14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has announced that the next expansion for World of Wacraft will streamline end-game progression, doing away with the Justice and Valor currency.
The upcoming expansion for Blizzard Entertainment's massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, dubbed Warlords of Draenor and due out in November, will bring a lot of new changes to the title, to put things mildly.
The company's plan to retire the Justice and Valor tokens in favor of a rather surprising currency has been announced in a blue post on the MMO Champion forums, informing that Blizzard plans to have gold function as the new go-to currency when getting new gear.
Currently, Justice and Valor tokens can be used to buy a lot of starting gear (and older items), and many players rely on them and their widespread availability to improve their gear and get ready for raiding, tweak their combat proficiency or acquire off-spec gear for their secondary specialization.
"What will be going away is Justice and Valor. Over time, they've moved away from their original purpose, and given how widely available they'd become (awarded from quests, scenarios, dungeons, raids, etc.), we'd rather return to the original universal currency: gold," game designer Watcher explains.
"The final values aren't hooked up yet, but the old Valor rewards for completing your daily random dungeon or an LFR wing will be replaced with a hefty sum of gold, which should make something like the gold turn-in for a bonus roll seem far more attainable even for players who currently don't have much gold," he concludes.
Using gold as a straight-up means to acquire starting raiding gear sounds interesting, but the implications that such a system carries with it still remain to be seen.
"Honor and Conquest definitely are not going away, just to clarify a misconception - you'll still be earning those currencies through PvP and using them to buy your PvP gear," the blue post clarifies, in case you were wondering whether the plans extend to purchasing player versus player gear using in-game gold.
For the time being, there are no further details on how exactly the system will work, but we'll come back with the news as soon as new information becomes available.
The Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft is scheduled to go live on November 13 this year, and pre-ordering the game can net you a free level-90 character boost that you can take advantage of right now, and see what the Mists of Pandaria expansion introduced to the game, in case you skipped it.