Gear changes are coming! First, in Patch 5.4.8 (which is currently in testing on the PTR), all upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels. This change will be applied to all items found on the Timeless Isle and in Siege of Orgrimmar. For instance, if you have an item level 553 Greatsword of Pride’s Fall and its Upgrade Level is 2/2 making it item level 561, once the new patch goes live it will display 2/4 and allow you the opportunity to bump it up to item level 569. Whether you’re working on a newly boosted character or progressing through Siege of Orgrimmar, we hope this change will provide you with the extra punch you need to take down your foes.
Second, we are also adding a new token called Deeds of Valor which will cost 3000 Timeless Coins, and can be used to grant your character 100 Valor Points. Players who wish to purchase the new token can do so by visiting Mistweaver Ai on the Timeless Isle next to the Celestial Court. Keep in mind, these tokens won’t allow you to go above the current weekly cap on Valor, but they do provide you an extra option to gain the points you may need so you can upgrade your gear.
We will be bumping up the ilvl of all Garrosh Heirlooms by +8 in 5.4.8, since they are not upgradeable with Valor. The intent of the 5.4.8 VP upgrade change is to let people continue to progress, and we don’t want those who are using one of the Garrosh BoA weapons as their primary weapon to feel like they need to go get a brand new weapon due to this change.
Blizzard also posted a new mount image on twitter last night. It looks like it will be a mount in draenor, and it looks a bit like a ravager!
Hello, and welcome to Artcraft! I’m Chris Robinson, senior art director on World of Warcraft, and in today’s edition we’re going to give you a first look at the new female Night Elf model. As you probably know, we’re in the process of updating all of the original character models, along with the Draenei and Blood Elf, to improve their texture, polygon, and animation fidelity. Let’s get this going with some comments from Tyson Murphy, our lead character artist.
Hi all—I’m Tyson, and on behalf of everyone on the art team, we’re excited to be able to give you a first look at our in-progress female Night Elf model.
This is a good opportunity to talk about the iterative process we go through with all of the art we create, especially with the updated player models. We don’t call anything truly “complete” until it’s in the game and fulfilling all of our (and your!) expectations. This means that when it comes to concept art, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation, everything is always up for debate and change, and we’re rethinking and revising continuously. Creating these updated models is a huge team effort, and we’re constantly considering feedback and suggestions on what we can do better. We’ve committed ourselves to this process, and the female Night Elf provided a unique opportunity to put it into practice.
The female Night Elf was actually one of the first models we started, but as we began to develop our other character models, we also wound up refining the overall look we were going for with the models and our processes for creating them. Ultimately, we felt that in order to do the female Night Elf justice, we needed to revisit her model with fresh eyes and continue iterating based on what we’d learned from working on the other models. The Night Elves have such a distinct but subtle character, and we spent a lot of effort in trying to help that come through.
As with all of the updated character models, our goal is to keep everything the original model accomplished intact, while using the additional fidelity to realize characteristics that we weren’t able to fully represent with the lower polygon counts and texture resolutions. Overall, we’ve made her new model a little more defined, made some of her proportions a bit more realistic, and added a bit more muscle tone. We wanted to visually communicate that she is a fully capable warrior huntress, and small details like muscle definition help highlight that. We also put additional focus on her hands and fingernails, giving a very slight point to her nails to provide just a hint of a more feral nature.
Last but not least, the all-important Night Elf ears. In the original model, these were quite literally separate pieces of geometry effectively tacked onto the head of the Night Elf. In the new models, we’ve taken care to fully integrate the ears into the geometry, which leads to a far more natural and high-quality look.
I’ve asked Tamara Bakhlycheva, who also worked on the female Night Elf model, to add a few closing thoughts.
Hi all, I’m Tamara from the World of Warcraft art team. Being able to work on the female Night Elf has been a great experience, and the team has put a lot of effort into preserving the iconic Night Elf look—beautiful, wild, and dangerous. I hope you’ll enjoy playing your new Night Elf as much as we’ve enjoyed creating her.
Chris here again; thanks for reading, and we look forward to sharing more about the ongoing process of bringing the art of Warlords of Draenor—and beyond—to life. Thanks!
This week Blizzard had it´s quarterly earnings call in which they announced that WoW is back down to 7.6 million subscribers! That´s a loss of 200.000 subscribers, which is how much they had gained last quarter. Let´s not forget that 7.6 million subscribers is still an amazing number for an MMO and a game that´s nearing it´s 10 year anniversary. Other somewhat interesting tidbits from the call:
Content updates are in development for Diablo 3
WoD Alpha test is coming soon
More than 10 million players have registered to Hearthstone
It doesn’t look like Heroes of the Storm will go out of technical Alpha any time soon
In other news a small patch 5.4.8 was datamined this week with 2 buffs to help you out with the legendary chain quest grinding parts.
Gaze of the Black Prince – Increases reputation gained with the Black Prince by 100%. Increases the chances his most hated foes will relinquish their Secrets of the Empire, Sigil of Wisdom, Sigil of Power, or Titan Runestones.
Hopefully they’ll make doing the legendary quest chain on an alt somewhat bearable!
And then lastly, there will be no WoW Weekly podcast tonight, but we should be back next week!
Blizzard came out with 2 interesting posts today. The first being on the changes that will happen in Siege of Orgrimmar when 6.0 hits (which will be 4 to 6 weeks before WoD launches!). And the second with a look at the design of the Spires of Arak, one of the new zones in Draenor.
In the recent Dev Watercooler: Raiding Azeroth Part 3—Warlords of Draenor, we discussed some of the raid changes coming in the next WoW expansion. Before Warlords of Draenor launches, players will have a chance to experience the new raid structure firsthand in the Siege of Orgrimmar.
In the upcoming Patch 6.0, the pre-expansion “systems” update planned to go live in the weeks leading up to Warlords of Draenor’s release, we’ll be converting Siege of Orgrimmar to use the new Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties. Both Normal and Heroic difficulties will support flexible raid sizes and our cross-server Group Finder tool, while Mythic will be a fixed 20-player size. At the same time, “stat squish” will be in effect, the new class changes will be live, and Hit and Expertise will no longer be stats on items, so those will be replaced with more useful ones on all existing items. The raid as a whole will be retuned for the new numbers and scaling size—overall, it should prove no more difficult than it is currently, and will likely be easier in many places.
With the end of an expansion and a raid tier, along with introduction of a new level cap, we’ll also be retiring a handful of rewards. We want to encourage everyone to enjoy one last hurrah in the Siege of Orgrimmar before your adventure on Draenor begins.
In addition to the above changes, when Patch 6.0 arrives:
Flexible Raid difficulty will cease to exist as it does now, and will be removed from the raid queue interface. The new Normal difficulty of Siege of Orgrimmar will offer a similar experience to that of Flexible Raid.
The new Group Finder tool will be available, designed to help players create and find groups for Normal and Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar and other cross-realm group content.
Siege of Orgrimmar achievements will be relabeled according to the new difficulty structure (e.g. “Heroic: Malkorok” will now be “Mythic: Malkorok”). Credit for these will be retroactively awarded to players who earned them before Patch 6.0.
This means that the Kor’kron War Wolf, awarded by the “Ahead of the Curve” Feat of Strength, will also cease to be obtainable upon release of the pre-expansion Patch 6.0.
With the release of Patch 6.0, the drop rate of the Heirloom weapons from Garrosh Hellscream on Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties will be significantly increased.
Players who have yet to get any Heirlooms will have a 100% (guaranteed) chance of getting a spec-appropriate Heirloom when defeating Garrosh on Normal difficulty or higher.
The chance of receiving additional Heirlooms beyond the first will also be increased.
When Warlords of Draenor is released and players are able to head to Draenor and level past 90:
Garrosh Hellscream will no longer drop Heirloom weapons.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Artcraft. I’m Chris Robinson, senior art director on World of Warcraft, and today our environment team is going to give you a look at one of the zones we’re creating for Warlords of Draenor, as well as share some insight into how we approach creating environment art. Take it away Gary!
Hey, I’m Gary Platner, lead environment artist on World of Warcraft. I direct a team of artists who help create the world . . . of Warcraft. We shape the land; texture it; place the trees, rocks, and buildings; and design the “sets” where our quest team will later place the “actors.” Today we’re going to be showing you some of what’s going into the creation of the Spires of Arak. This location that would later become known as Terokkar Forest, but in Draenor-terms, this zone is the home of the regal, sinister, and flighted arakkoa.
One of the best parts about working on WoW for me is when we first start a new exterior zone. Creativity reigns, and almost anything goes—it’s real blue sky stuff. When we started working on Spires of Arak, we only had some basic ideas: tall rocky spires jutting out of a dense forest. So we got together to talk about what that might look like, and soon afterward, artist Jimmy Lo started making concepts.
Based on these concepts, we could tell right away that this zone was going to present some unique challenges. The biggest one was how we were going to build the large spiky rocks that would give the zone its distinctive look. We had two basic methods in mind to create those spires. Some of us thought that the best way would be to make most of the rocks as 3D props instead of using our terrain editor to sculpt the landscape into tall spires. 3D props have some distinct advantages, since building a prop allows for the creation of fully 3D objects of any shape, which gives us a lot of design freedom. The downside is they tend to be difficult to blend into the landscape in a natural-looking way (see the original Blade’s Edge Mountains in Outland). They’re also much more difficult to iterate on as design needs change. If instead we used our terrain editor to create the spires, that would allow us a lot of freedom to iterate on zone layout and design without needing to fidget with large pieces of premade geometry, with the potential downside of not being able to do the concept justice.
Our design team wanted to at least give the terrain editor option a chance, so they embarked on creating a proof of concept to see how well it could work. A lot of us contributed to the Spires of Arak, but ultimately Matt Sanders (exterior level designer) and Kelli Hoover (environment artist) were tasked with creating the zone. Kelli gathered resource material and started to do some paint-overs of our concepts in order to unify a distinctive new color palette. Meanwhile, Matt created the proof of concept in our editing tools in order to test ideas for creating large spiky rocks with the exterior terrain editor.
Kelli gathered a lot of reference pictures, paying special attention to color and mood. She then slightly recolored Jimmy’s concepts to model different times of day.
Then Kelli moved on to testing texture ideas by creating rough and quick block-out textures, which aren’t intended to look final but help give us an idea of color and detail. We can paint these rough textures over the landscape and do various tests to help us see how they interact. We can also see how the textures change and distort as they are painted on steep mountain terrain.
As you can see here, Matt and Kelli experimented with different textures and geometry in an attempt to duplicate the concepts from Jimmy.
Kelli and Matt discovered that using a striated rock texture would actually work better than a simpler rock pattern, and the striations give the impression of upward movement. These linear texture shapes would also bend and stretch well over the exterior terrain creating a really unique look for the zone.
Once Matt and Kelli finalized their demo zone and we agreed that everything was heading in the right direction, the real work could begin. Now the whole zone could be completed using the style and techniques that worked in the small demo zone. They’d still have to work out the look for some of the smaller subzones, though, like dense forests, beaches, and a massive thorny bramble where the Shattered Hand orcs dwell.
Last but not least, we’ve prepared a short video for you to demonstrate the various steps involved in creating the Spires of Arak. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the future!
While the website was offline 2 interviews took place with Ion Hazzikostas, also known as Watcher. These were of course intended to clarify whatever was needed from his raiding philosophy blog series. On friday Watcher had an interview with wowhead which you can check out here. On sunday FinalBossTV was lucky enough to interview him which you can check out here.
Outside of the two interviews there was also another Azeroth Choppers episode, and a blog about PvP and it’s gear in WoD.
War looms on the horizon, and although the Iron Horde poses a substantial threat to all of Azeroth, the old grudges between the Alliance and the Horde are not so easily set aside. As development of the Warlords of Draenor expansion continues, we wanted to share with you some exciting changes coming to PvP gear, and the methods by which you can earn it.
I’ve Got the Power!
In Mists of Pandaria, we added PvP Power as a stat that would allow PvP gear to be functionally superior to Raid and Dungeon gear in PvP combat, without exceeding the value of its equivalent PvE gear in PvE content. That was largely a success within instanced PvP Arenas and Battlegrounds, but we think we can do better while also ensuring outdoor world PvP is able to benefit from that same intent. So, in Warlords of Draenor, we’re taking a different approach.
PvP gear in Warlords will no longer have PvP-specific stats. Instead, it will scale up to a higher item level as soon as you enter a designated PvP area, such as an Arena or Battleground, or as soon as you enter PvP combat anywhere else in the world. If you’re out questing with PvP gear, the item’s base item level will be used while fighting back the Iron Horde, but the second that raiding druid tries to gank you, your higher PvP item level kicks in and you’ll have the upper-hand. Each piece of PvP gear will have its PvP item level displayed clearly on its tooltip, so there’s no guesswork involved.
On top of that, all gear—even gear found in PvE content—will be scaled up to a certain minimum item level in any designated PvP area. That minimum is still lower than any of the actual PvP gear, but a fresh level 100 character who’s just wearing some dungeon gear, or even whatever they picked up while questing, will not be at quite as severe a disadvantage should they choose to step into a Skirmish or Random Battleground.
One added advantage of this new system is that most PvE gear will no longer need to be downscaled in PvP areas, as the equivalent PvP gear is already a higher item level in PvP situations. Instead of making players wearing PvE gear feel weaker in PvP, we make players wearing PvP gear feel stronger. The only exception is Mythic raid gear. Mythic’s PvE item level and Conquest’s PvP item level are very close, so we’ll be downscaling Mythic gear slightly in designated PvP areas just to make sure that Conquest gear remains the best available for PvP.
What’s In the Box?!
The Warlords of Draenor expansion will also bring some major improvements to the way PvP gear is earned. For starters, we’re vastly improving the bonus rewards you can earn from doing Random or Call to Arms Battlegrounds. At the end of a match, you’ll earn a Bronze, Silver, or Gold Strongbox. Which Strongboxes you earn depends on how well your team did in the match, but you can still earn them even if your team doesn’t win.
Take Warsong Gulch, for example. If your faction captured at least one flag before the game ended, you’ll get the Bronze Strongbox. Capture a second, and you’ll earn both the Bronze and Silver. And if you capture all three, not only do you win the game, but you’ll also earn all three Strongboxes. We’ll be restructuring the scoring of other Battlegrounds slightly (such as changing Arathi Basin to end at 1500 points) so it’s easy to figure out what you need for each Strongbox.
Inside those Strongboxes could be any number of rewards: Honor points, Conquest points, even gear! Better Strongboxes can have better rewards, so even if your team is behind in the match, it’s worth keeping up the fight to try to earn the best reward you can.
Of course, Skirmishes (the unranked Arenas we announced a little while back) will have rewards as well. We’re still discussing exactly how we want to hand them out, but you’ll be able to earn gear and Honor by playing Skirmishes if you’d prefer.
A Veteran’s Honor
Another issue on our radar is the ever-increasing item level gap between the gear you can purchase with Honor and Conquest points. To help bridge that gap, in Warlords, we’re going to have three separate tiers of PvP gear.
It starts with an introductory set of a quality similar to today’s Honor gear, except you’ll earn it much, much faster. That set comes primarily through the Strongboxes, and you’ve got a high chance of getting a piece in each Strongbox you earn. After that starter gear comes a new set: Veteran’s gear. There’s a small chance to find a piece of Veteran’s gear in a Silver or Gold Strongbox, but you can also purchase Veteran’s gear with Honor points. That gear’s PvP item level will be halfway between the starter gear and Gladiator’s gear.
Adding the Veteran’s tier accomplishes a lot of things for us. First, it makes sure that someone who wants to step into rated PvP later on in the season isn’t nearly as far behind their opponents in gear. Second, since the basic gear is earned so quickly, that helps make sure players get those important set bonuses, trinkets, etc. without too much trouble, and helps ensure everyone is on some baseline in their ability to compete. For players who enjoy PvP but aren’t really interested in jumping into rated competition, earning Veteran’s gear will feel a lot more rewarding.
As for Gladiator’s gear, we’ve been pretty happy with how Conquest points have worked in Season 15, but we are making one small change: Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas will have the same base Conquest cap. That cap can then be increased by your rating in either Arenas or Rated BGs (whichever is higher). Instead of giving you extra Conquest points, winning a Rated Battleground will allow you to use a bonus roll token for a shot at a piece of Gladiator’s gear, similar to the Celestial world bosses on the Timeless Isle. This tweak makes the weekly Conquest cap easier to understand, while still providing an extra incentive for running RBGs, and letting you use your bonus rolls on PvP gear through PvP.
The Island
We’re all very excited for what Warlords of Draenor is bringing to World of Warcraft PvP, and want to make it the best it possibly can be. Of course, there’s another major piece to this puzzle: Ashran. We’ll be sharing more details on what you can earn from Ashran soon. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing you on the battlefields!
Incase you missed it on our social media yesterday while the site was down, this week’s WoW Weekly Podcast is up! This week we talk about the WoD Raid Philosophy, WoD Flying and a bunch of other stuff that we would like to see happen in Warlords of Draenor!
I’ve Got the Power!