With Netherwing being just around the corner (25th of March, 18:00 CET!), we decided to make a little guide highlighting the most important realm details and features so that you don’t miss out on anything! Without further ado, let’s get into it.

BASE RATES AND REALM DETAILS

This time around we opted for a bit higher (x3) than usual xp rates to make the process less time consuming without making it completely obsolete. Keep in mind, there will be an option to lower your personal experience rates and there will also be 100% (x6) experience boosts available in the store a couple of weeks after release.

Netherwing will once again have a PvP realm type so make sure you stay on your guard when travelling through Stranglethorn Vale, Hellfire Peninsula or other contested zones! We also decided to up the honor rates slightly to make PvP gearing up a bit less tedious. The remaining rates such as professions or reputation will remain at default values.

DUAL TALENT SPECIALIZATION

Dual Spec becomes available at level 40 at your class trainer for a small fee (Alliance gets it for free!) and lets you have a second set of talents you can swap to when out of combat. Once purchased, you can switch your current specialization by either using the “.dualspec” command or right clicking your character portrait and selecting the “Activate Secondary Spec'' option. Your action bars and macros setup should switch automatically (provided no macro changes were done in the meantime), but you can also use an action bar managing addon if you prefer to do it yourself.

RACIAL SWAP

More often than not players feel forced to pick a certain faction or a race due to racial traits, which goes against the idea of character fantasy. To remedy this issue, we are introducing Racial Swap feature. Simply visit Engineer Upaq (near the entrance to Valley of Honor in Orgrimmar, Old Town in Stormwind or Lower City in Shattrath) to switch your racial traits to one of different race’s! Keep in mind you are only able to switch to races that can also field your class and the feature has a 14 day cooldown once you use it. Additionally, Draenei racials are locked to Alliance only. To prevent issues with racial transparency in PvP, in Battlegrounds and Arenas you will visually see enemies as members of the race they switched their racials to. For example, if an Orc Warrior switched their racials to Human ones, in BGs and Arenas they will appear to you as a Human. This adjustment does NOT apply to World PvP.

DYNAMIC RESPAWNS, PARTY AND DYNAMIC QUEST DROPS

One of the most annoying things to happen while leveling certainly is waiting for the mobs to respawn, especially in the crowded starting zones. To remedy this, Netherwing will feature Dynamic Respawns for creatures and gameobjects. Please note that our Dynamic Respawn system is quite different from the ones you might have experienced before. For example, not every creature or object is a part of the system and will respawn faster. To prevent exploits we were quite selective about which entities we want to include, but in general you should expect it to be applied to most of the quest mobs in starting zones or other areas that tend to get crowded. The most important difference by far is how this system works. Creatures and gameobjects will not just respawn faster by default or if there are a lot of people in a given area. Instead, the system will automatically “resupply” the missing ones if the number of remaining entities falls below a specific threshold. To give you a very simple example with randomly picked numbers - if there are 10 kobolds occupying a mine and 7 or 8 of them get killed by players (leaving just 2 or 3 left) the system will instantly respawn 3-4 of them. This means that players questing in the area will never run out of kobolds to kill and at the same time you will not run into a situation where you get overwhelmed by the respawns being way too quick to handle!

To make the leveling experience even smoother, we implemented two additional features from future expansions - Shared Party Quest Drops and Dynamic Quest Drops. The first one simply means that while leveling in a group, most of the quest items you drop will be lootable by all party members. The second one functions as “bad luck protection” - each time a creature fails to drop a quest item you need, the chance to get it next time will increase until you get it! This should make certain quests a lot less frustrating than in the past.

FACTION BALANCING

One of the biggest concerns with TBC is the disparity between the factions and we are taking this issue very seriously. To prevent one faction from being a clear choice due to racials we introduced Racial Swap (mentioned earlier) and we are also adding additional perks to players who pick Alliance, which tends to be the underpopulated faction. To check those features out, please read more here: https://stormforge.gg/news/45/netherwing-faction-balance-adjustments!

DUNGEON AND RAID ADJUSTMENTS

Netherwing will feature both T4 and T5 raids available simultaneously just like back in the day. The only difference this time is they will open on the 5th of April (with the weekly reset) rather than at launch, to give everyone a bit of breathing room to just level up and prepare.

To make PvE way more engaging, we are once again enabling pre-nerf mechanics, such as additional platforms on Al’ar, Lady Vashj mind control, 2.0 Astromancer Solarian and more! To complement that we are also adjusting the overall health and damage values of enemies in raids and dungeons to make those hostile places really dangerous and provide an actual challenge compared to wet noodles of 2007 with today’s player skill and knowledge. We hope that this will lead to a fun and exciting experience!

PVP ADJUSTMENTS

To encourage more activity in battlegrounds and arenas as well as make it more rewarding and overall better to play, we are adding additional features such as daily quests, increased honor rates, remote queuing and more! Read the full post to find out the changes here: https://stormforge.gg/news/48/netherwing-pvp-changes

STORMFORGE LOGS

We are happy to announce that Netherwing will use StormforgeLogs as its main service for tracking and displaying things such as raid progress, character sheets, PvP ladders and more! You can click on the “logs” button to see how it currently looks for the Mistblade MoP realm or click this (https://logs.stormforge.gg/)

That’s it for this guide! If you have any questions you can always ask on our official discord. Make sure to check out our Netherwing landing page for a more graphical overview of the features and the countdown (https://tbc.stormforge.gg/). See you on March 25th!