Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Rosstafa]

Not sure if i should start a new threat for that, but how would people feel if at the end of TLT, through defeating Aman'thul, the Titan that can control time, we create Murozond, due to his connection to the time magic of Aman'thul? And he shatters time, and the next expansions after the World Soul Saga is the Infinite Timeways Saga? A saga about recreating the timeline, but as always with time travel stories, some things don't return to how things are exactly. Heroes and Villains could return. Landscapes changed. New alliances forged.

And i just realized, that Heartstone does that somewhat in their latest expansion...

I do feel like they have under-utilised the whole multiple timelines stuff. We have AU Elisande running around somewhere still. Yrel and the Lightbound took over AU Draenor. Things with the Infinite Dragonflight were resolved way too quickly and awkwardly for my liking.

That being said, I don't think multiverse stuff will be the way we go post-The Last Titan. I think Azeroth will wake up and actually be a character that has agency in the world, and I think her being the Prime Worldsoul will mean she has a much greater obligation to the universe. Maybe she takes the races of Azeroth on a universe-wide crusade to save other planets from their problems. Maybe she decides she wants to know what happened to the First Ones (I refuse to believe they're being retconned). World of Warcraft becomes more of a Warcraft Universe.

[JohnnyCasual]

Hopefully housing gets reenabled tomorrow lmao

The longer you obsess about housing exteriors the longer its going to be shut down, so quit it.

[Joshuaj]

The longer you obsess about housing exteriors the longer its going to be shut down, so quit it.

You naive fool! I'm gonna obsess about it even more now!

[Vakir]

They're a bit random with which time-limited rewards they bring back.

Absolutely. It would be a shame, those are even more rare and coveted but aren't super high quality or anything so it would be pretty asinine.

To clarify, I'm not even against it, I have my Plagued and Death's Demise (got screwed out of Naxx25 and ToC25 Immortal sadly) and I could live with it if others could get them, but it would bug me if they'd say "no" to much higher quality and cool rewards that people benefit from seeing, like the Mage Tower appearances, but if they'd give up rewards that...frankly haven't aged well but are solely interesting by their rarity/exclusivity, lol.

I think a lot of those challenge weapons are a net gain because they're genuinely cool even today, but more plagued/black protos would take a kind of meh mount and make them even lamer. But it's all hypothetical and I doubt it.

[Joshuaj]

https://x.com/TheChunkeyNinja/status...68168367268286

Oooooo, look at this house exterior, ooooooo!!! *Ghost noises*

[Enrif]

I do feel like they have under-utilised the whole multiple timelines stuff. We have AU Elisande running around somewhere still. Yrel and the Lightbound took over AU Draenor. Things with the Infinite Dragonflight were resolved way too quickly and awkwardly for my liking.

That being said, I don't think multiverse stuff will be the way we go post-The Last Titan. I think Azeroth will wake up and actually be a character that has agency in the world, and I think her being the Prime Worldsoul will mean she has a much greater obligation to the universe. Maybe she takes the races of Azeroth on a universe-wide crusade to save other planets from their problems. Maybe she decides she wants to know what happened to the First Ones (I refuse to believe they're being retconned). World of Warcraft becomes more of a Warcraft Universe.

The whole time power thing is strangle paradoxical. It is important enough that the leader of the Titan pantheon has power over it, that one of the five dragon aspects got that power from said titan, it was part of the story of several novels (war of the ancients trilogy, shattering), was features in many different expansions and cause for a whole expansion, and Murozond is a knowns thing that has to happen, to make his appearance in the Endtimes dungeons make sense.

And then as of MoP Remix, we got some Infinites on friendlier terms.


And then there is the whole Salandria things in the Caverns of Time. Mind you, Salandria is a Paladin and old enough, during Midnight were the Light can make people go a bit too zealous.

There needs to be some conclusion to all of that.

IF we fight Aman'thul in TLT and defeat him, that has to have a effect on the bronze dragons, and especially Nozdormu. and i don't think (and hope) that Azeroth has given Nozdormu the same Time Powers he had from Aman'thul.

[Darkarath]

Not sure if i should start a new threat for that, but how would people feel if at the end of TLT, through defeating Aman'thul, the Titan that can control time, we create Murozond, due to his connection to the time magic of Aman'thul? And he shatters time, and the next expansions after the World Soul Saga is the Infinite Timeways Saga? A saga about recreating the timeline, but as always with time travel stories, some things don't return to how things are exactly. Heroes and Villains could return. Landscapes changed. New alliances forged.

And i just realized, that Heartstone does that somewhat in their latest expansion...

Multiverses are a sickness that change sagas for the worse.

WoW story and narrative team are in no way prepared to deal with multiverses (as WoD proves) or with complex themes like death (as SL proves).

We have Yrel and eventually we will deal with her, but other than that, WoW should stay as far away of multiverses as possible.

[Vakir]

https://x.com/TheChunkeyNinja/status...68168367268286

Oooooo, look at this house exterior, ooooooo!!! *Ghost noises*

That's so fucking cool.

Sturgeon's Law is in full effect but some people genuinely blow me away with their creativity.

I really hope the decor budget is very flexible on release or they'll have grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory with this. Kind of like the fun of Beta Torghast vs. Live. Or any other feature they've fucked up.

[Sondrelk]

That's so fucking cool.

Sturgeon's Law is in full effect but some people genuinely blow me away with their creativity.

I really hope the decor budget is very flexible on release or they'll have grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory with this. Kind of like the fun of Beta Torghast vs. Live. Or any other feature they've fucked up.

The latest update did seem to make the budget players were initially given quite restrictive. You will still likely get a very lenient budget once Midnight actually launches and you can increase Renown. But if I were to guess, I would say the devs will probably keep it restrictive until the initial wave of players has passed, and the surface level tourists have decided it isnt for them.

[Vakir]

The latest update did seem to make the budget players were initially given quite restrictive. You will still likely get a very lenient budget once Midnight actually launches and you can increase Renown. But if I were to guess, I would say the devs will probably keep it restrictive until the initial wave of players has passed, and the surface level tourists have decided it isnt for them.

Yeah, that's part of why I mentioned it. Hopefully there will be some middle ground. I want to go really, really hard with making my outdoor plot resemble more Eversong than Azshara and have an extremely elaborate garden, but my understanding is that external budgets especially are a lot more conservative as of Phase 4.

[Sondrelk]

Yeah, that's part of why I mentioned it. Hopefully there will be some middle ground. I want to go really, really hard with making my outdoor plot resemble more Eversong than Azshara and have an extremely elaborate garden, but my understanding is that external budgets especially are a lot more conservative as of Phase 4.

We will have to see I guess. But I figure that the restrictive budget is probably here to stay as baseline. Only real question is whether they will increase it before Midnight. Whether that means unlocking more, or just straight up increasing it in a hotfix.

[vindicator782]

Thanks, I used the 1 button rotation and a WA that turned off the UI during clones and it took just a few tries to get her

I still don't like this fight as it's too much about visual puzzles and not enough about actual wow combat gameplay, unlike zevkir.

Problem with making them like typical wow combat is zekvir ?? was extremely free if you had a poison cleanse

For me it's Kyveza > Zekvir > Underpin

Underpin I think we can all agree was awful, it was so buggy and unfun

[Rosstafa]

Multiverses are a sickness that change sagas for the worse.

WoW story and narrative team are in no way prepared to deal with multiverses (as WoD proves) or with complex themes like death (as SL proves).

We have Yrel and eventually we will deal with her, but other than that, WoW should stay as far away of multiverses as possible.

Multiverse stuff can be super interesting in terms of seeing a different side of certain characters, or bringing back old characters in an interesting way. WoD had so much potential with those major orc characters and it completely fumbled it, but I don't think that means there's no value in something like that. Murozond for example could have been an expansion level threat, with zones taking place in different timelines, fighting raids where events played out another way etc. That would have been much better than just dealing with it in a dungeon and making the Infinite Dragonflight good guys with little reason.

[Viridiel]

Revisiting Legion has made me curious: do people like world quests?

I'm usually a huge sucker for negative psychology in game design, like dailies and the Farmville-esque appointment mechanics we had in garrisons, but world quests have always rubbed me the wrong way. I think the peak daily experience was in MoP, visiting a specific location every day to do set quests with rares etc. peppered around to keep us there longer. World quests being spread across the continent with a lot of randomisation kills it for me and doesn't really utilise the psychological aspects of quests that I enjoy -- I want to hand in a dozen quests at once after completing them in a relatively small area. It doesn't help that a lot of world quests are based on experimental or unique quests like trailing the spy in Suramar or the vehicle combat as an ancient in the Emerald Dream.

I get why world quests were developed the way they were. Spreading them across the continent gets people out and about which has always been a challenge with the existence of hubs, and having them be a single quest in a single location allows for there to be a bit more roleplaying flavour than "kill 10 bad guys and kiss 10 frogs", but it feels like both purposes have failed and never really appealed to me to begin with. World quests are always in the same location which means players don't actually end up seeing more of the world, they just end up visiting the same locations over and over that they already saw when they were questing, and the vast majority of world quests have very minimal roleplay and never have any actual impact anyway. And the greatest sin: world quests have polluted the map beyond saving. I was recently (in Dragonflight) doing a lot of archaeology and there are times in Legion and BfA where the archaeology icon is completely obscured by a world quest. That's mostly just poor planning, but it seems inevitable when you're intentionally flooding the map with icons to make it feel more alive. I assume we can probably hide world quests now with the improvements they made to the map, but that doesn't help with it being ugly and overwhelming for new players.

I was hopeful that the success of the events in Dragonflight would lead us away from world quests and more into an enjoyable appointment system, but for some reason they just haven't been able to replicate the success of the soup event and it pretty much fell apart in TWW except for Undermine. I think Undermine is the closest we've come to the sort of thing I want: a small, contained zone with self-paced repeatable content, scheduled repeatable content, and scheduled events. Price Surge could've been more frequent (or there should've been other scheduled events, like during the Diablo event) and the world quests should've been dailies, but other than that it was pretty good to me.

The events are up this coming week in the Midnight alpha, right? Their descriptions sound good, and the fact that they specifically cited the soup event rather than one everyone hated like Nightfall really gives me hope. I know there's probably not a chance in hell they're going to go back to dailies from world quests, but hopefully things like the events and the Prey system pull us in a slightly different direction.

[Sondrelk]

Revisiting Legion has made me curious: do people like world quests?

I'm usually a huge sucker for negative psychology in game design, like dailies and the Farmville-esque appointment mechanics we had in garrisons, but world quests have always rubbed me the wrong way. I think the peak daily experience was in MoP, visiting a specific location every day to do set quests with rares etc. peppered around to keep us there longer. World quests being spread across the continent with a lot of randomisation kills it for me and doesn't really utilise the psychological aspects of quests that I enjoy -- I want to hand in a dozen quests at once after completing them in a relatively small area. It doesn't help that a lot of world quests are based on experimental or unique quests like trailing the spy in Suramar or the vehicle combat as an ancient in the Emerald Dream.

I get why world quests were developed the way they were. Spreading them across the continent gets people out and about which has always been a challenge with the existence of hubs, and having them be a single quest in a single location allows for there to be a bit more roleplaying flavour than "kill 10 bad guys and kiss 10 frogs", but it feels like both purposes have failed and never really appealed to me to begin with. World quests are always in the same location which means players don't actually end up seeing more of the world, they just end up visiting the same locations over and over that they already saw when they were questing, and the vast majority of world quests have very minimal roleplay and never have any actual impact anyway. And the greatest sin: world quests have polluted the map beyond saving. I was recently (in Dragonflight) doing a lot of archaeology and there are times in Legion and BfA where the archaeology icon is completely obscured by a world quest. That's mostly just poor planning, but it seems inevitable when you're intentionally flooding the map with icons to make it feel more alive. I assume we can probably hide world quests now with the improvements they made to the map, but that doesn't help with it being ugly and overwhelming for new players.

I was hopeful that the success of the events in Dragonflight would lead us away from world quests and more into an enjoyable appointment system, but for some reason they just haven't been able to replicate the success of the soup event and it pretty much fell apart in TWW except for Undermine. I think Undermine is the closest we've come to the sort of thing I want: a small, contained zone with self-paced repeatable content, scheduled repeatable content, and scheduled events. Price Surge could've been more frequent (or there should've been other scheduled events, like during the Diablo event) and the world quests should've been dailies, but other than that it was pretty good to me.

The events are up this coming week in the Midnight alpha, right? Their descriptions sound good, and the fact that they specifically cited the soup event rather than one everyone hated like Nightfall really gives me hope. I know there's probably not a chance in hell they're going to go back to dailies from world quests, but hopefully things like the events and the Prey system pull us in a slightly different direction.

I think people like them in the sense that it's the best way to organically weave quests into the world. Dailies do add a tiny bit more structure and narrative to them, but it could also be seen as fairly overwhelming to have several dailies active each day, compared to World Quests which, while technically just as overwhelming as a bundle, are easier to digest as single activities.

Zone events are always tricky though. There are two factors that need balancing: When everyone plays them, and when nobody plays them. And designing it to work for both seems like it might be impossible. We see this when you compare zone events like the Nazjatar one and the newer ones. You either get spectacle that looks impressive and gives a sense of community. Or you get ones that actually feel playable outside those moments.

[vindicator782]

Revisiting Legion has made me curious: do people like world quests?

I'm usually a huge sucker for negative psychology in game design, like dailies and the Farmville-esque appointment mechanics we had in garrisons, but world quests have always rubbed me the wrong way. I think the peak daily experience was in MoP, visiting a specific location every day to do set quests with rares etc. peppered around to keep us there longer. World quests being spread across the continent with a lot of randomisation kills it for me and doesn't really utilise the psychological aspects of quests that I enjoy -- I want to hand in a dozen quests at once after completing them in a relatively small area. It doesn't help that a lot of world quests are based on experimental or unique quests like trailing the spy in Suramar or the vehicle combat as an ancient in the Emerald Dream.

I get why world quests were developed the way they were. Spreading them across the continent gets people out and about which has always been a challenge with the existence of hubs, and having them be a single quest in a single location allows for there to be a bit more roleplaying flavour than "kill 10 bad guys and kiss 10 frogs", but it feels like both purposes have failed and never really appealed to me to begin with. World quests are always in the same location which means players don't actually end up seeing more of the world, they just end up visiting the same locations over and over that they already saw when they were questing, and the vast majority of world quests have very minimal roleplay and never have any actual impact anyway. And the greatest sin: world quests have polluted the map beyond saving. I was recently (in Dragonflight) doing a lot of archaeology and there are times in Legion and BfA where the archaeology icon is completely obscured by a world quest. That's mostly just poor planning, but it seems inevitable when you're intentionally flooding the map with icons to make it feel more alive. I assume we can probably hide world quests now with the improvements they made to the map, but that doesn't help with it being ugly and overwhelming for new players.

I was hopeful that the success of the events in Dragonflight would lead us away from world quests and more into an enjoyable appointment system, but for some reason they just haven't been able to replicate the success of the soup event and it pretty much fell apart in TWW except for Undermine. I think Undermine is the closest we've come to the sort of thing I want: a small, contained zone with self-paced repeatable content, scheduled repeatable content, and scheduled events. Price Surge could've been more frequent (or there should've been other scheduled events, like during the Diablo event) and the world quests should've been dailies, but other than that it was pretty good to me.

The events are up this coming week in the Midnight alpha, right? Their descriptions sound good, and the fact that they specifically cited the soup event rather than one everyone hated like Nightfall really gives me hope. I know there's probably not a chance in hell they're going to go back to dailies from world quests, but hopefully things like the events and the Prey system pull us in a slightly different direction.

I like non-tedious world quests - I wish the majority of them where kill X enemies/ kill X boss - people complained about not having enough variety and that's why we have a lot of world quests that take WAY longer than a simple kill quest

World events are lame; it's world content so there's zero difficulty and it just turns into a lag fest where you wait for loot

[Marlamin]

"A few hours?" The build is tomorrow, no?

Should be, yeah.

Usually, yes, but both Beta and PTR servers went down for maintenance earlier today and got new builds (are now incompatible). Whether or not they hold the build back/keep both down till tomorrow remains to be seen. Could also still be today, but time is running out.

[Joshuaj]

Usually, yes, but both Beta and PTR servers went down for maintenance earlier today and got new builds (are now incompatible). Whether or not they hold the build back/keep both down till tomorrow remains to be seen. Could also still be today, but time is running out.

Since phase 5 looks to be much bigger than the other phases, I imagine they shut the servers down early so they could be extra prepared for tomorrow.

- - - Updated - - -

Makes sense, as this is also the phase before Beta, and I imagine this is also when housing will be reenabled (Hopefully. Johnny Casual ain't gonna stop me from talking about it. W name btw).

[Count Zero]

Absolutely. It would be a shame, those are even more rare and coveted but aren't super high quality or anything so it would be pretty asinine.

To clarify, I'm not even against it, I have my Plagued and Death's Demise (got screwed out of Naxx25 and ToC25 Immortal sadly) and I could live with it if others could get them, but it would bug me if they'd say "no" to much higher quality and cool rewards that people benefit from seeing, like the Mage Tower appearances, but if they'd give up rewards that...frankly haven't aged well but are solely interesting by their rarity/exclusivity, lol.

I think a lot of those challenge weapons are a net gain because they're genuinely cool even today, but more plagued/black protos would take a kind of meh mount and make them even lamer. But it's all hypothetical and I doubt it.

Yeah I don't have a strong opinion either way on time-limited rewards returning. I only got my Warlock appearances from Mage tower; I don't mind if people would be able to get those now, but I also think it's okay if I ever can't get the others.

[Marlamin]

Since phase 5 looks to be much bigger than the other phases, I imagine they shut the servers down early so they could be extra prepared for tomorrow.

- - - Updated - - -

Makes sense, as this is also the phase before Beta, and I imagine this is also when housing will be reenabled (Hopefully. Johnny Casual ain't gonna stop me from talking about it. W name btw).

Very possible, yup!