#358 - For Azeroth!: “Beta Build Anxiety”

The Midnight Beta is Live. Raid Testing is Scheduled. As the March on the next Warcraft Expansion moves on the crew questions if we are going too fast, too slow, or both simultaneously.

The Warning Overlooked

• Midnight Prologue: The Warning
• Dec 2nd in NA
• Vereesa Windrunner and Arator investigate visions and prophesies
• As a part of the content update, players who have added Midnight to their account will gain access to Housing Early Access.
• Updated New Player Experience
• New Lorewalking: The Elves of Quel'Thalas allows players to learn about the origins of the Blood Elves and the Void Elves.
• The Lich King’s assault on the Sunwell
• The tainting of the Sunwell by Alleria Windrunner, and the creation of the Void Elves
• Pandaren Heritage Armor
• Turbulent Timeways returns
• 10 weeks of Timewalking
• 6 new dungeons from the Shadowlands
• The Brawler’s Guild
• Dec 9
• New bosses
• Revised encounter order
• Rewards including Housing Decor

Links

• Midnight Prologue: “The Warning” Content Update Goes Live December 2!

Play with the Blues: Midnight Pre-Launch Event

• Mon Nov 17
• 11:00 PST - 13:00 PST
• Realm: Midnight Prelaunch Event
• The realm will become available when the event begins and will remain open after the event ends for a short period of time for those who still want to test out the pre-launch event.
• Requirements: Copy a character from the live servers to participate in the test.
• The quest “The Cult Within” will begin a chain that will lead players to the Twilight Highlands in the Eastern Kingdoms.
• The event repeats quickly and can be tracked in the map.
• The build will be based on Midnight so there will be class changes

Links

• Play with the Blues: Midnight Pre-Launch Event - November 17

Midnight Beta

New with the beta:

• Allied Race: Haranir
• COMBAT TUNING
• Developers’ notes: As Midnight transitions into beta, tuning will quickly start happening at a much more rapid pace. We are working to get things into a better tuned state to ensure quality playtesting and feedback from both internal and external sources. This tuning will come in various stages and won’t all happen at once, but a few notable changes are happening that feel worth discussing slightly more:
• Several classes will see some generic increases or decreases to their overall throughput amounts. Most of this right now is to coincide with “zeroing out” some passive modifiers attached to the class or spec that was adjusting their throughput. Rather than continue to tweak this number up and down, most of them have been set to zero. In some cases, we adjusted the spec’s tuning up or down to compensate for the change. In other cases, we felt it was ok to not adjust the spec’s throughput and just return the values to zero.
• Melee classes are starting to see an increase to their auto-attack damage dealt either in this week’s update or in the coming week’s updates. Auto-attacking is a part of melee characters, and we want to make sure that an appropriate amount of damage is being attributed to your auto-attacks while engaged in combat.
• All healers had a 20% increase to their damage dealt this week. We are monitoring the rate at which they can complete content while solo and felt that a boost to their offensive throughput would be appropriate.
• NEW ACCESSIBILITY FEATURE: COMBAT AUDIO ALERTS
• Combat audio alerts have been added for reading your target’s name and announcing when your target dies, when combat starts, and when combat ends.
• Transmog is disabled for the week.
• Next Week: Limited Raid Testing
• Updated Transmog System
• Mythic+ Dungeons
• Midnight Season 1 Dungeons
• Upper-tier Delves
• Housing - Night Elf and Blood Elf exterior decor
• Additional User Interface Updates

Links

• Midnight Beta Test Development Notes - #18 by Linxy
• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe26_kqAy4ypSkmpRiO_eJQyvcp0el5PKcUTO0ZrYu4qi3-eQ/viewform

Raid Testing

• Midnight Raid Testing Schedule