Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Release Candidate Build on Beta, 6.0 Coming Soon, Probably

We, of course, know when Warlords of Draenor will officially launch. In fact, today, as the last day of September, we are roughly a month and a half away. Perhaps that feels like a pretty long time (it's funny to think that Hallow's End is going to happen before the launch) but it's exciting to know that the wait will not be all that much longer. Having played through the Beta since it started, I'll admit that it's less of an excitement for actually seeing content (though I have been restricting myself from running dungeons and raids, so there's some big stuff I have saved for myself) and more of an excitement for stuff I do in Draenor actually counting.

The new build for Warlords is a release candidate. This means that pretty much all the content is in there (for some reason I haven't been seeing the weekly story quests pop up at my garrison, but I figure I'll be more diligent about looking on live.) Garrisons have been implemented, and they've tweaked the design of some of the buildings and the way some of the systems work. The new character models that will be coming in 6.0 are all there (sorry Blood Elves. Soon, guys, soon!) The dungeons are there. The zones are there (Tanaan remains inaccessible after the intro, since I think we'll only be seeing that in a later patch, and possibly the final patch. And... I really hope they put Farahlon in there in some patch, but I'm not going to hold my breath.)

Release candidates don't mean that they're coming immediately. This just means that it's literally the first build that they'd even consider putting up live, and Blizzard's focus on polish means that there's still going to be some iteration there. However, while some fine-tuning of class abilities and such will continue, and some bug fixes will happen, the expansion is more or less looking like how it will look when it comes out on November 13th.

They're also currently testing 6.0 on the PTR, which has all of the system changes, but leaves out Draenor itself. While the release date for the expansion itself is locked down at November 13th, 6.0 is going to have to come out at least a week before that, and probably more like a couple weeks. I assume that the 6.0 build on the PTR is also flagged as release (as I imagine they're pushing similar builds.) So we could be seeing 6.0 coming very soon to the live servers. Certainly not this week, but I'd expect that some time in early or mid October (so I'd guess in the next three weeks) we should be getting 6.0, and with it, Warlords' launch event.

Yes, a bunch of things are going away (the only thing, well, other than challenge mode armor, but I'm resigned to the fact that I won't get that, that I'll be upset about not getting is the Kor'kron War Wolf, but there are other Wolf mounts available to Alliance in Warlords, so I won't be too upset if I can't PUG a normal-mode Garrosh defeat.) But we'll also get a nice little event. It doesn't look like the Warlords launch will be anywhere on the scale of the Wrath or Cataclysm launches, but there will be some stuff to do in Blasted Lands (and hopefully some kind of Feat of Strength and cosmetic reward to go with it, though I haven't seen anything about that.) There will also be a level 90 version of Upper Blackrock Spire, which will be level 100 in Warlords. I believe that this one will be truncated, having us fight only two or three of the bosses but not getting all the way to Warlord Zaela (Zaela, I thought you were cool! I thought you were cool.)

And anyone who hasn't been able to play in the beta will now get to agonize over the new character models. Some are way more dramatic than others, but all of the model revamps have made the faces far more expressive. The other thing that's great is that a lot of the animations feel more fluid. My Draenei's run is less of a kangaroo-hop now and my Human can actually swing his arms properly and lean into his run. There will be, I'm sure, some uproar about certain models not looking the way that people remembered them, but I think that should die down after a bit. Ultimately, we'll get used to them and WoW will just be a better-looking game.

The ability squish is going to cause the most uproar. Somehow, some people seem to like the new Arms, but I'm definitely going to have to change specs on my Warrior. That said, I think that's the only character I'll have to do so on. We'll see how things turn out. In the long run, the contours will shift a bit, but we'll adjust. If certain specs were really as "ruined" as their players thought they had been, there will be changes. Hell, "there will be changes" is probably the biggest constant in WoW's history.

And the next big change is about to come.

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