Rise of Azshara Preview: Heart of Azeroth Updates

[Stoy]

Rise of Azshara Content Preview Live Stream

Rise of Azshara Preview: Heart of Azeroth Updates

Azeroth’s need has never been greater—and now more than ever, Speaker Magni Bronzebeard and the titan watcher MOTHER need your help to heal the world’s grievous wounds.

In Rise of Azshara, we’re introducing a new system for the Heart of Azeroth that will provide additional power customization options: Essences. You’ll collect these Essences by taking part in a variety of content, and infuse them into the Heart of Azeroth using the new Heart Forge in Silithus, giving you access to new abilities and bonuses.

The Speaker’s Quest Continues
Once you’ve established a new hub in Nazjatar, one of the new areas in Rise of Azshara, you’ll receive a summons from Magni to join him at the Chamber of Heart. There, you’ll learn that MOTHER has completed her calculations related to what's plaguing Azeroth, and determined a way to heal her well ahead of her original 77-cycle estimate. New forms of power have begun to coalesce and manifest around Azeroth’s wounds, and MOTHER has discovered that these “Essences” are compatible with the Heart of Azeroth. To make use of them, she has created a new device in the Chamber of Heart that can harness that incredible power: the Heart Forge.

The Essence of the Heart Forge
The Heart Forge lets players infuse their Heart of Azeroth with Essences to grant new combat-related powers. Once you’ve collected a new Essence—obtained by participating in a wide variety of content—you’ll head to the Heart Forge to infuse your Heart of Azeroth with it, “learning” the Essence and permanently adding it to your collection. Much like Talents, once you’ve learned an Essence, you’ll be able to apply it or swap it out through a new Heart of Azeroth interface within rest areas, cities, or when using items such as the Tome of Quiet Mind.

Each Essence has both Major (generally active) and Minor (passive) abilities. Upon completing the initial quest from Magni, you’ll open a single Major slot in the Heart of Azeroth. Placing an Essence in the Major slot grants you that Essence’s Major active ability, which is added to your Spellbook. You’ll also gain the benefit of any Minor passive abilities from the Essence.

There are also two additional Minor slots in the Heart of Azeroth that will activate the Minor (passive) abilities of any Essences added to them. The first Minor slot will become available at Heart of Azeroth level 55, and the second Minor slot will become available at Heart of Azeroth level 65.

In Essence
Essences are acquired from a variety of content in Battle for Azeroth. You’ll earn your first one by completing the quest line with Magni, but you’ll be able to earn others through completing specific activities, such as PvP, raids, or World Quests.

Each Essence has four ranks that provide new effects. Rank 1 provides a unique ability based on your role (damage dealer, tank, or healer), while rank 2 and rank 3 provide enhancements to both the Essence’s Major and Minor effects. Rank 4 adds a flashier cosmetic effect to the spell, providing a unique visual that will make you stand out from the crowd. Once an Essence is learned, you’ll be able to hover your mouse over the Essence in the user interface to see what you get with the next rank. And because of how Essences are collected, it’s possible to receive and infuse a rank 3 Essence without having learned rank 1 or 2.

It’s important to note that while many Essences are role-agnostic, some of these are only usable by a specific role (tank, healer, or damage dealer). Characters who can spec into multiple roles can collect any Essences that are appropriate for those roles, but the system will restrict characters from collecting Essences meant for roles their class can’t fill—for example, a Warrior couldn’t collect a healer Essence.

More Azerite Gear Ahead?
Essences add a whole new layer to the Heart of Azeroth system, in addition to the Azerite Armor that you already have. With all the content coming in Rise of Azshara, there’s are sure to be some new Traits to discover and gear to collect along the way.

[THEORACLE64]

Welcome back, friend. This is how it should have been since the start.

[Echoherb]

Looks cool, hopefully the abilities stick around in 9.0.

[SoundOfGuns]

I fail to see the real improvement here.

[Eleccybubb]

I fail to see the real improvement here.

Don't worry. Most people do as well judging by the stream.

[Nevcairiel]

Looks cool, hopefully the abilities stick around in 9.0.

Is this your first expansion? Such things never do.

[RivenXIII]

Looks like an improved version of the netherlight crucible. Inovation!...

[Dizzeeyooo]

Looks cool, hopefully the abilities stick around in 9.0.

Why would you think or want azerite themed generic abilities to stick around into the next expansion?

[Firebeast]

So another grind????? Oh joy

[MasterHamster]

BFA-specific Glyphs
But hey, it was obvious it couldn't be fleshed out enough since it was a system born out of panicked damage-control, and not planned before BFA launched.

[Williamgood]

... so grinding more HoA levels and farming now for essences, which arent alt shared... great....

[TigTone]

Look forward to all the new content. Seeing as I won’t burn through soo plenty of hours of entertainment for me.

[legendaryusername]

So we had dog shit and now we will have ape shit

[prwraith]

This looks...awful.

[Teph]

No idea why i thought we get class specific abilities and not this generic bandaid fix. Sad.

[prwraith]

Everybody in my guild is blowing up in discord about how moronic this is.

Literally the only thing we're looking forward to is the mega dungeon.

[KainneAbsolute]

A sort artifact glyph system

Why not just leveling that abilities? Why we need to find them?

[Gasparde]

Why am I not surprised that the great Heart of Azeroth revamp is so utterly... underwhelming?

Like, they're giving us a grant total of ONE new and awesome usable ability. And not that, that one single active ability is also a super generic ability that doesn't have anything to do with your spec or even your class at all, probably meaning that it's going to have 0 interactions with anything and is just a button to press on CD or something else to line up with your other cooldowns.

Like, if that's their big revamp, if that's what they've been working on for 6 months, maybe even longer, who knows, then holy fuck, that's just lame af. I'm a fucking Hunter, I don't want to channel stupid azerite laser beams at my enemies - gimme a new azerite shot or coat my pets in azerite or what do I know. If that's seriously the best they can come up with then there's seriously no hope that anything about the gameplay is going to change at all during this expansion. Honestly, this just looks awful.

[Kallor]

As someone who quit early on in the expansion, this doesn't make me wanna come back at all. This is the first expansion where I haven't bothered returning when the big content updates gets released.

[Wangming]

On the one hand I am super happy that we finally get something substantial for the necklace.

On the other hand this uses a completely new resource, further proving that Azerite is meaningless, can only be accessed with from one ingame object and worst of all: Is role specific. Why is that a problem? Cause class design is completely netured in BfA. If not even THESE give an identity to classes (or god forbid specs), nothing in BfA will.