After many many years World Of Warcraft Cross-Faction Raids, Dungeons, and rated PVP is finally here. Blizzard announced today that WOW instances will be able to be played cross-faction and fans seem to really like this news! Sadly the change will not be coming until a future 9.2.5 update due to so much code behind the single faction rules of old. But it should be worth the wait!
So why the change and what are the specifics behind it? Well, Blizzard said they were guided by two main goals for the rule set that came down to Focus on organized instanced gameplay and Make this an opt-in feature as much as possible.
With those two goals in mind, this is the ruleset Blizzard came up with.
- Players will be able to directly invite members of the opposite faction to a party if you have a BattleTag or Real ID friendship, or if you are members of a cross-faction WoW Community.
- Premade Groups in the Group Finder listings for Mythic dungeons, raids, or rated arena/RBGs will be open to applicants of both factions, though the group leader may choose to restrict the listing to same-faction applicants if they so choose.
- Guilds will remain single-faction, and random matchmade activities like Heroic dungeons, Skirmishes, or Random Battlegrounds will all remain same-faction (both because there is less faction-driven pressure around random groups, and to avoid compromising the opt-in nature of the feature by randomly placing a queuing orc in a group with a night elf).
Once in a party together, members of the opposite faction will remain unfriendly while in the “outdoor” world (and fully hostile in War Mode!), as they do today, though they will be able to communicate through party chat. Upon entering a dungeon, raid, or rated PvP match, however, all members will be friendly and able to assist each other in combat, trade loot, earn shared achievements, and otherwise fully cooperate the same way members of the same faction have always been able to.
This change looks to be amazing for all players and will really help the overall community within the game. We look forward to the future of WOW and can’t wait to see how this update eventually plays out. Is this update a sign of new things to come due to Microsoft buying Blizzard Activision? Let us know over on Twitter what you think of the future update and if you’re excited about it or not!