wow Patch 8.1: Content Release Schedule

[Stan 5,024]

The article aims to explain content that will not be available immediately when Tides of Vengeance goes live this week.

War Campaign (December 11)

New War Campaign chapters await both factions, but they are staggered and culminate in opening of the Battle of Dazar'alor raid.

• 8.1 Tides of Vengeance: War Campaign Part 1 (December 11th)
  • (A): Continue the War Campaign by joining Jaina Proudmoore in the defense of Kul Tiras. Rally your allies and rout the Horde!
  • (H): Continue the War Campaign by joining Rexxar in Kul Tiras and disrupting the Alliance's Azerite weapons testing.
• 8.1 Tides of Vengeance War Campaign Part 2 (December 18th)
  • (A): A new ally in the war needs your help-- and a little bit of gnomish engineering--to execute his brilliant plan.
  • (H): Assist Trade Prince Gallywix in a test drive of his deadly brand new mech, the G.M.O.D.

Battle of Dazar'alor Raid (January 22)

The raid becomes available on January 22 and that's more than a month away from now.

• January 22 — Normal and Heroic Difficulties
• January 29 — Mythic and Raid Finder Wing 1              
• February 12 — Raid Finder Wing 2
• February 26 — Raid Finder Wing 3 

Allied Races: Kul Tiran Humans & Zandalari Trolls

Both Allied Races were confirmed to join their respective factions after the raid and while no specific dates were announced yet, we at least know the unlock requirements for both races.

Mythic Season 2 (January 22)

• New Seasonal Affix: Infested is retiring and once the new raid opens, Reaping will take its place. The Season 2 affix is themed after Bwonsamdi.
  • Every 20% on the Enemy forces bar, Bwonsamdi resurrects spirits of fallen enemies that will charge at you no matter where you are.
• Item Level Increase: Blizzard's increasing dungeon rewards and difficulty across all dungeons as follows:
  • Normal dungeons drop ilvl 340 gear (up from ilvl 310).
  • Heroic dungeons drop ilvl 355 gear (up from ilvl 325).
  • Mythic dungeons drop ilvl 370 gear (up from ilvl 340).
• Weekly Mythic Cache & Mythic+ Rewards: Items found in your Grand Challenger's Bounty and end-of-run rewards will have a higher item level as well. 
  • Mythic+2 rewards start at 375 up to item level 400 from Mythic+10. Check out more details in our guide.
• Azerite Armor Vendor: Items sold by Thaumaturge Vashreeen for Titan Residuum will be increased to a maximum of item level 415 (up from 385).

Battle for Azeroth PvP Season 2 (January 22)

The second Season becomes available along with Mythic Season 2 and the Dazar'alor raid. This means an overall item level increase in rewards across the board. Gladiators will be able to earn a new proto-drake.

Crucible of the Storm Raid

Game files contain all data for the second 8.1 raid, but it probably won't open before the release of Patch 8.1.5.

[Arcling 877]

Late release of raid will likely severly reduce the number of Kul Tirans and Zandalari being played. Many people wanted to play them not long after release, but now they are bored of grind. These races will become available over half a year after release, and that's assuming they will come immediately after raid, as it is expected they will have to release 8.1.5 to make them playable. Personally, not interested in these, however it's very daunting for a large portion of playerbase to have one of main features released so late, as usually new races or classes are the major selling points of expansions. It's almost funny how many bad PR decisions Blizzard made recently, including dumb Diablo 3 Switch contest.

[ArusVicious 156]

36 minutes ago, Arcling said:

Late release of raid will likely severly reduce the number of Kul Tirans and Zandalari being played. Many people wanted to play them not long after release, but now they are bored of grind. These races will become available over half a year after release, and that's assuming they will come immediately after raid, as it is expected they will have to release 8.1.5 to make them playable. Personally, not interested in these, however it's very daunting for a large portion of playerbase to have one of main features released so late, as usually new races or classes are the major selling points of expansions. It's almost funny how many bad PR decisions Blizzard made recently, including dumb Diablo 3 Switch contest.

I’m not sure why, but the WoW dev team just doesn’t seem to get it. They don’t have the capabilities to understand why people are angry with the game in its current state, and even when they do, they don’t know how to properly fix it. They just want everything to be time gated while no one else does. They want RNG, while no one else does. I think this is the most disconnected Blizzard has been with its community since WoD. It’s sad, because I really love WoW, but it’s hard to keep such a passion of it after how Blizzard has handled BfA.

Edited December 10, 2018 by Maxkitty

[Lighting 1]

1 hour ago, Arcling said:

Late release of raid will likely severly reduce the number of Kul Tirans and Zandalari being played. Many people wanted to play them not long after release, but now they are bored of grind. These races will become available over half a year after release, and that's assuming they will come immediately after raid, as it is expected they will have to release 8.1.5 to make them playable. Personally, not interested in these, however it's very daunting for a large portion of playerbase to have one of main features released so late, as usually new races or classes are the major selling points of expansions. It's almost funny how many bad PR decisions Blizzard made recently, including dumb Diablo 3 Switch contest.

Well said!

This will be for me last WoW expansion, and I'm not going to play it trough. Game has chanced so much since Vanilla and this expansion is so bad, even thou story written for it is best so far. I'm really sad how Blizzard has changed since joining with Activision. I have loved Blizzard games since Diablo 1, but now it seems that greed is number one priority for Blizzard/Activision. I hope that in some point we get good story games again. 

[Kurosu 58]

BFA promotion : play as zandalari and kultiran humans as playable races. Release : August 13th.

 

Unlocking of races : February 26th ( could be more based on the rest of requirements).

 

Thats more than 5 months later.And people still support this LOL.

 

Edit : oh did we mention they start at level 10 and you will have to level them up through our NERFED leveling system right in the middle of an expansion? Thats a pure coincidence by the way.Definately not intended to tempt you buy a level boost.

Edited December 10, 2018 by Kurosu

[jinsu2301 273]

12 hours ago, Kurosu said:

oh did we mention they start at level 10 and you will have to level them up through our NERFED leveling system right in the middle of an expansion? Thats a pure coincidence by the way.Definately not intended to tempt you buy a level boost.

Level 20, and you are actually incentivized to not boost since it would prevent you from getting the heritage armor. And like you said, they nerfed leveling, meaning you need less XP, so you are even less tempted to boost.

[Athonian 0]

Actually, they are looking to get all of us to race change our mains and we'll do it too.

[Kurosu 58]

7 hours ago, jinsu2301 said:

Level 20, and you are actually incentivized to not boost since it would prevent you from getting the heritage armor. And like you said, they nerfed leveling, meaning you need less XP, so you are even less tempted to boost.

That is not what I meant and you know it. Dont twist my own words in order to suit your argument.The leveling has  been made harder and with bad scaling.Dont pretend it isnt so.And its kind of "strange" how you only chose a fragment of my argument to reply to instead of its whole point.

[Kurosu 58]

2 hours ago, Athonian said:

Actually, they are looking to get all of us to race change our mains and we'll do it too.

That as well actually.Many people will choose that over leveling a character mid way throughout an expansion plus gearing him up from scratch.

[jinsu2301 273]

27 minutes ago, Kurosu said:

That is not what I meant and you know it. Dont twist my own words in order to suit your argument.The leveling has  been made harder and with bad scaling.Dont pretend it isnt so.And its kind of "strange" how you only chose a fragment of my argument to reply to instead of its whole point.

I didn't twist anything, I quoted you. And I only quoted the part that I had something to say about, there is nothing strange about that. Your argument was that they "nerfed" leveling to make people buy boosts. I countered that argument.

I have leveled several characters since 8.0, and dozens more before that. And while I do agree that there have been issues with scaling with certain mobs, overall it is still *filtered* easy, only now you no longer oneshot most mobs. But keep in mind that combat only makes up a fraction of the leveling process. Most of it is travel time. All in all, it usually takes me about 50 hours to get to max level. Just as much as in WoD or Legion. And with the 8.1 changes it's probably gonna shave off another 5-7 hours.

And just so you don't have to bring it up, yes, I too think that the allied races are coming too late, that's why I didn't argue with that point.

[CorneliusBrutus 6]

On 12/10/2018 at 10:52 AM, Maxkitty said:

They just want everything to be time gated while no one else does.

Time gating is a necessary evil of MMO development. Either you stagger content releases so players get a chance to experience things at roughly the same time, or the hardcore players blast through the main progression track in less than a month and complain about "no content." A live development team, even one with limitless resources, simply cannot manufacture quality content at a rate that would satisfy the no-lifer contingent.

[Kurosu 58]

1 hour ago, jinsu2301 said:

I didn't twist anything, I quoted you. And I only quoted the part that I had something to say about, there is nothing strange about that. Your argument was that they "nerfed" leveling to make people buy boosts. I countered that argument.

I have leveled several characters since 8.0, and dozens more before that. And while I do agree that there have been issues with scaling with certain mobs, overall it is still *filtered* easy, only now you no longer oneshot most mobs. But keep in mind that combat only makes up a fraction of the leveling process. Most of it is travel time. All in all, it usually takes me about 50 hours to get to max level. Just as much as in WoD or Legion. And with the 8.1 changes it's probably gonna shave off another 5-7 hours.

And just so you don't have to bring it up, yes, I too think that the allied races are coming too late, that's why I didn't argue with that point.

No you "quoted" part of it because it changed its meaning that way.Otherwise you would have used a full quote and reply to that part only.You didnt countered anything, unless you also consider "I said sky is green therefore I countered your argument that sky is blue" a "counter" as well. 

 

The fact that you leveld characters means only that ...you leveled some character.It is still taking longer than it used to.And anyone can talk numbers without proper proof.Hey you know what? I leveld from 1 to 120 withing a night! Source : dude trust me.

 

You can continue to fanboy blizzard if you want to I guess but the leveling issue has been an outrage since BFA release and the marketing trick is obvious here to anyone that plays blizzard games for a while.Denial wont change the facts, sorry.

[jinsu2301 273]

57 minutes ago, Kurosu said:

The fact that you leveld characters means only that ...you leveled some character.It is still taking longer than it used to.And anyone can talk numbers without proper proof.Hey you know what? I leveld from 1 to 120 withing a night! Source : dude trust me.

https://imgur.com/a/gqo7eXq

Most of my alts I've played a bit on max for transmog and mount runs, and I've spent about 10 hours farming junkboxes on my rogue. My maghar warrior is my most recent alt, and I leveled half of it as fury questing, half of it chainrunning dungeons as prot whenever Darkmoon was up, and the last 10 levels I did with the 14% birthday buff. You can check the heritage achievements on my chars, I play on Thrall-EU. 

1 hour ago, Kurosu said:

You can continue to fanboy blizzard if you want to I guess but the leveling issue has been an outrage since BFA release and the marketing trick is obvious here to anyone that plays blizzard games for a while.Denial wont change the facts, sorry.

Okay, the pointless fanboy accusation aside, if this really was just a marketing ploy to drive people into buying boosts, then why lock the heritage armor behind leveling? Why nerf Xp required even further? And wouldn't it make more sense to release allied races at the start of the xpac when endgame content is still fresh, instead of half a year down the line when people have nothing better to do than leveling alts? Of course Blizz wants you to buy boosts, but I don't see how the game is supposedly designed around that. If they truly wanted to do that they would go back to pre-cataclysm leveling and let you grind mobs for weeks and months.

[PatrickHenry 293]

4 minutes ago, jinsu2301 said:

pre-cataclysm leveling and let you grind mobs for weeks and months.

and vanilla quest markers... oh wait there werent 1/5 as many as there are today. 

Objective markers??  You mean click the guy til you find the guy?