FAZ 126 – “Interviews Out The Wazoo!”

by | Jul 17, 2020 | For Azeroth | 0 comments

Manny and Joce dive into all the interviews that are making the rounds this week, as well as cover the Shadowlands Beta that is now live. All that and more on this week’s For Azeroth!

You can find Warcraft Radio on Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as Discord. 

Flood of Information from Interviews

Many members of the Warcraft Team were interviewed by several media outlets and content creators. We have gathered highlights from the interviews.

Story

  • The Horde vs Alliance story isn’t the main focus at the outset of Shadowlands, but there will be some story there.
  • Villains need to be at least at Titan power level now to be a credible threat.
  • Don’t expect cameos from every major character that has died in Shadowlands.
  • It is likely Baine will reunite with the spirit of his father and learn the truth of his people during Shadowlands.
  • The death of the Old Gods will attract the attention of the Void Lords
  • When you could level through zones in any order, a new zone didn’t feel difficult due to the scaling and the sense of danger and struggle was lost.

Mechanics

  • Weapon Swapping might be allowed in M+ again!
  • The team is making changes to current affixes as well as discussing the potential for new ones, but the team is trying to rework current ones to make a lot of them less of a healer issue and give incentive to do appropriately. The example given is having Volcanic do less damage, but cause a knock up if hit.
  • Heirlooms will no longer have experience bonuses.
  • The team is talking about how to further customization for druid forms, Paladin wings, etc.
  • EU and US servers as separate systems is not a great experience and said it would be great if people could play across both regions.
  • Blizzard will add new and more powerful conduits over the course of the expansion, making it necessary to seek out new conduits the entire expansion with each update. Nothing is final, but this is probably how it will work.
  • Morgan cannot say off the top of his head if a new expensive mount like the Brutosaur is being added in Shadowlands.
  • Diminishing returns will ensure that you do not have to do an obscene amount of work to stay competitive.
  • There will be several sources to acquire legendary recipes in Shadowlands.
  • There will be nothing new for archaeology in Shadowlands.

Covenants

  • The team wants players to be able to pick the Covenant that they think is cool and enjoy playing more rather than having to pick one for power reasons.
  • The goal is for all end-game systems to be accessible within your first week. It’ll be paced a little bit so that you don’t arrive at your Covenant and have a ton of systems unlocked.
  • You’ll need to be in your Covenant Sanctum to change your Soulbind. Respeccing the Soulbind will be a minimal anima cost. You’ll need to unlock the full tree over time, it’s only fully unlocked in Alpha for testing.
  • The team first designed the shadowlands with 4 distinct zones that represent different aspects of death.
  • While leaving a covenant is a relatively straightforward process, coming back to one isn’t as easy, as it is akin to “breaking” an oath.
  • Players who do so will incur penalties, such as the inability to claim covenant-exclusive rewards such as armor, and even soulbind abilities. They will still be able to access sanctum content and currency, however.
  • MMO-Champion’s Interview Round Up

Shadowlands is now in Beta

As promised, this week Shadowlands has now moved into beta. A wave of invites have been sent out and more invites will come with future waves.

 

Podcast (faz-pod): Download (Duration: 1:29:44 — 82.2MB)

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