Developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas

[Redecle]

The 1 or 4 or 12 skins are a tiny small amount of the overall transmog system, that will be locked. You might be a completionist when it comes to gathering skins, but then you should be ready for that somethings are not just gonna be collected. If you wait for Argus, you proberly need to have half LFR gear and half normal raiding gear to be able to ignore any form of DPS requirement in the challenges. If you can't get that gear, then you are again not deserving of getting that exclusive skin.

Again, this is a tiny small thing to give away to the exclusive crowd. You as a transmog collector have been able to get 99.9% of all the games skins and you saying, that that is not enough is simply bafling. If you want a skin, go do what it requires. If you want ALL the skins, do what it requires and get them, but if you can't or don't think it is worth it, then these skins are simply not worth it for you and that is okay.

Well i'm on the path to get them i've been on that path for a year now. I just really don't feel like spending a year trying to work for something and then not being able to reach it, that's a year i could have spend doing other things. I started on solely without even knowing if the skins are usable after Legion, which was already a shit place to be, I haven't enjoyed the skins in Legion, I've been basing getting them so I can actually make use of them after when I don't have to wear hidden skin to farm 1000 honor kills instead of the cool one I want to wear, just in case that in the future i might like the hidden skin more than I like that one i would like to wear in Legion.

The difficulty of the challenges is subsided in the end by the gear, possibly or possibly not on all specs, then I'm to do what i did with the warlock greenfire quest in MoP. I'm going to spend 3 months and 600+ or something pulls of ramming my head to a stonewall until it's done. In the end I fucking hated that questline and I hated my warlock, I still do, if I have to enslave one more demon ever again i'm going to find the dev who put that spell in to the game and force feed it to them, but hey I got a title.

The bigger problem is that there's not enough time. Getting there takes enormous amounts of time and I pretty much do this 12 hours a day, every day on multiple characters. Still i'm afraid the it's not going to be enough, that it's not even possible to do this in the given time frame. Specifically if I have to start bruteing some challenge tactics with my head to the stonewall for months on end like that warlock, months that I possibly don't have. That we really don't even know cause no one wants to tell us. It's estimated that 7.3 will hit in the next months and last raid tier opens in november.

Lessons Blizzard learned from WoD was not to dryspell content between expacs, meaning we might very well be looking at the next expac in january or february depending on gamescom announcements. Essentially leaving about 6-7 months to complete it all, when getting to this point has taken already what 11 months and it's not even close there yet. And highly likely getting fully geared towards the very end, meaning it'll be up to the very last weeks of working the challenges. Something I did with the MoP CM sets, I was in there pushing 24 hour days in the last week just to get my shaman set and again I hated doing that, but in the end I got the set. I hated playing the shaman after so really it's bittersweet to have the set cause playing with the class now is just bad memories and source of immense stress. There's no prestige or reward in challenge, only stress. It's nothing but a ball of ugly growing stress that's just going to burn you out in the end.

Heck the only toon I play to reach pvp prestige cap like mad man, more hours than my main just because eu alliance pvp is so shit, is currently at prestige 5 and needs to be level 15 to unlock their skin and I've played that char now for 6 months out of the 11 to get that far, it's looking like it's going to be mathematically impossible, not much more you can do when you're already grinding stuff 12 hours a day every day. One thing is already sure if I ever get to that prestige 15, i'm never ever ever going to heal anyone in pvp again. If there's something that makes you hate other people and humanity it's that, be a healer in pvp and get ready for apocalypse after.

[Flurryfang]

I think it would be cool in future xpacs to have a mini holiday where the people of a azeroth celebrate defeating the burning legion, and part of that would be access to the mage tower fight. You're right though the reality is that Blizzard is removing it and the people who don't want it gone need to move on.

I actually think you have a good idea with the micro holiday But it would proberly need to happend in 9.X before the outrage would be small enough

[Deleted]

No, he's completely wrong.

Actually he is mostly right. But Hey If you feel like, at some point, you have some actual valid arguments then feel free to bring Them up.

[Florida Man]

Soooo they haven't even started on worgen update. Great.

[sgthotrod]

So after all that work i'm going to lose my appearance?

[Renchard]

I guess. I think this actually promotes the opposite. "I'll quit paying my sub, and even when I come back, I'll be on par with everyone else with AK."

I understand it might lure some players back, but I think it would also make people more comfortable with what they'd be losing if they stop paying for the game. I think that's something Blizzard wouldn't want.

If 7.3 content doesn't bring you back, you're telling me automatic AK research will? What type of players do we want coming back, exactly?

I think, in general, it's better for the long-term health of the game if people resub because they want to see new content, rather than people being afraid to unsub because they'll fall behind.

I would imagine players who constantly re-sub/un-sub are older players who play off and on based on nostalgia (raises hand). Those people are also probably people who pay for character services more frequently precisely because they have more spending money.

[Deleted]

Well to be honest the mage tower challenge appearance doesn't have to be made unavailable. I mean we have scaling tech in the game now, so how hard would it be to implement that for this scenario?

Because classes never change between expansions? Heck, nowadays you can solo most of the stuff that used to require full party at that level, at least the oldest content left. Shadow priests used to wand their way through most of vanilla zones, power creep is a thing people oh so eager to forget.

People value exclusivity, or what's left of it, in a world where you could be wearing LFR gear while raiding mythic, if you were (un)lucky enough. Is it reasonable to complain that your mage does not have corrupted ashbringer transmog, because you were a druid up to wrath? Or didn't even play? No, I don't think so. Would a Black Qiraji Battle Tank even be a prestigious mount if anyone could go back and farm it? No, it would just be another bronze drake.

Plus, be glad you have a warning about exclusivity of the skins. +15 skin can be done easy enough, or carried through, even bought if you don't have guildies willing to do so. And when argus drops, you'll be able to get a full set of 910 without ever stepping in to a dungeon, well enough to do the mage tower challenges. Or are you saying you want to get things other's had to work for, but without putting in at least some effort?

[Valette]

Really? Are they arguing that their internal test team is WF level? Better than Method etc? And if they tested for hundred of hours how did they mistune the fight so badly??

No they are not. If you had actually watched the video instead of just reading mmo-champion's recap, you would know ion clearly stated they are not as good as method at all. But that their team is better than they used to be (makes sense that a team gets better over time, no?), and they underestimated their own team's skill (partly because they used to be worse). So when they tuned the fight to be harder than what their own team could do, they anticipated the difference between them and method to be bigger, and therefore overtuned it.

[Eleccybubb]

So after all that work i'm going to lose my appearance?

No you are not.

Any appearances you have now can be used for transmog post Legion.

The mage tower appearance and +15 Mythic ones will be unobtainable after Legion.

You will still be able to go back and obtain the appearances to use as Transmog.

[sgthotrod]

No you are not.

Any appearances you have now can be used for transmog post Legion.

The mage tower appearance and +15 Mythic ones will be unobtainable after Legion.

You will still be able to go back and obtain the appearances to use as Transmog.

YAY!! I'm glad

[Lac]

anyone know where this vendor is on the ptr to unlock all content?

[Averrix]

heh, that's funny. "Every item that doesn't have your best two stats you would reforge to have your best stat. This didn't really make for interesting choices."

"There were some good parts, such as giving players choices to make."

[HitRefresh]

but Goblin and Worgen models are still on the high priority list!

Let's refer back to this when they add 2+ new races and Goblins and Worgen look exactly the same.

[Deleted]

So now they are undoing "tourist mode" LFR and bringing back harder MoP-like LFRs.
They have been slowly undoing all of their terrible, incompetent changes that they made in WoD and Legion.

Honestly, they should just stop wasting everyone's time and revert everything back to MoP already. Especially everything they done to the classes, like ability prunings.

[Hirako]

Just blame your player base if you're too incompetent and impotent to balance more than 4 classes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

He is actually not entirely wrong with that statement though.

[Svad1287]

Nah, they don't want you to have to rush to collect them all before Legion. Will change the wording there to make it clearer as I finish up this pass on the recap!

Cheers Chaud, would be nice for us silly none native english speakers

[clevin]

No they are not. If you had actually watched the video instead of just reading mmo-champion's recap, you would know ion clearly stated they are not as good as method at all. But that their team is better than they used to be (makes sense that a team gets better over time, no?), and they underestimated their own team's skill (partly because they used to be worse). So when they tuned the fight to be harder than what their own team could do, they anticipated the difference between them and method to be bigger, and therefore overtuned it.

Ok, that makes sense, thanks. And yeah, I was just going off the recap.

[Ophenia]

The Challenge Appearance for Artifact, even though it was 100% sure, bothers me... I hope this fight is not scaling too much and that we will hopefully be able to bruteforce it with some higher stuff, because I kinda suck with some toons, and it seems like I have microlags on my connection making me fail some encounters (I don't even try anymore).

The other changes looks fine. My Mage is 110 since Monday and I hated wasting my time doing the billions of nonsense quests to unlock Points>34, third relic, Illidan and all. Even without the time-gated content (they're still time-gated, just a bit less than before).

Great for the "worldwide Artifact Knowledge" as well. I didn't even think about resubbing after missing a few months, because I knew catching up with AK would be painful back in time. The 4-hour research was perfect, the new proposed system for 7.3 looks fine too.

[Bigcountry11782]

The team doesn't want to make players feel like their spec or class is constantly changing due to hotfixes.I call Bullshit on that LOL

[nekobaka]

There is a handful of statements that either counter each other or lack logic in how to handle them. One of which.

The team is hoping to make difficulty closer to Mists of Pandaria difficulty than Warlords. There are some fights that are too easy still.

So buff the "some" fights that are too easy. No need to return to the wipefest of MoP LFR that had screams of complaints on the forums. The people who do LFR as their endgame have spoken. It is the organized raiders who are complaining. Queues are significantly lower and runs faster than that of MoP. Todays LFR is casual friendly.

Tier sets have always been one of the things you can get from raiding. Even if you can get similar item level loot from other sources, you had to organize a larger group to earn the sets.

For a large chunk of WoW's history this has been false. WotLK and Cata had tier gear available to people who never touched foot into raids and since the introduction of LFR aside from WoD players have did not have to organize a large group to get tier gear. The following point trumps all their reasons.

The team doesn't want to remove too much of the incentive from raiding by providing the same rewards to players doing Mythic+

Devs need to keep shoving non-raiders into raid content.