 I'll turn your world upside down! Bear the burn! You are not prepared! He said the thing! He said the thing! Usually, when we start Belizcon, the opening call is my favorite Warcraft faction, the Alliance. Nice, very good. My favorite faction, the Horde. I get confused. Usually, I'd be speaking to 40,000 for World of Warcraft. We'll be showing you what's next for both Shadowlands and Classic. I'm sure you're all burning in anticipation for that one. Yes, we all have a medium. Hearthstone, let's hear what's next for World of Warcraft. Here it comes! Here it comes, Chad! Is this it? Is it official? Thanks for joining us today. No matter where you are, World of Warcraft unites us all. Whether you're exploring the Shadowlands, Classic Azeroth, or another part of the Blizzard Universe, I'm glad you could make it. But first, let's start with some Covenant Pride! The Nush, thank you for the tier one. Curian, take flight! Curian, that's me! Let the hunt begin. Necrolob's to war! He has wholesome data, didn't he? Let's party! Let's recap the events in Azeroth. In Wild Classic, we fought an endless battle for South Shore and Tarn Mill. We banded together to open the gates of Ankara and joined forces to take down Kel'Thuzad in his floating citadel of Nexramus. Yeah, that bitch. Shadowlands, the Helter Covenant recover from the anima drought, brought on by Sire Denathrius, master the vintyr and traitor to the Pantheon of Death. We survived the halls of Torgas and crafted legendary gear in our efforts to expel Denathrius from his castle lair. He's grandpa Shroud, but innocent souls are still wrongfully being sent to the maw. Wait, since when does Shroud's dad work for Blizzard? The jailer continues to grow in power. He's preparing to break free from the maw and complete his plan to unmake the entire Warcraft Universe. And Sylvanas, you may be wondering what she's been up to all this time. Today, we're excited to unveil our first major content update for Shadowlands, Chains of Domination. Chains of Domination, Van? Look around you! What makes you believe you're not just a weapon to achieve his end? Enough! Join our cause or be made to serve. Right now, you hold all the power. Make your choice, Sylvanas Windrunner. Oh Frick, the choice will be made. Coming soon. Despite all our efforts, the maw continues to grow. What if Denathrius' treachery is irreparable? The primus is lost and Bastion cannot save the Shadowlands alone. None of this should have happened. Perhaps the Winter Queen could. My Arkhan, a living soul seeks an audience. A mortal? A king by all our measures. One who has spent his life striving for justice. One who would give anything to serve his people. Watch out, Twidge, there's a delay. One whose heart is true. Very well, he may approach. Step forward. My ascended have spoken of you. The king held captive in the maw. That prison could not hold me forever. Why have you come to Bastion? You have a key that I need. Release this soul from your grasp. No, he is bound to me. Just as you were sought to buy. Was sought to buy your own world. Wait, what? Question mark? I'm so lost. What the hell? Did he... So now he... Obviously, big sea was never meant. Chains of domination. What the frick? That end was a bad night. I'm so intense. I know you probably have a lot of questions about what you just saw. And what it means for the next stage of your Shadowlands journey. Later today, my teammates, Ian and Jeremy... He re-rolled Death Knight. ...will be telling you more about Chains of Domination in our Shadowlands update. Classic players, now it's your turn. It's my pleasure to hand off to my teammate, Holly Longdale. She's a long time... Karen's here with the Prime. ...Veteran in the Moonsilver. And she's going to tell us what's in store for WoW Classic. Here it comes. Here it comes. Hi everybody. First, I'd like to thank all of you who've ever been part of the WoW community over the years. When I jumped blindly through the Dark Portal and was running through Hellfire Peninsula... Heard this terrifying noise. And then saw the Fel Reaver. Biggest roamer I had ever seen. And I was very glad I had feigned death in that moment. And that's the thing about WoW. These stories and experiences we all share... Dude, I'm waiting for this background to change into, like, Illidan. ...time after time. Let's go. Where is it? I'm super excited to be able to share with you where our adventures are taking us next. I have stuff to complain about for... Oh, here it is. Prepare for the next classic adventure. Here it is, dude. Tear into my realm. It's there, it's official. That's right. The Crucifix. This has brought you to this end. Blood and choke on it. Death to the outsiders. I'll turn your world upside down. Prepare to burn. He said the thing! He said the thing! The portal reopens 2020. There it is, dude. Brings back so many memories, right? There it is. Like exploring the fungal forests of Zanger Marsh, or being awestruck at the chaotic magic alive in Netherstorm. The Draenei in Exodar. The Blood Elves in Silver Moon. I love playing them both. Do you choose to enlist the Aldor or the Skryers in your quest to fight the Legion? And of course, we can't forget, gathering all your friends to fight Illidan at the top of the Black Temple. I can't wait to relive it all with you. Since the team first set out on their own quest to bring the original WoW back to life, we have learned a ton about what players are expecting from this kind of experience. We've also learned when to keep things just as they were, and where we all might be open to some changes. We're bringing all these lessons into Burning Crusade. Thank you. With our primary goal is to bring back the same feeling you had when you faced the Felhound Poop. When you were digging through piles of Felhound Poop. Of course, we can't get this right without you, our incredible community. Don't read Reddit. Soon you'll be able to revisit Outland yourself when Beta starts, and tell us what you think. What is Beta starting? Later, all WoW Classic players are going to be presented with a meaningful choice for each one of your beloved characters. Do you want to move on into Burning Crusade Classic? Or do you want to stay in the original Classic Era forever? Whatever you decide, you can do it all with your one WoW subscription. Now, I know I've thrown a lot at you, but don't worry. We'll be getting into the details in our panel later today. So stick with us. We'll make sure you are prepared. No copy. Another interesting change, Birmingham is specific to Paladins, which are present in Classic, but were added to Horde and Burning Crusade. When that happened, Horde Paladins were given an ability called Seal of Blood. Alliance Paladins were given Seal of Vengeance. The abilities Birmingham said were intended to be equal in power, but distinct, but that didn't pan out. Seal of Blood was four more powerful, so with Burning Crusade Classic, both factions will learn the opposite factions' version of the Seal at level 70. Alliance Paladins are getting Seal of Blood, dude. That is so big for PVE. That is so big. The complaining paid off, dude. Nice. Huge. Huge. They actually listened, dude. They actually listened. We look forward to talking to you about it. I have spent hours chatting. I have spent, I'm going to go into this article whenever I get a chance. I have spent hours in conversations with people complaining about some of this stuff. About the bosses being too nerfed. Oh, dude. Dude, I'm so ecstatic about them coming out and finally saying that about Burning Crusade. I'm so happy, dude. So let's get into some of those details. One of the challenges has been that we don't actually want to ship on the old code. And the reason for that is because it's got a lot of bugs and difficulties with the architecture that we don't want to have to deal with. But we do want that old data. We talked about this when we did the original launch of Classic, was how the data is really the thing that describes how the game is supposed to be played and what things are supposed to happen in it. And so we want to bring that old data and we want to run it on the modern code. The same as we did for Classic. And there's like 750,000 rows of data that we have to convert from their old formats to their new formats. When the team gets together, we're preparing for a play test and we go to create our characters. And we see this blood elf who, you know, he remembers the Sunwell. Oh, he remembers it. He got his pants. Real good. So everything didn't work the first time. What? I know. Yeah, I did mention like we had to go through and check for problems in those conversion scripts. Sure enough, what's going on here is this guy thinks he's dressed, but he isn't. And you can see why he thinks he's dressed if you look at this. Does that happen to you a lot? Yeah. Only in my high school dreams. You can see the, if you look at his calves, you can see that he's got the, they're flared out because he thinks he's wearing boots. And what the system works is we first set the geometry up for all the items that you're supposed to be wearing. And then we layer on various images that we call textures. And we'd use those to build up a single composite texture that's then wrapped around the geometry. But of course, in this case, when we were layering them on, none of the textures were assigned. So it just started with his, you know, naked body and then was going to go layer on textures and it didn't find any. We actually had a lot of requests originally for spell batching in that kind of no changes charge. Where they said, hey, I remember when I used to be able to have two mages polymorph one another. Remember what I said about this? And that's cute and fun. And I kind of like that. And so we said, okay, well, we can put that back in. But the system that causes that is, of course, that the spells are batched up and processed in these giant batches. But over the last two years, people realized that what that comes with is about a half a second of kind of built-in latency. It should be 200 milliseconds. And it doesn't actually take effect for that half a second. It's way too big. It involves waiting to keep it up. 200 milliseconds. And people were starting to find that frustrating. I talked to a lot of people who said they were excited about it when it first came out with Classic. But after they've been playing it for two years, they're really ready to see it go. And we're ready to take it out, too. So we're going to remove spell batching with burning crusade. That's definitely great, because I remember every two weeks I get a book report, Vanish is broken again. And it was because of stuff like this, right? If you Vanish at the same time a fireball is hitting you, it's going to pop you out, right? Exactly. And so we were trying to do all these tacky solutions to it. But the real answer is just don't spell batch. But we didn't have the ability to do that, though. So glad we're doing it now. Another one that I've got. I think with the batching, the only way that it works is if they complete their movement, if there's certain interactions that maintain. 2004, 2005 timelines compared to today. So the rating community knows exactly what's going on. And they want a challenge. They want more of a challenge. So rather than always giving them the last version of the boss, the final form of the boss, which maybe has been hit with a few nerfs, let's not do that anymore. Let's give them a more challenging version of the boss. I'll give you an example of Mooroo, right? Where the initial version of that boss had a lot of spell pushback. I didn't do this back in the day. It's really tough to bring casting classes to it. I know a little bit about it. But I didn't do this. We did fix that pretty quickly and change the fight to allow for that. But they are doing it pretty good. We probably would incorporate in this, right? We don't want people to feel excluded or not part of being able to do a fight like that. But then, probably a month or so after that, we nerfed Mooroo's health. That doesn't need to happen. Let's just keep it in the hard form. We can evaluate any changes we need to make after that. But yeah, it won't just be like, hey, final form. We're not even going to look at it. Let's call it a day. Yeah. So how did your mage handle the pushback? I just got sad. It feels personal, yeah. No, I was the raid leader. So I got the situation right. The one mage allowed to go. They need to timegate Tier V. They need to timegate Serpent Shrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. Another change that we're talking about making is along the lines of that PVP balance, faction balance is, you know, obviously with Burning Crusade, Paladins are introduced to the Horde and Shams are introduced to the Alliance. And that was intended to be a balancing of the factions and let's, you know, make them even. And then they wanted to kind of keep a little bit of flavor of that faction identity. So they kept Seal of Blood on the Horde and Seal of Vengeance on the Alliance. It was intended to be equivalent power abilities that were just slightly different in flavor. But in retrospect, Seal of Blood was just so much better. And so one of the changes that we are going to make is we are going to give the opposite factions Seal to the other faction. But we're going to do that at max level. So we keep just a little bit of that faction identity where Horde will get Seal of Blood at level 64 on schedule and then get Seal of Vengeance at level 70. And similarly, Alliance will get Seal of Vengeance at level 64 and then their equivalent, Seal of the Martyr at level 70. Another thing we want to talk about is new teams. When it first came out in Burning Crusade, the Arena team system only let you have the same number of players on your team that was the size of the bracket it was for. So for example, a 3v3 team can only have three players on the team. So if someone was like sick or unavailable one night, you couldn't play. And that felt really frustrating. So we're definitely going to go with like the last version of that where you could have twice the size of the bracket on your team roster so that you had alternates you could swap in and out. Oh, yeah. And then that way, as long as anybody had participated in I think 30% of the matches, then they got the full credit for the week of participation. So when we did personal ratings versus team ratings. I think that came later and we're also considering whether or not we want to do something with that as well because... I do think this is a legitimate discussion. This is a very legitimate discussion. The way that the ELO system was so inflationary and so we're talking about whether or not we want to move forward with converting that to something more like the modern MMR system so that it isn't as punishing to people in terms of like waiting hours for a match at the highest level, something like that. And another change, we're going to give players access to Blood Off and Draenei early so that before we actually open the door we'll have a chance to level those up. That's definitely not something we did originally. Good. Yeah. I remember I had a friend. At first I was against this. Given that Seal of Blood, he was like, I'm still back in my head. I think it's a good change. This is good. It's a good pre-patch. When can I play with you guys? It's a good pre-patch. Very good. Doing that with pre-patch? Yeah, that's the plan. Oh, there it is. Pre-patch to come out and be able to go start your run-up some pre-night. Huge dude. And then content. So we've got some phases happening. Yeah. So the content phases that we got coming are exciting. We're going to start with Charizard and Gryll's Lair and Mack Theron's Lair. Please time get pleased. And we want to start with just that released because we found with classic that people really enjoyed their progression. Thank you. And that's where all the tier four gurus do those raids. Oh, thank you. And we want people to have an opportunity to level up, catch up to their friends, and all kind of go through these things together. So as we unlock each chapter, we want to make sure everybody's had enough time to be part of that chapter. And the next chapter after that will be phase two, which will be Serpentine Cameron and Tempestine. Then next we move on to phase three, which is Hyjal and the Black Temple. And the reason that's a change is, of course, originally Hyjal was available from the launch of Burning Crusade, but nobody could really get in there because of the way the attunements work. So we'll unlock that as a later chapter alongside Black Temple. And then that'll go with arena season two at that point. And then arena season three will come out at one time to Le Mans, and we'll be able to catch up gear for anybody who's taken that long to catch up. It's another small race. Four phases, four seasons. And then finally, phase five will be Sunwell and arena season four. It's been a very busy year. You skipped. You said five. It's an experience with a lot of in it. Yes. And so we spent a lot of time talking about Burning Crusade Classic and Burning Crusade. Did he skip four? Which is exciting. We're very excited about it, but there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot coming, and we want to walk through how this is going to materialize. Four is Le Mans. Oh, it's going to be like a mini. We have a diverse player base where people have a lot of different months of needs. That's actually good. It's like, yeah. And how do we get there? That's good. How do we get to Burning Crusade? Well, the first group of people that we wanted to make sure that we were serving well is those people who do want to go to the Burning Crusade. We feel that most of the community is interested in this. They're going to want to do this. We want to make it simple and easy. So it's forced catch up, yeah. So how are we going to do that? As we said earlier, you're going to be able to make a choice. So we'll talk about and explore these choices in some detail, and I'll give you some examples. So to start with, the current servers you're on now, classic live servers, are going to become what we're calling progression servers. And what that means is the servers that are live now will always unlock any expansion we release. So when we get to our patch day, you're going to be presented with a choice. Do you want to continue on into the Burning Crusade? Give me this. Give me this. I drew it out earlier today. Give me this. So in that space, you're going to do that for every single character. So for my example, I'm on warm rest accord. So I've got a level 60. I am definitely taking that on through to Burning Crusade. But I've got a couple of mid levels that I know I want to move with my friends. Those are characters I level with my friends in class. I don't want to continue that journey with them. We want to make it as easy and seamless as possible to just get right into Burning Crusade. But there are options. That's awesome. I'm excited to hear that. I know there's a lot of my friends, for example, who maybe didn't really play classic when it first came out, right? And so now they're behind. And they're interested in playing the Burning Crusade. This was for a lot of people, their favorite expansion that we've done. I have to think about this first thing. And one of the ways we could do that is provide a boost to people who are interested in coming back that maybe aren't interested in doing the classic. I think if they do more than one boost, it's not good. It's possible. Yeah. So the team, we spent quite a bit of time discussing if you want to make sure we respect the time of the people that have been playing classic for two years. But also, we want people to be able to enjoy Burning Crusade if they loved it the first time and maybe missed classic. So we are going to offer a level 58 boost for purchase. But it does come with some restrictions. So it's going to be one per account. It's not going to be usable on Blood Elf or Draeneye. Good. It'll have some dungeon blues. It'll have level 40 mount skill. No professions. The basics. Basically, your Outland starting kit. That's cool. That's a really great way to jump into the game for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I'll be looking forward to that. Look, I know a lot of people came back to play while classic. And that's all they want. That's all they ever wanted. They're like, you know what? Burning Crusade, that's awesome. I'm sure some people are going to love that. But for me, I came back for while classic. What did they get to do? What's their options? Yeah, that was really important for us. This is what I want to happen. I hope this is it. We had all sat down and discussed how we should frame this. So when we get to our patch day, which is prior to the Dark Portal opening, when I said before, I'll go back to my example for warm rest, we will be launching classic era realms at the same time as we do our patch. So when you make the choice to go to Burning Crusade Classic or you make the choice, like on my example, my level 40 Druid, I want to move that character to classic era. What classic era means is that those particular servers are going to stay in that era forever. So that is going to remain classic till the end of time. But I know that for me, it really is going to be that pole to go to both places. So I want to be able to say, you know what? I'm willing to pay some money for this. I want a copy of my character that lives in classic era forever. I also go to Burning Crusade with that character. That way I can stay with my friends who are really excited to go to Karazhan. I'm really excited to go to Karazhan. I want to see my Hunter go through Karazhan. But if I'm missing like a couple pieces of my tier three set from Naxoramas, I still have an opportunity to go find a new guild there and go through Naxoramas again until I finish that set. We're going to be spending a lot of time communicating these details. So even as much detail as we're giving now, it's very high level. I feel like that's something that should not be paying. So keep an ear out. But with that said, that's something that she just offered. When's all this happening? Oh. So yeah, this is something that is important to get. People are still playing through Naxoramas. We want to make sure that they have enough time to do that. But what we are looking at, this will be happening in 2021. For sure, we are committed to doing that. And what we're looking at is starting the beta rather soon. So hopefully that beta will go up and we'll get that running. The community can come and participate, help us out. We'll start to hear some feedback on the things we've talked about today. If there's any adjustments we need to make, we want to make sure we have a long enough beta period for that to happen. And then we'll get that out to the players if we can all enter the dark portal. Yay. Yeah, it's exciting. So any final words? Yeah, I just talked about the beta. And I will say just to the community, you all have been so instrumental in making Classic the success that it has been. And you will be equally instrumental in making the Burning Crusade a tremendous success also. So please get in that beta, play, give us your feedback. We want to hear all about it. So enjoy, welcome, and let's have some fun. Yay. Yeah. And it's been the highlight of my professional career to work on it. I don't have beta keys. And have the support and love of this community. It is really special to me and I'm really excited to be sharing this with all of you in the Burning Crusade. Yeah, and for me, I've been playing Classic since it launched. And I wasn't working at Blizzard then. And it's changed my life, obviously. So from me and the entire WoW team, we want to thank you for bringing Azeroth to life for us. So we will definitely be seeing you in-game in whatever flavor you choose. And until then, stay Classic. So here's where I'm at with this. New store mount. Okay, whatever. So let me explain what I was hoping that we're going to explain. I think they're going to do this and I think they should do this. I think they should go through Classic, Burning Crusade, Wrath, whatever, right? Each time it switches. Oh, I'm so in. Axes. Heroes. That looks so bad. That looks so bad. Oh, my God. That doesn't look so bad. Christian. It's been ages. Scuffed up the game. This is important to me chat. Moving on to additional updates within Chains of Domination, fans of the Operation Mechagon Mega Dungeon from our previous patches will be happy to learn that we are once again bringing back the concept of the Mega Dungeon. A Mega Dungeon is an eight-boss dungeon. I trust that needs no explanation. So let's move on to the rewards. The rewards of this Mega Dungeon include things that we will only see within Broker Culture. Some very special Broker Pets, including a Broker-themed cat. We can capture some of the rats that scurry around within the Broker Trading City and we'll get to see one of the pets that the Brokers actually use as a currency. These strange worms that they found on another world and have scintillating eyes that are gem-like. It's sort of like a living sign of your wealth for the high ends of the Broker Cartels. You might be able to purchase one of those within the dungeon or fight an enemy in order to obtain one of them. And we'll be able to obtain the Brokers with an interesting Disc Mount with a fly around their Trading City. Let's move on to... That's the thing that should matter! We've been fighting hard to be in renown with our Covenants. My natural feeling towards that is, hey, I don't like that they're adding in a character boost, but I'm really trying to think through this and look at all the pros and cons. Pros, people who did not play Burning Crusade Classic able to come in... and play Burning Crusade Classic and they're not too far behind. I do think a boost kind of kills the old world a little bit, but it's only one per account. Now here's the thing. Nowadays, some of these guys, they don't care. They will go buy another account and they will go buy a boost. Yeah, that's what we're going to watch right now. I think I will, too. I'm very excited. I'm going to start playing Classic to level for BC. Maybe, I don't know. Is Crusade or Whittle Crusade still recruiting? If so, who do I whisper? Sorry if it's an odd question. I started playing in TBC, but I was only 8 so all I did was explore the world. Great memories. Less than 3. Yeah, Crusade and Whittle Crusade is still around. People can invite in there. But I don't know who's online that can invite Classic Cat. But yeah, Crusade is still recruiting, too, and we're planning on sticking with Crusade and Feralina through Burning Crusade right now. I guess that I don't like it, but I'm thinking it through. I think what's bad is that people will buy multiple accounts and get multiple boosts and then have characters to use for primal transmutes and stuff like that. That's what I'm worried about. But then again, people are saying people just boost they do dungeon boosts and stuff anyways now. And there's bots and there's a whole another problem. So, how do you fix it? Maybe if you have paid boosts, then there's less reason. You'll see less bots doing dungeon boosts and stuff like that of people. Because you have paid boosts, because people just rather pay than have to deal with the botting. I don't know. I'm on it. I can invite on Hellraiser. Yeah, Battle of Bunch is on Hellraiser and you can invite to Whittle Crusade if you're looking for a leveling guild on Feralina. So for example, people buy and sell gold right now that's botted, right? Botted gold. Like you have bots farm gold, this and that. They go put it on the website and people buy the gold selling and stuff is an issue in Classic WoW. And the reason why they put in the WoW token in the first place is to not have to deal with that. So like the most effective thing to counter bots and buying and selling gold is to just put the WoW token in. Because I think a lot of people don't understand how the WoW token works, myself included initially. Because people have to go and they have to farm the gold themselves and then they purchase the token of the auction house with a thing. The purpose of 58 boosts is for players that are new to Whittle Crusade to be able to come in and play.