Adventurers,
The autumn air chills as new evil descends on Warcraft Reborn: November’s first content updates storm into Ascension. These updates will begin on Reborn before expanding into CoA and Live Realms.
- 2 New Custom Dungeons
- November Deals (up to 30% off Conveniences Items)
- Poll Results
- Mythic 0
- November Balance Patch
- Refunding Worldforged Upgrades
Let's dive into specifics:
Challenge New Dungeons
Charge into two new, completely custom dungeons on Ascension, hand-sculpted from the ground up to offer a new challenge to 5 man teams. These dungeons are Ascension exclusive. You’ll find new environments, new creatures, new bosses, new treasure, and even new achievements inside.
- Vault of the Inquisition
- Road to De’ Other Side
Both dungeons release this Sunday, November 16th.
The Vault of the Inquisition
The calm glades of Northshire Abbey: a place of peace where fledgling adventurers begin their journey. None would suspect the Abbey’s sinister past, where The Inquisition once jailed all who shunned the light. Now these ancient catacombs are overrun, threatening to disrupt the peace the Abbey’s patrons have fought so hard to protect. You must enter the Vaults and slay the evil within.
The Vault of the Inquisition is a new 5-man dungeon located beneath Northshire Abbey. Expect the sinister remains of the Vault’s jailed denizens, as well as an invasion of the kobolds who have made the caverns of Northshire their home.
Road to De’ Other Side
The ancient trolls have tales of the passage which leads from one world to the next: a road which leads to the life beyond. But those within have become restless, and it’s up to you to clear the path.
The Road to ‘de Other Side is a new 5 man dungeon located in the Valley of Trials.
No matter which dungeon you challenge, you can expect new bosses, new mechanics, and new, custom treasure. Each dungeon features exclusive, original items hand-crafted to sate your thirst for power.
New Staff
New 1H Sword
New Fist Weapon
New 2H Axe
New Achievements
Each new dungeon features brand new achievements to earn, which culminate in all new rewards.
Ascension In-Game Polls and Surveys
Ascension recently introduced in-game Polls and Surveys to live-realms, featured in this article:
https://ascension.gg/en/news/ascension-in-game-surveys-and-polls/515
These surveys help inform important decisions like content releases and what types of content is introduced.
Moving forward, these surveys and polls will contain more information, with body and description paragraphs added to provide additional details and ensure clarity. One issue that surfaced with the recent Bronzebeard surveys is that they didn’t have enough information for the community to make a decision. This was most clear with the release date of Molten Core, where many people reasonably assumed releasing Molten Core sooner would mean that all raids would be released rapid-fire. However, it is normal on Ascension to release the first tier of Raid Content quickly to increase the amount of lockouts you get to enjoy in these raids, and then have a bigger gap between tiers instead. Future polls and surveys will contain detailed information in this regard to ensure you have optimal clarity when voting.
Survey Results
According to recent surveys, the majority of the community feels that the pacing of content releases on Bronzebeard is just right. This will be taken into account moving forward.
How do you feel about the cadence of content release?
For those that feel it is too fast, note that once Tier 1 content is out there will be a much longer gap in the content. The current release schedule speed is aiming to get a wide array of entry level content out so that everyone can enjoy the first tier of the thing they love: whether that’s dungeons, raids, or PvP.
For those that feel it is too slow, there will be additional content added within the same gear level in the form of new dungeons, world bosses and more, content for you to enjoy while the majority still leveling enjoy the journey.
The most important thing is to ensure that the widest array of entry level content is available so that as many different types of players can play the thing they love:
Here are the survey results:
When Should Molten Core Release?
Historically, the community has tended to overestimate how long they want to wait for different content releases. On the 2-3 occasions where raid releases were polled the community often gave feedback after that they overshot it. Based on these results, the plan is to leave this poll running, so new players reaching 60 or anyone who progressed faster than they expected can update their votes. As mentioned before, once Tier 1 content is out there will be a much longer gap in the content.
Now that realms have stabilized should Malfurion merge into Bronzebeard?
Note on this survey, many more people voted no on Malfurion, and they are definitely weighted higher in this poll. Currently, Malfurion has remained substantially more stable than Bronzebeard, this will be addressed and validated before a merge is scheduled. The merge is expected to happen no later than the end of December. Likewise, with these polls you can update your response at any time and this will continue to inform how urgent of a priority this is compared to other things.
Would you like to see Potion of Experience enabled?
This was a really close survey. Based on these results, a slight majority either thinks potion of experience should not be released or at least should not be released yet. This poll will be left open to assess changing community sentiment. What this means and that the most likely outcome is Potions of Experience are implemented in the future. The next survey that will be added will assess whether potions should be made available for Alt characters like heirlooms currently.
Would You Like To See Potion of experience enabled for those who have a level 60 already
In response, this poll regarding potions of experience another poll was opened to open up potions of experience if you had already gone 1-60 and wanted to level alts. This poll the majority was in favor of this change right now, so it has been done.
Would you like to see Warmode and Highrisk in a different phase in the Open World separate from PvE mode?
Based on these results and results surrounding the community’s favorite pvp format, splitting the phases will be assessed after this set of content
updates
On the whole, how balanced does PvP in Reborn feel to you?
What is your favorite form of PvP Content?
What is your second favorite form of PvP content?
What’s your favorite format for Arena?
What’s your second favorite format for Arena?
The results of these polls will inform the release of content moving forward.
November Balance Patch
On November 19th, a PvP & PvE balance patch comes to Bronzebeard to address the following:
- General improvements to underperforming Specializations and Mystic Enchantments
- Refinement to the strengths and weaknesses of many different specs, Enchantments, and Abilities:
- All hunters use Explosive Trap regardless of Single Target or AoE Situations: it’s just exceedingly powerful and better than immolation trap even when hitting just one target. This patch will slightly reduce the damage of Explosive Trap and significantly increase the damage of Immolation Trap to the point that it will be better to use if you are fighting only one enemy.
- Rogues have very little built-in AoE. Although the Crimson Tempest LRE exists, it’s rarely picked. All Rogues now get Crimson Tempest baseline so that they have another tool to use compete in AoE scenarios
- Protection Paladins strengths all align to make them exceedingly powerful at solo gameplay, leaning on their combination of damage, tankiness and self-sustain. Their power within this niche will be reined in somewhat, without significantly impacting their strength in group content.
- Certain bugfixes that have significant implications on balance have been put on hold. With this patch these will go live together with accompanied adjustments.
- Reworking Armor Penetration to be more widely useful
- The new design significantly buffs Armor Penetration while at lower levels, fixing the issue where its hyperscaling make it a bad stat until you have extremely high amounts of it
- This also fixes the unintuitiveness where armor penetration actually is weaker against high armor targets like Golemagg, when it should be most effective against a mob like him.
There will be an entire article with the full updates to look forward too closer to the 19th.
Mythic 0 Releases on November 22nd
Dive into Mythic 0 dungeons next Saturday, November 22nd. Mythic vanilla dungeons give you access to stronger versions of classic dungeon gear to give you even more ways to gear up your class. Want to keep using that Hand of Justice? Love the raw power of a Briarwood Reed? Get mythic versions of these items to unleash your full strength.
This release of Mythic dungeons will work slightly differently than past releases:
- Mythic Dungeons will have an instance lockout for each dungeon until Mythic+ releases: so if you clear UBRS on Mythic you can still run Scholomance, but once you do you’ll be locked out of those dungeons for a day
- With this, at launch there is no LFG for Mythic Dungeons: gather your party and brave the wilds on your way to the dungeon portal to enter.
- The goal with these changes is to get Mythics out sooner but the gear from them is so strong compared to Zul’gurub and MC Raids that this content should not be invalidated.
- In a future release, this lockout will be removed and Mythics will be added to LFG.
November Deals and Item Sales
From November 13th to 16th, you can grab up to 30% off all convenience items for all Ascension realms. This includes items like:
- Vanity Collection
- Book of Ascension
- Riding Tomes
- Portable Mystic Enchanting Altar
- …and so much more!
Navigate to the Convenience tab to see what’s for sale:
Refunding Worldforged Upgrades
Sometimes Worldforged Items get changed: that’s okay. What’s not okay is feeling like you lost out on Runes of Ascension when these changes occur. To prevent this, you now have a new option on the Recovery Service menu: Worldforged Item Refunds.
Worldforged Item Refunds allow you to refund Worldforged Items for their full Mark of Ascension value if they get changed.
You have 2 weeks to log-in and refund a Worldforged Item after it gets changed.
This ensures that you never miss out on Runes if an item you recently upgraded happens to undergo some balance changes.
You can find this option in the Help menu under Recovery Services.
You’ll be able to refund them immediately if items are nerfed.
