Mobs Scaling With Item Level, Sacrifice, Known Issues, Season 3 Live, Blue Posts

[chaud]

Update: Added tonght's hotfixes.

New Journey to Un'Goro Card Revealed: Evolving Spores

Patch 7.2 - Mobs Scaling With Item Level

Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider.

We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty.

But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher?

To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die.

Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.)

The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing.

Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion.

So now we have to consult ilvl spreadsheets to figure out which pieces of gear we need to unequip to make our daily chores as painless as possible. Fun.
To be clear, it's unacceptable to us for the "right" thing in any form to ever be equipping weaker gear, unequipping items, or doing things that in any way lower your "absolute" power. There are a couple of loopholes where that is true currently, and they'll be high-priority fixes for us in the next day or two.

Also to be clear, scrapping the entire system is certainly still an option. My post was not meant to be a "too bad, get used to it" proclamation.

But I did want to lay out what we consider to be the very real problem we're trying to solve here. I also understand that to many folks it doesn't appear to be a real problem at all, and it seems like we're just trying to throw up pointless obstacles.

Power always feels good. It feels better to kill something in 5 seconds than in 10, especially when you remember when it took 10. Even better when you can do it in 2. Better still when you can kill 4 or 5 things in that time. But is there a point where that goes too far? We think so, and we're just looking to ease up off the gas pedal a little bit. We don't want to halt the power curve, and certainly never to go in reverse, but rather to take a bit longer on our road to an endgame world where everyone effectively walks around death-touching mobs for quest credit.

Patch 7.2 Hotfixes - March 28

Creatures

• Skittering Demons and Sister Silkreaver should no longer randomly evade.

Dungeons and Raids

• The Nighthold
  
  • The Achivement Ahead of the Curve: Gul'dan can once again be earned. It will be available until Tomb of Sargeras opens.
    

Quests

• Completing World Quests that award reputation should again bring you across the threshold from Revered to Exalted.
  
• Gryphons should be easier to shoot during “The Splintered Fleet”.
  
• Players should now be able to turn in "The Final Judgement" after completing it.

Zone

• Players who die in Xylem's Tower or the surrounding area are now placed at the closer tower graveyard.

Sacrifice
Blizzard released a nice Illidan focused recap video.

Patch 7.2 - PvP
Holinka highlighted some of the PvP changes in Patch 7.2.

How do I obtain the Echoes of Battle/Echoes of Domination?
Echoes of Battle come from obliterating Season 3 Gladiator gear. Echoes of Domination come from obliterating Season 3 Elite Gladiator gear. (Source)

In case you missed it, new in 7.2 is the Enlistment Bonus. Whichever faction has shorter BG queues gets extra honor (including mercenaries). (Source)

PSA: The Artifact Power reward for the 1st RBG win of they day is very good. (Source)

Patch 7.2.0 Known Issues

Greetings all,
Here are the known issues for patch 7.2.0. Please note that this is not a complete list of every issue we're aware of, but bugs we feel may significantly impact players. Fixes for these issues may be deployed at various times, so I'll update it on a weekly basis. Thanks everyone!

Classes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Blight will not allow Death and Decay to hit stealthed targets that have been detected.
• The spell FX and buff aura for Blood Mirror persist after the target dies.
• The additional minion form "All will Serve" remains visible while your character is in a vehicle.
• The active time that Summon Gargoyle and Dark Arbiter casts does not match their listed tooltip durations.

Demon Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Demon Hunter: Casting Fel Rush might disconnect players.
• Unending Hatred can trigger from every cast of AOE spells, instead of the first cast.

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• New Moon does not correctly update to Half Moon on the cast bar text.
• Treant Form and Moonkin Form will sometimes switch position on the Special Action Bar.
• Shooting Stars proc will stand a player up while eating or drinking.
• Malorne's Swiftness does not increase Travel Form movement speed while inside a Battlegrond or Arena.
• The spell visual for Ferocious Bite still displays above targets when you attempt to use it while facing the wrong direction.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Diamond Ice does not have any effect if the Steel Trap Talent is learned.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• The visuals from Chi Orbit cannot be seen by remote hostile players.
• The spirits summoned by Storm, Earth, and Fire will not mirror Fists of Fury if it is cast at the same time that the spirits are summoned.

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• The debuff for Judgment of Light incorrectly states the amount healed per melee attack.
• Players are automatically dismounted from Divine Steed and lose out from the movement speed buff if they collide with collision above their character model.
• The artifact trait Blessing of the Ashbringer does not state both Greater Blessings are required to be active to gain the benefit.
• Arcing Light, the healing component of Light's Hammer ignores line of sight for the casting
• Hammer of Reckoning does not gain stacks from the Paladin taking damage.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Shadowy Apparitions stand players up while eating or drinking.
• Casting Dispersion does not interrupt the Void Torrent channel if the Void Torrent's target is immune, causing players to drain Insanity during Dispersion.
• Spreading dots with The Twin's Painful Touch will decrease the time increase on dot by void bolt.
• The talent Purge the Wicked will not spread to other targets when all the targets are moving.
• Psyflay from Psyfiend has a longer cast than the duration of the creature and does not try to find new targets when its first targets dies or moves out of line of sight.
• Penance continues to display a channel bar after it has been interrupted by a crowd control effect.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Thick as Thieves does not apply a buff aura.
• The range on the "Shadowstrike" spell is not factoring in combat reach.

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• The Honor Talent Grounding Totem can be killed through damage transfer when a target protected by Grounding Totem Effect takes damage.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Enslave Demon will persist even if the warlock dies.
• Command Demon loses track of your active demon for a short time when you zone.
• Pets summoned from the Grimoire of Service talent can fail to perform their special ability if they spawn out of line of sight or out of range of their target.

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Rampage has a variable GCD at some haste levels but not others.

Broken Shore

• "Begin Construction" can take days to complete if no buildings are in the Under Construction state.
• Entering the Warrior Order Hall while queued for the Legionfall scenario will play the scenario cinematic and disrupt your queue.
• The tooltip for "Dream Vortex" states the incorrect amount of damage.

Transmog Updates

• There are wands that do not display any Weapon Enchantments.
• Long female Pandaren tails are not displaying correctly in the Appearances UI.
• Some weapons do not have the option to apply a Weapon Enchantment appearance in the transmog UI.
• The Glorious Tyranny weapon enchant causes performance issues when opening the character pane.
• Warlock's "Visage of the Black Harvest" displays incorrectly in the appearances window on certain races.
• Some variants of certain transmog sets are missing pieces.

Class Campaigns

• The completion POIs for "False Orders" , "What's the Cache?" , and "Loot and Plunder" are misplaced on the zone map when all three are ready for turn in.
• The cut scene visual effects are visible to all players in the area after one player turn-in the quest "Return of the Archmage".
• Legion Portals are periodically uninteractable during the "Panic at the Brewery" scenario.

Demon Assaults

• Stormheim Scenario: Odyn's talking head dialogues do not play a VO.

Legion PvP Season 3 Has Begun

A new season has begun, and the Arenas and Battlegrounds await new contenders. Who will rise to the top?

With Legion Season 3, the maximum number of times you can earn Prestige has increased from 9 to 13.

Season 2 Rewards Reminder
If you participated in Season 2, to ensure you receive the rewards that you’re due, please keep the following in mind:

• Refrain from transferring your character(s) to another realm or faction until after Legion Season 2 rewards have been distributed.
  
• Legion Season 2 titles and mounts will be awarded approximately two weeks after the season ends.

Faction-Based Rewards
Don’t forget: end-of-season rewards are based on your faction. The top 0.5% of Alliance PvPers will be awarded the Gladiator: Legion Season 2 achievement and mount, and the same will go to the top 0.5% of Horde PvPers. If you transferred your character to the other faction, you must have earned 50 wins after the transfer to receive the reward.

The Arenas and Battlegrounds await!

Blue Posts

Random Heroic Dungeon and Karazhan
From my understanding, for Heroic, this is a bug that we are in the process of hotfixing - Return to Karazhan (Heroic) should not have an attunement attached to it.

Return to Karazhan (Mythic) will continue to have an attunement attached to it and players will need to complete "Power of Corruption" before entering. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Holy Priest - Prayer of Healing
Prayer of Healing has been a bit of a puzzle to decide the right approach for in recent expansions. We always appreciate feedback on where it currently is, but for a few thoughts on it:

We definitively wanted to get rid of the version based on raid subgroups in Legion. At this point, it was the only spell left in the game that relied on that, and required raid leaders to rearrange groups at the behest of one player to make one of their spells work correctly. Furthermore, with an increasing amount of raiding being done in the "flexible" framework, raid sizes are not even reliably a multiple of 5 anymore.

We also want to be careful with heals that are too smart. A PoH with a large radius, smart targeting, and no cooldown would essentially be a self-working raid healing spell/rotation. As long as 5 people are damaged (which is frequently), you can spam that spell to the get best efficiency from your mana, not overheal, and not have to worry about targeting. That's a direction we don't like for healing gameplay in general and have been paring back on in recent years.

One other thing that felt bad about the 7.0 version (20 yard radius) was that it didn't hit the whole party in 5-player content. That's a role that Prayer of Healing has always had and that it should keep having. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Reap Souls
FYI, the Reap Souls change should be in place on the PTR already.

We do agree that always starting at 0 would not have been a great place to end up, and wanted to put something in at the same time to help address the concerns that have been mentioned. The total result should be that you feel like you can have a more reliable opener with at least 3 Souls. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Weekly Bonus Event - Pet Battles

An extra weekly quest and rewards are here— the Pet Battles bonus event is underway!

This Week
All week, get out there and fight with your mighty minions. When the time comes to take on other players, open your Pet Journal and hit the “Find Battle” button to be matched up with an opponent whose team is competitive with yours.

Look for the following all week long:

• Archmage Timear near Violet Hold in Dalaran has a quest for you.
  
  • Quest requirement: Win 5 pet battles versus other players with a team of three level-25 pets.
    
  • Reward: One Ultimate Battle-Training Stone.
    
• Passive bonus: All Pet Battle experience gains are increased by +200%.

World Boss - Drugon the Frostblood
Drugon the Frostblood is up this week, rewarding players with gold and a chance at item level 860 loot.

[ravity]

The mob scaling was the straw that broke the camel's back; I unsubscribed. I've obviously done this many times, but this time felt inherently different.

I gave this as the answer to the question/questionnaire Blizzard gives you about why you are canceling your subscription: overwhelmed by monotony.

I couldn't be more happy that Blizzard fixed the biggest problem with WoD: lack of content. Unfortunately the content they are putting out/have put out I find to be fundamentally poorly designed, and not well thought through. Maybe the next expansion will see them fix that problem too. I truly hope so.

[Deleted]

So that was another lie:

Q: Do World Quests scale with item level, or will they just become trivially easier for greater rewards?

A: Once you're max level, the world isn't scaling with your gear. There would be problems if we tried to do that - what do you do with a fresh 110 and a raid-geared 110 fighting the same mob in the same place? We could some kind of scaling I guess, like leveling, to normalize it? But I think that would go too far in undermining the core sense of power progression that is part of an MMO. The stuff that was challenging for you in Suramar, that was challenging when you first hit 110 in greens...when you come back in Mythic dungeon gear, you should crush them a bit. The intent is that the content is is something you outgear, outpower eventually.

Patch 7.2: Active subcribers have noticed that mobs appear to be scaling up based on player item level.

I hope the re*ard who choosed that idea will lose his job. People can handle losing everything after 2 years by the new exp. But losing power after every patch. This is next level. There is no point to grind if you cannot feel the progress. This is another pure example the developers don't play their own game. what a shame... Total disconnection with their player base.

My account is frozen. Your move PR managment.

[Guyon]

Went from lack of content to too much content and too much farming. Balanced

[GSN]

Mobs scaling with ilvl hits healers very very hard. Just did the intro scenario - some mobs have ~100 million hp and my dps is around 250k. Hope it gets adjusted/revoked soon.

[kamuimac]

What an absolutely shitty decision. They want the sense of progression and now they take it away. Yes, exactly...I like to get more powerful and kill mobs that used to take 10 seconds in 5 or 2. Fuck this.

this change is indeed beynd retarded - and what make it even worse they knew how it will play out that why they kept it in complete secret till launch of patch

wat i find trully hillarius is how fast players found a work around this shit retarded change by unequiping ring and droping down 50 itlv ^^ showing that players are better at understanding how game works then devs

[Deleted]

So that means you need another gear for outdoor work... We need programs what calculate what ilvl/damage is the best for mobs. Removing rings and neck seems the best way. ANd try to get a full 830 gear with perfect stats. RIP bag space AGAIN...

[Thelxi]

That is a sneaky and greedy thing they did there. Wow.

[Eleccybubb]

I love how people are threatening to quit over something even they admit is a bit too steep and will probably be adjusted.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Deliberate but even they admitted they fucked up.

[Deleted]

hilarious xd

[Eleccybubb]

Mobs scaling with ilvl hits healers very very hard. Just did the intro scenario - some mobs have ~100 million hp and my dps is around 250k.

Get a DPS artifact. You are welcome. You should know damn well as a healer to have a DPS artifact ready for things like this to avoid this. You can literally get half the traits for one in an hour. Maybe less.

[Deleted]

Illidan's condescending tone really makes me want to side with the legion, if only to bash his face in all over again.

[Aggrophobic]

I love how people are threatening to quit over something even they admit is a bit too steep and will probably be adjusted.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Deliberate but even they admitted they fucked up.

Becuase the point of the game is to get gear and make your character stronger and when Blizzard removes the point of getting gear the point of playing the game at all goes away.

Legion is some kind of video game socialism where the ones that actually put some effort into the game are punished and the ones that just do bare minimum are rewarded becuase... Reasons? Blizzard feeling sorry for them?

It's getting worse and worse with ever patch as well.

[Doomchicken]

I love how people are threatening to quit over something even they admit is a bit too steep and will probably be adjusted.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Deliberate but even they admitted they fucked up.

And that they may just delete the whole damn thing, if necessary too. I don't really care either way tbh. Didn't even notice the scaling when I went out there on my 902 brewmaster.

[GSN]

Get a DPS artifact. You are welcome. You should know damn well as a healer to have a DPS artifact ready for things like this to avoid this.

They said they wanted to make healer- and tankspec viable options in the open world because of how the artifact system works. Questing as a healer has worked perfectly fine, but currently if you sit at 910+ ilvl it gets extra painful for healers compared to dps.

My dps weapon is 850 ilvl, my healer weapon is 920+, if you want to gift me some relics, feel free to send me your btag.

[Doomchicken]

Becuase the point of the game is to get gear and make your character stronger and when Blizzard removes the point of getting gear the point of playing the game at all goes away.

Legion is some kind of video game socialism where the ones that actually put some effort into the game are punished and the ones that just do bare minimum are rewarded becuase... Reasons? Blizzard feeling sorry for them?

It's getting worse and worse with ever patch as well.

You still get stronger, just less so. Or did you not read the blue post?

[Eleccybubb]

They said they wanted to make healer- and tankspec viable options in the open world because of how the artifact system works. Questing as a healer has worked perfectly fine, but currently if you sit at 910+ ilvl it gets extra painful for healers compared to dps.

My dps weapon is 850 ilvl, my healer weapon is 920+, if you want to gift me some relics, feel free to send me your btag.

Mines only a tad higher. Your own fault for not farming some OS relics with World Quests. There is usually an OS one every day or two. So again DPS artifact. You are welcome.

Would love to know where they said they wanted to make healers more viable in the open world. Because all I have as a 890 Resto is Lava Burst, Flame Shock, Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt. And they hit like shit even with the guaranteed crit on Lava Burst from Flame Shock.

[nekobaka]

I love how people are threatening to quit over something even they admit is a bit too steep and will probably be adjusted.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Deliberate but even they admitted they fucked up.

The issue I am having with many of the responses is acting like the devs are flat out killing character progression. The intent is just dampen the explosion in gear power compared to before. The tuning was off and there is what appears to be a similar bug to gear scaling that was there last expansion.

I would be against a linear scaling but this is not that. Complaints over lack of testing in PTR and with it the ahead of time knowledge of such a change does have its point.

Also if the devs had created a new end game zone then the zone would of still gave healers shit and low ilvl players would be struggling even more.

[Frood]

I love how people are threatening to quit over something even they admit is a bit too steep and will probably be adjusted.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Deliberate but even they admitted they fucked up.

Sounds more like they're going to fix the loopholes rather than what people are actually complaining about. Perhaps that's why people are still threatening to quit.

[Aggrophobic]

You still get stronger, just less so. Or did you not read the blue post?

I did read the blue post. It was a bunch of bullshit.
Just like their claim that they would aim to improve communication.