10.0 SoA leak

[ommmayhems]

Name: Shadows Over Azeroth

Villain: Sabellian

Story:
-Pre-patch: Players and the other characters that came back from shadowlands are invited to a party by Wrathion. Wrathion, in a private conversation between him, Anduin and the player talks about sharing a discovery he has made now that things are cooling down. Party is crashed by a void corrupted Sabellian (possibly mind controlled, possibly gone mad) who takes over the blackrock spire with the help of the infinite dragons. Everyone escapes and regroups in Shadowforge city. Wrathion is injured and needs time to recover.
-Opening cinematic: Sabellian uses Nefarian’s lab to resurrect Malygos.
-Expansion proper: A mysterious blast of magic seen off the coast of Quel’thalas gives back the dragon aspects their power and the main story consists of a succession crisis of the black dragonflight with Wrathion and Sabellian competing on becoming the new black aspect. Wrathion recruits the players, anduin, the explorer’s league and the reliquary to do some archeology on the dragon isle and find the Heart of the First Whelp (a tiny gem that can channel the nature magic of all creatures, including wild gods and loas on azeroth into the one who consumes it), all while Sabellian is trying to resurrect Galakrond as a Chromatic Dragon using a mix of nefarian’s research and void magic. There are also other problems the other dragon aspects have like chromie trying to find out why and how the infinites are working for Sabellian and Nozdormu being of no help whatsoever, Klec dealing with malygos and maybe bringing him back to our side, ysera finding some terrible revelations about elune and fighting off void corruption herself and alexstrasza seemingly acting completely oblivious to everything that is happening. As all this is happening and as anduin is on an adventure with wrathion a different succession crisis is brewing in Stormwind, as anduin is having a personal crisis over whether he is even fit to be king anymore and whether he should even return to Stormwind at all or remain in exile with wrathion. AND on top of that Moira is getting tired of dragons in her mountain so she is plotting to maybe get rid of the black dragons for good.

New continent: the dragon isle will have only 3 zones like the bfa continents. A green hill zone where wrathion and his supporters have gathered, filled with dig sites and shrines and dragon statues. A charred zone where sabellian and his supporters have gathered with new chromatic and twilight horrors and animated dragon statues as well as madness domes which switch every hour between showing the past, present and future of the section of the zone they surround. The third zone is a giant temple sunken into the ground that you can enter and exit at the bottom into a section of Azjol’Nerub. Flying in the first 2 zones is available at launch. The continent is heavily inspired by Iceland. The architecture of the ruins on the island consists of mounds, pyramids and tents all being made with petrified logs and giant bone splinters. The structures are heavily angular and slanted and the giant temple is inspired by the Hallgrimskirkja.

New race: Drakonid. Neutral race like the pandaren. Start at level 60 and only available after completing the pre patch party questline.

New class: Chosen

The race is unlocked in the pre-patch while the class is unlocked during the story. The explorer’s league discovers a temple on the dragon isles where, in a later chapter, wrathion and the player find out that moira has been bringing test subjects from across azeroth and using a special chamber in the temple to imbue them with ancient dragon magic and turning them into chosen. Wrathion is outraged and shuts down the operation, but the citizens of Azeroth who have already become chosen are brought by the player back to stormwind/orgrimmar. When you make a new chosen character your actual character you played this quest with becomes the quest giver that gets you out of the intro experience. The class itself will have 3 specs: life, fire and frost. The class in general is all about teleporting rapidly around a target to position yourself at different ranges which make different spells available. Life is a healing spec which does burst healing in melee range and weaker healing at ranged. Fire is all about a damaging shield which you can make explode knocking you and enemies about everywhere with your shield dealing damage passively while enemies are in melee range with diminishing returns and recharging while no enemies are in melee range. Frost is all about debuffs that last less the further you are from the target and all other attacks that hit harder the further you are from the target.

New progression type: Kinship. Kinship will be a mix between renown and legion artifact power. You get kinship from pvp, dungeons, raids, daily quests, exploration, solo challenges and pretty much anything you do in the new expansion. Gaining kinship levels unlocks campaign chapters, increased stats, new abilities, new passives, new mounts, gear and dungeon and raid difficulties. The entire main story of the expansion will be in the single player campaign with raids and dungeons being entirely self-contained side stories. Each campaign chapter will have an extra hard quest at the end which can range from a mage tower style boss, a scenario like the many deaths of chromie or a variety of more difficult quests that can be done as soon as you get them with enough skill or can be brute forced by grinding more kinship. Many of these quests are class specific challenges, some that require a specific ability that is unlocked at a certain level of kinship. Gear will no longer have stats in SoA and will only have passives or other abilities + a single stat called inner fire that just increases the benefits from your kinship level by a percentage based on how much inner fire you have. This is just so that you can’t take off all your gear and be just as powerful as in full gear. All older gear will only work while in chromie time.

Chromie Time: It’s now just On/Off and is automatically On on all new non-drakonid, non-boosted characters created and can be turned off at any time. All older gear including tier gear, legendaries and legion artifacts will have their stats, abilities and talent trees restored. It can be used at any time, but if you are level 60 you will not gain gain exp and if you are above level 60 chromie time will delevel you to level 60 and your kinship and other mechanics or abilities from SoA will be disabled. Completing achievements while in chromie time will grant you quite a good amount of kinship to incentivize players to go back and experience older expansions on their own time and maybe even play parts of older expansions they have missed the first time around on their main characters. While in chromie time you can also take part in quest chains that have otherwise been removed like the legendary chains in MoP and WoD and the Battle of Undercity in WotLK. A new mount will have Chromie riding with you whenever you summon it.

2 new cities: Black Rook Hold (Alliance) and Andorhal (Horde). These 2 cities will have Zidormi in them that will be an all in 1 phasing mechanic and will allow you to switch the world to any phase from cataclysm to SoA since the story will take the player all over azeroth and outland and a lot of events will change the layout and inhabitants of these zones, Zidormi will allow you to browse through and choose to set the whole world back to any state of the world that you have unlocked from any patch of any expansion.

At the rate things are going, release in Q1 of 2023 is just hopeful even while anticipating crunch, I don’t see how it can be released by then unless stuff gets cut and placed in a later patch. Most likely everything in outland since it involves multiple zones being remade and being taken over by the void. Alternatively I can see it being cut completely and being saved for 11.0 to be done properly. Then maybe even a Q4 2022 release is possible.