Knowing what tools you have to decorate your home is one thing but knowing how and where to get your decor is another. Step into our showroom as we open our catalogue on Housing rewards and share more information about what you can expect when seeking to outfit your Azeroth home in style.
Welcome home, Adventurers!
At the end of our
previous article, we asked a few questions regarding the source of decorations and how professions fit in. Today, we’re going to answer those questions, talk through our philosophies for Housing rewards, and provide a few more details on the decoration “economy.”
Before starting we wanted to state our usual disclaimer: This is still a work in progress and names and details may change between now and launch, but this is directionally where we’re aiming.
Setting up Our Guiding Principles
We began our discussions by drafting a few guiding principles to inform our design:
- Progressive Journey – Similar to our Housing pillar of Long-lasting Journey, players should expect the collection of decor to be just that, a journey. The collection of the perfect room and house is something to strive towards, not run to a vendor and complete on day one. Furthermore, this journey should be engaging and possible for most players, regardless of how “hardcore” or not they may be. Put another way, getting any single piece of decor should eventually be possible, but getting everything should be incredibly difficult.
- Core Gameplay (With Variations) – Similarly, we want to reward decor through a wide variety of our core gameplay in World of Warcraft. We don’t want decor to come from only housing-specific activities (though some will!), but instead meet you where you are, however you choose to enjoy the game, whether that’s solo questing, crafting decor with professions and using the Auction House, running dungeons with your friends, or raiding with your guild.
- Reverence for the Past – Some of you have been playing for 20 years and we want that time to feel worthwhile. Your past adventures and time spent in Azeroth means your collection will have a leg up and you won’t start from square one when you first purchase a house.
That’s great, but what do these mean in practice?
It’s about the Journey (Not the … Decoration)
The Progressive Journey principle means that the majority of decor types (e.g., chair, bed, shelf, etc.) are considered commodities and are readily available from vendors, other players via the Auction House (spoiler!), questing, and so on. If you want a wooden chair, it’s very easy and inexpensive to acquire.
Next there’s “investment” decor, which are generally more niche items, in either theming, looks, or appeal, which require more time and/or cost investment. Examples could be a sparkling fountain with particle effects or magical books that flap about on their own.
Lastly, there are what we think of as “Trophies.” These are things that require skillful play, cooperation with other players, and/or larger time commitments. Think along the lines of M+ and raid rewards or long-term Achievements. If you’re looking to mount Onyxia’s head on the wall, you’ll have to defeat her and take it!
One of the powerful aspects of decoration is that since it’s cosmetic by nature, placing hard-to-acquire things throughout the game gives players reach-goals that don’t hamper their character development and they’re free to pursue— or not—just like mounts and transmogs. That said, it should be easily possible to kit out your home on day one to strike the vibe you’re looking for without too much effort. Your decor journey should start out awesome and continue to be that all along the way.
Variety Is the Spice of Life
When we first were drafting this article, there was a line that read: “Where can I get decor? Yes.” While pithy, it’s not far from the truth either when it comes to our second principle of Core Gameplay (With Variations).
Decor should come from everywhere and everything! We want you to find decor rewards in all sorts of gameplay, not just a single avenue that you feel forced to interact with over and over. For example, while a specific jade-inlaid bookshelf might come from a particular quest in Pandaria, other bookshelves could come from vendors, professions, or other varied forms of content.
Thanks, Past Self!
Finally, the principle of Reverence for the Past encapsulates a few things:
- All the time spent in Azeroth is worth something! We’re leveraging legacy reputations, professions, and more. If you’ve achieved something in the past, we want to embrace that time spent. If you raised your reputation to exalted with someone, you’ll be able to purchase their goods right away. If you completed an achievement 10 years ago that rewards a NEW piece of decor today , you’ll be granted that piece of decor on login.
- Legacy decor should be well-integrated into the appropriate existing content and not feel crowbarred in. For example, using the local systems and currencies of a piece of related content (such as Mechagon’s Junkyard Tinkering) when it makes sense and as it’s available.
- We’re not going to have the decor equivalent of “transmog runs.” We’re still working through what this means in practice (Is it only available during TImewalking? Is there something more deterministic we can do, etc.), but the thought of someone farming a mount for years across multiple characters every week, finally earning it, and then being told “welp, time to go back and grind for the couch” is rough. We’d like to avoid this.
- Harkening again back to the Long-lasting Journey pillar, we’re going to continue fleshing out decor from past expansions in future patches and they will be earnable via the appropriate content of their expansion.
One thing we’d like to give you a heads up about here is that we intend to offer decor rewards for past expansion “meta-achievements” (
A World Awoken,
Back from the Beyond, and
A Farewell to Arms are the three currently available). If you think you might be a decor completionist, it’s worth starting these in your downtime!
Trust Me, I’m a Profession(al)
We’re not going to bury the lede here: decor will be crafted by ALL existing non-gathering primary professions instead of creating a new profession solely dedicated to it. Each profession will be able to craft a few pieces of appropriate decor
from each expansion using that expansion’s version of the profession (e.g., to craft something from Mists of Pandaria, you will need the relevant Mists of Pandaria profession at the appropriate level.)
To craft something, players will need not only the required recipe and skill level, but they will also need to gather a new type of decor-crafting specific reagent per-expansion as well as any required reagents from that expansion.
In general, like most profession-made goods, crafted decor can be traded to other players or sold on the Auction House.
Some examples of what some professions will be able to make:
- Blacksmithing creates decor made primarily of metal.
- Enchanting creates magical decor like floating books or glowing orbs.
- Jewelcrafting creates decor like gems and gem-studded objects as well as being the designated stoneworking profession.
Two of the points above should be underscored: Your professions and their levels from past expansions matter and so do some of the reagents from those expansions. You know, just in case you were looking for something else to do between now and the launch of Housing . . .
Some Light Housekeeping
We want to mention a smattering of related but smaller things as well before we wrap things up:
- Decorations are only placeable if you have enough of them, based on how many you’ve collected. If you want to place four chairs, you’ll need to collect four chairs. Furthermore, collected decorations are shared across your entire Battle.net account, so anything you collect on any character on any of your game accounts is shared across all of them. If you have four fountains and place three of them on the lawn of your Alliance house, your Horde house will have only one available to place.
- On the flipside, there’s a concept of “unique” decor that you can only place once, no matter how many copies of it you may have. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to place 9 copies of Onyxia’s Head on your wall (despite how many times you may have killed her).
- You’ll note a mention of “housing-specific” activities earlier. That might be better worded as “neighborhood-specific” activities. . .
- We’re committed to an ongoing release of new decorations, going both backwards into previous expansions as well as forward with new ones. What do you want to see?
Thanks so much for reading! We have plenty more to cover and as usual, please keep sending your feedback both about rewards as well as what you’re looking forward to hearing more about. We’ll be at
PAX East on May 9 for the
Warcraft 30th Anniversary celebration. Hopefully, we’ll get to see some of you there!
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