World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion will bring many changes to the MMORPG

Apr 30, 2014 16:45 GMT  ·  By

The upcoming expansion to Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, titled Warlords of Draenor, will fundamentally alter many of the game's core concepts and mechanics.

The developers have announced the many changes they plan to introduce, even releasing the Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes, from the internal testing version, for all the world to see.

The upcoming changes were received with mixed feelings by a majority of players, worried that the game they love might take things into a different direction than they would like.

Such was the case when Blizzard announced that there would be no flying in Warlords of Draenor, a decision motivated largely by the fact that all the game's content took place on the ground, and the ability to swoop in and out everywhere would alter the core game experience.

The latest Battle.net blog post outlines the incoming modifications to the Player vs. Player system and the reasoning behind the designers' decisions.

No matter what enemy the Horde and the Alliance were facing, the rivalry between the two has always been the game's main driving force. The two factions banded together to take down the Burning Legion and the Lich King's horde, but the old grudges are not so easy to set aside.

Mists of Pandaria, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, saw the introduction of the PvP power stat, allowing PvP-specific gear to function in a superior manner to PvE raid and dungeon gear, without being overpowered when utilized in PvE content.

While the change was regarded as a balance success in instanced PvP arenas and Battlegrounds, the members of the team feel that they can do even better than that, also granting the same benefits in spontaneous world PvP.

As such, gear in Warlords of Draenor will no longer have PvP-specific stats but will instead scale up to a higher item level when players enter designated PvP areas, or simply engage in PvP combat anywhere else in the game world.

The change will make it so that PvP gear will utilize the items' base item level when fighting PvE enemies such as the Iron Horde, while questing for instance. However, the second a player engages in a PvP encounter, the higher item level of equipped PvP gear will kick in, offering an advantage over PvE gear wearing adversaries.

On top of this, all gear pieces, even those coming from PvE content, will have a certain minimum PvP item level in any kind of designated PvP area, allowing ill-equipped players to engage in organized PvP without being at a severe disadvantage from the get-go.

An issue that often arose during Mists of Pandaria was the fact that some high-level pieces of PvE gear were actually better than dedicated PvP gear during skirmishes.

The change means that PvE gear will no longer have to be downscaled for PvP purposes, as the equivalent PvP gear will already be of a higher item level in PvP situations, making players wearing PvP-specific gear always be stronger in PvP scenarios, as is normal.