Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Joshuaj]

Dude that might be so cool. Imagine the zones if we're going off of the 4 zone structure of modern expansions. Bring Demon Hunters back into the fold in a major way, expanded race-class combos (Draenei, Orc...)

4 TBC-esque expansive zones with a meaningful demon warlord in charge:
Xoroth (remnant Eredar, like the Fel-Knights we fight in the Broken Shore Warlock Mount quest line)
Rancora (confirm it to be the Aranasi homeworld)
Nathreza
And the Pit Lord/Annihilan Homeworld

"Warlords of the Nether" (Definitely a WIP that one.)

Or all in on Nathreza (my bias personally)

I was thinking something like this

Revamped Outland for the .0 region
3 raids at launch:

Argus Raid, Rancora Raid, and a Defense of Shattrath Raid
PVP Zone at either Tarratus, or at the core of the Nether.

Nathreza would be the .1 Zone
And Xoroth would be the .1 Raid

Kerxan would be the .2 Zone
And Nihilam would be the .2 Raid

And each world would have a unique theme to it:

Argus would house a faction that still believes in Sargeras's Burning Crusade (The world would look how it currently does)
Rancora would house a faction full of Sayaad, Shivarra, Imp Mothers, and Aranasi (A Labyrinth)
Nathreza would house a faction of Dreadlords, Inquisitors, Jailers, etc (A shattered, dark world full of obsidian)
Xoroth would house a faction of Infernals, Fel Hunters, Doom Lords, Fel Knights, Dreadsteeds, Fel Lords, and other races. But here they'd be infused with Hellfire instead of normal Fel (A firey hellscape)
Kerxan would be full of Antaen, Fel Reavers, Mo'arg Engineers, and other machines and intelligent Demons (A factory full of giants)
And Nihilam would be full of Pit Lords, Mo'arg Brutes, and other mighty Demons of all types (A gigantic battlefield that also serves as a chaotic mosh-pit. Think Maldraxxus but less orderly and far more green and whatnot)

[Cheezits]

If they did -that- to K'aresh, no chance are we getting a demon expansion.

[Vakir]

As with the reality of any cool fan concept, take all the ideas and scale them back by about 60%.

Then add an Allied Race nobody wanted made up out of nowhere. How about...Neutral Draenei made out of yellow rocks? That's sufficiently stupid.

But seriously that does sound fucking rad. Might be an unpopular opinion but the Legion remains the most interesting faction (tied with the Scourge) in terms of visual diversity to me other than the green spam parts of course.

[Reive]

Sorry if I'm answering late, but when you replied to me last time it was past 4 am in my country.

That's not what I mean. Nobody is satisfied with it, but the idea and understanding of it being subjective is analyzing what makes a story work or not work.

My point is that two sentence all lowercase posts gives you all the robustness of a head of lettuce.

How many more times do people need to explain why the story is bad? 90% of the issues the story has lie within the writing itself, while the remaining 10% can be blamed on either having to rely on external sources like books etc to get a full picture of the narrative or on how drip-fed and sparse story content is.

Speaking of the writing, these are imo some key issues:

-dialogues: the way characters speak and interact feels innatural.
-retcons and character assassinations: the writers don't adapt to the setting or the background of characters but wrap everything to make it fit in the plot
-political agenda/personal beliefs: you REALLY can tell the writers are pushing certain ideas and morals into the game.
-failure to properly convey the scale of the events: we fought a void lord and it felt the lamest thing ever. we're getting attacked by the void but you can't even feel 10% of the danger you felt against the burning legion. In general, we often get results and payoffs without seeing the development. It's not impossible for a certain character to change his/her way of thinking, but the development should be shown to the readers.

Other WoW platforms are perpetually on fire and these are people freaking out about addons that haven't actually been removed, their continued updating was ceased out of being reactive by their creators and not Blizzard, and they're judging UI elements that we know already technically exist but aren't implemented yet.

There's plenty of stuff that needs to be tweaked, like coloring nameplates for clarity that are being opposed with stuff like Ion saying it "invalidates instance knowledge," but it's massively exaggerated.

This is what I'm talking about with the takes being devoid of nuance.

Was the outrage for the convenants also massively exaggerated? This is not blizzard adding another mount to the shop but them altering how the game works. For some losing certain addons means losing access to the game. Blizzard should have done a better job with their ui before dropping a nuke on addons.

"but they are only removing combat addons"

Yes, but by doing so they're also breaking other addons (collateral damage as Ion called it) that allow people to play and customize the game however they want.

"they still have time"

4 months are not nearly enough to make up for 20 years of addons development, especially with their "skill". Example? yesterday they "fixed" the issue with stacking nameplates on the beta. Want to know how it went? They still don't work properly

I think blizzard should really consider delaying the expansion. Not much can be done for the story but they can definitely improve the gameplay side of the game

[JDBlou]

I was thinking something like this

Revamped Outland for the .0 region
3 raids at launch:

Argus Raid, Rancora Raid, and a Defense of Shattrath Raid
PVP Zone at either Tarratus, or at the core of the Nether.

Nathreza would be the .1 Zone
And Xoroth would be the .1 Raid

Kerxan would be the .2 Zone
And Nihilam would be the .2 Raid

And each world would have a unique theme to it:

Argus would house a faction that still believes in Sargeras's Burning Crusade (The world would look how it currently does)
Rancora would house a faction full of Sayaad, Shivarra, Imp Mothers, and Aranasi (A Labyrinth)
Nathreza would house a faction of Dreadlords, Inquisitors, Jailers, etc (A shattered, dark world full of obsidian)
Xoroth would house a faction of Infernals, Fel Hunters, Doom Lords, Fel Knights, Dreadsteeds, Fel Lords, and other races. But here they'd be infused with Hellfire instead of normal Fel (A firey hellscape)
Kerxan would be full of Antaen, Fel Reavers, Mo'arg Engineers, and other machines and intelligent Demons (A factory full of giants)
And Nihilam would be full of Pit Lords, Mo'arg Brutes, and other mighty Demons of all types (A gigantic battlefield that also serves as a chaotic mosh-pit. Think Maldraxxus but less orderly and far more green and whatnot)

Certainly intriguing, and I love the worldbuilding but I'm curious about the ordering of each of the planets in a patch cadence. You don't think they'd position Nathreza last so Denathrius could be the expansion end villain? Are you picturing him as the final boss of this expansion at all? He's certainly the most built out character with which we'd interact with Legion remnant narrative thread. I highly doubt they'd position anyone else as the final boss, just from a marketing and narrative stand-point.

There are no pre-existing lore-relevant characters to fill that last boss role, and we've seen how poorly that goes when the villain of an expansion is just wished into existence like the Jailer or Dimensius (despite how great the actual Dimensius fight is). You want the final boss to be meaningful and iconic, and be somewhat multidimensional.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

I think the idea that this is a Covenant situation is silly. Warcraft Team flops like a wet noodle whenever any drama is sparked in the community (See: Transmog changes recently). If the Addons problem becomes existential and the issue of the Story starts creeping in they will just revert it and move on.

They are also most likely making the Addons decision based on some sort of inhouse calculations around KPI increases regarding Raiding, obviously they may be wrong on that but that remains to be seen when we actually have real datapoints on the matter in Season 1 of Midnight. This is why I am certainly very annoyed about the drama because we haven't even "felt" the changes nor seen if their datapoints increased for engagement in Raiding.

In many ways, I've felt the Addons issue was more of a smoke screen so they have the noise required to get safely to Blizzcon so they can reveal Classic+ and then nothing matters until we're in The Last Titan and by that point we're all just ready for 14.0 anyways.

Even for the people who believe in the Domino Effect collapse theory, we already collapsed and we saw that the World Soul Saga and the Gameplay Focused 2 Major/6 Minor structure was born from it. Do you really want to risk even further pissing on this franchises' story with another collapse? I certainly don't after what has transpired in regards for Lore/Narrative fans.

[Eldryth]

If they did -that- to K'aresh, no chance are we getting a demon expansion.

I could see a demon expansion happening again, but not (mostly) on their homeworlds.

It sounds cool because we like to imagine those worlds being distinct, but that's not at all how the Legion worlds have been portrayed so far in Legion. It's always been the same ruined, Fel-scorched wastelands, which isn't diverse enough to make a good expansion. Even Argus, the one world that would have made a lot of sense to have a civilized Demon world with Eredar culture intact (alongside Nathreza, which exploded), just had the same wastelands and some ruins.

Plus if you want to have it spread across different Legion worlds, you'd run into one of Shadowlands' bigger problems again- people hated having every zone be a standalone floating island. Even Midnight got complaints for having Harandar and Voidstorm be detached.


So the only way I can see another demon expansion happening is if they come to a more intact and varied location again. Maybe Nashabor- it's an intact, civilized world, with friendly Legion defectors who can show us the demon races' original cultures. And then we could get a demon world for the final zone (like Voidstorm) and maybe another one or two as patch zones.

[Joshuaj]

Certainly intriguing, and I love the worldbuilding but I'm curious about the ordering of each of the planets in a patch cadence. You don't think they'd position Nathreza last so Denathrius could be the expansion end villain? Are you picturing him as the final boss of this expansion at all? He's certainly the most built out character with which we'd interact with Legion remnant narrative thread. I highly doubt they'd position anyone else as the final boss, just from a marketing and narrative stand-point.

There are no pre-existing lore-relevant characters to fill that last boss role, and we've seen how poorly that goes when the villain of an expansion is just wished into existence like the Jailer or Dimensius (despite how great the actual Dimensius fight is). You want the final boss to be meaningful and iconic, and be somewhat multidimensional.

I was thinking Nihilam for a couple of reasons:

1. I'd have there be less of a "final boss", and more of an ordeal where each boss is essentially the leader of each antagonistic demon faction. They'd all be "final bosses" in a way.

And 2. It's the location where Sargeras battled the Titans. I think it'd be the perfect location to locate a climactic demonic battle!

- - - Updated - - -

Also, I like the idea of the mighty hellfire demons going against the more secretive, shadowy demon group.

[Vakir]

@Reive

I'm not saying anything "needs" to be explained as a defense. I'm saying "lmao they need to delay" adds fuck all to speculation and discussion.

Literally all the story problem points you're saying are 100% present, I agree, but my point is we're applying all of them to the individual story beats or new information rather than just chucking it as a generalized, nebulous whine. Very few people are on a different page from you. My point is you aren't doing the valid criticism much of a service and make it look bad by being basic.

On the gameplay front:

I was one of the biggest critics of Covenants from the start while everyone dismissed that the only people who would be negatively impacted would be meta chasing min-maxers. I was right, because I pretty much always am. The people who said otherwise never mention it again or are suspiciously absent from caring about the game they were ardently defending.

I get the concerns but I feel they are wildly different from something like Covenants which had red flags conceptually. Covenants had the wrong premise from the start by designing things around not cooperating with a game already built around flexible respecializing and having at least 3 very different forms of core content (M+, Raids, PvP) that all sought different powers.

The UI issues are way more granular. There's also never going to be a perfect solution besides "don't do that" but they've explained well and good why they're doing it and the philosophy behind it is sound whether they execute it well at all.

Name plates stacking in large groups, coloring allowed on plates to make it more clear on interrupt or CC priority, font legibility on unit frames, allowing the API to accommodate certain info used for accessibility mods (deaf guilds for example) are all very specific and aren't an entire "throw this shit out, the central premise is an issue" concept like Covenants.

As far as the collateral damage, part of the complaining is on bad faith for a lot of said mods. Plenty of creators that said they aren't supporting their mods are doing so before the changes are even live and threw in the towel the minute they didn't have everything exactly as they want it. They weren't abandoned, they were immediately chucking the baby out with the bathwater over something because they refuse to entertain the possibility that there might be something workable that doesn't 1:1 resemble prior add-ons that shared data while in combat.

So no, this isn't similar to Covenants, and it isn't about there "still being time" - even though that's technically true because they're literally still adding things addressing complaints from build to build.

As far as class design with regards to passives, I think it's wildly exaggerated. There's maybe 2-3 more passive points in a class or spec tree most of the time for the course of 90 levels. We're still way past the point of WoD class design where you made 6 meaningful choices total, and there's still build diversity even if there's accommodating some buttons into one. Even the passives you're taking flow as relevant to the playing experience because you're selecting what you take as you level rather than just having 10-15% more damage on Ability A thrown at you at level 36 rather than selecting the order you get certain modifiers.

With all of the above understood, I still get it. A ton of shit is still up in the air for Season 1 in terms of gameplay. If it bombs, honestly, just like Covenants, good, immediately vote with your wallet and they'll probably walk back add-on changes in moments and we'll be back to needing 734 WeakAuras and a bunch of automations to tell us how to navigate a bunch of mechanics without any effort.

The reason I'm arguing in good faith here for them while dunking on them in other areas is because there's a lack of complacency. They could just do the same business as usual nonsense and put out a complete clone of TWW mechanically with no changes to their philosophy. They aren't. This is different but it means there's a vision worth trying out even if the vision may not work. I respect that way, way more than collapsing to just do a reskin of the same shit. Covenants were another thing entirely because it was explicitly taking content away from you that would be present in any other expac.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

I feel like if we're ever getting into Demon stuff it most likely will be more Disorder oriented or Denathrius related, perhaps even both. Either way, it will be interesting to see what a nu-Legion color scheme even ends up being and how they will go about engaging with it.

[Joshuaj]

I feel like if we're ever getting into Demon stuff it most likely will be more Disorder oriented or Denathrius related. Either way, it will be interesting to see what a nu-Legion color scheme even ends up being and how they will go about engaging with it.

Why can't it be both? Lmao

[Vakir]

Doing both could kinda dilute the overall pool of the threat by lacking focus.

That said, it also opens to the potential of a civil war plot if they did do both, and it means Denathrius can just be awesome with his own goals and movement without being bogged down by the stupid blue Handsome Squidward tumor or being a Legion patsy.

[Sondrelk]

I think the idea that this is a Covenant situation is silly. Warcraft Team flops like a wet noodle whenever any drama is sparked in the community (See: Transmog changes recently). If the Addons problem becomes existential and the issue of the Story starts creeping in they will just revert it and move on.

They are also most likely making the Addons decision based on some sort of inhouse calculations around KPI increases regarding Raiding, obviously they may be wrong on that but that remains to be seen when we actually have real datapoints on the matter in Season 1 of Midnight. This is why I am certainly very annoyed about the drama because we haven't even "felt" the changes nor seen if their datapoints increased for engagement in Raiding.

In many ways, I've felt the Addons issue was more of a smoke screen so they have the noise required to get safely to Blizzcon so they can reveal Classic+ and then nothing matters until we're in The Last Titan and by that point we're all just ready for 14.0 anyways.

Even for the people who believe in the Domino Effect collapse theory, we already collapsed and we saw that the World Soul Saga and the Gameplay Focused 2 Major/6 Minor structure was born from it. Do you really want to risk even further pissing on this franchises' story with another collapse? I certainly don't after what has transpired in regards for Lore/Narrative fans.

The Addon change reads to me like the changes to flying in WoD-SL. Objectively the correct decision from a game design standpoint. But one the players will hate because they have gotten used to the alternative.

Hopefully the devs can actually stick to the no combat addon policy this time. Rather than capitulating like they did with Flying.

[Cheezits]

I'm 99% sure they are going to retcon (? is it? I think there's enough wiggle room) Denathrius into being the one behind Zovaal's schemes as we still don't know why he was so cool with the end of reality. It makes way more sense that he knew Zovaal was going to die and made moves to live beyond him/escape the Shadowlands to do his own thing.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

The Addon change reads to me like the changes to flying in WoD-SL. Objectively the correct decision from a game design standpoint. But one the players will hate because they have gotten used to the alternative.

Hopefully the devs can actually stick to the no combat addon policy this time. Rather than capitulating like they did with Flying.

Best case scenario is that they just hold their ground and stop wasting interview spots to explain this for the nth time. You made a choice, get some datapoints and then reevaluate and if reevaluation occurs and flop transpires have a good post-mortem of the situation.

[Sondrelk]

I just want them to not flop without a good post-mortem on their decisionmaking. Best case scenario is that they just hold their ground and stop wasting interview spots to explain this for the nth time. You made a choice, get some datapoints and then reevaluate and if reevaluation occurs and flop transpires have a good post-mortem of the situation.

Issue here is that there isnt really a way to reevaluate that can give a different option besides complete 180. Best they can hope for is to cross their fingers and hope that by letting addons use combat data, that players will simply choose to not use them.

[Cheezits]

Best case scenario is that they just hold their ground and stop wasting interview spots to explain this for the nth time. You made a choice, get some datapoints and then reevaluate and if reevaluation occurs and flop transpires have a good post-mortem of the situation.

Towellie made a stink that they aren't doing interviews on other things, but there is nothing to talk about that hasn't already been covered.

[Sondrelk]

Towellie made a stink that they aren't doing interviews on other things, but there is nothing to talk about that hasn't already been covered.

Exactly. It's either this, or increasingly obscure facts about housing. "Will there be custom pathfinding for mounts?" "Maybe at some point"
They are not going to talk about story points beyond what we can see. Much less hard confirm or deny speculation besides the completely out there theories.

What they should be better at is communicating class design intentions. But that is more of a general development issue, rather than a lack of interviews.

[Ochinko]

With Turbulent Timeways lasting till February 10th, will we get an earlier xpac release than we thought? But that would leave us at only two weeks of pre-patch. Or is it still the first week of March with two weeks "filler" between Timeways end and xpac launch.

Wish they'd just go out and tell us already.

[Sondrelk]

With Turbulent Timeways lasting till February 10th, will we get an earlier xpac release than we thought? But that would leave us at only two weeks of pre-patch. Or is it still the first week of March with two weeks "filler" between Timeways end and xpac launch.

Wish they'd just go out and tell us already.

I would normally assume that Turbulent Timeways ends when Pre-patch starts. Certainly not halfway through. Could be some crossed wires here on either when the expansion is supposed to release, or when Turbulent Timeways is supposed to end.

- - - Updated - - -

Or actually. Two weeks (or even just one week) earlier does make sense now that I think about it. Might create some issues with early access. Would probably be a complete shitstorm if players somehow got raid gear if they had early access.