World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

As we announced last Thursday, with scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, a new system will allow players who have Rank 3 Azerite essences on at least one character to more directly acquire those Essences on other characters. This will use a new currency called Echoes of Ny’alotha. Here are more details about the system.

If a Rank 3 Essence has been earned by another character on your account, MOTHER will offer that Rank 3 Essence for 500 Echoes of Ny’alotha. Any player who is eligible to purchase at least one Essence from MOTHER will now receive Echoes of Ny’alotha from a wide range of activities in current content. These are the values we’re planning per activity:

• Black Empire Assault – 125 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Aqir/Amathet/Mantid/Mogu Assault – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Horrific Visions – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha, plus 25 per additional objective completed (i.e. 150 Echoes for a full clear)
• Emissary Quest – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Heroic Darkshore Warfront – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Normal/Heroic/Mythic Ny’alotha raid bosses – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha each, once per week per boss
• Ny’alotha Raid Finder wings – 25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Random Battleground wins – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Rated Arena wins – 10-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
• Rated Battleground wins – 35 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
• Weekly PvP Cache – 175 to 300 Echoes of Ny’alotha, based on PvP rank
• Mythic Keystone dungeon end-of-run chest – 3 Echoes of Ny’alotha per Keystone Level (i.e. 30 Echoes of Ny’alotha for a Mythic 10)
• Weekly Mythic Keystone Cache – 20 Echoes of Ny’alotha per highest Keystone Level

The general goal here is that doing Assaults and associated Horrific Visions should provide enough to get at least one Rank 3 Essence of your choice per week. Doing other content you like (PvP, dungeons, or raids) will increase that significantly, depending on the level of content you’re doing. Of course, Essences can still be earned normally via their associated activities, so if you want to get your Essence of the Focusing Iris directly via Mythic Keystone dungeons and then buy others from MOTHER, that’s now an option. Within a couple of weeks of hitting max-level on your alt, you should be able to obtain your preferred Essences by playing the game as you usually would.

Please note: Echoes of Ny’alotha may appear to replace Azerite in the Emissary and PvP reward panes, however, it does not. Echoes of Ny’alotha are always additive with existing rewards. We believe that it is more important to release this update with a reward display issue than hold the change for a fix. We expect to fix the display issue in the next week or two.

We’ve seen discussion in the community wondering about the motivation for this change, especially considering that we previously signaled that we didn’t plan to make Essences account-wide. We’ve increasingly moved towards making cosmetics (mounts, pets, transmog, titles, etc.) and access to content (World Quest unlocks, dungeon attunements, etc.) account-wide, but we’ve tried to keep power (character levels, items, expansion-specific systems like artifacts or garrisons, etc.) character-specific.

We take this approach for two main reasons. First, a core part of the experience of playing an alt has always been gaining power as you see the game from a different vantage point, and setting your sights on a goal, whether that’s just reaching max level, or achieving a certain PvP rank, or raiding at a specific difficulty. Thus, every reward that’s account-wide becomes one fewer goal to strive for on alts. Second, while many players enjoy playing multiple characters, and while having alts offers a number of advantages, we’re wary of making it feel as though focusing on a single main character is objectively the wrong way to play the game. If more power rewards are multiplied across all characters on an account, not having multiple max-level alts would be inefficient.

That philosophy led us to initially decide against having Essences be an account-wide unlock, though it was the topic of significant and repeated internal discussion among the development team. The activities that reward Essences are all things that we believe are important to do at least once so that you become familiar with zones and stories, or to engage in aspects of the game that you may not have had a reason to try. If you are just returning to Battle for Azeroth or experiencing it for the first time, the goal of acquiring all of your Essences will lead you through many aspects of Warcraft’s endgame.

More recently, as we continued to revisit the subject, especially in light of ongoing Shadowlands design, we came to see subsequent playthroughs of the same content for the same player differently. While we still firmly believe that each character should have a progression arc of power gains, the player behind those characters understandably may not want to repeat the exact same arc multiple times when they feel they have exhausted the variety or rewards an activity might hold. So if you’ve thoroughly worked with Nazjatar followers to earn your Rank 3 Memory of Lucid Dreams, or delved into Battlegrounds and Island Expeditions enough to earn Rank 3 Blood of the Enemy, we understand why you might not want to feel required to repeat that experience. This is the same philosophy that’s informing our plans for leveling in Shadowlands, where alts can pick and choose their path through level-up content once you’ve completed the linear narrative experience once on a character.

Thank you again for your patience as we’ve worked through these questions, and for all of your feedback! You’ve helped guide us to these improvements to the system. This is the sort of conversation that we revisit every time we consider how upcoming systems will interact with multiple characters. We hope to get it right more quickly next time.

Building on a great deal of feedback and discussion, we’re working on an update to the game. With the next regularly-scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, players who have earned a given Rank 3 Essence on one character will be able to directly obtain that Essence from MOTHER on any subsequent characters.

When playing an alt character that is missing Essences that have already been earned on a different character, most ordinary Visions of N’Zoth activities, such as Horrific Visions, Assaults, raid bosses, Mythic Keystone Dungeons, or BFA Season 4 PvP, will award a new soulbound currency – Echoes of Ny’alotha. These Echoes can be brought to MOTHER in the Heart Chamber, and exchanged directly for eligible Rank 3 Essences. While ordinarily each specific Essence must be learned in order to unlock it for other characters via MOTHER, all Essences associated with Nazjatar and Mechagon reputations will be available if any other different character has earned any of the Essences available from that reputation.

Our goal with this update is to preserve the efforts that players put into unlocking a given Essence through its associated activity the first time, while offering subsequent characters far more flexibility in pursuing that goal. We’ll have additional details in a forthcoming hotfixes update that goes out around the same time as maintenance, but we wanted to let the community know ASAP that this change is in the works.

As always, thank you for all your feedback on this topic!

Presented by Blizzard Entertainment’s University Relations and World of Warcraft development teams, the ninth annual Blizzard Student Art Contest has drawn to a close. After some fervent debate and impassioned deliberation, our judges sifted through the many remarkable entries and identified the winning entries.

Check out the winners and runner-ups below for each of the four categories.

Environment Art Contest

Winners


Runner-Ups


Character Art Contest

Winner


Runner-Up


FX Contest

Winner


Animation Contest

Winner


Runner-Up


Winners from each category will be invited to Blizzard Entertainment’s campus for a tour, 1-on-1 mentorship with senior artists and more.

Visit our contest announcement to see a complete list of prizes.

Congratulations to all the winners and we look forward to seeing what incredible creations you submit next time! Join the discussion on the forums.