Official Heart of Azeroth Preview, Warcraft CelebriD&D with Terry Crews

[Stoy]

Battle for Azeroth Preview: Closer to the Heart of Azeroth

Recently in Silithus. . . .

Aided by the heroes of Azeroth and their powerful Artifact weapons, Speaker Magni Bronzebeard was able to stabilize the planet’s grievous wound. For now, Azeroth is stable, but the road to healing her fully will require much more than a temporary bandage.

The Road Ahead. . . .

The events in Silithus were just the first step in aiding the planet. The path to restoring her continues in Zandalar and Kul Tiras as you seek out Azerite to aid the Horde or Alliance. Speaker Magni has a way for you to help Azeroth and empower your armor at the same time—the Heart of Azeroth. By utilizing this powerful Artifact, you’ll be able to harness Azerite to “awaken” pieces of armor that possess astounding latent powers.

Claiming the Heart of Azeroth

After completing the Battle for Lordaeron, you’ll be directed to meet Magni once again in the deserts of Silithus. He’ll present you with the Heart of Azeroth, a powerful neck piece that you’ll take with you on your new adventures in Kul Tiras and Zandalar. The Heart of Azeroth will allow you to siphon the power of Azerite as you continue to heal of the planet, and once it’s empowered, it will level alongside you. As this Artifact increases in power, so too do its stats. It will also help you empower special helms, chest pieces, and shoulder pieces.

Each piece of Azerite-empowered armor has anywhere from three to four rings of Azerite traits available to unlock as you level up your Heart of Azeroth. As it increases in power, you’ll unlock more rings on your Azerite-empowered items. You can—and should—equip Azerite-empowered armor pieces in all three of the available slots, and you can view and change their associated powers by using Shift Right Click to open the interface.

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Each ring of traits provides a specific type of benefit for you to choose from.

• Outer Ring: Powers that reside on the outer ring will often be influenced by where you collected the piece of armor they’re found on. These powers can also be associated with specific class specializations.

Example:
Pauldrons of Vile Corruption
Filthy Transfusion (Passive) - Your damaging abilities have a chance to invoke a tainted swamp beneath the target, siphoning 8,628 health from them over 6 sec.

• Second Ring: These powers generally benefit the performance of your in-game role—they’ll provide damage increases for DPS classes, increase damage mitigation for tanks, or bolster healing output for healers.

Example: Savior: Your heals on targets below 35% health have a chance to heal for an additional 942.

• Third Ring: These are defensive or utility-oriented powers for your class.

Example: Azerite Fortification (Passive) When stunned, immobilized, or knocked back, you heal for 1,852.

• Fourth Ring: Azerite Empowerment is the power that resides on the central fourth ring, and increases an armor piece’s item level by 5.

Epic-quality gear, such as are rewards from raid dungeons, can have a fourth power tier available, which appears as the armor piece’s second ring. Lower level gear will generally only have three rings available, and won’t include this second ring.

If you change your mind on any of your power choices, you can always visit the Azerite Reforger in Boralus or in Zuldazar. While the cost is relatively low at first (5g), it will increase in cost the more times you reforge. The cost won’t stay that high forever— every two days, you’ll see your reforge cost decrease.

Dressing for Success
There are a few other things to consider with Azerite-empowered armor. These pieces don’t have secondary stats, so you won’t need to worry about choosing powers with those in mind. Also, unlike the Heart of Azeroth itself, they can be enchanted.

Another exciting thing to note for Azerite Armor is that each item has been created with specific powers on them. So, if you’ve taken a liking to a specific piece of armor’s powers, you’ll be able to hunt down the same piece of armor at a higher item level. For example, a piece of armor from Raid Finder will have the same powers as a Mythic piece of armor, but the Mythic version will have a higher item level, higher stats, and will be more powerful overall. Items have also been deliberately created and placed in the world, so if there’s a piece you have decided must be yours, you’ll know exactly how to find it. This variance in item level also applies to rewards from Mythic Dungeons and PVP.

Here’s an example of what the same piece of gear from Tol Dagor looks like depending on the level of Mythic difficulty where it dropped:

Overseer’s Riot Helmet
Tradewinds (Passive) - Your spells and abilities have a chance to grant you 287 Mastery for 15 sec. When this effect expires, it jumps to a nearby ally, granting them 144 Mastery for 8 sec. Requires Heart of Azeroth level 16

Mythic 0 (340)

• 415 Armor
• +411 Strength
• +698 Stamina

Mythic 10 (385)

• 552 Armor
• +625 Strength
• +1127 Stamina

Azerite-empowered armor can come from a variety of activities, from questing, to Raiding, to PvP. Each piece you receive will have an item level appropriate to where it dropped. If you’re looking to claim top-end gear, you’ll be able to collect it from taking part weekly activities such as raiding, from the weekly Mythic cache, Raid bosses, Warfronts, World Bosses, and via the Rated PvP activities.

You’ll also want to make sure you take part in the World Quests given by Magni Bronzebeard. He’ll be an important part of empowering your Heart of Azeroth. As you build your reputation with him from friendly to exalted, you’ll be rewarded with Azerite as well as a chance to receive Azerite armor along the way.

Catching Up to the Crowd
Similar to Artifact Knowledge in Legion, the Heart of Azeroth will help players keep up with the ever-increasing power curve. Over time, the amount of Azerite required to level the Heart will decrease, allowing players the ability to catch up if they’ve fallen behind. The system should help give you a leg up if you need one, but you’ll still need to put forth an effort to keep your Heart of Azeroth’s powers growing.

There’s no shortage of opportunity to tailor your gear to match your playstyle no matter your focus as you work toward healing Azeroth.

CelebriD&D with Terry Crews
If you missed it yesterday, the entirety of the Warcraft themed CelebriD&D with Terry Crews is now available online!

[Eleccybubb]

This whole Azerite thing really does feel meh. It doesn't feel better than AP and Artifacts personally and from Beta the effects were miniscule at most.

If anything it's essentially Tier sets 2.0 mixed with the old AP stuff.

I mean as long as they learnt their lesson and we can earn Azerite Power fairly quickly without the knowledge research crap like at the start of Legion then fine.

[Mamut]

If anything it's essentially Tier sets 2.0 mixed with the old AP stuff.

But it was supposed to be Armor Sets 2.0 so whats the problem?

[Voidwielder]

Nice armor set on that Night Elf.

[Archmage Alodi]

Heart of Cancer.

[Eleccybubb]

But it was supposed to be Armor Sets 2.0 so whats the problem?

Meh I just wish they had stuck with normal tier sets personally. Just my 2 cents mate.

I mean maybe I end up enjoying the system and maybe not. Have to wait and see. Just gave an opinion on it for now.

Just part of the system itself doesn't feel better than what it's replacing. I mean I'm glad we are going back to traditional weapon drops and all but this new system looks worse than artifacts.

[Deleted]

So do we get it next Wednesday immediately after finishing Lorderon or not?

[Kathranis]

This whole Azerite thing really does feel meh. It doesn't feel better than AP and Artifacts personally and from Beta the effects were miniscule at most.

Well, a lot of people are thinking of the traits in terms of being just one choice you make on one piece of gear, but the system is more about choosing what combination of Azerite Armor pieces you want, and stacking traits that synergize with each other. It's sort of a "build your own Tier Set Bonus" system, with minor elements from Legendaries and the AP horizontal progression system baked in.

If what we've seen so far feels a bit underwhelming, to be fair, it's mostly been basic entry level gear. We really haven't seen how extreme the traits on Azerite Armor will get as we go deeper and deeper into endgame. If people are still underwhelmed, they can buff the traits, or just continue to amp up the effects when they introduce each new tier. By the end we might have Legendary Azerite Armor that is similar to the Legendaries we had in Legion, without all the RNG.

Personally I think the system has potential, it just might need a couple patches of iteration to get it to the right power level where it feels rewarding and interesting. Hopefully Blizzard can deliver.

[Eleccybubb]

Well, a lot of people are thinking of the traits in terms of being just one choice you make on one piece of gear, but the system is more about choosing what combination of Azerite Armor pieces you want, and stacking traits that synergize with each other. It's sort of a "build your own Tier Set Bonus" system, with minor elements from Legendaries and the AP horizontal progression system baked in.

If what we've seen so far feels a bit underwhelming, to be fair, it's mostly been basic entry level gear. We really haven't seen how extreme the traits on Azerite Armor will get as we go deeper and deeper into endgame. If people are still underwhelmed, they can buff the traits, or just continue to amp up the effects when they introduce each new tier. By the end we might have Legendary Azerite Armor that is similar to the Legendaries we had in Legion, without all the RNG.

Personally I think the system has potential, it just might need a couple patches of iteration to get it to the right power level where it feels rewarding and interesting. Hopefully Blizzard can deliver.

But it shouldn't need a couple of patches. It should feel powerful and rewarding from the start or when you at least get enough AP to unlock the traits/passives and whatnot.

We shouldn't have to wait patches for a feature to get good. Like we did with Artifacts in WoW because at the start they were so-so.

I do agree though the potential is there. Just imo it should be there right now. But who knows maybe I'll be wrong and it'll be great by the time I unlock stuff. I mean hell I'll admit I'm wary of it but if I enjoy the feature I'll happily come and say my scepticism and whatnot was wrong.

[thilicen]

Nice armor set on that Night Elf.

That's from the quest rewards you'll get while leveling, it's really nice for a rogue-like character.

[Eleccybubb]

So do we get it next Wednesday immediately after finishing Lorderon or not?

More than likely it'll be on launch day.

Although will be a nice surprise if we are able to get it right after Lordaeron.

[Deleted]

More than likely it'll be on launch day.

Although will be a nice surprise if we are able to get it right after Lordaeron.

Considering the Siege of Lordaeron is only for preorders it wouldn’t be too crazy if they actually did that. Plus, it’d prevent the Kalimdor servers from crashing at launch when everyone’s forced to go to Silithus first.

[Eleccybubb]

Considering the Siege of Lordaeron is only for preorders it wouldn’t be too crazy if they actually did that. Plus, it’d prevent the Kalimdor servers from crashing at launc when everyone’s forced to go to Silithus first.

Nah they won't crash. CRZ and Sharding should take the load off like it did with Legion. Will probably be the odd issue or two but tbh Legion's launch was pretty decent.

[monteiro]

Spoiler: by the end of BfA, we will consume the power of our necklaces to fully heal Azeroth, rending them useless and powerless. New characters will start with an already depleted necklace as well.

[Celeclop]

HAHAHAHAHA oh the optimism. Oh, it hurts.

Legion had a pretty smooth launch. It's not that far fetched to think that BFA will have a smooth launch as well.

[Kathranis]

HAHAHAHAHA oh the optimism. Oh, it hurts.

Well, we're already playing the expansion patch right now, and the servers have been stable since they resolved the shitshow with Communities that happened on the first day.

August 14th isn't bringing any patches or downtime or anything, they're just flipping the switch that allows 110 players to start leveling again and to activate the quests that let you go to the new zones.


And with Horde and Alliance players seperated to different continents and the Battle for Undercity being made available a week early to people who prepurchased, there shouldn't be any issues with quest bottlenecks or instance servers going down or anything like that.


I mean, there's no accounting for a massive DDOS or a buggy hotfix, but in all likelihood the developers have been able to test level 110+ content on live servers for a few weeks now, so they should have had plenty of time to work the kinks out between 8.0.1 launch and BFA content unlocking.

- - - Updated - - -

Have you been playing the last 2 weeks? Just sayin'.

The point of the last 2 weeks has been to work out the kinks with the patch before the expansion content is unlocked on the 14th. Just sayin'.

[Eleccybubb]

Have you been playing the last 2 weeks? Just sayin'.

And they are working continuously to fix the issues that arose with the pre patch so that the expansion launch goes smoothly. Pre patches will always have issues because it's a huge systems patch that mostly changes a lot about the game.

The only major time we've been unable to play was for 1 day when Communities were causing crashes.

[frogbound]

I'm 75 minutes into the Geek & Sundry video and I am entertained.
It's really good!

Love Terry Crews and Mercer kills it as the Dungeon Master!

[ONCHEhap]

I'm 75 minutes into the Geek & Sundry video and I am entertained.
It's really good!

Love Terry Crews and Mercer kills it as the Dungeon Master!

Mercer's god-tier at DMing

[Deleted]

I'm 75 minutes into the Geek & Sundry video and I am entertained.
It's really good!

Love Terry Crews and Mercer kills it as the Dungeon Master!

I strongly recommend G&S's Critical Role campaign, bunch of professional voice actors playing D&D. Warning, it will eat your life, each episode is approx 4h and there are about 90 of them in the first campaign and so far almost 30 in the 2nd.