We all learned about World of Warcraft’s Guardians of the Dream patch in terms of its overall location and content offerings yesterday, along with its arrival on the PTR just after it was confirmed, but now we’ve got a more granular look at what’s arriving with the latest patch notes from said PTR. Just in case you’re the sort who would rather read about features instead of hear Blizzard devs talk about them.
Naturally the PTR build features the Emerald Dream zone, the Amirdrassil raid, and the new Dream’s Hope class armor sets up for testing, but the build also brings on a new world boss in the form of Aurostor the Hibernating, opens up a new Battleground Blitz PvP brawl, and applies a wide array of class changes, particularly in the case of Druids, Hunters, Priests, and Rogues. There are plenty of things to comb through if you’re looking to dive into the notes before diving into the PTR.
In other WoW news, Ion Hazzikostas and Holly Longdale both held an interview with GameSpot about the MMORPG, with the two leads talking up the game’s “staggering” content update cadence, lauding the return of Chris Metzen to the studio, and hinting at a potential revamp of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor (while claiming to have learned lessons from Cataclysm).
“Hazzikostas said an old world revamp is something that is ‘likely to happen’ in the future, but that the team would learn lessons from Cataclysm, which was criticized for essentially deleting parts of 2004-era WoW, and use modern solutions to preserve currently existing pieces of the game were it to become a reality. ‘We are definitely open to it at some point,’ Hazzikostas said. ‘It is a shortcoming, if you take a step back and think about World of Warcraft as an ongoing living world, if we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner where we have all these iconic locations but we can’t really use them because they’ve already been used.'”
The interview also sees the devs promise that the trading post will not turn into a microtransaction shop while also stating the intention of selling trader’s tender to serve those who call for the option. “They’re not very vocal, but there are some players that ask, ‘I don’t have time to get all my tender, I’d buy some of this stuff,’ and so, you know, we try it out,” says Longdale. “We’re trying stuff.”
