Overview for World of Warcraft 6.1 PTR Build 19445

An early build of Patch 6.1 is now available on World of Warcraft Public Test Realm. Currently, there isn’t much to showcase just what is instore for the next patch, but many clever dataminers were able to gather together the changes. And many of these upcoming changes were mentioned by Blizzard Entertainment in their Plans for World of Warcraft in 2015.

The Story Continues

The journey continues in Draenor as heroes must storm the Iron Docks of Gorgrond. It’s interesting that players would be returning to an area that was originally used as a 5-man Dungeon. Perhaps this will be how the Azeroth heroes will gain a strong foothold on Draenor, by reforming the Iron Docks for their own means.

There is currently no quests that have been datamined to shed any light on the Iron Docks. All there is currently are the “quest hubs” for both Horde and Alliance. It’s possible that this area will be similar to Mists of Pandaria Patch 5.1: Landfall with weekly unlock-able progression.

The Legendary Questline will continue with the finale rewarding players with a Legendary follower who starts with ilvl 630 gear. We’ll keep the spoilers out, but this follower will have three abilities including one with a high success chance on all targets.

Defending the Garrison

• New top-level for Invasions: Platinum
• Master and Commander: Summons bosses into Garrisons (10-40 player)
• Garrison Jukebox: Music coming to Garrisons from all across Warcraft
• New missions and rewards

Heirloom Tab

With the implementation of the Heirlooms Tab coming in Patch 6.1, there are many changes coming for Heirloom items. Heirlooms will automatically be added to the tab without removing it from the characters’ bag or armory.

• Heirlooms now scale from 1 to 60
• Heirlooms can be purchased for gold
• The new heirlooms can be upgraded by items like Ancient Heirloom Scabbard and Timeworn Heirloom Scabbard to Level 90 and Level 100.

Twitter In-Game

Currently, there is no way to actively test the in-game Twitter UI since it requires to sign-in. Attempting to connect with Twitter brings up a black screen with no options.

Thankfully, Bashiok had posted on the forums what players could expect:

The implementation is really slick and out of the way. If you’re using Twitter it helps you share things with an in-game UI you can choose to bring up. If you don’t use Twitter just don’t attach a Twitter account and I don’t think you’ll see anything related to it. The goal isn’t to start socializing everything, it’s really just to make it more convenient for people that already are sharing their gameplay. If you know anything about our UI and philosophy on simplicity I think you’ll have a good idea of how subdued the implementation is, but it could get fun as Addons hook in and interact with it.

And there will be no way for a tweet to go out without the player hitting the available button or using the appropriate macro. We’ll know more once it’s accessible on PTR.

And More

This was just a quick overview of the changes and improvements coming to Patch 6.1. The full datamined information can be found thanks to Wowhead. Please note that many of the changes, especially for classes, are simply tooltip updates, which require a patch to reflect live changes made through hotfixes.