World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Hello again Hunters,

This won’t be a specific list of everything that has changed, but some notes on changes coming to the next build.

Class Tree:

• Some minor changes have been made to some node connections.
• Lone Survivor’s cooldown reduction has been lowered from 60 to 30 seconds.
• Death Chakram should work in non-Shadowlands zones, and should increase all damage taken rather than just Physical damage taken
• Master Marksman should work with melee abilities as well.

Marksmanship

• Lots of bug fixes.
• Legacy of the Windrunners has changed into a 2-point node again, each point will add 3 wind arrows. Also any buffs to Aimed Shot now applies to these Wind Arrows.
  
  • To clarify the point about Legacy of the Windrunners gaining bonuses from Aimed Shot, this is any buffs to crit chance or damage to Aimed Shot. Trick Shots will not be sending Wind Arrows all over the place.
• New talent in the bottom left area: Bulletstorm. Extra targets your Aimed Shot or Rapid Fires ricochet to from Trick Shots grants a stacking buff to your Multi-Shot damage.
• Bombardment has changed to a 1 point node and is located right below Multi-Shot
  
  • There has been some discussion about how Bombardment should work, or perhaps that it should just work like the current 4-piece set bonus with alternate numbers. Tracking resources spent is difficult in the default UI, and most people feel it is necessary to get an addon to track how much more Focus they have to spend to get a Trick Shots effect.
  • With the current design of X Arcane/Chimaera shots required as opposed to Focus Spent, why require a Multi-Shot instead of just granting Trick Shots? Most of the purpose of this talent is to provide some limited options for Trick Shots when you don’t have 3+ targets to consistently gain Trick Shots. If the fight has one target most of the time, and occasionally some adds spawn, getting a buff that guarantees your next Multi-Shot to grant you a Trick Shots regardless of targets hit should grant you increased control over when you want to use the effect. The Bombardment buff currently lasts 2 minutes, so there is no rush to try to jam in some extra shots right as some adds spawn, you have time to prepare and use this.
• Calling the Shots has had its design adjusted to grant cooldown reduction for Trueshot from Focus Spent, rather than require specific shots.

Beast Mastery and Survival have also had some bug fixes, but no notable design changes this week. That doesn’t mean things are final.

edit: To clarify the point about Legacy of the Windrunners gaining bonuses from Aimed Shot, this is any buffs to crit chance or damage to Aimed Shot. Trick Shots will not be sending Wind Arrows all over the place.

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Podh: I hope the team looks at the proc rate or damage on the Wind Arrows such that it is a competitive choice in single target talent setups.

This is the goal. It may not be there with current numbers, but these 3 points (yes, they are still 3 total points, Windrunner’s Guidance is 1-point again), is that this should be competitive. Maybe it needs to be from Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. Maybe Arcane Shot/Chimaera shot can also cause it. There’s danger in lumping too much extra damage to Aimed Shot for PvP reasons - hypothetical numbers, if Aimed Shot normally does 1000 damage, but via procs can sometimes do 2500 damage, the damage swing is super high. A lot of bonuses were pulled out of Aimed Shot in BFA/Shadowlands and just lumped into Aimed Shot damage to try to keep its damage consistently strong.

Podh: Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm’s design is currently a buff that stacks up to 10, but doesn’t refresh duration as you gain stacks. It lets you get some big Multi-Shots in, but in a cyclical fashion.

Podh: additional talents that specifically buff Rapid Fire

There’s some potential tree restructure that has to happen if this is the case, because Rapid Fire is technically optional, and having a line of things coming off of rapid fire and not connecting anywhere else limits how you can move your points around the tree. That isn’t to say this isn’t possible, just that it’s more involved than just putting a node somewhere that buffs only Rapid Fire.

Asthelon: replacing Survival’s Mastery

There are no plans to redesign any of the Mastery effects for Hunters.

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I should clarify my post above a bit more.

PvP is a concern for abilities that sometimes deal big damage or heal lot. This is true for the game as a whole. We have tools available to change things in PvP compared to PvE. While these tools obviously work, it’s not intuitive that Aimed Shot does 1000 damage against a kobold, and 500 damage against a player because of a hidden multiplier.

There are also PvE concerns of your abilities swinging in damage a lot. Partly for tuning reasons, but also for how the game feels. Again using hypothetical numbers, if Aimed Shot does 1000 damage, but sometimes 2500, your damage variance from each boss attempt, or on that difficult M+ pack, or in the Mage Tower challenges, or wherever, is very unstable. Sometimes it’s OK for your damage to be very swingy, some specs inherently have a lot of randomness in how they play and that’s by design. Critical strikes are already a thing that exist that changes your damage a lot, but you don’t often pull a boss and think “oh, my aimed shot didn’t crit, lets reset and try again”. That’s obviously an extreme example, but if there’s so much randomness tied to one ability’s damage, and that ability is a significant part of your total throughput, maybe it’s a problem we should try to address.

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Podh: Similarly with Hunter’s Knowledge, Focused Aim, and Deathblow - if I take those talents, why would I also not take Rapid Fire?

If they only buff Aimed Shot, does that make Rapid Fire less desirable because it has fewer modifiers than Aimed Shot?

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I did not intend my question to be combative if it came off that way, it was just a question of how things look at a glance. For players who don’t rely on 3rd party sites or high end theorycrafting, if they look at the tree and see 5 things that only buff Aimed Shot, and Rapid Fire off to the side, Rapid Fire probably looks like a much less desirable button. When these 5 things buff both Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire, maybe it’s a good push in the right direction that Rapid Fire is an important button you should get, and these bonuses also work on that ability so you feel like you’re getting full value from them.

Neither direction is objectively correct or incorrect.

It’s been some time since the Auction House was available to mobile users, but the time has come for its return. With the 9.2.7 patch, it becomes a part of the WoW Companion App.

A Little History

The Remote Auction House was once a part of the WoW Armory app released in 2011 and retired in 2018. Due to the way this app was built, there were times in which individuals would abuse the architecture of the app, often causing a disruption to the player economy and even, in some cases, causing in-game latency. This was largely due to the number of queries that could flood the auction house resulting in strained servers as they attempted to manage the larger load. While there were ways that we could and often did mitigate the effect, the ongoing negative impact from those who sought to exploit the system outweighed continuing to support ongoing development.

In light of the change in direction, we moved on to the development of the current WoW Companion App, which provides a more secure experience more in line with the types of activities your character takes on when you log in to play the game today.

Framing the App for Modern Times

In our previous Engineer’s Workshop covering the development of the WoW Companion App, we delved into the intricacies of creating a system simultaneously for both mobile and PC platforms. The biggest hurdle in implementing new features was structuring the necessary frameworks to support the feature. Many of these frameworks were written over the 17+ years of history of World of Warcraft during a time when mobile wasn’t a consideration. This leads to additional work to modernize systems to support both a PC and mobile experience.

In addition, data delivery methods and restrictions look different on PC and mobile. While a system may serve the same set of data to both, extra care must be taken to minimize what is sent to mobile to limit what the player needs to download.

For a feature as large as the Auction House, there were and are many additional frameworks that need to be carefully modernized to support both experiences.

Developing for the Now

When looking into the implementation of the Auction House as a part of the WoW Companion App, we had to gauge how much structure we could put in place for the now and what that would mean for the immediate functionality of the Auction House once it was pushed live. To do this, we took time to dig into more of who is using the Auction House and what they are using it for. We identified the various archetypes and what we could deliver to each user group within a reasonable time.

In the end, we determined that we wanted to create something that would still be useful to casual and mid-core players who use the Auction House regularly for more common purchases such as dungeon and raid preparation or looking out for additional items for their collections.

The original Remote Auction House was never meant to be a “go-to” tool for hardcore traders. In many cases, these users were already using other addons or external tools to maximize their trades beyond what the app could provide. Keeping this in mind, the new app update provides a way for players to make purchases, view listings, and more. Due to our desire to provide an Auction House experience in a more immediate timeframe, we have excluded listing items for sale.

What Can You Do?

With the WoW Companion App update, players will be able to:

• Browse and view current auctions
  
• Bid and buyout auctions
  
• Search for auctions
  
• Add and remove items from your Favorites list
  
• View and cancel your listed auctions

What's Next?

As with the introduction of cross-faction development in the 9.2.5 update, we want to start off slowly. This allows us to assess how players use the app, assess the impact and risk vectors, then introduce more as it makes sense and fits within our development structure.

We hope this new addition to the WoW Companion app enhances your time in Azeroth and look forward to your ensuing feedback.

The Shadowlands 9.2.7 update arrives to World of Warcraft on 17 August!

AUCTION HOUSE UPDATE: REGION-WIDE COMMODITIES

• Auction Houses across all realms on a given region will now share commodity listings (gems, herbs, flasks, consumables, etc.). Items that aren't commodities–like armor and weapons–will continue to be realm-specific.

THE AUCTION HOUSE JOINS THE WOW COMPANION APP

• Players can now do the following from the WoW Companion App:
  
  • Browse and view current auctions
    
  • Bid and buyout auctions
    
  • Search for auctions
    
  • Add and remove items from your Favorites list
    
  • View and cancel your listed auctions
    
  • Developers' note: We are very pleased to be able to bring the Auction House back as a part of the WoW Companion App. The new app update provides a way for players to make purchases, view listings, and more. Due to our desire to provide an Auction House experience in a more immediate timeframe we have excluded listing items for sale. While we understand selling items is a much-loved part of the past feature from the previous Remote Auction House, we wanted to provide access to many of the features regularly used by players as quickly as we could with an eye on potential additions to the app in the future. We intend to make improvements as we evaluate player usage, risk, and the developmental load in implementing tech frameworks to support future updates. Learn more about this update on our latest post.
    

USER INTERFACE AND ACCESSIBILITY

• A new chat channel for searching or advertisement of services like raiding, dungeons, or PvP activities has been added: Trade (Services).
  
  • Developers' note: The trade channel that’s been in the game for 18 years will continue to exist, but we wanted to add a new channel to direct messages about the request and advertisement of services like raiding, dungeons, or PvP activities. If you’re looking to buy or sell these kind of services, this is the channel for you! If you’re not interested in those, you can leave the channel and avoid the noise, or move it into its own chat tab. We believe that with this new distinction, you’ll be able to keep Trade chat for the traditional buying and selling of items and professions, and not other chatter.
    

To view all content update notes, click here.

Hello everyone!,

As I’m sure many of you folks are aware, Back in the day there was an App for our mobile phones for selling stuff on the Auction House. This App was widely known as the Mobile Auction House.

I’m not sure as to exactly why this App was retired from use, But I’ve seen numerous threads including This One, I commented in tonight asking for it to be returned.

I personally enjoyed using it for checking and selling my Auctions while I’ve been away from home. I would personally use it for those times when I was on my break at work and when travelling!

I’m also sure MANY players would be joyed to see this App make a comeback. I’m sure I would be!

Hi, everyone!

During the WoW Q&A portion of BlizzConline last year, a player asked the WoW Development Team about plans to bring the Auction House to the WoW Companion App. John Hight talked a bit about some of the history of the Armory App that previously hosted the Remote Auction House feature, why it was discontinued, and expressed a desire to bring the Auction House back to mobile in some form that serves our goals and players’ needs as much as we can, without devolving into a platform for automation and other forms of abuse.

I come bearing good news! My team has been working for quite a while on an updated version of the mobile Auction House that we think will satisfy those goals, while hopefully addressing the avenues for abuse, considering both the ways that players interact with the Auction House, as well as avenues in technical frameworks. We’re posting an article soon with more information. This version of the mobile Auction House will be available not Soon-ish™, not Soon™, but Very Soon™ – with the release of the 9.2.7 update! We hope you give the article a read, discuss, and try it out!