Patch 8.2 Rise of Azshara - Information Roundup from Content Creators

[Tazr]

What does that even mean? That sounds like timegating to me...

Probably means that there are items to gather that requires more effort/more quest turn-ins than are available for a 24-hour period. I mean, grinding Ogres in a cave to get from unfriendly to exalted would have taken more than a day back in BC.

[dranlord]

What does that even mean? That sounds like timegating to me...

it mean that you need to farm mats to progress on it, they explain it on the stream, there is so much stuff to do that you cant complet it all in 1 day.
(some idiot that play 24hs probabbly will)

[Tazr]

so am i reading this right? I have to buy water walking for any mount i want to walk on water now?

Apparently, each character gets a mount equipment slot. They can put what they want in that slot and it effects every mount for that character. Shaman and DKs are lucky because they don't need water walking equipment.

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Am I the only one that's upset that there is forced War Mode for Mechagon? The neutral "hub" is likely only a quest turn-in/vendor/Inn area. They already broke PvE realms with War Mode and sneaky insertion of force flag areas that are impossible to avoid in some cases (and good luck finding non-War Mode groups in group finder for many things). Now, if people want Pathfinder II, they have to PvP? I was about to log in and do the Assaults (working on the currency for that last mount), but I can't justify logging in ever again if this is the case. Not like current content is engaging, it's just currency grinds for mounts, pets and toys.

[Daevied]

So they nerfed mounts or they buffed them? Am not sure, but i will hate losing water strider perma water walking

[Ielenia]

"You said you didn't like flying being gated, so now water walking is too. Thanks for your feedback!"

I guess you completely missed (ignored?) this part, right? Here:

• Mount Equipment
  • If you have the Water Strider mount, you receive the water walking mount equipment for free in the mail on patch day.

So where's the "gating", again?

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LOLWUT? Joke?

Just take the water-walking equipment you'll get for free in your mail (if you have the water strider mount) and equip it to your water-walking mount. Presto. Everything is how it was before for you.

[grexly75]

Notice the new uniwheel mount? Now think of that South Park episode where Mr Garrison created that uniwheeled contraption.. Seems someone at Blizzard must like South Park.. lol

[joxur]

Oh those features look pretty nic.... oh wait. sorry folks, I forgot my guild already disbanded because everyone hated the state of the game. Too little too late. Make a new game.

[McNeil]

So Ashvane is going to betray Sylvanas for Azshara? How am I not surprised.

I wonder how a female sea giant is going to look like

[Kallisto]

Notice the new uniwheel mount? Now think of that South Park episode where Mr Garrison created that uniwheeled contraption.. Seems someone at Blizzard must like South Park.. lol

Or they have seen numerous other mostly anime shows where there are similar designed vehicles which are actually used to mow down people.

[rogueMatthias]

lol player housing?

Great we'll get to just hang out all day in your garrison.. i mean house.

Screw player houses, they should do guild air ships instead which can fly about and have a hearth back to it. Your guild could fly it around the world super slowly, and leave it parked near to raids for easy guild access. (until pesky horde come and you have to battle them out of the sky).

[Logwyn]

"It's totally not time gated, but its actually tied to daily quests, week long missions, and raid resets!"

True! But meh someone will do it!

[Surreality]

good for you go play Final Dollhouse or Elder Dollhouse or whatever other mmo you like. (every single mmo fallow copy pastes formular and are grind fest)

I don't really play MMO games anymore. They are all pretty much garbage these days. It's strictly single player games now. The Tomb Raider games. The Uncharted games. Modded Bethesda games. A number of "old" single player games that are still better than most of the games they release now. I guess I do still play STO some, but that community is a completely different entity than what you get in the more "popular" MMO games.

[Lockport]

Am I the only one that's upset that there is forced War Mode for Mechagon?

It's not. Go back and read.

[prwraith]

It's not. Go back and read.

I had to go back and read to, If there had been forced war mode, I'd have quite literally blown my stack. That really my have been what pulled me off this game for good.

Fuck pvp.

[MasterHamster]

It's so unfortunate because I can tell Blizzard is really trying to tackle the "lack of progression" problem, and this is a step in the right direction, make no mistake.
But it doesn't adress the real problem. In a better balanced world, I couldn't wait for a system like this. Finally there's a way to always have a goal in front of you, a carrot on a stick.
That is what the game sorely lacks in the current patch.

But when my characters get all these powerful bonuses, and all those minor traits.... what role do they actually serve in a broader sense? Alright, more ways to progress, sweet. But where do I need them? Certainly nowhere but high M+ or heroic raids. I am someone who doesn't raid, I have no urge to schedule my playtime and feel forced to play certain hours or feel like I am letting someone down if I can't play for 2h straight. Neither do I enjoy M+ pugging or really want to find a stable 5 man team for it. It's not what I am after. But BFA feels like it's either too easy or too demanding, and nothing inbetween. Too top- and bottomheavy. Why can't there be queued mythics, if normal/heroic dungeons are supposed to be braindead easy even in "appropriate" gear?

Why is the only way to fail in a Warfront to run a heroic one (presumably, since regular Warfront is literally designed to make sure you win), or an Island Expedition?
Everything has this aura over it that people genuinely need to play terribly in order to even risk failure. What kind of game experience does that provide? Players are bored and they can't even tell why, that's the worst thing about it.

So Blizzard is making a genuine attempt to fix the disgraceful lack of power-progression of characters in BFA... but they doesn't do anything about the fact that only premade content actually requires a bit of power progression to begin with. If you only run LFR, regular dungeons, world quests, do reputations or work on professions... you don't even need azerite at all. You can probably do all of it in green gear. It's tough to give a good analogy to this situation. It's like having an environment where people have lacked proper ways to earn money on the side, and the city provides... but they don't make sure there are expensive things people want to save up for and buy.

So in 8.2, I am going to get a bunch of powerful traits and active abilities... but I won't need any of them. I won't want them.

At some point, Blizzard has to realize that the game needs decently challenging content even in less coordinated content like solo/world content and queued stuff like IEs, Warfronts, and regular dungeons. Until then they can add how many progression systems they want, it won't really solve the problem.

Gear and other means of becoming more powerful only matters as long as there's challenging content you want to do. Non-raiders (or raiders that aren't raiding that evening) have absolutely none. It's nothing but faceroll anyway.

[Vynestra]

What does that even mean? That sounds like timegating to me...

It has so much content that you can't possibly complete it all in one day.

How about that?

Make sense?

[Ethas]

I thought they learned their lesson with housing aka catering to korean audience. We don't need housing in MMO. Work on bringing social aspect back to the game instead!

[Clbull]

All essences will work in PvP according to Holinka.

Holinka. Did he just say Holinka? I thought Holinka quit the WoW dev team halfway through Borelords of Draenor in shame at releasing one of the worst outdoor PvP zones to exist, and being a bad PvP class designer in general.

If that dude's been working on BFA, no wonder the expansion's been so terrible. Any other development studio would have canned him.

Mechagon and Nazjatar will be fully open on day 1, while the dungeon and raid will launch either the second or third week.

Remember the days when dungeons and raids weren't locked until weeks after a content patch's launch? It's lame that Blizzard do this because it just gives their expansions an empty and artificial sense of longevity.

Lady Priscilla Ashvane is a boss in Azshara's Eternal Palace and her model is a sea giant.

I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard were so out of ideas that they just literally copied the Ursula fight from Kingdom Hearts. I mean Priscilla already looks so much like the antagonist of The Little Mermaid that I'm surprised Disney haven't sued Blizzard for copyright infringement.

Blizzcon will happen this year.

Kinda wish Blizzard would give it a break with Blizzcon because the convention used to be a treat when it was held every other year, or every three years. Since 2013 it's done nothing but ruined the grand finals of their respective esports tournaments by making it impossible to get spectator tickets; since you have to compete with legions of nerds who have zero interest in competitive gaming just to get tickets for the main event. And don't get me started on the visa issues that many professional players have had. Give us another Battle.net World Championship please, and maybe host it in Europe this time. I mean China got one back in 2012 and since then Europe's had zero grand finals.

Holding Blizzcon this year is also a bit risky, given the poor aftertaste that Blizzard fans got from the tone-deaf announcement of Diablo Immortal last year, and the heaps of broken promises and outright lies surrounding HGC and HotS.

Housing is a big topic at Blizzard. The developers are still thinking about how to implement it so that it does not feel so clumsy.

When Square Enix, Trion Worlds, ArenaNet and Carbine Studios already worked out phenomenal player housing systems many years ago, what is there left to figure out?

Blizzard wants to change warforged and titanforged items, but they don't have a solution in place for it. Without this system, some players would have their maximum gear after only a few weeks and thus have nothing left to aim for gear wise.

There are plenty of solutions.

1) Stop giving out welfare epics like frickin' candy. Make players progress through each raid in linear order, like with Vanilla and Burning Crusade. Burning Crusade had a huge content drought between patches 2.1 and 2.4 (unless you count Zul'aman which hardly quenched the thirst of hardcore raiders and was more of a side raid) yet the subscriber count skyrocketed. Why? Because catch up gear was virtually nonexistent and even then post 2.4 the Badges of Justice required to purchase a Black Temple quality piece of equipment required significant amounts of grinding through tough content to obtain. Players had to progress through Gruul/Kara/Mag, then through SSC/TK/Zul'Aman and finally through BT/Hyjal in linear order.

2) Make professions relevant again. Jewelcrafting used to mean something because sockets were abundant and colour matching sockets used to give you significant bonuses on your gear. Enchanting used to mean something because you could at one point enchant nearly all of your gear, rather than just your rings. Blacksmithing used to be relevant because you could create consumables that gave you extra prismatic gem sockets. See a pattern here? Professions give raiders a goal to progress and customise their character. Take away these customisation options and you have nothing more than a crappy second-rate Fisher Price My First MMORPG.

3) Stop rehashing the same raid on 4 different difficulties. The prime reason for player burnout is that they are forced to run the exact same raid on four different difficulty levels which only increase the boss's health and the damage of their abilities, whilst maybe adding new mechanics only once in the transition between Normal and Heroic? If you want to stop players from getting burned out, you should stop shoehorning them into the latest raid. WoW has a shitload of content yet all of it is invalidated by Blizzard's incessant urge to push everyone into the latest raid.

4) Bring back talent trees, or meaningful progression systems like the Legion Artifact Trait system. Legion's system was actually good because it gave you a meaningful goal to work towards. Hopefully this is what we get in 8.2.

5) For the love of god stop gating everything behind quest grinds. Quests are boring as hell, and I actually feel like I'm being put at a disadvantage because I don't want to play through content that I legitimately HATE. I shouldn't have to complete the 21 quest lines that encompass three zones just to unlock a goddamn Mythic raid. I shouldn't have to do a rep grind with a faction from the previous expansion on top of that just to unlock an allied race that should have been made available to everybody that purchased Battle for Azeroth from the outset. And don't get me started on how tedious, boring and un-fun it is to unlock the ability to use flying mounts that were released six expansions ago - because screw Pathfinder.

6) If you're gonna add in rep grinds, don't make World Quests the only way to gain reputation like you did with the Champions of Azeroth faction. Because that rep grind is so slow and so bad that it's actually gimping the item levels on my Heart of Azeroth and putting me at a disadvantage because I don't like to do boring and repetitive tasks in the open world. Wrath's championing system was really good because it gave you multiple options to gain reputation with a faction, and added another purpose to running normal and heroic dungeons.

7) Stop dumbing down character stat sheets, reintroduce primary/secondary stats and undo the ability pruning that has dumbed this game down and infantilized its community. I recently reinstalled RIFT out of sheer curiosity and when my RIFT Warrior gained a more complex rotation in the first 5 levels of gameplay than my WoW Warrior did in 100 levels, it's a testament to how little Blizzard's game designers respect the intelligence of their own player base.

[Tinytalon]

I thought they learned their lesson with housing aka catering to korean audience. We don't need housing in MMO. Work on bringing social aspect back to the game instead!

And that, my friend, is your opinion. I, for one, have been waiting for player housing for so many damn years, it'd be awesome if it finally happened. And I know a shit ton of other people who feel the same. Just because you don't want it, doesn't mean it's a shit idea.

[Stormwolf64]

Here we go again with Blizzard wanting to reinvent the wheel. Let's see in what way they'll fuck it up now. I'm guessing this will mostly just limit what we already have been used to, in that case they can stuff the change back up their ass.