The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[pacotaco]

Why not? There's no indication of the distance between the west of Kalimdor and the east of EK.

If we look at Azeroth in the Legion finale, it seems like the "know world" is about 1/4 of the surface of the planet

[Makorus]

I agree with this for at least the open world content and when low RNG is the only way to get the mount. Doing the same rare with no strat or difficulty just feels like putting a time coin into a machine just to see if you're going to get the goodies or not.

It's not entertaining to farm mount in WoW when they are time gated low chance attempts. I'd rather have reputation mount or some weird grind like the Deathwing worshipper's mount rather than a "Kill a rare everyday and if you're lucky you'll get that mount".

I wouldn't mind having those very rare drops if there was another way to farm them like we had in Shadowlands for some of those mount. You could buy them with anima, which in my opinion was one of the good features of SL. Sadly, they didn't expand this to every rare mount.

Okay, your comment did bring up a good point, which is Mythic Raid Mounts. I think they are fine with being a low drop chance IF they were a 100% during the relevant expansion.

But yeah, realistically, even if killing the rare gives you a currency, and you need to kill it 100 times, it's still not great, but it's better than it being completely random

Does the person who gets it after the first kill feel accomplished? No, of course not, they are just happy they don't have to kill the rare again?

Does the person who gets it after killing the Rare 500 times feel accomplished? No, they are just glad it's over.

[Melorandor]

I wonder if we will get any Reforged news on Blizzcon. I know it isn't related to WoW but still.

[Raetary]

If there was something there, it can't be as big as the Broken Isles or the Dragon Isles. There's not enough room to fit a continent of those sizes.

If anything it looks like something about as big as Zandalar or Kul'tiras.

We have no idea how much space there is in the ocean on the backside.
Hell, we don't even know how big the Great Sea is.

And not that it matters, as Blizzard can and does shift and retcon the size of the planet and its continents to whatever it is they need at the moment.

Nvm that the in-game world can be any size, completely detached from its actual lore size.

[Marlamin]

@Marlamin , Have you seen anything in the files that could directly or indirectly indicate that the next expansion would be larger than what is typically expected?
For example, a file loading system that would not be necessary at this time or similar indications.
I'm just curious, because i think that even if 11.0 is not a world revamp i feel like Blizz will go big this time.

Not really. One can maybe argue the airlock system used in Zaralek which allows them to preload other maps while on another one as well as seamlessly transfer players between them, could theoretically be used to tie together maps at certain points to give the illusion of larger maps (provided they improve upon it since the Zaralek transition can be a bit buggy at times).

As always there are very small things that show up in the client itself that either aren't used yet, are for something internal or are for another branch like 1.15.x so it's hard to tell if any of that will end up being for 11.0 or not, but I haven't seen anything that implies a larger world or anything like that.

[Hitei]

There's no pro argument to have a low RNG mount, period.

Sure there are. They provide very long term goals for players, incentivize revisiting content, and makes item drop interesting.

The second I found out Mossy Mammoth's completion was tied to a specific Vaults iteration instead of RNG, opening any doors or chests other than the weekly Zskera quest's assignment to progress to that iteration became completely pointless, as did bothering to get keys. Getting the mammoth was a completely uninteresting experience because it was pseudo RNG, not actual RNG.

If it were actual RNG, I might've had a reason to continue doing a fairly interesting weekly activity.

Just because you don't care about/don't like a gameplay aspect doesn't mean there's no arguments for it.

[Nymrohd]

Not really. One can maybe argue the airlock system used in Zaralek which allows them to preload other maps while on another one as well as seamlessly transfer players between them, could theoretically be used to tie together maps at certain points to give the illusion of larger maps (provided they improve upon it since the Zaralek transition can be a bit buggy at times).

Plus the Zaralek transition depends on a low-feature tunnel to achieve that illusion. If that transition had to be triggered on a much larger plane it would be much harder to do successfully. I do wonder if it could be done on something nearly featureless but with a far large trigger plane (e.g. open sea, illusion of a silhouette of the target area by using the skybox)

[Darkarath]

I am curious, besides the survival game, has there been any indication of Blizzard developing a new (non-mobile) game?

For example, we recently knew that they were developing a kind of online WoW mobile game, a secret project that, to my knowledge, no one knew anything about.

Is there any job post or some clue about a new game?

[Marlamin]

Plus the Zaralek transition depends on a low-feature tunnel to achieve that illusion. If that transition had to be triggered on a much larger plane it would be much harder to do successfully. I do wonder if it could be done on something nearly featureless but with a far large trigger plane (e.g. open sea, illusion of a silhouette of the target area by using the skybox)

Seamless map teleports on the open sea could be doable provided it's a bit foggy/stormy so terrain in the distance doesn't show up (or as you mentioned with a secondary illusion in e.g. the skybox).

In regards to the airlock system I'm more curious to see if they will apply the preloading more generally to improve on loading screens between teleports in some cases. I can imagine it is a terrible idea to preload all the destinations the Stormwind portal room can take you (maybe pick the busy/current content ones?), but there's only 2 places the Dark Portal can take you for example, would cut down some loading screen times significantly.

Other examples could include e.g. the Oribos portals/taxi, any instance portals, any boats/transports, the portal between EK/Quel'Thalas etc. Wouldn't get rid of loading screens entirely, but would make them very short in good conditions (hardware/latency).

[Woggmer]

We have no idea how much space there is in the ocean on the backside.
Hell, we don't even know how big the Great Sea is.

And not that it matters, as Blizzard can and does shift and retcon the size of the planet and its continents to whatever it is they need at the moment.

Nvm that the in-game world can be any size, completely detached from its actual lore size.

There has to be a limit, even with the "Titans have been gaslighting us this whole time" card there needs to be a limit of what's actually left to explore Azeroth. Even Blizz admitted that they've exhausted all their resources from the Warcraft games and need new material to work with.

Whatever is hidden away would have to be something the Titans don't know about or chose not to talk about. There's no way they would lie about there being an Old God hidden away over there (if they did, not only would it make them look incompetent, but also it would imply there are probably multiple different Old Gods that we don't even know about that are corrupting Azeroth from the BACK.)

So with that in mind, it could probably be something that even the Old Gods haven't touched and is something so ancient that it dates back to the Elemental Lords.

[Viridiel]

We have no idea how much space there is in the ocean on the backside.
Hell, we don't even know how big the Great Sea is.

And not that it matters, as Blizzard can and does shift and retcon the size of the planet and its continents to whatever it is they need at the moment.

Nvm that the in-game world can be any size, completely detached from its actual lore size.

We've seen global views of Azeroth before but they're obviously different over time, so it could change at a moment's notice. The Ulduar globes iirc essentially placed Northrend at the north pole and Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms at opposite eastern and western poles, which would comfortably allow a continent twice the size of Kalimdor. I think the view of Azeroth in the Argus skybox is similar but the continents are shown to be smaller and more widely spaced (reminiscent of the maps in Chronicle), which would allow for basically another whole map the exact same size as the one we have.

They can definitely just retcon it so we're actually only dealing with a tiny part of the planet's surface, but I think they've given themselves enough wiggle room as is.

---

I'm hoping the next expansion deals with Spirit and Decay in a way which properly explains why they're left out when talking about the primal elements. There's a fine enough explanation for why the four primal elements were the only ones manifest during the Black Empire (Azeroth was eating all of the Spirit, and the Old Gods were probably using all of the Decay to subjugate the other elementals), but they don't really seem to apply anymore since there's plenty of both Spirit and Decay on Azeroth, they just haven't coalesced to form a culture anywhere.

I'd like to see a fairies (Spirit) vs. monsters (Decay) kinda thing in Avaloren. I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legend to know if that's involved as a theme, but I'm assuming there's something similar.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

hopefully virtual ticket/goodies stuff will be revealed on tuesday.

[Yus atath]

Hopefully in the next expac we find out what this big threat is that the Jailer warned us about.

[pacotaco]

Zovaal was destined to lose because the first ones foresaw his treachery

Like I'm not even talking shit this is the plot of SL we are the chosen ones and that's why we can travel to the maw

Not our ties to Azeroth
Not the fact we killed a death titan
Nope just mysterious ways

Isn't it because we have the Hearth of Azeroth? I though that was connection.

[Nymrohd]

Seamless map teleports on the open sea could be doable provided it's a bit foggy/stormy so terrain in the distance doesn't show up (or as you mentioned with a secondary illusion in e.g. the skybox).

It's just that if they could manage that, we could have seamless transitions from continent to continent by just using the existing assets (Island Expeditions) and geography. Which I doubt is a priority but it would make for some crazy flying.

I also do hope we could have sea battle that way; imagine taking a boat from booty bay, following the ship much further into the sea and then transitioning into an open ocean area where you get attacked by the Bloodsail.

- - - Updated - - -

Isn't it because we have the Hearth of Azeroth? I though that was connection.

That was my understanding as well.

[pacotaco]

As a software engineer I love how you try to give this thread a little dev flavour xD

So, could it still be for a prepatch event? Like burning of teldrassil? "Crossing of the storm" or something?

That was my though too.

[Makorus]

Dunno if it's been discussed yet, but this Tweet is very interesting.

https://twitter.com/TripdWyr/status/1710768187468640731

He worked on the Warlock Customization options, the Dark Ranger customization and Dragonriding Customization. Generally, customization.

Dunno if he is referring to the next PTR build or 10.2.5.

[Holdodlig]

Okay, your comment did bring up a good point, which is Mythic Raid Mounts. I think they are fine with being a low drop chance IF they were a 100% during the relevant expansion.

But yeah, realistically, even if killing the rare gives you a currency, and you need to kill it 100 times, it's still not great, but it's better than it being completely random

Does the person who gets it after the first kill feel accomplished? No, of course not, they are just happy they don't have to kill the rare again?

Does the person who gets it after killing the Rare 500 times feel accomplished? No, they are just glad it's over.

I wasn't necessarely speaking about killing the same monster for the currency. I pointed out anima as a global currency which is cool way but maybe there's more to do elsewhere. In DF, we have a shitload of grey useless items who seems to be here for the sole purpose of filling your inventory while giving up very meaningless informations about the lore. Maybe we can have those items in different rarity type instead like we had with the same expansion and they could serve as currency.

One of the most well done thing in early DF was the way you had to farm mount. There was almost no "Kill this rare 1000 times". Most of them was their own specific little quest and that's the direction they should take in the future in my opinion.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

Dunno if it's been discussed yet, but this Tweet is very interesting.

https://twitter.com/TripdWyr/status/1710768187468640731

He worked on the Warlock Customization options, the Dark Ranger customization and Dragonriding Customization. Generally, customization.

Dunno if he is referring to the next PTR build or 10.2.5.

Sounds more like 10.2.5 but i don't know what it can mean, boomkin are getting new stuff in 10.2 so maybe DK pets? Draenei got eredar customization

Red orcs? Dragonmaw customization? 10.2.5 would be also after blizzcon so maybe there will be some 2 new allied races with preorder. who knows.

[Valysar]

Sounds more like 10.2.5 but i don't know what it can mean, boomkin are getting new stuff in 10.2 so maybe DK pets? Draenei got eredar customization

Red orcs? Dragonmaw customization? 10.2.5 would be also after blizzcon so maybe there will be some 2 new allied races with preorder. who knows.

New DH wings please