Challenge Mode Season Ending Clarified
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
As previously reported, the nine Challenge Mode dungeons released with Mists of Pandaria will be shutting down at the end of the “challenge season,” widely speculated to be the pre-Warlords of Draenor “6.0” patch. Today, the Community Team offered some additional clarity on what the end of the season will look like in terms of rewards.
- All CM achievements will turn into Feats of Strength.
- Rewards like the “Undaunted” title and the Pandaren Phoenix mounts will become account-wide. More specifically, instead of only getting one mount on one character for a full rack of Silver Medal wins, all four mounts will be available to all characters on the account. (Mount collectors, start your engines.)
- Folks who earn Gold will be able to repurchase pieces of their class-specific transmog armor sets after earning them, and if you’ve earned the teleport to an instance, you’ll get to keep it. (Flashy armor collectors and… folks that really like teleporting to esoteric places… GO TO.)
- The realm best titles, though? GONE. Blizzard promises new titles in WoD, of course.
With the knowledge that Warlords will be released sometime in the fall, and that the pre-expansion patch typically predates the expansion by 2-4 weeks, players have probably got until mid-September to complete their Challenge Mode objectives. That said, CMs are challenging for a reason, and between iLvl-throttling and players taking breaks in the post-expansion lull, the opportunity to find or create a team competent enough to get Gold is getting shorter by the day.
In case you missed it, new BlizzPro contributor Malon provided this look into Challenge Modes a few days ago that may be of interest.
Got an opinion about how Blizzard is handling CM rewards, or challenge modes in general? Let us know in the comments.
I wish they’d just give us an idea on the date this is happening. I hate that they’re removing content from the game, but such is life.
Well, deductive reasoning tells us it’ll be the pre-expansion patch, and that the expansion will be out sometime during fall. That gives us a solid range with enough notice to work on it.
As for the removing content… I get the rationale. It would be great if CMs were just another tick on the difficulty slider, but I think that undoes the element of their difficulty being exceptionally refined. I don’t think it makes sense to create a scenario where the encounter team has to go back and re-jig the encounters in previous expansion CMs just so players in future expansions have an even greater spread of CMs to play. In a dream scenario they’d have the resources to do that, but realistically, that just cuts down on the efforts they can put into new encounters.