Battle for Azeroth

[Fernia]

Although it's tempting to switch to Ferndoyln for the next expansion, to solve our perpetual lack of Druids in the raid ... I think I will stick with Fernia at least to begin with.  Sounds like disco will be more bubble oriented again, and shadow will have shorter / less punishing rotation.  We'll see --- I'm in the middle of endless renos right now, so I might be late to the raid party this time around.

[jsoh]

Prepatch coming this Tuesday

[Marco]

The first part of the War of Thorns went live today.  It's a short quest line with no cinematics, essentially depicting the opening stages of the war.  After the quest line some world quests open up in Darkshore.  One of them awarded a warglaive weapon for my DH, so I guess there are some transmog rewards here.  My other characters didn't have immediate access to the world quests, so it's possible that you have to run the quest line multiple times to get everything.

Blizzard also released an animated short about Jaina.  "Animated" is maybe a little generous because it's basically still frames, but the artwork is quite good.  It contains a song which will absolutely get stuck in your head.  There are two more shorts coming, one about Azshara and one about Sylvanas (possibly not in that order).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqN5IQD-3L0

[Honorata]

According to some folks on my Twitter dash, you can talk to your faction leader on alts to skip the story questing and go straight to the new War of Thorns WQs on your alts.

[Jenilea]

According to some folks on my Twitter dash, you can talk to your faction leader on alts to skip the story questing and go straight to the new War of Thorns WQs on your alts.

Yes, but be sure not to complete the follow on quest to talk to Mathias Shaw. Once you complete that quest, the option to skip Darkshore is gone.

[Snique]

So, I did the quest chain and it just kind of left me sitting on a dock with Malfurion. I assume that's deliberate, and there will be a continuation of that in the future?

I agree about the Jaina video - it's done in a semi-still anime style that I quite like and I think the artwork is good. Online buzz is that the singer of the song is the woman who does Jaina's in-game voice acting.

I am not at all up on the lore, but I'm told that the video references all the way back to Warcraft III and may hint at characters appearing in BfA that were in the earlier Warcraft games but haven't yet been seen in WoW. Anyone have more info on that?

[Marco]

Taliesin explains most of it in his analysis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgN8m09hD7c

For a longer treatment, Nobbel (https://www.youtube.com/user/Nobbel87/videos) is also doing a multi-part rundown of the Jaina story, but I haven't watched it.

I'm not easily finding a good text summary; I'm sure it's out there.  In Warcraft 3 we get to see that Jaina basically sided with Thrall and Rexxar against her father Daelin, and for pretty good reasons.

[Honorata]

Online buzz is that the singer of the song is the woman who does Jaina's in-game voice acting.

Yes, Laura Bailey, who does the in-game VO for Jaina also recorded the voice for the new video.

[Marco]

It looks like the War of Thorns world quests spawn four at a time at 11am each day.  They all appear to award base-ilvl-210 gear, which is on par with normal Antorus loot.  So while there is no leveling bonanza in this pre-patch event like there was with the Legion one, you can at least gear out alts for slightly faster early BfA leveling.

[Fallowgrey]

One nice thing to note about doing the Darkshore WQs is the reward of 210 weapons.  For several of my alts these were great replacements for dead artifacts.  It's still possible to pursue relics for artifacts for i-level updates, but not nearly as easily.

I did note that on completing the quest chain on my heroic Antorus geared main, that I'm not seeing the WQs on my map.  I mean, I'd have no reason to pursue 210 gear, but still.  Sweetums found forum posts saying the map might not be showing quest areas that are actually there.  But I've only seen them on "undergeared" alts who could benefit so far.

Also, the gear drops do not seem to have any draw for transmog.  The only set I worked at getting all of, for my hunter, all has the appearance of the base initial set of hunter gear.

[Marco]

Do you use World Quest Tracker or a similar addon?

[Marco]

Here's a spreadsheet (not really functionally a spreadsheet, but it's stored as one) with advice on BfA leveling and raid prep.  This is targeted at people who are like 800% more hardcore than anyone I know, but it still might be interesting for people to pick and choose advice from.  The professions page might be the most relevant to some people here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xHvIxX5TE0ZMYTKBzkaRNFQTJzYQJhhho8KuyK4CB0w/htmlview?sle=true#

[Snique]

I was wondering about the value of the weapons dropped from these quests. My guildmate got two of them on his hunter. Both polearms, and both well below the ilvl of the artifact on my lowest-alt-what-has-done-mythics. I imagine it'd be good for alts just hitting 110 but polearms for hunters??

[jsoh]

I imagine it'd be good for alts just hitting 110 but polearms for hunters??

Survival hunters.

[Marco]

Doing the second week's quests appears to open up a fifth daily.  I didn't see a way to skip the second part of the quest line on alts, though.  (The existing four dailies are still available if you don't do the week quests.)