Thursday, November 30, 2017

7.3.5 on the PTR and Speculation on Allied Races

7.3.5 is on the PTR now, and there are a few major things of note:

The biggest new feature is the implementation of level scaling in pre-Legion content. Let's break it down:

Starting zones (like Elwynn Forest and Durotar) will scale from level 1-10. The other "Old World" zones appear to only scale up - you'll still need to be level 35 to go to Western Plaguelands, but the quests and enemies you encounter there will all scale up to level 60.

I think this is actually a pretty good way to do it - you don't want someone going through Burning Steppes before they do Redridge Mountains, and while that's still technically possible, keeping the minimum levels roughly where they are helps preserve a sense of flow.

The problem that scaling is meant to solve is the way that you could be doing the quests in a zone like Ashenvale and out-level it before you were done with half of them. Now, you can finish the story there before you move on and not feel like the challenges and rewards are trivial.

Outland and Northrend will both be accessible at level 58, and they will both scale to level 80, allowing you to do them in either order (or, I suspect, doing most of that leveling in one or the other.) Likewise, the Cataclysm zones and Pandaria will scale from 80 to 90. Draenor then takes you from 90 to 100 and the Broken Isles are unchanged.

I don't know quite how precisely the minimum levels will be handled with overlapping expansions - given that you could do Northrend before Outland, I don't know if there is scaling within the continents to make sure you do the zones in any particular order.

Moving on:

Another interesting piece of the patch is that Embassies in both Stormwind and Orgrimmar have opened up, where all the faction leaders (or nearly all of them - I only saw Muradin as the dwarf representative) are gathered, apparently discussing recruitment of the Allied Races.

Notably, Baine Bloodhoof, Nathanos Blightcaller, High Overlord Saurfang, and Trade Prince Gallywix have new models (we saw Gallywix's way back in the Legion beta, but given that he hasn't had a permanent location, we never saw it.) Sylvanas also has new voice lines referring to her position as leader of the Horde and the war against the Alliance. Likewise, Baine has new voice lines referring to his eagerness to recruit the Highmountain Tauren. Rolkan appears with a generic Troll model and voice, apparently the representative of the Darkspear.

Each faction seems to be discussing two allied races, with Baine arguing for the Highmountain and Lady Liadrin advocating for the Nightborne. On the Alliance side, Turalyon seems to be advocating for the Lightforged Draenei while Alleria stands in front of a symbol for the Void Elves.

I would assume that you'll have to complete one quest chain before doing the other.

Where the Dark Iron Dwarves or the Zandalari Trolls fit into this, I don't know. Moira is not seen in the Alliance embassy.

To me, this gets the speculation-engine turning. Given that three out of the six allied races are deeply tied to the plot of Legion (and four if you count Void Elves through their connection to Alleria,) and that we're getting references to them in the 7.3.5 patch, when the expansion is probably not coming out for about a year, I wonder if the plan is to allow players to create members of these four represented races well before Battle for Azeroth comes out.

Blizzard has incentivized leveling up these new races from level 20, and the level-scaling feature is perfect for that, which means that a lot of the pieces are already in place.

With Legion, we actually got Demon Hunters before the expansion proper, though it was in the pre-patch. Might we be seeing these new races added far earlier?

Allowing us to create characters of the new races early would allow those players who want to have, say, a Void Elf main, to level them up and have them ready for when Battle for Azeroth comes out. Rather than splitting attention between new races and the new content, they could let them come in right off the bat - much as they did with Demon Hunters. But while Demon Hunters only had two levels and about two or three hours (if that) of questing to be caught up, the Allied Races will probably have a far longer way to go.

Now, what about the Dark Iron and Zandalari? Well, unless there's extensive pre-expansion stuff around the Zandalari, I expect that we're not going to be able to do their quests until we actually get to Zandalar. While the Dark Iron are not tied to Kul Tiras the way that the Zandalari are to Zandalar, I imagine they might be the "mirror" to the Zandalari, and thus will have some relevant stuff to do on Kul Tiras.

This might explain why there's no mention of them in the embassies. It also might explain why we know fewer details about them, like what classes they can be.

Keep an eye on this: if we wind up getting some of the allied races before the expansion launches, I want to be able to say I told you so!

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