During and just after yesterday's World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth Q&A with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, a number of interesting tidbits of information about the upcoming expansion were revealed. These include the removal of the Strand of the Ancients battleground from the PvP queue, some clarification about the global cooldown changes and the news that no Alliance High Elves are coming to the game as an Allied Race.
Here are the key takeaways:
- the team is keeping an eye on the player reaction to recent additions of abilities to the global cooldown that span all classes and specs. Some have already been removed from GCD but they will continue to iterate on the updated system
- Artifact abilities or abilities that "made gameplay interesting" have been shifted to talents. Classes / specs shouldn't feel complete with Artifacts, but should feel so on their own
- more Azerite armor will be added to the beta for testing.
- this expansion should be easier for players to maintain multiple specs
- Island Expeditions will be the primary go-to to acquire Azerite to empower the Heart of Azeroth
- PvP gear will be less random with predictable rewards at certain benchmarks -- still no vendors
- large BGs (Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest) are being moved into a separate queue from smaller battlegrounds. It's possible old battlegrounds like Tol Barad and Wintergrasp could be added
- Strand of the Ancients is being removed in BfA
- some racials have been tuned for BfA
- "Blood Elves are basically High Elves with slightly different eye color and backstory. If you want to be a light skinned Elf, that is basically a Blood Elf. Giving that to the Alliance would blur the line between factions."
- armor sets going forward will be thematically distinct based on where they are acquired
- Horde being "evil" is a matter of perspective
Check out the Twitch replay below and let us know what you think in the comments.
