Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I can see Saurfang trying to defend his people or even the other faction from a threat and then he says "I finally have my death I deserve...Live on with honor hero"

I could see him maybe pulling a heroic sacrifice to stop Sylvanas.


It's been a while since we had a real heroic sacrifice ending, since Wrath.

[FlubberPuddy]

Yes.

I think of that old TV Show, Beast Wars. Dinobot's death. Best moment of the entire show was the self-sacrifice of one of its best characters. I cried a river when he said his final words.

Beast Wars is my favorite iteration of Transformers.

"Tell my tale to those who ask. Tell it truly, the ill deeds along with the good and let me be judged accordingly. The rest is silence."

-ugly sobbing commences-

[TheFirstOnes]

Beast Wars is my favorite iteration of Transformers.

"Tell my tale to those who ask. Tell it truly, the ill deeds along with the good and let me be judged accordingly. The rest is silence."

-ugly sobbing commences-

Such a sad moment indeed.

FeelsDinobotMan

[madmossy]

Yeah, but the very starting of any conquest is bad in itself, especially when it is unwarranted and uncalled for.

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Pretty much.

Most wars start of that way, all about resources and in this case it was Azurite. Much like how modern wars have been about Oil and control of the middle east. We all know how well that has panned out.

[rcshaggy]

By the way do you think we will see more of the Twilight's Hammer with the Black Empire?
Can see N'Zoth appear with Yogg'sarron and C'Thun once more....

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I could see him maybe pulling a heroic sacrifice to stop Sylvanas.


It's been a while since we had a real heroic sacrifice ending, since Wrath.

Like a Grommash Hellscream where he saved the Orcs from their bloodlust of Mannoroth?
Yes I did play Warcraft III and I loved it so much...

[Valysar]

Alliance still have one IG cutscene left, the one where we see the Zandalari fleet, is there a Horde counterpart cutscene ?

[Nyel]

You're preaching to the choir in this thread. No one here cares about game play. 90% of the posters here would still be addicted to this game even if every class literally had 2 buttons: Attack and Heal.

Well, I'm absolutely sure that the dull gameplay in BfA will be a major factor of how poorly the expansion is going to be received overall (commercially, critically). So it really doesn't matter if I'm against 100 guys here in this thread. We won't see the fallout in the first weeks but in the first 6 months, the same as it was in WoD.

[CasualNoob]

Alliance still have one IG cutscene left, the one where we see the Zandalari fleet, is there a Horde counterpart cutscene ?

At the end of SW scenario should be something.

[Nyel]

New moon, the artifact ablity, again i said all artifact abilities, but that is 1, not "10 times what azerite does"
also how the fuck does "power of the archdruid" change your gameplay? All it does is make your next spell hit 2 others... wtf are you going on about.

LOL UNLEASH THE SHADOWS IS LITERALLY JUST "crits have chance to deal extra damage"
and mass hysteria is literally just "2% increased damage per second while in voidform"


again i fucking love how you keep saying "no but artifacts changed your entire gameplay, azerite does not" while i show you multiple times the polar opposite, while you show me "examples" of this, that literally did not change your gameplay IN THE SLIGHTEST

"Omfg i want to keep voidform up as long as possible!? before i just sat afk and let my voidform drop off without casting anything, this is totally a new rotation!"

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I love how you skip all the other examples and go for 2 of the weaker ones, but yes, desperate power makes drain life actually useable in lower health pools, and again accelerent is amazing in situations where you have 3 targets but for example would only need to hit 1.

3 mobs, a boss and 2 adds taking 99% less damage, literally no point to use rain of fire...
but with accelerent there is!

You wanted me to show you artifact stuff that changes your gameplay. I gave you the example of the artifact skills, they changed your gameplay or at least added something to your basic rotation (that's more than Azerite has to offer). On top of that you've had an arsenal of 20 traits that were not only passive buffs but spec-wise gameplay altering as well.

And you're still questioning that artifacts had a lot more impact on your class/spec than Azerite?

You haven't shown or proved anything. You're claiming that a stat proc or something like the leech buff would be gameplay changing or affecting your gameplay at all while it's not. It's just a stat stick. If you condemn my example don't use exactly the same ones when it comes to Azerite and claim they're different.

Unleash the Shadows had a massive effect on your gameplay, character layout, equipment etc. because it shifted your priorities. Mass Hysteria was basically the entire point of Voidform. Of Voidform, which now in the BfA prepatch is almost useless because the entire Shadow Priest spec without artifact doesn't make sense anymore.

Oh and something that @Nymrohd brought up as well: relics. Azerite traits are basically Legion's relics. You choose which one you want to enhance. See how Legion offered several layers of development while Azerite offers exactly one?

Artifact: artifact skill + artifact traits (~ 20-25) + relics (3)

Azerite: three class related traits

So Azerite offers us exactly the same amount of development like our relic choice in Legion. Granted, there are other rings that are not class specific that add a bit of flavour to the system but that's still nothing more than just another passive artifact trait.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Hmm did they remove the RP dialogue of the grieving NPCs in stormwind harbor? In the beta Susan and Ann kept repeating it ad nauseum, now I'm standing here for 5 minutes and haven't seen it once .. the poor stormwind infantry captain is probably also tired aleady because his arm is stuck in the salute pose.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Reading the novels just leaves me wondering why the in game depiction has to be so poor. Yes, it's an event that will only be seen for 3 weeks but why not make a bit of extra effort.

By the novel, SW should be FULL of night elves; they were in every inn, the cathedral was crammed, they had cots in the keep. We should have seen a large number of night elves stationed outside the Temple of the Moon, Mia standing there by the portal, a constant flow of refugees through the SW mage tower with Tyrande there consoling them, the Cathedral stuffed to the brim with refugees with Velen there walking among them.

The question really is, how easy is it for them to script such events.

There is really no excuse for the actual questline being so poorly represented. When it comes to stuff like stormwind though it probably is alot more difficult, especially with the various things happening in stormwind for multiple quests, phasing there is probably a bitch already and they could break alot of older quests.

[DeicideUH]

Reading the novels just leaves me wondering why the in game depiction has to be so poor. Yes, it's an event that will only be seen for 3 weeks but why not make a bit of extra effort.

By the novel, SW should be FULL of night elves; they were in every inn, the cathedral was crammed, they had cots in the keep. We should have seen a large number of night elves stationed outside the Temple of the Moon, Mia standing there by the portal, a constant flow of refugees through the SW mage tower with Tyrande there consoling them, the Cathedral stuffed to the brim with refugees with Velen there walking among them.

The question really is, how easy is it for them to script such events.

In the Beta, there were lots more of refuges in Stormwind. And I really mean lots more! They were all over the channels, many wounded. I don't know why Blizzard toned their numbers down, the earlier version was way more powerful.

This article of WoWHead shows the earlier version, thought the screenshots are very few and don't reveal the whole number of refugee camps in Stormwind originally.

[rda]

Watching player activity levels on global stat captures. Two things:

1. There is an expected ramp up of activity from the pre-patch. The pre-patch performs well on that front. Compared to Legion, we are obviously quite far from the activity peak on its launch, but we might reach that peak on the launch of BFA or only undershoot by a little.

2. There is an unexpected swap of general faction dominance from A to H right in the last few weeks. This never happened before (faction representation at high level PVE/PVP was wildly different between expansions, right now H is over-represented in all PVE/PVP at max level, but when you include leveling alts and people who don't participate in PVE/PVP much, A was winning from the very beginning to the very end, all the time, this now ended). This is almost surely the result of Blizzard being apathetic and ineffective regarding faction balance with the war mode being the last drop.

If they don't allow mixing factions which was overdue for years, WoW is going to end up de-facto as Horde and that tiny forgettable other faction with a couple of folk who mostly RP and where you roll a throwaway alt periodically to get easy ratings / achievements. We are already half-way there. (I already switched to the Horde like I said earlier and that WoW is already half-way on the road to a single-faction game was apparent from other things way before I saw the charts, the charts just confirm this once again.)

[rda]

(Also. You guys are too harsh on Steampunkette. If this thread is destined to be about lore, so be it, and I think Steampunkette's posts on lore are frequently better than such posts of many others - as long as they don't cross over into gender issues and similar stuff, but this wasn't a problem lately as far as I can see.)

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One more thing. For those who haven't been keeping track, now is the best time to be buying tokens for gold or close to it. The prices have been falling for objective reasons (too long for this post) and they will continue to be falling for several weeks after the pre-patch, but then they are going to rebound very fast - and in BFA that moment will quite likely come earlier than in Legion, so don't miss your window of opportunity.

[Yunero]

You wanted me to show you artifact stuff that changes your gameplay. I gave you the example of the artifact skills, they changed your gameplay or at least added something to your basic rotation (that's more than Azerite has to offer). On top of that you've had an arsenal of 20 traits that were not only passive buffs but spec-wise gameplay altering as well.

And you're still questioning that artifacts had a lot more impact on your class/spec than Azerite?

You haven't shown or proved anything. You're claiming that a stat proc or something like the leech buff would be gameplay changing or affecting your gameplay at all while it's not. It's just a stat stick. If you condemn my example don't use exactly the same ones when it comes to Azerite and claim they're different.

Unleash the Shadows had a massive effect on your gameplay, character layout, equipment etc. because it shifted your priorities. Mass Hysteria was basically the entire point of Voidform. Of Voidform, which now in the BfA prepatch is almost useless because the entire Shadow Priest spec without artifact doesn't make sense anymore.

Oh and something that @Nymrohd brought up as well: relics. Azerite traits are basically Legion's relics. You choose which one you want to enhance. See how Legion offered several layers of development while Azerite offers exactly one?

Artifact: artifact skill + artifact traits (~ 20-25) + relics (3)

Azerite: three class related traits

So Azerite offers us exactly the same amount of development like our relic choice in Legion. Granted, there are other rings that are not class specific that add a bit of flavour to the system but that's still nothing more than just another passive artifact trait.

Felplague will only ever reply with the Warlock example. Since that specific spec had a very boring Artifact. It's also the only class he knows. Literally. He spams that example in many threads.

Hate him or love him, Preach explained well in one of his videos how the fire Artifact had heaps of gameplay effecting traits + Legendary swapping.

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(Also. You guys are too harsh on Steampunkette. If this thread is destined to be about lore, so be it, and I think Steampunkette's posts on lore are frequently better than such posts of many others - as long as they don't cross over into gender issues and similar stuff, but this wasn't a problem lately as far as I can see.)

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One more thing. For those who haven't been keeping track, now is the best time to be buying tokens for gold or close to it. The prices have been falling for objective reasons (too long for this post) and they will continue to be falling for several weeks after the pre-patch, but then they are going to rebound very fast - and in BFA that moment will quite likely come earlier than in Legion, so don't miss your window of opportunity.

It isn't that the specific poster has bad posts. It's that they are constantly recycled and regurgitated. He seems to want to discuss the same topic over and over and over whilst also pushing an external agenda. It just gets irritating.

That's just my take. No hate.

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I like how they said that the reason they could not make the Saurfang/Tyrande scene more impressive was lack of animations available. Wait, what? They do not have an animation to place a large cylinder in white light? They don't have multiple moon themed animations in the game (Balance Druids, Tyrande dungeon boss from End Times, Tomb Sisters)?
Nope, just lazy.

Tyrande should sue Blizzard writers for character assassination.

I think by now we can all agree that 8.0 was rushed.


I mean... Malfurion and Sylvanas just standing in an opening shooting at each other? The whole thing was low effort. You have to read/watch 5-6 external sources to get the whole story.

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Well, I'm absolutely sure that the dull gameplay in BfA will be a major factor of how poorly the expansion is going to be received overall (commercially, critically). So it really doesn't matter if I'm against 100 guys here in this thread. We won't see the fallout in the first weeks but in the first 6 months, the same as it was in WoD.

Even the loss of Artifacts was overshadowed in the pre-patch because of how shoddily Q&A tested the patch was overall. People were whining about other things. I agree the realization probably won't hit for a lot of players until their Legendaries stop working and they realize there is no reward waiting for them at level 120.

[rda]

I think by now we can all agree that 8.0 was rushed.

I mean... Malfurion and Sylvanas just standing in an opening shooting at each other? The whole thing was low effort. You have to read/watch 5-6 external sources to get the whole story.

By the way, maybe this was really the reason, or part of the reason, that the events in-game make much less sense than they do in the novels. That is, they were scrambling for time trying to tie it all up and release something that won't outright crash and collapse in the hands of the players, dropping many things on the floor, and so the pre-patch events only got token attention.

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Also, the videos were cool again. I guess that's the method to enjoying WoW stories: don't put too much weight into them and watch them like one would watch a movie - it is clear things are making little sense, you are watching for special effects and occasional cool moments.

[Doomchicken]

I have a strong feeling Yunero is another alt account for scarecrowz.

[rda]

Does it matter? (It doesn't. Reply to the thought, not to the author.)

[Thenatural]

I have a strong feeling Yunero is another alt account for scarecrowz.

Of course it is lol

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Reply to the thought, not to the author.

Context matters.

[Rhlor]

azshara?????