World Quest Group Finder Addon, World Quest Tab Addon, Mythic Helya Statement, Tweets

[chaud]

D2 Ladder Reset, First Person Job Opening, Chris Metzen Interview

New Shaman Card Reveal: Jinyu Waterspeaker

Addon - World Quest Group Finder
World Quest Group Finder is an addon that automatically creates or joins groups when you enter a World Quest area. This allows you to complete quests faster and avoid the manual steps of making and finding groups.

Addon - World Quest Tab
World Quest Tab is an addon that provides a list of world quests in the quests pane.

• Sort quests by time remaining, faction, type, zone, name, and reward.
• Filter quests by specific factions, quest types, and reward types.
• Click on a specific zone to see quests in that zone, along with icons that display the time remaining and reward.

Exorsus - Mythic Helya Statement
Exorsus posted a statement on Reddit today about their Mythic Helya kill.

Helya situation
To make sure everyone fully understands what's happened, i will try to explain it as simple as it could be. Helya has a "Breath" ability, which deals cone damage + spawns adds on 1st phase and void zones on 2nd phase, that should be soaked. Our guild found out, that if you're killing your tank on 1st phase, Breath is stopping, so using shamans talent "Ancestral Protection Totem" to kill your tank effectively gives you more damage on 1st phase without any negative consequence. At that point we never knew how it works on last phase, however we've been pretty confident that we can avoid this breath the same way on the last phase.

Before starting to discuss everything else, I'm pretty sure some of you will ask - why would you do this?! It's an exploit by itself, you're killing tank to avoid mechanics. The answer is no, that was the strategy everyone been using on Archimonde (avoiding the crystal via tank death) and even Blizzard themselves are ok with this part.

So the real deal comes to the last phase, because for some reason after you're avoiding first breath, she simply stops casting it. It's an obvious bug (that has been reported by some guilds on a heroic week), that makes encounter easier (not even close to trivial, if you ask me). So at this point we had 2 options - completely scrap the strategy and start inventing new one or stick to this strategy, considering it's still a solid one, because even without this bug it's a valid strategy (because if Blizzard fixed a bug, that Helya stops breath we still can kill our tanks to avoid the same ability, simply by ressing them via combat resses or via shaman's totem). I guess you already know which strategy we've chosen after all.

Talking about consistency - ALL last bosses in last 3 raid contents had some "tricks" to make them easier, on some bosses even totally trivializing last phase: 1) You were able to use Monk tank on last phase of Blackhand to completely avoid his smashes - top 4 and top 5 guilds both used it (and even published a video) - yet no consequences. 2) On Mythic Archimonde you were able to kill your tank to avoid Crystal on last phase, helping with dps requirement on the fight. Every guild in top 5 (or even 10, most likely) used it. Again, no consequences.

So now comes the last part of 1st paragraph - our kill log. In case some people are wondering is this legit kill or not (or if the boss is trivial with this "exploit" or not) - when boss died we had 3 combat ressurections available + totem (more than enough to cover all the breaths without any bug on the encounter). Once again - i'm 100% sure it will not change anything, so it's more of a thing for community to take a look at:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/VynvfKX7HtmqGpZ2

Now let's move to some other paragraphs.

Legendaries
I'm 100% sure this is something that almost every WoW player currently experiencing, so want to brought up some of the main issues with them, because they're making only more frustration to MAJORITY of the playerbase:

1) Design itself - currently we have utility vs dps legendaries. For almost any situation you want to bring dps/hps legendary, making utility legendaries totally unwanted. And even dps/hps legendaries now are not always something everyone wants, because it may be slight to none in dps gain, due to bad design. Solution to this problem is simple - all legendaries should only be utility ones, making them something you want to get for some new capabilities, but not making you always win/loose on dps meter.

2) "4 legendaries softcap". I know that Devs stated more than once that there's none such a thing like "softcap", but it's definitely currently in game. For sure, there are persons with 5 (or even 8) legendaries, howeve i assume most of them due to early bug, that helped you to get many legendaries if you got your 1st one at the start of the expansion. In fact, even the guy (or guys) who made 1340 M+ dungeons on his character still has 4 legendaries, which is more than enough of a proof. Currently, such softcap leads to some totally idiotic things, raiders (including mine) are forced to do. Got 4 legendaries on your class and they're all terrible? Got 4 legendaries for "Fire" spec and now it's useless, so you need Arcane ones? Missing one that is crucial for your gameplay?

The answer to ALL of those questions is simple - go on and create new character, level it to 110 and good luck this time. That's the ONLY choice right now for you, otherwise good luck with your useless ones.

Solution to this issue is surprisingly easy: either let us exchange our 2-3 legendaries into a new one or just remove this softcap, which is just ingame for god knows why reason. Talking about Mythic raids - i would prefer if Blizzard completely disabled legendaries for 1st 2-3 weeks (making their enabling as a 1st meaningful nerf to the dungeon)

"Race coverage"
That's the next issue i want to brought up with all the community and Blizzard. Am i the only one, who's a bit upset about the fact, that best PvE MMO Ever has PvP tournament each year at Blizzcon, however no one cares about PvE at all? More on that, we even have M+ rankings on Blizzard side now, but still nothing about raid dungeons. Every time i'm checking official Warcraft twitter i can see reposts about someone beating "Lil'idan" petbattle with some fancy screenshot, but almost not a single mention about the PvE race at all.

The sad thing is - PvE top scene is slowly dying. Remember the times when getting into top 10 of the world was something you dreamed of as a hardcore guild? Now it's more of a question if you have 20 people to stay online for 14+ hours for 1 week.

Split raids are killing top guilds too. Progressing in Mythic difficulty is fun, but leveling 6 characters, farming legendaries, AP, gear on them to make 6 splitraids on heroic week is not. The reason such things still exists is understandable - heroic week is a "1 more PTR test week" for developers, where they can fix bugs, tune classes and so on, however from top guild perspective it's just terrible.

Recruiting becomes almost impossible - it's hard to explain to any skilled player, why would he waste his time on this, when the only good outcome he gets is some cheering on twitter and some good emotions after the kill. The only thing that still attracts people to such guilds is "boosting" (and it's gonna be the last paragraph), because selling M+ and raid runs for a real life money helps every top guild to at least get some cash for what they do.

And for all this situations i see only 2 variants (I'm not telling they're ideal ones, just my 2 cents):

1) Introduce some kind of small prize pool for top N guilds in a world, making rules pretty straightforward (you need to kill the final boss, maximum X raiders per guild, etc), this changes will attract a tons of people back to hardcore scene, to WoW as a game and will give Blizzard additional media resources and advertisement. They can even introduce some kind of pets (for example a small version of every endboss in a raid dungeon), and sell them as a crowdfunding thing (5%/10%/20% of all payments are going to prize fund) for this prizepool. All of these thing are even making more sense, considering Blizzard is trying to expand into Cybersport industry in every single game right now (seen this cool Krusher video?). Why not to make it in most successful one?

2) This variant helps if Blizzard definitely still don't want to care about PvE race as a thing. How about introducing totally new "progress" system? Rules are quite easy and simple - every guild streams their progress and the one that kills it 1st (2nd,3rd etc) on the stream gets the prize fund. With such variant attracting more sponsors for such progressions will be easy as a cake. And i'm 99% sure every top guild will agree on such terms.

"TOS Violation"
I've seen such popular statement from different fans and just forum posters on different websites. I'm pretty sure they don't really understand to what extent ANY top guilds violates ToS in fact. I just want to shed some light on how everything really works for a top guild:

1) "Small abuses" - every top guild tries to maximize their character performance, so if they found a small bug, which helps you to get an advantage - they will use it 100%, unless it's a clear bad exploit. (examples in Legion - enabling raid group before withered scenario to get exalted with faction / enabling raid group for infinite gathering world quests / dueling in 5 man dungeons to get PvP talents working (hello DHT) / resetting insanity drain on Shadow Priests and many more).

2) "Account sharing" - once again, if some guild needs 4 (insert class here) and their main roster has only 3 of this character or some guy has an alt / inactive guild players with better legendaries - they will just transfer him to new account with the same name and surname, and use him for progression for another player. If it's an inactive player account, they will just "rent" it for the progression. It's a common approach and every top guild uses it when they need it. (And yes, top guilds been using it even on last 2 contents with a bunch of examples)

3) "Boosting" - as I've already stated in 3rd paragraph, every guild needs to attract and keep people by some ways, other that "we're top guild, it's so fun to be on progress site top rankings". Because of that and the fact, that there are 0 tournaments or opportunities to somehow get any $ from top raiding (apart from streaming) every top guild is selling boosts for real life money. So by paying ~100-1000 USD/EUR you can get your piloted (yes, even with account sharing) / selfplay raid / Mythic+ run with a top guild. And if, for some reason, you're interested in buying something every week, you may even stay in this top guild (finding examples is not that hard simply by observing some "strange" raiders in wowprogress roster), to avoid confusion on the streams etc (however most of them anyway using addons, which replacing nicknames on raid frames and damage meters to avoid questions on streams). Once again, it's not something every guild is doing because they enjoy it, it simply a matter of surviving because of the fact, that "PvE race" is not something that by any means acknowledged by Blizzard. The sad part is, that a lot of guilds are now completely abandoned such thing as progression and just simply focusing themselves on boosting as many clients as possible.

4) "Raid abuses" - such term as "abuse of ingame mechanics" is always a very creative thing from developers side to interpret. Sometimes a lot of things are simply ignored, sometimes we're being punished for them. Most of the time developers are even watching at top guild pulls during progression, and fixing some stuff over here and there. In the end of the day, every progression for a top guild is more of a situation, where they encounter a fight, that is simply tuned for ilvl, that is way higher than they have. And starting from this point we're trying to find different solutions how to heal/damage it through. Sometimes we're coming up with simple solutions like "let's just try it with 3 healers", sometimes it's "let's keep the dragons away, because this way we can avoid killing dragons", sometimes it's "let's kill our tank on crystal / breath, to avoid killing this add, because we're lacking of DPS". In that case it's always been like that and nothing will change in a future, unless something drastically changes.

Hope some of those words will explain a lot of rumors about top raiding and probably even some Blizzard guys will read this and probably this will change something.

Other than than i still want to say thanks to Blizzard and add that from casual player perspective Legion looks like the most successful expansion ever, due to tons of things to do and some really good timing with adding new content over time. However i do hope they can show some love to dedicated players of their game too.

From Scratch - Mythic Helya Statement
From Scratch posted a statement on their site today about their Mythic Helya kill.

Blizzard Careers - Unannounced Project: First-person Engine
A new job listing for an unannounced project was posted this week.

Blizzard Entertainment is seeking an experienced engine engineer to work on a robust first-person engine for an unannounced project. The ideal applicant has demonstrated ability to lead a team of engineers to success, has a vision for how a scalable, performant and technically excellent engine should be built, and has a passion for adopting state of the art rendering technology to implement visually stunning games.

You must be an excellent engineer, collaborating closely with the technical director and other engineering leads to build a technically excellent engine across multiple platforms. You must enjoy collaborating with art and technical art leads, understand the artistic vision of the game and identify the technology needed to achieve and extend that vision. As a leader you will inspire and guide some of the most talented and passionate engineers in the industry as your team builds that technology together.

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

What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of the DPS/Tank/Healer triad? Should games keep that or should it be scrapped? Do you think that MMOs could benefit from the composition of teams and combat styles we see in MOBAs?
Man, this could be an entire book.

I think the biggest pro is that DPS/tank/healer generally works and it’s something players understand by this point.

I think the cons are that it’s a bit tired (though I think devs are more tired of it than players are), that setting up any system of “you must have X types” makes group-building harder, and it doesn’t mesh well with other systems. By that last bit, I mean that if you’re going to have a healer, it’s hard to come up with another leg in that stool that is as capable as the healer (say a “controller” or whatever) because nothing is as useful at a base level as unwinding damage. This is why we really only have one healer in League, Soraka, and she’s a pain in the ass to balance.

I will argue that tank/DPS/healer doesn’t scale very well. What I mean by that is that if you have a game with character progression, the player expectation is that the tank gets more tanky, the DPS does more damage, and so on over time or successes or both. But if the tank starts out 30% more tanky than the DPS and becomes 200% more tanky than the DPS, then you move the two roles farther and farther apart the more progressed the characters can get. Maybe this means your DPS can tank a little at low progression but gets one-shot at higher progression. Maybe this means the suggestion of having three roles becomes more mandatory the higher you get. (D&D for example has all three roles, but generally doesn’t mandate that you use them all, except possibly for 4th edition, because your group can scale the character progression and difficulty however they want.)

[Glaziola]

Pretty interesting to read how the top hardcore players exploit the hell out of this game

[DesoPL]

It's amuses me, how hardcore players justify thier actions and blaming Blizzard for that. I lol'd.

Also another bla bla bla from GC, who cares?

[Super Kami Dende]

First Person Engine.

God i wish Blizzard would make a Timesplitters type FPS in the Overwatch universe.

[Zagnaphein]

God.. Look at them god! The Rise and Fall of Decent guilds.. Well we learned everyone was exploiting it so we did it to feel cool.. Wish everyone who exploits to get perma banned.. but..

As Captain Boomerang said.. You know what they say about the crazy ones!

[LemonBabby]

It's amuses me, how hardcore players justify thier actions and blaming Blizzard for that. I lol'd.

Also another bla bla bla from GC, who cares?

Of course you have absolutely no grasp what the race is like at that level. Their statements were very level headed and any reasonable person would likely agree.

Also why are people so salty that they see GC on front page? What the hell is up with this? Can they not sleep at night knowing people were able to read insights from him on game design?

[kamuimac]

what a bunch of sore loosers from exorsus - i lost all repsect i had for them after WF EN - f... those cheaters for openly admiting that they abused ToS and they will keeping doin so they hsould all get perma bans

a wall of text which can be sum up in "bla bla bla we re top mythic guild so we deserve to cheat without punishemt ... blabla bla legendaries are unfair ... bla bla bla we should be able to boost for real money thus violating ToS " - bunch of cheating crybabies.

[Deleted]

exorsus admitting to RL Money Boosting should net them a perma Ban

[chaud]

Just a heads up that the author of the World Quest Tab addon has said that they are no longer maintaining it. Last update was more than a month ago.

Yup, in the past someone has stepped up to take over addons when we news them, hopefully if people like it this will be the case here.

[AmilAsphoron]

I like the first one of these that came out where they boiled down to: "Yep, we did it. We are responsible for our own actions. And if we could go back and do it over, we'd probably still do it."

The idea of building a new first person engine for something unannounced is interesting. I'm assuming this means they couldn't adapt the Overwatch engine, which drops a wide assortment of game styles from contention for what it is. Although, it could still be those and the engine just didn't do what they wanted. Just speculating,

[Narruin]

That reddit post is pathetic

[Zabatakis]

The soft cap is there for a pretty obvious reason, isn't it? Carrot on a stick. Blizzards main problem with wow is people playing the hell out of it, burning the content faster than they can or at least want to create it and then quit. But what if you couldn't because it is capped? Then you would keep playing ofc chasing a carrot that is a non shit legendary you can't possibly catch. By that logic blizz would also never tell you the soft cap is real, since you would just quit when you get whatever number it is and realise there is nothing left for you until they raise it again.

But its kinda tin foil hatty to even suggest it, and they could make it possible to get 5 but just insanely rare (even more than legendaries under the cap are) so a few people would pop up on the armory and "debunk" the theory in its entirety. So super smart move honestly.

[Holycrap1]

I like how Exorsus talks about the Archi crystal. The big difference my comrade is that the crystal doesn't stop spawning if the tank dies.

[Moceidin]

So I saw people jay walking in front of cops all the time. The cops did nothing. But one day I jaywalked and the cops gave me a ticket. So I should blame the cops because they start to enforce the law or should I blame them for not enforcing the law the last time I jaywalked? Please look at yourself and stop blaming blizzard.

[Deleted]

what a bunch of sore loosers from exorsus - i lost all repsect i had for them after WF EN - f... those cheaters for openly admiting that they abused ToS and they will keeping doin so they hsould all get perma bans

a wall of text which can be sum up in "bla bla bla we re top mythic guild so we deserve to cheat without punishemt ... blabla bla legendaries are unfair ... bla bla bla we should be able to boost for real money thus violating ToS " - bunch of cheating crybabies.

only looser here is you

[thilicen]

"People got away with it before, therefore we should be able to do it on purpose and not get punished". Yeah, that's literally not how anything works.

[courgette]

Those TL;DR tho.. "we cheated, but others cheated too, now give us money"

[Bigbazz]

It's amuses me, how hardcore players justify thier actions and blaming Blizzard for that. I lol'd.

Also another bla bla bla from GC, who cares?

Makes sense though, the strategy would have worked and it only caused an "exploit" because the fight was broken. So the fight being broken meant that they had to change their perfectly valid strategy purely to avoid exploiting a broken mechanic. Ultimately if the fight was not buggy their strategy is perfectly valid.

Also, you have to take into consideration that Blizzard is selective with which bugs they ban over, in every tier there have been bosses where many guilds killed those bosses with the help of "clever use of mechanics" or outright exploits and Blizzard didn't do a damn thing, some of those situations even became the mainstream strategy for the fight.

So if you're in a competitive environment you have to make a choice, they made the choice to continue with this strategy and it didn't pay off, but there was a very equal chance based on history that it could have paid off, or even that they could have used a different strategy (to avoid triggering the bug) and then lost the race to someone who did exploit the bug and got away with it.

It is ultimately Blizzards fault for having a situation where a valid strategy causes a bug with the fight.. If Blizzard had been consistent with exploit bans in the past then nobody would exploit bugs, but since Blizzard are very inconsistent you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

exorsus admitting to RL Money Boosting should net them a perma Ban

It's clear they are talking about the high end raiding guild scene as a whole. This statement in general is pretty ridiculous of you, completely missed the context of their post and grabbed your pitchfork, ready to burn the witch!

[furydeath]

It's amuses me, how hardcore players justify thier actions and blaming Blizzard for that. I lol'd.

Also another bla bla bla from GC, who cares?

"How DARE a mage use spell steal and use a mob's buff to gain an damage boost!!!!!!" ~ blizzard

[Gratlim]

Thank you Exorsus for your honesty about the kind of players / guilds doing PVE HL content. Hopefully it will be eye opening for blinded white knights out there pretending Boosting for real cash / systematic abuse of mechanics are not a thing in wow top guilds. The boosting thing is the real cancer of the game right now imo. The number of brats pretending to be PVE heroes because of high ilvl, achiev or mounts while spitting on casuals to feel better about themselves when they get carried all the way by real money is insane.

I wish sponsored race with Blizzard was a thing, so that you guys could finance yourself properly without spoiling wannabes. The thing is, even if one could be a pro raider, what would stop top guilds to continue selling boosts for extra cash every week?