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Category: Warcraft

Podcast Episode 62, Patch 6.2 Preview – Ashran Updates, Live Q&A Saturday, June 6 w/ Ion Hazzikostas!,

Podcast Episode 62 Patch 6.2 PTR Experiences

The podcast is back this week and in it we talked about everything major within WoW that’s happened within the last month. The main topics are the subscriber drops, no flying in the forseeable future and the content coming in patch 6.2 and our experiences on the PTR so far.

Patch 6.2 Preview – Ashran Updates

Quote from: Blizzard
Patch 6.2 Preview – Ashran Updates

In Patch 6.2, Warlords of Draenor’s PvP zone Ashran is getting some new quests and an eerie new area to explore. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll encounter on the glorious battlefield between Warspear and Stormshield.

Warning: Here be spoilers!

New Quests

Faction bosses and events will no longer reward Conquest points after Patch 6.2, but will continue to reward Honor points and strongboxes. To fill your pockets with lots of Conquest points going forward, you’ll want to pick up and complete these new quests:

  • Slay Them All! – A weekly quest to rack up 200 honor kills for a reward of 200 Conquest points.
  • Ashran Dominance – Rewards 500 Conquest points when you kill the enemy faction boss and win five events—also weekly.
  • Continue the Domination – A repeatable quest that unlocks after Ashran Dominance is completed. Rewards 500 Conquest points when you kill the enemy faction boss and win five events.

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This is new. What could be going on in here?

Meanwhile, Belloc Brightblade and Harrison Jones have followed the siren-like call of a new artifact being unearthed in Ashran. They each offer a quest leading you to fight your way into a new section of the zone. . . .

A New Area

The Ashran Excavation has been revealed, and its unearthly inhabitants are none too pleased about the presence of you and other visitors.

Once you enter the Ashran Excavation, you’ll find yourself inside a very large underground area. Similar to other parts of Ashran, a competitive event is randomly triggered in the area. When the event begins, your goal is to collect Apexis Marks of Redemption by taking down the Arakkoa ghosts that haunt the depths.

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Later on, you can tell all the ghost stories you want.

Somewhere in this underground labyrinth, you’ll find a ghost named Rukmaz—one of the few entities here who doesn’t want to kill you on sight. He’s a collector of Marks of Redemption, and he’s waiting to award victory over the Ashran Excavation to whichever faction turns in 50 Marks first.

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Rukmaz doesn’t like being called “the friendly ghost”.

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There’s a lot going on in Ashran, and if you haven’t fully explored Draenor’s sprawling PvP zone yet, you might want to check out Wowhead’s Ashran Reputations Guide and their Comprehensive Ashran Guide by HelloKitty.  Enemy players are in there right now, just waiting for you to kill them.

Want to get a first look at the next patch for yourself? Join us on the Patch 6.2 Public Test Realm, and share your thoughts and opinions on everything coming to World of Warcraft in our PTR General Discussion forum. If you find a bug while testing, let us know about it in our PTR Bug Report forum.

Live Q&A Saturday, June 6 w/ Ion Hazzikostas!

Quote from: Blizzard
This Saturday, I’ll be joining World of Warcraft Lead Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas to answer your questions live on Twitch.TV! With Patch 6.2 rapidly approaching, we wanted to take the opportunity to not only answer any questions the community has regarding the new content and features in the patch, but also take a look back at the challenges we’ve faced (and the lessons we’ve learned) when developing the Warlords of Draenor expansion and Patch 6.1.

When: Saturday, June 6, 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM Pacific time (Sunday, June 7, 12:00 AM to 1:00 AM CEST). See this handy tool to find when that is in your local time!
Where: The World of Warcraft channel on Twitch.TV/WoW

There are two ways to submit questions. If you’re using Twitter, simply tweet your question using the hashtag #WarlordsQA. You can also ask it as a reply to this forum thread; however, as we’d like to get to as many questions as possible, we will only consider questions using 40 words or less. Make them count! In order to be considered, your question must be submitted before 12:01 AM Pacific time on Saturday, June 6.

See you there!

Upcoming Live Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas

Quote from: Blizzard
On Saturday, June 6th, at 2:00 PM Pacific time, I’ll be sitting down with Lead Game Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas to answer your questions about Warlords of Draenor — including the upcoming 6.2 Content Patch, as well as lessons we’ve learned throughout Warlords of Draenor’s development.

We’ll be sharing more information, including how to submit your questions, in a full announcement on Monday, but wanted to give the community as much advance notice as possible regarding the date and time of this upcoming Q&A. We’ll see you there!

6.2 PTR Mythic Dungeons Preview – Auchindoun and Bloodmaul Slagmines

We went onto the PTR again on Tuesday night (which we livestreamed) to check out the Mythic dungeons. Currently on the PTR your item level gets reduced to an average of 660, to test the difficulty of the mythic dungeons. We found that beside a few abilities that could nearly 1 shot (which need to be interrupted), the dungeons were not that hard on mythic difficulty.

What are Mythic dungeons?

Mythic Warforged ItemOne of the features coming in patch 6.2 is the Mythic dungeon difficulty. Each of the 8 Warlords of Draenor dungeons will have this difficulty. On this difficulty the bosses will drop ilvl 685 gear and they have a chance to upgrade to ilvl 700 gear. Mythic dungeons have a weekly loot lockout. This means that you can do the mythic dungeons as many times as you want, but you’ll only be eligible for loot on your first kills within the mythic dungeons every week.

There is also a weekend event to go along with this difficulty. During the Draenor dungeon weekend event you’ll be able to pick up a quest that will reward you with a heroic Hellfire Citadel cache. It will require you to do 4 mythic dungeons.

Mythic dungeons will work a lot like Challenge Modes when it comes to starting the dungeons. You will have to get together your own group as there is no random mythic dungeon queue. You can of course use the LFG tool to find a team though, as the mythic dungeons are cross realm enabled. Once you have your group together you will need to physically walk to the entrance of the dungeon and zone in. Don’t forget to put dungeon difficulty on mythic before you do so!

Mythic Item

Speculating On The 6.2 Release Date

Welcome to Mezzy Talks! The editorial where I take a look at something within World of Warcraft culture, game design (which has been moved to the design corner) or anything else WoW related.

Update2:

The release date has been confirmed: June 23rd!

Update:

PTR testing is heading towards it’s final phase. Zorbix just posted on twitter:

“We’ve reached a point in 6.2 testing where going forward, builds deployed to PTR are going to be flagged as “release” versions.”

This makes an end of June / start of July release a lot more likely.

Original Article:

Recently the first bit of patch 6.2 hit the background downloader causing a lot of speculation as to when the patch will be released. As it’s a quiet Sunday night, I thought it would be good to tackle the subject of the release of patch 6.2.

Since the background download has started there have been 2 camps of speculation. The first one being that the patch will already be released within the next week or two. You’ll mostly find these players in-game in the trade channel, whenever the background downloader gets mentioned.

The second camp is one you’ll more likely come across in the online community and social media. You’ll more likely hear from this camp that it’ll take 1 month – 4 weeks for patch 6.2 to be released. Let’s take a look at each of the speculations and then I’ll do some speculating of my own.

Speculation of 1 week

When it comes to addressing this particular time frame we can be done pretty quickly about it. Before a major patch is released there is always at least 1 release candidate pushed to the PTR, if not more than 1 candidate. We’re currently getting 1 new PTR build a week and the content itself isn’t done yet (which we’ll go into more deeply shortly). There is no way in the emerald nightmare that we’ll see 6.2 release in 1 or even 2 weeks.

Speculation of 1 month

Timewarped Item
Another factor – timewalker (and raid) tuning

One month – 4 weeks would seem more reasonable, but at the current state of things it would mean just a meager 4 more PTR builds. They could (and likely will) increase the amount of new builds they do per week, but there’s still a lot that has to be done to make the 6.2 patch complete.

The shipyard can’t be upgraded to even level 2 yet, the quest(s) to get more than 2 ship blueprints still do not work properly (beyond having used a bug in previous builds to obtain the submarine), the way shipyard missions work still don’t seem to be final (the mission requirement changes in the last build indicate that at the very least) and the new reputations for Tanaan Jungle Watcher recently talked about in an interview haven’t even made it onto the PTR yet. In fact, they’re still being fleshed out. They’re not even fully designed yet.

So while 1 month seems reasonable and puts 6.2 at a end of June release, I feel it’s unlikely with the amount of time and effort that undoubtedly still needs to go into 6.2. After all if there’s one thing we learned from the delayed release of WoD, it’s that game design takes time.

Neither

So if it’s not 1 week, 2 weeks or even 1 month, when can we expect the release of 6.2? Well given the pattern Blizzard has shown in the past, I feel there are 2 possibilities that take the “soon” comment from the recent interview into account.

The first possibility is mid July which would put the wait time at 6 to 7 weeks. The second possibility is mid August. Which would put it at another 10 to 11 weeks. So you might be wondering, why the gap? Well at the start of August Gamescom takes place from the 5th to 9th of August. Whenever these events occur, the week before and the week after nothing usually happens.

Speculating the release of a new patch is a very inexact science. No one actually knows how far 6.2 is in the development process outside of Blizzard themselves. So while we as a community enjoy the guessing, in the end we’ll just have to wait for the official announcement. 1 month is possible but unlikely, let’s just hope it isn’t actually another 2,5 months!

6.2 Tanaan Jungle Blood Moon Event Preview

One of the events that we have come came across in Tanaan Jungle is the Blood Moon event. It has been slightly bugged in past PTR builds, and even now the event icon will not go away even when the event is not active. Obviously bugs are part of the PTR, but it was good to see it finally working. As such we’ve got a preview video of how the event will work and what the reward is when you complete it!

No Flying In The Forseeable Future, More WoD Content Patches After 6.2

Polygon recently interviewed lead designer Ion Hazzikostas about 6.2 and the future of WoW. You can read the full interview here. Below is a summary of the new bits of news:

  • They will add a couple of reputations for players to earn from multiple factions in Tanaan Jungle.
    • You can gain these by defending certain areas that come under attack or by hunting rare creatures.
    • Awards will include cosmetic upgrades, some player power items and some convenience items.
  • There will be no flying in Draenor. And there might not be in future expansions.
    • “The world feels larger, feels more dangerous. There’s more room for exploration, for secrets, for discovery and overall immersion in the world. At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”
    • There might be flight options in specific expansion ideas or zones that would benefit from it
  • Patch 6.2 will not be the last content patch of Warlords of Draenor.
    • “We’ve got plenty of more story to be told after this”
  • Patch 6.2 will be released “soon”.

6.2 PTR Timewalker Dungeons Preview – Slave Pens and Mana Tombs

The Timewalker dungeons are active on the PTR again, this time they’re The Burning Crusade dungeons! We took a look at two of them today. These seem a lot easier than the Wrath of the Lich King versions. Other than a few trash mobs that really could hurt, it was a walk in the park. So there is likely still some balancing to be done, after all it is the PTR!

On the last preview article the question was asked if legendaries can be used in these dungeons. They can! Both Tokk and Mezzy used their Thoridal bows during the first run.

What are Timewalker dungeons?

One of the features coming in patch 6.2 is the Timewalker event. It’s one of 7 possible weekend events. One is for The Burning Crusade, and one is for Wrath of the Lich King. During the event there is a quest you can do to get 1 extra raid loot bonus roll coin that does not count towards the 3 per week cap. To get this you will have to do 5 random Timewalker dungeons. You can pick up this quest in your garrison.

Other than the quest the bosses also drop timewalker items that look like their original TBC/WotLK counterparts. These have the “timewarped” tag. At level 100 these have an item level of 660. If you do the timewalker dungeons as a level 90, these will have a 463 item level. You’ll be able to do timewalker dungeons if your level is atleast as high as the original dungeon’s requirement. This means level 70 for TBC timewalking and level 80 for WotLK timewalking. The item level of the loot will adjust to your level when it drops.