IRVINE, Calif.—November 19, 2014—On November 13, millions of Azeroth’s champions enlisted for the war against the Iron Horde with the launch of World of Warcraft^®: Warlords of Draenor^™, the fifth expansion to the world’s #1 subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game.^* Blizzard Entertainment today announced that as of the first 24 hours of the expansion’s availability, more than 3.3 million copies had sold-through^† and the game’s global subscriber base had passed 10 million, with growth across all major regions.

Sounds good. When you look at it graphically (thanks to MMO-Champion for the graph) it looks great too.

When I heard this almost 3 weeks ago I was happy, the game I love is once again thriving. Launch day saw sales of the expansion pack hit 3.3 million, back in August it had sold 1.5million copies so between August and November 13th it sold a further 1.8 million copies and during that same period subscriptions rose 2.6 million. Assuming that ALL 1.8million sales were returners (unlikely) we're looking at 800,000 new subscribers that haven't ordered the expansion along with 5.9 million subscribers.

Maybe it's just me assuming that more people bought expansions on the day. 

One worrying thing is that, the servers came to a complete standstill across the US and EU realms with 3.3 million players trying to use them at once. According to WoWProgress, there are 120 US realms (counting connected realms as one realm) and 123 EU realms, this means that each realm averaged 13,580 subscribers that bought the expansion on or before launch day and the servers couldn't cope with the demand. 

I wonder if this means that some connected realms could now be at risk of being over populated? What would happen? Especially if one half of the connected realm get over populated? This could have a crippling effect on guilds, especially on guilds that have the majority of their members from the sister realm rather than the realm the guild was formed on.

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The Sunday Screenshot is back and today I'm celebrating dinging 100, finally. The road to 100 has been frustrating. Not because the Warlords of Draenor questing is rubbish (which it is NOT) but because the servers have been awful. I'm a vetaran in this game and I've experienced launch day on every expansion. 

TBC was my first, on the launch day I went to my local Game store and purchased the CE box at 9am (as it happens I was served by a certain John Bain before he went off to the US), there was no problem logging on at 10am, yes there was lag, yes there was a shortage of mobs but players grouped together for quests and shared kills, we made friends there were pretty much no douchebags and we had no server crashes. What the servers were like at the midnight switch over I cannot comment.

My second experience was Wrath and my guild decided to have some midnight launch fun. I decided to take part late and hadn't pre-ordered. At midnight, I went to the local supermarket and bought myself a copy of the standard edition (which irks me as it is the only CE I'm missing), returned home and was on line by 1:30am, again no problems logging on, server was laggy, very laggy we got DCd, we got straight back on and after a while, the Northrend realms crash, I rolled a DK and did the whole starting area without anything more than a bit of lag, OK a lot of lag. After the first few hours everything was smooth.

Cataclysm was the third launch, once again I was taking part in this at midnight, I pre-ordered the CE box and this arrived ahead of time and I was ready to go at midnight when Blizzard restarted the servers. We had log on issues, the start zones were chaos, there was lag, servers crashed but as had happened in Wrath, afer the first few hours everything was smooth.

In Mists I once again took part in the launch at midnight, I pre-ordered the CE box and was very disappointed when this didn't arrive ahead of time. My guildies all ordered the digital edition and were online and playing at midnight. The servers did not need a restart this time but, if I remember correctly, players needed to log out and back in to activate their access, the login servers got swamped and people couldn't log back in. I was getting the itch to join in though and decided to buy a digital edition and beg for my money back when I upgraded to the CE (this didn't happen but I did get my std edition key back to reuse). I got in and there was lag and a buggy quest which was only allowing one person to do it at a time /facepalm. However this was fixed quickly and while there was a bit of lag around certain quest hubs the game was very playable  after the first few hours.

This year, I once again oredered the CE and hoped to get it ahead of time, I didn't and once again caved in and bought a standard digital edition knowing that I would get the key back to reuse or gift. I did this because I wanted to play and play early, I had booked time off work that the following 2 nights to be able to get to 100 before the weekend. The servers once again didn't need a restart, and we didn't need to relog. However, as usually happens the servers couldn't cope with the demands and there wa lag, quest congestion and DCs. Once getting past the initial starting experience we all got driven into the garrisons. The garrison is an instanced area, there is no portal or load screen but it IS instanced.

The servers could not cope and players got DC's and then couldn't log back in because the character was either not found or already logged in. After an hour of this I decided to give up and go to bed and just play normally Thursday morning. This I did for about an hour before I went back to the garrison for a quest. Then I hit the same wall as I had the night before, many guildies were in the same position and eventually the server crashed and freed us all. I continued playing and that evening the problem happened again more players were stuck and when zoning into the garrison, a personal instanced location, the garrisons were full of other players all unable to move without DCing.

I decided to switch to one of my other level 90s, when Itried to log on I got to 90% load bar and then DC'd I repeated this on 4 characters before deciding to try a lowerlevel alt, I got in. So now on expansion launch day I was only able to play low level characters, After being unable to play, I decided to go to bed aerly and try Friday morning, Friday was basically the same deal, everyone that used the garrison was unable to play. Guildies that avoided them managed to level quite quickly. To ease the problems Blizzard reduced server capacity which resulted in every server being locked and having queues. So if you were unlucky enough to get DCd, you'd most likely hit a queue.

Saturday was a day I feared the worst as more players were going to want to play, I logged on early and decided to avoid anything garrison related and that strategy worked amazingly well as I stayed on line all day and got to 99 before I had to sleep. However, other people had all the issues of the previous 2 day. Warlords of Draenor has truly been the worst launch of a WoW expansion pack. 

I'm sure that the reason is because of server connections because while these are not officially mergers, the realms are all sharing the same physical servers of only one of the realms. This of course means there are less servers to accommodate the majority of subscribers at once and while this is an unusual occurrence, it is a predictable event as it only happens every expansion and Blizzard really should have been prepared better for this.

I'm hoping for at least some game time credits for all subscribers, not because I want the compensation (quite frankly this would be 2 days pay for me because of my wasted leave days) but  as an admission from Blizzard that they messed up the launch big time.

What has your launch experience been like? Did you manage to level to 100 yet? I'd love to see your answers to all 3 questions in the comments below.

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So BlizzCon 2014 has come and Day 1 gave us some big surprises. The biggest was the lack of Warcraft news.

With all the hype over the past week about the trademarking of the Eye of Azshara, everyman and his dog wasguessing that this was either Warcraft 4, the next World of Warcraft expansion or an outside shot as the new Hearthstone expansion. Which at least two of the three are now definitely out of the running as the new Hearthstone expansion was announced as Goblins vs Gnomes, and this is hitting the streets, albeit virtual ones, in the next month and will feature on cards of a mechanical nature.

It is also very unlikely to be be Warcraft 4, as Blizzard decided that their next big title was a new IP. Yes despite officially abandoning project Titan, the FPS MMO, Blizzard have decided that the next big thing they're giving us is to be an FPS, but NOT an MMO, and a certain Jeff Caplan was the man at the helm of the team, sounds like the restart of Titan changed the direction from including an MMO element to the game, which will be called Overwatch. It looks awesome and I'll certainly give a go but my past experiences of FPS style games makes me believe that I'll both suck at it and hate it unless I can play in 3rd person mode because my brain can't cope with the loss of peripheral vision.

 

The thing I particulrly like are the graphics which are typically Blizzard cartoon style rather than realistic but there is now a much more polished feel than even the new WoW models. If only they could get this style into WoW...

This leaves Eye of Azshara as really only a WoW title now, and if that ends up being the case that is fine, I'm just glad the announcement hasn't happened at BlizzCon because, quite frankly, knowing the next expansion content (WoW 7.0)  just a few days before we get the Warlords of Draenor (WoW 6.0) would feel very wrong and detract a lot of focus from the new shiny content before it was even live.

The fear this creates in me is knowing that we're likely to only get two raid tiers in Warlords and that the chances are we won't get sight of the WoW 7.0 beta until after next BlizzCon which means one of two things:

1. We're getting two very long tiers of raiding over 18-24 months;
2. We're getting a third tier of raiding which could mean a Trial of the Crusader/Helion raid;

Of course there is a third option of us getting an announcement 'soon™' of the expansion and beta is going to happen around spring 2015 (which coincides with Overwatch beta) and the launch will be Winter 2015/2016. But if that is so, what of BlizzCon 2015?

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Evolution of a brand happens and when Blizzard announced that the character models were to be revamped there was much excitement and much nervousness. But at BlizzCon 2013, Blizzard knocked our socks off with the new character models and I was one of the millions of players that rejoiced at the way the new models where so close to the original, but better! So far, I have not heard a single dissenting voice about the models, sure people whined that the NElf had no fangs, but she did, and ofc the female Draenei April Fool caused a ripple but no one seems to have moaned about their toon being ruined.

But today for the first time I've been having some doubts because the female human model looks kind of odd. To show you what I mean I put Evlyxx to the test on the beta realms by using the diable new character model feature so I knew it was a direct replacement rather than me getting something wrong elsewhere.

Undressed the human female form looks very unchanged:

This is great and adding some armour shows some subtle changes in posture, notice the neck and shoulder area and the way the robes hang differently near the feet:

I'm sure you'll agree it all looks rather good and nothing much to complain about.

Until you look at the face. The changes are, quite sublte and revolve around the mouth being a different shape and the eyes being less animé style and also being furter awayy from the eyebrows but it makes such a huge difference to the character. She looks as if she is in deep thought and less friendly, meaner, more grumpy even. If it were a person I was talkking with, it is if she is not engaged in the converstaion with me but had her mind on something some place else. In short, Evlyxx no longer looks like Evlyxx it is as if someone kidnapped her and replaced her with an evil clone of her.

Maybe I'm being petty, maybe there are some tweeks left to come from Blizzard but right now I'm a very unhappy bunny about potentially having to use the old character models when using Evlyxx, especially after being a fan of the new models for so long, maybe I'll warm to the new look, who knows. Have you checked your toon out to see how it changes when using the new model? If so I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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The cinematic is incredible and really makes me wish that Blizzard had tackled the soon to be released movie in house. Sure te resources needed would have been far more than that required for a 5 minute trailer but, we've waited 8 years already and still have another 2 more years to wait, surely it must have been a possibility.

Blizzard have thrown us all a major curve ball with the release date of Warlords of Draenor coming on a Thursday as all previous Warcraft realeses had been on a Tuesday. My predicted date of 23 September was very, very wrong. I also think that Blizzard could have pushed it back a day and made the release date 12-13-14!

That said the exact day is pretty much irrelevant and it seems that Blizzard expects us all to endure another 3 months of Siege of Orgrimmar. I'm both saddened and happy at this as it does give my guild 3 more months to kill Garrosh HC, well most likely 2 as once the pre-oatch gives us mythic I don't think we'll have the personnel in place geared and experienced for such trials but I'd love to be wrong.

Anyway that means 2 more months to get things done like a few more alts through Challenge Modes and finishing off my Legendary Cloak collection and a few other goals. I won't be ending my subscription between now and then. Will you? If not what are your goals between now and November?

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With the Warlords of Draenor beta being addon free, I've been looking around for a way to bind a macro to a keybind.

Hunting around I discovered a script that allows just that (which sadly doesn't fix the issue as scripts are also currently banned on beta). However, as I'm hoping to free myself of as many addons as possible when warlords hits the streets sometime in 2015 (?) it will be some use later on.

The command you need to run is:

    /run SetBindingMacro("SHIFT-A", "MacroName")
    /run SaveBindings(1)

I use a macro on a hotbar for this and recommend you do too as I'm not too sure how it behaves if you simply type it in on two lines. Of course, when you do this, you need to change the exact wording to fit your needs:

• Replace SHIFT-A with whatever key you want to bind the macro to (e.g. A, ALT-A, CTRL-SHIFT-A);
• Replace MacroName with the name of your macro;
• Replace the 1 in the SaveBindings call to a 2 if you use character specific key bindings which I don't as all of my character use the same bindings;

You can also replace MacroName with the name of a spell or other ability, which can be useful especially for pet abilities. more »

Got a few minutes yesterday to take a peak into the Warlords Beta, something I never had the chance to do with my alpha access, on loading up you are presented with the image above as a splash screen. I was expecting the images to link to other items, but currently they don't.

I'll be taking a better look round over the next few days and will most likely post a few things here also.

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I've been asked a couple of times the past week what the guild needs for raiding in Warlords of Draenor so people can re-roll a new class.

While this is all very good of you guys to want to do the best thing, my answer is and always will be, "Play the class you want, in the role you want".

Ultimately, this makes you a happier player and better at playing your class because you don't feel that you're stuck playing something you may not enjoy.

The other reason I give this answer is that I don't know what class balance will be like in Warlords, today's OP class is liable to be the weakest class next expansion because that is generally how Blizzard over-correct things. So warlocks, brewmaster monks, blood DKs, enhancement shaman and disc priests will likely be the "ugly sisters" in Warlords as they're the most OP right now.

The other variable is your guild, if the GM/raid leader tells everyone that asks to roll a mage or a rogue as they are the DPS class needed most right now, in Warlords EVERYONE will be a mage and a rogue and they'll need a hunter, a warlock and a DPS DK to balance the team and then there won't be room for all of the people that specially went out and rolled the mage and rogue, which makes them upset because they will claim, "I only rolled one because you said so, and now you don't want me".

If you're really stuck for what class you want in Warlords, my generic advice is roll a tank or a healer as these are the spots most in demand. I won't promise that you'll be guaranteed a spot in yout guild raid team as they'll only need 2 tanks and 2-6 healers depending on raid size and difficulty.

When choosing your class for your tank or healer choose one that has 2 alternative role choices as this means you get more flexibility. If you decide you want to try a tank role and you enjoy healing DON'T choose a warrior or DK. If you want to try healing but enjoy tanking DON'T choose a priest or a shaman.

Keep your options open and play what you want to play, after all it is a game not a job.

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I would like to thank all 26 people who replied. The mix was good as I had all 13 of the HC raid team respond (I did /slap them though) and 13 other people respond. This means that the results are a really good indication of what you guys want both now and in Warlords. The information gathered will allow us to make decisions that fit your life and game goals. I have put as much of the information into pictures to keep the waffle down. I have also broken the responses into 3 groups:

• Overall: This is everybody that replied;
• HC Raiders: This is everyone in the Wednesday/Thursday raid team;
• Non HC Raiders: This is everyone except the HC Raiders;

Also during this post please note that the terms I use are the Warlords of Draenor terms for the raid difficulty:

• Normal: what we currently know as Flex and raid on a Sunday;
• Heroic: what we currently know as Normal and raid on a Monday;
• Mythic: what we currently know as Heroic and raid on a Wednesday/Thursday;

Overall

Almost 2/3 of the people want to do Mythic raiding in Warlords and only 2 people want to tackle raids only on the easiest mode (LFR doesn't count).

The people who want to raid Mythic difficulty also prefer group loot over personal (LFR style) loot and the majority of people would like to use the Loot Council method of loot distribution.

One of the questions I asked was, "Would you be prepared to be an assistant raid leader, this will need time spent in and out of game?" looking back this was a badly phrased question as what I was after was people who could help manage a Mythic raid team if we decide to run that content in Warlords. The reason for needing this assistance is that managing a squad of 15 raiders is hard work and one that my co-raid leader and myself  have done this expansion and while my co-raid leader has been a great help I have carried the bulk of the "invisible" work that needs to get done to get the show on the road.

A Mythic raid team will need 30 people for us to get a raid team out every night, this is a big task and also means that we have to put a loot distribution system in place as /roll really doesn't work in a large team. Therefore, the kind of roles that we will need filled are:

• Raid Leaders;
• Class/Role Leaders;
• Loot Masters;
• Strategy Planners;
• Statisticians;
• Recruiters;

and that is what I meant by "assistant raid leader". 7 people responded with at least a "maybe" and that includes 2 of Exhumed's raid leaders and myself. I will be speaking with the other 4 over the next week or so.

Here we see that most people want to raid only 2 days per week, none of you want to raid only 1 day but a few folks would raid 3 or 4 days per week.

The most popular days are our current raid days with Sunday and Monday the most poular. Only a few people liked the thought of raiding on a Saturday (afternoon or night) and a few liked the idea of a Sunday afternoon raid).

With regard to our start and finish times 69% said they could start at 8pm (server) while 54% could raid until 1am (server).

HC Raiders

Looking now only at our HC Raid team. The vast majority want to raid Mythic. One person that doesn't want to move to Mythic because of the 20 man raid size and the other would raid Mythic but preferred Heroic difficulty.

The majority prefer Loot Council, and the "n/a" figures also include people that had no preference.

In addistion to my co-raid leader and myself, 3 people said they would maybe like to help run the raids. As stated previously, I will speak with these people soon™.

Most people like our 2 day raid schedule...

...and our Wednesday and Thursday schedule...

Almost half the team could start at 8pm and almost 2/3rds could raid until 1pm.

Non HC Raiders

While not as numerous as the HC Raider group,almost half of our more casual players would actually like to do Mythic raiding in Warlords.

Of those wanting Mythic raiding, over half would prefer Loot Council. The 46% "n/a" shown below either didn't want to raid Mythic or had no preference.

In addition to the normal team's raid leader, 1 other person said they would like to assist in the management of the raid team.

Most people want to raid 2 days per week...

...and for Sunday and Monday to be those days...

Most of the Non HC Raiders want to start at 8pm but over half don't want to finish later than midnight.

What Does It All Mean?

In brief:

• We raid on days that the guild members want to raid on;
• Most people prefer to raid 2 nights a week;
• The Non HC Raiders would like raids to start at 8pm;
• The HC Raiders generally like their 9pm to midnight raid times;
• Most people want to raid Mythic;
• A few people may be able to help assist in the running of raids;

Over the next few weeks, the Exhumed officers will be using this information to decide our Warlords schedule and that may possibly include changes to the way we are raiding for the rest of this expansion as we make the transition between the 2 expansions.

If you'd like to part of Exhumed, on Shadowsong EU, please check us out at http://www.exhumed-guild.co.uk/  and if you like what you see, register and apply to join.


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So, Blizzard seems to have committed fully to no moe flight, at least not in the Warlords of Draenor expansion.The forums have exploded, and many tears are already being shed and many more will follow I'm sure. But is it really a bad thing?

There are of course many benefits to flight, we can fly direct from point A to point B is the most obvious one and with the magicl mystery tour that some flight paths take that really is a good thing. Then of course there is the fact that we can quest faster, why bother wading in through armies of mobs when we can drop into the exact spot highlighted on WoWHead and get exactly to the objective? It makes sense faster questing = faster levelling = WIN!

Also farming herbs and ores is very efficient whiel flying. The amounts you can farm per hour are dramatically higher than you can even on the fastest of ground mounts.

Other arguments for flying include:

• it expands the world as points of interest can be hidden away in places that are hard to reach;
• it gives us more content;
• it provides for more variety in mounts;
• it is better for short WoW sessions;
• archaeology will suck;
• it gives better game performance as there are less people consuming your FPS;

While all these are valid points some are stretching things, although not as far as the most bizarre point I've read from the pro-flying brigade; that Blizzard are doing this to save development costs as they won't need to develop in all directions.

My personal view is that it is actually a good thing overall. Sure I'll miss it but I'll cope because of the benefits that I hope it will bring. 

The main benefit is that it will fill the world back up, I remember WoW as an MMO, outside of the majorr cities, it doesn't feel like a multi-player game. Because, the first few weeks of the expansion aside, you go out to a quest hub and you're likely the only one there. Now I always assumed that this was because people had levelled up and no longer went there. But thinking about it, early in every expansion nobody can fly. 

It will also make questing feel immersive, Bashiok got it summed up best when he said:

Questing like this also gives you XP and the chance of loot drops that cn be sold earning you a few extra gold that you can then spend on your taxi rides! If Blizzard design the quests right you'll end up with multiple quests that you complete along the way to killing the end goal target. In Bashiok's example above, you could have the enemy leader is your primary quest and you have 3 side quests to kill 10 minions, collect 10 rifles and steal some invasion plans along the way. But we do have to hope they do that.

I also believe that we make more friends when we see others around, again I had put this down to moer people playing early in the expansionbut it is because you're more likely to group up to kill quest mobs rather than fight over them.

This re-poulation is good for more reason though, it allows guilds to grow and it prevents ne people falling into the trap of believing they are playing a solo game. Could it produce better players overall? Maybe not but it just might make everyone frendlier and less likely to break Wheaton's Law.

Some also argue that flying has killed world PvP, again while it has not helped world PvP, I think killed may be a bit of an exaggeration as half the servers are PvE and many PvP servers have ridiculous faction imbalances that they too may as well be considered PvE realms.

Blizzard are promising not to create crazy flight points and more importantly to add more flight points and both these points are essential to make life easy in Warlords without flight. The biggest irony? Our first visit to Draenor was the expansion that gave us flight and the Reins of the Raven Lord mount (which didn't fly) and our reward for purchasing the Collector's Edition of the expansion that sees us return to Draenor is Reins of the Dread Raven, a a revised version of the original, that does fly. Go figure!

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With the announcement yesterday of BlizzCon 2014 I decided to have a think and see what that means for the likely dates for the release of Warlords of Draenor.

BlizzCon is on November  7th-8th and that for me means that the expansion WILL be before this time. Then I had to make the following assumptions:

• it takes 3 weeks of work in the BlizzCon offices in preparation for BlizzCon;
• as we have no beta yet the launch can't come earlier than August;
• Blizzard are creatures of habit;

This led me to the assumption that the expansion will come in August, September or October.

Next I looked through the history of WoW to see what has happened previously in those months and discovered that Blizzard has a heavy bias towards releasing content in a 5 week window that is the last week in August and all of September. 

There is of course a very good reason this time of year is chosen. Many players of the game are young 20 somethings, who like to go and party in the summer months, a good number are college/university students who go home for the summer and return to their studies in late August early September. On top of that you need to consider the Blizzard workforce also would like to holiday in the summer and when you consider that it makes perfect sense.

Looking back through time you see a lot of major events happen:

• September 2 2001 - World of Warcraft announced.
• September 13 2005 - Patch 1.7.0
• August 22 2006 - Patch 1.12.0
• September 11 2006 - Burning Crusade announced to be released on January 16, 2007
• September 27 2007- Patch 2.2.0
• August 21 2008 - Wrath of the Lich King cinematic released
• September 15 2008 - Wrath of the Lich King release date announced to be November 13, 2008
• September 2 2009 - Faction Change service offered
• September 19 2009 - World of Warcraft relaunches in China under its new licensee, NetEase
• September 22 2009 - Patch 3.2.2
• September 7 2010 - Cataclysm pre-events Operation: Gnomeregan / Zalazane's Fall
• September 25 2012- Mists of Panderia released
• September 10 2013 - Patch 5.4
• September 25 2013 - The first Connected Realms are implemented

We also know that Blizzard release everything on a Tuesday. This now gives us five potential dates:

1. August 26 2014;
2. September 2 2014;
3. September 9 2014;
4. September 16 2014;
5. September 23 2014;

Historically, the prepatch comes 4 weeks before the main event so this "evidence" only leaves one possibility, September 23 2014 with the pre-patch (6.0.x) hitting us on August 26 2014.

So much for Blizzard "not leaving us hanging" like they did in Wrath or Cataclysm, but there is the possibility (or should that be hope)  that I am miles off target. I know I certainly don't want to wait that long, as my guild is already struggling with the attendance boss in raids.

Do you think my prediction is miles off target? Too optimistic? Too pessimisitic? Do you have crazy theories for the release date? If so, please leave a comment. more »

The stuff from BlizzCon is mostly good news imho. The new expansion isn't what I was expecting and the time travel but not time travel thing is something odd but we have a wibbly wobbly timey wimey time line already as a new char starts in a post-Cataclysm times but at levvel 60 moves back in time to Outlands until 68-70, then forwards to Northrend (but still pre-Cataclysmic) before until level 80 before returning back to post-Catatclysmic timeline until 90 as we quest through Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria zones.

Of my predictions only the very obvious were correct. They were:

1. I'll start with the 99.9% certainty, a new expansion;
2. We will not get a new playable race or a new class;
3. We will get new character models for all existing races except Goblins, Worgen and Pandaren;
4. We will level to 100;
5. We will get a 7th tier of talents;
6. Normal mode raids will adopt the flex technology allowing raid sizes to vary between a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25; 

The expansion "highlights" are that Garrosh escapes and goes back in time to Draenor to and try to prevent Gul'dan drinking the blood of Mannorth and thereby preventing the Orcish demise and allowing him to build the Iron Horde, which will try to invade Azeroth. 

This is a bit of a disappointment as it seems to be another Horde centric expansion and all focused around Orcs. But it is really too early in the whole process to really make a judgement so I'l give it the benefit of the doubt. As a lore freak though the whole expansion does sound like it could hit the right spots. 

We have also been given a "Garrison". This is player housing and shows what the farm was the trial for. Garrisons contain buildings that "can have multiple tiers, specializations, offline progression, and more!" I am really hoping this is account bound so my alt army can share the base that Evlyxx will build. Th efarm has not been done on my alts and their garrison would definitely never get off the ground. I like this idea but only one per faction per realm please. We are getting seven dungeons, 4 for leveling and 3 heroic only. This is awful. Had they all been for leveling and then heroic it would be much better but as one of the heroic only ones is Upper Blackrock Spire that wouldn't work anyway. Mists saw 4 initial leveling dungeons with 2 added mid way through and that made that much better so seeing this number reduced when we're getting 10 levels simply doesn't cut it for me. 

Moving on to end game, we have two Raids with 16 bosses plus World Bosses. This is awesome news and follows the trend started in Cataclysm and proved great in Mists. I just hope that we get a two raid teir later in the expansion this time around. 

The raids come in four difficulties Raid Finder, Normal (currently known as Flex), Heroic (currently known as Normal) and Mythic (currently known as Heroic). Sounds great and makes sense renaming them. Raid Finder stays much as it is now, with the exception that if people drop from the group mid way through the boss will scale down to adapt to the new number in the group. Normal (WoD) and Heroic (WoD) difficulties will also be flexible with 10-25 players and cross realm enabled. Their loot will be the traditional style and bosses will drop 1 item per 5 players and if that produces 2.6 items a boss will drop 2 items and then have a 60% chance of dropping the third item.

These changes are brilliant and will help smaller raid guilds hugely. As a raid leader and officer in a guild that raids this makes me happy as I won't have to make decisions to leave anyone of our 15 person raid squad out of our progression focused team out of the raid team.

Mythic difficulty will be a 20 man raid group. This is NOT flex enabled and will work exactly as heroic raids do now. That is they have a defined raid id and players will not be able to join a second raid even if they have only killed the first boss of the raid.

The Mythic raid difficulty changes really are a kick in the teeth for me and our main raid team. We raid 6 hours a week and don't demand high attendance because we realise that people have family and work to do as well as play games. Considering this our progress is awesome and if we were to raid as much as most other guilds on our server would be pushing for the number 2 spot. But we currently run 10 man because we don't have the resources to manage a 20 man raid guild. Our server is also really tough to recruit on (maybe Connected Realms will change this) because we have too many guilds and too few skilled raiders on the server to go round. 

Most of the expansion this change would have not had any impact on our team but we're currently 2 bosses away from heroics (Mythic come WoD) and that is liable to happen in the next month. Under the current system we'll be moving on to heroics soon. If we were in Warlords of Draenor we would have finished and be left with the option of farming the instance waiting for the next raid, bringing in alts to restore some form of challenge or simply declaring the game as beaten and stop raiding.

Moving up to a 20 man raid team would for us mean we need 15 more skilled raiders, it would mean we need to implement a fully fledged loot distribution system which means someone to manage it. The beauty of 10 man raiding is that loot can be /rolled because there isn't much competition for items and unlucky streaks don't really affect things when there are only 2 people rolling. But doubling up can cause an unlucky player to go a long time without winning anything. The new loot system also won't help that as items now will be open to all who can wear the armour class which means /rolls for mail, leather and plate will be between mêlée and casters now, although the drp rate of a usable item will increase too but that can just help introduce unlucky streaks.

My biggest fear is that if we don't make the change and try to have a 20 man raid team I will lose most of my team and be left with the option of not raiding at the level I am now.

Something needs to be done and Rob Pardo's answers to questions similar to my concerns didn't give me the impression that Blizzard were liable to change this decision. Time will tell and at least we have time to make decisions, I just want Shadowsong to become a Connected Realm real soon so I can have the option of recruiting people now in preparation for the future. One thing is for certain, me and the officers in Exhumed are going to have to make some tough decisions in the next few months.

Anyway moaning over and lets look at something more positive! The new models look absolutely awesome and the fact that they have made them look so good while keeping the look and feel of the races is a testament to the graphics team. I just can't wait to see the remaining models, particularly the human models.

We don't yet know when or how the new character models will be released yet. It could be that Blizz have all of the completed race at launch, or they could add them every patch. Personally I hope they are added at launch but if only half the races are fully complete by then I'd rather see them launched then and get the ramaining races added later rather than delay them all.

It has also been confirmed that there will be no free re-customization for characters after new character models. This is something that I really can support as the models are so true to the originals it does seem pointless. But I'm sure if there is uproar at the new look I can see this decision being reversed. The bigger disappointment in this statement is that I don't believe that there will be any more character customisation than we already have which is a real shame as compared with games released in the past 5 years the Warcraft character models are so generic.

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