Something massive comes next expansion

[Osmeric]

Free To Play transition.

[Watchers]

Lich King 2.0, with Sylvanas.

and dark rangers

[Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang]

Maybe big cosmic magic will happen, maybe Outland will crash into Southern Hemisphere of Azeroth, maybe a bit will break off and wreck the sword and plug up the sword hole, maybe....

I like the concept of a planetary band-aid!

[Jimmyw]

1) Outland has been dying since it is Outland. Y'know, it's a floating rock.
2) There won't be a new faction ever. I hope you don't need an explanation why that wouldn't work.
3) Every expansion is straightforward, BfA is not better or worse than any other.
4) A level squish is a possibility, but that's it. Don't expect an overhaul to the basic leveling formula.

I love how you are just going off as "what im saying is FACTS, I KNOW" - smug much? - also a 3rd faction is unlikely but it has been done in other games and CAN work - I just dont think we will ever see it in wow, and why would we? - and yes BFA is somewhat worse than other expansion, I think most people can agree that the two worst expansions so far has been BFA and WoD with Cata coming in on a close 3rd. Most people also agree that Wotlk and MoP, even Legion to an extent, is among the Top xpacs released.

stop trying to put off your own opinions as facts and you will have a better time all around. Use words like "I think", "To my experience", "I hope" etc. OR back up your data with hard irrefutable facts.

[Qnubi]

Live WoW is a collection game, gear is a 2nd thought. That's why it is meaningless and they can't go back from it since they would scare away the collectors. There is no progression in terms of gear. My warrior got 420 with socket and 425 with socket in his +8 and +9 respectively while my main never got anything above 415 in his weekly m10. Gear system is garbage, classes are meh, there is no hope left they will keep RNG loot like it's Diablo. My only shimmer of hope is that Classic will be so successful that retail WoW dies off.

[Mardux]

Live WoW is a collection game, gear is a 2nd thought. That's why it is meaningless and they can't go back from it since they would scare away the collectors. There is no progression in terms of gear. My warrior got 420 with socket and 425 with socket in his +8 and +9 respectively while my main never got anything above 415 in his weekly m10. Gear system is garbage, classes are meh, there is no hope left they will keep RNG loot like it's Diablo. My only shimmer of hope is that Classic will be so successful that retail WoW dies off.

So because you had one toon get extremely lucky with 2 drops, the gear system is garbage and theres no gear progression with any of the other slots?

[Lumineus]

Lich King 2.0, with Sylvanas.

Nah fam, you gotta think bigger. The expansion will be called World of Warcraft: Scourge, where we fight nebulous forces of death on a random-ass continent before going to no-fly Shadowlands with the help of everyone's favorite golden boy, Arthas Menethil, who it turns out was just a misunderstood saviour. There we'll take on Sylvanas but it turns out the real final boss is Xe'ra, who has become a void lord after being disenchanted by Illidan on Argus. Then we'll sit Sylvanas on the throne of Icecrown, because Bolvar was killed (again) to fill the human paladin sacrifice quota, before the world event teases Ka'resh as the next expansion.

[Hottage]

Something massive comes every expansion, that's kinda the thing about expansions.

[Garymorilix]

I love how you are just going off as "what im saying is FACTS, I KNOW" - smug much? - also a 3rd faction is unlikely but it has been done in other games and CAN work - I just dont think we will ever see it in wow, and why would we? - and yes BFA is somewhat worse than other expansion, I think most people can agree that the two worst expansions so far has been BFA and WoD with Cata coming in on a close 3rd. Most people also agree that Wotlk and MoP, even Legion to an extent, is among the Top xpacs released.

stop trying to put off your own opinions as facts and you will have a better time all around. Use words like "I think", "To my experience", "I hope" etc. OR back up your data with hard irrefutable facts.

I love when someone says I need to provide irrefutable facts for things that are blatantly obvious.
WoW is built around having 2 factions. It won't change. Other games can do whatever, becuz WoW is not other games. That's why it's WoW. Plus it's a retarded move to break your playerbase into even more pieces.
Outland has been dying ever since WC3. What is not fact about that?
I don't have to disprove something that hasn't been proven in the first place. You saying BfA is bad is as much an opinion as me saying it isn't. There are no study you can pull to determine the subjective quality of BfA or other expansions. I can still see hundreds of thousands still playing. You most likely don't, but that's not the expansions problem.
MoP was universally hated for pandas, eastern theme and dailies. Legion wasn't considered good until 7.2 and onwards. We're not in 8.2 yet. WotlK was a very good theme and premise with WC3 fan service but the actual in-game activities were very limited. For the last 7 months all I could do was daily 5-man for tokens and raid once a week. If that's all you want, fine, but you can't tell me there ain't 10 times the things to do now.
When you look at core gameplay features of the game you can safely call it a fact that those won't change. This is not an opinion, it's like expecting Raids to turn into turn-based combat next expansion. Could it work? Yea. Would it be WoW? No. So will it happen? No. Simple.

You can have crazy fckin ideas about everything, idc, but don't try to tell yourself that Blizz would ever implement those. You know they won't. You're not arguing me. If you want something whacky there is probably a game out there doing just that. Play that then.

[justandulas]

I’d love a third, evil, faction but wow devs don’t have the testicular fortitude to make something like that

Everyone has to be the hero in their game

[Nzx]

BFA is a fantastic expansion. It's not the best expansion, but it's maybe ~4th on the list after Legion, Wrath and MoP. I think Warfronts and Islands will be dropped as failed experiments and I doubt they will continue with "locked" gear slots like legendaries and azerite gave us, but M+ is excellent as always and BoD is right up there as far as raids go. The new content in 8.2 looks good, the essence system looks excellent, and if they continue with more of the same WoW will be around for a long time yet. I think next expansion will have a talent tree revamp and a separate character progression system that is something like artifact weapons, but with the choice/customization aspects of Heart/essences merged in. I also expect a "level squish" of some kind, whether that be "void levels" in addition to your normal character levels, or straight up squashing the game back down to ~80-100 levels. Other than that, the tried and true formula of M+ with uncapped rewards and very difficult Mythic raiding (with a view towards even more watchable MDI/world first races) will remain, and I'm happy about that.

I really have to question why some of you are still posting about a game you (apparently) don't care about anymore. Some of you have tens of thousands of posts complaining about something that supposedly has no impact on your life, and that's a bit strange. Gaming addiction was recently recognized as a legitimate psychological disorder - some of you are clearly suffering and I hope you visit your doctors soon, because life's too short to be so angry about something you say you don't care about.

[jiih]

Free To Play transition.

they milk a 15y old version with 13euro/month and you think about f2p ?

[Qnubi]

So because you had one toon get extremely lucky with 2 drops, the gear system is garbage and theres no gear progression with any of the other slots?

The gear progression is based around WF/TF + sockets. all the BIS items are RNG, and I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE. Not one item has inherit sockets. So you play casino and not a RPG with set drops. My warrior has 2 items that I can't get without RNG, that's a garbage gear system.

[CiccioBello]

And it is precisely for this reason that bfa is going wrong, because the blizz has taken few risks.
I hope instead that in the next expansion the blizz is a little more courageous in its choices, even radically changing certain established mechanics.
For me if 9.0 will only be a shuffling of some mechanics of what is currently bfa, it would be really a serious mistake.

[J012D4N]

Why would they kill their game like that

and their stock would plummet.
"Hey investor, that one big avenue for cash flow ATVI had for 15 years, yeah that one. Well .... um ... it's gone."

[unbound]

Bfa a pretty straightforward and bad expansion with nothing new which means they save something for the next

For clarity, they didn't save something for the next...that's not how they operate.

BfA was a bad expansion because Blizz erroneously believed that they could leverage much of the work they put into Legion and go super-cheap on BfA. Initially, it looked pretty good, but they got too cheap and the players noticed (either directly, or indirectly with a more generally feeling of boredom or badness).

Whether the next expansion will be better or not depends on how Blizz executives want to approach the problem of the overall decline of WoW. They may continue to push out cheap expansions with increased emphasis on store sales and close the doors on WoW after another expansion or two. They may decide to put serious effort into the next expansion like they did with Legion and, along with Classic, maybe stabilize again (or possibly grow slightly with the combination).

[Lurker1]

People need to realize, that Classic is not going to have any reaction for Devs. Even Nost at it's most active point(not counting bot accounts) only had about 250k active players. That's at worst 1/8th of what BFA is currently at. Classic isn't going to be super active, it's not going to be huge, it's not going to show retail devs anything except that people "prefer" how trash the game is now in comparison to how trash it was back then.

- - - Updated - - -



Well we saw reference to it in the Cinematic that came out yesterday. Thrall was in Outland Nagrand. So it could be foreshadowing with Saurfang saying "this place isn't right, it's dying" essentially.

100% truth and it was that many people while it was free so it will be alot less then that now!

[Soluna]

Don't be naive. Next expansion will be more of the same. They're not going to shake up the core formulae. Blizzard don't do risk.

You say that, but that's how we got Legion, which was an awesome expansion, and very different than anything before it. But ye, keep yelling that it's all dark and gloomy.

[toffmcsoft]

The next expansion on wow should be Wow 2 w/ an entire reset of the game.
Build off the classic principals except, cut the lvling time in 1/2.

There shouldn't be any more expansions.

[Okacz]

Remember the "even expansion" theory going on for since Cata. WotLK, Mists, Legion were great (at least in scale) expansions that brought an array of systemic changes and huge amounts of content. Cata, WoD and BfA are their half assed sequels, introducing little to nothing new and having less to offer.

So yeah, by that estimate next expansion is destined to be freaking huge.