Gameplay Elements you're hoping for in Expansion Six.

[Smitten]

What are your hopes for gameplay elements and mechanics to be added or changed in the next expansion?

Personally, I've thought about this a lot. This is my very abbreviated list.

Garrisons:

Garrisons will no longer provide any progression rewards. There will be a Garrison-style feature in the next expansion, but it is purely a cosmetic feature.

• Buildings such as the Stables and the Pet Menagerie will remain, and allow you to show off your favourite mounts and pets.
• Monuments will have a sub-category, trophies. These are retroactive and provide trophies to hang on the wall of the main building. Achievements that reward trophies include:
  
  • Realm First Achievements
  • Cutting Edge Achievements
  • Challenge Mode Gold Achievements
  • Gladiator and Rank 1 Achievements
  • Hero of the Alliance/Horde Achievements
  • Reputation Achievements
  • Loremaster Achievements
  
  
• Garrisons can be placed in a number of set zones, with new zones being rolled out each major patch. They will be available in zones from each expansion.
• Garrisons can be moved for a fee.
• Garrisons will follow a more traditional player-housing model, allowing you to collect patterns and build different objects to place as you wish. Objects have no set location and can be placed wherever you wish.

Dungeons:

Moving forward, the way dungeons work will receive a large revamp to make them more appealing throughout the expansions life. They can be split into multiple categories

• Normal: These are the dungeons you do while levelling, just the same as how they work today.
• Heroic: These are the max-level beginner dungeons. They work the same as they are today.
• Mythic: Mythic dungeons are revamped Heroic dungeons. Moving away from the Patch 6.2 model of a harder Heroic, they are redesigned with new boss mechanics, extra bosses and an extended dungeon.
  
  • There will be numerous optional bonus objectives, locations and bosses.
    
    • Bonus objectives can reward gear (Personal Loot), gold or currency (detailed later on).
    • Bonus bosses drop gear. They have randomised abilities that are chosen from a large pool.
    • Bonus locations (accessed by taking extended routes behind bonus bosses with additional trash) can contain profession materials, gold or currency. Personal loot.
    
    
  • The more bosses and objectives you complete, the larger the reward from the final boss. Killing the bare minimum (same as Heroic mode) will reward no additional bonuses. Larger rewards include increased item levels, additional currency.
  • Mythic dungeons will scale to the groups average item level, and item level drops will be scaled as well. In theory, they will always remain challenging to a point.
  • They will have difficulty akin to bosses
  
  
• Challenge Mode: The same as current Challenge Modes, based on the Heroic mode version.
• Timewalk: Timewalking dungeons will be available all the time, instead of a weekly event. During the weekly event, items that drop will be a slightly higher item level.

Dungeons will start rewarding rare drop mounts and pets again. The drop chance does not change based on difficulty. Each dungeon will have at least a pet OR mount, and some will have both.

Running dungeons with a full realm-group provides a bonus in order to encourage more realm activity.


Raiding:

The amount of raid difficulties will be cut down. All raid difficulties will drop the same gear at different item levels.

• LFR: LFR will be 30 player: Two tanks, six healers, 22 DPS. Tier gear will drop, and have the same set bonus, but will not work with any tier gear from outside LFR. More casual raiders and alts will still get the benefit of the set bonus, but more hardcore raiders won’t feel pressured to run LFR just to get set bonuses when a tier releases.
• Normal: Normal will work the same as today, from 10 to 30 players.
• Heroic: Heroic will be the hardest difficulty, and the 10/25 Player model will return, allowing smaller and family/friend-oriented guilds to operate as they did in the past. All bosses will have an additional difficulty mode inside Heroic, similar to Ulduar’s “Hard Mode”.
  
  These Hard/Mythic modes are activated during the boss fight, or activated by doing something before the boss fight throughout the raid. Hard/Mythic modes will have achievements to go with them, and certain bosses can be activated at various levels of difficulty based on how they approach the fight. The harder the difficulty, the higher the reward.
  
  Some extremely challenging hard/mythic modes will reward a title.

All difficulties will drop currency. Hard/Mythic mode boss fights will drop increased currency. Each raid will have class-specific trinkets, as well as general trinkets for each role type. Class-specific trinkets will be something you want to get.

Raids will begin dropping rare, class-specific transmog sets, such as the Dark Shaman set in Siege of Orgrimmar. Each raid tier, 2-3 classes will have a set that can drop. They will drop on any difficulty, but only have one chance per week for it to drop regardless of what difficulty you play.


Currency:

A form of currency similar to JP/VP will make its return. This currency will drop from dungeons, raids and be rewarded from daily quests, pet battles and world events (more later).

There will be a weekly cap on how much currency you can obtain, but it will not be capped per day or from where you can get it, so you’re free to obtain the currency however you wish. The currency can be used for a large number of rewards for all different types of gameplay, to suit all players.

• Item Upgrades: Currency can be used to upgrade items, similar to the Siege of Orgrimmar system. Each item can be upgraded twice. Any max-level item that is Blue quality or higher can be upgraded.
• Tertiary Stat Reroll Scrolls: As said. If your item has tertiary stats, they can be randomly rerolled for a small currency fee. You will not get additional stats (such as moving from +speed to +speed and +leech), but the amount of stats you do have will be changed into a different type.
• Items: Items equal to that of Heroic Mode from last tier. This will come out on the second raid tier. During the first raid tier, heroic dungeon quality items will be purchasable. A full set of items won’t be purchasable, rather a variety of different items for different slots.
• Mounts: Mounts will be available to purchase for currency. They will cost a large amount of currency, possibly two or three months worth if you capped weekly.
• Pets: Battle pets will also be purchasable. 2-3 weeks of currency.
• Profession Mats: Profession mats will be purchasable for each profession type. You can buy a number of a certain type of mat (such as 20xNew Ore 1, 20xNew Herb 1) or you can buy a sack of mats for the same cost, but will have no control over what it contains. It will contain a larger amount though (15x New Ore 1, 5x New Ore 2, 5x New Ore 3).
• Toys: A variety of account-wide toys will be available to purchase at varying costs.
• Heirlooms: Additional heirlooms that can’t be purchased with gold. Proc trinkets possibly.
• Class Cosmetic items: More on that further down. Somewhat large cost.

World Events:

Every two or three months, there will be a unique world event. They will be not too challenging, and be completable by people at reasonably high levels (90+). These events are spread out over Azeroth. They could require killing, infiltrating enemies, collecting and such. Each event should take no more than 20-30 minutes.

Completing a single event rewards some gold and currency. Completing every event for that period will reward a unique tabard or pet specific only to that period of events, and a Legacy achievement for that event. There will only be cosmetic rewards.

This is to reward active players. Old rewards will appear on the BMAH for hardcore collectors who missed out for whatever reason, but they won’t get the achievement that goes with it.


Class Cosmetic Items:

Class cosmetic items will be items that change the appearance of certain things, specific to your class. They will come from a wide range of sources, some obviously rarer than others. These include dungeon drops, raid drops, achievements, challenge modes, currency reward, PvP rewards, world events, world bosses.

Unsure as to what would be available for each class, but some examples include:

• Shaman: Totem skins, ascendance skins.
• Hunter: Visible quivers, pet skins
• Paladin: Visible librams, special seal animations.

As you collect them, they can be swapped in and out using an interface similar to the glyph page.


Professions:

Professions will return to their former glory. Items will require a range of different mats to make. Herbs and Ores will only be collectable by Herbalists and Miners once again. Mats will drop in dungeons, be craftable, collectable, or come from other professions.

Basic patterns will be learnable while levelling. High level professions can drop from dungeons, raids and world drops. There are also patterns learned from Research, quest chains and from creating other high-level items.

Reforging will return as a secondary profession that everyone can learn after a quest chain that will not be too difficult and achievable in questing gear at max level. Reforging will require different materials for different sockets, and not just gold. Materials will be easy to obtain and not too expensive if you wish to buy them.


PvP:

Racials removed from PvP. New arena and new node-capture Battleground. World PvP zone like Ashran, but properly refined, tuned and adequately rewarded. Not required for PvP to get items. More non-gear rewards. Less PvE. More encouragement for factions to fight through gameplay and design choices, not through nerfing fun.


Transmog Tab:

When you collect an item, you can add the items appearance to your Transmog Tab. This will make the item untradeable. In the future, you can use that item's appearance to transmog regardless of whether you still have the original item or not. This should help free up significant amounts of bank and void storage space for people who collect large amounts of transmog items.


Miscellaneous:

• PvP mounts will be class-wide. If you got a Gladiator mount on one Shaman, they'll be available on all your Shamans.
• Tabard Tab, account wide (PvP tabards class-wide)
• Shirt Tab
• Transmog list is searchable.

[magnaton6zeros]

why would anyone level up so many shamans

[gtiii]

why would anyone level up so many shamans

Shaman is love, Shaman is life.

[Smitten]

why would anyone level up so many shamans

Shamans are pretty sweet.

[IGG]

Very nice ideas, nice read overall, I hope blizz will leech at least some of them

+ rep