Build of the Month
Recent Blue Posts
Feedback: Death Knight Updates
Feedback: Death Knight Updates
Recent Forum Posts
Are we approaching a Solo Raid WoW Experience?
New heritage armors (Draenei and Troll) are not acceptable
Console Lag Issues, Fastest Level 1-70?
What's Senior Game Designer Ben Brode Playing?, Deck Shuffling, How Good is Curse of Rafaam?
Who's Next TeaserLegion - Priest Tier 19
Keep in mind that some of these colors will be used for PvP gear and the others for raid gear.
Legion - Thistleleaf Adventurer Pet
Legion adds the Thistleleaf Adventurer pet, which can be looted from a Small Treasure Chest found inside a cave located in Lunarwing Shallows, in Val'sharah. He will mount up and follow you on an Enchanted Fey Dragon!
Pre-purchase Legion™ Now, Upgrade to the CE
With the digital version of World of Warcraft: Legion currently available for pre-purchase, we know many of you are interested in getting your level-100 character boost now and early access to the new Demon Hunter before launch. We also know many of you are planning to get the Collector’s Edition of Legion once it’s in stores, but would still like to get in on the action with your boost sooner rather than later.
To help you do both, we’ve set up a process similar to the one for Warlords of Draenor to receive a replacement Legion game key once you upgrade to the Collector’s Edition. Just follow these steps:
1. Pre-purchase a digital version of Legion now and begin using the included character boost immediately.
2. Pick up your Collector’s Edition pre-order once Legion releases.
3. Enter your Collector’s Edition key on your Battle.net Account Management page.
4. Contact Blizzard Customer Support for a replacement of your original Standard or Digital Deluxe Edition Key.
5. Give the shiny new digital key to a friend!
We’ll provide more information, including additional details on what’s inside the Collector’s Edition, in the near future.
To help you do both, we’ve set up a process similar to the one for Warlords of Draenor to receive a replacement Legion game key once you upgrade to the Collector’s Edition. Just follow these steps:
1. Pre-purchase a digital version of Legion now and begin using the included character boost immediately.
2. Pick up your Collector’s Edition pre-order once Legion releases.
3. Enter your Collector’s Edition key on your Battle.net Account Management page.
4. Contact Blizzard Customer Support for a replacement of your original Standard or Digital Deluxe Edition Key.
5. Give the shiny new digital key to a friend!
We’ll provide more information, including additional details on what’s inside the Collector’s Edition, in the near future.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Tank & Healer Ability Tuning
In regards to tank healing, I am very much a fan of "Many hits to be killed, many heals to be healed." This adds variety and allows the engaging task of healing prioritization (i.e. what makes healing fun).
Most of the posts on here have pretty much already spelled out the problem which is scaling. Once you start scaling these heals more than you scale the HP pools, you run into near instant top offs. Then this begins the slippery slope of competitive (raids) top offs, and the trivialization of mechanics. Then the mechanics become more bursty to make healing more engaging and the cycles repeat.
More attention needs to be paid to ensuring that the gear scaling doesn't lead to instant topping off, so that encounter design no longer needs to keep ratcheting damage to extremely bursty levels. Exponential gear curves work great for DPS, but terrible for healing and tanking. We are of a symbiotic relationship in this regard.
We generally agree with this thought process. The fact that tank healing gets spikier as ilvls rise is a huge problem that we're making some significant changes to help address. Most notably, Spirit's removal, and the changes to how secondary stats scale with ilvl will help. The % of a tank's healthbar that you can heal per second went up over the course of Warlords, by a massive amount (probably about 3x). We don't want it to not go up (it gives a good feeling of progression), but it should only go up a little (probably to 1.5x).
I echo the sentiments of other tanks in this thread regarding the removal of active mitigation abilities. Being responsible for accurately recognizing and appropriately responding to potential threats is fun, is engaging, and does not need to be changed. Requiring active responses to incoming damage increases the skill cap, and is one of the things that allows good tanks to outshine other more mediocre players.
We agree with your sentiments; perhaps my wording was not clear. We are not removing active mitigation abilities; we're making them more active. Apologies if my original post was unclear about that. Currently, you can maintain 70-100% uptime on most rotational active mitigation, making them rather passive-feeling. By making them 40-60% uptime, the choice of when to use them becomes more skillful.
On the topic of tank offense, we see lots of discussion about how tanks need to have ways to trade defense for offense, such as choosing to use resources on defensive abilities or offensive abilities, what choices they are for that, how effective they are, etc.
We actually completely disagree with that whole premise, because it leads to a lot of un-fun cascading effects. You may focus more on damage, and frustrate healers with needing more healing. You may focus on your assigned role of tanking, maximizing defense, while doing meager damage. While there are definitely upsides (it can certainly be fun trying to ride the line of not giving up too much defense, while maximizing offense), there is a better way.
Instead, we think that how skillfully you play your class should affect both your offense and defense. If you're trying hard to play your character well, you should be performing well at all of your jobs, and that includes both survival and damage dealing for tanks, not sacrificing one for the other. You shouldn't have to give up your mitigation in order to deal respectable damage. You shouldn't have to accept doing trivial damage if you want to really make sure you survive and minimize healer assistance. Both of those goals should be aligned, and you should be rewarded for playing well with great damage and survivability.
We won't be removing absolutely all damage/survivability tradeoffs, but the few that remain will be significantly toned down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
New Logging Feature: COMBATANT_INFO
@Celestalon: Don't forget people can swap weapons in a fight for various reasons.. to use different enchants or to have specific speed for their opener.. I don't know if the combatant info section will only state the initial weapon used? Although will people even consider this with Artifact weapons now that I think about it...
Technically, It'll show equipped weapon in the list of equipped items. In the section of artifact traits, it'll show the traits of the current spec's artifact, wherever it is. However, as you realized, there would be no reason not to have your correct artifact equipped for 7.0 content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Weakaura Scamming
Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
An update to WeakAuras was released during the night which should have resolved this issue. However, please always remaing vigilant when importing any AddOn settings or scripts from players you do not know.
We are also working on preventing this type of situation in the future by adding an extra step of security for all gold transfers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
In regards to tank healing, I am very much a fan of "Many hits to be killed, many heals to be healed." This adds variety and allows the engaging task of healing prioritization (i.e. what makes healing fun).
Most of the posts on here have pretty much already spelled out the problem which is scaling. Once you start scaling these heals more than you scale the HP pools, you run into near instant top offs. Then this begins the slippery slope of competitive (raids) top offs, and the trivialization of mechanics. Then the mechanics become more bursty to make healing more engaging and the cycles repeat.
More attention needs to be paid to ensuring that the gear scaling doesn't lead to instant topping off, so that encounter design no longer needs to keep ratcheting damage to extremely bursty levels. Exponential gear curves work great for DPS, but terrible for healing and tanking. We are of a symbiotic relationship in this regard.
We generally agree with this thought process. The fact that tank healing gets spikier as ilvls rise is a huge problem that we're making some significant changes to help address. Most notably, Spirit's removal, and the changes to how secondary stats scale with ilvl will help. The % of a tank's healthbar that you can heal per second went up over the course of Warlords, by a massive amount (probably about 3x). We don't want it to not go up (it gives a good feeling of progression), but it should only go up a little (probably to 1.5x).
I echo the sentiments of other tanks in this thread regarding the removal of active mitigation abilities. Being responsible for accurately recognizing and appropriately responding to potential threats is fun, is engaging, and does not need to be changed. Requiring active responses to incoming damage increases the skill cap, and is one of the things that allows good tanks to outshine other more mediocre players.
We agree with your sentiments; perhaps my wording was not clear. We are not removing active mitigation abilities; we're making them more active. Apologies if my original post was unclear about that. Currently, you can maintain 70-100% uptime on most rotational active mitigation, making them rather passive-feeling. By making them 40-60% uptime, the choice of when to use them becomes more skillful.
On the topic of tank offense, we see lots of discussion about how tanks need to have ways to trade defense for offense, such as choosing to use resources on defensive abilities or offensive abilities, what choices they are for that, how effective they are, etc.
We actually completely disagree with that whole premise, because it leads to a lot of un-fun cascading effects. You may focus more on damage, and frustrate healers with needing more healing. You may focus on your assigned role of tanking, maximizing defense, while doing meager damage. While there are definitely upsides (it can certainly be fun trying to ride the line of not giving up too much defense, while maximizing offense), there is a better way.
Instead, we think that how skillfully you play your class should affect both your offense and defense. If you're trying hard to play your character well, you should be performing well at all of your jobs, and that includes both survival and damage dealing for tanks, not sacrificing one for the other. You shouldn't have to give up your mitigation in order to deal respectable damage. You shouldn't have to accept doing trivial damage if you want to really make sure you survive and minimize healer assistance. Both of those goals should be aligned, and you should be rewarded for playing well with great damage and survivability.
We won't be removing absolutely all damage/survivability tradeoffs, but the few that remain will be significantly toned down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
New Logging Feature: COMBATANT_INFO
@Celestalon: Don't forget people can swap weapons in a fight for various reasons.. to use different enchants or to have specific speed for their opener.. I don't know if the combatant info section will only state the initial weapon used? Although will people even consider this with Artifact weapons now that I think about it...
Technically, It'll show equipped weapon in the list of equipped items. In the section of artifact traits, it'll show the traits of the current spec's artifact, wherever it is. However, as you realized, there would be no reason not to have your correct artifact equipped for 7.0 content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Weakaura Scamming
Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
An update to WeakAuras was released during the night which should have resolved this issue. However, please always remaing vigilant when importing any AddOn settings or scripts from players you do not know.
We are also working on preventing this type of situation in the future by adding an extra step of security for all gold transfers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
DLC #522 - Field of View
DLC #522 has been released.
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