More interviews have come out for The War Within and datamining has continued as well!
Below is a roundup of new information, of course you can expect some spoilers:
Quests/World content
- The experience required to getting to level 70 is being massively reduced. A 75-80% reduction from 60 to 70 has been datamined (Wowhead)
- Delves will also be part of the campaign (PCGamer)
- At the end game Delves will have different variants of each Delve (IGN)
- Keys for end of Delve chests will be earned through outdoor content (IGN)
- There are likely to be a few Delves per week that are highlighted with bonus loot (IGN)
- While they originally planned for one difficulty during leveling up, delves will have multiple difficulties during leveling up as well (MrGM)
- The emphasis with Delve difficulty is on what’s more fun for the player, rather than the right choice (MrGM)
Gear/Itemization
- Flightstones are being replaced with the evergreen Valorstones (MrGM)
Classes
- Oracle Priest is no longer support oriented but instead focused on priest healing (Towelliee)
- Some class talent trees are being updated to make room for new Hero Talent buttons on your action bars. They are paying attention at preventing button bloat with the addition of Hero Talents. (Towelliee)
- In Alpha week 1 we’ll already see class talent changes for Evoker, Druid, Monk and Paladin (Towelliee)
- They consider Augmentation Evoker to be a success. With The War Within they will add better combat log tracking as well (Towelliee)
- It’s likely in Midnight when the level cap goes up again they’ll add new talent points to the existing talent trees (IGN)
- There are no plans for hero-class heritage sets (MrGM)
- Non-evoker dracthyr classes will have an emphasis on playing in visage form (MrGM)
Dungeons/Mythic+/Raiding
- There will always be some tension with affixes. It is discussed within the team and they don’t have anything to share right now. They’ll continue experimenting with them (Towelliee)
- The Rookery dungeon will have Follower Dungeon support as it’s part of the campaign. No confirmation on all 8 dungeons being Follower Dungeons. (Towelliee)
- They’ve discussed having a PvP Brawl-like feature to experiment with things for Mythic+ (Towelliee)
- No seasonal affixes planned for The War Within (Towelliee)
- They’re going to try making any dungeon part of the Mythic+ rotation possible as a Mythic+0 dungeon so that players in that bracket have seasonally changing content too (Towelliee)
- Like previous old expansion dungeons, Grim Batol will get a rework that keeps the spirit of the dungeon. There will still be a bombing run (Towelliee)
- They currently have nothing to say on tuning intentions for end of raid Mythic bosses (Towelliee)
- In season 4 Dawn of the Infinite is tuned much higher so it feels and rewards like a mini raid (Towelliee)
- Heroic dungeon queues will also be for the dungeons in the current seasonal rotation (IGN)
- They don’t have a specific number of raids they’re committing to yet for TWW (IGN)
- They’re happy with season lengths and raid tiers that last around 5 months (IGN)
- They might only do the “heroic” week in the first tier of the expansion but have the Mythic raids be open on week 1 in the later tiers (MrGM)
- They’re unlikely to test the final boss on the Beta on lower difficulties if their confidence internally in tuning and quality is high (MrGM)
- Plans for season 4 TWW are not finalized (MrGM)
- There are no plans to change from the 20man mythic raiding format (MrGM)
- They would like to explore the ability to specate while dead (MrGM)
Dragonriding
- Characters will learn Dynamic Flying at level 15 (Warcraft)
- As you level up you’ll get the flying talents, no need to find Glyphs in the Dragon Isles (Warcraft)
- Lightning Rush, the Whirling Surge replacement, of the War Within Heroic Edition mount, will be usable by other mounts as well (Warcraft)
- There will be new Glyphs to collect across Khaz Algar for exploration achievements and cosmetic perks (MrGM)
Lore
- The story will not be a darker story like Shadowlands. However the will be a lot more at stake. (PCGamesN)
- In a way The War Within is a bit of a reset. In Dragonflight we took a step back to take a moment to breathe and this is the beginning of a new arc (PCGamesN)
Warbands
- Raid skips will become account wide (MrGM)
- They hope to provide options to customise the character login screen during TWW (MrGM)
UI
- As spiders are predominant in The War Within, there will be a new Arachnophobia filter to change them into crabs (PCGamer)
- While they won’t be doing it with The War Within, it is on their list to update the quest UI to better communicate lore and NPC interactions (MrGM)
- They want to update Tabard customization in the future, but it won’t be for TWW (MrGM)
- They would like to clarify and improve the visibility of respawn points in Raids (MrGM)
Professions
- They are moving towards more cross realm features for the cross-realm auction house and want to remove barriers (MrGM)
Misc
- They are expecting to announce a 2025 roadmap at the end of the year (MrGM)
- The goal is to allow cross faction queueing (LFG/LFR) when you have a full group sometime during TWW (MrGM)
- They have no intention to return to big borrowed power systems (MrGM)
Full Interviews/Sources:
Dev Interview Towelliee
Leveling Datamining Wowhead
World of Warcraft Flying Video
PCGamer Arachnophobia Filter
Story Interview PCGamesN
PCGamer Storytelling in Dungeons
IGN Dev Interview
London Group Interview Ion Hazzikostas, MrGM writeup
Previous Roundups:
The War Within Alpha Interview Roundup Part 1