Legion - World Quests, Salvage Yard, Pruning, PvP, Legion Goals, Tracer Spotlight

Upcoming End of Era 5, Quin's Overview & Thoughts on Patch 2.4.1

New Mage Card Reveal - Twilight Flamecaller

Tracer Hero Spotlight

Overwatch Beta Weekend Survival Guide - Learn the Heroes & Maps, Overwatch at PAX East 2016

Legion - World Quests
Blizzard gave some additional clarifications today about world quest availability, as well as the original design notes. Please keep in mind we have only had a few days to test it, so the following information could be incomplete or incorrect:

  • World quests become available at Level 110.
  • These quests have a limited duration, with some as short as a few hours and others as long as a week.
  • One faction has a set of emissary quests every day, requiring you to complete four quests for that faction to earn some gold and a cache of loot.
  • Each set of emissary quests will be available for three days, so you can have up to three at once.
  • Quests appear all around the Broken Isles, with markers on the map:
  • Possible rewards include:
    • Artifact Power and Relics
    • Rare item level 805-825+ gear
    • Gold
    • Pet Battle-Stones
    • Order Hall Follower Equipment and Resources
    • Crafting Reagents
    • Pets and Mounts
    • Reputation
  • There are several different types of quests:
    • Regular, Rare, Rare Elite, Epic, Elite, and Epic Elite World Quests
    • Profession World Quests, including Herbalism, Skinning, Mining, First Aid, Fishing, Cooking, and Archaeology
    • Dungeon World Quests
    • PvP World Quests (Not required to complete Emissary quests)
    • Battle Pet World Quests
  • The quest icon helps to indicate what type of quest it is. Swords for PvP, Profession icons, Battle Pet icons, and then different rarity colors and borders around the normal quest icon. The dragon border usually indicates a group is required.





World Quest Availability
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Yes! One of our major design goals for the endgame of Legion is getting players out into the world with friends to do activities.

A few things help accomplish this:

1) Everyone in your entire region will see the same World Quests. Invite your cross-server friends, you can all do the same activities!*

2) Similarly, everyone will see the same loot (or a fallback). If a world boss spawns and is going to drop a mount this week, everyone will see (on the World Quest UI) the mount.**

*Some World Quests may be gated behind personal quest progression (e.g. Suramar), though.

**There will still be random, rare toys/mounts/pets from a variety of activities, this is simply a philosophy for World Quests.

We want to make it easy and fun to coordinate an adventure with your friends, no matter where they are in the world, and what item level they're at.

Legion and the Salvage Yard
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
just saw he salvage crate nerf on MMO-C, will that take effect on prepatch, or will we be able to keep our boxes for wardrobe?
In 7.0, Salvage Yard will give a new crate. Pre-existing unopened crates will not be affected. We’re not THAT cruel.
To clarify, changes like this are being made so that you don't feel obligated to run Draenor missions in Legion. (WarcraftDevs)

To clarify: we're going to make sure you can still get the transmog gear sets. The intention is NOT to remove that gear or make it otherwise inaccessible. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

On Pruning, PvP, and Our Goals for Legion
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
So, let’s talk about pruning. I’d like to give some clearer insight into what we’re trying to achieve, and the type of feedback we’re looking for. Warning: there are likely to be many, many words here.

What you’re seeing in Legion falls under one of two different goals:
  • Refocusing each spec around their core concepts
  • Reduced reliance on cooldowns, both offensive and defensive

I’ll explain these one at a time.

On refocusing: Over the years, as we’ve attempted to add new toys for every class in each expansion, we feel that the gameplay of quite a few specs has drifted away from the philosophies and ideals behind them. For some classes, such as Rogue, the specs don’t really feel very different from each other. For others, such as Priest, the differences are purely mechanical; Discipline uses absorbs, and Holy uses direct healing, but it’s not really clear why.

So, in Legion, we’re taking a hard look at what each spec should make you feel like when you’re playing it, and making sure that the abilities you’re using tie into that. When we talk about “class fantasy,” that’s more or less what we mean. It’s also made us realize that, frankly, we’ve made some mistakes over the years. Each spec is supposed to have some strengths and weaknesses, and as we’ve added abilities to shore up those weaknesses, we’ve diminished the value of their strengths.

Compare a Mage to a Warlock, for example. Mages were supposed to be highly mobile, but very squishy if you can lock them down; Warlocks were supposed to be able to take more direct punishment, but have a harder time getting away. But then we started giving Warlocks more mobility, which meant we had to give Mages more survivability, and nowadays those differences are subtle at best. The two classes should feel a lot more distinct than they do, both to play as and to play against. That means dialing back the mobility for Warlocks, and dialing back the survivability for Mages.

End result: Yes, you’ve probably lost a couple tools in Legion. But so have other people. So, when we get feedback along the lines of “Now I don’t have any way to deal with X”… we might actually think that’s a good thing. In PvP, this means you’re going to rely on your teammates a little more often. In a raid or dungeon, it means you might not want to purposefully stack Warlocks just because “they have the best numbers.”

On cooldowns: We’ve gotten a ton of feedback over the past couple of expansions that players feel like they aren’t able to do much without cooldowns active. When a Ret Paladin uses Avenging Wrath, Holy Avenger, and Execution Sentence all at once, they hit like a freight train carrying a truck full of bricks, but as soon as those effects end, they just kind of… keep themselves busy until their cooldowns are back up. “Your class is fun and exciting 17% of the time” isn’t awesome.

We’ve also gotten to the point where there’s entirely too many “get out of jail” cards in PvP. The Mage is in trouble… Ironbark. In trouble again… Nature’s Swiftness. Then Ice Block. Then another Ironbark. Then a trinket. Then Nature’s Swiftness. Then maybe, if you’re really good, you can get the Mage’s second Ice Block before Ironbark comes up again. He had to use Cold Snap, what an amazing play!

I’m obviously exaggerating here – most of the time, your goal is to force several of those cooldowns at once – but that kind of illustrates the point. In order for a kill to ever happen, things have to get excessive. So, in Legion, we want to chill out on just how strong those cooldowns can be, so that we can let you be more effective once they’ve worn off. Theoretically, we could accomplish that by just making the numbers on those cooldowns lower, but that quickly gets to the point where each individual cooldown just feels flat. “Increases damage by 5% for 20 seconds” just isn’t that exciting. Our only real alternative is to reduce how many cooldowns you have available, so that the ones that are left can still feel substantial.

Now then, on feedback: We recognize that all of these changes are pretty scary, and we’ve been in the MMO business long enough at this point to know better than to assume we’ll get everything right on the first try. So, let’s talk about feedback, and what you can do to help us make Legion an amazing expansion.

Many players have already been providing great feedback and bringing up good points of discussion, which we’re extremely grateful for, and have already made several changes that were influenced by that feedback. For example, pretty early on in the Legion Alpha, we decided against our original thought of removing resurrection spells from non-Healer specs (such as Shadow, Enhancement, or Balance). A lot of you thought that felt weird, and we agreed. More recently, several PvPers have expressed concern that Legion is currently too focused on simply dealing damage, and there aren’t enough opportunities for a skilled player to shine. That’s a big concern of ours as well, and one we’re doing our best to avoid.

However, sometimes good feedback gets so bogged down in hyperbole that it’s hard for us to tell if the point you’re making is based on actual concerns and testing, or if you’ve just been misinformed. For example, one complaint we see a lot is that “classes only have 5 or 6 spells in Legion.” That’s simply not true – as of this post, most specs have between 20 and 25 baseline abilities, with talents, Honor talents, and your Artifact active skill adding up to 5-10 abilities on top of that (and yes, we recognize that not all of those skills will be useful in all situations).

So, the biggest thing that can help us understand your concerns is to be as specific as possible. “I have too few abilities” is certainly a reasonable opinion, but that doesn’t tell us why you feel that way. Instead of leaving at that, try to expand on it a bit:

  • What specific ability do you miss, and why do you feel it’s important?
  • If you’re concerned that your spec will be too weak in a given scenario, what makes you feel that way? Do you feel you shouldn’t be? Why?
  • If you want more abilities, but are taking passive talents instead of active ones, why is that?
  • Are the new abilities your spec has in Legion not doing it for you? Why not?

Those are obviously just some examples, but that’s the sort of feedback that lets us really understand what your specific concerns are. And while there are certainly going to be cases in which we just disagree (we’re always going to do what we feel is right for the game), pointing out the underlying issues goes a long way towards making sure we recognize when we need to improve.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Broken Shore Scenario
Thanks for the feedback! What you're seeing is a consequence of the current beta concurrency. The Broken Shore Scenario supports up to 20 allied players at once (and eventually, 20 Horde as well).

New tech allows you to queue and be placed in the scenario immediately, without waiting for a full 20 players. For the first 20 seconds of the boat ride, other players can be placed in the instance, up to the cap of 20.

This will allow you to play a player-filled scenario during the first few weeks of the expansion launch, and continue to play Broken Shore much later in the expansion when less than 20 players are present in the queue.

This also means that the scenario should be fun for both groups of 20 and solo players, please let us know your thoughts! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Testing Schedule - April 15-18
Schedule update: We'll only be testing Tel'arn on Monday.

High Botanist Tel'arn - Heroic Nighthold
14:00 PDT (17:00 EDT, 23:00 CEST) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

FEEDBACK: Artifacts in a Raid Context
So for today's raid tests (and going forward), we have artifact traits fully unlocked, and are scaling item level down a bit to offset the extra power. Please use this thread to offer feedback and discuss concerns regarding artifact traits in a raid context. That can be anything from bug reports, tuning issues, conceptual concerns with trait design, reports of traits that can break or trivialize mechanics, and so forth. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Discipline Priest Feedback -- Build 21466 -- 13-Apr
What kind of trinket rules should we be able to expect? Anything that does spell damage = atonement? Or only holy/shadow spell damage?
Not finalized yet. Worth pointing out, there is something to be said for the option of not letting any of them Atone, which would let us tune them around damage alone for Disc. That would probably mean a minor proc rate reduction compared to casters, rather than a very substantial one. And it would maintain the use cases for trinkets more clearly and consistently with other healers--healer trinkets for healing, DPS trinkets only for DPS use (so rarely in serious content). Either is an option; we want to see how it plays out in testing.

The main point above was that, in ether case, we don't want caster trinkets to be better for healing. Disc can get caster trinkets (necessarily, since Shadow uses them), and they can have some damage or damage+healing value, but they shouldn't be desirable for main role use in challenging content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

World Quests - Time Remaining
Thanks for the feedback. We will be swapping it to the same notation as buffs are currrently (a single number, like "2h" or "49s"). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

[Feedback] Flightpaths
Final continent wide taxi pass is in progress right now. This should be improved soon™ (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Elemental Shaman Feedback -- Build 21466 -- 13-Apr
Chain Lightning consumes all 3 charges of Stormkeeper

Thanks, this should be fixed next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Heroes of the Storm - Tracer Spotlight
Blizzard recently released an overview of the Tracer hero.

This article was originally published in forum thread: Legion - World Quests, Salvage Yard, Pruning, PvP, Legion Goals, Tracer Spotlight started by chaud View original post
Published on 2016-04-16 07:10 PM
41 Comments
Comments 40 Comments
  1. Demoncrash's Avatar
    That map looks exactly like the D3 adventure mode map.
  1. Fenzha's Avatar
    it specifies that pvp aren't required for emissaries but nothing for pet battle quests. They better not be required for anything because they are awful.
  1. Mask's Avatar
    I may be the only one, but I am loving the ability pruning and the class theme refocusing that they are doing. I actually had a lot more fun with PvP back in the vanilla wow days when classes were very distinct and all had very glaring strengths and weaknesses, as well as generally having a lot fewer cooldowns to work with. The ability bloat and class homogenization that has been going on over the last 7 or so years has really taken something away from the feel and quality of the game, imo.

    Glad to see Blizzard is finally realizing that and doing something about it. I just hope the inevitable whining from the playerbase doesn't cause them to backtrack on their vision here too much.
  1. Incandio's Avatar
    I wish Tracer didn't say "Love" all the time. It makes her sound like a sixty year old shopkeeper. Nobody her age in the UK talks like that.
  1. Fenzha's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Mask View Post
    I may be the only one, but I am loving the ability pruning and the class theme refocusing that they are doing. I actually had a lot more fun with PvP back in the vanilla wow days when classes were very distinct and all had very glaring strengths and weaknesses, as well as generally having a lot fewer cooldowns to work with. The ability bloat and class homogenization that has been going on over the last 7 or so years has really taken something away from the feel and quality of the game, imo.

    Glad to see Blizzard is finally realizing that and doing something about it. I just hope the inevitable whining from the playerbase doesn't cause them to backtrack on their vision here too much.
    After seeing the destro lock i could not disagree more about pruning. They took 4-5 things that have been a part of the spec for a long time and just added most of them back as talents again but just made some worse.
    Then we have the grimoire talent row which just doesn't work with the spec at all. After taking away the warlocks dps cooldown they shortened the guardian cooldown to replace it but taking 1 of the talents just removes that dps cooldown altogether and leaves you with nothing... it makes no sense to me.
  1. Zoidie's Avatar
    I wish Tracer didn't say "Love" all the time. It makes her sound like a sixty year old shopkeeper. Nobody her age in the UK talks like that.
    Don't they use it down south somewhere like Pet/Cock up north?
  1. ElDoorO's Avatar
    McCree is my man. Tracer has dat ass and vulva... but McCree... he speaks to my soul.
  1. PragmaticGamer's Avatar
    I do hope that the emissary quests offer enough options so that you aren't railroaded into content you don't like. (E.g., Fenzha mentioned pet battles, and I wouldn't want the dungeon quests or the open-world quests higher than regular.)
  1. elvor0's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Fenzha View Post
    After seeing the destro lock i could not disagree more about pruning. They took 4-5 things that have been a part of the spec for a long time and just added most of them back as talents again but just made some worse.
    Then we have the grimoire talent row which just doesn't work with the spec at all. After taking away the warlocks dps cooldown they shortened the guardian cooldown to replace it but taking 1 of the talents just removes that dps cooldown altogether and leaves you with nothing... it makes no sense to me.
    I agree with the concept of bringing classes back to their core concept, but the execution is pretty much what you said.

    Ret Paladin got hit pretty hard, it's gone from a fast paced spec with one the best flowing playstyles, to a boring, slow paced colossus smash style of gameplay. A style that arms warriors that were pissed about. Even the idea about having the talent columns changing the playstyle is never going to work, because one is going to be the superior DPS version, which any raider worth his salt is going to take.
  1. GMZohar1's Avatar
    End result: Yes, you’ve probably lost a couple tools in Legion. But so have other people. So, when we get feedback along the lines of “Now I don’t have any way to deal with X”… we might actually think that’s a good thing. In PvP, this means you’re going to rely on your teammates a little more often. In a raid or dungeon, it means you might not want to purposefully stack Warlocks just because “they have the best numbers.”

    Um how is that a good thing? Oh I cant fight classes X, Y, Z cause I should rely on my teammates more.. Oh look X is attacking me, well since its a good idea that I dont have anyway to deal with X I guess I should just stand here till im dead... Oh look Y is defending that node, well I would go attack but since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Y, I should just stand here and wait for more people.. Oh look im guarding a flag and Z just came outta stealth to attack me.. But since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Z I should just ask for help and sit here and die and wait lol...
  1. rosebull's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by GMZohar1 View Post
    End result: Yes, you’ve probably lost a couple tools in Legion. But so have other people. So, when we get feedback along the lines of “Now I don’t have any way to deal with X”… we might actually think that’s a good thing. In PvP, this means you’re going to rely on your teammates a little more often. In a raid or dungeon, it means you might not want to purposefully stack Warlocks just because “they have the best numbers.”

    Um how is that a good thing? Oh I cant fight classes X, Y, Z cause I should rely on my teammates more.. Oh look X is attacking me, well since its a good idea that I dont have anyway to deal with X I guess I should just stand here till im dead... Oh look Y is defending that node, well I would go attack but since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Y, I should just stand here and wait for more people.. Oh look im guarding a flag and Z just came outta stealth to attack me.. But since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Z I should just ask for help and sit here and die and wait lol...
    Honestly, if you don't understand why its a good thing i dont think theres any amount of explaining that will change your mind. Its pretty straight forward.
  1. coprax's Avatar
    so what does item level '+' mean exactly?
  1. Maerad's Avatar
    Well, this time I decided to NOT go too much into the new addon details, so I have some surprises left when it hits.

    But honestly .... from all I read by flying over the mmoc main site ... this looks more like World of Diablo. Fine with some ideas coming to wow, but that is quite much in almost the same "taste".
  1. Fenzha's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by coprax View Post
    so what does item level '+' mean exactly?
    Probably that any reward might be higher than that ilvl, maybe some form of warforged item or maybe just a higher ilvl item.
  1. THEORACLE64's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Demoncrash View Post
    That map looks exactly like the D3 adventure mode map.
    And you make that seem like a problem because?
  1. mmoc9aac36c166's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by GMZohar1 View Post
    End result: Yes, you’ve probably lost a couple tools in Legion. But so have other people. So, when we get feedback along the lines of “Now I don’t have any way to deal with X”… we might actually think that’s a good thing. In PvP, this means you’re going to rely on your teammates a little more often. In a raid or dungeon, it means you might not want to purposefully stack Warlocks just because “they have the best numbers.”

    Um how is that a good thing? Oh I cant fight classes X, Y, Z cause I should rely on my teammates more.. Oh look X is attacking me, well since its a good idea that I dont have anyway to deal with X I guess I should just stand here till im dead... Oh look Y is defending that node, well I would go attack but since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Y, I should just stand here and wait for more people.. Oh look im guarding a flag and Z just came outta stealth to attack me.. But since its a good idea that I dont stand a chance against Z I should just ask for help and sit here and die and wait lol...
    Quote Originally Posted by rosebull View Post
    Honestly, if you don't understand why its a good thing i dont think theres any amount of explaining that will change your mind. Its pretty straight forward.
    Well, as I see based on this blue post about Legion pvp, it's all going to be like pet battles. Which is very bad. I don't play many pet battles, nor many pvp pet battles, but I played enough to see what the whole concept of it is about. You have abilities to use, but you can change or pick abilities what you are going to use in a combat situation. Some abilities are more useful against specific classes/families some are not. Some can be offensive, defensive, crowd control, healing etc. However if you are a pro, you just put the best pet combo together to make the most effective team that can counter the most of the random enemies you face. (You can still end up getting a complete counter of the team.)

    Anyway based on these informations 80% of the classes in Legion pvp will end up like hard counter of x class and hard countered by y class, but 20% with a high skill cap and luck will be able to counter both x and y and will be hard to counter by both x and y, resulting 20% of the classes will be played by majority of the player base and 80% of the classes will be played by minority of the player base. I can already tell which classes will be the 20%: demon hunter (dps) > death knight (frost) > hunter (survival) > warlock (affliction), where warlock could be an exception because of it's representation, but it will be still viable. You can add some healer classes, like discipline priest, holy paladin.

    So I think the whole class identity thing will be bad for the pvp part of the game and it's better to be a bit "blurred" as it is now. Why? Because WoW is becoming more and more casual, and what casual players do? They join random BG-s, maybe a few world pvp situations, where there is minimal or no communication. As GMZohar1 said, those situations will be very real and painful experiences and will disgust more and more casual players of WoW pvp. They will either quit playing pvp or create/reroll to the "hero" classes mentioned above. This is a certain point where this concept will be a failure in Legion. It was a failure back in BC already. That's why Blizz created the idea: "Bring the player not the class." In legion we will be back to: "Bring the class not the player."
  1. amythist's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Fenzha View Post
    Probably that any reward might be higher than that ilvl, maybe some form of warforged item or maybe just a higher ilvl item.
    yeah I would assume warfroged or maybe a few patches in they boost the ilvl of the drops to make it better match up with entry level gear for later raids
  1. pfbe's Avatar
    That means dialing back the mobility for Warlocks, and dialing back the survivability for Mages.
    wait, what? Didn't a dev tell mages (in regards to them being the only class without a self heal) that it was okay, because mages were meant to avoid damage (and could conjure food, anyway)? What's this about mage survivability?
  1. mmocc24a3db56c's Avatar
    Those world quests .... they look like Final Fantasy XIV ARR "FATES".
  1. Eleccybubb's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by choww View Post
    Those world quests .... they look like Final Fantasy XIV ARR "FATES".
    FATES are decent though. If they adopted a system similar to that or GW2's open world events would be cool.
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