Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Edoll]

Anyone see the front page of MMO-Champion? They datamined a mount for the CE of Diablo 4, the “Amalgamation of Rage.”

[Therougetitan]

The encrypted stuff could be a few things. 10.0 Digital Deluxe stuff. D4 Mount. There could even be warcraft mobile related pets/mounts.

[Revamp Man]

I don't think it needed much confirming tbh. WoW expansions usually release roughly a year after their announcement. I've been fully expecting 10.0 to come out around April 2023 the whole time.

Any sooner would probably be a disaster anyway. As you said, they need time to get things right. I'm personally hoping they go the Legion route of giving us a long Alpha/Beta with a lot of community involvement and frequent dev updates. But maybe that's huffing too much copium.

Let’s look at season 4 as that 6 month gap and figure season 3 is 8 and assume alpha a few weeks after announcement
That would place alpha probably in may so plenty of test time
9.2.5 in October with season 4
Prepatch in March

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This isnt really OT, but has anyone had the issue of not seeing the new vestige in ZM? It was hotfixed in a day or two and and still not showing for me.

The new what?

[Chickat]

Let’s look at season 4 as that 6 month gap and figure season 3 is 8 and assume alpha a few weeks after announcement
That would place alpha probably in may so plenty of test time
9.2.5 in October with season 4
Prepatch in March

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The new what?

Its a reagent that lets you craft rank 1 leggos into rank 5 leggos ilev 249 for like 1/3 the price of a 291 leggo. Its not as good, but for poor people and alts. Also helps crafter level leggos easier since you can use the mats of a rank 1 instead of rank 2, 3, or 4 which can be up to 4 times as high. I had to spend over a million gold powerleveling JC leggo to max rank just a month ago. Kinda wish I had waited not, but whatever. The reason I want to buy them is so I can verify my auctions somewhat. I can have max rank ones and 249 ones to get more gold flowing it.

Oh and it was hotfixed into the game day before yesterday. Its up for just about everyone but I cant get it to show up on any of my characters.

[ercarp]

Let’s look at season 4 as that 6 month gap and figure season 3 is 8 and assume alpha a few weeks after announcement
That would place alpha probably in may so plenty of test time
9.2.5 in October with season 4
Prepatch in March

These are the estimates I posted in another thread a few days back:

10.0 Announcement: Apr 19 2022
Alpha: ~Aug 24 2022
Beta: ~Dec 8 2022
Pre-Patch: ~Mar 7 2023
Release: ~Apr 11 2023

[username993720]

Hmm, I gotta disagree on that point. Imo all they have to do is add this as the heritage armor and it would be perfect:

Yes to that. And to the female version:

[ercarp]

Yes to that. And to the female version:

Yup, it's pretty much the perfect Heritage Armor Set for NE imo. I would really like to see it happen.

[Revamp Man]

Its a reagent that lets you craft rank 1 leggos into rank 5 leggos ilev 249 for like 1/3 the price of a 291 leggo. Its not as good, but for poor people and alts. Also helps crafter level leggos easier since you can use the mats of a rank 1 instead of rank 2, 3, or 4 which can be up to 4 times as high. I had to spend over a million gold powerleveling JC leggo to max rank just a month ago. Kinda wish I had waited not, but whatever. The reason I want to buy them is so I can verify my auctions somewhat. I can have max rank ones and 249 ones to get more gold flowing it.

Oh and it was hotfixed into the game day before yesterday. Its up for just about everyone but I cant get it to show up on any of my characters.

you had my hopes up for the tier maker lol

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These are the estimates I posted in another thread a few days back:

10.0 Announcement: Apr 19 2022
Alpha: ~Aug 24 2022
Beta: ~Dec 8 2022
Pre-Patch: ~Mar 7 2023
Release: ~Apr 11 2023

i dont see a time when alpha is so late
its definitely possible especially with them being around 6 months behind but im too optimistic

[Local Ardenweald Faerie]

These are the estimates I posted in another thread a few days back:

10.0 Announcement: Apr 19 2022
Alpha: ~Aug 24 2022
Beta: ~Dec 8 2022
Pre-Patch: ~Mar 7 2023
Release: ~Apr 11 2023

While I'm sure the strike last year put a damper on things, I'm not really sure they'd release that late.

At least, I hope. Presumably, the wait in announcing the expansion has nothing to do with delays, but rather the big controversy last year and the lack of a Blizzcon, they had to figure out a new way to announce things.

[Luck4]

Blizzard isn't holding the announcement for no reason, usually, there's a full year time gap between the announcement and the release. I don't think this time will be different.

We must bear into our minds that Blizzard can't fail this time. I mean, I'm on the horde side, and I'm having to play at prime-time to improve my score, but this season just started, this makes me wonder how season 4 will play out... it's kinda scary...

The most deadly thing for an MMO isn't bad lore, bad design, bad balance, it's the lack of players. I still remember when HOTS started to have 10 mins queues and many friends I made there, myself included, stopped playing solely because the queue times had become unbearable.

[Chickat]

My guess would be similar, but a bit earlier.

9.2.5- June 7th
Alpha- June 22nd
Beta- September 15th
Prepatch on PTR- December 7th
Prepatch live- March 7th
10.0 Live- March 28th

Long testing phase, but that can only be a good think when you are revamping the world

[Revamp Man]

Blizzard isn't holding the announcement for no reason, usually, there's a full year time gap between the announcement and the release. I don't think this time will be different.

We must bear into our minds that Blizzard can't fail this time. I mean, I'm on the horde side, and I'm having to play at prime-time to improve my score, but this season just started, this makes me wonder how season 4 will play out... it's kinda scary...

The most deadly thing for an MMO isn't bad lore, bad design, bad balance, it's the lack of players. I still remember when HOTS started to have 10 mins queues and many friends I made there, myself included, stopped playing solely because the queue times had become unbearable.

ill say best case scenario seaon 4 will be shorter than 6 months because theres nothing new in it

[Chickat]

Blizzard isn't holding the announcement for no reason, usually, there's a full year time gap between the announcement and the release. I don't think this time will be different.

We must bear into our minds that Blizzard can't fail this time. I mean, I'm on the horde side, and I'm having to play at prime-time to improve my score, but this season just started, this makes me wonder how season 4 will play out... it's kinda scary...

The most deadly thing for an MMO isn't bad lore, bad design, bad balance, it's the lack of players. I still remember when HOTS started to have 10 mins queues and many friends I made there, myself included, stopped playing solely because the queue times had become unbearable.

Yep, Plus with them confirming a season should last up to 7 months, I think its clear that the 2 seasons arent going to be 4-5 months each. More like 6-7 months each.

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Yes to that. And to the female version:

Too low rez to be heritage armor. Unless you mean remaking it?

[Sondrelk]

ill say best case scenario seaon 4 will be shorter than 6 months because theres nothing new in it

There is technically something new though, the upscaled raids. Recycled content for sure, but in many ways a mechanic as integral it the game as M+ is if it gets carried forward.

[Revamp Man]

There is technically something new though, the upscaled raids. Recycled content for sure, but in many ways a mechanic as integral it the game as M+ is if it gets carried forward.

they have to make the new affix actually meaningful otherwise sludgefist with the affix wont be any different

[Sondrelk]

they have to make the new affix actually meaningful otherwise sludgefist with the affix wont be any different

It's still older raids being appropriately scaled to the newest raids. Really the only thing it has going against it that I can see is the lack of tier sets that can be gained at higher ilvl.

[Mferna]

Sigh.

Blizzard began setting up the theme of the next expansion by sewing random seeds into what is usually the end of the current expac around cata.

1. Cata- after becoming familiar with wrathion thru the rogue legendary character in the last patch he transforms into his whelp form and flies away claiming he’s going to “explore a new land which was once surrounded in mists”

2. MoP’s siege of orgrimmar patch (last patch) literally included an entire patch zone called the timeless isle and introduced a bronze dragon character which would eventually help garrosh go to alternate draenor. The timeless isle and the bronze dragon had virtually nothing to do with MoPs story and popped up randomly at the end. Remember this whole xpac themes were similar to bfa’s: faction war which turned into old god stuff somewhat

3. WoD- ended with archimondes defeat and hurling alternate gul’dan into our Azeroth. Obvi we knew this would lead to gul’dan doing some legion related stuff in our world… and thus came legion. Wow.

4. Legion- ends with sarg stabbing the world with his sword. While this was a bit more vague, if u look earlier on in the expansion they were sewing the seeds for sylvannas acting sketchy with helya and clearly plotting something. There were also zandalari and kultiran npcs found in azsuna.

Bfa- while Bfa ended with the old god nzoth, it had two separate endings. The initial A plot ended in 8.2.5 with sylvannas killing varok and team rocketing away to fulfill her mysterious destiny and abondoning the horde. Which we obvi knew at that point, whatever purpose she was serving we were going to become familiar with and we had also heard mumblings of bwonsamdi’s boss and all this death lore up untill then.

To conclude, the themes thrown in at the end of the expansion are like 90% of the time directly meant to lead into the next expac. As blizzard has been setting up this story progression (hate it all u want) since MOP where before that, vanilla, TBC, and WOTLK and cata were all vastly independent from one another and didn’t spill into their predecessor.

Whatever happens in 10.0 I can assure you, will have something to do with lordaeron.

[Nymrohd]

There is technically something new though, the upscaled raids. Recycled content for sure, but in many ways a mechanic as integral it the game as M+ is if it gets carried forward.

Honestly I think it would be an interesting idea to split current seasons in half. If we could get back to the perfect cadence of Legion (patch with content every X weeks) you could split each new raid season into two; first half has the new raid, second half keeps the new raid and also adds an older raid with a new affix. Could be combined with a much longer Timewalking so it's not just raids from the same expac. Would also be adding that Timewalking's Mythic dungeons into the M+ group (would require them to slowly convert at least a couple of dungeons per xpac into M+ ofc but every xpac has at least a couple of candidates for that).

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Btw Icy Veins reports Orgrimmar ALSO got a stables area. Something tells me it WILL be the worst case scenario and end up being a place you can preview shop mounts.

[Dracullus]

It's still older raids being appropriately scaled to the newest raids. Really the only thing it has going against it that I can see is the lack of tier sets that can be gained at higher ilvl.

There is no problem with creation catalyst up and running from day 1. Better question is if we see new tier next season or it will be just S3 with higher item level to refarm.

[Nymrohd]

There is no problem with creation catalyst up and running from day 1. Better question is if we see new tier next season or it will be just S3 with higher item level to refarm.

Heck they don't even need the creation catalyst. The Vault alone can solve tier.