Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Seramore]

I'd imagine it's related to getting the raid functional on live, doubt it's anything important and I doubt even further that it will be down for even close to that amount of time. They give long initial times in case something doesn't go as smooth as they expect it to, luckily this hasn't been an issue for a few years now.

[delphiskye]

The Christie Golden novel Before the Storm has received a new release date June 12 moved from May 15, 2018

New novel description:
An all-new, official prequel novel to The Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard Entertainment’s next expansion to the critically acclaimed World of Warcraft.

In Before the Storm, Anduin Wrynn, king of Stormwind, and Sylvanas Windrunner, warchief of the Horde, are new to their positions of power, both ascending before they were truly prepared. As the Alliance and the Horde struggle to recover from the devastating war with the demonic Burning Legion, a terrible discovery will test both leaders, threatening to reignite the bitter enmity between their factions and shake the very foundations of the world of Azeroth.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

The Christie Golden novel Before the Storm has received a new release date June 12 moved from May 15, 2018

Wondering if that terrible discovery is the Azerite.

[Mafic]

The Christie Golden novel Before the Storm has received a new release date June 12 moved from May 15, 2018

I don't think the release date of the book being moved by a month makes a difference. If they are going to alpha/beta test the game to the public in Q1 of 2018 then the release date was going to be in the Aug/Sept/Oct range anyways.

I am going to go with an early Sept release which puts it in the "late summer" category.

[delphiskye]

Wondering if that terrible discovery is the Azerite.

well if u look at the book bit that was in the blizzcon bags Two goblins are in what remains of Silithus with a meter thingie and Find something so i would say u are right

[Ningjinq]

I’m curious how many spoilers the book will actually have since everything in 8.0 will have been datamined by then at minimum.

[Grimfrost]

Is anyone of you worried about the "we hope to release it in 2018" statement? The forums have turned into salt mines!

[Draedarr]

Is anyone of you worried about the "we hope to release it in 2018" statement? The forums have turned into salt mines!

A little, but not so much, although they could be more optimistic, dropping something like August/September.
The downside would be if their plans don't work and the expansion is delayed beyond these dates, i think that this is the reason for the before the end of 2018.

[derpkitteh]

i bet it's that new fucking AI causing this.

just scrap the shit and put typical mobs in there. integrate the new AI later.

[SunspotAnims]

i bet it's that new fucking AI causing this.

just scrap the shit and put typical mobs in there. integrate the new AI later.

That's quite a lot of assumptions for two sentences. Anyway, the AI is supposedly already in a playable state, as indicated by this interview where Ion comments on how the internal testers feel playing against them.

[Seramore]

Is anyone of you worried about the "we hope to release it in 2018" statement? The forums have turned into salt mines!

No, the expansion will still be out at around the time Legion came out.

Their statement is literally damage control on the off chance that something goes horribly wrong with the development causing them to delay it to the end of 2018 or later.

[rcshaggy]

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...of_teldrassil/

I knew it!
Nomi was the cause of it all...

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The Christie Golden novel Before the Storm has received a new release date June 12 moved from May 15, 2018

Oh hell no...
Then the later year will be a possibility...for the release of Battle of Azeroth.

[George Costanza]

Garrosh is back!

[derpkitteh]

That's quite a lot of assumptions for two sentences. Anyway, the AI is supposedly already in a playable state, as indicated by this interview where Ion comments on how the internal testers feel playing against them.

if so much of the expansion is in a good playable state, i don't know why they'd have such a grim target date.

i just need those races. i'm hoping so hard they're available before release.

[CosmicGuitars]

Oh hell no...
Then the later year will be a possibility...for the release of Battle of Azeroth.

BfA was always going to be at the later part of 2018, whether or not the book came out earlier.

Aug/September 2018, it's gonna happen.

[tristannarutofan]

Locked behind reps itself isn't bad. Faction gated behind reps would be annoying.

That would mean every Horde player wanting to play Void Elves would have to farm.. - what? Argussian Reach rep to possibly exalted on an Alliance character? Not sure how many Hordies are in for that.

I doubt anyone who plays exclusively one faction is going to switch Just because the other side has a race that is the same as theirs but slightly different. You are still going to be in zones you dont like with aesthetics you dont like and allies you dont like.

Its very redindant to get bent out of shape now considering we dont know the requirements.
But if you really think you'll suddenly be playing an elf that is taller and purple than what u have now, or shorter and paler, and NOT just going yo play for a few days and abandon it cus you hate the faction, it would behoove you to get used to being that faction NOW wouldnt it?

[MadamSerenity]

I doubt anyone who plays exclusively one faction is going to switch Just because the other side has a race that is the same as theirs but slightly different. You are still going to be in zones you dont like with aesthetics you dont like and allies you dont like.

Its very redindant to get bent out of shape now considering we dont know the requirements.
But if you really think you'll suddenly be playing an elf that is taller and purple than what u have now, or shorter and paler, and NOT just going yo play for a few days and abandon it cus you hate the faction, it would behoove you to get used to being that faction NOW wouldnt it?

This is exactly the point. From my perspective, Void Elves are being added to give the Alliance a Blood Elf type look, just like Nightborne are being added to give the Horde a night elf type look. Highmountain Tauren and and Lightforged Draenei just give a few new customizations to an already specific race to each faction, and Dark Iron just give dwarves more people will actually want to play. The only semi-new race is the Zandalari Trolls, and that is mainly to give the trolls a straight backed look with different cosmetics. No one will go out of their way to make a character for a faction they don't play.

[Eurhetemec]

I wonder if Allied Races will receive their own unique mounts like every other race. And, even though there are already reputation factions associated with most of them, I wonder if they'll receive their own faction-specific reps.

I think it'll vary depending on the Allied race.

With the 4 "Legion" races, I doubt any of them will have racial mounts. Nightborne have an obvious one - that you can get in-game already. Void Elves are so new they're unlikely to have one (and if they did, it'd probably just be one of those flappy ray things from Argus or something). Highmountain Tauren don't have racial mounts that I'm aware of, and "Yet Another Kodo" would excite few people, and Lightforged Draenei, well again they have an obvious "racial mount" and it's 500k gold right now.

So I don't expect any of them to. I also suspect they will all be fairly trivial to unlock - a few quests, maybe a brief scenario, that's it. Probably significantly less than it took to unlock your first Artifact weapon and class hall, each.

Dark Irons and Zandalari Trolls may be a bit more in-depth, because they don't seem to be initially available for unlock, and are allegedly something you work on during leveling and so on in BfA. As such, I would be unsurprised if they did actually have racial mounts (but equally I wouldn't be shocked if they didn't).

Re: reps, I think it's clear from what Blizzard have said so far that the four "Legion" races will use Legion reps as part of the unlock. How high they'll require you to get that rep, and/or whether there will be a rep "catch-up" mechanism remains to be seen. Honestly there's no way Blizzard is going to lock paid features of an expansion behind long grinds in the content of a previous expansion though. So really there are two possibilities:

1) They will require a fairly low rep level, like Friendly, to unlock the quests to unlock the race.

or

2) They will incorporate some kind of "catch-up" mechanism so people can grind these reps, probably in BfA content as well as Legion content.

I think 1 is a lot more likely.

All this talk of racial mounts though brings something else to mind - come day 1 of BfA, when we're all in the starting zones of the new continents, how many bloody Lightforged Power Armour suits are we going to see lumbering around? Dozens? Hundreds? It's going to look pretty bizarre, even by WoW standards.

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No one will go out of their way to make a character for a faction they don't play.

You are so wrong lol.

I am literally considering faction-changing for Nightborne and Zandalari.

But the guy worried about the reps being faction-gated doesn't need to, Blizzard have pretty much implied they aren't, and it would be insane if they were, because, as discussed, they'd be locking current-expansion content behind a previous-expansion grind.

[SunspotAnims]

if so much of the expansion is in a good playable state, i don't know why they'd have such a grim target date.

i just need those races. i'm hoping so hard they're available before release.

The only actual target date we have is "sometime in 2018," which is obvious. It's hard to make the claim that the release date of the book provides any sort of accurate window for release, given the inconsistent release dates of tie-in novels with their respective expansion.

[Tuirsah]

This is NOT the case as you say. There have been two developer interviews already that has already cited that several factions like Highmountain Tauren and Nightborne are gated behind reputation grinds. If you would like to view the interviews, I can pull them up for you.