World of Warcraft Reveals Alpha Patch Notes for Midnight Expansion

World of Warcraft is gearing up for the Midnight alpha, meaning it has shared a massive set of patch notes detailing available content, class changes, player housing, and more. The closed public alpha for World of Warcraft: Midnight kicks off on October 2, with new builds and features becoming available every week after.

Recently, World of Warcraft confirmed the alpha test for Midnight would begin soon. Starting October 2, World of Warcraft will be testing different zones, dungeons, and other features of the next World of Warcraft expansion each week for five weeks, before heading into the beta.

Now, with the first build of the alpha right around the corner, Blizzard has revealed the first set of patch notes for Midnight. This massive forum post covers tons of information, including what will be available in the first week. The Eversong Woods zone and campaign, plus the Arator campaign coming in WoW: Midnight and the first Arcantina quest, will be playable, along with the alpha build of player housing. The Windrunner Spire and Murer Row dungeons, Collegiate Calamity, Parhelion Plaza and The Darkway Delves, and the first boss of March on Quel’Danas raid will also be testable during the first week.

The lion’s share of these patch notes consists of adjustments to all classes. Each specialization is changing, with some receiving significant reworks that add or remove abilities found in many of them. Additionally, every Hero Talent has three extra nodes, and new Apex talents at the end of each tree offer further strength for each class – though some are still in development. Lastly, the Devourer Demon Hunter specialization is available to test in World of Warcraft, along with the Annihilator Hero Talent. The class changes can be found in Blizzard’s forum post.

Some incredible changes are coming to the game’s user interface as well. A new Journey’s tab in the Adventure Guide allows fans to easily track Renown and Great Vault reward progress, and improvements to nameplates, boss warnings, and the Cooldown Manager will make encounters more readable, even without addons. Additionally, World of Warcraft: Midnight will implement a stat squish and a new maximum level of 90, though players can only reach level 83 during the first week.

These are only some of the many features that will be available in the World of Warcraft: Midnight alpha, with more content coming in the following weeks. While there is no way to guarantee access to the alpha, fans interested in trying the expansion before it launches can opt in to the beta or secure themselves a spot by pre-purchasing the Epic Edition of World of Warcraft: Midnight.

World of Warcraft: Midnight Alpha Test Development Notes

CHARACTER LEVEL

Developers’ notes: With each phase, we encourage players to make a new template character and avoid using their previous characters as they could potentially be in a broken state. After making a new template character, make sure to talk to Questzertauren and he will prepare you for any available content.

• Level 80 Character Template
• Maximum Level: 83

ZONE

• Eversong Woods

STORY AND QUESTS

• Level-up Campaign
• Local Stories
• Arator Campaign
• Arcantina: Visitor Quest 1
  • Developers’ notes: Accessible after the completion of the Arator Campaign.

WELCOME HOME

When you login, you’ll be given a quest “A House for You” which will lead you to your faction’s Neighborhood, introduce the Steward, and take you on a tour of the Neighborhood, and ultimately direct you to buy your house.

Please note, the house cost is not final and assuming you used a template character, you’ll have plenty of gold to afford it.

Once you have a house, start building! You’ll be able to find a variety of decorations on vendors, professions, and throughout the world and use them to make your house a home. Lay out your rooms and expand into a spooky basement or lofty attic. Explore the Neighborhood and see what’s hidden around the corner or say hi to your neighbors.

Please leave any feedback on the feature in the Housing feedback thread.

What to Expect Going Forward

During Alpha and Beta, we’ll be adding a ton more content and functionality to Housing, including:

• Moving your house will become possible. Please be especially careful of your choice since it is not possible to change right now.
• Exterior decoration (being able to place decor outside) AND exterior customization (being able to change the outside appearance of your house) will both be enabled.
• House exteriors will also be able to upgrade their visual size
• Charter Neighborhoods will be enabled allowing arbitrary groups of players to have a private neighborhood. In the meantime, Guilds can create their own neighborhoods to test.
• Endeavors will be turned on, allowing your Neighborhood to work together to achieve rewards and welcome new NPCs to town.
• Social visiting will be enabled, allowing friends, neighbors, party members, and guild mates to easily visit each other.
• Lumber is very much a work in progress and will be getting a lot of updates, polish, and balancing.
• We’ll be adding tons of new decorations, profession recipes, neighborhood activities, and more content.

Known Issues

There are a number of things we know about already and are actively working on and want you to be aware of ahead of time.

• Walking towards another player’s doorstep can sometimes cause a crash. Focus on decorating your own home for now.
• Entering other players’ houses will sometimes take a VERY long time.
• When visiting other players, refreshing the UI list of all their visitable houses can sometimes take a very long time to load.
• As a quick headsup, Dyes are only available via Inscription and Alchemy (and can be placed on the Auction House) so if you’re looking to pretty things up, start there.
• For Alpha, all room placement costs are intentionally set low to enable better testing. Costs will increase to their intended amount during beta and release.
• Private Neighborhoods with names longer than 50+ characters will cause disconnects and crashes. Be brief!
• If you drag decor across room boundaries, a crash can sometimes occur. Put the decor away in your chest and take it out in the target room to avoid this.
• If you have a LOT of decor in a single room and add more, a crash may take place.
• Customizing rooms will always have the “Vaulted” ceiling type option available, though it only works on some room types.
• Houses that are owned by other players will occasionally display the For Sale sign asset even though they’re not for sale.
• You’ll likely encounter a variety of LUA errors. It’s fine to ignore these, but occasionally you may have to relog or reload your UI.
• There are some visual issues with various pieces of decor, rooms, and customizations.

DUNGEONS AND RAID

• Windrunner Spire
• Murder Row
• March on Quel’Danas
  • Belo’ren, Child of Al’ar
  • Developers’ notes: Speak to Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade IX in Silvermoon City, Orgrimmar, or Stormwind to be summoned to this raid encounter to test Boss Timelines, class updates, items, Boss Alerts when it becomes available, and other updates. This encounter will be removed in a future Alpha build.

DELVES

• Collegiate Calamity
• Parhelion Plaza
• The Darkway
• New delve companion: Valeera Sanguinar

STAT SQUISH

• Starting in Public Alpha 1, we’ve squished numbers across the board. Like previous squishes, we are reducing values across the board, including player and creature health, damage, healing, item level, and stats on items. This squish will not affect player character levels.
  • For players logging into Public Alpha, the new character templates will reflect the expected player power from levels 80-90.
  • Known issues: Item previews in the Quest Rewards pane can show pre-squished item levels. This is just a display issue, the item will be set to the correct squished item level when it is created.
• Developers’ notes: We welcome your feedback as we continue to work on this feature. While the squish has been applied across the game, it’s possible some items or effects may have escaped having been squished or have been squished too harshly. Legacy content scaling has also been adjusted to compensate for the squish. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with these or other scaling content.

COMBAT APPROACHABILITY IN MIDNIGHT

With Midnight, we aim to make gameplay clearer and easier to understand, so the path to improvement is more apparent for players at every skill level, while maintaining the depth of mastery that WoW offers.

We are updating every class specialization with an eye towards approachability by reducing complexity and making gameplay more intuitive. We are beginning by focusing on what makes each specialization unique and designing gameplay that matches their theme, so your character’s personality and style are reflected in how you play. Our goal is for the most appealing, visible elements of your spec to be what matter most in gameplay. That often means managing resources, tracking a few key buffs and debuffs, using ability charges strategically, and responding to important triggered effects (also known as “procs”).

We want to ensure that players have all the necessary information to play a spec with clearly visible prompts and indicators in the user interface. This can include changing the design of complex abilities or reducing the number of buffs or debuffs that can be active, so it’s easier to pick out the most essential information on enemy nameplates or in the Cooldown Manager.

We are also reviewing the amount of concentration or “cognitive load” required to play each spec. Cognitive load encompasses tasks such as keeping track of active auras, parsing conditions to choose the most effective ability in a given moment, or remembering long sequences of abilities. Some specs will demand more cognitive load than others by design. Keeping track of damage over time effects requires concentration, but is also a big part of the appeal of specs like Affliction, Feral, and Assassination! However, we are reviewing all specs for areas where concentration demands are excessive, unclear, or don’t serve enjoyable gameplay.

Ultimately, our goal is that once every spec has all its new class talent points, Hero Talents, and Apex Talents, it has what we feel is a manageable, fun, and appropriately challenging level of complexity.

Visit the Developer Insight: Combat for Everyone in Midnight article for an in-depth look on these changes. And for more details on the combat approachability changes to healing and PvP, check out their forum threads: Healing Changes in Midnight and PvP Changes in Midnight.

DIMINISHING RETURNS

• Developers’ notes: We are making some adjustments to how diminishing returns work in World of Warcraft. “Diminishing returns” refers to the system that reduces the duration of crowd control effects if they are used repeatedly against the same target. In order to make crowd control less frustrating in PvP, players will now become immune after 2 applications of crowd control from the same category (ex. after being stunned twice, you are now immune). We felt that very low duration crowd controls were making it hard to cast spells and generally felt excessive. For PvE, we are removing the immunity after 3 stuns. Our primary goal here is to remove the need to track diminishing returns state on enemies. Instead of enforcing a hidden and complex system to reduce effectiveness of stuns, we are doing a pass on classes and making sure the amount of stuns and their durations are appropriate for combat.
• Diminishing return categories will reset after 16 seconds (was 18 seconds).
• Creatures will no longer be immune to stun effects after 3 applications of the effect. The duration of the stun effect will continue to diminish in half upon each application, until they reach 1/16th duration, where it will remain until 16 seconds have passed.
• In PvP combat, players will be fully immune to a crowd control category after 2 casts (was 3).

CLASSES

Please see the full patch notes for class change information.

ITEMS

• Fully collecting a class set’s appearances now unlocks all lower difficulty variants. For example, collecting all Mythic appearances will automatically unlock the Heroic, Normal, and Raid Finder variants while unlocking Heroic would only unlock Normal and Raid Finder, etc. Eligible sets will be marked as such in the set collection UI. This change is retroactive to all legacy content. Items will no longer change their appearance when upgraded.
  • Developers’ notes: While we feel the Catalyst has been largely successful in expanding access to powerful seasonal set bonuses, it has also generated friction in its dual use as the primary source of class set appearances for many players. This friction has been further exacerbated by loot roll restrictions in situations such as participating in LFR raiding. In conjunction with this change, we want to better preserve the value and identity of item art from difficult content.
• Acquiring a class set 4-piece bonus now unlocks a character-specific Feat of Strength that will enable Catalyst charges to drop from raid bosses, Mythic+, Bountiful Delves, and Rated PvP on that character for the remainder of the season.
  • Developers’ notes: The decision to spend Catalyst charges can be difficult early in a season as players anticipate looting more powerful armor in the same slot in the near future. For example, catalyzing a Veteran or Champion helm may feel like a mistake knowing that a Hero helm could be around the corner in your next Mythic+ dungeon. If a player decides to spend that charge and then receives that Hero helm, it may have to sit in their bags for up to two weeks before it can effectively be equipped. This change should empower players to chase their seasonal class set bonuses early on without reservation with the knowledge that additional Catalyst charges will likely be farmable for them just several weeks into the season. In addition, armor pieces with desirable secondary stats in non-set slots such as belts and boots should feel like more viable options earlier in the season.

PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER

• Elite Rank is now attained at 2300 personal rating (was 2400). Additionally, this also means that correlated ranks and titles such as Legend, Strategist, and Gladiator will have their game win requirements to be at or above 2300.
  • Developers’ notes: We’ve seen feedback around the top end PvP rewards being extremely difficult to achieve in the more recent seasons. Our goal with this adjustment is to slightly ease the requirement while still maintaining the prestige that comes with attaining these rewards and titles.
• BATTLEGROUND BLITZ
  • Eye of the Storm
    • Developers’ notes: We’ve reverted the Eye of the Storm map mechanic changes and made some adjustments to Swift Pursuit on the map for better traversing. Our initial goal with these map changes was to have a better gameplay experience with smaller team sizes on our larger maps. We saw that the changes on the map led to stalemate gameplay which we want to avoid.
    • The map mechanics in Eye of the Storm for Battleground Blitz have been reverted to align with how the map typically functions. This means that all four bases will be active at all times, rather than its prior functionality in Battleground Blitz where only two bases alternated based on flag captures.
    • The following adjustments have been made to Swift Pursuit for better map traversal:
      • Swift Pursuit now grants 100% mount speed (aligned with other large maps, Arathi Basin and Deepwind Gorge)
      • 30 seconds after the match starts, Swift Pursuit is increased by an additional 50% while on the map’s bridges (150% mount speed total).
• DEATH KNIGHT
  • Unholy
    • Doomburst has been updated – Sudden Doom also causes your next Death Coil to deal damage of your plagues an additional time at 25% effectiveness and reduce the target’s movement speed by 45% for 3 seconds.
    • Life and Death has been updated – When the target afflicted with your Dread Plague is healed, you are also healed for 10% of the amount. Additionally, Dread Plague deals 200% of its remaining damage to the target when dispelled.
    • Necromancer’s Bargain has been updated – Festering Strike no longer causes Scourge Strike to summon a Lesser Ghoul but instead causes it to deal Shadow damage and heal you for 100% of that amount.
    • Necrotic Wounds has been updated – Putrefy has 1 additional charge and applies a Necrotic Wound to the enemy when it deals damage, absorbing 8% of all healing received for 15 seconds. Max 3 stacks. Adding a stack does not refresh the duration.
    • Reanimation renamed to Zombify.
• MAGE
  • Master of Escape moved to the Class talent tree.
• MONK
  • Windwalker
    • Tigereye Brew has been removed.
• PALADIN
  • Holy
    • New PvP Talent: Barrier of Faith – Imbue a friendly target with a Barrier of Faith, absorbing damage for 12 seconds. For the next 24 seconds, Barrier of Faith accumulates 20% of effective healing from your Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Holy Shock spells. Every 6 seconds, the accumulated healing becomes an absorb shield. Replaces Holy Prism.
    • Searing Glare now overrides Blinding Light.
• PRIEST
  • New PvP Talent: Psychic Shroud – When your Psychic Scream affects 1 or more players, the next crowd control effect against you is prevented. Lasts 15 seconds.
  • The following PvP talents have been removed:
    • Catharsis
    • Mindgames
    • Thoughtsteal
  • Discipline
    • Trinity now increases cast speed by 15% (was 30%) and Atonement duration by 15 seconds (was 10 seconds).
    • Inner Light and Shadow moved to Discipline talent tree.
  • Holy
    • The following PvP talents have been removed:
    • Divine Ascension
    • Holy Ward
    • Ray of Hope
• SHAMAN
  • New PvP Talent: Lightning Lasso – Grips the target in lightning, stunning and dealing Nature damage over 5 seconds while the target is lassoed. Can move while channeling.
  • Enhancement
    • Stormweaver has been removed and its effect is now combined with Raging Maelstrom.
  • Restoration
    • New PvP Talent: Master of the Elements – Casting Lava Burst increases the healing of your next Healing Wave by 30%, stacking up to 2 times. Healing Wave applies Flame Shock to a nearby enemy when empowered by Master of the Elements.

PROFESSIONS

• All profession recipes and gathering nodes are available.
• Lowered the number of qualities for stackable reagents and consumables to 2 (was 3).
  • Developers’ notes: One goal of having qualities is so that players who invest time and effort into their professions can produce more valuable goods. We believe that, as far as reagents and consumables are concerned, this goal is better accomplished by having 2 qualities, normal quality and high quality, with the added benefit of simplifying the system a little.
• Fractured Sparks no longer need to be combined into whole Sparks before they can be used in crafting. Whole Sparks drop instead of Fractured Sparks and Spark costs have doubled.

USER INTERFACE AND ACCESSIBILITY

• NEW INTERFACE: JOURNEYS
  • A new tab called Journeys has been added to the Adventure Guide. This tab will help players track their Renown, Delves, Prey, and Great Vault reward progress.
    • Developers’ notes: Only previous expansion Renown and Midnight Delves will be available in Public Alpha 1. Artwork is still work in progress.
  • Delves tab has been removed from the Group Finder panel. Players can now configure the Delve companion through the Delves section of Journeys.
• NEW INTERFACE: BOSS WARNINGS
  • A timeline of spell casts will now appear when engaging bosses in dungeons and raids.
    • Developers’ notes: Artwork on the timeline is still a work in progress.
  • This timeline can be moved and adjusted through HUD Edit Mode.
  • Alerts are categorized into Critical, Medium, and Minor which can also be customized through Edit Mode for additional settings.
    • Developers’ notes: This feature is not completely implemented nor functional for bosses for Public Alpha 1.
• UPDATED NAMEPLATES
  • Nameplates now have a new visual style.
  • Nameplates has its own Options Menu section under Gameplay.
  • Added options:
    • Preview of the Nameplate as options are being changed
    • Nameplate style
    • Display certain Nameplate Information like rarity icon, health %, health values.
    • Highlight important casts
    • Cast bar information
    • Types of buffs and debuffs to display
    • Size of the buff/debuff icons
    • Debuff padding
    • Aggro display
    • Nameplate sizing
    • Show offscreen Nameplates
    • Simplify Nameplates
  • Developers’ notes: Behavior of stacking nameplates is still a work in progress.
• COOLDOWN MANAGER
  • Added support to save multiple layouts.
  • Right-clicking a cooldown in the Cooldown Settings window will now give players the option to assign a sound and event type. Up to 3 alerts can be assigned to a cooldown.
• Personal Resource Display has been added to HUD Edit Mode with the following options:
  • Show Friendly Buffs
  • Show Special Resources on Targets
  • Hide Health and Power Bars
  • Only Show While in Combat
  • On login, existing players may be prompted with a choice to adjust movement keys to use strafe or keep them to turn the character camera.
• Catch Up Experience
  • If a player hasn’t logged in for a long period of time, in character select, returning characters may be given the option to go straight to the Catch Up Experience.
  • New Tutorials tab has been added to the Adventure Guide for players to teleport to a Catch Up Experience.