9.0 General Discussion

[TheFirstOnes]

login music is in the data.

Let's...FUCKING...

GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

[Nagawithlegs]

There is movement.. the shattered pieces of the sky move or at least that is what I saw from Stiven's stream.

Yeah, but what prompted the shift to 2D images with some movement? I'm curious, I'm assuming its a resources thing.

Oh yeah, and the new "kill the leaders" achievement shows that Turalyon is in the throne room now. Curiously his opposite is Rokhan.

[gunner_recall]

I'm curious why they moved away from 3D login screens.

It's cheaper and easier.

Which is distributed over a very large area, so the likelyhood of a peasant to encounter any one of them is actually fairly low.

Besides, you're treating events that are extraordinary even for WarCraft as commonplace. Yes, Ner'zhul did that... as a last resort. And it can't be repeated easily, nor was he able to do it easily. For that matter, most people probably aren't terribly interested in doing it.

Do you find the idea that Krakatoa happened horrifying? That's the kind of situation you're describing here.

But...you have mages and wizards who teleport and create portal networks.

You have demons in Azeroth. You have warlocks WILLINGLY summon demons. You have demon hunters eating those demons and becoming demons.

There's the undead. There's dragons. Hell, even murlocs in lore are dangerous. I'm not saying that the people of Azeroth live in constant fear but there's definitely got to be this concept of "I could literally die tomorrow because some asshole didn't want to take a zeppelin to the other side of the continent."

And yes, seeing as how everything in general right now is going to shit because of climate change

The world we live in has enough mundane threats. I couldn't imagine having to deal with one of these fuckers barreling out of the woods at me.

[Cosmic Janitor]

But...you have mages and wizards who teleport and create portal networks.

Not really a thing in lore. Someone making you a portal is quite the feat and not something used casually by everyone.

[gunner_recall]

Not really a thing in lore. Someone making you a portal is quite the feat and not something used casually by everyone.

The second most famous use for transmutation magic is teleportation. The most basic teleportation spell is blink, and it remains among the most useful. Blink can be used to quickly escape a foe - or save a mage who has accidentally fallen off a cliff. Do not attempt to use blink to escape falling to your death unless absolutely necessary. This is the kind of trick you can only fail once.

Make absolutely certain you know your destination before attempting to teleport. There's a reason we have very specific spells to teleport to certain locations - attempts to cast a teleportation "on the fly" often result in one very dead mage inside a wall, chair, or another mage. And I don't mean in a fun way.

There's a book about it. Teleportation is absolutely a thing. Not to the frequency that the player character does it obviously but it's a thing that still happens. Jaina does it all willy nilly.

This entire expansion is about the fucking sky exploding. Shit's rough on Azeroth.

[Doffen]

Man looking at the mounts Wowhead shows from the new builds preamble. So looking forward to get these. Those stag mounts looks awesome. Even the dark horse looks nice!

[Cosmic Janitor]

There's a book about it. Teleportation is absolutely a thing. Not to the frequency that the player character does it obviously but it's a thing that still happens. Jaina does it all willy nilly.

This entire expansion is about the fucking sky exploding. Shit's rough on Azeroth.

Again, you won't find actual teleport networks connecting all cities in lore, so that every peon can travel across the globe in an instant. If you need a teleport it's more along the lines of some high class mage coming along, making you one and then closing it again. The way portals are used ingame is not a thing. Jaina is special as it's like one of her fortes, but she is also on the level of archmage and certainly not someone that will make you a portal for shits and giggles.

[therumblings]

[gunner_recall]

Man, that's a great loading screen even when it isn't animated. But the animation and the music, it amazing.

[huth]

There's a book about it. Teleportation is absolutely a thing. Not to the frequency that the player character does it obviously but it's a thing that still happens. Jaina does it all willy nilly.

This entire expansion is about the fucking sky exploding. Shit's rough on Azeroth.

In the city of mages. And it specificially notes that teleportation is not easy. You're vastly overstating how common these things are. We regularly encounter them, but we're hardly playing average people.

For a peasant, even seeing a mage is rare unless you specificially seek them out for something.

[MightyWarrior]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Mk3Su-jNE&t=360s

[TheFirstOnes]

Sylvanas: *Gets an 11 Minute theme*

Sargeras, Arthas, Illidan, and Deathwing: Amateur!

[Nagawithlegs]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Mk3Su-jNE&t=360s

Good song, but you have to wonder where 11 minutes of that will be used.

[Hitei]

God damn, 5:30+

[FlubberPuddy]

I don't think every MM hunter playing the same is a problem no. Why should/is it be a problem?

If you want to design a game around meaningful choices and then there are choices that aren't meaningful then that's a problem. Whether you as a player mind it or not is not the deciding factor.

If it were then we would only have 1 class per role and players would play each of them instead of periods of FOTM where some classes, even for specific roles like Tanks/Heals, stay far above the other options. Because players are always complaining about certain others being overpowered over others and trying to aim for a balance too, not just the developers.

More importantly Covenants don't solve anything about this problem. Talents already let players diverge, "But their not, they follow a guide". Well what do you think is going to happen with Covenants? People will follow a guide.

Covenants aren't meant to be sole solution to this problem Blizzard have. They're a step in the direction where Blizzard want their game to be, it's similar to how Ion said they don't want WoW to turn into some twitch-style APM game (despite the game getting more and more twitch-based each expac). It's just their design philosophy for how they'd like the direction of the game to be.

Kind of like how some Talent trees have had dead talents for a long time, and Blizzard are changing them up and making talents baseline as they've become so core to the spec/class.

None of what anyone is saying here is that they're right for doing so or that they're going to hit their mark this time compared to the other times. Players just gotta understand the philosophy the designers are coming from. They don't have to agree with it though, that's the whole point of giving feedback on liking/not liking how things are going.

[gunner_recall]

Good song, but you have to wonder where 11 minutes of that will be used.

We're about to have a final battle with Sylvanas where we stand atop a cliff near an ocean as the waves crash during a thunderstorm shouting our ideologies at each other.

[Nagawithlegs]

God damn, 5:30+

That track HAS to be De Other Side.

[Jastall]

The timeline was officially documented finally with the third chronicle, despite fans still getting it wrong/fighting over it. Good rule of thumb, every expansion is 1 year, except for Cata, which lasted 2.

So,

Classic: Year 25
TBC: Year 26
Wrath: Year 27
Cata:Year 28
MoP: Year 30
WoD: Year 31
Legion: Year 32
BFA: Year 33

Pretty crazy than in 8 years we've had two Burning Legion invasions, the war on the Scourge, two HvA world wars, three Old Gods rising and being krumped, a dragon redoing the landscape, giant Satan stabbing the planet, and time-traveling orcs stirring up trouble, and I'm leaving out many, many events. And we think 2020 was a bad year in real life, at least we aren't ass-deep in demons or zombies forever, not yet anyway.

[Edward Wu]

Latest build ever?

[FlubberPuddy]

If you want players to diverge spend less time on adding more layers to pick from a guide and instead work harder to make the existing choices statistically similar enough that it doesn't matter which you pick.
Because that is the only way to stop people from following a guide, by making the relevant entry in a guide say "do what you like it doesn't matter".

I generally agree with this. In all honesty I think it's a mix of player choices need to better balanced but that Blizzard need to have better encounter design (more open) so that certain class choices aren't vastly superior to others.

Although to be honest with the difficulty that Mythic Raids are and how scaling occurs in M+, I don't think encounter design can be more open without being lower in difficulty. And the scaling in M+ doesn't really matter because Blizzard don't care if certain classes aren't competitive at doing a +25 for instance - since they don't even give meaningful rewards for clearing such high keys and have said they'll continue to keep max meaningful rewards at +15.