Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Kiivar86]

-New Talent: Arcane Pulse – Replaces Arcane Explosion. A pulse of Arcane magic erupts from underneath your target, dealing Arcane damage to all enemies within 2 yards. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets. Each Arcane Charge increases damage, radius, and mana cost.

I never did like Arcane Explosion needing me to be up in the thick of it, so that's a nice one.

Not really happy with Mirror Images being only 15 seconds, that's a lot less time, woof.

-Strike of the Windlord is now on a choice node with Whirling Dragon Punch

Oh damn it all, I like both of those.

[Nymrohd]

I am mostly loving the class changes

[Eldryth]

Dual wielding survival hunters!!!!

And a much bigger focus on bombs, so the Survival changes overall seem like a massive monkey's paw given how many people seem to hate that aspect of the spec.

[Lady Atia]

Dual wielding survival hunters!!!! Also, Single Minded Fury is being removed?

YES! Now ease up on transmog restrictions so we can use the Sylvanas daggers for survival!

[BaumanKing]

The fifth boss of The Voidspire is the Lightblinded Vanguard, which suggests that we won’t just be fighting Void forces, but also forces of the Light along the way.

Well, well, as I predicted. The Army of Light will finally show its true colors. It's strange to see Lothraxion tho. After all, he had once begged Xe'ra to spare Alleria's life. I hope he doesn't die as anticlimactically as Locus-Walker.

[Cheezits]

Which dungeon is Lothraxion a part of?

[Jaggler]

I am very curious how Fire will play it reads very... gutted and rather passive.

[Ersula]

What do Voidlords have to do with WarCraft roots anyway? Prior to TWW, if you didn't never Chronicles, you wouldn't even know they existed.

That does make sense why a lot of the Void stuff seems rather low effort to me. They clearly want to move on to something else. Lets just hope its actually better.

I think you're right about Void Lords never being Metzen's baby, but they're something that got namedropped constantly since TBC.

Which dungeon is Lothraxion a part of?

March on the Sunwell. We have to fight the void & the light who want to use the sunwell to hit self-destruct on the planet, which has apparently been a thing this whole time. As well as my theory about extreme light being the easiest thing to corrupt, as some of the light allies instantly turning to void. Sounds like a very chaotic instance.

[Jaggler]

Where do you guys get the Dungeon journal thingies from?

[Throren]

Crendor has an hour long video exploring new Silvermoon



He also has videos on his channel exploring the new Eversong and the two housing zones

[Teriz]

Dual wielding survival hunters!!!! Also, Single Minded Fury is being removed?

With that and Pack Leader, it looks like we can finally play as Rexxar.

[Lady Atia]

I am very curious how Fire will play it reads very... gutted and rather passive.

If you read the "combat for everyone" post, you will realize they are making every spec and class easier to play with midnight (atleast that's the goal). The focus is no longer about mastering your class, but playing mechanics. Which is a good change imo.

Healer changes also look good on paper, cant wait to try it out soon!

[rainhard]

If a light sunwell can destroy the planet what can a void one do?

[Lady Atia]

If a light sunwell can destroy the planet what can a void one do?

Spawn ..... lots of tentacles?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Dual wielding survival hunters!!!! Also, Single Minded Fury is being removed?

Wooo yaaa baby, hunter I’m coming hooooooome!

[Merryck]

If Survival Hunter didn't have grenades and bombs, I'd probably play it. Hopefully they get rid of that crap when they add Tinker.

[Hearthfinder]

I got a bit held up and watched the videos an hour late. Some thoughts!

- Presentation is A-tier. Great job after the mess that was Gamescom. They really poured a lot of love into this one, and it shows. Well done! Maybe each expansion should get one of those properly narrated 30 min videos from now on?

- Big kudos to Kaivax for asking some of the popular questions from the forums for the Q&A. I was worried they'd only cherry-pick the easiest ones or the ones strictly relevant to Midnight's announced content. But it feels like I really picked a solid bunch of them from every corner of the community.

- It didn't really feel like a deep dive. More like a polished retelling of what was told at Gamescom. I expected this, but am still left a little bit disappointed. I want more out of Midnight, but maybe my expectations were just too high. We got nuggets of new information and footage for sure, as well as several clarifications, but when I think of a "deep dive," I imagine the BlizzCon panels of old with tons and tons of PowerPoint slides featuring concept art, ideas, systems, etc. It's absolutely crazy that the deep dive video only briefly mentioned Apex talents without actually showing them. I would've expected a list at this point, at least 3-4 examples.

- Annoyingly dodging popular requests for character customisation, glyphs, player races, world revamps, etc. "We have this approach where we like to do it when it makes sense in the story, but ultimately our goal is complete parity between all races" (paraphrasing). Well, uh, you're adding like a few hair colours for one race in Midnight, which is about the same as what you added in Dragonflight and The War Within. At this rate, it just looks like a way to dodge the question because even Blizzard must realise that with this pace, it'll take them two decades to get this done (WoD and Shadowlands did it in one expansion). Same with zone revamps. If they keep doing 1 every 2-3 expansions, Azeroth will never truly be revamped because by the time they finish the last zones, the first ones will be ancient already. They just need to set their minds on doing one of these major projects and invest in it. But clearly, not a priority for them.

- A lot of textures in the alpha footage look pretty rough, honestly. Thinking for example of the leaves on trees in Eversong Woods. I guess they'll add more polish over time but at the moment it doesn't look super impressive. I was way more impressed by places like Stormsong Valley and Zuldazar back when they were added.

It's pretty clear to me that the devs, while professional and with the best of intentions, really just wing it with most of these answers. It reminds me of when I'm having a client meeting at work, and they ask me about something I haven't done yet, prompting me to just come up with something that makes it sound like I didn't just drop the ball or forget about it. "It's something we like to do, and it's absolutely a good thing to look at provided X and Y, but right now we think Z is what we should be focused on".

Popular community requests might sometimes end up in the game, but it feels like Blizzard just completely ignores most of them. They need to get much better at doing pure fan service.

Anyway, overall I'd rate today's presentations a solid B. Great presentation, somewhat disappointing answers to a lot of questions. Good thing the Alpha drops soon!

[hattahat]

Which dungeon is Lothraxion a part of?

Nexus-Point Xenas. According to the Dungeon Journal, the goal of stopping the Voidstorm is technically the same for both us and him. The difference is that Lothraxion takes a much more extreme approach, trying to blow up the entire facility, and we step in to prevent that. So he might not be a complete villain here—at least not at that point.

[Lady Atia]

I got a bit held up and watched the videos an hour late. Some thoughts!

- Presentation is A-tier. Great job after the mess that was Gamescom. They really poured a lot of love into this one, and it shows. Well done! Maybe each expansion should get one of those properly narrated 30 min videos from now on?

- Big kudos to Kaivax for asking some of the popular questions from the forums for the Q&A. I was worried they'd only cherry-pick the easiest ones or the ones strictly relevant to Midnight's announced content. But it feels like I really picked a solid bunch of them from every corner of the community.

- It didn't really feel like a deep dive. More like a polished retelling of what was told at Gamescom. I expected this, but am still left a little bit disappointed. I want more out of Midnight, but maybe my expectations were just too high. We got nuggets of new information and footage for sure, as well as several clarifications, but when I think of a "deep dive," I imagine the BlizzCon panels of old with tons and tons of PowerPoint slides featuring concept art, ideas, systems, etc. It's absolutely crazy that the deep dive video only briefly mentioned Apex talents without actually showing them. I would've expected a list at this point, at least 3-4 examples.

- Annoyingly dodging popular requests for character customisation, glyphs, player races, world revamps, etc. "We have this approach where we like to do it when it makes sense in the story, but ultimately our goal is complete parity between all races" (paraphrasing). Well, uh, you're adding like a few hair colours for one race in Midnight, which is about the same as what you added in Dragonflight and The War Within. At this rate, it just looks like a way to dodge the question because even Blizzard must realise that with this pace, it'll take them two decades to get this done (WoD and Shadowlands did it in one expansion). Same with zone revamps. If they keep doing 1 every 2-3 expansions, Azeroth will never truly be revamped because by the time they finish the last zones, the first ones will be ancient already. They just need to set their minds on doing one of these major projects and invest in it. But clearly, not a priority for them.

- A lot of textures in the alpha footage look pretty rough, honestly. Thinking for example of the leaves on trees in Eversong Woods. I guess they'll add more polish over time but at the moment it doesn't look super impressive. I was way more impressed by places like Stormsong Valley and Zuldazar back when they were added.

It's pretty clear to me that the devs, while professional and with the best of intentions, really just wing it with most of these answers. It reminds me of when I'm having a client meeting at work, and they ask me about something I haven't done yet, prompting me to just come up with something that makes it sound like I didn't just drop the ball or forget about it. "It's something we like to do, and it's absolutely a good thing to look at provided X and Y, but right now we think Z is what we should be focused on".

Popular community requests might sometimes end up in the game, but it feels like Blizzard just completely ignores most of them. They need to get much better at doing pure fan service.

Anyway, overall I'd rate today's presentations a solid B. Great presentation, somewhat disappointing answers to a lot of questions. Good thing the Alpha drops soon!

For your point about stuff looking rough - I think we are at a point were the graphics (prolly?) won't get better in a sense like we had between WotLK and lets say WoD or Legion. I had the same feeling with the mounts earlier - they are cool looking but the "wow" effect is gone since we have so many good looking mounts since I would say MoP, and they usually don't really get better in the same way a WoD wolf looked thousand times better than a classic wolf.

[Jaggler]

If you read the "combat for everyone" post, you will realize they are making every spec and class easier to play with midnight (atleast that's the goal). The focus is no longer about mastering your class, but playing mechanics. Which is a good change imo.

Healer changes also look good on paper, cant wait to try it out soon!

Yeah I get the premise, it's just weird looking at it from the current perspective. But i don't minde everything being a bit simpler