Challenge Mode Feedback
Current challenge modes do normalize people's gear and levels down, so current challenge modes will always be the same (or near same) difficulty into the future. Not exactly what you mean, I know, but that kind of tech does already exist.
Challenge modes are already the most efficient way to get Valor, which is pretty rewarding. If we put an item at the end of it, either it's going to be low enough ilvl to be worthless to the types of people tending to run challenge modes (progression raiders), or it's going to be a BiS, at which point challenge modes become required for progression, tuning suddenly becomes a really big deal, etc. etc. It's not the intent of challenge modes, and not somewhere we're planning to take them. (
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A Discussion of Gear Scaling
This is not an announcement or pertinent information about 5.2.
A player asked this question in the set bonus / class thread. I really wanted to answer it, but I also said I wanted that thread to be about short questions and answers. So I am going to violate the spirit of that rule but not the letter by addressing it here.
The problem I have is the feeling that you, GC, and your development team, are downplaying the importance of scaling in that tuning. Scaling of secondary stats is important, not just for pure damage reasons, but to maintain consistent damage relative to other classes across a wider range of item levels.
Okay. Scaling.
As a sweeping generalization, players worry too much about scaling. Back in vanilla and maybe BC, it was a huge concern. Some abilities scaled with attack power and some just did flat damage. Guess what happened when gear level increased?
Now days (unless I am forgetting something) every ability scales with attack power or spell power, meaning it scales with the primary stats that we slather on your items. If not then it at least scales with weapon damage, which is also just a function of ilevel. An ability that scales well with crit and haste and mastery will do even more damage as ilevel increases, but you have to consider the deltas we're talking about here. If your entire raid improves every single item in a tier (which doesn't always happen), your ilevel might go up by 13 ilevels. Let's be charitable and assume an ilevel is a 2% DPS increase. That means someone with awesome scaling might get a 26% DPS increase compared to someone with no scaling. But we already established all abilities scale with primary stats. So even the low end guy is going to get some scaling. Furthermore, we're typically talking about a player with one strong secondary stat and two weak secondary stats. So he gets a lot from the primary, less from the good secondary, and even less (but not zero!) from the bad secondaries.
Furthermore, specs that tend to not scale as well with their secondary stats will scale better with their primary stat. To use the warrior as an example (since that's what kicked this off), Fury scales well with secondary stats, but Arms scales well with Strength. We also think that's interesting because it makes you look at your gear and really think about the stat allocation instead of "Plate? Go." On top of all of that, you can reforge and gem to lean towards stats that are the best for you, which downplays the impact of bad scaling even more.
So again let's be charitable and say that we're talking about a max delta of something like 5-10% between someone who scales awesome and someone who scales poorly at the very end of a raid tier when everyone is completely geared, which by the way, is probably when you don't care so much about being able to kill those bosses since they're by definition all on farm. Encounter mechanics can have a much bigger impact on DPS than 5-10%.
Now this might still be a problem if we didn't make any adjustments throughout an expansion and the poor-scaling guy just fell farther and farther behind. But we don't do that any longer. Every tier these days is a new chance for us to readjust the numbers and make sure that even if there is a stat scaling issue that we can compensate for it.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you'd assume that we check DPS only at the current ilevel. We check for ilevels that won't exist within the 5.0 time period. On occasion we have tested with stupidly theoretical item levels of 10,000 or more just to see what happens to the curves.
It also doesn't help the conversation that the word "scaling" gets misused a lot. The question above uses the term the way we would, but misuse is sadly pretty common. "Our scaling is bad" gets used as a synonym for "My dps is lower than I want" or even just a vague "My dps needs to be overpowered now, because of, you know, scaling."
TLDR: many players worry far more about scaling than they need to. (
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Is Samwise Still Around?
He's art director on StarCraft II, so most of his time is spent there, but he still does some concepts and bits for Warcraft now and again. (
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Daily Quest Feedback
Questing is an essential part of World of Warcraft. In the past, we've opened up hubs of daily quests tied to a specific storyline, but not necessarily integral to that expansion's theme. This time around, we worked to expand the storyline by coupling the lore of Pandaria and the various zones you adventure in with the daily quests that become available. The ultimate goal is to provide players who aren’t raiding, and who do enjoy questing, something to do at max level beyond grind heroics. One of the main complains in Cataclsym was there was nothing to do, you sat in Stormwind and queued for stuff. Daily quests, if you want to do them, do in fact lead to getting more people out and about in the world. Giving people something to do outside of instances.
We still very much believe players do not have to partake in daily quests to progress. Items that can be purchased from a Quartermaster can easily be matched by items earned through raiding and PvP. What it all boils down to is each individual’s play-style. There are those who will only want to run dungeons and raids; those who only want to PvP; those who only like to work on their farm and do some Pet Battles; those who only like to earn achievements, and any combination in between. We’re trying to appeal to millions of different types of players as best as we can, and we understand that not every piece of content or decision is going to be everyone’s favorite. That’s why to a large degree you can pick and choose what you want to do. It may not always be the most efficient, but the option is there. You've specifically seen that we’re listening to feedback in the addition of the Grand Commendations which not only benefit your alts but make the Revered->Exalted run that much shorter. You’ll also see some changes to reputation gains in Patch 5.2 where a player can champion a faction and earn reputation for their first heroic and scenario runs of the day.
On a personal note, every single person I work with is absolutely, 100% dedicated to their job, to this company, and to our games. Your concerns are our concerns. We may not always agree with you, and you may not agree with us, but in those disagreements we can try to have a conversation and come to understand the motivations of each other. The goal here is to better explain why we’ve designed the game the way we have, rather than disagreeing to disagree. (
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Flying Mounts Feedback
In spite of your firm belief that you feel flying mounts are detrimental to gameplay
No one ever said they are detrimental to gameplay, or they're being removed, or we hate flying mounts, or any of the other things people have inferred for no good reason. What I said was that experiencing a world directly from your character to the earth beneath it, and approaching questing content, is not served well by being able to lift off and set down wherever you like. In most cases we've relegated 'non-flying' to new characters experiencing an expansion for the first time, and then sometime later given them a way to give their alts flying in a quicker manner. In some cases, such as the Isle of Quel'danas back in BC, and now on the 5.2 Thunder King island, we've made a conscious effort to design a no-flying area to present that content in a different, and we believe, more intimate way. That's our job as game designers and world creators to define the restrictions and rules to create what we feel crafts the best experience. You can disagree with the restrictions and rules that define what World of Warcraft is, and we can have a conversation on the pros and cons (and certainly there are both), but let's be careful not to take things out of context and jump to extremes.
Can you start spending as much time making a conscious effort to make content that is based around FLYING characters, even though it may be more difficult?
It is very clear that there are atleast as many people who DESPISE travel by ground. The only reason that the "questing experience is better from the ground" is because that is the way you make it - so make it differently.
All of the level-cap content and locations (daily quests, hubs, etc.) are designed around the knowledge that you have a flying mount available. (
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LFR Loot System Feedback
The LFR loot system works extremely well for what it's intended to do, it sees a ton of traffic, and gears people up in end-game content that just wasn't possible even a year ago. By all accounts it offers people not able to commit the time, or have the resources, to raid. That in and of itself is a major accomplishment, and the intent of the LFR system. Regardless of your personal circumstances, you can get in there, see the story, experience most of the content, and get some decent items. But I think the rub is the expectations it sets. It looks like a raid, and it smells like a raid, but there's fundamental differences in how it's perceived due to the format. For traditional raiding you get together with your guildies and friends, you struggle on bosses, wipe after wipe, and finally through teamwork and perseverance you overcome the obstacle, loot drops, and even if you don't win a roll you feel like you've made a meaningful contribution to your team and your chances at success later through the overall gearing up of your raid group. In LFR the entire dynamic has to change because you're being matched up semi-randomly with other players. Because of that there is no feeling of helping your team get better, you enter the queue alone, and it's mainly about personal goals to gear up, which then maybe help you in coordinated raids later. You're in there for loot for yourself, and because of that there's less tolerance for overcoming obstacles, so encounters are much easier, and the loot system is per-person and not a communal distribution.
As others have noted the chance to get items in LFR versus a traditional raid scenario are actually higher, but that doesn't change the expectations of people jumping into LFR that this should be a system that provides more consistency. Whatever the underlying reason is for that, I'm not totally sure it matters beyond there is an expectation difference between traditional raiding and LFR. It's something we're keeping an eye on for potential tweaks in the future. We have tech for quests that increases your chance for a quest item to drop if you haven't gotten one recently, and so that's something we're at least beginning to think about and how that kind of consistency system could translate into things like the LFR. If nothing else tweaking drop rates on prior tiers when a new tier hits is pretty low hanging fruit on at least ensuring people can more easily get those last few ilvls so they can queue for the new tier. (
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Mists of Pandaria and Alts
Sure go ahead and lie but please try not to make it that obvious. If you find them useful and enjoyable, you must be flying around in orgrimmar/stormwind waiting for something to happen because that's the only thing i know is worse than questing. And how dare you defend the content??? We both know it's crap and the one who created it deserves to hear it.
Sorry but you can't call me a liar because you don't like my opinion. If you don't like questing, that's all fine (in fact, there's plenty of players out there that don't like having to level when a new expansion is launched), but you can't pretend your opinion is an universal, undisputable truth and everyone else is just a liar.
LFR requires you to have ilvl460, which you can get by completing all the Dread Wastes quests, some Townlong Steppes rewards, and if you're still lacking gear for some reason: heroics/scenarios. You don't need to dailies to get in.
Yes I'm quoting myself!
As some people have pointed out, you can't reach ilvl 460 in Dread Wastes/Townlong Steppes (and I totally made a mistake in that sense). What I was referring instead, was 5-man heroics. My points stands still, you don't need dailies to gain access to the LFR, and chain running 5-man heroics will be faster too since you don't need a 463 item on every slot to access LFR, but you won't get it either just with Dread Wastes/Townlong exclusively. (
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Updating Older Dungeons
Thanks for your suggestions, we’re aware that some dungeons are being somewhat missed out by players while levelling up, and I agree, they’re missing some really great PvE content.
I believe that one of the possible issues is that some of those instances are probably not tuned with the new players in mind, they were instances that were added late on previous expansions and so they are supposed to be harder and they wouldn't be a good experience for players levelling up for the first time. Tuning older dungeons (revamping quests, tuning bosses/mobs, items) is something that takes time and currently the focus is on level 90 content, but don’t worry, devs are aware of this, if there are any changes we’ll let you know. (
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Converting Justice Points Into Elder Charms
I would like to be able to convert justice points into coins.
Justice points are the lower currency, useful for those looking to gear up for heroics, pre-raid stuff really. While I can see how JPs can build up for players who don't want to spend the surplus points on various items such as heirlooms, legacy gear for transmog purposes or trading in for honor points to get PvP gear, it doesn't make much sense to me to allow this lower currency to be used as a way to get the higher level gear, that's the issue I see with it. (
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