor to begin. Stay tuned for more information on presales and our beta plans, and we hope you’ll join in and help us test this stuff out when it hits the PTR.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Warlords of Draenor- Scouting Report started by chaud View original post
Comments 292 Comments
  1. Jocelyn84's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by MentalBrakedown View Post
    ya i know what your saying i have 12 90s myself but it is going increase the number of bad players
    As if the game didn't have enough already
  1. Buuagr's Avatar
    Please for the love of god dont let us able to buy max level characters..... even near max level characters is a no no. Buying characters at all is just EVIL. BREAKS THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE MMORPG.
  1. crious's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dzudzadzo View Post
    This wouldn't be an issue if this was not an MMO game. But WoW is an MMO game where you play with other players. Or at the very least, YOU should be playing with other players. Such actions do in fact affect other players. Consider this, a new player sees the shiny button and skips leveling by rolling a warrior. Here are the results:

    - skipped leveling content, one less potential tank during leveling process, LFx for leveling content working sub optimally
    - skipped leveling content, one less potential tank who actually learned how to tank along the way, LFx systems dealing with sub peformance giving blizz even more reason to nerf LFx content to the ground.
    - skipped leveling content, the player literally ignore 90% of the entire game content. A new guy ignoring old content because its old does not make sense because he is new to the game and he didn't even saw it.

    If WoW was a single player game then none of those issues would be a problem. But WoW is not a single player game.
    All of your highlighted problems are reasons to make tanking easier, not reasons to do away with purchasable 90s.

    I'm a long time tank, and I can say that active mitigation model of tanking is amazingly fun, but it is also something that creates a very harsh environment for new tanks. If you don't do it right, you're incredibly squishy, but if you do it right you almost don't need healers. Unless you want to change that model it won't matter if the character leveled a tank or not, because active mitigation doesn't come into play in any significant way until later levels (80+).

    That said, the reality of the situation is that tanking is an important role, and that's the only difference between it and a DPS. If a tank doesn't know what to do, then it makes it harder for the group to progress. This is contrasted to DPS where most of the time the few people who are LFR try hards do more damage than the bottom 10 damage dealers, and it's irrelevant if a new player who chose a DPS role knows what to do. The solution to your highlighted points are to make tanking less important, which would alter the raiding model significantly.

    To sum all this up, if you want better tanks, start tanking. It doesn't matter if you start at level 1 or level 100, you won't learn how to do it right until you're practicing in actual raid content.
  1. thebigman154's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Gangplank View Post
    I get that. But those "big bads" weren't galactic threats like the WC3 ones. From a lore perspective, they pale in comparison. That's what I'm disappointed with. It's almost like we're going backwards in the context of lore difficulty. Each expansion introduces new villains that aren't quite as powerful (in lore) as the previous expansion.

    Kil'Jaeden > Arthas > Deathwing > Garrosh > younger Garrosh?
    Bitch please deathwing is more powerfull than arthas and Kil'Jaeden and garosh was using motherfucking old god power and lol thunder king was same power as arthas and grom lol grom killed a pit lord on ONE strike so yeah he can be a big bad
  1. mmocbaa4faebe5's Avatar
    It dont bother me either. dont gonna use it...got 22x 90s :P
  1. thebigman154's Avatar
    on thread dont bother at all free 90 gonna lvl a ally druid finally
  1. Lessthanzer0's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dawnte View Post
    What about if you get physical collector's edition.... no early 90 and such??!?
    Not sure if it was mentioned cause I didn't have to time to read all 15 pages yet. I work at best buy and when you preorder games with extra content in store, you have to provide an email address so they can email you a code to get the extra content. I would think that blizzard would do this so that the people that want the collector's edition aren't penalized for spending the most money or wanting a physical copy.
  1. Cervantas's Avatar
    There will still be physical standard editions right? I kinda like having all the wow stuff on my wall and not being able to get Warlords of Draenor would be kinda sad.
  1. Neliah's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Adema1080 View Post
    Also people will easily learn their class from 90-100. It doesn't take long to learn class basics
    Funny, since you still see people at 90 that can't play their class
  1. wunksta's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Igzorn View Post
    from a business standpoint ......$YES$.
    No, there will only be one expansion out at a time. When WoD is released, MoP will be combined with the base package.
  1. Daedius's Avatar
    " in the near future we’ll be testing out a feature that gives you the option to purchase a character upgrade directly"
    Erm... when it says character upgrade directly, that a continuation of level boosting to 90, or actually buying upgrades [gear-wise] ? o.O
  1. CalamityHeart's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by BeerWolf View Post
    Erm... when it says character upgrade directly, that a continuation of level boosting to 90, or actually buying upgrades [gear-wise] ? o.O
    If you had read the blue post, you'd know that in context, of course it refers to the leveling boost.

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