This week Manny and Joce talk the Shadowlands pre-launch event, as well as wrap up all the interviews from the Warcraft dev team this week. They also talk about the new short story, “We Ride Forth”. All that and more on this week’s For Azeroth!
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Death’s Rising Week 2
The 2nd half of the prerelease event dropped a day earlier than most expected, arriving Monday in NA and Tuesday in the EU.
- 2nd week of the story line quest chain
- Zombie Invasion became active
- ICC Rare increased spawn rate
9.0.2 Arrives
As we reached the release date for Shadowlands, Team 2 decided to split development of Shadowlands into a systems patch: 9.0.1 and a launch patch: 9.0.2. Now patch 9.0.2 has dropped in anticipation of the Shadowlands launch next week. There have also been several hotfixes after the patch which we will include in this summary.
This patch includes:
- Further adjustments to the classes in baseline spells and talents
- Many trinkets have been nerfed including top tier items from Ny’alotha and Eternal Palace
- Undocumented changes
- New customizations (purple eyes for Blood Elves and Void Elves)
- Glitches with world boss loots and helm clipping
- Official Shadowlands Profession Preview
- World of Warcraft Survival Guide
- Brave the Beyond: Shadowlands Goes Live November 23
- Hotfixes (up to Nov 18th)
- Shadowlands Pre-Expansion Patch Notes (Updated November 12)
Shadowlands Launch Test
Interviews w/ Ion Hazzikostas
Several news outlets including Windows Central sat down with Ion Hazzikostas. Here are some take away points from those interviews.
- Shadowlands gets back towards larger epic narratives that are focused on the bigger more digestible beats.
- The increased presence of Vol’jin is not a direct reaction to fans want to see more from him
- Ion would not say for certain if we would see Nathanos again in SL but said “he said what he said for a reason.”
- Covenant story-lines will intertwine with the “common reality.”
- The team will be conservative with balancing because they understand people will have made large investments in things like covenant choices and crafting legendary items. Larger changes will be confined to patch cycles as was before.
- They are officially done with “Bring the player not the class.”
- Team 2 is trying to make the best only situationally best.
- There will be no flight whistle in SL. Player’s will be limited to the Covenant Halls transportation network.
- When swapping covenants or otherwise behind the catch up mechanic is dynamically scaling, and slows down as you get closer to the current cap.
- It should take “a few days of gameplay” to become “viable” while “a couple weeks after that you should be totally fine.”
- The weekly “checklist” will be short and then players can opt to do a number of other things.
- Getting Renown for the week through activities
- Rescuing Souls from the Maw
- Climbing Tor’ghast to get Soul Ash
- Callings will take you to a single place and you will not be required to travel vast distances.
- Tor’ghast is going to unlock progressively.
- Layers (difficulty levels) 1 – 3 on release
- 4 – 6 with Heroic Castle Nathria (Dec 8th NA)
- 7 – 8 with Mythic Castle Nathria (Dec 15th NA)
- Recipes for Legendaries will not always have a 100% drop rate. Drop rates align with lock outs.
- There is no bad luck protection for Recipe drops but they have a much higher drop rate than Legion legendaries.
- There are no catch up systems planned for Soul Ash.
- Legendary Items will not be transmoggable at first.
- Interview Transcript
- Media Group Interview
We Ride Forth
The Four Horsemen ride to confront the Lich King.
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