Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Reive]

the devs are stubborn. they're going to spend the next expansion trying to fix a system that has more cons than pros. they should completely redesign the concept of hero talents

[Ersula]

The problem is if one of your two hero talent picks will be better than the other. Like being a dps spec and you have two choices for hero talents, but one does higher dps. And so all of the guides tell you to spec one of the two and guilds demand you run that one, even if the thematic was not the one you wanted for your character.

"But I am a beast master! I love using living pets in combat, not undead ones! Why do I need to spec into Dark Ranger to be competitive?"

AKA Covenants

Unlike covenants, people can have as many spec builds as they want. You'll be switching hero specs all the time based on the situation.

SoD phase 2 lost 75% of its playerbase from phase 1 before they did the xp changes. theres a reason they bumped up the xp buff from phase 3 to phase 2, no one was playing. plenty of people have been logged into retail all season long.

That sounds typical for every version of wow. SoD phase 1 had a freakish number of players.

Imagine if Blizzard just gave us class skins or total conversion glyphs. They could bypass so much superfluous discourse with a bundle of texture and model swaps.

I think they'd lose more subscribers by giving people everything they want cosmetically instead of actually new combat abilities. Players are fickle. Cosmetics aren't as fun as people say they are.

[Makorus]

Imagine if Blizzard just gave us class skins or total conversion glyphs. They could bypass so much superfluous discourse with a bundle of texture and model swaps.

How would that even work with something like Dark Ranger?

[Reive]

sod is going to reach its peak after phase 4 where people are max lvl and the devs move beyond levelling as focus

[justwatching]

SoD phase 2 lost 75% of its playerbase from phase 1 before they did the xp changes. theres a reason they bumped up the xp buff from phase 3 to phase 2, no one was playing. plenty of people have been logged into retail all season long.

I dont know why people feel the need to make these absurd claims that are easily disproven by available data. https://ironforge.pro/population/sod/overall/ This is based on WCL so even if you want to adjust for Alts SoD is doing completely fine.

[Nibelheimy]

Xal gunna take the heart before Garrosh can use it. He's coming back baby! (if only)

[milkmustache]

We do have a perfect connection between Xal'atath and a possible Blackrock Depths/Blackrock Spire revisited raid in Phase 4 (Since they were dungeons in the 50-60 bracket, surely they can be revisited in P4):

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Modgud


Considering how Xal'atath whispered madness into the Dark Iron Empress, she can easily be retroactively connected to the Dark Iron/Dark Horde storyline from Classic Blackrock.

And since Xal'atath is an agent of the Void, she can definitely have ties to Onyxia/Nefarian.

Either way, SoD is a golden opportunity to build up Retail's villains; since SoD is literally Retail's past, expanded.

Ooo, I completely forgot about this connection post-TWW announcement.

That being said, Moira and Dagran are going to be major characters in TWW with Dagran finally being of age. Not that they need to continue turning faction leaders evil, but there could certainly be a plotline where Xal'atath tries to lure Dagran II into alleigence due to the former covenant between her and Modgud, of whom he is a direct descendent. I think you're totally right here, we may see a culmination of the Xal'atath SoD storyline in BRD.

[Gurahk]

People still don't understand that the hero spec system is a solution to the class trees becoming bloated in the future. It's quite frankly a genius solution, and if you truly want to immerse yourself with a chosen hero spec, you can just swap back to it with a click after you're done min-maxing in a raid or something.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

Xal gunna take the heart before Garrosh can use it. He's coming back baby! (if only)

He will call xal'atath a bitch.

[milkmustache]

Xal gunna take the heart before Garrosh can use it. He's coming back baby! (if only)

Garrosh hopping through another timeline to return back to the story would be so dumb but so excusable. Garrosh is an awesome character who I wish lasted longer.

[Nibelheimy]

Garrosh hopping through another timeline to return back to the story would be so dumb but so excusable. Garrosh is an awesome character who I wish lasted longer.

Snap. I do actually think there is a minor possibility it could happen, but the chances are slim.

[Dracullus]

SoD phase 2 lost 75% of its playerbase from phase 1 before they did the xp changes. theres a reason they bumped up the xp buff from phase 3 to phase 2, no one was playing. plenty of people have been logged into retail all season long.

Pretty obvious, starting new and first few zones are strongest in Classic, same happened in 2019. Blizzard would have to done a lot more work than few secrets and quests here and there to convince more people to keep playing levels 30+.

Other way would be adding retail rewards for completing stuff in classic. But I think very quickly classic players would wake up in world where 9/10 people on server doesn't even like classic but want speedrun through this just for some transmog.. yeah I leave rest to your imagination.

[Makorus]

Xal gunna take the heart before Garrosh can use it. He's coming back baby! (if only)

Xal already has the Heart.

[Woggmer]

Honestly, what I think would give the story a lot more room for that is a new unplayable adversarial faction. Not just groups of baddies we wipe through every expansion to be reskinned to new baddies in the next, but a lasting adversary that tracks across story lines. If the Horde and Alliance aren't going to be foes any more, give them a common enemy that forces them to stick together. My hope is that Avaloren in the future will provide just that.

I'm of the mind that they should stop chasing after trying to recreate Legion. It's failed before with BFA and incorporating N'zoth, it failed a 2nd time with trying to make the Jailer into a grand mastermind... They didn't try with DF because they knew at that point it wouldn't work.

As for the whole faction tension thing... It's really not that hard, just for once... make the Alliance the aggressors, because more often than not they keep using the Horde to be the aggressors and people are sick of it.

[Cheezits]

People still don't understand that the hero spec system is a solution to the class trees becoming bloated in the future. It's quite frankly a genius solution, and if you truly want to immerse yourself with a chosen hero spec, you can just swap back to it with a click after you're done min-maxing in a raid or something.

I think its a combination of people being mad its not class skins and also confusion as why they are marketing it so hard (as it's just new talents).

It's kind of a point to the lack of features in the expansion.

[milkmustache]

I'm of the mind that they should stop chasing after trying to recreate Legion. It's failed before with BFA and incorporating N'zoth, it failed a 2nd time with trying to make the Jailer into a grand mastermind... They didn't try with DF because they knew at that point it wouldn't work.

As for the whole faction tension thing... It's really not that hard, just for once... make the Alliance the aggressors, because more often than not they keep using the Horde to be the aggressors and people are sick of it.

I agree but the story telling clearly has no room for any playable faction to be anything other than a hero. It's uniting to fight threat again and again, which is fine because that's always been the case, it's just the lack of distinction between factions now that makes it more frustrating.

I honestly wouldn't even mind if they made more of an effort with the Dragonscale Expedition than it being just a silly group. It was cool seeing Reliquary and Explorer's League members have their own respective set ups and worth together, but aside from that everything was just kinda "I'm here to have fun!". Which again, cool, fine, but at some point when all of the playable races are within the same roles with no additional flavor from all of the racial lore they have built up, it just feels stale and foreign to everything that had been built up in the past.

[Cheezits]

Considering the new Saga model it's really rough that Sylvanas wasn't the final boss of BFA because that would've worked perfectly leading up to Zovaal.

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I honestly wouldn't even mind if they made more of an effort with the Dragonscale Expedition than it being just a silly group. It was cool seeing Reliquary and Explorer's League members have their own respective set ups and worth together, but aside from that everything was just kinda "I'm here to have fun!". Which again, cool, fine, but at some point when all of the playable races are within the same roles with no additional flavor from all of the racial lore they have built up, it just feels stale and foreign to everything that had been built up in the past.

DF followed the Exiles Reach model for "you dont need to know anything to enjoy this" but they ignored a ton of racial and class order lore at its expense. The second they had the Exiles Reach characters in the first camp I figured that was how the expansion would go.

I think it was intentional that the Earthen Ring was used so little for that reason. Kirin Tor squeezed by because Kalec belongs to it (at the start of DF)

LOL what if the dev talk was something like "we are not going to do the Earthen Ring because new players will be confused which elemental people are good and which ones are bad"

[Viridiel]

Well then, that would certainly be something. Still, retroactively added lore does not excite me. We all member the reception to "Jailer was behind everything" in SL.

It's all retroactive because the concept is meant to be exploring things that supposedly happened from perspectives other than our own. As long as there's nothing major they're expecting us to believe happened that we haven't heard about, I think it's great.

For example, they recently added a xenophobic kaldorei nationalist who will definitely show up if we return to Kalimdor.

[milkmustache]

Considering the new Saga model it's really rough that Sylvanas wasn't the final boss of BFA because that would've worked perfectly leading up to Zovaal.

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DF followed the Exiles Reach model for "you dont need to know anything to enjoy this" but they ignored a ton of racial and class order lore at its expense. The second they had the Exiles Reach characters in the first camp I figured that was how the expansion would go.

I think it was intentional that the Earthen Ring was used so little for that reason. Kirin Tor squeezed by because Kalec belongs to it (at the start of DF)

LOL what if the dev talk was something like "we are not going to do the Earthen Ring because new players will be confused which elemental people are good and which ones are bad"

Man dont remind me how under utilized Khadgar was in this expansion. I liked the idea of him continuing to mentor Kalecgos into his new role as Aspect of Magic, but then he completely disappeared after being heavily present in all of 10.0. What a weird, weird situation.

But you're totally right, there was an absolute lack of factions or groups that have been heavily present in the game in the past. The Earthen Ring should've been there. The Kirin Tor work okay.

[Darkarath]

People still don't understand that the hero spec system is a solution to the class trees becoming bloated in the future. It's quite frankly a genius solution, and if you truly want to immerse yourself with a chosen hero spec, you can just swap back to it with a click after you're done min-maxing in a raid or something.

Genius in principle, not in execution.

I main a Vengeance DH and the Aldrachi Reaver is one of the more simple Hero Talents tree IMO, yet it adds a bunch of stuff that I will need to pay attention to.

Frankly, just reading the wall of text of some talents makes me lose interest.

Talents trees will become bloated no matter what. I guess that they have a plan and it will last until TLT is done, which is a lot of years, so good job, but I cannot even imagine how bloated with skills we will be by then.

IMO WoW needs less skills, not more.

Until they solve the problem of having to add more skills each expansion just to spice things up a bit, skill bloat will be a problem. Maybe a system similar to D3 in which we can just select a number of active skills will make things easier and more manageable, but I guess that something like that would imply a full revamp of the combat system.

IMO FFXIV'S Job system is a true masterpiece because they can add new classes indefinitely. If you get bored with one you can change to another, all in the same character without losing anything. You do not need talents. You have more variety and less problems, and skill effects way beyond any WoW class has.

Combat is way superior in WoW though.