World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is the fifth expansion set to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, following Mists of Pandaria. It was announced on November 8, 2013 at BlizzCon 2013.The expansion was released on November 13, 2014

The expansion raised the existing level cap from 90 to 100 and introduced player-built, upgradeable garrisons.Most of the player models were updated to have more detailed textures, animations and facial expressions, thus increasing the system requirements of the game.

The expansion allows players to level up to 100, an increase from the cap of 90 in the previous expansion Mists of Pandaria. It initially included eight 5-man dungeons and one raid, Highmaul, that opened in early December 2014.There was also a rebalancing of raid difficulty by the addition of a new difficulty called Mythic, which became the hardest version of the raid system that requires exactly 20 players. The easiest is 25-player raid finder (or "Looking For Raid"), and flexible raiding was expanded to include normal and heroic difficulty, allowing groups to range from 10 to 30 players, with the enemies scaling dynamically depending on the raid size.Players are able to build and upgrade their own garrison, a personal area in which they can recruit non-player characters (NPC) to carry out missions to earn the player or NPC experience and items. The garrison is assembled from the individual buildings like stables or armories, increasing their size and modifying their appearance.The Blackrock Foundry raid was opened in February 2015. The 6.2 patch in June 2015 introduced the third and final raid of the expansion, Hellfire Citadel.

The development team made a number of changes to the player versus player (PvP) aspects of the game. They altered the way that PvP items behave when players fight, reducing crowd control abilities, and added a new PvP-focused island area called Ashran containing various objectives and battles for players to participate in.

The proving grounds were updated for Warlords of Draenor. In order to queue in random matchmaking for a heroic dungeon, a silver medal from the proving grounds is required for the desired role. However, if a full premade group is used instead of matchmaking, the medal requirement does not apply.[10] Challenge modes and the pet battle system were also updated to work within the new content.

The player stats of hit, expertise, dodge, and parry were removed from new items and new tertiary stats were added to give additional movement speed, reduction in area of effect damage taken, indestructible (item does not need to be repaired) or leech (converts a portion of damage and healing into self healing).

Some item drops can randomly be upgraded. For example, quest rewards have a chance of being upgraded to rare or epic quality. Raid loot and heroic/mythic dungeon loot has chance to randomly gain tertiary stats, a bonus socket and/or an additional item level upgrade called "warforged", and baleful gear can proc "empowered" to gain additional item levels from 5 to 45, up from the 650 base item.

Development

For this expansion the development team changed the file format used by the game, moving from the MPQ file format used previously to a new file format called CASC. The game also contains updated character models with improved textures and a higher polygon count for all races released prior to Cataclysm;the developers have said they want to "keep the soul of the original characters" while upgrading them to the quality of the Pandaren race released in the previous expansion, and the Worgen and Goblin races released in Cataclysm. Game performance has been taken into account with this expansion, with the developers saying that there will be no big drop in performance as a result of the models and that there will be no reduction in the amount of visuals on screen during large fights.

Warlords of Draenor was playable at PAX East and entered alpha testing in April 2014.Blizzard invited players to enter the beta in June 2014.Players who purchased the game received a free level 90 boost for one character. Subsequent boosts may be purchased for $60 each. Blizzard said they made the price high because they did not want to devalue the experience of leveling a character.

With this expansion, Blizzard once again expressed a desire to begin creating expansions at a more frequent rate, as often as once per year.

Sales

Warlords of Draenor sold over 3.3 million copies within the first 24 hours, and subscryption numbers increased from 7.4 million to over 10.5 million in November 2014.However, by the end of the first quarter of 2015, the number of subscribers had fallen to 7.1 million; 300,000 subscribers fewer than before the release of Warlords of Draenor. By the end of the second quarter, the number of subscribers dropped to 5.6 million, the lowest number of subscribers seen in the game since 2005.By the third quarter, subscribers held at 5.5 million.In November 2015, Blizzard said it will no longer report on the number of World of Warcraft subscribers.