WoW Classic is back in the headlines again, looking forward to some of the server’s next steps in a group discussion with devs and community council members that was held earlier this week. The discussion touched on a number of topics of player interest, from the raids to PvP to faction balance.
Starting with raids, the devs have confirmed that 10-player and 25-player raids will not share a lockout, while normal and heroic raids will. The devs are also looking at making targeted changes to specific raids such as giving players more reasons to run Ulduar along with reducing item level rewards from Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel. “What we want is something like what happened in Burning Crusade Classic, where players were still going into Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep at the same time Black Temple was out,” said one of the devs. “There’s a lot of different activity across different levels, so that everyone was able to play different things and run their alts. It was sort of a vibrant ecosystem of raids.”
On the subject of PvP, the devs confirmed that nitro boosts would be available for use in the Arena’s first season, though the team will be keeping an eye on how they change things and adjust accordingly in future seasons. The discussion further confirmed that there would be multiple instances of Wintergrasp running region-wide, meaning that if one player in a faction on a realm wins in their battleground, the entire realm will have access to Vault of Archavon.
Finally, the topic of balancing faction population was brought up, with one dev floating the idea of offering buffs to honor, XP, and rep earnings for factions that have lower populations. Testing this idea would likely be done on one of the smaller realms first to see if it has the desired effect before expanding the system to more populous and one-sided servers.
