Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Chickat]

Are we even sure Elune's on the moon? Or is that where she just conduits her power from on Azeroth?

No, but she has ties to the moon. Maybe an old base there? Maybe the keeper dwarves there would start worshiping her instead. She very well could have her own facility there as she probably wants Azeroth's world soul too.

But physically, no shes more important than that. Shes probably somewhere else right now. She may have never even physically been to Azeroth, but theres a chance she had some of her followers go there. Perhaps to the moon.

Either way I was just joking about making a fake moon dwarf leak. I do think the idea could be cool, but its not gonna happen. Lets move on.

[D4NNYB0Y]

If a world revamp happens, you think Nelves would still start in Teldrassil? No, they wouldnt. Even if it means they start at 10 like an allied race. In a revamped world it makes 0 sense for any race to still start in a Cata world. At the bare minimum they would need to update the starter zones, or make everything start at 10.

Agreed, and players that wanted to level through the older starting zone experience could use Chromie time.

[Pheraz]

I did refute this a few pages ago, but they're not going to update some of the older dungeons to go with Mythic+ but the dungeons that have been revamped like Scholomance, Scarlet Monastery (and Scarlet Halls), Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, Upper Blackrock Spire, Blackfathom Deeps, Razorfen Kraul and Razorfen Downs.. all have the potential to be made into Mythic+ dungeons should Blizz choose to.

(Stormwind Stockades and Ragefire Chasm were revamped as well, but they're too short and easy for Mythic+ and both entrances are within the major cities so people of the opposing faction can't do one or the other.)

I should mention this bit but in the Forsaken Heritage armor quest ....

I don't know... but it does seem like Blizz is giving the Scarlet Crusade a bit of attention lately.

yeah ... also a lot of lordaeron hints since shadowlands in general. I am pretty sure they see the whole lordaeron story as a core and very essential part of their work. Especially metzen has this second "identiy" beside thrall and orcs, which are human paladins and lordaeron. I know I am starting to look like a weirdo when I say that I still dont believe we are going to yet another magical hidden island after dragonflight. This is marketing wise just not selling enough, especially for this blizzcon after years of pause and drama. And ofc for the anniversary. My bets are still on light invasion/eastern kingdoms revamp

[Reive]

DF is an okay expansion with more accessible outdoor content than SL. I personally spent 0 hours raiding this time around, it wasn't aesthetically pleasing.

i disagree with your take. i think shadowlands had better outdoor content than df. even korthia was better than zaralek.

Let's not kid ourselves that WoW is any more than indoor/outdoor PvE and arena/bgs. You didn't enjoy it, all expansions will repeat the same formula. Maybe it's time for a break to try other games or hobbies.

again, i disagree. while raiding and pvp have always been the main pillars of the game, every new expansion used to bring something new. dragonriding aside, dragonflight hasn't added much. they gave us so many patches this expansion but there is barely any content in them and the little we get has almost no variety. did we really need dreamsurges when we got time rifts 1 month earlier? Dragonflight is the expansion for people that don't want to play the game

P.s as i said above, i unsubbed last month because i wasn't having fun. i still like wow's core gameplay and the setting, but if 11.0 is like dragonflight then i'm probably done with the game.

[Hitei]

yeah ... also a lot of lordaeron hints since shadowlands in general. I am pretty sure they see the whole lordaeron story as a core and very essential part of their work. Especially metzen has this second "identiy" beside thrall and orcs, which are human paladins and lordaeron. I know I am starting to look like a weirdo when I say that I still dont believe we are going to yet another magical hidden island after dragonflight. This is marketing wise just not selling enough, especially for this blizzcon after years of pause and drama. And ofc for the anniversary. My bets are still on light invasion/eastern kingdoms revamp

A new zone is much better marketing than a revamp. I feel like people focus so much on what they see in very specific forums/discord that they don't recognize the average player just wants to do new content, not see WPL for the third time but "it's even greener this time!"

There is a reason that Cata didn't go over well.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

A new zone is much better marketing than a revamp. I feel like people focus so much on what they see in very specific forums/discord that they don't recognize the average player just wants to do new content, not see WPL for the third time but "it's even greener this time!"

There is a reason that Cata didn't go over well.

I mean, noone from us knows what average player wants, not pheraz, me or you it's really pointless when it comes to denying someones "average person wants that" with "average person wants that, not what you said". We don't have the numbers and at least when it comes to just social media, revamp is the most talked about currently and dwarves.

It's all pure speculation and cata happened many, many years ago, they can do a lot better this time, If it will happen in the end.
I don't think its set for next expansion but i would like to be wrong.

[Chickat]

Honestly, a Titan-themed base with Elune-esc architecture on the Moon would be great to see, yeah.

As for Elune herself? Idk, I think we'd have a higher chance seeing her this patch than on Azeroth's moon, just my opinion however. If not, then we'll likely see her in a Domain of Life expac

Yeah, if the moon thing somehow happened, I dont think we could see her there. Not at launch at least. But ruins with various left behind elune keepers and various elune worshiping races? Absolutely.

A moon xpac would be cosmic and grounded all in one. Kind of Outland level imo. Not full on cosmic, but not on Azeroth, and kinda wild and cool looking. Also imagine Moon gravity. They could have some fun with that.

[Pheraz]

A new zone is much better marketing than a revamp. I feel like people focus so much on what they see in very specific forums/discord that they don't recognize the average player just wants to do new content, not see WPL for the third time but "it's even greener this time!"

There is a reason that Cata didn't go over well.

Yeah and that reason was not the world revamp, mainly because people were first shocked how "hard" (old standarts) the dungeons were, especially for people who started in wrath, where the dungeons were very easy. Secondly because the last raid tier was art-wise underwhelming.

Marketing wise anotrher island to explore after dragonflight would be underwhelming for people who played dragonflight. But you are probably right for new people. Now the question is what the target audience is for this 20 years old game. Not being ironic, I am actually curious.

Lordaeron, scarlet crusade, undeads, worgen and "evil light" has so deep lore and especially so much good artwork laying on the table that I am very sure they could make it into a killer xpac. Especially since alliance players might be kind of sick of stormwind humans and lion symbolism.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

. But you are probably right for new people. Now the question is what the target audience is for this 20 years old game. Not being ironic, I am actually curious.

When im a new player going to other MMO, i don't really care about what is the latest expansion, but usually other big mmos do introduction part pretty different from WoW.

In Wow i guess if you're new player and go very quickly through lvling you don't even know whats going on, like we have DF now and new players start in BFA with factions war, so there's at least a faction part to it that you choose in the beginning with your race, but no faction conflict is present in newest expansion they go into after lvl 60 so it's like wtf.

Next expansion will have DF as new player default experience, where there is almost 0 faction presence. then in some cases i could imagine a situation where new player asks themselves "where are these faction stories i picked character for?"

Starting new player experience is very weird at least on retail wow i would say.

[Hitei]

I mean, noone knows what average player wants, not pheraz, me or you it's really pointless when it comes to denying someones "average person wants that" with "average person wants that, not what you said". We don't have the numbers and at least when it comes to just social media, revamp is the most talked about currently and dwarves.

It's all pure speculation and cata happened many, many years ago, they can do a lot better this time if it will happen in the end, but i don't think its next expansion but i would like to be wrong.

I have no doubt that they would do a revamp better now. It'd be hard to do it worse.

But I also think "the average player would rather go to a new area than somewhere they've already been twice" isn't a particularly controversial statement. Even the praise for Cata zones is largely for interesting bits of questing or narrative events, not the zone updates themselves. I don't think I've ever seen someone argue they like slighty-more-healed Cata-EPL more than original deathland EPL, or that Desolace is super cool now that it has a green area in the middle. Even the most altered zones, like 1K needles or Azshara aren't typically brought up as particular highpoints of the expansion (people liked the giant gun though).

This only becomes a bigger problem now that it's a revamp of a revamp, and now that most zones narratively are being rebuilt, not destroyed. Stuff like zones being torn up by earthquakes was at least inherently exciting for a brief period in a way that "Gilneas' small towns are rebuilt!" or EPL being healed lacks.

I think it's a bit telling that something like Lordaeron being revamped always gets paired with some huge exciting additional thing. "Lordaeron revamp... and the Naaru are invading, and Yrel is coming from the AU with a massive army of lightbound to wage war on the planet!", "EK revamp... but also the Light and Void are having their final war on it!". Even the people advocating for 3.0 still feel like narrative excitement has to be brought to it rather than it being an exciting thing itself, and I don't blame them for it because it's hard to sell regrown meadows and rebuilt farms as something new and exciting.

[Schwert]

When im a new player going to other MMO, i don't really care about what is the latest expansion, but usually other big mmos do introduction part pretty different from WoW.

In Wow i guess if you're new player and go very quickly through lvling you don't even know whats going on, like we have DF now and new players start in BFA with factions war, so there's at least a faction part to it that you choose in the beginning with your race, but no faction conflict is present in newest expansion they go into after lvl 60 so it's like wtf.

Next expansion will have DF as new player default experience, where there is almost 0 faction presence. then in some cases i could imagine a situation where new player asks themselves "where are these faction stories i picked character for?"

Starting new player experience is very weird at least on retail wow i would say.

Got a friend coming back to the game right now and this is already a massive problem for them, and they have a past basic grasp on the game's lore. I feel awful for brand new players.

Cataclysm is, sadly, still the best actual lore introduction to the game on retail, and is far superior despite questing mechanics being outdated simply because it actually builds upon the world at a basic enough level a new player can learn about their race and the basics. And I'd be willing to bet money a lot of people who pick up an RPG are wanting to pick it up to play an RPG to start, not M+ or arenas or something. We fail to grasp people and get them invested early, they won't stay, nor get that hook a lot of us did back in the day where we get invested in our race / faction.

[micwini]

Anything new in the last ~50 pages?

[Nymrohd]

A new zone is much better marketing than a revamp. I feel like people focus so much on what they see in very specific forums/discord that they don't recognize the average player just wants to do new content, not see WPL for the third time but "it's even greener this time!"

There is a reason that Cata didn't go over well.

? If the issue was lack of hype for a revamp then subs would not have surged at the last quarter of Wrath and for the launch quarter of Cata. More people signed up for the revamp than to kill the Lich King. The time when the revamp was released was the peak of WoW's popularity.

And we are comparing that to they "hype" for a new land that no one who is not wired to Warcraft forums and reddit will have even heard of?

[ImTheMizAwesome]

I have no doubt that they would do a revamp better now. It'd be hard to do it worse.

But I also think "the average player would rather go to a new area than somewhere they've already been twice" isn't a particularly controversial statement. Even the praise for Cata zones is largely for interesting bits of questing or narrative events, not the zone updates themselves. I don't think I've ever seen someone argue they like slighty-more-healed Cata-EPL more than original deathland EPL, or that Desolace is super cool now that it has a green area in the middle. Even the most altered zones, like 1K needles or Azshara aren't typically brought up as particular highpoints of the expansion (people liked the giant gun though).

This only becomes a bigger problem now that it's a revamp of a revamp, and now that most zones narratively are being rebuilt, not destroyed. Stuff like zones being torn up by earthquakes was at least inherently exciting for a brief period in a way that "Gilneas' small towns are rebuilt!" or EPL being healed lacks.

I think it's a bit telling that something like Lordaeron being revamped always gets paired with some huge exciting additional thing. "Lordaeron revamp... and the Naaru are invading, and Yrel is coming from the AU with a massive army of lightbound to wage war on the planet!", "EK revamp... but also the Light and Void are having their final war on it!". Even the people advocating for 3.0 still feel like narrative excitement has to be brought to it rather than it being an exciting thing itself, and I don't blame them for it because it's hard to sell regrown meadows and rebuilt farms as something new and exciting.

I mean there are many variables to "average players", how many people that played in cata are still playing wow right now on retail?
How many people start in legion for example and never really even lvled in these old zones, so with fresh stories on these lands and graphical revamps it would be still something new to explore, something that they didn't experienced before.

The questing and narrative would be big part of world revamp again, it's integral part of it and like i said it would be much better right now, especially with Metzen being there possibly correcting his mistakes from around the time that Cata was developed.

Also meadows and rebuilt farms wouldn't be a selling point of a revamp expansion, it would be some kind of "coming home" scenario with advancing plots that were long forgotten for the sake of just going to new islands/planets, favorite races and maybe their capitol cities having big presence again and such.

But everyone is different when it comes to feeling the themes of certain stuff, for me in that case full underground expansion or another cosmic on different planet expansion as 11.0 sounds like a snoozefest that hardly gets me excited as a theme.

[Schwert]

? If the issue was lack of hype for a revamp then subs would not have surged at the last quarter of Wrath, way after the Lich King was available and for the launch quarter of Cata. The time when the revamp was released was the peak of WoW's popularity.

I'd also like to wager a reason that the revamp wasn't taken so well is because it was borderline just content for leveling a new alt.
While's it's hard to tell how many players truly spend most of their time questing, doing quest content that's like 50+ levels above you isn't engaging, and not everybody really plays alts.

We now have technology like world quests and scaling that'd allow the content to be viable for players of all levels, and additionally unlock even more content in certain zones at max level. There's more ways to approach these things, but effectively boxing your average player into making an alt to experience a core chunk of an expansion's content properly wasn't a good move.

[Nymrohd]

Anything new in the last ~50 pages?

It seems pretty clear that the Diablo Leak that also mentioned a revamp and the expansion's acronym being SoA is fake.

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I'd also like to wager a reason that the revamp wasn't taken so well is because it was borderline just content for leveling a new alt.
While's it's hard to tell how many players truly spend most of their time questing, doing quest content that's like 50+ levels above you isn't engaging, and not everybody really plays alts.

We now have technology like world quests and scaling that'd allow the content to be viable for players of all levels, and additionally unlock even more content in certain zones at max level. There's more ways to approach these things, but effectively boxing your average player into making an alt to experience a core chunk of an expansion's content properly wasn't a good move.

And again, the revamp was not taken well after people experienced it. People were insanely hyped for it. And that was before WoW had a crazy leap in graphic quality from MoP onward.

[Schwert]

It seems pretty clear that the Diablo Leak that also mentioned a revamp and the expansion's acronym being SoA is fake.

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And again, the revamp was not taken well after people experienced it. People were insanely hyped for it. And that was before WoW had a crazy leap in graphic quality from MoP onward.

Because some of the zones, not all, were literally destroyed? And some races - lmao night elf - got dumpstered?

People want to see things brought up, not torn down. Especially the things they've invested into for 10+ years, and at this point, rebuilding the world, updating the lore, and making sure it's modern 20+ years in would do the game a favor, especially for the groups that were disappointed in Catalcysm, and some that continue to be disappointed to this day as to how they can't seem to get things to be excited about for more than 5 minutes.

Only way to fix that is to fix the world.
Aka: revamp.

[Hitei]

? If the issue was lack of hype for a revamp then subs would not have surged at the last quarter of Wrath, way after the Lich King was available and for the launch quarter of Cata. The time when the revamp was released was the peak of WoW's popularity.

Why would you assume that? Subs surge for any expansion. That isn't an indication of the hype for a particular one.

I think it's disingenuous to pretend that sub level is somehow tied to that specific element, especially when Cata also included a typical new "continent" of five zones, two new races with their own zones, new class combinations and the gimmick of being able to fly in the old world for the first time.

I think it's even more disingenuous to suggest that a second expansion of "updated EK Kalimdor" would hold similar levels of interest to the original idea of old zones being broken and made flyable.

[Pheraz]

I have no doubt that they would do a revamp better now. It'd be hard to do it worse.

But I also think "the average player would rather go to a new area than somewhere they've already been twice" isn't a particularly controversial statement. Even the praise for Cata zones is largely for interesting bits of questing or narrative events, not the zone updates themselves. I don't think I've ever seen someone argue they like slighty-more-healed Cata-EPL more than original deathland EPL, or that Desolace is super cool now that it has a green area in the middle. Even the most altered zones, like 1K needles or Azshara aren't typically brought up as particular highpoints of the expansion (people liked the giant gun though).

There are some zones that I would call a success and others not. Thousand needles was previously def. better, redreridge mountains on the other hand is freaking incredible, I guess you played it too? 10/10 can really recommend It is kind of like an action movie.

I am probably being wrong and it is what is the most obvious which is avaloren and khaz algar, but I think the game desperately needs a revamp visually, level design wise and especially new player experience wise. Currently it is total chaos after you leave the new starter island. If they want to go for another 10 years, they need a solid plan and evergreens. I am not sure if this plan can be to always add new islands and landmasses and leave the rest in ruins. Also think of things like client size and so on.
The problems with "wasted" zones in cata is no more since they improved on world content like world quests and missions and so on.
Another thing is you need to stay iconic. For example blood/high elves. You dont want to add more "noble" "elven" creatures who think they are the best. I mean, you could but then you devaluate the work youve done already. They also don*t want to add more "paladin"-like races and factions. You can totally start over in a new game in a new art universe but warcraft exists so long that certain directions in art and theme are just "set".

[Nymrohd]

Why would you assume that? Subs surge for any expansion. That isn't an indication of the hype for a particular one.

I think it's disingenuous to pretend that sub level is somehow tied to that specific element, especially when Cata also included a typical new "continent" of five zones, two new races with their own zones, new class combinations and the gimmick of being able to fly in the old world for the first time.

I think it's even more disingenuous to suggest that a second expansion of "updated EK Kalimdor" would hold similar levels of interest to the original idea of old zones being broken and made flyable.

Subs do not surge for every expansion. They did not surge for MoP.

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There are some zones that I would call a success and others not. Thousand needles was previously def. better, redreridge mountains on the other hand is freaking incredible, I guess you played it too? 10/10 can really recommend It is kind of like an action movie.

I am probably being wrong and it is what is the most obvious which is avaloren and khaz algar, but I think the game desperately needs a revamp visually, level design wise and especially new player experience wise. Currently it is total chaos after you leave the new starter island. If they want to go for another 10 years, they need a solid plan and evergreens. I am not sure if this plan can be to always add new islands and landmasses and leave the rest in ruins. Also think of things like client size and so on.
The problems with "wasted" zones in cata is no more since they improved on world content like world quests and missions and so on.
Another thing is you need to stay iconic. For example blood/high elves. You dont want to add more "noble" "elven" creatures who think they are the best. I mean, you could but then you devaluate the work youve done already. They also don*t want to add more "paladin"-like races and factions. You can totally start over in a new game in a new art universe but warcraft exists so long that certain directions in art and theme are just "set".

There is also the issue that enough time has passed that a proper revamp can give you VERY DIFFERENT versions of the zones. Beyond the fact that the graphic update is massive, settlements could completely change in size due to the time difference.