With a global launch in 48 hours and twelve minutes (as I write this sentence,) we're already in the biggest state of upheaval lore-wise since WoW launched. Two of the original six vanilla capital cities are gone (accessible via Bronze Dragon Zidormi as they've tended to do with removing old content post-Cataclysm.) While we didn't lose any major lore figures the way that we did in the beginning of Legion, many Horde players may have lost faith in theirs. Saurfang has had a hard time living up to his honorable ideals and has now been captured by the Alliance, while Sylvanas has gone into full super-villain mode with her genocidal actions and her willingness to blight-bomb her own troops if it means hitting the enemy.
On a game-mechanics side of things, we've also seen our artifacts de-powered to the point of being generic weapons - and some of us have replaced our beloved weapons with new generic ones from Darkshore world quests.
Transmogging new weapons to look like your artifacts is more flexible than it has been previously. Two-handed weapons (like a caster staff) can be transmogged to look like two-piece sets (like the Skull of the Man'ari and Thalkiel) though these are still limited to spec (sadly no awesome Judgment-themed Silver Hand for your Ret spec, unfortunately.)
Every spec has seen some changes, but a handful (Survival Hunter is the one I'm thinking about the most) have undergone extensive changes.
Some of those changes involve integrating ideas from the artifact weapons into the spec, while others have been your standard between-expansions re-works.
In terms of game systems, most players have yet to experience Island Expeditions and Warfronts, the two new major group content features of the expansion. Expeditions will largely be similar to the three-player scenarios from Mists of Pandaria, with a theme of competing against a group from the other faction to secure Azerite. There will be a PvP version of this, though most follows a PvE model.
As with any expansion, we have new zones, dungeons, and raids to look forward to.
Unlike any other expansion (other than vanilla, which technically wasn't an expansion,) we're getting two continents. The leveling experience for Alliance and Horde will thus be entirely different (a kind of expansion of the Shadowmoon Valley/Frostfire Ridge separation.) The Alliance will navigate islands of Kul Tiras, investigating the supernatural and political threats to the safety of the island nation as they try to secure their legendary navy. The Horde will attempt to defeat the evil cult rotting out the heart of the Zandalari Empire to secure the Empire's fleet for their purposes.
It's debatable whether you would consider the first four allied races as a Legion or BFA feature (though given that they require a pre-purchase of the expansion, I'd say the latter,) but BFA brings two more in 8.0 with another two promised in a subsequent patch (I'm assuming 8.1.)
In 8.0 we'll get two of the three most-requested Allied Race options (before the term "Allied Race" had been introduced): Dark Iron Dwarves for the Alliance and Mag'har Orcs for the Horde.
Professions are also undergoing a change, with each expansion block counted as a separate skill, meaning that if you pick up, say, Blacksmithing upon your arrival in Zandalar, you should be just as ready to start smithing as the guy who's been pumping out Fel Core Hound mounts for the last year and a half. The one downside here, though, is that if you want to go and produce stuff from older content and you had not reached their skill threshold, you won't be able to rely on low-requirement but high-skill-up recipes as we had in Legion.
Honor is now an account-wide stat, meaning that you can feel free to switch characters as you like when working on honor rewards. It's retroactive, too, so if you did even moderate amounts of PvP or their associated world quests in Legion, you could very possibly have the PvP artifact appearances (at least the first tier.)
One small detail for transmog farming - raids from expansions before the previous one will be subject to "legacy raid rules," which means that even on flexible modes, they should drop the maximum amount of loot. I'm not entirely sure how this will work, as currently Warlords of Draenor raids still shrink the loot tables to the minimum, but it's possible that the rules don't go into effect until we're 120.
Leveling should work the following way:
If you've done the Battle of Lordaeron, you'll be able to move on to the starting quests for the new continents. Both involve prisons, and the Horde actually has a mission to Stormwind before they go to Zandalar, while the Alliance heads directly to Kul Tiras (though the events a little messy, as the Alliance intro is technically a response to the Horde one.)
Questing will be broken up a little on the main continents with shorter quest chains to establish bases in enemy territory, so your human can go do a little questing in, say, Vol'dun between completing whole quest chains in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley.
There are four level-up dungeons per continent, with the other continent's dungeons opening up at the level cap. Finally, there is a pair of Mythic-only dungeons that I believe will cap off the stories of each continent and are, of course, limited to the cap.
Finally, about three weeks after the expansion launches, we'll be getting Uldir, BFA's first (and actually the only announced) raid. Uldir is in the center of the swampy Nazmir zone in Zandalar, and is a corrupted Titan facility in which a hideous creature called G'huun has emerged as a "Blood God."
From there, we don't know exactly what we're getting, but we do know that Azshara will be the final boss of a subsequent raid, though not BFA's last one.
There are a lot of big questions about the plot of the expansion - will we see the Horde fractured once again as their Warchief's villainy turns on her own people? Will we see the Alliance sacrifice some of its ideals in the name of survival - or revenge? Will we discover that there is some darker, more supernatural force that is manipulating things behind the scenes?
No comments:
Post a Comment