Dragonflight 10.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Ersula]

I think they will reveal some kind of preorder bonus for TWW (not the bonus items) as we are currently lacking one. BFA had ARs, SL had new DKs, DF had... a pet.

we did have to wait a good while for AR DKs. Did they say we get playable Earthen at the prepatch or do we have to wait till the formal release?

[Merryck]

we did have to wait a good while for AR DKs. Did they say we get playable Earthen at the prepatch or do we have to wait till the formal release?

You unlock Earthen by doing the War Within campaign. I don't think it will be a preorder bonus.

[Eldryth]

we did have to wait a good while for AR DKs. Did they say we get playable Earthen at the prepatch or do we have to wait till the formal release?

They're unlocked by completing the campaign, so I can't really imagine them being made available early. Maybe they could have an alternate unlock method for early access but I think that'd be incredibly unlikely.

[Raetary]

we did have to wait a good while for AR DKs. Did they say we get playable Earthen at the prepatch or do we have to wait till the formal release?

It's an AR that you unlock via the campaign, they won't be accessible during the prepatch.

[Zers Editor]

Illidan, Arator and the Fordragons feel likely. Turalyon?

Odyn and Tyr will be major characters (and will definitely fight) but IDK about main cast.

Betting on Alexstrasza dying at the beginning of it, either from Iridikron or from Aman'Thul.

[Ersula]

What is the possibility of the lively looking area with Talanji being a rework of the primordial trolls from early on in DF's concept? I'm sure it's incredibly unlikely, but I think it'd certainly be interesting, especially with the trolls history with the Old Gods.

Those were the Djaradin. They had more exaggerated troll features in the concept art. I think this was to establish that there are no playable race origins completely unaffected by the old gods (presumably the djaradin got an analog to the curse of flesh & became primordial trolls) so maybe they tones down those features so they could cover that storyline in depth over multiple expansions so you're probably right.

It's an AR that you unlock via the campaign, they won't be accessible during the prepatch.

I was hoping the emphasis on TTW's campaign starting in 10.2.7 that we might be able to do the Earthen Campaign before the formal release. I guess it's another Mag'har/Darkiron situation.

[BaumanKing]

I have a feeling Anduin and maybe Thrall will be star players throughout, but imo Alleria is going to die in Midnight, so who will take her place in TLT? Bolvar and Taelia?

There's no way they're killing Alleria off so early after so much character development. Besides she is basically the only relevant character among the good guys who has a connection to the Void side of the cosmic plot. Blizzard writers are clearly interested in her. On the other side her husband and even their son are not so save.

[Chickat]

You can argue it was a terrible expansion. It even makes sense to say Shadowlands was the worst expansion. But saying it almost "ruined the brand" when its sub figures have the same average as Legion, doesn't make any sense. There's more validity in saying Cata or MoP ruined the brand because they were losing subs even more steadily.

And I still think more people resubbed to play 9.1 than TBC, microscopic uptick that it is: Simply because people who were into classic wouldn't have unsubbed in the first place.

Naxx and AQ were huge spikes in difficulty. A lot of people quit Mid classic until TBC.

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Armor type restrictions just don't make sense anymore as others have detailed. I also think they need to just bite the bullet and allow you to toggle whether your hair shows under your helm or not as well for a similar reason: the battle is already lost. It's so easy to make 3D gear pieces clip with your character model these days, sometimes gear clips with its own set pieces and that's even on the human male model that's used as the default for modeling. You'll get some ugly clipping with it but we've already hit that point, the benefit of allowing it outweighs that.

I could see a middle ground solution.

Cloth can wear cloth and leather
Leather can wear cloth, leather, and mail
Mail can wear leather, mail, and plate
Plate can wear plate and mail.

At that point why not just open it up, but I think they don't want cloth wearers wearing plate or mail, or plate wearers wearing cloth or leather.

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There's no way they're killing Alleria off so early after so much character development. Besides she is basically the only relevant character among the good guys who has a connection to the Void side of the cosmic plot. Blizzard writers are clearly interested in her. On the other side her husband and even their son are not so save.

Eh. Maybe, but someone is definitely dying in Midnight. Alleria is a prime candidate. Could also be Turalyon or Arator.

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On the topic of upgrading gear. I wonder if they will add the Titanforging mechanic back. It's main weakness was always that it was always going to be better than the same unupgraded piece, but now that we have upgrade tracks the people getting them will in effect only get to save some flightstones and crests.

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Was it? It's been so long since I saw the articles, but I think it was a WoW developer talking about using AI to add the hair back to the models.

Might just habe been speculation though. But would be nice of it wasn't.

Titanforging that is limited to its bracket would be interesting.

Raiders wouldn't have to do world content aside from maybe delves and the world boss for the vault. They certainly wouldn't have to clear the map of WQ which was the complaint.

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Probably on Thursday.

I'd say we are gonna get Hero Talents later, CE + Release Date reveal tomorrow, Press Release from content creators and Alpha on Thursday.

Idk. They are streaming Wed. It would make a lot of sense to release creator videos before alpha so they have time to get views before being made immediately irrelevant by streaming the whole alpha.

[Raetary]

Arator is a next-gen character, he's safe for another decade (at least) as are all the characters belonging to that group.

Turalyon can go either way, but Alleria has a rather obvious arc in all of this, especially when you take her Legion lore into account.

I say she'll inevitably break and fall to the void, likely with the help of Xal, maybe even be the one to corrupt the Sunwell in Midnight and later on get killed by Arator after a confrontation where she hesitates and refuses to kill him.

[doledippers]

btw , for what its worth, i noticed the collectors edition countdown is based on local time, so they fucked something up. tried changing my time to a couple days in the future to see if it unlocked a link or some shit but it just put the countdown into the negatives lmao

expecting it to release at 10am PST tomorrow

[Chickat]

They really fucked Uldir by having the mythic set be so drastically better designed than the LFR-Heroic variants.
The other sets overshadow the mythic set as all everyone thinks about is how crappy the first 3 sets look.

The mythic cloth set is very pretty, yet neutral enough for varied use.
Yet not a single soul wants to run the raid for mogs and soloing it is incredibly frustrating or almost impossible for some bosses.

Should be pretty easy to solo in TWW.

[Raetary]

Should be pretty easy to solo in TWW.

It better be.

I want those damn shoulderpads...

[Chickat]

It has a base pre-order bonus.

500 Tender and a raid ready lvl 70 boost.

Thats not a preorder bonus right? Everyone who buys will get those.

[justwatching]

https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/overall/

As you can see in the WCL Data(which is incomplete blabla) TBC brought Classic raid activity nearly back to peak 2020 pandemic levels. Blizzards subgraph has exactly one spike in 2021 and its right before TBC Classic launched. Also from the WCL Data you can see that the Classic player activity after it settled in has been extremely consistent so a lot of the boost is simply factored in but guesstimating here TBC still seems to have provided around a 30-40% boost in Classic player activity. In fact TBC raid activity seems to have peaked in September 2021 around 3 months after launch.

There is zero evidence in Blizzards graph that there was any surge of people resubbing for 9.1 the resolution of it isnt even good enough to discern between TBC Classic and 9.1 there because they only launched around 4 Weeks apart.

But if we use some common sense here for a second: We have one of the most disliked patches in modern wow history and Blizzards comments about that + the fact that 9.1.5 is considered the "ripcord" patch versus a Classic expansion that showed clear signs of growth even months post launch.

The only logical conclusion that isnt driven by some weird desire to justify an expansion that Blizzard has all but admitted was a failure is that Classic absorbed a huge chunk of the subscriber bleed and that without it SL would've dipped probably a couple million lower.

[Chickat]

I guess it's safe to say not all hero specs will be playable right away with the alpha. I figured each spec would have one testable but they still haven't covered any of Shadow's.

They said they would be. Bad look if not.

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It's an AR that you unlock via the campaign, they won't be accessible during the prepatch.

Speaking of prepatch. Who wants to bet there will be a silithid and cultist invasion of Silithus for the prepatch event.

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Arator is a next-gen character, he's safe for another decade (at least) as are all the characters belonging to that group.

Turalyon can go either way, but Alleria has a rather obvious arc in all of this, especially when you take her Legion lore into account.

I say she'll inevitably break and fall to the void, likely with the help of Xal, maybe even be the one to corrupt the Sunwell in Midnight and later on get killed by Arator after a confrontation where she hesitates and refuses to kill him.

Metzen said Midnight wouldn't go to plan. Alleria being a spy for the void would facilitate that. She betrays us in the final patch perhaps. Maybe she wont die and can be saved by defeating the void in Midnight, but I think shes dying.

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https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/overall/

As you can see in the WCL Data(which is incomplete blabla) TBC brought Classic raid activity nearly back to peak 2020 pandemic levels. Blizzards subgraph has exactly one spike in 2021 and its right before TBC Classic launched. Also from the WCL Data you can see that the Classic player activity after it settled in has been extremely consistent so a lot of the boost is simply factored in but guesstimating here TBC still seems to have provided around a 30-40% boost in Classic player activity. In fact TBC raid activity seems to have peaked in September 2021 around 3 months after launch.

There is zero evidence in Blizzards graph that there was any surge of people resubbing for 9.1 the resolution of it isnt even good enough to discern between TBC Classic and 9.1 there because they only launched around 4 Weeks apart.

But if we use some common sense here for a second: We have one of the most disliked patches in modern wow history and Blizzards comments about that + the fact that 9.1.5 is considered the "ripcord" patch versus a Classic expansion that showed clear signs of growth even months post launch.

The only logical conclusion that isnt driven by some weird desire to justify an expansion that Blizzard has all but admitted was a failure is that Classic absorbed a huge chunk of the subscriber bleed and that without it SL would've dipped probably a couple million lower.

Yep. TBC brought back a million players. Or close to it. SL lost at least 500k that month/quarter.

[Ersula]

Yep. TBC brought back a million players. Or close to it. SL lost at least 500k that month/quarter.

Your logic only makes sense if people can't play retail & classic simultaneously, but that's not true; most players play both with one subscription.

At no point on the ironforge graph justwatching posted did TBC have a million players; are you suggesting half a million people bought subs then just chose not to play during it's first month?

[Woggmer]

Metzen said Midnight wouldn't go to plan. Alleria being a spy for the void would facilitate that. She betrays us in the final patch perhaps. Maybe she wont die and can be saved by defeating the void in Midnight, but I think shes dying.

I don't think it'll be just her dying... What I'm kinda hoping for is that Xal'atath is almost dying but in a last ditch effort, she takes control of Alleria's body and possesses it as her own. Alleria is gone, but Xal'atath acquired a new body with newfound powers making her stronger than ever.

[Chickat]

Your logic only makes sense if people can't play retail & classic simultaneously, but that's not true; most players play both with one subscription.

At no point on the ironforge graph justwatching posted did TBC have a million players; are you suggesting half a million people bought subs then just chose not to play during it's first month?

I don't trust the info graphics. People using those to predict subs were wildly off by at least a factor to two every time and now we can prove that.

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I don't think it'll be just her dying... What I'm kinda hoping for is that Xal'atath is almost dying but in a last ditch effort, she takes control of Alleria's body and possesses it as her own. Alleria is gone, but Xal'atath acquired a new body with newfound powers making her stronger than ever.

I mean shes already done that once. Would be kinda boring imo.

[Woggmer]

I mean shes already done that once. Would be kinda boring imo.

Yeah, but they treated that moment like a side-quest and it had almost no baring to BFA's plot just setting up stuff. You don't get a cinematic for it, it just happens in real-time while you're fighting off monsters.

Plus you'd have to go out of your way to actually do that quest... having it be a major plot-point in the story + cinematic will get a lot of people's attention and get a lot of click-bait reaction to it.

[Scyth]

Arator is a next-gen character, he's safe for another decade (at least) as are all the characters belonging to that group.

Turalyon can go either way, but Alleria has a rather obvious arc in all of this, especially when you take her Legion lore into account.

I say she'll inevitably break and fall to the void, likely with the help of Xal, maybe even be the one to corrupt the Sunwell in Midnight and later on get killed by Arator after a confrontation where she hesitates and refuses to kill him.

I think her almost messing up the sunwell and bringing void creatures out whilst back at Silvermoon at the end of Legion is foreshadowing that she will probably be what brings the void back.
She's got a pretty big death flag hanging over her imo.