Let’s Talk About Brawler’s Guild, Heart of Fear Progression, Heroic Zor'lok Hotfixes

[chaud]

Cinder Kitten Charity Drive, Patch 5.0.5 Hotfixes, Patch 5.1 PTR - Build 16281

Let’s Talk About Brawler’s Guild

Yes, we’re breaking the first rule of Brawler’s Guild.

For those of you that haven’t been following along, the Brawler’s Guild is a new feature being introduced to World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria in patch 5.1. This new part of the World of Warcraft has generated a lot of excitement--not to mention a few questions--so we’re going to try to provide a clearer picture of what we’re hoping to accomplish with the Brawler’s Guild in this thread.

First, a little bit about what it is, and what it isn’t:

What Brawler’s Guild Is

• A fun, but small diversion that could grow in time
• A venue for a realm’s community to come together
• A unique way to earn some solo PvE bragging rights
• A cool place to hang out

What Brawler’s Guild Isn’t

• A means of solo progression
• A major patch feature accessible to everyone (at first)
• A way to earn lots of in-game rewards
• Proving Grounds where you can develop class skills (that’s a different feature arriving later on)

So, to sum up, we’re trying to give the Brawler’s Guild a tight knit, underground kind of feel, and we expect the Guild on each realm to slowly grow to encompass more and more of the population over time. Because invites will be so limited, it’s likely that a lot of the players that join the Brawler’s Guild will have had some kind of interaction with one or more existing members before they ever step into the ring. Finally, a smaller population will help keep the queues low for quite a while – since a big part of the Brawler’s Guild is watching other players fight their own battles, right now instancing arenas or using phasing isn’t an attractive option.

About Those Invites
Invites to the Guild will (at least initially) only be available for purchase on the Black Market Auction House. We’ve taken this approach both to control queue times, and also because the Brawler’s Guild is meant to be kind of a small, underground thing, and a way for players on a realm to come together. At first, that will happen because invites will go out from one player to another based on who buys those initial Black Market invites. After reaching a certain rank in the Brawler’s Guild, each of the new members can eventually earn one new invitation of their own to pass out to someone else on the same realm, so the Brawler’s Guilds on each realm should get progressively larger and larger over time. We may also investigate alternate methods of acquiring invitations or making them more plentiful.

World First?
We’ve also decided that attaching a realm first style achievement to the Brawler’s Guild isn’t necessarily the right move. Rest assured that there will be other achievements to earn in the ring though.

We know you’ve got questions, so ask away, and we’ll try to clarify where things are hazy.

Heart of Fear Heroic Progression Update
Manaflask has been keeping track of progression in Heart of Fear, or lack thereof, on Imperial Vizier Zor'lok. Arctìca (EU-Chromaggus) decided to skip that boss and killed Blade Lord Ta'yak for World First. Congratulations to them!

Heroic Imperial Vizier Zor'lok Hotfixes

The Heroic Zor'lok encounter is currently more difficult than intended. While we prefer to avoid changes to encounters in the midst of progression, we would like to fix a few quality of life issues and make some targeted balance changes that do not invalidate the efforts that guilds have put into learning the encounter so far. Later today a hotfix will make the following adjustments:

• Zor'lok's Echoes will pause briefly before beginning to cast Song of the Empress.
• Zor'lok's berserk timer has been increased slightly.
• Zor'lok will no longer summon Echoes of Force and Verve during the final phase of the encounter.

[Lora]

I'm glad they aren't gonna have realm firsts for it. That takes away any problems really.

[Deleted]

Brawler's Guild seems like a really good idea though I dunno why not give a realm first achi... Yea, people would be mad if they didn't get it because of gold or something but why should we have equality of results? WoW isn't ran on communist principles after all...

I also wonder how it will be tuned because while Blood DKs will tear through it, priests for example won't probably have such an easy time.

[Mawnix]

Nice to see the Heroics for this Tier are quite difficult after MV.

Can't wait to see how hard Sha of Fear is.

[ZeroEdgeir]

Gonna enjoy me some Brawler's Guild fun... but being on a low-Horde pop server, might not be so easy to win me an invite. But I got plenty of gold to work with, so here's hoping. And I play some weird hours, based on my work schedule, so might get to snipe something.

[markdall]

Brawler's Guild - much like challenge mode, something for the guild master of my server's top raiding guild and his buddies to do - and nothing more.

[Tureni]

Imagine if they'd just followed rule #1 and just put it in without mentioning it in the patch notes...

[nickfetus]

Brawler's Guild, whatever it's supposed to be, just sounds like an egg with no yolk. I laughed when I read the part about it being "a cool place to hang out".

[i4ni]

Grats Arctìca ^.^

[Deleted]

I recon the brawlers guild will be quite fun looking forward to that.

[Deleted]

But, will Brawler’s stuff give you some gear or it's only for boring people?

[greyghost]

The "place to hang out" part isn't gonna really be there if there's no carrots to dangle in front of people going there, ie the whole lack of "in-game rewards" or "not a source of solo progression".

Pretty much my lone contention with the thing, really, but I look forward to poking around with it. Whether or not it becomes a popular hub is.... well, let's just say I hope they put in a pet battles room if they want to guarantee me always being there. :P

[dfjdejulio]

Pretty much my lone contention with the thing, really...

My contention with it is, they're taking something that could have been an awesome tool for solo play, and trying to shoehorn it into being needlessly social.

If it were something I could do without interacting with any other players, I'd be all over it. As things stand, I suspect I'm not even going to be aware of what's going on there on my servers.

[Yig]

But, will Brawler’s stuff give you some gear or it's only for boring people?

People who only do things for gear ARE the boring people.

[MatadorMedia]

Is the Brawler's Guild basically duals? Like one-on-one? Or what?

Blizzard posts a several paragraph post about it and fails to explain WTF it is....

[Deleted]

Deuse its Player vs a monster.

[NefariousNinja]

They stated "and we expect the Guild on each realm" so is the tram CRZ at the moment or is it the original realm? (sorry, haven't been down there in awhile)

[nimryas]

I thought you couldnt skip heroic bosses to move up to another one? Or is that only for end bosses of each raid instance? Skipping is for wusses!

[DisposableHero]

I get the impression from other blue responses in the Brawler's Guild thread how they considered it to be a minor feature in the patch that they severely underestimated how much excitement the idea of an underground solo PVE fight club would generate.

[Daws001]

My excitement for the Brawler's Guild is fizzling out. I get that they're trying to create an atmosphere but...meh. Wait and see.