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- By StarymIt seems we're getting a whole lot of Alterac Valley soon, as Classic is getting the 1.12 version in one of the latter content releases and we're getting the special 15th Anniversary edition on live servers in Patch 8.2.5 during the event! Today at midnight CEST there's another Play with the Blues event on the 8.2.5 PTR gathering all Valley enthusiasts and all you have to do is hop on to the PTR and use the Group Finder to jump in!
You can get the high-rez versions of the two original mounts from the event, which you can check out here as well.
Play with the Blues (source)
Tomorrow 12:00 AM CEST, please join us on the 8.2.5 PTR for an old school Alterac Valley Play with the Blues.
Starting promptly at 3:00 p.m. PDT, Blizzard employees will be testing our 15th Anniversary rendition of AV on the PTR, and you can join us for some strife in the Field of Strife.
Please log into the PTR by that time and then open your Group Finder (default hotkey: i) and switch to the Player vs. Player tab. You’ll see Alterac Valley waiting for you to join.
Afterward, please return to this thread with your feedback.
Thank you! - By StanThe news image above is fan art created by Dogslug. You can find more of his work here.
Blizzard mentioned multiple times that they would add Allied Races whenever they fit the story. The Horde's hottest candidates are currently the Vulpera of Vol'dun, even though their story doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now. Recent rumors suggest that Gilgoblins could be in the final pair of Horde Allied Races too.
The Vulpera currently have too many unique animations, and they are a community-favorite. Pretty much every Horde player wants them to become playable. They're coming, and it's just a matter of when. We think the first set of Allied Races will be introduced in Patch 8.2.5 with the second one coming in Patch 8.3.5. Based on datamining, the Vulpera should be live on or before September 20th. You can find all their customization options here.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Alliance will get Mechagnomes led by Prince Erazmin of Mechagon, but it's still not clear what the second race will be.
Lightforged Forsaken led by Calia Menethil are a possibility based on the Before the Storm novel and Calia also received a new model in the initial Patch 8.2.5 build.
Next up are Gilgoblins! We encounter them in zones like Vashj'ir and Nazjatar in Patch 8.2. They are a species of aquatic goblins created by Hobart Grapplehammer. Gilgoblins are very similar to traditional Goblins. They have various tattoos and fins on their arms to help them swim.
Gilgoblins are currently not included in the game files as playable races as opposed to Mechagnomes and the Vulpera. They only exist as creatures.
The female model has more customization options compared to the male model. Would you like to see them become playable in the future?
We know that Blizzard wants to add more customization options to World of Warcraft, and a recent leak suggests that all Allied Races will become customization options in Patch 9.0 except for the Nightborne and the Vulpera. Let's see what the first set of Allied Races is going to be now that Patch 8.2 should hit Public Test Realms reasonably soon!
TL;DR
The first set of Allied Races (Mechagnomes/Vulpera) coming in Patch 8.2.5 on or before September 20th. The final set of Allied Races will include Gilgoblins and Lightforged Forsaken (based on the Before the Storm novel) in Patch 8.3.5. We know that Mechagnomes and the Vulpera are coming, but what about the second set of Allied Races? - By StanWe're one week away from WoW Classic launch. This week, you can get a piece of Heroic Palace armor from the weekly quest.
Highlights
Artifact Knowledge will continue to increase until October 1. Queen Azshara nerfs are now live ahead of Classic launch. The Classic development team conducted a Reddit AMA and shared more details about the intended player cap for dungeons and cleared some layering misconceptions. Read our recap of the AMA for a full summary of highlights! Mythic Keystone Affixes
Fortified Sanguine Quaking Beguiling Weekly Quests
Collect 36,000 Azerite from Island Expeditions for Azerite for the Alliance & Azerite for the Horde to receive 3,500 Azerite and 1,500 reputation with Honorbound/7th Legion. Complete 4 Mythic BfA Dungeons for Emissary of War to receive a cache which contains a piece of Heroic Eternal Palace gear. Nazjatar World Boss
Players can kill Wekemara this week for ilvl 415 loot.
Tidal Lurker's Greathelm Naga Ritualist's Mantle Spitcharged Shoulderguards Chestguard of the Submerged Belt of Rising Guardians Deepcaller's Clasp Serpentskin Splashers Wekemara's Warboots Shockbiter's Fang World Events
Battle for Azeroth Dungeon Event (August 20th - August 27th)
Blizzard (Source)
The Battle for Azeroth Dungeons Bonus Event is underway!
THIS WEEK
All week, open Group Finder (default hotkey: I) to queue for any Battle for Azeroth dungeon on Normal or Heroic difficulty.
Alternatively, get a group of veteran dungeoneers together and travel to one of the Battle for Azeroth dungeons on Mythic difficulty:
Atal’Dazar Temple of Sethraliss The Underrot The MOTHERLODE!! Freehold Shrine of the Storm Tol Dagor Waycrest Manor Look for the following all week long:
Chronicler Shoopa in Zuldazar or Chronicler Toopa in Boralus has a quest for you – Emissary of War. Or, if you forget to pick it up there, you can start it within the Adventure Journal. Quest requirement: Complete 4 Battle for Azeroth dungeons on Mythic difficulty. Rewards: One loot box containing a piece of gear from Heroic difficulty The Eternal Palace. Passive bonus: The final boss in each dungeon drop additional loot on all difficulties (except Mythic Keystone difficulties.) EVERY WEEK
The Bonus Events system consists of a rotating schedule of different activities, currently scheduled to run each week beginning on Tuesdays. Each Bonus Event grants a passive bonus to a particular game activity and offers a once-per-event quest with a noteworthy reward for accomplishing a related goal. The in-game calendar can serve as your one-stop reference for the event schedule. The Adventure Guide also offers a direct link to active Bonus Events, allowing you to easily accept any associated quests.
PvP Brawl: Arathi Blizzard (August 20th - August 27th)
Blizzard (Source)
Frozen Arathi Basin (Resource Race)
Put away your bathing suit, pull out your parka, and enter a winter wonderland as the Arathi Basin you know and love gets a fresh coat of ice and snow. You'll be racing your way between the farm, stables, mine, lumberyard, and blacksmith through piles of snow and over a - mostly - frozen lake. One more thing: the weather forecast calls for a bit of fog of war. We hope you're prepared for the weather. - By StanToday's hotfixes come with a lot of nerfs to Queen Azshara. Vitality Conduit now correctly transfers health from a target with absorb shields, and more.
Blizzard (Source)
Dungeons and Raids
Azshara’s Eternal Palace Queen Azshara When either Aethenel or Cyranus is slain on Normal, Heroic, or Mythic difficulty, there is now a 3-second delay before the other one gains the Torment buff. Azshara's Indomitable is now summoned 10 seconds later than previously observed on Mythic difficulty. Tidemistresses have 5% less health on Mythic difficulty. Fixed an issue where casting either Moonfire or Regrowth twice in a row while affected by Repeat Performance was not triggering the silence. Fixed a bug on Mythic difficulty where the damage effect from Deferred Sentence could trigger the healing reduction from Obey or Suffer right as the decrees transitioned between each other. Siege of Boralus Corrected an issue where players’ pets were unable to attack the tentacles during the Viq’Goth encounter. Items
Heart of Azeroth Vitality Conduit (Essence) correctly transfers health from a target with absorb shields on them. Learning new ranks of Conflict and Strife (Essence) should now properly grant achievements such as Power Up. - By StanArtifact Knowledge will continue to increase each week until the week of October 1, according to Blizzard, despite the fact that in previous Seasons, it ended around the twelve-week mark.
Blizzard (Source)
Is this being cut off soon? Or are you leaving it on indefinitely?
It’s been 8 weeks now, and 8.2 kicked off with 4 weeks of AK already calculated into the game, so in theory, we’ve had 12 weeks of AK at this point. AK ended around the 12-week mark in the prior seasons.
This is an inquiry, I’m not asking that it be cut off. I think they should leave it on, but that wouldn’t fit the prior seasons.
No to both questions. 🙂
As things currently stand, Artifact Knowledge will continue to increase each week until the week of October 1.
The pre-expansion patch is now available in the background downloader, seven weeks before BfA launch. Players can now pre-download Patch 8.0.1 that will go live soon.The patch size is ~ 15.88 GBs.
A: We’re not releasing specific numbers, that will likely change dramatically. Based on the response we got from name reservations, we’re anticipating large player populations for some realms initially. This may change as players switch to lower population realms. We’ll use layers to help improve performance in the short-term if large groups of players cluster in an area. We hope to reduce the use of layering over time as people spread out in each realm.
Q: Do you have a contingency plan to deal with a larger-than-expected population? Suppose as many people create characters in the 24 hours before and after launch as have done so already – how quickly will you be able to add new servers?
A: We have contingency plans in place to bring up additional realms quickly if needed. We may also integrate character transfers (this ultimately became a service in original WoW.)
As you can imagine, it’s difficult for us to gauge how many people will come to play Classic and stay on to experience max-level content. Ultimately, we want to see realms with healthy stable populations so we’ll try to match demand without inadvertently creating low population realms in the process.
Q: With so many of the classic servers showing ‘full’ population already, a few questions: How long do you expect the queues to be? What do you consider to be an acceptable queue to login? What steps do you have in mind to remedy the situation if not enough people are moving off the full servers given that alot of people will still want to roll on them to join friends/guildmates already there? Can we expect free server transfers further down the line if the situation doesn’t sort itself out?
A: Hi starfishbg, we’ve answered these questions in more detail in other posts but I’ll try to summarize answers for you. Based on the name reservations we’ve seen, the queue time on some realms will be extremely long. We’ve opened up additional realms and we’re encouraging people to set up their characters on lower population realms for a better experience. This is a good time to coordinate with your friends/guilds to switch if they’ve reserved names on a full realm. We are considering integrating character transfer services later on, when players have higher level characters.
Q: Will PAID transfers also be a thing should a server drop heavily in population and a player wishes to move to find more activity or reconvene with friends on another server?
A: We’re considering integrating a character transfer service once players have reached higher levels. This was available in the original WoW. We’ll look at the rules we imposed at that time and also discuss the implications of players moving to a new realm. We believe realm identity is an important aspect of Classic so any guidelines around transfers should support this belief.
Q: On the Herod and Shazzrah servers, assuming population stays like it currently is, can you provide some rough idea of what you expect the minimum time in queue to be at launch? Can you elaborate in any way on some on the expected queue lengths (preferably in length of time) at launch?
A: On the most popular servers, such as Herod and Shazzrah, we are currently estimating lengthy queue times - up to several hours or more in certain instances. That is why we strongly encourage players to use the name reservation period to transfer their characters and their guilds to lower pop realms.
Q: Will we see a maintenance downtime the morning after Launch?
A: We are not currently planning a maintenance downtime for the morning after launch.
Q: What will you do if all of the realms are capped out at launch day with massive queues? Will you continually put up realms until the demand is met?
A: As /u/altruiswow said elsewhere: We have contingency plans in place to bring up additional realms quickly if needed.
We took a careful approach here. Taking various things into consideration, we wanted to hold true to our main objective of ensuring healthy realm communities in a post-Launch world. Therefore, we felt that the best approach here was to start off with fewer realms in order to gauge player interest during the name reservation period. As we have seen players congregate on certain types of realms, we have opened up new realms with communication to that effect. While we acknowledge that queues will be part of the launch experience, we encourage players to keep an eye on the forums and message boards over the next days/weeks for communications around realms with lower populations and therefore more manageable queue times.
Q: What are plans for phase 2 if some realms are horrifically overpopulated at 50K+ players? Will layering stay?
A: We’re absolutely committed to reaching one layer per realm by Phase 2. This is why we need to have upper bounds on the number of players connected to the realm at one time, and queue players past that point. That, of course, is why we’re willing to open new servers if necessary, and we’ve even started doing that in response to the incredibly positive reception we’ve had during the name reservation period!
Q: My understanding is that layering is mainly a tool to alleviate the playing experience in overcrowded zones, not to fill up servers “infinitely” to avoid queues. Could you reiterate and clarify this and your current intentions and plans with layering, server caps and handling population at launch and in the future now that you’ve had the chance to study and tweak it during the stress test?
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A: I’m so glad you asked this question.
We’ve seen some confusion about layering, both about how it helps support our launch, and how it’s supposed to behave while its active, so I’d like to both speak to it and clear up some misconceptions about it.
First, we’re absolutely committed to reducing to one layer per realm before our second content phase goes live, and the sooner we can get there, the better. The reason we can’t do that initially is that on launch day, everybody will be clustered in the starting zones, and having players so close together causes an exponential drain on server resources. In fact, the same number of players cause more server problems crammed into Northshire than they do spread across all of Elwynn Forest. We expect that even after the first couple of days, we’ll need fewer layers than we need for the initial hours of launch, and our stress tests have confirmed that expectation.
A related concern that was raised during our pre-launch test was that capital cities felt empty, but that only occurred because we left the pre-launch test running two days past its original end date, and we didn’t reduce the number of layers at all during that test. During our launch week, as the players spread out across the world, we’ll monitor activity and reduce layers as necessary, so the world continues to feel full.
Some players have suggested using sharding in low level zones to address launch demand, both because we talked about that at Blizzcon, and because it’s what they’re used to from our modern expansions. Unfortunately, while modern WoW has content designed to work with sharding, WoW Classic does not. The most obvious example of incompatible content is Rexxar’s famously long patrol path, but there are lots of other examples throughout WoW Classic. Since we want all that content to work as it was originally designed, we’ve made sure that every layer is a copy of the entire world, so you can kite Anachronos all the way to Orgrimmar, and you can ride the boat from Ratchet to Booty Bay with the same people alongside you the whole way.
Some players have asked us to use realm caps and login queues to handle the demand, and while those are tools we have at our disposal, we don’t want to rely on them exclusively, because they keep people from playing the game.
One of the most frequently reported problems during our tests was players transferring to a layer for what seemed like no reason. There were several bugs that caused this, and we’re confident we’ve fixed them. At this point, the only thing that should cause you to change layers is accepting an invite from a player on another layer. Additionally, it should always transfer the player who was invited to the layer of the player who invited them.
Nonetheless, after accepting an invite, the layer transfer doesn’t always happen immediately, because we don’t want to transfer you in the middle of combat, or before you get a chance to loot. During our pre-launch test, we saw a few reports of what seemed like random layer transfers, but when we investigated, we realized this was due to us making that transfer delay too long. The delay was so long that players could unintentionally chain one delay into another by starting combat immediately after looting. Because of those reports, we’ve fixed the transfer delay to give you enough time to loot, without being so long that you’re left wondering why you can’t join your friend. We’ll keep an eye on that, and we may decide to reduce it further.
We’ve also seen reports of people transferring suddenly at the entrances to capital cities, which was related to the transfer delays. If you’re waiting to transfer to your friend’s layer, and you enter a capital city, we ignore the delay and transfer you immediately. The long delays were making it more likely that you’d enter a capital with a transfer pending, and now that we’ve reduced the transfer delay, it will be a bit more clear that your transfer was the result of accepting a group invitation.
Regarding PvP, we saw many posts from players wondering if getting invited to a party is a good way to escape from PvP combat. I’m pleased to say there’s actually a separate, longer transfer delay following any PvP combat. We know a lot of world PvP enthusiasts are excited for WoW Classic, and we don’t want the additional layers to feel like they’re robbing you of your kills. When the time comes to withdraw from the fight, you’ll have to escape from your enemies and get to a safe place before you’re able to join your friends on another layer.
I’d also like to clarify how multiple layers work with logout. Early in our stress testing, players reported that logging out and back in would let you hop to a new layer to farm the same mineral or herb node on different layers. That was a bug, and we’ve fixed it. Your layer assignment now persists for a few minutes between logouts, long enough that by the time the game would choose a new layer for you, that node would have respawned on its own anyway.
I hope that all makes things a bit more clear.
Q: If my intentions are to group up and fight back against the opposing alliance all I need to do is be the party leader and invite my friends, not accept invites from them?
A: Yes, that’s correct. The person who issues the invite will bring the invited players to their layer. Inviting your higher-level friends to come help you fight back is certainly something people used to do, and we encourage you to do so. Enjoy the fight!
Q: On Aug. 12, the Classic servers in place were buckled nearly to the breaking point under the weight of character creations alone. Many players showed up early, only to be randomly lagged out/disconnected, held back sometimes 30 minutes or more, and potentially missing the chance for their reserved names.
- What steps are being taken to ensure that at launch, the same thing doesn’t happen on an even grander scale during the initial rush? (i.e. those showing up early, only to be arbitrarily disconnected and thrown to the back of a queue)
- Are there measures in place to avoid punishing those that get randomly disconnected through no fault of their own? (i.e. If I wait in a 2-hour queue and finally get in, only to get disconnected 5 minutes later, do I have to wait in the 2-hour queue again?)
A: We’re planning a number of fixes to improve that experience. First, we’ve already begun opening new realms and we encourage people to switch to them. We’ve also increased the size of the realm queues, so they can hold more people before disconnecting them. And we’ve improved the error message you get, so that you’ll know you’re being disconnected because the queue is full, instead of getting a generic disconnect message.
Q: Will servers be brought down at some point before release or will players be able to sit at character select waiting for “Enter World” to activate?
A: We are likely to perform some kind of realm restarts or maintenance between now and launch. However, in the minutes leading up to launch, our plan is that the realms will up and available and the Enter World button will instantly light up once we’re launched.
Q: What are your plans for server reset days for Classic? Will it align with retail reset days? Tuesday NA/Wednesday EU? Have you thought of having a separate day for Classic reset to offset a little?
A: The raid reset points have been restored to their original 1.12 values.
Wow Patch Download 3.1.2
Classic operates as part of our general World of Warcraft infrastructure. Our goals are to minimize service downtime and maximize availability. In some weeks we might not need to take realms down for maintenance.Newest Wow Patch Download
Q: How does that work with the honour calculations? They were always done in downtime.
A: When restoring the honor calculation code we re-wrote it so it can work while the game is live. Realms do not need downtime for honor to update.