Post by SGTBRabbit on Oct 16, 2016 1:01:43 GMT
Patch 7.1 Goes Live Oct 25, Legion Q/A Recap
Class Balance
The team is happy with balance, but admits there's still a lot of work to do.
We should expect some class balance changes before and after Patch 7.1.
Numbers players are looking at to gauge balance are a reflection of actual people playing the game, not a reflection of sims.
A large community portion that plays the "strongest thing". Those are the same players that are min-maxing and trying to play the cutting edge.
Whichever spec is played by most of the people is going to get a natural bump in results.
Frost Mage was set as an example, He's way better in game than logging sites suggest and that's because a lot of top-notch mages are playing Fire.
If the Frost specialization received buffs and became the best spec, plenty of Fire players would feel frustrated with how much effort they devoted to their gear and Artifact weapon.
The very same players that made Fire look strong in logs would start switching to Frost.
The team is trying to avoid wild swings in class balance.
Bring the player not the class is the main concern, but the game drifted a little to farm from bringing the class.
This statement dates back to Sunwell Plateau raiding during late Burning Crusade where you needed a melee group. The Rogue needed a Warrior, the Warrior a Shaman and suddenly there were only two spots left in the melee group.
This was a problem and got solved with raid-wide buffs that eliminated mandatory interactions between classes.
The plan is to re-introduce abilities that allow to fill special roles or give utility.
Shadow Priests
There are currently issues with Surrender to MadnessSurrender to Madness. It was supposed to be high risk/high reward, but instead, ended in playing too much of a role in class viability.
The team wants to offer other robust alternatives to it, but this won't happen until after 7.1.
Fury Warriors
Changes are coming in Patch 7.1.
These changes are only a band-aid and a future redesign will be necessary.
The damage penalty is being reduced from 30% to 20%.
The team admits they should have listened more to the feedback from beta, but better late than never.
The extra damage taken feels frustrating, because there's no way to control it.
Ultimately, the fantasy is to giving up some defense for extra damage, but having some control over it.
Protection Warriors
Should be a combo of tanky and mobile with abilities like Heroic LeapHeroic Leap and InterceptIntercept that help achieve it.
Some of the rage from damage taken was a throwback to the old warrior days.
Getting punched makes you angry and you use the anger to fuel your attacks.
It was a replacement for Vengeance and Resolve.
It's important for your tankiness to scale with the content you're doing.
Balance Druids
Have great utility in Mythic+ Dungeons.
Marksmanship Hunters
BarrageBarrage
The team's working to make the ability more consistent, but they need to make sure you can still stand on a hill and hit mobs below you.
It may be changed to a cone that is cut in half so that you don't pull things flying high above you.
The talent is currently the best choice in its tier, making it hard to pick an another talent.
Secondary Stats
The way primary and secondary stats have played out is one of the biggest issues of Legion.
There are disparities between the value of secondary stats for certain specializations.
While it's great to have a best/worst stat, items that don't have your best stat shouldn't be worthless.
This is something the team wants to fix but in such manner that players won't feel that all of a sudden their item choice is invalid.
At no point in the game's history have Primary stats been less valuable than Secondary stats.
It was caused by being really weak with low crit levels and reaching a soft cap on crit levels towards the end of an expansion.
Secondary stats are front loaded now and the issue will get fixed with higher item level gear.
Even though item level should be a good upgrades indicator, in reality, it isn't. It's especially bad with the personal loot trading system being based on item level.
Crafting Costs
The team wants to see how the economy's affected by the Blood of Sargeras vendor.
Expect a huge supply of mats as players will be able to turn their Blood of SargerasBlood of Sargeras into gold.
Despite that, crafting items will still be more expensive as in Warlords.
In Warlords prices for Flasks were the lowest in the game's history.
There has been a large influx in supply materials as players realized how much demand there is.
This is a part of a healthy player economy.
The consumable psychology needs to be reexamined.
Players during Warlords were pre-potting on every pull during progress and farm.
But will a single potion REALLY do the magic during learning boss mechanics?
Certain consumables were designed to be used when they're useful rather than throwing them away without thinking.
The price of consumables will go down throughout the expansion and if this doesn't happen the team will be making adjustments.
Legendaries
When it comes down to Legion Legendaries, it's all about the "moments of excitement".
Placing Legs on a vendor would feel like a painful grind and once you're done, you'd feel relief, not excitement
Systems are in place that prevent extremely bad luck.
Legendaries are altering your gameplay.
They are a direct complement to Artifact Power.
Blizzard is aware of player frustration.
There are still lots of players who haven't had any luck yet to see a Legendary.
Another case is where Legendaries are simply bad and not as good as the team expected.
These will get buffed in a not so distant future.
Prydaz, Xavaric's Magnum OpusPrydaz, Xavaric's Magnum Opus simply feels bad for tanks, but changes could be made to make it better.
Legendary Item Bad Luck Prevention
No time component associated to how it works.
If you got a Legendary, you were lucky.
A single digit percentage of people who got their first leg did get a second one but it didn't have a big impact.
The team should also have implemented good luck protection for legendaries to address the non-functional perception of the system.
Players can randomly get 3 legs without the system being broken, it's RNG.
Raids
Trial of Valor
Won't open on October 25, but two weeks after Patch launch (after BlizzCon).
Mythic Emerald Nightmare
The team isn't satisfied with how they tuned Xavius on Mythic difficulty. Ideally he would have taken at least a few days to kill.
The rest encounters had a nice ramp of difficulty.
Top guilds are doing a lot of split clears, which result in clearing the raid with a higher item level than other guilds.
The developer team would like to find ways to dis-incentivize things done by top guilds like split clears that players don't enjoy, but consider them necessary to stay competitive.
Karazhan
The attunement will be an account-wide unlock and requires followers of item level 850.
Action Camera
Is making a return in Patch 7.1 and will disable itself every time you log in.
Bonus Roll
The Bonus Roll can't award anything else apart from Gold if you get no loot.
The system needs improvement (e.g. rewarding Artifact Power), because Gold reward feels more like an insult rather than consolation prize.
Mythic+ Dungeons
There are no current plans to increase the item level rewarded from Mythic+ with the release of Trial of Valor raid.
The item level will be increased with the release of the Nighthold.
While admitting ninja-leaving in Mythic+ is a frustrating experience, the team can't think of alternatives that wouldn't result in a serious abuse of the system.
If player swapping would be allowed, what would stop the leader from kicking people and bringing his friends?
If the keystone was restored if somebody leaves, every group would make someone leave if the run went bad.
I feel the sudden urge to add my personal opinion here. Like how hard is it to implement a Leaver Penalty that would render the leaver unable to join Mythic dungeons for x days? The penalty would have a multiplicative nature, increasing by +24 hours with every additional leave. Problem solved?
Mythic Dungeons & Class Balance
The team is aiming for areas of strength and weakness. Not every class can have strong consistent AoE.
E.g. a Feral Druid is great at single-target DPS whereas a Demon Hunter does high AoE damage.
AoE is an important tool for speed farms, which was especially the case during dungeon farming prior to the Emerald Nightmare release.
If we say "Strong AoE" Shadow Priests probably aren't something you'd think of even though a Shadow Priest was in a group performing well in a Mythic+15 keystone clear.
It's hard to find a group (regardless of how good you and your spec are) if your spec is perceived by the community as being bad.
Relics
Unlike other items, item level is what matters when you're evaluating upgrades. The team is perfectly fine with that.
Relics not being destroyed would result in bags full of relics that players would constantly swap.
Emerald Nightmare Trinkets
The team is looking at EN trinkets that aren't as powerful as they should be so expect buffs.
Artifact Power & Knowledge
There are no plants to allow moving AP from one weapon to another.
AK makes it easy to keep up with your other weapon.
The team didn't want to have a hard weekly cap. It would feel like a responsibility to hit the cap and after hitting it there'd be no motivation to play.
Research rates for alts are a little shorter to help them catch up.
Drastic catch up measures might be necessary in a few months to get you quickly caught up.
World Quests Variety
Overlapping world quests aren't handled well now.
The system tries to avoid overlapping and prioritize WQ that haven't been seen recently.
If another quest is still active in that area the system can't put the new one up.
Quests up often are the only ones available in that area.
Once UI & gameplay fixes are made, multiple world quests will have the option to appear in a single area, reducing quests that appear too often.
World Quest Rewards
Rewards aren't adjusted to your loot specialization.
It'd be annoying if the map changed every time you switch specs.
Having to cycle between different specs to see different rewards isn't good.
It allows you to get items for off-specs without having to change your loot specialization.
Hidden Artifact Appearances
The team's avoiding a singular approach.
The hunter appearance being on a vendor was implemented to give Hunters an alternative option that wasn't a gun.
The Fury Warrior appearance being only from a World Boss is a valid concern and will be addressed in the future.
If an appearance is hard to get, it's more prestigious and impressive.
It was fun watching the community come together to find hidden things, hopefully there's more of this in the future.
Class Balance
The team is happy with balance, but admits there's still a lot of work to do.
We should expect some class balance changes before and after Patch 7.1.
Numbers players are looking at to gauge balance are a reflection of actual people playing the game, not a reflection of sims.
A large community portion that plays the "strongest thing". Those are the same players that are min-maxing and trying to play the cutting edge.
Whichever spec is played by most of the people is going to get a natural bump in results.
Frost Mage was set as an example, He's way better in game than logging sites suggest and that's because a lot of top-notch mages are playing Fire.
If the Frost specialization received buffs and became the best spec, plenty of Fire players would feel frustrated with how much effort they devoted to their gear and Artifact weapon.
The very same players that made Fire look strong in logs would start switching to Frost.
The team is trying to avoid wild swings in class balance.
Bring the player not the class is the main concern, but the game drifted a little to farm from bringing the class.
This statement dates back to Sunwell Plateau raiding during late Burning Crusade where you needed a melee group. The Rogue needed a Warrior, the Warrior a Shaman and suddenly there were only two spots left in the melee group.
This was a problem and got solved with raid-wide buffs that eliminated mandatory interactions between classes.
The plan is to re-introduce abilities that allow to fill special roles or give utility.
Shadow Priests
There are currently issues with Surrender to MadnessSurrender to Madness. It was supposed to be high risk/high reward, but instead, ended in playing too much of a role in class viability.
The team wants to offer other robust alternatives to it, but this won't happen until after 7.1.
Fury Warriors
Changes are coming in Patch 7.1.
These changes are only a band-aid and a future redesign will be necessary.
The damage penalty is being reduced from 30% to 20%.
The team admits they should have listened more to the feedback from beta, but better late than never.
The extra damage taken feels frustrating, because there's no way to control it.
Ultimately, the fantasy is to giving up some defense for extra damage, but having some control over it.
Protection Warriors
Should be a combo of tanky and mobile with abilities like Heroic LeapHeroic Leap and InterceptIntercept that help achieve it.
Some of the rage from damage taken was a throwback to the old warrior days.
Getting punched makes you angry and you use the anger to fuel your attacks.
It was a replacement for Vengeance and Resolve.
It's important for your tankiness to scale with the content you're doing.
Balance Druids
Have great utility in Mythic+ Dungeons.
Marksmanship Hunters
BarrageBarrage
The team's working to make the ability more consistent, but they need to make sure you can still stand on a hill and hit mobs below you.
It may be changed to a cone that is cut in half so that you don't pull things flying high above you.
The talent is currently the best choice in its tier, making it hard to pick an another talent.
Secondary Stats
The way primary and secondary stats have played out is one of the biggest issues of Legion.
There are disparities between the value of secondary stats for certain specializations.
While it's great to have a best/worst stat, items that don't have your best stat shouldn't be worthless.
This is something the team wants to fix but in such manner that players won't feel that all of a sudden their item choice is invalid.
At no point in the game's history have Primary stats been less valuable than Secondary stats.
It was caused by being really weak with low crit levels and reaching a soft cap on crit levels towards the end of an expansion.
Secondary stats are front loaded now and the issue will get fixed with higher item level gear.
Even though item level should be a good upgrades indicator, in reality, it isn't. It's especially bad with the personal loot trading system being based on item level.
Crafting Costs
The team wants to see how the economy's affected by the Blood of Sargeras vendor.
Expect a huge supply of mats as players will be able to turn their Blood of SargerasBlood of Sargeras into gold.
Despite that, crafting items will still be more expensive as in Warlords.
In Warlords prices for Flasks were the lowest in the game's history.
There has been a large influx in supply materials as players realized how much demand there is.
This is a part of a healthy player economy.
The consumable psychology needs to be reexamined.
Players during Warlords were pre-potting on every pull during progress and farm.
But will a single potion REALLY do the magic during learning boss mechanics?
Certain consumables were designed to be used when they're useful rather than throwing them away without thinking.
The price of consumables will go down throughout the expansion and if this doesn't happen the team will be making adjustments.
Legendaries
When it comes down to Legion Legendaries, it's all about the "moments of excitement".
Placing Legs on a vendor would feel like a painful grind and once you're done, you'd feel relief, not excitement
Systems are in place that prevent extremely bad luck.
Legendaries are altering your gameplay.
They are a direct complement to Artifact Power.
Blizzard is aware of player frustration.
There are still lots of players who haven't had any luck yet to see a Legendary.
Another case is where Legendaries are simply bad and not as good as the team expected.
These will get buffed in a not so distant future.
Prydaz, Xavaric's Magnum OpusPrydaz, Xavaric's Magnum Opus simply feels bad for tanks, but changes could be made to make it better.
Legendary Item Bad Luck Prevention
No time component associated to how it works.
If you got a Legendary, you were lucky.
A single digit percentage of people who got their first leg did get a second one but it didn't have a big impact.
The team should also have implemented good luck protection for legendaries to address the non-functional perception of the system.
Players can randomly get 3 legs without the system being broken, it's RNG.
Raids
Trial of Valor
Won't open on October 25, but two weeks after Patch launch (after BlizzCon).
Mythic Emerald Nightmare
The team isn't satisfied with how they tuned Xavius on Mythic difficulty. Ideally he would have taken at least a few days to kill.
The rest encounters had a nice ramp of difficulty.
Top guilds are doing a lot of split clears, which result in clearing the raid with a higher item level than other guilds.
The developer team would like to find ways to dis-incentivize things done by top guilds like split clears that players don't enjoy, but consider them necessary to stay competitive.
Karazhan
The attunement will be an account-wide unlock and requires followers of item level 850.
Action Camera
Is making a return in Patch 7.1 and will disable itself every time you log in.
Bonus Roll
The Bonus Roll can't award anything else apart from Gold if you get no loot.
The system needs improvement (e.g. rewarding Artifact Power), because Gold reward feels more like an insult rather than consolation prize.
Mythic+ Dungeons
There are no current plans to increase the item level rewarded from Mythic+ with the release of Trial of Valor raid.
The item level will be increased with the release of the Nighthold.
While admitting ninja-leaving in Mythic+ is a frustrating experience, the team can't think of alternatives that wouldn't result in a serious abuse of the system.
If player swapping would be allowed, what would stop the leader from kicking people and bringing his friends?
If the keystone was restored if somebody leaves, every group would make someone leave if the run went bad.
I feel the sudden urge to add my personal opinion here. Like how hard is it to implement a Leaver Penalty that would render the leaver unable to join Mythic dungeons for x days? The penalty would have a multiplicative nature, increasing by +24 hours with every additional leave. Problem solved?
Mythic Dungeons & Class Balance
The team is aiming for areas of strength and weakness. Not every class can have strong consistent AoE.
E.g. a Feral Druid is great at single-target DPS whereas a Demon Hunter does high AoE damage.
AoE is an important tool for speed farms, which was especially the case during dungeon farming prior to the Emerald Nightmare release.
If we say "Strong AoE" Shadow Priests probably aren't something you'd think of even though a Shadow Priest was in a group performing well in a Mythic+15 keystone clear.
It's hard to find a group (regardless of how good you and your spec are) if your spec is perceived by the community as being bad.
Relics
Unlike other items, item level is what matters when you're evaluating upgrades. The team is perfectly fine with that.
Relics not being destroyed would result in bags full of relics that players would constantly swap.
Emerald Nightmare Trinkets
The team is looking at EN trinkets that aren't as powerful as they should be so expect buffs.
Artifact Power & Knowledge
There are no plants to allow moving AP from one weapon to another.
AK makes it easy to keep up with your other weapon.
The team didn't want to have a hard weekly cap. It would feel like a responsibility to hit the cap and after hitting it there'd be no motivation to play.
Research rates for alts are a little shorter to help them catch up.
Drastic catch up measures might be necessary in a few months to get you quickly caught up.
World Quests Variety
Overlapping world quests aren't handled well now.
The system tries to avoid overlapping and prioritize WQ that haven't been seen recently.
If another quest is still active in that area the system can't put the new one up.
Quests up often are the only ones available in that area.
Once UI & gameplay fixes are made, multiple world quests will have the option to appear in a single area, reducing quests that appear too often.
World Quest Rewards
Rewards aren't adjusted to your loot specialization.
It'd be annoying if the map changed every time you switch specs.
Having to cycle between different specs to see different rewards isn't good.
It allows you to get items for off-specs without having to change your loot specialization.
Hidden Artifact Appearances
The team's avoiding a singular approach.
The hunter appearance being on a vendor was implemented to give Hunters an alternative option that wasn't a gun.
The Fury Warrior appearance being only from a World Boss is a valid concern and will be addressed in the future.
If an appearance is hard to get, it's more prestigious and impressive.
It was fun watching the community come together to find hidden things, hopefully there's more of this in the future.