Leveling nerfed AGAIN in 8.0

I noticed last night when leveling up a Void Elf I made yesterday (my next heritage armor goal!), that the dungeon window did indeed say the bonus was only once per week - but the bonus remained similar each time I queued and completed a dungeon, so I suspect that is just a display issue. I'm currently chasing this up internally.

The Legion Invasions have now been hotfixed so that they now scale down to level 98 as before.

We're forwarding on reports we receive of perceived scaling issues (such as mobs taking an excessively long time to defeat, mechanics being lethal that were not lethal before etc.) and if you come across anything like this in-game, please submit a bug report.

As confirmed during the Q&A last night, it is a display issue that the Random Dungeon finder says that the bonus experience can only be obtained once per week. There's no intent on nerfing the dungeon experience.

The experience awarded for completing the dungeon has been rolled into the experience awarded after defeating the final boss of the dungeon. You will still receive it, it will just show up as one large number rather than 2 separate smaller ones.

The devs are working on squashing the bugs with scaling as fast as possible, so if you see anything out of the ordinary (like enemies one-shotting you) please submit a Bug Report in-game and be as specific as possible (i.e. the name of the mob, the name of the ability etc.)

Just an update here, we've made a large number of hotfixes and changes to leveling the content since the Pre-Patch to address issues such as; adjusting mobs that were too hitting hard, some mob HP being disproportionately high, bosses having lethal abilities that weren't lethal before etc. both in, and out, of dungeons.

If you notice that a particular mob takes a long time to kill, or has an ability that seems to hit a lot harder than before (this is for both open world, and within dungeons), please do continue to make bug reports about it. Being as specific as possible with the report, including information such as the name of the mob, what felt off, any high impact abilities, as well as what class and spec you're playing, will really help pin-point further pain-points so that we can fix them.

Likewise if there are any dungeons you feel take too long or don't award EXP proportionate to the length, please do continue to submit these reports as well.

Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to submit reports so far. We're continuing to squash bugs and make adjustments as the reports come in, the intention isn't for leveling to be slower than it was in 7.3.5

25/07/2018 07:22Posted by Acee

Hey i have an idea lets remove Argus AHOTC and the Spellwing mount before prepatch,then roll out the said prepatch destroy anything that was left from Antorus and then try to fix..it? 3 weeks before BFA?

Not really related to this topic, but the Violet Spellwing can still be obtained up until the release of Battle for Azeroth.

25/07/2018 12:50Posted by Kikuyu

Wow! thanks for an overdue post that doesnt actually address many of the issues. there is STILL no word about the dungeon completion bonuses. ive spent half my time attempting to level and the other half sending in bug reports. even gm's have brushed me off. just admit its broken. that's all we are asking! I dont care if it didnt get fixed for a week or so at least admit there is a problem! this has still not been addressed or even commented on!

It was explicitly said in the Q&A last week that it's not intended for leveling to take longer, or be any more difficult, than it was in 7.3.5. If a mob took around X seconds to kill in 7.3.5, it should still take around X seconds to kill in 8.0.1. If it doesn't, we will fix it - this is an ongoing process.

I also mentioned earlier in this thread that the inconsistency on the Random Dungeon queue reward was a display issue - you should receive the same bonus each time when doing a random dungeon. We're continuing to forward on the reports about inconsistencies with the end of dungeon completion bonus.

Yes, you're right, I do realise it's frustrating to be told "make a bug report" - but from my own play experience recently there's definitely mobs out there that are in worse places than others in terms of time-to-kill and damage output. Specific details about the mobs that feel much worse than others allow us to get to those, and alleviate those pain-points more quickly. However, this doesn't mean that the rest of the world won't be looked at.

Again, the intent is not for leveling to be slower or harder than it was in 7.3.5. When all is said and done it should feel similar to what it was in 7.3.5 and it's something there are people working toward every single day.

25/07/2018 14:01Posted by Kikuyu

25/07/2018 13:55Posted by Aerythlea

I also mentioned earlier in this thread that the inconsistency on the Random Dungeon queue reward was a display issue -

this is the damn issue you guys have! people are having issues and reporting COMPLETION XP not RANDOM DUNGEON XP as it is MISSING! I have even wrote in my post quite clearly COMPLETION XP yet you are quoting a completely different source of xp to me >.< I have done bug reports, spoken to 2 GM's and here on the forums and all your officials are showing is they have NO IDEA WTF THE PLAYER BASE IS TALKING ABOUT!

That is why me and others are getting annoyed. you buffed random dungeon xp, when people are complaining about the completion xp that ion himself in the Q and A said that 'oh its rolled into the boss xp' NO IT ISNT AND NO IT ISNT A DISPLAY BUG!

At the end of the very paragraph you only quoted the opening part from, I said:

25/07/2018 13:55Posted by Aerythlea

We're continuing to forward on the reports about inconsistencies with the end of dungeon completion bonus.

To clarify that a bit more, I mean inconsistencies between what you get now, and what you got in 7.3.5

Just had a little bit more info regarding Legion mob HP specifically:

The mobs in the outdoor world Legion had their HP (and power) lowered in 8.0.1 due to de-powering of Artifact Weapons. This was done so that there wouldn't be a sudden increase in difficulty between Warlords of Draenor and Legion questing, as well as to prevent a sudden increase in difficulty at 110 for players engaging in outdoor content such as World Quests compared to 7.3.5. The current plan is for Legion content to be tuned to be more in-line with the rest of the leveling curve in a future patch.

Good morning all!

We identified an issue with the dungeon completion bonus which meant that players were only receiving 1/5th of the EXP they should be getting (due to the way EXP works in a group). I've been informed that this issue should now be resolved, so you should be receiving a large amount of EXP upon completing a dungeon now. If this isn't the case please do let me know.

The following was just posted by Watcher in the NA forums, copying it here for discussion:

If any of the communication thus far, or the lack of visible action, has given the impression that we don't consider the issues raised in this thread and others like it to be a problem, I'd like to emphatically state that nothing could be farther from the truth.

At this point, the feel and pacing of the level-up experience is a top priority for the team. We made deliberate changes to the feel of combat six months ago in 7.3.5, moving away from a world where low-level players (especially with heirlooms) could often kill outdoor enemies in 3-4 seconds, and where dungeon mobs died so quickly that a caster with a long windup might not even get a single spell off. Those changes were controversial at the time, but we stand by them as an improvement to the overall pacing of the game. But we also think that those changes went quite far enough, and have absolutely no desire or intent to continue moving in that direction. Nothing about the pre-patch was deliberately intended to make combat take longer than it did previously.

So why haven't we fixed it yet? Honestly, because we genuinely don't know where exactly the problem lies, and we don't want to make a blind blanket change that actually misses the real source of the problem. That's why much of Ythisens' and others' messages thus far have been asking the community for detailed examples to guide our search.

We "squished" stats and item levels, but this was done with the aim of being neutral with respect to the duration and lethality of combat. When we heard complaints about things taking too long to kill, we immediately assumed we'd gotten those calculations wrong. But a look at the raw data didn't suggest any clear anomalies. So we started testing empirically: We can run internal 7.3.5 builds, so we set up test characters (e.g. a level 70 wearing appropriate quest gear awarded by quests around that level - Item Level 115 in 7.3.5, Item Level 79 in 8.0.1) and fight outdoor enemies in 7.3.5, and then take the same character in 8.0.1 and fight the same enemies, and compare.

We are seeing the same sort of discrepancies that folks in this thread and others have pointed out, but still have yet to pinpoint the exact aspect of scaling that we failed to account for. We want to understand WHY the numbers are off and fix the underlying cause: Were stats on gear reduced too much? Some aspect of creature armor or other combat calculations? Are our baseline values accurate, but the shape of the scaling curve wrong such that it’s particularly far off the mark in the 60-80 range? We would prefer a targeted solution versus just applying a bandaid fix that could mask deeper issues that could cause problems down the line, but at some point it’s not fair to give you a degraded experience for the sake of that investigation, so we’ll likely go ahead with a blanket health reduction in the near future while we continue to investigate.

Either way, the current state is not the game experience we intended, and it’s something we will fix.

There is another issue tangentially related to this discussion that I also would like to address: Many feel that it takes too long to level in the 60-80 range in particular, and that the combat pacing issues discussed here are just a piece of that larger problem. We agree – currently players are taking about 15% longer per level, on average, in that range as compared to before 60 or after 80. We’re in the process of assembling a set of changes that will smooth out the experience curve at level 60 and beyond, reducing the experience requirements for those levels.

We’ll have further updates as specific changes roll out, but we’re prioritizing our work on this problem and hoping to get these improvements out to everyone in the coming days.

We've just applied a hotfix that reduces the damage dealt by creatures between level 1 and 100 by up to 16%, and their health by up to 24%. Until a subsequent fix (targeted for next week) to update clients with the new data, unit frames may not reflect the change in creature health, but combat should be faster and a bit less lethal across the board while leveling.

Thank you for your patience - we'll continue to monitor both logs and feedback closely, and will make further tweaks if needed.