In preparation for the soon-to-be-released World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard is pushing out its next major update this week. Numbered 6.0.3, it’s called The Iron Tide, and it makes significant changes to prelude the beginning of a new era.
Among the incredibly long list of additions and changes coming in 6.0.3 are the long-awaited new character models. These will update the Dwarf, Gnome, Human, Night, Elf, Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead, and Draenei—sorry Worgen and Goblins—models to have more polygons and detail, while retaining their original “look and feel”.
Equally as important is the patch’s stat squish. World of Warcraft‘s combat numbers have been hyper-inflated over the past decade through several expansions, with players now dealing hundreds of thousands of damage. Blizzard sees this as a problem, and has used a complex algorithm to retain percentages while displaying much less overbearing numbers. Stats on items have also been changed with the removal of reforging, hit, dodge, and parry. This change is said not to affect combat when engaging in lower level content with a higher level character.
Also See: Warlords of Draenor Official Trailer
Among other changes are a restructuring of the Looking for Group and Looking for Raid systems, the merging of the Horde and Alliance Auction Houses, and major improvements to inventory management.
Lastly, as with all previous expansions, a world event will be held from the patch’s release until the release of Warlords of Draenor. It’s called Iron Horde Incursion, and it’s been described as the following:
The Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands has turned blood red. Hundreds of strange-looking orcs are violently pouring into Azeroth, killing everything that stands in their path. Nethergarde and Okril’lon have already fallen, and while the Horde and the Alliance moved as quickly as they could to get reinforcements to their people, they are too late. The Iron Horde invasion has begun.
Adventurers looking to dislodge the Iron Horde’s attempts to establish a foothold on Azeroth should visit the Blasted Lands.
A specially revamped five-player version of Upper Blackrock Spire is available to level-90 characters for a limited time, and sets the stage for the coming counterstrike against the Iron Horde.
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor will debut on November 13th. Purchase of the expansion will include one free upgrade of a character to level 90. The level cap in Warlords of Draenor will be 100.
You can read the dozens of pages of patch notes on the official World of Warcraft website.
