Nether Disruptor and Command Center Buildings, Tweets, Con Before the Storm, DLC #579

[chaud]

Necromancer Influencer Summit 2017: New Information on Skills, Sets, and More

Discover New Standard Decks From Un'Goro to Play This Weekend

Nether Disruptor and Command Center
The Nether Disruptor is active on both US and EU realms. The Command Center is active on EU realms and should be ready in the next day on US realms.

Nether Disruptor

• Zone-wide buff: Epic Hunter
  
  • Unlocks new world bosses in the Broken Isles. These bosses drop item level 900 loot.
  • If your profession is maxed before you complete the building, you get Armorcrafter's Commendation to start on the crafted legendary item questlines.
  • Purchase a Nether Portal Disruptor to disrupt Unstable Nether portals around the Broken Shore. This summons a small boss which drops War Supplies, Beacons, and other loot.
• This week's buff: Fate Smiles Upon You - Chance to have Seal refunded on failed bonus roll.
• Potential buffs: Fate Smiles Upon You, Netherstorm, Reinforced Reins, Seal Your Fate

Command Center

• Zone-wide buff: Forces of the Order
  
  • Unlocks Cathedral World Quests, which don't appear to award any Armies of Legionfall reputation.
  • Unlocks a "Challenging Mission" for the Broken Shore. Currently this rewards less Artifact Power than most world quests.
• This week's buff: Well Prepared - 10% stats in outdoor Broken Shore area.
• Potential buffs: Heavily Augmented, War Effort, Worthy Champions, Well Prepared

Blue Tweets

Character / Items
Is the Riddler's Mind-Worm in game? Spending quite some time looking for it. Just prefer clarification if it were in game
Yep! (Muffinus)
Can you say for sure that the Mind-Worm isn't in any difficulty of Tomb of Sargeras? Or is it in the open world?
It's available right now (Muffinus)

Lore
Hey Dave, how old can a Half-Elf get in Warcraft's universe?
Half-races are so rare in Warcraft that we don't really have any established lore. (That I'm aware of). (DaveKosak)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.

In the games you’ve worked on, how did you handle writing ability tooltips? Was it something gameplay designers did, or was it something you had writers handle? And on the subject of tooltips… how do you balance being descriptive without being too pedantic?
I have written shit tons of tooltips. I haven’t done many for League, but I did a ton for WoW and it’s possible I did all of them on some of the Age of Empires games. I also made an editing pass on almost all of the WoW class ability and talent tooltips, and truth be told, I should probably be doing more of that for League, since our tooltips are getting out of control.

Overall, I find that designers and writers make a few common mistakes with tooltips. Again, I don’t pretend to be the galaxy’s best tooltip writer. I’m just sharing what I’ve noticed.

First, you can’t teach everything in a tooltip and that’s really not their point. A new player (or even someone new to a particular tooltip) doesn’t need tons of detail. It will just be overwhelming. And an experienced player already knows all of the text anyway. So I often try to think of tooltips as just a reminder about what something is. Imagine that a player frequently confuses two spells with similar thematics, or there is an icon for some kind of menu feature that isn’t super self-explanatory.

Shorter is almost always better. A few times on Blizzard, we found ourselves in a situation where QA would point out that a tooltip was technically incorrect because maybe it implied that it blocked ALL magic. QA was right to point those potential errors out, but they were just that - potential - and it wasn’t necessary that we took that documentation as a mandate for change. Our tooltips over time started to look like legal documents with lists of parentheticals and exceptions. Just cover the main use cases. A tooltip doesn’t need to provide binding arbitration. Clarity is king.

Second, I agree with you that it’s easy to make tooltips too flowery. I don’t think tooltips are the best opportunity to show off beautiful writing for the sake of writing. (Now, I’ll also argue that really well written tooltips ARE beautiful.) Flavor text in a different format is a good option to communicate to players “There is something hopefully cool here, but it’s an aside to the main description.” But not every tooltip has room to support flavor text. It is possible to take this too far. Words are precious and you don’t get too many of them in a game, especially for tooltips, so if you can convey a lot with a little, go for it. I named one of the early Death Knight talents “Veteran of the Third War.” I didn’t explain what that meant in the tooltip itself, and it was probably some lame passive stat boost, but folks who knew WoW lore understood the reference. There is nuance among words like affect, blast, penetrate, strike and so on. What feels the most appropriate for your game? But shorter is still better.

And speaking of room… if you’re an English-speaking designer or writer, it can be easy to forget that other languages take up different spaces. German and Russian for example are long. It can take 50-100% more space to convey the same message in those languages. German also uses long words that can look bad in a narrow tooltip space if they get hyphenated a a lot. Korean is tall. If you devote tooltip space that is horizontally long but vertically short, then Korean characters might get clipped off.

I’m a fan of style guides. They can be a pain to compose (mostly because you have to get everyone to agree and then enforce them), but the consistency will help provide clarity later on. For example, what kinds of words do you capitalize? I started capitalizing class names in WoW at some point and can never break the habit. Do you refer to the player as “You” or do you try to avoid mentioning them? Are fragments okay? (Probably.) Do you use periods? Do you say “Creates a bolt of energy that flies at a target causing X damage”? or do you say “A bolt of energy strikes your opponent for X damage”? or “Strike your enemy with a bolt of energy, causing X damage”” or simply “A bolt of energy - X damage”? Players may not notice the differences in style (though I always do), but it does help add polish and clarity when tooltip sentences are structured similarly and you use the same kinds of words. (Source)

Con Before the Storm
Podcasters, streamers, pro teams, artists, news sites and fan sites come together for Con Before the Storm, which will be on Thursday Nov. 2nd.

Dark Legacy Comics #579
DLC #579 has been released!

[Jodmos]

DLC is spot on. Most amusing.

And boy the command center sucks. Follower mission. Hmm, let's think, will I do the one that takes 12 hours and gives me 2 million AP or the nice new one that takes 2 days and gives me 1 million AP. Hardly comes across as a wonderful bonus.

That the CoEN quests don't give rep is another case of Blizzard trying to drag out the rep grind for flying.

Apart from the achievement for helping build it 5 times I think I'll stick to the other two unless I'm capped and it's the only one that is being built.

Edit - actually, the other buffs may make it worthwhile. Don't think I'd mind a legendary champion item but it'll be random and getting a good one won't be likely. Also, the one to give extra legionfall supplies would have been useful as it would help get rep.

[Taurous]

Too bad I decided to become an alchemist to provide my guild with flasks. No legendary for me.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Haha, that DLC was all too true!

That being said, I sure hope they'll increase the intensity of the invasions...

[lichbane]

Too bad I decided to become an alchemist to provide my guild with flasks. No legendary for me.

Feel better that you have a useful and profitable profession in the first place. The armorcrafting professions are useless time and gold wasters. Fishing has a more fruitful outcome than armorcrafters!!

They MIGHT ACTUALLY be useful now.

[Zabatakis]

lol @ command center quest offering no rep and less AP than common WQ. Trololol

[Onikaroshi]

Feel better that you have a useful and profitable profession in the first place. The armorcrafting professions are useless time and gold wasters. Fishing has a more fruitful outcome than armorcrafters!! They MIGHT actually be useful now.

I beg to differ, my GF has made about a million gold over the last 2 months with crafting professions, the 815s(now 835s) sell for anywhere from 2k-50k (no shit, she's sold something that cost her about 100g to make for 50k, think it was a double haste roll cloth chest)

armor professions are far from unprofitable, you just gotta put a little work into it.

[lichbane]

I beg to differ, my GF has made about a million gold over the last 2 months with crafting professions, the 815s(now 835s) sell for anywhere from 2k-50k (no shit, she's sold something that cost her about 100g to make for 50k, think it was a double haste roll cloth chest)

armor professions are far from unprofitable, you just gotta put a little work into it.

This surprises the hell out of me. Considering most crafted armor is quickly outleveled by world quest armor, who's buying it?

[Onikaroshi]

This surprises the hell out of me. Considering most crafted armor is quickly outleveled by world quest armor, who's buying it?

Good question, and one I can't answer lol, but it's selling like crazy and that can't be argued! I mean there's some really good stuff out there you can't get anywhere else (double rolls, DMF trinkets) but some of it I wonder myself.

Obliterum goes like hot cakes too, you almost can't post it fast enough.

[Enfilade]

DLC implies people that play Legion actually have jobs. April Fools was last weekend.

[TheFirstOnes]

Kil'jaeden is TOO FUCKING SMART!

That...BASTARD!


He fucking knew our weakness, something Villains from almost EVERY Game fail to realize....


Damn him! He's different from the Normal Anime Villain, DAMN THE DECE---

*Looks at him being a US MMORPG Villain* *Looks at his "Deceiver" title*

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.......OHHHHHHHHHH..........Oh.

[Morgomir]

Good question, and one I can't answer lol, but it's selling like crazy and that can't be argued! I mean there's some really good stuff out there you can't get anywhere else (double rolls, DMF trinkets) but some of it I wonder myself.

Obliterum goes like hot cakes too, you almost can't post it fast enough.

well high single stat roll items are very high on the BIS list for some specs, especially if you arn't raiding
with demonology valuing haste at almost double the value of intellect it can cause some serious ilvl downgrading to occur

[darquis]

Feel better that you have a useful and profitable profession in the first place. The armorcrafting professions are useless time and gold wasters. Fishing has a more fruitful outcome than armorcrafters!!

They MIGHT ACTUALLY be useful now.

Idk what professions you mean, but at least LW has been fantastic for gold - I made at least 2-3 million on the obliterum forge bracers, and I only started when 7.1.5 dropped.

[Onikaroshi]

well high single stat roll items are very high on the BIS list for some specs, especially if you arn't raiding
with demonology valuing haste at almost double the value of intellect it can cause some serious ilvl downgrading to occur

Yea, those ones I understand, but its the non-double stats, easily replaceable stuff that sells too, not for as much but damn does it sell, I guess people love to get their Ilvl up and have lots of G to spend.

[S7orm]

next week's DarkLegacyComics strip is writing by itself

I was so right :P

[DesoPL]

KJ actually got good plan, but failed miserably. :P I feel bad for him. xD

[Deonora]

The command centre is a joke if you ask me. The world quest for Cathedral of Eternal Night gives 0 rep. The table missions give a silly low amount of AP my normal table missions give more. What is the point of this? I thought it would at least give stuff that would be usefull. Same with nether disruptor. Spent yesterday going up and down Broken Shore looking for Unstable portals found 3. Each rare giving a silly 2-4 war supplies. Common? Really?!

[nothinunik]

After the hotfix my command center mission gives 5.3 million AP for two day mission.. that's fine by me

[Onikaroshi]

The command centre is a joke if you ask me. The world quest for Cathedral of Eternal Night gives 0 rep. The table missions give a silly low amount of AP my normal table missions give more. What is the point of this? I thought it would at least give stuff that would be usefull. Same with nether disruptor. Spent yesterday going up and down Broken Shore looking for Unstable portals found 3. Each rare giving a silly 2-4 war supplies. Common? Really?!

They hotfixed it, the WQ for Cath now gives like 250 rep and the Mission now takes like 1 day and awards 5.3M at like 26 AK.

Honestly the ND is worth it JUST for the WB and it's 500 rep.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

This surprises the hell out of me. Considering most crafted armor is quickly outleveled by world quest armor, who's buying it?

Crafted gear upgrades to 875 atm, and gold is plentiful. I splurge on all my alts. Some pieces are worth more than others, of course. Belts and cloaks are easy slots to fill with raid-drop BoEs, but the crafted tanking trinket (DM Immortality) is absolutely useful for 900+ toons even at 875 item level.

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Too bad I decided to become an alchemist to provide my guild with flasks. No legendary for me.

They'll be available through friends, or in the AH, and the prices will come down over time. Market forces and all that.