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

[Hitei]

Or maybe just don't tie mounts to RNG drops that you can only roll once every couple weeks on a character? That's not good gameplay and it's very obviously a carrot on a stick tactic. They could just as easily go back to the old method of using currency to buy mounts. That way players at least know when the insufferable grind is over.

There are literally hundreds of determinstic and steady progress mounts. It's fine for some of them to be low, raw RNG.

[Sondrelk]

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?

I think it's going to be a race unlocked along with the mount. Possibly two reward for Silver and Gold.

[Makorus]

I think it's going to be a race unlocked along with the mount. Possibly two reward for Silver and Gold.

Yeah. All the Gold Racing Achievements give titles, so it makes sense.

It's usually "X Racer", so "Storm Rider" kinda falls into the usual naming scheme as well. Except "Storm Rider" is a title someone would actually use compared to "Eastern Kingdoms Racer", a title I would assume is currently used by 0 people.

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There are literally hundreds of determinstic and steady progress mounts. It's fine for some of them to be low, raw RNG.

Low RNG mounts would be alright if they were Pseudo RNG.

My partner has been camping Arachnoid Harvester for 3 years, killing it every day and still no mount.

It's not even a cool mount or anything either. There's no benefit to it being rare either.

[Nymrohd]

Blizzard does not do singleplayer games. I would love them to do them, in any of their franchises, it would be absolutely awesome. But it will not happen. That is why we just can aspire to a singleplayer online game with multiplayer elements (Diablo 4, probably the new survival game). That is the way to go.

Warcraft as a franchise has such an immense potential. They should start to make more games about it.

I am not sure Blizzard is ideal to do a Single Player game. Their devs completely oppose player choice generally delivering very railroad experiences, their single player games would still be an always online through Battle.net mess that disallows any modding and I don't think they could ever do nuance. They'd do beautiful set pieces and great cinematics but that's it. Single Players usually get their replayability by either offering branching paths and a ton of customization. Blizzard games get their replayability by grind (be it mindless mob killing grind or repeating the same gameplay loops like dungeons and rifts) or through inherently multiplayer pvp.

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Low RNG mounts would be alright if they were Pseudo RNG.

I think Low RNG mounts work well if there are deterministic ways to get that same model.

[Makorus]

I am not sure Blizzard is ideal to do a Single Player game. Their devs completely oppose player choice generally delivering very railroad experiences, their single player games would still be an always online through Battle.net mess that disallows any modding and I don't think they could ever do nuance. They'd do beautiful set pieces and great cinematics but that's it. Single Players usually get their replayability by either offering branching paths and a ton of customization. Blizzard games get their replayability by grind (be it mindless mob killing grind or repeating the same gameplay loops like dungeons and rifts) or through inherently multiplayer pvp.

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I think Low RNG mounts work well if there are deterministic ways to get that same model.

Low RNG mounts are the laziest form of content in the game lmao.

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

[Nymrohd]

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

Yak trains waiting for Huolon.

[Holdodlig]

Low RNG mounts are the laziest form of content in the game lmao.

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

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.

[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.

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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.