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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. |
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We've just applied a hotfix that reduces the damage dealt by creatures between level 1 and 100 by up to 16%, and reduces 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. |
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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. |
To be clear, it's unacceptable to us for the "right" thing in any form to ever be equipping weaker gear, unequipping items, or doing things that in any way lower your "absolute" power. There are a couple of loopholes where that is true currently, and they'll be high-priority fixes for us in the next day or two. Also to be clear, scrapping the entire system is certainly still an option. My post was not meant to be a "too bad, get used to it" proclamation. But I did want to lay out what we consider to be the very real problem we're trying to solve here. I also understand that to many folks it doesn't appear to be a real problem at all, and it seems like we're just trying to throw up pointless obstacles. Power always feels good. It feels better to kill something in 5 seconds than in 10, especially when you remember when it took 10. Even better when you can do it in 2. Better still when you can kill 4 or 5 things in that time. But is there a point where that goes too far? We think so, and we're just looking to ease up off the gas pedal a little bit. We don't want to halt the power curve, and certainly never to go in reverse, but rather to take a bit longer on our road to an endgame world where everyone effectively walks around death-touching mobs for quest credit. |
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Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.
Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future. Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider. We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty. But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher? To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die. Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.) The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing. Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion. |
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Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.
Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future. Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider. We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty. But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher? To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die. Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.) The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing. Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion. |
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Let's talk a bit about legendaries.
From the beginning of Legion, we've deliberately been pretty tight-lipped about how obtaining them works, because the best thing you can do to get them really does just boil down to "play the game and do the max-level activities you enjoy most." It was meant to be a background universal reward that would occasionally offer a surge of power to complement the transparent and omnipresent Artifact and normal itemization systems. Obviously, as we sit here reading posts speculating whether it's better to delete unwanted legendaries to improve your chances of getting more, there's a lesson for us to learn from how that approach has played out. (PS: Don't delete your legendaries. The system looks at what you've gotten, not what you have.) We've also been pretty conservative in our design, with the intent of loosening the reins as time went on. With a system of this scale that spans all max-level activities, we couldn't be certain that we'd tuned it correctly based on data from thousands of people playing our beta for a few hours a week; it'd inevitably be different in the live game with millions of people playing in far more focused ways. And we knew that if we erred on the side of legendaries being too common, we could easily end up in a situation where some people (whether lucky people, or those who played the most) were flooded with them. If that happened, it'd have been a mess - a chunk of the playerbase would've had bags full of legendary items and no more to look forward to for months to come, and if we'd tried to "fix" it after the fact, then everyone who hadn't taken advantage of the generous period would have felt forever behind. So we started out stingy, since if we erred in that direction it would be far more fixable. (We've since increased legendary drop rates in general, in patch 7.1). We also put some measures in place to reduce the gap between the very luckiest player and the unluckiest player. Luck is inevitably a factor in games like this, but with millions of people playing the game, if we allowed pure randomness to go unchecked, there would inevitably be some players who played hours every week and literally never saw a single legendary item. Thus, the so-called "bad luck protection" that improves your chances a bit each time you could have gotten a legendary but failed to do so. As its name suggests, the "bad luck protection" system exists to protect the unluckiest players from the cruel fate of the dice. Those who were on the other end of the spectrum in terms of good fortune, we figured, didn't need a system to help put them even farther ahead of the rest of the world. And we drew that line at 4 legendaries, initially, planning to raise it as time went on. Once you'd gotten 4, you could absolutely get more, but the invisible hand of "bad luck protection" would no longer help you. Almost by definition, if you had 4 legendaries in, say, early October, you were super-lucky. You didn't need help getting more. What we genuinely did not anticipate was just how much some of the very most dedicated players would play, mainly in pursuit of Artifact Power. By mid-November, we started to hear questions about whether there was some sort of 4-legendary limit, and we realized that there existed a group of players that had done so much content that they actually had an expected legendary count of around 4. They hadn't needed to be unusually lucky to get there. (Note that this is a very small group. They're overrepresented in these discussions, because this issue concerns them, but we're talking about hundreds of people out of millions.) So we removed that soft cap just over a week ago. "Bad luck protection" now applies indefinitely. Most of the players in this category have probably been focusing on Mythic Trial of Valor for the past week, and since wiping repeatedly to raid bosses during progress sadly can't award legendaries, they haven't had a chance to see the effects of the change just yet. If/when some players get to a point when they have every legendary available for their spec, then so be it. They certainly will have earned it, and there will be more coming in future patches. The Unique-Equipped limit keeps the power gap between the haves and have-nots reasonable, and we'll continue to adjust the effectiveness of the outlier legendaries (coming up in patch 7.1.5) with the goal of keeping them exciting but not gamebreaking. |
Actually, we did just take action against players who went out of their way to take advantage of this bug. We had two main motivations: First, fairness to those who could have taken advantage of this exploit but chose not to; and second, setting/reinforcing a precedent that flagrant abuse of bugs for personal gain will be taken seriously. Even if you're not concerned with fair play on a community level, from a pure selfish perspective, you're better off not taking advantage of loopholes like these as it's very likely that you'll end up worse off than if you'd never done it at all. Obviously, the existence of a bug like this is our fault. We should have caught this issue (which arose from a a conflict between two world quests, causing credit to not save properly) during testing. But the existence of our mistake doesn't excuse players' deliberate actions to take advantage of it. Here's an awkward real-world analogy: Let's say you're walking down the street one day, when you look down, and notice a crisp bank note being lifted by a gentle breeze around your feet. You look around, and no one is in sight. Well, guess it's your lucky day! A few moments later, you come across two or three more bank notes. Definitely strange, and you're a bit suspicious because this obviously isn't normal, but they're just lying there. No one can really blame you if you pick them up, right? Now, you turn the corner, and you see vast stacks of bank notes sitting on a pallet in the middle of the road. It seems like an unfortunate driver failed to properly secure the rear door of his armored truck, leading to this scene. But if you walked up and grabbed a large handful from the pile, would that be an entirely innocent act? Would you be surprised if a police officer who witnessed you do that thought otherwise? Finally, if you were to fetch large garbage bags, and call up your friends and tell them to do the same, so you could load up as much of the cash as you all could carry.... Still entirely innocent? Sure, the driver made a big mistake in not locking the door, but would there be any surprise if you were tracked down based on CCTV footage and there were consequences for that act? (Hey, I said it would be an awkward analogy.) The account actions taken today were generally in direct proportion to the degree of abuse. Players who may have innocently repeated the quest just a few times were not actioned. But on the other end of the spectrum, some who managed to fit in literally hundreds of completions, forming groups to do so, received far more serious penalties. We apologize for the existence of the bug in the first place, but once an issue like this is out in the wild, we need to act to preserve the spirit of fair play. |
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Hi.
If it seems like there's a lot of "listening to feedback," and not much in the way of answers or concrete plans, it's because we haven't yet formulated those answers, not because there won't be any or because we don't care to. Overall, the 7.0 patch and the Legion expansion probably saw more total change to class mechanics than any other single update in the game's history. And hunters were among the most affected. That sort of revamp represents the beginning of a cycle of feedback and iteration, not an endpoint, and we know there's a lot of work left to do here. In the weeks immediately following launch, the team has primarily been focused on fixing bugs and on overall spec balance. Numerical tuning isn't everything, but it can be done straightforwardly, often via hotfix, to get changes into players' hands as quickly as possible. The team's goal in this phase is for players of each spec to feel like they can succeed in the Legion endgame. But, of course, numerical viability doesn't mean much if you aren't enjoying the feel or mechanics of your class. The next phase of iteration will focus on talent rows that seem devoid of choice, often because there is one dominant "correct" option. Through a mix of numbers balance and some redesign where needed, we'll aim to improve talent diversity, opening up new playstyles and options in the process. That is our plan for all classes, but it applies especially to hunters, where talent diversity is often sorely lacking. These types of changes require more testing time and iteration than pure DPS tuning: This is why planned changes to priests' Surrender to Madness, or paladins' Crusade, were delayed until a later patch in order to allow for more thorough evaluation. Finally, we'll move on to evaluating base class and spec toolkits. Those types of changes are the riskiest to make, especially in the middle of an expansion, because they affect the core experience of every player of a given spec. But we don't plan on waiting an entire expansion to address concerns like the ones that have been raised in this thread. All sorts of potential changes are on the table. For example, in retrospect, while a focus on traps strengthened Survival spec identity, taking so many traps away from Marks/BM entirely was harmful to hunter class identity. But changes like those can only happen in a full patch, and will benefit from a lengthy PTR cycle. PS: Yes, I realize that hunters don't have an ability called Deterrence anymore, and I should have said Turtle instead. Force of habit - I also still called Hand of Protection "BoP" for years (though now it actually is BoP again...). Sorry. |
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Whoops, didn't realize the thread was capped. Fixed.
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Sorry to hear that it came across that way. Just to be clear, I was trying to explain why we sometimes may seem conservative or slow with balance changes. Frost mages were used as an example of a spec that we do feel is currently lagging behind in raid and dungeon gameplay, but not by nearly as much as data from public log sites might suggest. It seems less disruptive to buff a spec incrementally, allowing time for the results of each change to play out and repeating if needed, rather than risking overshooting the mark. (And yes, we definitely have failed in this goal at times - post-launch rogue spec balance comes to mind.) At the heart of balance concerns is the fact that people just want to be able to feel like they have a place in the endgame as their preferred class/spec, and we entirely share that goal. Class balance is an ongoing process, with new variables coming into play all the time, as item level increases, new trinkets, legendaries, and set bonuses enter the mix, players get deeper into their respective artifact trees, theorycraft evolves, etc. The Q&A didn't delve into specific details because the exact list of changes is and was still evolving. There will be a new 7.1 build on PTR very shortly, and patch notes to follow. That patch contains some improvements for several of the specs that currently are currently underperforming (including both flavors of Frost). Those changes should in general move things in the right direction, but we'll be continuing to watch and adjust further as needed. |
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Oversight. Will be fixed ASAP.
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Since the expansion launched, aside from fixing bugs, our class and systems teams have been keeping an eye on qualitative class feedback, looking for things that can be addressed via hotfix. We recently increased the default number of Warlock Soul Shards to 3 to decrease their ramp-up time; we also reduced the base cooldown of Arms Warrior Colossus Smash to 30 seconds, to mitigate the worst-case scenario when Tactician failed to reset its cooldown.
In the Developer Q&A last week, we touched on the general topic of class balance so far in Legion, and suggested that we were looking at making tuning changes via hotfix towards the end of this week. However, after further consideration of available data and the current state of the game, we feel that it’s still premature for a broad tuning pass. World of Warcraft’s endgame consists of a range of activities, including varied raid encounters at different difficulty levels, random matchmade dungeons, Mythic dungeons (both baseline and Keystone-modified), outdoor questing, and of course arenas and battlegrounds (though I’ll be focusing on other gameplay modes in this post, since we can now handle PvP tuning separately). That’s the game that was available in beta, and it’s what our classes are designed and balanced around. But right now, everyone at max level is playing a very narrow slice of that diverse endgame: we are running dungeons, and we’re specifically running them with a focus on efficiency rather than success. Many players have learned the various dungeon encounters, and now zone in with their Heroic or Mythic groups not wondering whether they’ll be able to prevail over the challenges within, but rather how quickly. Unsurprisingly, that places an inordinate value on sustained AoE/cleave damage, and especially on-demand burst against the groups of four or five targets that comprise most enemy packs in dungeons, and so those specs that excel in those areas seem elevated above the rest. But in a couple of weeks, when we talk about balance, major considerations will include things like meeting the single-target DPS check on Ursoc or handling the spread-out tentacles of Il’gynoth in the Emerald Nightmare, or making sure that your group can reliably interrupt Odyn’s Stormforged Obliterator in Halls of Valor, while running away from Radiant Tempest, so that he doesn’t derail your Mythic Keystone run entirely. Until we can see data from the endgame in its entirety, we can’t make informed decisions about which numbers need adjusting, and by how much. Therefore, at this point we’re aiming to hold off on a broad pass of tuning hotfixes until the end of the first week of raiding and Mythic Keystone dungeons. In the meantime, we are looking at a couple of targeted changes to address some clear outliers: in the near future, we’re planning on deploying hotfixes that reduce tank damage output across the board (tanks should be very sturdy and effective at killing things, but too often their damage output rivals that of pure damage dealers), as well as reducing the AoE burst damage capabilities of Windwalker monks (mainly Strike of the Windlord’s area component) and Havoc Demon Hunters (mainly Fel Barrage). Those specializations will still excel in that area, but will not be so clearly dominant over their peers. In the long run, our tuning goal is simply for everyone to feel that they can play the class and specialization they prefer. There will of course be areas of strength and weakness, and some specs will thrive in certain situations while lagging behind in others, but those gaps should not preclude viability. We’ll continue to look at available data and player feedback and make adjustments until that is the case, but that process will not begin until next week. Thank you for your patience. |
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Since the expansion launched, aside from fixing bugs, our class and systems teams have been keeping an eye on qualitative class feedback, looking for things that can be addressed via hotfix. We recently increased the default number of Warlock Soul Shards to 3 to decrease their ramp-up time; we also reduced the base cooldown of Arms Warrior Colossus Smash to 30 seconds, to mitigate the worst-case scenario when Tactician failed to reset its cooldown.
In the Developer Q&A last week, we touched on the general topic of class balance so far in Legion, and suggested that we were looking at making tuning changes via hotfix towards the end of this week. However, after further consideration of available data and the current state of the game, we feel that it’s still premature for a broad tuning pass. World of Warcraft’s endgame consists of a range of activities, including varied raid encounters at different difficulty levels, random matchmade dungeons, Mythic dungeons (both baseline and Keystone-modified), outdoor questing, and of course arenas and battlegrounds (though I’ll be focusing on other gameplay modes in this post, since we can now handle PvP tuning separately). That’s the game that was available in beta, and it’s what our classes are designed and balanced around. But right now, everyone at max level is playing a very narrow slice of that diverse endgame: we are running dungeons, and we’re specifically running them with a focus on efficiency rather than success. Many players have learned the various dungeon encounters, and now zone in with their Heroic or Mythic groups not wondering whether they’ll be able to prevail over the challenges within, but rather how quickly. Unsurprisingly, that places an inordinate value on sustained AoE/cleave damage, and especially on-demand burst against the groups of four or five targets that comprise most enemy packs in dungeons, and so those specs that excel in those areas seem elevated above the rest. But in a couple of weeks, when we talk about balance, major considerations will include things like meeting the single-target DPS check on Ursoc or handling the spread-out tentacles of Il’gynoth in the Emerald Nightmare, or making sure that your group can reliably interrupt Odyn’s Stormforged Obliterator in Halls of Valor, while running away from Radiant Tempest, so that he doesn’t derail your Mythic Keystone run entirely. Until we can see data from the endgame in its entirety, we can’t make informed decisions about which numbers need adjusting, and by how much. Therefore, at this point we’re aiming to hold off on a broad pass of tuning hotfixes until the end of the first week of raiding and Mythic Keystone dungeons. In the meantime, we are looking at a couple of targeted changes to address some clear outliers: in the near future, we’re planning on deploying hotfixes that reduce tank damage output across the board (tanks should be very sturdy and effective at killing things, but too often their damage output rivals that of pure damage dealers), as well as reducing the AoE burst damage capabilities of Windwalker monks (mainly Strike of the Windlord’s area component) and Havoc Demon Hunters (mainly Fel Barrage). Those specializations will still excel in that area, but will not be so clearly dominant over their peers. In the long run, our tuning goal is simply for everyone to feel that they can play the class and specialization they prefer. There will of course be areas of strength and weakness, and some specs will thrive in certain situations while lagging behind in others, but those gaps should not preclude viability. We’ll continue to look at available data and player feedback and make adjustments until that is the case, but that process will not begin until next week. Thank you for your patience. |
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One thing that I should have stressed more in discussing warlocks in the Q&A is that we haven't done any class/spec numerical-balance hotfixes yet, for anyone. Initial efforts have been focused on fixing bugs (where possible without waiting for a new patch), and gathering data. The basic concern of "our DPS is low" is one that we can and will address. We just need more data from the live environment, from all 24 DPS specs, in order to inform the exact changes we'll be making.
But warlocks should absolutely be numerically competitive with other damage-dealers, and we'll make sure that's the case. The Soul Shard change got a lot of attention just because it's something that we can handle via hotfix. Concerns such as artifact trait design, visual issues, and rotational flow could only be tackled via a future patch, and are a topic of discussion among the class team. Your feedback is being read and discussed, and threads like http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20748795049 are excellent. If it sounded like I was saying we were literally unable to find any quality feedback, that certainly wasn't my intent. I understand frustration when it seems like valid concerns are being ignored, but constructive feedback is always more helpful. We both want the same thing here: for you to have fun playing your class. |
To clarify: This experimental mode is/was apparently being enabled in some cases through no direct action of users. The concern isn't that people could somehow accidentally type "/console actioncam full" and then be bewildered regarding how to disable it. The concern is that people have logged into 7.0.3 and found some of those features defaulted on, with no indication to that effect, and the game does not provide any clear direction regarding how to disable it. "Action cam" will return. It was an in-development feature that ended up being accessible to players in one of our beta builds, and when we saw how much fun players were having with it, we decided to keep it around as a hidden toggle rather than disabling it immediately. It seemed harmless at the time. But there is now clear evidence to the contrary. The mode needs some extra safeguards, and we need to make it easier for players to know whether portions of it are enabled and if so, that it's an experimental feature, and how to disable it. That isn't possible without a real patch (that is to say, not a hotfix, but rather a new patch number beyond 7.0.3). |
Sorry, I should have mentioned that. We don't believe that is currently happening, and it's absolutely not intended. If an item is for your class, you should be able to roll Need on it regardless. If it is specifically for your spec, your roll should take priority over off-spec rolls. And if an item is not for your class (unequippable or intended for a role your class cannot perform, such as a rogue looking at a tank trinket ), then you should only be able to roll Greed/DE. There should be no other logic or restrictions on the system, and if you encounter any, we'd be very interested in hearing more. The reports we've seen that seemed to blame player item level for inability to roll, thus far, were actually caused by the Rogue/Hunter issue I mentioned above. |
There's a significant bug with Group Loot that posts like this have brought to light over the past day. On Leather and Mail armor, which has both Intellect and Agility, the presence of Intellect is incorrectly preventing Rogues and Hunters from rolling Need on those items. That's obviously unintended, and terrible. It shouldn't behave that way, and we're working towards a fix within the next day. The Tier Token behavior you mention is also unintended - class restrictions should be respected. We'll investigate and fix if something is awry there. |
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Just to clarify, there are more than two loot options here. No one's forcing raids to use Personal Loot, just because Master is off the table. (Though I am requesting that people give it a try and let us know what you think, since there have been significant improvements. Or don't. Your choice.)
As a player, in my own guild raids, we've used Need/Greed for as long as I can remember, sometimes just passing on contested stuff, figuring out who should get it, and then having them loot it. Uncontested stuff just gets Needed and ends up in the player's hands immediately. It always seemed simpler than manually assigning each piece. But maybe we're weird. If you aren't a guild group, other Group-Loot-based methods remain available for your use in raids (both Need/Greed and FFA). Obviously that opens the door to ninja-looting, which is why I asked about that concern in my first post. But if you aren't worried that one of your friends/guildmates is going to steal something and vanish, then the only loss is the slight of inconvenience people needing to loot items off a corpse, or having someone trade items around to whoever's awarded them. I of course understand the desire to avoid any inconvenience, and we've tried to minimize the impact on static raiding groups, but we feel that curbing harmful uses (and abuses) of Master Loot in pickup groups is a benefit that offsets those costs. |
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We've made a few more tweaks to abilities that were unaffected by Demoralized (e.g. Wrought/Focused Chaos) because they were "friendly-fire" damage. Those hotfixes should now be live, and will be documented in hotfix notes later today.
Raid Finder should also now be receiving a weaker form of the Demoralized debuff (many of the changes that the Normal/Heroic/Mythic version is offsetting involve things like high-end raid trinkets that aren't as commonly present in Raid Finder). That said, having seen how Normal, Heroic, and Mythic have played out over the course of the first day of the patch, raiding has been easier in some ways (many combat times are a bit faster, even if on-pull burst is slower), but harder in others (healer throughput is more stressed, old methods of handling some mechanics are no longer reproducible, etc.). That's not the intent - were definitely aiming for "slightly easier" across the board. We'll be increasing the magnitude of the Demoralized debuff later today, and will continue to keep an eye on content. We're also looking at introducing a form of the debuff to Warlords dungeons (Mythic especially). |
