Warcraft Movie Updates, Legion Talent Changes, 7 Million Overwatch Players, Foxtrot

[chaud]

Affix and Item Optimization Analysis & Diablo/Half-Life Twitter Tease

Weekend Wacky Wild Decks - Take a Break from Standard!

Haunted Mines Rework Not This Year, Fall Championship Details, Anniversary Bundle Tip

More than 7 Million Overwatch Players Worldwide!

Warcraft Movie Videos
Even more Warcraft movie related videos were released at the end of the week.

Warcraft Movie Box Office Update
The Warcraft Movie continues to do well internationally, with Deadline posting updated numbers for this weekend:

• The movie did $31.8 million in the 20 markets from the first weekend release.
• It opened in 8 more markets since then, adding a total of $29 million through Sunday.
• It was the number one movie in seven of the eight new markets.
• Warcraft is still the #1 movie after 9 days in Germany and still at #2 in Russia.
• The international release has a total of $69.1 million so far.
• The movie opens in China on Wednesday, where pre-sale numbers look strong.

Warcraft Movie Premiere Live Stream on June 6

The Warcraft movie will swoop into theaters on June 10, but we’re inviting you to join us on June 6 for the premiere live stream, direct from Hollywood! Hosts Jesse Cox and Michele Morrow will be joined by Warcraft movie director Duncan Jones, movie cast members, and many more special guests as part of this Legendary event.

Join us here and on the official Warcraft Twitch channel for the live stream beginning at 5pm PDT on June 6. You won’t want to miss it!

Legion Talent Changes
Blizzard has hotfixed talents on the beta realms to make changes to talent choices and positions. These changes are reflected in our talent calculator.

Hey all.

The last two Beta builds have included a number of changes to talents for many specs, most of which involved rearranging the talent trees, and/or tweaking some talents to be useful in more situations. I'd like to give a little context about those changes, and discuss the further implications of them.

Goals and Obstacles
One of the goals of talents in Legion is to provide more meaningful choice than before, with a focus on customizing your gameplay to suit your tastes. More than ever before, there are options to add or remove complexity, skew what your spec excels at, or opt into alternative rotation styles.

We've moved away from talent rows containing 3 flavors of the same thing, to choices that are impactful in completely different ways. We're not going back on that, but trying out differences as extreme as we were has revealed some new problems. In many cases, the difference between talents was so stark in common situations that it became more of a 'test', and less of a choice.

The Current Situation
There are no hard and fast rules to what makes a good talent row or talent tree, and there are legitimate exceptions to nearly every idea about good talent design, but one of the biggest sticking points is around multi-target damage. Talents can have a huge variety of impacts on damage, falling on a spectrum that ranges from purely increasing single target damage (such as Pyromaniac), to being awesome in mass-AoE but having no value at all against a single target (such as Fire and Brimstone). The majority of talents are somewhere in the middle, offering solid value in most situations.

In many cases, we had talent rows that pitted talents at opposite ends of the spectrum against each other, such as the Arcane level 15 row, where you had the choice of two purely single-target talents against a talent that offered only a little against a single target, but massive value in AoE. This wasn't an interesting choice, it was just a test of whether you could pick the right talent for the situation, and the difference was so strong that you felt punished for having the wrong one.

The Solution and Further Implications
However, we don't want to go back to a world where a talent row is about picking which slightly different flavor of AoE you want. We've opted to rearrange things such that you have more choices that mix generally useful talents vs the more specialized talents. Hopefully that line between the theoretical best talent and the others will be a bit more blurry now, and the talent you do choose won't feel like a wasted talent point in many situations.

As you may have guessed, these changes are going to require a cascade of other related changes, mostly around tuning. Not every talent row is equally valuable (nor are they intended to be), and with new talents competing with each other, adjustments will have to be made. Talents that moved, and their competition, will have to be retuned to become viable choices. Additionally, the overall strength of some specs in common situations will be adjusted to account for talents now offering more or less in those situations. An example of this is Assassination Rogues, whose baseline AoE damage was low, but had an extremely strong AoE talent in Blood Sweat, creating one of those obvious 'test' problem cases. We opted to remove Blood Sweat, adding choice to that talent row, and will be improving their baseline AoE capabilities instead.

We'd love to hear your feedback about these changes, and what you think about talent choices in general at this point. Thanks!

Blue Posts

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Protection Paladin Feedback -- Legion Beta Feedback
FYI, one talent tweak didn't make it into this build. To allow Blessed Hammer to still mostly act as a filler, it'll have 3 charges, up from the 2 you currently see. (I believe I said previously that that was planned, but there was a bug with it that delayed it until the next build.) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Discipline Priest -- Legion Beta Feedback
PW:s sounds loud now and I don't like it
This should be fixed next build--various Holy school spells are incorrectly playing the Guardian Spirit sound. A similar bug with Druid Nature spells should also have been fixed in today's build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warcraft Movie–Inspired Transmog Items Update
An update was made to how mailing the movie transmog items works, converting them if you mail them to a character on the other faction.

The Warcraft movie is almost here, and we’ve been celebrating by equipping heroes of the Horde and the Alliance with a set of movie-inspired transmogrification items. Players who log in through to August 1 will receive special Warcraft movie-themed items on the first Alliance and Horde character to log in. To help with making sure you’re able to transfer your items between factions, we’ve applied a small update.

Items that are mailed to an opposite faction characters will now convert to the opposite faction items. You can mail these items to alternate characters on a different faction to receive their version of each item. For example, mailing the Alliance sword to a Horde character turns it into the Horde axe. This should also address issues that some have experienced with duplicate items allowing them to be sent to other characters and converted.

Once the updated Transmogrification system releases with Legion, items received during the promotional period will be automatically added to the Wardrobe even if they have been deleted from your inventory.

Don’t miss out on collecting these items. Log in today!

North American Road To BlizzCon Format Update

We wanted to provide some additional clarity on the format and logistics for this year’s North America Qualifier cups. This post will be updated with additional information as needed.

Seeding:
Seeding will be based on the average ladder rating of the highest rated three players on the team. This will be based on a ladder snapshot that will always take place at 2pm Pacific on the Monday prior to the Round of Eight broadcast.

Following the ladder snapshot, the brackets will be seeded and released by the end of the Wednesday prior to the Round of Eight broadcast.

Match Schedule:
All matches leading up to the Round of Eight will be played starting from 7pm Eastern on the Thursday and Friday nights prior to the Round of Eight broadcast.

Once the brackets are seeded and released, the schedule will be available. Teams must be online and ready within 30 minutes of their scheduled match time. Subsequent matches will be scheduled once the matches required are completed. All matches will be Best of Five.

Rules:
All the rules can be found on the MLG Gamebattles Tournament Page, and on the official blog. Please familiarize yourself with the rules. Admins from GCDTV and MLG will be on hand to assist you with any disputes or issues.

Overwatch - More Than 7 Million Players
Overwatch is off to a great start, with more than 7 million players already!

Foxtrot - Theater Rep
The Warcraft movie was mentioned in this week's Foxtrot comic!

[mileskg21]

GG 10/10 Movie Comic

[Taiknee]

I'm interested to see how the talents moved around/got changed. Glad you guys updated!

[Count Zero]

Haha nice comic strip

[Teebone]

Foxtrot never disappoints. Neither does Dark Legacy >=)

http://darklegacycomics.com/540

[merex760]

After two weeks those numbers...don't look very strong. If there are to be more Warcraft movies, and for Legendary to consider it a success, it needs to make 2-3 times the budget minimum (and production budget doesn't even include P&M). China is going to have to carry this Pacific Rim style for any chance of future movies if the number tracking in the US holds true. At least we got one movie, I guess. Probably shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint trying to appeal to the fans. They make up a small portion of potential box office revenue.

[Narshe]

Best WoW related comic strip I've seen.

[xezar]

11/10 on the comic strip, actually laughed out loud irl and got a few stares. Some movie theaters out there should consider this for sure.

[Plehnard]

After two weeks those numbers...don't look very strong. If there are to be more Warcraft movies, and for Legendary to consider it a success, it needs to make 2-3 times the budget minimum (and production budget doesn't even include P&M). China is going to have to carry this Pacific Rim style for any chance of future movies if the number tracking in the US holds true. At least we got one movie, I guess. Probably shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint trying to appeal to the fans. They make up a small portion of potential box office revenue.

This is on a very limited number of countries. If you look at the markets where it's shown right now it's performing very well.
It had the best start in 2016 in Germany for example, blowing "Cap.Amarica:Civil War" and other films out of the water.

[Stormykitten]

Merex, anybody who likes fantasy movies will at least enjoy this movie, I think, unless expecting Game of Thrones - the movie. I don't even like effects spectacle films but I still found it nice, because it's character-driven rather than 100% fx-driven. I simply don't think it will struggle with making a profit.

[Easo]

Success in the world, but not in USA. Is there really such a big influence of "reviews"?

[Eon Drache]

After two weeks those numbers...don't look very strong. If there are to be more Warcraft movies, and for Legendary to consider it a success, it needs to make 2-3 times the budget minimum (and production budget doesn't even include P&M). China is going to have to carry this Pacific Rim style for any chance of future movies if the number tracking in the US holds true. At least we got one movie, I guess. Probably shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint trying to appeal to the fans. They make up a small portion of potential box office revenue.

If you look it was top in 8 of the 9 countries that just got it. And it did VERY well before that in Germany and such. Don't forget China and the USA are the biggest player base for the actual game itself. Those numbers speak volumes.

[yunito]

Success in the world, but not in USA. Is there really such a big influence of "reviews"?

its not even out in usa yet....

[Tornwar]

After two weeks those numbers...don't look very strong. If there are to be more Warcraft movies, and for Legendary to consider it a success, it needs to make 2-3 times the budget minimum (and production budget doesn't even include P&M). China is going to have to carry this Pacific Rim style for any chance of future movies if the number tracking in the US holds true. At least we got one movie, I guess. Probably shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint trying to appeal to the fans. They make up a small portion of potential box office revenue.

It has hardly been 2 weeks for a couple of countries. Like spain and brazil, they opened on June 3rd. So those has only been a few days. You shouldn't shut it down already.

And btw. A lot of non-fans has praised the movie... so it isn't just for fans

[Socialhealer]

8400 pieces of popcorn just for revered?

not the worst rep grind i've done in wow......

[ChaosWolf]

Success in the world, but not in USA. Is there really such a big influence of "reviews"?

It hasn't come out in the US yet.

[Shudder]

If those were US numbers it would be considered a flop. The new depp movie made the same and they were calling it a major flop. And that's just in the US. Also that comic sums up what most people are thinking. That this is a World of Warcraft movie.

[merex760]

If you look it was top in 8 of the 9 countries that just got it. And it did VERY well before that in Germany and such. Don't forget China and the USA are the biggest player base for the actual game itself. Those numbers speak volumes.

It's tracking to open at around 25 million, which would put it at #3 behind Now You See Me 2, and The Conjuring 2. The following week, Finding Dory (easy lock for #1) and Central Intelligence (The Rock and Kevin Hart = money) release, which will push it even further down the chart. It's basically up to China if there are going to be sequels. Again, with 160 million production budget alone, when you factor in P&M, you're looking at 500 million minimum worldwide for Legendary to consider it a moderate success for a summer blockbuster. Pacific Rim getting a equal from Legendary bodes well for this though even if it makes less than expected. Pacific Rim was another movie for them that under-performed in the US but killed it in China.

[Magemaer]

Comic was brilliant. 10/10

[Eon Drache]

It's tracking to open at around 25 million, which would put it at #3 behind Now You See Me 2, and The Conjuring 2. Next week, Finding Dory (easy lock for #1) and Central Intelligence (The Rock and Kevin Hart = money) release, which will push it even further down the chart. It's basically up to China if there are going to be sequels. Again, with 160 million production budget alone, when you factor in P&M, you're looking at 500 million minimum worldwide to be considered a moderate success for a summer blockbuster.

That projection was also made by Variety.