Yesterday, Blizzard released news that Patch 10.1 – Embers of Neltharion will hit the PTR later this week. They also added a preview of some exciting content to look forward to, including a new zone, Raid, and much more.
Continue reading to see what’s coming in Patch 10.1 – Embers of Neltharion.
Since the release of the Trading Post at the beginning of February, several things have drawn my attention, stuff that wasn’t available/noticeable during the testing phase on the PTR!
As I mentioned in my previous blog post: The Trading Post, the information I shared could change at any time due to testing, and this appears to be the case.
Please continue reading for some of the changes to The Trading Post.
Blizzard is finally releasing their new patch, Shadowlands 9.1 – Chains of Domination, next week! Therefore, I thought it would be beneficial to quickly check out the PTR and see whether they’ve successfully incorporated the long-awaited solo queue for Island Expeditions.
According to Jeremy Feasel, he was hopeful that a solo queue for Island Expeditions could be incorporated in 9.1 but didn’t hold much hope for Warfronts.
For those unaware, Blizzard introduced Island Expeditions in Battle for Azeroth (BFA). Players could approach the Expedition Map and sign up to queue for four different difficulties, Normal, Heroic, Mythic, and PvP.
You needed a team of three players to participate, and it had a simple objective, reach the azerite goal first, and you won! In addition, Blizzard introduced further incentives and tasks throughout the expansion of BFA and made it worthwhile for players to continue participating in Island Expeditions for Companion Pets, Mounts and Transmog.
With the release of Shadowlands and the lure of new content, players that continued to queue for Island Expeditions found it difficult to get groups due to a lack of interest. Thankfully, early in Shadowlands, there was hope. Jeremy Feasel informed the World of Warcraft community that they were trying to incorporate a solo queue. The community had hoped that the improvement was ready for Shadowlands 9.1.
I quickly copied over my main character onto the PTR and hurried over to the Port of Zandalar. I interacted with the Expedition Map. To my astonishment, there was no method to solo queue for an Island Expedition.
When I hovered over the four difficulties, the tooltips expressed the need for three players to participate in the Mythic and PvP queue. However, the tooltip for Normal and Heroic had no minimum player requirement. Furthermore, all four options needed me to select find crew, suggesting there’s no solo queue yet!
With 9.1 due to release on the 29th of June for NA (30th for EU), there’s no way they’re releasing the solo queue unless they plan to release something in the next few days. So that would suggest that there’s no testing expected before the release of 9.1.
Suppose there’s no solo queue in 9.1. In that case, I can only assume that Blizzard maybe hit a snag while making alterations to Island Expeditions. However, if they plan to release this during Shadowlands, then perhaps it will come in 9.2. It’s worth remembering that Blizzard usually waits for two expansions before making previous content more accessible for soloing.
The inability to solo queue for Island Expeditions means that players will continue to struggle to queue. Therefore, the need for offloading Island Expedition Transmog (as warned in my previous post) may not be necessary now. Gold-makers were worried that with the ability to solo queue, the demand for Transmog would drop. At the same time, the supply would increase, meaning a loss in value. What will likely happen now is the opposite, more demand and a lack of supply, slowly increasing its value!
But stay vigilant; Blizzard has in the past made changes where necessary, without warning. So expect Island Expedition Transmog to hold its value for now, but adapt if there are any late changes.
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With six days till the release of the Shadowlands pre-patch on E.U (14th Oct), Blizzard has finally acted on the vast amounts of profit that was achievable on the PTR using the Relic Shuffle. To understand the Relic of the Past in greater detail, here’s my original post. Blizzard has added three vendor items, which will be necessary to craft a Relic. With the new additions, it has increased the crafting cost to craft Relics, meaning it’s now less profitable to shuffle these Relics to a vendor.
Each profession has their own Relic crafted with different materials, this is also true with respect to the new vendor items, as outlined below:
With respect to the vendor items in Battle for Azeroth (BFA), these were only accessible from BFA vendors. The vendor items mentioned above may only be available from Shadowlands vendors. Wowhead hasn’t confirmed this, but if this is the case, you won’t be able to craft Relics when the pre-patch hits, instead you’ll need to wait until Shadowlands releases with all the new zones, etc.
When you craft a Relic of the Past I, it will also require one vendor item associated with that profession (e.g. Blacksmithing Relic will require Luminous Flux); the amount of vendor items required per Relic increases substantially depending on the Relic you wish to craft. I’ve outlined below a complete rundown of the number of vendor items needed to craft each Relic.
Relic of the Past I – 1 Vendor Item
Relic of the Past II – 2 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past III – 3 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past IV – 15 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past V – 25 Vendor Items
As you can see, to craft the Relics IV and V you need 15 and 25 vendor items, this means that there is no longer large amounts of profit, when crafting items to sell to the vendor. The nerf was a well-needed addition to the PTR, without it, there would’ve been people practically printing money! The knock-on effect would’ve vastly inflated the economy, and there would’ve been a reaction to the WoWToken prices too.
Don’t be disheartened, this Relic system should still be a great addition to the game and those that look to level will be looking for Relics, as they increase in level and look to upgrade their gear. The next couple of weeks will show how crafted items scale when Relics upgrade their pieces and some may turn out to be best in slot. So don’t be put off just yet, as there could be further markets in the future, only time will tell.
EDIT: Added on 14.10.2020
The Devs have also added a nerf to Relic V. They have reduced it’s level requirement and ilvl. The updated information is outlined below. I can only imagine this nerf, is to prolong the current BFA gear for level 50 characters.
Relic V
Required level: 47
ilvl: 54
What is also evident this morning is the rush to quickly offload materials to the Auction House that players have purchased/stockpiled to take advantage of the shuffle upon the pre-patch launch. There will be a lot of players this morning dumping these materials, hoping for others unaware of these changes incoming and buying up these materials. A tweet I saw immediately after logging in this morning on Twitter from @Hikons, shows the dramatic rush of players dumping their Runecloth on to the Auction House.
Be sure to drop a follow to Hikons if you haven’t done so already! Excellent gold-maker that plays on U.S. servers. He also streams on Twitch and uploads content to Youtube! Added links so you can check him out!
I believe this to be a quick fix or desperate move from Blizzard to prevent the inevitable, they should’ve acted sooner and implemented a better system, that is after all, why we have Alpha/Beta for testing purposes. Instead, they’ve left it 6 days before release of the pre-patch to act, and here’s hoping it doesn’t have a detrimental effect on what could’ve been good.
Personally, I didn’t invest in this market at all. I wasn’t going to participate in the Relic Shuffle, as I’m aware of previous issues in the past, where Blizzard had handed out unfair bans/suspensions when it deemed something to be an exploit, especially when developers created the issues themselves. This is why so many Goldmakers were trying to get Blizzard to act quickly on this issue. I’m not stating this is or was an exploit, just merely playing it safe due to previous issues within the Gold-making community.
The best way I can translate this change to be a necessary one, is in the long run, if this method of Relic shuffling went live, the need for players to buy WoWTokens to get gold in-game would be non-existent. There would be an extremely easy way to earn guaranteed gold in-game (practically AFK) this would mean those that purchase WoWTokens, wouldn’t need to any longer and this would increase the prices of WoWTokens until they disappeared.
Please remember, these changes are from the PTR and look very likely to come in pre-patch, but future changes can and will happen. Please adapt accordingly. Only invest with gold you can afford to lose.
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WOW! just look at that mount! Wowhead have just informed us all, that Patch 6.2.3 will be hitting the PTR very soon and without doubt the highlight for me, is the news of this mount, The Infinite Timereaver. With the emergence of Cataclysm Timewalking Dungeons, Blizzard have made this mount available via a RARE drop from any Boss within a Cataclysm Timewalking Dungeon.
However, some maybe upset to realise that the long-awaited mount, the Grove Warden, will be a quest reward, tied into defeating Heroic/Mythic Archimonde. If you’re not a regular raider like myself, and come to a point where you save up to pay for a boost, do expect to find the prices hike up, when this patch is finally gets released… but it’s well worth it in my opinion.
And in short, Valor Points and Item Upgrades are returning and finally, Pit of Saron will be included to WotLK Timewalking Dungeon and Magisters’ Terrace will be added to TBC Timewalking Dungeon.
Anyway, checkout Wowhead HERE for the full details…
Thanks for reading!