Hidden Artifact Appearances, A Note from the WoW Team, Warlock Q&A Followup, DLC #551

When we launched Legion on August 30, we opened up the Broken Isles to millions of players around the world. As with every expansion, there were feelings of excitement among the team in the lead-up, but also a bit of healthy fear and trepidation. We felt we had learned many lessons from the launch of Warlords of Draenor, and we took steps to help ensure we would have a smooth release. But questions remained: Would the updates to our technology and hardware be enough? Had we tested of all our new and existing systems enough? Did we properly account for the masses of players clicking on Khadgar to watch him teleport the city of Dalaran to its new home?

When the floodgates opened and players started their journey to the Broken Isles, it was gratifying to see many of you calling this our smoothest launch yet. We couldn’t be happier with how Legion has begun, and we hope that we’ll be able to continue to deliver a smooth experience throughout the expansion and beyond.

A ton of factors came into play to make this happen, and we wanted to share a few of the design and technological changes we made. First, we took some measures to control the bottlenecks that can occur when many players try to interact with a single quest giver, something that has caused issues in the past. These changes made it so people were able to get into the expansion at a smooth and measured pace before spreading out around the world to claim their Artifacts and choose their first questing zone.

On the tech side, rather than run one copy of Broken Isles per realm, in Legion we run multiple copies to ensure no one map is overloaded or overpopulated. We also have dedicated hardware for each zone, meaning Azsuna has a server, Highmountain has a server, and so on. Many of these decisions were based on painful lessons from Warlords of Draenor.

In Legion we also want to ensure you’re able to play together with people you know, so we keep friends, guilds, and groups together rather than spinning them off into different copies. At launch, this allowed us to keep regions of the world feeling populated without impacting game performance. We gave this tech a test-drive during the recent pre-expansion Demon Invasions: rather than seeing an entire realm’s population in one tightly packed location, you saw a smaller portion, but still enough to make an area feel alive.

How does this all add up? Since launch, players have acquired billions of Artifact Power. More than 5 million Demon Hunters made their way from Mardum to Azeroth to fight against the Legion, and more join the ranks every day. WoW’s concurrency during launch week climbed higher than it’s been in many years, and it’s been awesome to see so many of you having a great time playing together in the Broken Isles.

It’s also been exciting to see players enjoying the new WoW Legion Companion app, which allows players to engage with Legion champions and missions, customize their Order Halls, and explore World Quests all from their iOS or Android mobile device.

But the launch of Legion is just the beginning of the journey. As with many of you, we weren’t happy with Warlords of Draenor’s patch cycle, and have changed our strategy for Legion, prioritizing more regular content releases. As part of that, last week at PAX we announced Patch 7.1: Return to Karazhan, our first major content update, which reintroduces Karazhan as a 5-player Mythic dungeon, continues the Suramar campaign, adds new World Quests, opens up the Trial of Valor Raid dungeon, and more.

The future is bright for Legion and World of Warcraft, and we couldn’t thank all of you in the community more. Your enthusiasm, encouragement, and ongoing feedback all help make WoW what it is today. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for being a part of this journey.

See you on the Broken Isles,

J. Allen Brack
Executive Producer, World of Warcraft

Q&A Summary
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. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock Feedback
What he said was that while reading feedback and trying to find constructive posts, it doesn't help to see things like "REROLLING" and various petition threads (which are against the forum Code of Conduct, FYI). This is actually a valid point when it comes to the way feedback has been provided.

Those kind of statements don't help provide any kind of context or feedback to the developers as to what the state of the complaints are. I've said this in this forum before, but we really have found use in the collated lists of feedback that have been made here. Posts that are made that detract from an orderly discussion doesn't help to push your feedback forward. There's no denying that Warlocks are upset, and the forums have been busy - but the trolling and spamming, the grouping up to downvote any Q&A questions not to do with Warlocks, etc., really isn't the way to promote discussion.

As Watcher said, he personally is aware of the complaints that Warlocks have put forth, and the development team is working on making some changes and seeing where Warlocks land after that.

I agree, but shouldn't he have been able to at least find the threads that you've posted in? Because from what he said, it sounds like he couldn't.
I assure you, the threads where players worked to get all their feedback together were sent over.

Serious question man, why isn't there more direct communication between devs (or even CMs like yourself) in the forums? I really believe that so much of this negativity would have been avoided by just having a simple dialog every once in a while and letting us know that what we're saying really is being read.
We've had some failing on our part, communications wise, but the conversations we've had over the last couple of weeks has helped to push along the feedback everyone has provided.

If we didn't do this, we never would have gotten an answer at all. We HAD to. It was our only available option left after legitimate constructive feedback was completely ignored for months.

AND IT WORKED.
Most of the spamming and downvote spamming started in the last few days, well after I dropped in even to gather more feedback to send along - so I would go so far as to say it really didn't help much.

Again, all of your work and information gathering was sent over. We will continue iterating on Warlock changes, starting with the Soul Shard change, and we will see where Warlocks land after that.

@Ornyx, if you don't mind my asking, will we see devs sitting down to actually discuss the changes they are planning for Warlocks, relatively soon? Or will it be a matter of just checking hotfix notes every week?
If you're asking if they will pop in here and have conversations, we will see what happens. I will try, at least, to gather some of their thoughts and philosophies on the changes (or lack thereof) and share that here.

As I've said over and over again here, we are aware of the feedback and I'm still here reading.

I think we're going to step back a bit here and let the forum calm down a bit over the weekend.

Looking at the changes Ion proposed in the Q&A, let us know what you think about Soul Stones being expanded to sit at 3 out of combat; this is the first change we are looking at making, and any feedback you guys provide on this will help our thinking overall.

Thanks again for all your thoughts and feedback so far, and, again, let's keep this forum constructive. Enjoy the rest of the Q&A and have a good weekend everyone! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)