***World of Warcraft : Warlords of Draenor***

Soldato
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So, now that Blizzard have announced the new WoW expansion I thought it would be appropriate to have a new thread discussing what the new one has added, removed and what your general thoughts on this are.

Across Draenor's savage jungles and battle-scarred plains, Azeroth's heroes will engage in a mythic conflict involving mystical draenei champions and mighty orc clans, and cross axes with the likes of Grommash Hellscream, Blackhand, and Ner'zhul at the height of their primal power. Players will need to scour this unwelcoming land in search of allies to help build a desperate defense against the old Horde's formidable engine of conquest—or else watch their own world's bloody, war-torn history repeat itself.

Learn more about the fifth World of Warcraft expansion set, Warlords of Draenor: http://www.warlordsofdraenor.com




GAME FEATURES

Explore a Savage World: Explore the hostile world of Draenor, home of the orc and draenei races, as it once existed, and adventure in all-new zones alongside characters central to Warcraft history.
Build Your Garrison: Construct, command, and expand your own customizable stronghold on Draenor, and gather NPC followers to collect resources and embark on missions on your orders.
Instantly Upgrade to Level 90: Boost one character of your choosing to be ready to adventure on Draenor, making it easier than ever to enjoy the latest content alongside your friends.
New Player Character Art: Character models and animations for many of World of Warcraft's existing playable races are being fully revamped in keeping with the game's iconically epic style.
Adventure to Level 100: Reach new heights of power and unlock bonuses to further enhance your abilities on your way to the new level cap of 100.
…And More: Take on a wide array of Dungeons, Raids, Scenarios, Battlegrounds, Challenge Modes, and more—no matter what kind of content you enjoy, new adventures await.

In Warlords of Draenor, you’ll make a permanent impact on the world with a Garrison: your own personal fortress that you build, staff, and manage. You’ll customize your Garrison’s layout, appearance, and gameplay effects, and attract followers to operate it. The Garrison allows World of Warcraft players to own a larger part of the world than ever before, and opens up a wide variety of interesting gameplay decisions—with as much or as little micromanagement as you wish.

Your Garrison exists seamlessly in the world, but you won’t need to go into an instance portal to visit your home base—as you travel through Draenor, you’ll see your Garrison looming on the horizon.

Followers

Followers are NPCs (non-player characters) that you recruit to join your Garrison. You’ll send them on missions to improve your Garrison and earn loot for your character. You can also allocate them to complete tasks—things like crafting or gathering resources, which they’ll do whether you’re online or offline.

Followers have a character level, an item level, and traits that affect missions and tasks. For example, if they have the Mining trait, you’ll be able to assign them to a Mine in your Garrison to gather resources for you. There are common, uncommon, rare, and epic followers, and their rarity affects the number of traits they can have.

Recruiting Followers

To run an effective Garrison, you’ll first need to recruit followers. Some will make their own way to your base, but you can also upgrade your Inn to attract more followers. You can also win followers to your cause as you progress through the game’s story, when completing quests, or simply by coughing up the right sum of gold to hire mercenaries.

When they’re not away on missions, your followers hold down posts at your Garrison, where you can visit them at any time. A major goal for the Garrison system is for followers to be dynamic and interesting—for example, if a follower fails a mission that takes place in a local dungeon, they might be taken prisoner; the next time you adventure in that dungeon, you’ll be able to rescue them.

Missions

Mission Objectives

You’ll send your followers on missions for varied purposes. Successful missions will give you the resources you need to keep developing your Garrison, but you’ll also have the chance to acquire powerful loot for your character, and your followers will gain experience for each mission they run.

The resources you’ll acquire during missions include both existing crafting reagents and Garrison-specific materials. For example, if you assign a follower to a mining mission, you could receive ore, but you might also unearth stone, a new kind of resource used to construct and upgrade buildings.

Though followers are great for solo play, the system also has multiplayer elements. When you dispatch a party of your followers on certain missions, you’ll also be able to join forces with your guildmates’ followers, even if your guildmate is offline.

Follower Progression

Followers grow in power in a way that mirrors players’ progression. From levels 90–100, followers will gain character levels, which have a significant impact on their abilities and mission success chance. They’ll also increase their item level as you equip them with follower-specific gear; once they’ve reached level 100, equipment will have a larger role to play in their overall effectiveness.

Garrisons & Buildings

Building Functions

Buildings are the individual “pieces” of your Garrison—Stables, Farms, Mines, Armories, and more. They improve your ability to recruit, use, and train followers; to craft; to complete missions; and to run missions more quickly by reducing your followers’ downtime.

Each building in your garrison can be upgraded, which amplifies its mechanical effect and visuals. For example, an upgraded Barracks will grow bigger and more impressive, but it’ll also increase the number of followers you can send on missions at one time (for example, 5 followers at once for a level 1 Barracks, then 7 followers, then 12—though the exact numbers are still in flux).

Customizing Your Garrison’s Look

Buildings in your Garrison can be placed in a number of configurations. You can only place small-sized buildings (primarily crafting-related) on small plots; a larger building, like a Barracks, won’t fit. Bigger buildings can be constructed early on—even a “starting” Garrison has room for a large structure. As your Garrison increases in level, you’ll get access to more and larger building space, and increase the versatility and power of your holdings.

Garrisons are visually distinct depending on whether you’re a Horde or Alliance player, and you’ll be able to place your Garrison in one of several zones on Draenor. You’ll also specify your Garrison’s layout (the physical location of buildings within your Garrison’s walls), and select the buildings you’d like to include. Choosing to “spec” your buildings (more on that below) will also change cosmetic aspects of those buildings, like furniture types and decorations, in addition to imparting different gameplay effects.

Garrisons can be shown off to same-faction players in your party, who can walk around your base, converse with your NPCs, and appraise your layout. You’ll have a reason to show your Garrison off, too: trading resources. For example, if you have extra building resources, you’ll be able to bring them to a friend’s Garrison and exchange them for materials that you need.

Specializing Buildings

When specializing your Garrison’s buildings, you’ll choose a variant on the bonuses and abilities the building provides. For example, one Mine specialization might make your miners gather ore faster by the hour, while another will increase the chance that your workers strike a rare mining node. Several buildings can provide you with access to professions that your character hasn’t mastered—though you won’t have enough plots to put one down for every profession.

As you begin building up your Garrison, we expect that you’ll interact with it quite a bit. However, over time, it’s expected that your interaction will become more casual. At lower levels, your missions are on shorter time cycles (minutes, hours or days); once your followers have reached high levels, it’s likely that you’ll send some of them off on longer raid missions for a week at a time. We want garrisons to be important, but our goal is a system that’s easy to enjoy without being extremely intensive.

Plant Your Flag on Draenor!

Your Garrison will be woven deeply into the storyline of Warlords of Draenor, beginning when your faction leader commissions you to establish a beachhead on this alien world—but the ultimate fate of your personal fortress on Draenor is entirely up to you.
Now for me this expansion is looking pretty Epic. Lots on features removed to make the game more streamlined and new ones added to make more depth. I am looking forward to this one more than I was for MoP.

I am sure there will be some out there who dis this game saying its past its time but judging by lots of comments on various sites including this one this looks like it will be a hit.

What are your thoughts on this expansion?
 
Soldato
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Looks very good so far, very pleased that they haven't introduced a new class or race because the current game already is bordering on having too many. I'm going to have to see how the new raid content is for myself first though because the new group structuring has a few potential flaws which could spoil it but having said that, this IS a PvE game primarily so I think Blizzard know what they are doing.The Garrisons's can **** off though, I don't understand why so many people are excited for it, just seems like a new grind and gold sink to me but again we'll have to wait and see.

Insta-90 is going to be such an amazing feature, I've always wanted a Druid alt so that's where I'll be using mine on and it's going to be excellent for new or returning players.

The new models are epic.
 
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Soldato
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I get why they are doing new character models etc but is it really needed? Personally I don't really take much notice of my characters appearance and to me seems a waste of time. I guess for the RPers out there it will be a welcomes sign.

I am liking the look and sound of garrisons tbh. I think that will be fun. Having said that, we do not know how they will work as such just yet but I am sure they will have a big affect on the game in some way, maybe later on in a patch they will add the ability to attack other players garrisons and vice versa.
 
Associate
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I just hope levelling and gearing doesn't feel as much of a grind as MoP did, i've really struggled to play throuh MoP because i find it so incredibly boring to level my alts :(
 
Soldato
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Not played WoW since WOTLK, work patterns screwed that up for me...this does look an awesome expansion though, and the insta 90 looks very good, i already have 5 x 70s so would hit another one straight upto 90 >_<

Id need a different job to be able to come back to WoW though, not getting in from work until 9pm kinda means no raids :(
 
Soldato
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did i read somewhere about heir Loom changes ?

I think they are making them spell abilities which are account-wide like pets and mounts instead of physical items in your bag.

I get why they are doing new character models etc but is it really needed? Personally I don't really take much notice of my characters appearance and to me seems a waste of time. I guess for the RPers out there it will be a welcomes sign.

Even if you don't care for the texture changes they are still redoing all the animations aswell so it's generally going to feel much fresher and nice.
 
Soldato
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I started the last thread for MoP but the game still remains sealed on my shelf. With each expansion pack the game just seems to get more and more of a slog :(

On one hand i'm thinking i'm missing out on so much fun I had from previous expansions but on the other I've got so much more free time to allocate else where in life.

MW
 
Associate
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If I remember correctly they did mention that they wanted to pump content out quicker to try and retain customers. So im hoping they wont wait until Q4 next year for release.
 
Associate
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They aren't bringing out a 5.5 patch purely so that WoD isn't delayed any further than necessary, so I don't think it'll be late 2014, but personally I think they'll start hemorrhaging active subs once this current tier has been out for 5-6 months. Soon after my guild has cleared heroic I'll be off until WoD anyway.

A late spring / summer release is what they should aim for if they don't want another ICC level of discontent in the community.
 
Soldato
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This, but being (fairly) new to WoW, I can't quite get over Blizzard's unwavering loyalty to vertical gear progression. Definitely not looking forward to replacing my Legendary Cape with - I imagine - a quested Blue in ~10 months' time.

9xmwl.jpg

Every MMO has vertical gear progression in one form or another though?

For me, Im not sure on some of the things they are doing for this expansion, getting rid of hit/dodge/parry/exp isn't a good thing imo as I just don't like the continual removal of stats, wheres the rpg aspect gone? On one hand I love the idea of returning to Outland and getting off Azeroth, but on the other I hate what they did with Cata, it will be good to see lore figures though. I just hope Garrosh dies in the 1st 10 minutes

So I guess it must be a parallel time-stream then? If so & the original Dark Portal was never opened for the 1st horde to come through I guess it lets them do a JJ Abrams and visit all sorts of key points in WoW lore and have it retold in an alternate timeline style. Hence the line about many more expansions planned?
 
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Soldato
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lets hope they can get back the 6-7 million people that have left wow at its height by the time this comes out

Fixed for you & taken from the Blizzcon Q&A yesterday:

Warlords Release Date

Another MoP patch would delay WoD, so Patch 5.5 isn't going to happen. The entire team is working on WoD right now, so any more MoP content would slow down development.
Q: "Typically after you announce something it is another year, but we are at Patch 5.4 now. What content do you have planned for between now and then?" A: "Any content we do now will delay the expansion by the same amount of time it took us to make that content. We are completely focused on making the next expansion and will try to deliver that as soon as we can, hopefully on a shorter cycle than players are imagining, but you never know, we will have to see."
Q: "Typically that would be in the Winter of next year. Does that mean it is a goal to bring it in to Summer or Spring?" A: "Well certainly the goal is before that, but we'll see, it is very hard for us to predict."
 
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