The War Within Alpha Interview Roundup

The War Within Alpha is going live and that means there’s new developer interviews and other videos! Below is a roundup of new information:

Quests/World content

Dungeons will be part of the main Campaign but you can do follower dungeons to complete them if you prefer playing solo (WoWCast)
To start a Delve you click on the misty portal/door and it opens your own Delve instance (WoWCast)
Delves will have 11 difficulty levels (MMO-Champion)
Around Delve difficulty level 8 it will just be about bragging rights (MMO-Champion)
Delve progress will be account wide (MrGM)
In pre-season you can do delves and progress your companion to level 10, once a season starts it goes up to 50 (MMO-Champion)
They have talked about adding delves in older zones outside of TWW zones (MMO-Champion)
There are changes coming to World Quests but they’re not quite ready to talk about it yet (MMO-Champion)
The Live Team works on live content for the game. They don’t work on dungeons/raids/etc instead they work on things like more more holiday updates and fun content coming in the future (MMO-Champion)

Gear/Itemization

Tier sets are not going away. Delves will be included in the ways to obtain them (Raids/M+/PvP) (WoWCast)
Delves might grant gear up to Mythic+5 (MMO-Champion)
Outside of the highest item levels, Warbound equipment will be fairly common (MMO-Champion)

Classes

There are plans to expand the classes that Dracthyr can be but it won’t be at launch (MrGM)
Many of the Hero Talents have changed after the community gave feedback on the Hero talent blog posts (WoWCast)

Dungeons/Mythic+/Raiding

The season 1 dungeon rotation is Ara-kara City of Echoes, City of Threads, The Stonevault, The Dawnbreaker, Mists of Tirna Scithe (SL), The Necrotic Wake (SL), Siege of Boralus (BfA) and Grim Batol (Cata) (wowhead)
The team is still talking about making BfA raids more accessible for transmog farming…… (MMO-Champion)
Dawn of the Infinite was a progression experience and the team would like to do more of that (MMO-Champion)
The team is talking about how they can make Mythic+ affixes more interesting (MMO-Champion)
The team is still talking and looking at new affixes as well as positive affixes with a harder base difficulty (MMO-Champion)
In the first week of a season the Mythic raid will again not be available (Wowhead)

Dragonriding

They’ve made it possible for almost all old flying mounts to fly with dynamic flying/dragonriding (WoWCast)

Lore

Anduin and Alleria will be central characters running away from the wounds of their past and will in the end find redemption (WoWCast)
Magni Bronzebeard, Moira Thaurrisan and her son Dagran Thaurrisan will also play a part. Dagran has a very scholarly nature (WoWCast)
The raid is a city like Suramar. The nerubians are not super villains in a lair but a powerful race that we’re facing off against. (WoWCast)
The intro scenario will not be tested, however players will start on Khaz Algar in the wreckage of a crashed Dalaran (T&E)
They want to start with Dalaran crashing to let the players see the high stakes from the get-go. Anything can happen going forward, actions and events will have consequences (T&E)

Warbands

Warbands are a foundation. It allows them to structure data a lot more to be account based (WoWCast)
Any characters from any realm will show up on the favorites list (MrGM)
The account bound bank can get 5 tabs. Unlocking tabs costs an increasing amount of gold, ranging from 1000 gold to 2.5 mil gold (MrGM)
You can deposit gold into the bank to transfer gold between characters on different realms (MrGM)
A new toy you can earn with new leveling achievements allows you to open the bank from anywhere (MrGM)
The War Within and Dragonflight reputations will be account-wide upon launch (MrGM)
You can only get reputation from quests once. So doing quests on alts will not reward you with more rep (MrGM)
Achievement progress will be account wide but class specific achievements will not be (MrGM)
Leveling characters up to 80 gives you an account wide 5% bonus experience, up to +25% (MrGM)
Selling an item you can’t wear at all will add the transmog to your collections tab (MrGM)
New kinds of achievements are being added that might require you to use multiple characters to complete (Wowhead)

Quest markers are getting an overhaul to make it much more clear what type of quest they are (WoWCast)
The collections UI now has a dropdown for different classes (MrGM)
Ocean graphics at the beach have been updated (MMO-Champion)

PvP

Professions

They will fundamentally be like they were in Dragonflight (WoWCast)
Work orders will see the addition of NPC work orders (WoWCast)
The team is experimenting with Archaeology but nothing is confirmed for launch (MMO-Champion)
Herbalism will have a mini-game in Hallowfall (MMO-Champion)

Dragonflight Retrospective

When they started on DF they set the goal of 8 weeks per patch. Now they’re looking at how can they make this content cadence sustaintable for both the dev team and players (MrGM)
They set goals for the more different patches such as Plunderstorm and Remix. Plunderstorm met those goals and they’ll see on Remix. (MrGM)
There are a lot of different versions of WoW now (Retail, Classic, Season of Discovery, Hardcore) and they can do that because they have the player base to do so. A lot of what they’ve done in game modes for classic is a direct reaction to what the community wants. And with TWW they’ll be adding things based on community feedback too. Delves and warbands are two of those things that are a direct reaction to player feedback. (MrGM)
The teasing of patch 10.2.6 did not go the way it was intended. It was unplanned and they overplayed it. (MrGM)

Misc

They are strategic about the releases of different WoW modes not conflicting with each other. However they are fortunate that the Retail and Classic (Cata) player bases don’t overlap much. So they are not too concerned about releasing content for those 2 WoW game modes closely together. (MrGM)
The experimental gameplay team is now just part of the live content team and they have a giant list of crazy things they want to do (MrGM)
We can expect more of the experimental gameplay in The War Within. What works will return. (MrGM)
Holly is excited for the content planned for the more casual player. Delves and follower dungeons in particular. (MrGM)
There is a new toy to reveal the maps for any full maps your characters have explored (MrGM)
The team does not want you to feel forever behind if you miss a few days. The team has no plans to bring back such grinds (MMO-Champion)