by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Today’s PTR push for Patch 6.2 has revealed more of the current designs for the planned Weekend Events, two of which are the Timewalker events we learned about earlier in the patch cycle.

Those events are as follows:

• Timewalking Dungeon Event: Players level 71/81 or higher access a Timewalking Dungeon Finder queue. Bosses yield loot appropriate for a player’s natural level.
• Pet Battle Bonus Event: Pets earn experience at triple usual rate.
• Draenor Dungon Event: Defeating enemies in any level 100 Heroic or Mythic dungeon award reputation with a Draenor faction.
• Apexis Bonus Event: Crystals “multiply mysteriously” and they are more plentiful when looting enemies in Draenor.
• Battleground Bonus Event: Random battlegrounds award Honor at triple the usual rate.
• Arena Skirmish Bonus Event: Arena Skirmishes award Honor at triple the usual rate.

Now obviously, this is all PTR, so anything and everything about this can change, but assuming that this is what goes forward, here’s what this looks like so far.

Guys, Really, Let’s Timewalk

First off, the Timewalking event is actually two separate events; one for Burning Crusade dungeons (meant for players level 71 and up) and one for Wrath of the Lich King dungeons (meant for players level 81 and up). The two events don’t happen at the same time.

In addition, the new Adventure Guide offers a quest, seemingly sensitive to what bonus event is active: right now, it’s offering a Seal of Inevitable Fate (the new seal for HFC bonus rolls) if you complete three Timewalking dungeons.

Overall, that’s offering a bunch of incentive for Timewalking during the event: a seal for the most current raid content as well as the 690 gear that the dungeons drop? It seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Friday Night Flag-Cappin

The two PVP-oriented events seem tuned to act as an invitation to entry-level players: grind up a bunch of Honor within a short timeframe, and you’ll get access to the gear needed to compete at higher levels. Specifically for battlegrounds, this seems like a vast improvement over the Featured BG weekends we used to have, which really just governed what BGs people rushed (or blacklisted) during those weekends. Offering this bonus for all BGs is a great way to entice players to try out the fights they like and get rewarded well for doing so.

Gotta Grind ’em All

The addition of a pet battle event is interesting. If the presence of the Menagerie building (and a free max-level pet) wasn’t already an enticement to get into the pet battle game, having a weekend where all of your pets are leveling up super-charged is sure to get people building up their teams. I’m left wondering, however, if Blizzard is starting to see engagement with the pet battle system wane without a carrot like the Celestial Tournament in front of players.

Speaking of grinds…

It seems like the outcry people made for wanting to grind dungeons for reputation have finally provoked a response from Blizzard, but this has got to be one of the strangest implementations I’ve seen yet. This one is definitely a wildcard, since we’ve got no indication for how much reputation clearing a dungeon will get you, or whether you can choose what reputations to focus on.

What’s even more interesting about the dungeon reputation event is the Apexis event. There’s a weekend where you’ll get triple the drop rate of Apexis crystals from monsters out in the world. Combine this with the Scouting Report quest items in your garrison and you’ve got a way to grind mobs for Apexis in whichever place you want on Draenor. But because most of those Apexis areas also coincide with reputation groups, it also contributes to the reputation grinds, because if Apexis returns are amplified, people will get more reputation just through killing mobs in those areas.

To an extent, it feels like two separate solutions to the same problem, with one of those solutions also granting Apexis, which is of questionable use if you already have the pets/mounts/followers and don’t need the gear.

What does the future hold?

What we’ll hopefully learn as the patch cycle advances is what the Adventure Guide might offer as carrots for doing non-Timewalker content. Will it be extra seals every weekend, or something else?

What’s really got me interested, though, is looking past WoD into the future of WoW. The Adventure Guide is a much more logical place to put information meant to entice players into new and different content, and it will probably be a fixture going forward. My question is what other kinds of events will Blizzard start to offer when they have to cycle out the Apexis weekend, or the Draenor reputations weekend?

When we know more, so will you.