World of Warcraft: Current Year

xzi said:

Member when you actually saw members of your own guild in major cities instead of a bunch of strangers?

Member when a mage could just cast fireball regardless if he was fire or not?

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xzi said:

This is what I dislike the most about the direction of the game. They don't even "correct" the problem, just the solution players came up with. It's most evident by the recent changes to Underrot making it completely impossible to skip the first set of trash, because they just see through stealth now. Instead of reevaluating why players are choosing to use their 10min pot cd on this trash pull, they just make it so they players have no choice instead.

Or my alltime favorite is movespeed sets. Legion was an amazing time for running old content because you could speed up everything SIGNIFICANTLY. It also made things like soloing the first boss in mythic hellfire possible as a paladin, whereas even now it's 100% impossible to solo because you're just too slow. I get that you can make legion twinks for runspeed sets but why even remove them? It's not like someone in a movespeed set could even do anything in pvp unless the other person was very undergeared so it's not a balance issue really. It's literally just that they want to slow the game down with no given reason. They even nerfed bear tartare.

Oh they also just nerfed BFA gems so they only work on gear that is level 111+, further nerfing movespeed sets lol. They unnecessarily nerfed even more old content 4 months into the new expansion cycle.

AND FOR WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
FOR WHAT?

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velk said:

I can't believe they fucked up pet battles in 8.1 - how hard can it be to just leave them the fuck alone when they are working ? ;p

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Dom said:

You might not like it, but it's been a part of the game for 6 years, and it deserves to be bitched about like any other element of the game.

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• Patch notes were thorough, but not complete.
• Profession requirements on crafted gear wasn't an intended change in the form it took.
• Patch 8.0 crafted gear didn't have the profession requirement like previous expansions, this was fixed as being a bug without the entire team being involved. This was fixed as soon as the team realized what happened.
• Going forward, in Season 2 crafted gear will have the profession requirement.
• Some changes would clutter the notes, like belt clipping or typos.
• Some changes were missed, such as Stealth detection on Underrot mobs. This change was made a while back, and the team forgot by the time the notes were being created.
• Going forward, the team will try to ensure the notes are more complete.
• One of the challenges for the WoW team has been evolving their processes as the team size grew. It used to be 5-6 people working on a certain feature, so everyone was aware of what was going on. This is no longer the case, as more people that are spread out are involved with the game.
• The team wants to provide more reasoning in hotfix or patch notes when changes are made. They have been trying to do that for class changes, but will do it for more things in the future.

• There was a change that broke an addon that allowed players to talk cross-faction for RP reasons.
• Cross-Faction communication has the potential for toxicity, but it's very different when there is consent. If you are friends with someone or in a community, you can talk to them.
• The team didn't mean to break the addon, but can't restore the functionality.
• The team is looking at adding the Elixir of Tongues, allowing you to understand the opposite faction for an amount of time.
• This Elixir should go out in a hotfix this weekend or early next week.

• This was a quick change that wasn't fully thought out on the team's part. It was hotfixed in at the start of the season.
• Deleting keystones caused some bugs and led to emerging social issues, where players would cherry pick what seemed like the easier dungeons.
• Since Burning Crusade, the team has tried to point players at different dungeons. Remember the Mechanar problem? It wasn't the most fun, but it was the best place to go and farm badges.
• Some Affixes will make some dungeons easier than others, but the goal is for most dungeons to be similarly difficult.

• The team made many changes over the months to make dungeons less punishing.
• Hopefully at the start of next week, another large set of changes is coming focusing on trash packs and abilities.
• It feels like now there are a lot more pulls that offer challenges than in Legion. The team wanted to get away from AoE stun, cleave, and move on being the solution to all trash pulls.
• In the past few days, the team got some more logs and analytics for dungeons. They had lots of good analytics on boss encounters, but not as much visibility on what was going on between bosses.
• The team can see the most lethal trash mobs, which stretches of dungeons take the longest to get through, what areas are deadly, where difficulty changes too much with Teeming. Removing Infested from lieutenant mobs and some trash mobs are some of the changes coming.
• A lot of the changes that go into a patch were made months ago, sometimes before the team has seen much gameplay in the Mythic+ dungeons.
• The team balances hotfixing the live game and working on the next patch.

• High end Mythic Keystones are meant for coordinated groups.
• What can the team do to improve the integrated voice chat experience?
• The first time around, the voice chat integration was not great.
• This time around, voice chat should be much better and a good solution for PuGs.
• Are players not aware that they can use the in-game voice chat for their PuG?
• Do players just not want to use voice chat at all?

• Cutting Uldir short at this point would be too soon. It's a healthy tier and guilds are still progressing through it.
• Three months for the first raid tier would be too short.
• In-game rewards from Mythic+ progress in parallel with raiding.
• When a new Mythic+ season starts, the item level cap goes up, so it would invalidate Uldir, current PvP gear, and some of the new raid.
• New raid tier, Mythic+ and PvP seasons all will happen at the same time.
• The new Azerite traits are tied into the new gear so that people won't have to go and replace existing gear to get the new traits.

• There may not be a way to add a repeatable source that won't lead to the community trying to endlessly grind it.
• The system was designed to solve only getting Azerite from your weekly chest.
• In a raid you can bonus roll or focus on specific bosses.
• The system that has been set up gives you a piece of gear every 2.5 weeks or so.
• The current setup is one of the most efficient and lucrative systems for getting Azerite gear.
• The team wants to see how the current system plays out before making changes.
• Previous in-game currencies were hard capped or a new currency was introduced for the next season.
• The team will continue to inflate the prices as new seasons start, so each successive season of gear will cost ~10x more than the previous one.
• It will keep taking you ~2.5 weeks to get another piece of gear in Season 2.
• If you buy nothing and wait for the new raid, you might get a small head start.

• This is the same way it worked in Legion. When Legion came out, the cap was 25, then raised to 40 in Patch 7.2.
• In BfA, Knowledge is paced to match available content and the needs.
• Season 2 will come out and Knowledge will resume increasing then.
• If Knowledge kept increasing until then, there would be a bigger gap. Players that kept farming would be able to unlock all the powers right away.
• When Battle for Azeroth launched, the team planned for 15 weeks of Knowledge, it happened to line up with the patch.
• The same thing will happen next season, there will be a pause before Season 3.
• The team forgot to tell players about this at the start of Battle for Azeroth.

• The team has plans to make the Heart of Azeroth more engaging.
• On the story side, this was initially a B plot. It wasn't essential like the Legion Artifact weapon was. This will change with Rise of Azshara and beyond.
• A neck is less visible than a weapon, but the team didn't want to use the weapon slot all expansion again.
• The team has a lot of work to do on the Azerite system side. Deeper and more interesting.
• There is one central flaw. On one hand, AP should be relevant and you should have goals to work towards.
• AP in Legion gave you something to progress towards. What felt best was when you had a new gold medal talent to work towards, giving you a power boost. The desire for AP and the appeal of your artifact weapon faded after getting the gold traits.
• The system works best when there are exciting goals to chase.
• It feels really bad if you get a new piece of armor and the powers on it are locked.
• All you have to look forward to is utility abilities.
• As the team looks ahead, they want to significantly change how they are approaching the system.
• This will be the last tier that you'll have to unlock the powers on. Moving forward, they will probably be unlocked, giving you armor that presents choice.
• The team will shift AP to the Heart itself, allowing you to make choices about permanent powers, potentially active abilities. More to share in the future!

• Arathi Warfront is going to stay at the current item levels.
• Darkshore Warfront will have rewards bumped up 15 item levels once Season 2 starts.
• If you want, you can go back for alts, cosmetic things, or achievements.
• World Quest rewards will go up based on the item level ceiling. This is just keeping the outdoor world relevant, but is based on gear you got from other sources.
• Warfronts are like raids, this is the one for each tier, and they don't change.
• Heroic Warfronts might make an old Warfront relevant again for a tier.
• The team looked at the rotation rate, but in Patch 8.1 there are now two Warfronts. Every week or two you'll have a new Warfront to contribute to.
• The team is trying to balance giving players a chance to play a Warfront with the rotation speed.
• If you could do Warfronts more frequently, the rewards couldn't be as good.

• War Mode faction bonuses are region wide. Every weekly reset the system looks at participation in War Mode during the previous week and will adjust the bonuses.
• Early on, War Mode participation was better, but some bugs and quirks caused players to turn it off.
• In the last couple of days, players have been brought together by Assaults.

• Rewards from Island Expeditions will continue to evolve over the expansion.
• It's likely the team will use the vendor to allow you to target more right before the expansion is over so players that are missing a few items can get them.

• In Season 2, you'll have your progress bar towards the season mount, but this time the bar will reset and go to a Vicious Saddle. You can keep doing this throughout the season.

• The team is never truly satisfied with the state of class design.
• At a macro level, there was a change 8 years ago in how class design worked.
• For the first few years, every expansion kept providing more spells and talents. Action bars started to hit their limits.
• It was no longer clear what classes needed, as they had all of the tools they needed.
• Getting new stuff is cool and exciting, and something big was lost when the team pulled away from that.
• There are effectively 36 distinct classes. Years ago the specs weren't as different.
• In the last couple of expansions, the team went forward with expansion specific systems that gave you abilities. This wasn't as satisfying as the team had hoped.
• The team is trying to balance short term excitement vs long term sustainability.
• The pruning was very controversial, so the team took a step back from that in Battle for Azeroth. They actually added a few things back. Currently the team doesn't think they need to simplify any more right now.
• The team wants classes to not have prohibitive weaknesses that results them in being excluded from groups.
• It's hard to keep every spec unique.

• No legendary items are planned right now, but they could be added where it fits the story and content.

• The team did a lot of work to make Artifact transmog work, but nothing new to share about splitting the pairs right now.

• Ideally each path of endgame progression will have unique benefits and rewards.
• Gear swapping in Mythic+ is something the team thought about changing during Legion, but didn't want to do in the middle of an expansion.
• The team views a Mythic+ dungeon like a single boss encounter, which is why you can't change talents or respec in the middle of the dungeon. Choices are more interesting when you are weighing the entire range of situations that the dungeon is going to offer.
• If you are just gearing for a specific boss or pull, those choices are fairly easy. You just collect the right gear and set up macros to swap as you go.
• Your gameplay should be more important than having the right gear swapping macros set up.

• The team would like to have space in the game for sustained pressure, with DoT classes wearing down the healers, giving a burst class a chance to jump in and get the kill. Weakness in one area should be made up with strengths in another. If you are less mobile, you should be harder to kill. If you have high mobility, you should probably go down more easily if people are able to focus on you.
• The team would rather focus on increasing strengths rather than mitigating weaknesses. Always bolstering weaknesses makes everyone more average at everything.

• The team doesn't think they will need to do another stat squish for another expansion, and certainly not during this one.
• With the work that the team has done for the Battle for Azeroth stat squish, it should be easier to do it in the future, with far fewer bugs and issues. The team did a one time rework of every creature and ability in the game for Battle for Azeroth, converting them to a system that allows an easy 30% nerf under the hood. Now it is just changing one number and everything should just work.
• Stat squishes help to keep numbers from getting out of control while still providing for power gain over an expansion.
• The team doesn't have a great solution to avoid having to do stat squishes in the future.

• There is something nice about getting buffed up before a pull, it's almost ceremonial. It feels like you are powering up to go into a fight.
• The buffs also have a social element and make people stronger in a raid than they would be on their own.
• The buffs also gave some classes that could use some extra utility an extra reason to be brought.
• Paladins and Druids traditionally had raid buffs, but in the Battle for Azeroth environment, they already had plenty of utility.
• The team would rather focus on the unique and strong utility that Druids and Paladins already bring rather than adding more buffs if they feel that there isn't incentive to bring these classes.

• Loot used to be much harder to come by, with guilds clearing old bosses over and over because loot was rarer.
• Drop rates are now higher, there is personal loot, trading loot, bonus rolls, and other opportunities to get loot. The team expects players will get the loot that they want from a raid within a couple of months of doing that tier.
• It's very rare to actually go a meaningful amount of time into a raid tier without getting the items that you want.
• Warforging and Titanforging add some level of interest to repeated clears of a raid.
• You might have been doing Uldir for a couple of months at this point. There is still a chance to earn something interesting and gain more power to keep progressing in the raid.
• The team doesn't want players to feel obligated to go back and clear lower difficulties every week for the rare chance that something might be an upgrade.
• Most players aren't feeling forced to go back and clear lower difficulties anymore. In Legion, set pieces were a reason to go back to try and get upgrades, but the game has moved away from tier sets.
• It's up to players to choose where to spend their time, and what is most rewarding. You are better off doing Mythic+ than going back to lower raid difficulties for a slim chance at an upgrade.

• Overall, the team is happy with how Personal Loot is working out so far.
• The best geared raid groups are still the ones doing the hardest content.
• The benefits to removing personal loot are three things:
  • On the lower end, there are lots of guilds that churn through a steady stream of trials. Historically, guilds wouldn't give trials any loot, causing them to not have any progression.
  • On the highest end, there are guilds running multiple groups in parallel that would funnel loot to specific characters using Master Loot. This made it 4-5x faster to gear up compared to regular groups that were just doing one run. This led to more and more guilds to start running split raids.
  • Split raids made it difficult to balance raids for everyone, as the top end guilds were overgeared compared to average guilds.
  • If you want to be competitive and try for the Top 100, you can just focus on gearing up your main roster and maybe some backups rather than running split raids.
  • The team is able to itemize differently with Personal Loot. With Master Loot, the team had to design loot tables that didn't have niche items that would only be useful to a spec or two. Now the team can better cater to a wider range of itemization, with more fist weapons, range weapons, shields, and more.
  • For tight knit social groups that weren't abusing any of this, there is something that was lost with these changes.
  • The change for the game as a whole is a step in the right direction. Once you are past the first few weeks of a new raid tier, tradability helps offset these changes.
• The team is trying to make item level a better guide for what is an upgrade.
• Personal Loot is here to stay, so let's talk about how we can improve it rather than rolling it back to Master Loot.

• Battle for Azeroth Ranked PvP has worked out well so far, as there is a clear progression system.
• Unranked PvP isn't a hardcore and competitive environment, it is more relaxed.
• Solo queue isn't a great fit for WoW because the game is very composition dependent.
• When you make a Heroes or Overwatch team, players can switch what they are playing to build the right composition.
• Having good matchmaking with reasonable queue times, a good skill level match, and building reasonable compositions doesn't seem possible to achieve. It would either be very long queue times or wild mismatches in skill / compositions.
• The team is focused on improving the social tools in the game to make it easier for players to join groups of like minded folks. This also is a more social experience, which is something the team tries to emphasize whenever possible as an MMO.

• The difficulty structure that the team has settled on is the right one for World of Warcraft.
• For someone that does Mythic, both Normal and Raid Finder seem like they are the same, but they are serving very different audiences.
• Normal is for a mix of friends and family groups, and pick-up-groups. There are plenty of groups that spend an entire tier progressing through Normal difficulty. This is a satisfying and rewarding experience for those groups.
• Raid Finder doesn't provide a satisfying social or progressive experience.
• In Mists, Normal was similar to Heroic difficulty today. Groups would find Raid Finder to be unsatisfying and asocial, but Normal was too difficult.
• Raid Finder is for people that don't want to commit to a schedule or raid group. If you have some free time, you can jump in, check out the story, get some gear for your alt, finish a quest, and enjoy a bite sized chunk. It's not meant to be a lasting social experience, just a chance to experience raid content and an alternative progression path.
• It isn't possible to merge both of those experiences without heavily disappointing one group.
• Heroic is for more organized groups that value performance and class composition.
• Mythic is for players that want to do that at the very highest level.
• Hopefully groups feel like they can focus on two difficulties. Mythic raiders aren't going back to Normal.
• 30 item levels per tier is the right number assuming players are doing two tiers. The gap allows for progression and getting meaningfully more powerful. Heroic of next tier has to beat Mythic of the previous tier.

• With every expansion, the team has changed their approach to professions.
• Delivery mechanisms for recipes and ways for crafters to differentiate themselves from each other change.
• What makes one Blacksmith different from another? One can make something that the other can't.
• A lot of the differentiation was accomplished through rarity. A lucky drop gave players a reward.
• A world where everyone can make steady progress towards making everything harms the ability for a crafter to have an economic advantage. All crafters are basically the same thing.
• If you never get the thing you want, that would be frustrating, maybe some bad luck protection would help.
• You may not get Rank 3 of what you really want, but you might get Rank 3 for another recipe that will give you a different economic advantage.
• If you spend time being better at a progression, that should come with some economic and power advantages. The team isn't quite there yet.

Dom said:

God damn you are a whiny & salty little bitch.

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Dom said:

How am I going to manage to prove a personal opinion from some raging faggot on an internet forum is wrong? If you want to bitch about something to do with the game, do it. Acting like a fucking spastic retard towards anyone that likes things that they put in the game is just fucking sad and pathetic.

You're not even funny angry. You're just smashing keyboard angry. Go take your fucking meds.

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Fucker said:

Further, they've said similar shit before. Instead of making things better, they gave us patch 8.1. The game will not get better as long as these bozos are still employed there.

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