Battling for Azeroth: The Upcoming WoW Expansion

May be time for a new WoW thread, as Battle for Azeroth (BfA) is being released on August 14, with the pre-patch probably by mid-July. Anyone excited for the new expansion? Please spoiler datamined info or info gleaned from Alpha or Beta.

I have recently heard that the pre-patch is dropping soon (or has dropped already, not sure which) on the PTR. I’m going to go check that out when I get home and verify, but that’s the buzz.

I did briefly play some alpha and beta, but I’m trying not to see too much and burn myself out on the xpac before it even releases. I do have it pre-purchased and have unlocked all four live-realm-available allied races.

I haven’t even pre-purchased. Apparently, I’m putting myself critically behind the curve because I don’t even have an allied-race character yet.:rolleyes:

Sorry, I’m not feeling the new xpac yet. No good explanation, but it hasn’t happened. I may buy in or not.

It’s not as if I’m completely over Legion. It’s been a good xpac, and I have the alts I can work on. But I think it’s just change-fatigue again: I’ll have to learn all over how to play my classes. It’s beginning to feel a little treadmill-like after more than a dozen years.

Legion was my favorite expansion since WotLK, though I still think BC was when WoW was at its best.

BfA doesn’t have me intrigued. I got invited to beta (I didn’t apply, I don’t even subscribe anymore, they just asked me) but I’m struggling to get motivated enough to play it.

Yeah, I recently went back to Panderia to work on an alt after taking another alt through the 50’s on Azeroth. And I’m not nearly done with Legion yet, I’m just taking break before going back to it. It’s getting to the point that I almost don’t care there’s another expansion, I’m still playing with everything that came before.

Well, I’m in the beta :slight_smile: I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but it’s already a better experience than I had with the WoD beta. On top of the same time problems, they kept resetting everybody’s character back to 90 every time they changed something, so I never managed to get a character past level 92 and out of the starting zone. Not to mention that my old iMac was already struggling with the graphics. For BfA beta, they’re apparently not doing the constant character resets, and I have this fancy new up-to-date gaming machine to improve the experience …

I do get to say that I’m finishing Legion with, for the first time ever, a character of every class at max level. All on the same server and all Alliance this time, rather than being sprinkled around on different servers.

I haven’t played WoW since Lich King. How will the game be different for this new expansion? Worth trying again? I mostly just did questing and crafting, only occasionally doing dungeons or battlegrounds.

I’ve preordered but not yet completed the allied races quest. I’ve been busy getting my alt all the BC LW patterns.

I’m looking forward to Kul Tiras and Zandalar, but I don’t really care about the rekindled Horde vs. Alliance thing. Playing on a PVE server, it just seems like it’ll be an excuse for people to be jerks and /spit on you.

That’s a tall order. I don’t even really remember the state of the game in Wrath, let alone how it was different from Legion, or how the changes in BfA will affect that. There’s been so much.

Me, either. It seems like a stupid backstep to me. My ideal would be replacing the main-game faction conflict with open factions…your race doesn’t matter. You can be aligned with Stormwind or Orgrimmar no matter what race you actually are.

Frankly, the way the story’s looking from datamining and alpha/beta stuff, I haven’t played my Horde toons on Earthen Ring for over a month. I trust Blizzard enough to hold out until we get the actual story of BfA, but it looks like they’re making the Horde the bad guys, which isn’t right.

It certainly looks that way. But I wonder if we’re setting up for a late-Xpack DRAMATIC TWIST that suddenly and oh-so-unexpectedly either makes (A) the Alliance the real villain behind the scenes, or (B) reveals that the real villain behind the scenes is one of the very many Eldritch Horrors we’re beginning to see in the game content. (Stuff like new and old Elder Gods, the Void, etc.)

Or Blizzard may just fall back to the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans ethical basis that the Horde is, indeed, a bloodthirsty warmongering Horde. Since “Horde” is not usually used to name pacifistic associations of kitten-cuddlers and bakers of chocolate chip cookies. :mad:

For the record, I play 90% Horde and I rather preferred the “All Of Us Against the Big World-Threatening Bad” storyline.

Sorry, I’m not looking for detailed analysis, vague impressions are fine. :slight_smile: Is it easy to solo or find pick-up groups? Does the game feel grindy, or is progression fun the whole way? How will the expansion affect things like that?

There is a lot more solo content than there ever was, and literally hundreds of hours of things to keep you busy, depending on which things you glom on to.

Getting non-solo content done is also easier than ever. The group finder not only allows you to sign up for raids and dungeons, but there will also be groups created for doing quests, farming items, world boss kills, even fishing!

I’m not really feeling this expansion. The faction war doesn’t really make me excited, and neither does the Horde getting beat with the villain bat again. Legion was a great expansion, though I’m not happy with their recent class design of pruning abilities. I’ve played every expansion up to this to some extent, but might skip this one to start with.

I’ve often heard that we’re heading toward the end of World of Warcraft, with 1-2 expansions left (or at least planned), and I’ve always assumed that ultimately they would go back to the Old Gods vs. Titans, where the lore started. I’m not super familiar with the lore and I haven’t read many BFA spoilers, but it seems like with the presence of naga in Zandalar, we’re building up to another encounter with Queen Azshara which I can easily see leading toward some Old Gods vs. Titans action in the next/last expansion.

Pleonast, my current alt has reached lvl 85 almost entirely by pet battles. Any way you want to play, there’s a way to do it.

There is some reputation grinding that’s needed to unlock some parts of Legion, but IMO they’ve made it easier and more rewarding to do so than it was in past expansions. I just spent a few days getting exalted with Scryers, Violet Eye, honored with Mag’har, Consortium, Sha’tar, and other BC reps, and god, if I wasn’t relatively high level, it’d be a painful slog. In Legion, you can gain rep by doing daily quests or sending NPCs on missions, and you can distract yourself from the grind by fixating on what’s called Artifact Power on your artifact weapon. I totally expect BFA to continue this although you won’t have your artifact weapon anymore.

I have always hated rep grinding, but in Legion it really isn’t too painful. I have unlocked Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei without really going out of my way too bad. Also hit exalted with the Nightfallen with little effort.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Glad to hear rep grinding isn’t quite so tedious anymore. I’ll follow along the news. If I decide to come back, it’ll probably be once the pre-patch drops. I’m somewhat nostalgic for simple questing in Azeroth.

I’ve read about “personal loot” and how it’s going to be the only loot system for BfA. Can anyone explain it?

Everyone gets their own loot table, based on your class and spec, and you’re guaranteed to get SOMETHING appropriate for that class and spec when you kill a dungeon, raid or world boss. In the old system, even if you went in at over-level and soloed the dungeon or raid, you’d get something (maybe) off that boss’s loot table, which was a generalized loot table that may have dropped something you simply couldn’t use.

It also specifies that loot practices like Master Loot or a guild’s DPK type of thing are no longer usable. Personal loot is not only default, but mandatory (come the pre-patch).

Huh, that sounds good, if I’m understanding. Does this put an end to loot drama and ninjas? It only applies to bosses? Everything else is need/greed?

I think it’s everything, but bosses are the most likely to have decent gear on them. I don’t generally group up outside of dungeons or for world bosses, so I haven’t seen it in action in general.

The problem with personal loot in dungeons is that often, when soloing old dungeons, your loot from a boss is a token amount of gold, and nothing else. Kinda pissed me off when I decided to start farming some old dungeons for transmog and all I got from the bosses was gold. Given the speed with which I can make gold just doing ordinary things in the current expansion - 2000g+ by sending followers on a mission, or Griftah handing over 5000g to my rogue every Tuesday, I’m not much inclined to haul my ass all the way to Razorfen Kraul just to rifle the bosses’ pockets for bus fare.

Fortunately, this doesn’t appear to apply to old raids - I’m still happily farming up tier sets. Though Ulduar went a little bipolar on me the other day. I ran my druid through there for the very first time, and he got all the right tokens to complete his 10-man tier set. Then I ran my warlock, and she got absolutely nothing. Transmog is fun. Thanks to collecting Marks of Honor from PvP world quests, my paladin now has the transmog appearances of every single PvP gear set except for the most recent season (which you currently have to actually PvP to get).