WoW's 12th Anniversary, Nov 15-16 Hotfixes, Artifact Power Quest Exploit, Blue Posts

[chaud]

New Card Reveal: Backstreet Leper

Patch 7.1.5 PTR - Class Changes
Keep in mind that the changes you saw yesterday in the first PTR build are not complete!

WoW's 12th Anniversary
WoW's 12th Anniversary went live today!

• Logging in during the event will give you the WoW's 12th Anniversary achievement.
• Check your mail for a Celebration Package and 200 x Timewarped Badge
• The mail will send you on a quest to The Historians (H) / The Historians (A)
• This opens up a daily quest (A Time to Reflect (A) / A Time to Reflect (H)) that rewards 25 x Timewarped Badge
• Visit Historian Llore (A) or Historian Ju'pa (H) to purchase Corgi Pup for 200 x Timewarped Badge along with some other items.

Level	Type	Name	Cost
1	Companion Pets	Corgi Pup	200 ×
1	Holiday	Exquisite Costume Set: "Edwin VanCleef"	200 ×
1	Other	Inflatable Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker	50 ×
1	Other	Celebration Wand - Murloc	25 ×
1	Other	Celebration Wand - Gnoll	25 ×

Celebrating 12 Years of WoW!

The 12th anniversary celebration of World of Warcraft has begun! Log in between now and November 30 to earn the WoW’s 12th Anniversary achievement, then check your mail for a special Anniversary Gift Package.

This year’s package will include 200 Timewarped Badges, a Celebration Package item to increase experience and reputation gains from kills by 12% for 1 hour, and a “Letter from the Timewalkers” which will start a new quest that will lead you to either Orgrimmar or Stormwind. Questgivers Historian Llore and Historian Ju’pe will have a daily quest for players to earn additional Timewarped Badges by answering World of Warcraft trivia. If you’d like this year’s anniversary gift, the Corgi Pup, you can purchase it from them along with other additional anniversary goodies.

Thank you to all of the heroes of the Horde and the Alliance for your unfaltering dedication to Azeroth. Whether you are a clever night elf, a nimble gnome, a mystical troll, or a stalwart human, we appreciate your continued support, and we’re looking forward to sharing many more adventures with you for years to come.

World of Warcraft 12th Anniversary

Happy 12 years of WoW and 22 years of Warcraft, everyone!

Hopefully by now you've picked up the Box in your mail, which will contain an item that will start a short questline, ending at a vendor who will sell you an adorable Corgi pup (sell is maybe not the right word, since you're given the currency for it from the Anniversary Box, and you should always #AdoptNotShop)!

If for some reason you'd rather not adopt a Corgi (who are very much in need good homes), you're welcome to save the tokens and put them towards rewards in any of the time Timewalking events - I'd recommend waiting for Mists of Pandaria TImewalking in 7.1.5 and putting it towards a new Heavenly Jade Cloud Serpent mount!

Let's do our best to ignore trolls who will try to make a mountain out of our small anniversary celebration.

Thanks to our amazing and dedicated community for being with us and creating amazing memories over the last couple of decades.

As for the anniversary thingy it's absolute trash. It's my opinion.
As yes, the mysterious and "rare" shadowy Level 1 troll. A wonder to behold, I'm sure! Let's play nice, okay?

Patch 7.1 Hotfixes - November 15-16

Classes

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Displacement should now work for mages who know Arcane Momentum.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Weaponmaster no longer causes Goremaw's Bite to deal excessive damage when it activates.

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Pristine Proto-Scale Girdle buffs are no longer shared among multiple Shaman.

Dungeons

Return to Karazhan

• Grouped players can now loot Little Red's Cape for "High Stress Hiatus".

Trial of Valor

• There is now a portal to return to the start of the instance in Haustvald, and Odyn will teleport players out of the instance after Helya is defeated.
  
  • Helya
    
  • The difficulty of several aspects of the Helya encounter have been decreased on Raid Finder difficulty.
    
  • Resolved an issue where sometimes Bilewater Breath would cast while Helya is submerging.
    

Quests

• Warriors on "Capturing the Gateway" who aren’t seeing the required missions should return to their Class Hall, abandon the quest, and then re-accept it from Odyn. You will receive credit for missions you already completed and the remaining missions will now be available.
  
• The Burning Crusade quest "Blessing of Incineratus" can now be completed.

Classes
Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Borrowed Time and Muze’s Unwavering Will (legendary wrist item) now properly reduce the global cooldown of Smite, in addition to Smite’s cast time.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• The Warlock Glyph of the Observer should now summon an Observer that knows Devour Magic.

Dungeons

• The weekly Grand Challenger’s Bounty now contains Item Level 885+ rewards for players who cleared a Mythic Keystone Level 12 or higher dungeon the prior week.

Return to Karazhan

• Burning Bones should no longer sometimes inflict damage to the tank instead of the player with the debuff.

Player versus Player

• End-of-match rewards from Rated Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds now get increased item level based on your current rating in that bracket, instead of your current item level.
  
  • Developers’ Notes: While the Weekly Quests for each bracket were giving rewards based on rating, the rewards given at the conclusion of a Rated Arena or Rated Battleground weren’t aligned with the challenge involved in earning a high rating. This change makes winning high-rated Arena or Rated Battleground matches more analogous to running repeated high-level Mythic Keystone dungeons.
    
• Rated Battleground wins no longer have a guaranteed chance to reward an item.
  
  • Developers’ Notes: RBG wins would’ve been far too lucrative. We’re lowering the base chance of receiving an item, but also applying some aggressive bad luck protection. While you won’t earn an item from every single RBG win any more, they’ll still be very common, and far more valuable at higher ratings.
    

Artifact Power World Quest Exploit

Of course no action will be taken.
Actually, we did just take action against players who went out of their way to take advantage of this bug. We had two main motivations: First, fairness to those who could have taken advantage of this exploit but chose not to; and second, setting/reinforcing a precedent that flagrant abuse of bugs for personal gain will be taken seriously. Even if you're not concerned with fair play on a community level, from a pure selfish perspective, you're better off not taking advantage of loopholes like these as it's very likely that you'll end up worse off than if you'd never done it at all.

Obviously, the existence of a bug like this is our fault. We should have caught this issue (which arose from a a conflict between two world quests, causing credit to not save properly) during testing. But the existence of our mistake doesn't excuse players' deliberate actions to take advantage of it.

Here's an awkward real-world analogy:

Let's say you're walking down the street one day, when you look down, and notice a crisp bank note being lifted by a gentle breeze around your feet. You look around, and no one is in sight. Well, guess it's your lucky day!

A few moments later, you come across two or three more bank notes. Definitely strange, and you're a bit suspicious because this obviously isn't normal, but they're just lying there. No one can really blame you if you pick them up, right?

Now, you turn the corner, and you see vast stacks of bank notes sitting on a pallet in the middle of the road. It seems like an unfortunate driver failed to properly secure the rear door of his armored truck, leading to this scene. But if you walked up and grabbed a large handful from the pile, would that be an entirely innocent act? Would you be surprised if a police officer who witnessed you do that thought otherwise?

Finally, if you were to fetch large garbage bags, and call up your friends and tell them to do the same, so you could load up as much of the cash as you all could carry.... Still entirely innocent? Sure, the driver made a big mistake in not locking the door, but would there be any surprise if you were tracked down based on CCTV footage and there were consequences for that act?

(Hey, I said it would be an awkward analogy.)

The account actions taken today were generally in direct proportion to the degree of abuse. Players who may have innocently repeated the quest just a few times were not actioned. But on the other end of the spectrum, some who managed to fit in literally hundreds of completions, forming groups to do so, received far more serious penalties.

We apologize for the existence of the bug in the first place, but once an issue like this is out in the wild, we need to act to preserve the spirit of fair play.

Blue Posts

Legendary Item Level Hotfix
This is just a cache issue, your Legendary has been upgraded but it's still displaying the old tooltip locally.

Simply exit WoW, go to the WoW folder on your PC and delete the Cache folder. Then open WoW again and your tooltips should update to reflect the new values. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 7.1.5 - Prydaz Changes
The buff to the item coming in 7.1.5 is looking to make it one of the best tanking legendaries out there, so... soon™.

Well I'm sure glad I just got the best tanking trinket as a healer. Oh boy!As a healer, you may not want to use it but the stats could still be considered decent until you get a better slotted item. Survivability does help everyone, despite what some players may say - not every items can conform to simulations and discrepancies in logs while increasing flat-out throughput damage.

Wishing you luck on your next legendary (the mistweaver one coming in 7.1.5 looks to be pretty good)!

Its always "in a future patch, or it's coming. My question is: Why is it necessary to buff these legendary's, why were they put out in their crap state in the first place?
Not every legendary is meant to be on equal footing - sometimes they are meant to change a play style entirely, and sometimes not. Sometimes we miss the mark on them, as we have with the couple that have been buffed and nerfed.

WoW is a living game, things change over time. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.1.5 Hunter Changes
Good to note that we are still iterating on 7.1.5, and we are by no means patch-complete at this point. We aren't ready to share our thoughts here until the changes are fully implemented and players can see them firsthand.

Datamining is not something you should be going by 100% when providing feedback.

Let's be a bit more decent with our conversation here. Forum/text coding has absolutely 0 to do with our game development.

From yesterday: https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...21855439458305
@WarcraftDevs:Class updates for Patch 7.1.5 are still in progress, with much more to come. Please keep that in mind if you're looking at datamining.

Yeah nah, heard that before. Remember that 7.1 talent swap change for Warlocks discussion you responded to, once, and never came back? Will believe it when we see it. Y'all got some work to do to regain our faith.There are (literally) hundreds of moving parts within the greater World of Warcraft machine. Gears don't always turn smoothly - sometimes they need a bit of a push and grease, and sometimes they have to be disassembled entirely which can takes time to retune and repair them.

Not to push off blame here, but there are times where we only have one thing to say on current iterations while we focus on future plans. This is rare and far between, but talent swapping is a good example of this. 7.1.5 is the current focus when it comes to class and talent changes. Let's get these changes out before we start throwing point feedback that ends up changing in a few days time. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.1.5 Fire changes
As a long time fire mage player (among other classes, don't pigeonhole me ), I think it's very fair to say the spec needed some adjustments - that's something I've heard in Trade and Guild Chat since Legion day one (even the post above me is a player who boosted a mage for this reason).

While there are some (what I personally feel) valid concerns with how adjustments affect investment into Artifacts, our adjustments aren't of the caliber that should warrant "FIRE IS DEAD" being screamed from the mountaintops. We want players to play the spec they want, and not focus on switching in an out of the FotM every patch cycle.

Anyways, it's good to note that we are still iterating on 7.1.5, and we are by no means patch-complete at this point. We are not currently in a state where we are ready to share detailed thoughts on Fire until the changes are fully implemented.

Datamining is not always something you should be going by 100% when providing feedback - just something to keep in mind.

It's concerning that you are trying to justify nerfs with things you hear from guild chat and trade chat. Fact of the matter is, fire is just fine at the moment. It's not too strong, it's not too weak. Just fine. Every logging metric in the world corroborates this, the only people screaming fire is OP are daily dungeon heroes and trolls. Thanks for communicating at least.
There's really no difference between trying to justify nerfs with conversation on the forums than with chats with players in game than with players on Social Media. Every voice matters, and channel with a voice is just as valid as the next.

Nerfs aren't "justified" through conversation alone - in fact I think "justified" is a dangerous word to use here. The developers are looking at tons of information when they make these adjustments. I'm not saying conversation didn't impact changes at all (the previous were my notes, and I'm not a developer), but there are more than enough cases where people laugh and tell their fellow mages to be quiet or they will get them nerfed to cause a bit of an eyebrow raise for myself.

Ion went over why the Bracers are being changed during BlizzCon. You can find information on that elsewhere, as I don't have it readily available to repeat. But every pack should be what you consider "middle of the pack" in an ideal world. Raid vs Mythic environments adjust this, of course, but I don't see Fire falling off the deep end because of this.

In fact, with future secondary stat changes (talked about in the post BlizzCon Q&A) I think gear scaling will improve ten fold, and I foresee that these changes will actually be better long term.

Let's have a deeper discussion on this once 7.1.5 changes are finalized on the PTR, but I'll gather the feedback here for now and send it over.

Thank you again for a quick response! Yesterday felt very grim, but after thinking about it, I have absolutely no reason to believe this iteration of the PTR is final (and I am one of the people who lived through the "jaw dropping damage" of Burning Crusade). I don't necessarily agree with the every voice matters, but, again, how do you weigh the voice of these opinions to what happens in practice? Mages aren't exactly crushing it in Emerald Nightmare or Trial of Valor, they have their strong fights and their weak fights, they aren't shadow priests. By every metric, they are just okay, middle of the pack. This is underscored by the fact that the legendary wrists are indeed too powerful and is largely what props up mage performance.

On a side note for the legendary wrists. I know they were slated for a nerf this patch. I get it, they absolutely were too strong. I would just like to bring up the fact that their current iteration on the ptr makes the proc useless. The nerf they received is incomparable to the nerfs other over the top legendaries received (unholy wrists, havoc ring, etc.), they are simply on a differing order of magnitude. As of right now, in a vacuum, the proc is almost not worth using. This is further exacerbated by the removal of ice floes, which, for all intents and purposes, makes what once was the BIS legendary for fire mages absolutely worthless. Now, it is possible there are further changes that mitigate this nerf (for example, making pyroblast only take 3 seconds to cast, as an example), but as of right now, the bracers are just a glorified stat stick in 7.1.5.Appreciate the feedback on the bracers. I'm not sure of the state of the legendary item changes, they could very well be in flux, too. I've taken note that you guys are not so happy with the change, and I'll get that over the the development team to get some more appropriate feedback both ways.

As for the every voice matters thing, that is one of Blizzard's core values, and something we, as a company, hold very dearly. Every piece of feedback matters as much as the next - great ideas can come from anywhere. It is indeed difficult to weigh the conversation on both sides, but that's part of my job and so I take it seriously! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

BlizzCon 2016 Cosplay
Blizzard has a nice compilation of some of the cosplay at BlizzCon.

[xskarma]

CORGI

Arlee will be pleased

[Jester Joe]

ALSO DON'T MAKE THE MISTAKE I DID.

Although it's not much of a mistake, but worth remembering, pets are account wide. Yeah, they give you the exact amount for the pet, but if you wanna stockpile those points on your main, just go on an alt and get the corgi.

[Jasper Kazai]

It was rather poor timing to have Timewalking occur the week before this event that has things you can purchase for Timewalking badges. Yeah, they give you enough for the one reward that hasn't been in the game yet, but it's still a lame situation.

[TickTickTick]

What was the exploit btw (im asking this thinking its been fixed - if it wasnt, dont answer)?

[Jin84]

Ugh, costumes with charges. Hate hate hate them!

[chaud]

What was the exploit btw (im asking this thinking its been fixed - if it wasnt, dont answer)?

World quests you could repeat that you shouldn't have been able to, granting a lot of artifact power.

[TickTickTick]

World quests you could repeat that you shouldn't have been able to, granting a lot of artifact power.

Was it any WQ, or some in particular?
Did the WQ to kill 10 nightborne and Fiora in Suramar this morning, when I logged in this evening it was there again, with the same AP reward.

[Fenixdown]

At least this year their video has someone who actually looks nice on it's cover, and not "hey look a hot chick barely wearing any clothes watch pl0x" like the last two years.

[deadman1]

Sorry, I don't trust blizzard, their customer support member that thinks they are part of the dev team doesn't reassure anyone that blizzard didn't shit allover fire mages, because they absolutely 100% did.

People spent 2.5 months farming legendaries and AP and the spec got drastically changed and gutted. I DON'T TRUST BLIZZARD TO FIX THIS. I don't trust them.

[Zabatakis]

Sorry, I don't trust blizzard, their customer support member that thinks they are part of the dev team doesn't reassure anyone that blizzard didn't shit allover fire mages, because they absolutely 100% did.

People spent 2.5 months farming legendaries and AP and the spec got drastically changed and gutted. I DON'T TRUST BLIZZARD TO FIX THIS. I don't trust them.

Relax guy. Take it from outlaw rogues blizz will make this right. Lol jk.

[deadman1]

Relax guy. Take it from outlaw rogues blizz will make this right. Lol jk.

That's my point, they are asleep at the wheel. They simply don't play their own game.

[tiptopmemer]

Shame most of those are hired cosplayers and not actual fans of the game.

[Deleted]

Hilarious seeing Hunters & Mages crying like end of the world while they've been top of the charts for every type of endgame content this expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

Was it any WQ, or some in particular?
Did the WQ to kill 10 nightborne and Fiora in Suramar this morning, when I logged in this evening it was there again, with the same AP reward.

Yeah same, I did it on my DK alt and was like, I thought I already did this 1 earlier :P

[Deleted]

I know blizzard sucks at balancing but this forum community all over MMO champ and official forums is really obnoxious. A bunch of whiny five years old who don't have any clue about "general balance" and just want their OWN class to be the FOTM and be special snowflake in their raid team and BG/arena team. Lay off your fucking ego and enjoy a game without caring about your e-peenis

[Amerissis]

Hmm, who is that Medivh guy at 1:25? He looks just like the guy from the movie

[Zyrosis]

It was rather poor timing to have Timewalking occur the week before this event that has things you can purchase for Timewalking badges. Yeah, they give you enough for the one reward that hasn't been in the game yet, but it's still a lame situation.

Not really. There's a daily quest for 25 TW badges and the event lasts for 2 weeks. That's 14 days of 25 TW badges, or another 350. more than enough to buy every item the vendor sells and still have some left over.

[Tenjen]

As has been said before.

The initial changes in a PTr are just there for initial testing and numbers. THey are not the final changes, not the only changes and are not reflective of the final release for live and thus shouldnt be treated as such.

Most of the initial changes are just there to see what numbers crop up from practical use so they can better make intended changes. They will change the calculations to be higher and lower just to see what comes out to better judge related changes

[Monkstradamus]

You get a Corgi from your mission table. Unless it's a different one than Corgnelius?

[Deleted]

While I'm one of the people who were capable of mentally comprehending that it's just the first weave of changes, and they aren't final either, I still find it funny that they "open" the changelist with nerfing one of the worst specs' best legendary, instead of trying to buff the bottom specs in the first round.