We can now confirm that the Blizzard Warcraft team is currently focusing on the World of Warcraft Pandaren Phantom and World of Warcraft CTM Nostalgia Suits, so the opening progress of the much-loved World of Warcraft Exploration Server (PLUS) has been delayed, or forced to give way, according to the recent designer revelations and the latest blue sticker news, the World of Warcraft Exploration Server P4 phase is likely to wait another month.
However, for players in the national server, the postponement of the P4 stage of the exploration server may be a good thing, so that everyone has enough time to prepare for level 60, after all, the content before level 60, no matter how interesting, is transitional content, and it is biased to familiarize everyone with the new gameplay and new runes of the exploration server.
Level 60 will have a massive class balance
According to the designers, unlike previous phases, the P4 will launch a "limited-level" PTR that will be tested specifically for P4's combat and class.
In this special test server, the designers will provide players with a level 60 template character, as well as all runes and learned skills, as well as some level 60 set rewards (all set attributes and effects will be magical). The designers also provided training dummies and some team quest content, as well as battlegrounds so that players could test out their new BDs (a combination of skills, gear, runes, and talents).
The new unique content of P4 will not be available on this PTR test server, and it will not spoil everyone's exploration fun.
The designer said that the original intention of making this test suit was to balance the class intensity as much as possible in the final version of the exploration suit at level 60, and even the position of many runes will be changed, and some important generic runes will be changed to skills.
Xiao Tan thinks that it is almost an impossible task to balance in the exploration server, and a large number of skills and talents of the later version of the exploration server are added as runes, and the gameplay mechanism of the profession has almost swelled several times, which has led to the designer's workload doubling and doubling, Blizzard's nostalgic clothing development team is a small team after all, and it is simply impossible to complete this kind of work.
In fact, designers don't have to worry too much about the class balance, just make sure that there will be no orders of magnitude difference in the actual combat effectiveness of the major talents, and too much entanglement in the class balance will lead to homogenization and make the game boring.
Rollout cadence for level 60 team dungeons
Designers will roll out team copies in phases similar to the 2019 Classic Edition. The first phase will include Molten Heart and the Black Dragon Princess, and in a few weeks we'll see the Nest of Black Wings, followed by Zur Grab, with the designers also planning to add additional endgame content and surprises between the main team dungeon releases.
This quote from the designer is important, it reveals how the level 60 stage of the Exploration Server operates, and new content will be launched intensively at a pace of several weeks, not only limited to the old group book, but also possible surprises!
From the current designer's revelations and data mining, Xiao Tan predicts that there may be the following final content:
1. The new Orange Martial Arts and Orange Martial Arts story line.
2. Added challenge mode to some bosses of some team dungeons.
3. Added new outdoor gameplay in the update interval of the group book.
The designer hinted at the launch time of the P4
Following the release of the aforementioned blue sticker, Josh Greenfield, producer of the World of Warcraft classic senior game, offered his thoughts on the extension of Phase 3 and the delay of Phase 4:
1. The level 60 stage will be very cool and more like the old 60s in terms of gameplay, and the new endgame gameplay will be interesting.
2. The fourth stage will have to wait for a few more weeks, and players can choose to put down the game and rest for a few weeks, or they can choose to play Pandaren Fantasy Transition. Designer Josh Greenfield said that in the past few weeks, he will have to get a reliable temple gear for his other characters in the exploration suit to clear the MC.
Judging from Josh Greenfield's description, the P4 stage of the World of Warcraft exploration server should wait for another month, and Xiao Tan estimates that 620~627 is the most likely to be launched.
This point in time is also very comfortable for national server players, if the national server 66 official announcement, 613 open service, then everyone has one to two weeks to upgrade + engage in runes, you don't have to worry about the difficulty of upgrading, the current exploration server has 150% experience BUFF, the upgrade is very fast, you only need to get the whole body runes and some basic equipment to prepare for the desert MC.
Well, let's look forward to the double summer return of Warcraft and Exploration P4 in June!