Dungeon Deserter Buff
Because people would queue for a random dungeon then immediately leave if it wasn't the dungeon they wantedm you could literally wait an hour watching tanks join and leave if you were unlucky enough to get a dungeon like oculus.
I think looking at its inception, this is the most common-sense answer. It also previously served as a mechanic against AFKing in dungeons to gain currency such as Justice Points (member?), but we're a bit far down the line from that now.
I think its a good mechanic to prevent tanks/healers from jumping ship for a better group or a different dungeon, and saves the larger majority headaches and longer queue timers.
Wouldn't it be better to run with people who WANT to run the content? If players are jumping ship there's something wrong with how the dungeon is designed compared to the other options. Rewards for Random Dungeons and the Deserter Debuff just masks crappy design choices.
It doesn't really have a one-point answer.
In a perfect world, sure. But there /are/ a set amount of dungeons to run at any certain level range, and if you prefer a set number of them, you can always single queue for those specifically (when it comes to random queueing).
But this problem also exists for players dropping out due to disliking their group, or thinking their group isn't good enough, etc.
Like I said Ornyx it was more of a thing to keep tanks/healers from refusing to do their roles in Cata. While I'm sure it was around earlier I never saw it as a tank. It was Cata where tanks/healers would just sit down and absolutely refuse to do the dungeon.
Now as a geared tank during that time it wasn't a problem. I do think that if a dungeon is going that badly before the first boss we should be allowed to leave once a week.
I also never waited hours for a healer (I mained a tank during Wrath/Cata). I watched DPS queue with a healer and that healer drop and we needed to wait for another healer but in the long run it ended up punishing people who started the dungeon and saw it was going bad.
But then I never saw the other BS that people were going on about at the time - like 'I got kicked from a guild group'. Yeah no. Never been kicked from a guild group but I still lost my privileges to invite. I had a pure DPS toon during the heyday of Cata too and would jump in queue as a tank because of the terrible tanks I saw. Wanted to give DPS something better. But if my tank sucked and dropped - well couldn't just get an invite back as the tank after a certain point.
There are definitely people who try to work the system for their benefit or pleasure, and I've seen the complaints about guild groups, and, while its never happened to me, I can see how that scenario would play out.
Not saying dungeon deserter will always stay the same, but it does serve a purpose even now in Legion. This is something we can always take in feedback on and review if people feel strongly about it either way. (
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Challenge Warlord: Gold / Items
Then make the items invisible for players that can't buy the items, my eyes hurt from seeing such beauty transmogs being left alone for nobody to buy.
The vendor is there so that players who completed the achievement and have misplaced their rewards (even with the transmog wardrobe, some players still like to hold onto the actual items), or haven't even collected their rewards yet, have a means of obtaining them again.
There are currently no plans to open this gear up to players who didn't complete the achievement. (
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Paladin Class Fantasy
Why do you feel blessings and auras are fun? I can understand that it feels "nice" to help other players with buff spells, but, in general, they were just niche spells that actually didn't contribute much to meaningful game play (Seals are a different story, I guess). I never thought to myself on my Pally that turning on Retribution or Devotion Aura was going to result in an exciting change besides some passive armor or thorns-like-damage reflect.
The anti-undead themed abilities were cool though, in my opinion. I guess the question there that had to be answered was what happens when there's a zone or dungeon with no undead? Or an entire expansion without undead? Those skills essentially became useless.
The class can mean different things to everyone, so there's no right answer. Not trying to troll here btw, just personally curious on these points.
Also, updated descriptions of each class and spec were provided in the Legion Class Preview series, and you can find the Paladin one here:
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/19955661
I doubt you'll read this because the thread has gone on for so long, but for the sake of providing feedback, I'll throw my two cents in the ring.
I'm going to base my argument around Paladins and Shamans, but a lot of what I'm going to say could just as easily be applied to other classes and the buffs they used to have.
So, why are Blessings and Auras fun? For the sake of including Shamans in the argument, I'll combine Auras with Totems, but will just call them Auras.
The reason why players enjoyed Paladin auras doesnt come from any one source. Giving someone an extra 2% physical damage reduction with Devotion Aura may not be gamebreaking, but it was there. You could always tell that the Paladin had your back just by looking up at the corner of your screen and seeing that shield icon for Devotion Aura. But that 'hell yeah' feeling from Auras wasnt solely a gameplay function.
When players talk about class fantasy, one of the things I think Blizzard constantly misunderstands isnt just how the class feels to play, it's how the class should play in terms of lore. A Paladin isnt just a Warrior who happens to use the Light. They're a guardian, a divine protector, a shield who stands at the front lines and protects their allies. You'll never find a Paladin sitting in the back with a bow or hurling magic. They wear Plate for a reason, and that reason is because you'll always find them right in the middle of the brawl.
A Paladin is a knight who leads from the front lines, but that isnt what defines them. A Paladin is a righteous crusader who protects the innocent, shields their allies, and takes the brunt of the damage onto themselves. When a group of soldiers see that a Paladin has joined the fight on their side, they get a burst of morale, because now the Paladin is here to save them and suddenly there's hope of winning when there wasn't before.
A Paladin's Auras represented that perfectly. When a Paladin is in a fight, they dont just fight the enemy, they strengthen and rally their allies. Soldiers who were wounded are suddenly brought back from the brink of death when the Paladin lays their hands on them. Soldiers who fled in fear find their courage bolstered. Soldiers who are exhausted find the strength to pick up their swords and march back into the fray. A Paladin brings that sense of duty and courage and hope with their mere presence, and giving Paladins the ability to strengthen their allies through Aura spells was a fun and thematic way of presenting that.
Not to fire shots or start a flamewar, but the reason that Auras were removed werent because players didn't like them, it's because Blizzard didn't like them. Paladin Auras were nerfed several times because Blizzard didn't like how a Paladin's allies were essentially getting free buffs, despite that being an iconic theme of the class. Then when the nerfs were so heavy that the Auras did effectively nothing, they were removed entirely. Players never asked for this. Asking players why they want something back that made the class fun 'because it wasnt good' is a bit disingenuous when Blizzard is the reason they werent good to begin with.
TL;DR Paladins want their Auras back because a Paladin's presence grants strength and hope to their allies. That's what a Paladin does. Taking that away weakens the theme of the class as a whole, and pruning abilities just because they'd be easier to bake into the class is not an improvement of design.
I don't think it's anything close to "shots fired", I think it's a perfectly reasonable explanation.
I feel like the nerfs that came to them were a move in the direction of making it to where bringing a Paladin didn't feel necessary to the group because of the buffs they provided, which is much the same with Shaman totems. Though I understand the sentiment a bit more with Shaman totems (its never felt the same since they were removed in Mists(?)), as I've played my Shaman longer than my Paladin. Even now, the auras are given off at a much reduced range, with different effects for the most part, which isn't so much akin to how it was previously.
My concern there is that there is probably a better and more involved way of bringing that theme of an "inspiring presence" to the battlefield than what auras were/are. Personally, I think the way they are now may not be a good "fantasy" of this, and there are probably improvements that could be made to the overall theme, but I'm not too sure which way they could/might go. This is more the reason I ask why you want it back.
Fun is subjective, sure, but in that vein its good to note that the game's population has very much diversified since the days where auras were as you remember, and there is a much wider audience who might not look at it in the way of "turning on this passive buff really felt like I was inspiring my group and creating a meaningful difference". Its hard to see when looking at the forum community, as most posters here are some of the longest-time players, and don't always represent, I feel, a super wide berth. Creating a skill that lasting and memorable for that greater group seems like a better direction, philosophically, (albeit a harder one) and creating something feels like auras did way back when, but has an impact that adheres to more modern design is something I can see us doing more than just giving auras back as they were. (
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Developer Communication
Most people are still returning from the holiday break, so the appropriate players needed for this to happen are only just now getting back to work.
We never get a back and forth with the devs. At most, we get a series of calculated press releases that barely scratch the surface of the issues we care about. These amount to "announcements" rather than dialogue. The only blue posters who ever even pretend to have anything resembling a conversation with us are community managers, and those conversations are never substantive because they aren't the ones actually making the decisions that affect our classes.
It it part of our job and the role of a community manager to relay what the developers say and think, as they don't necessarily have time to do it themselves. We don't see it as an issue for us to communicate for them at all (in fact, that's the point), so we disagree with any sentiment surrounding that. This is what Lore has been doing on these forums prior to the break.
Aside from that, before there break, there was a good amount of back-and-forth on numerous topics - maybe not ones you directly care about, but that doesn't change the fact. We are still moving forward with improving our channels for communication, and we are obviously not where we need to be yet, but I do see us getting to a better state before long.
The problem is the barrier between devs and the playerbase. Community managers shouldn't be speaking for the devs or for the playerbase to the other parties. There needs to be a direct line of communication here now more than ever because the majority of specs are just not correct at all. It's not a numbers thing that gets fixed with flat %buffs and nerfs like what we're getting in 7.1.5 for multiple classes/specs, it's mechanical changes that we need to make specs not play and feel like garbage. It's feedback on specs that has been put forth SINCE ALPHA AND BETA that would have made specs play well, but communication has just been nonexistent on Blizzard's end because the devs want the CMs to pick and choose info for them to read. At what point will the devs look at their 2nd or 3rd monitors and READ THESE FORUMS THEMSELVES? When enough people quit the game or a spec has almost no one playing it that they realize that maybe they need to actively listen to the people playing the game?
We're happy that Bliz wants to increase communication, but so far it's just been another of Blizzard's "Soon™"s that we have to suffer through. We want to hear from the class balance devs, not the CMs. We want to hear their reasoning behind changes. We want to understand why the things we say and the feedback we give always fall on deaf ears. We respect the CMs wholeheartedly for being the punching bags that they have become, but when you look at any other game developer they have people from multiple departments engaging with the community, talking about the game, looking at opportunities for improvement, and hyping the players up with news on future outlooks. All we get is Community Managers who have to relay messages and deal with entire forums of angry nerds all day.
I have to disagree with your first note, especially when looking at it from the point of a game as large as WoW is, with teams as large as ours are. We CMs aren't a "barrier", by any means. None of us are reading feedback and saying "Oh, thats stupid, let's not send that over." I think that would be extremely dangerous and false to our roles here. We are simply collating feedback together and handing it off, while the developers work on making changes as they see fit based off of it. Those changes are passed back to us, since most of us specialize in communication, and know when and where to be soft and/or heavy-handed with such things (patch notes vs. forum conversation, for example). On the opposite side, we also do represent the player-base to the developers. Some older titles for community management were called "Community Representatives", and its still very much true for the team today in that our goal should ultimately be to represent the desires of the community to the rest of the development team, while acting as a source of information as to the sentiments of the greater community.
I understand that people may have feedback that they feel they would be resolved by mechanical changes, and that feedback has been sent to the development team and I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment. But class changes are an iterative design process, with 7.1.5 a part of that overall iteration.
And yes, issues have been mentioned time and time again since Alpha and Beta, and we have, as said previously, slipped up on these things - which is why we've made so many changes with 7.1.5.
You, the person behind the Ornyx account. The other CMs. ANY blue type that posts on these forums. I ask this genuinely, without trying to be catty: what good are you doing? If the answer to dozens of pages of feedback, hundreds of player hours spent testing and calculating and theorycrafting and testing some more, and a list of THOROUGHLY researched bullet points of the main issues with classes or specs, all from people who have spend hundreds if not thousands of hours with their class or spec of choice, is merely just "handed info on Point A to devs, will post back with news. they're aware of complaints"? If THAT'S all you can provide, then....
Why are you here? What good are you doing? Do you honestly think you're helping? Are we supposed to be satisfied with that? Are we supposed to be satisfied with another PR politics handbook reply of "design is iterative"? Are we supposed to be happy that we have ONE relatively active representative talking to us, who can't be bothered to maybe spend an hour researching BM hunters and why the belt nerf is so harmful and what their complaints are?
You know what I want, more than anything else, in regards to WoW? If one experienced, knowledgeable person from every class and spec could have one on one time, in face, personally, with the devs of the game. No Watcher to feed us ex-lawyer bull!@#$ about "we're baking in mandatory talents to add more interesting choices". No Lore to make huge TL;DRs absolutely FULL of ridiculous claims and utterly false facts about Shadow Priest mechanics, and then backpedal completely when this was pointed out. No CMs to feed us canned responses we've heard dozens of times just this expac. Just a few minutes to ask the devs, "what the %^-* were you thinking?" with legendary balance, performance disparities, design oversights, feedback going completely and utterly ignored since ALPHA, and a whole host of other problems.
I'm not trying to insult you or disrespect you, Ornyx. I'm saying: this isn't good enough. It never has been and it never will be and the "communication improvements are an ongoing effort" excuse isn't cutting it anymore.
I would much rather hear from the players directly what their problem is, rather than inferring it myself and possibly being wrong (happens more often than you think). There's nothing wrong with asking questions and admitting we may not know - which is what I did. I understand that generally BM has issues with focus, but I disagree that the belt should be the solution to resolve that issue, and, instead, we should be focused on the design of the spec's given skills to resolve that.
In terms of "what good do we do", a lot of that if its not here is behind the scenes, so it makes sense that you would insinuate that you think we aren't helpful. Aside from having daily conversations with developers, we work on tons of other projects that may or may not ever be attributed to us, from blogs to videos to social media to events to the forums - the list goes on and on. People have asked for us to pop into threads and say "Thanks for the feedback, we are looking into this - its been noted", and that's what we've done in a few places recently as sometimes we have nothing to share (various reasons for that, maybe changes are in the work, maybe we haven't heard back yet, etc. Its super case by case and there's nothing we can ever do or say that can make everyone universally happy).
In regards to your last point, I'd be fine with a system where we could have some sort of class representatives or something that could have those honest conversations with the developers in the open (in fact I created such a system in a previous life). It does help to have that one singular voice to talk to instead of 100,000, heh. But the community agreeing on who that person would be sounds like it would be a very difficult task - maybe something to think on.
I'm not insulted by any of what you said - its true in its own regard. I'm just trying to lay out the ground work and reasons behind some observations. As said, we have had communication failings over the last couple of months, and we are working on addressing that in the now.(
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