Patch 5.1 PTR - Build 16297, Interview, Garalon Hotfixes, Blue Posts, Weekly Roundup

We have a few updates regarding the hotfixes, and a couple new changes based upon some of the feedback we've received:

• In Raid Finder, the 30-second cooldown added to Garalon's Crush ability didn't properly apply through our most recent hotfix. We've isolated the issue and will apply a new hotfix to address this tomorrow during restarts.
• Also included in the next hotfix, the Raid Finder version of Pungency (with relation to Garalon's Pheromones ability) will only stack 20 times, and Fury will only stack 5 times.
• Once the realms are back up tomorrow, classes with pets can rejoice! All class pets will now gain the Weak Points buff in all versions of the encounter (Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic).

EDIT: Clarification, not just Hunter pets, but all classes that have pets.

Daily Quest Feedback
Finally ready to call it quits, realized today after almost 8 years of playing that I just didn't enjoy the game anymore.

MoP ruined this game for people like me, I have a family, and I cannot and WILL not be forced into doing dailies across all my toons or hell even ONE toon in order to progressively gear my characters.

The new loot system for LFR, Sha, etc is completely unbearable, constantly seeing 28g pop up across all my toons gives me ZERO incentive to continue grinding out the casual content I am used to.

And its not like I havent given it time, I leveled nine classes to 90, and going through the same content over and over wasn't so bad, its the point where you get to 90 and you are pigeon holed into grinding dailies over and over or PVP'ing (which I do NOT enjoy). So I canceled today, which is saying alot because I play alot and used to enjoy this game massively.

Some will flame me, blizz will probably close the post, but truth be told, if they don't address these things soon there will be many following suit.
There is definitely legitimacy to your post, and we've been reading a lot of the feedback players have been sharing lately as we evaluate our endgame progression systems. Even as World of Warcraft evolves over each expansion, and as happy as we are with the experience we crafted for Mists of Pandaria, we always know we can do better.

Having said all of that, I'm just not personally sure we can design a game that's going to feel fresh and rife with content every time you login, if the expectation is that the average World of Warcraft player will have nine level-90 characters less than two months after the expansion's release. I really don't mean this as a judgment of how you choose to spend your time, either. But when considering everything you said in your post -- you mention needing time for family and enjoying casual content -- your noted (or implied) play time really sticks out.

Another sticking point is you brought up being forced to either do dailies or PvP. Why? Looking only at progression of character power at 90, do you not want to do scenarios, dungeons, or raids? What pushes you into reputation progression such that you feel you have to do it x9 and burn out on the game?

Zahrym what you said is offensive.
That's silly. The idea that I should have a placating "grin and bear it" approach to players on the forums -- as was discussed last week -- is what you should actually find offensive. And I'm only responding to this to make a quick point:

A lot of people have called my recent posts (and me personally) any number of negative things. Let me just say that I read a lot of great critical posts on the forums everyday -- there are some great ones in this thread. And we're constantly discussing the feedback with our developers. Just because I'm challenging a person's analysis of the game doesn't mean I'm not listening to them, or don't think they're making any good points.

If I can offer counterpoints to threads that will focus the debate on further specifics and details of a topic, that allows me to take more succinct feedback to the developers, often times including many of the great suggestions I see.

Because you have locked away a portion of the progression path behind endless dailies.
But character progression isn't blocked entirely "behind endless dailies." You can get into Raid Finder without any reputation rewards. Sure, it's clearly more effective to be earning some steady reputation with the core factions (which is the point) while running other content, but that's less relevant when an argument is made in absolute statements, such as "forced," "mandatory," and "locked away."

I'm not naive and I know that if you invest more time into your character by doing dailies along side your group content, your rate of progression will be faster. And again, that's by design. But certainly we enjoy hearing feedback about the design and how things could be tweaked to improve the model.

For instance, we talked recently to the developers about an evolution on the idea of being able to champion a faction via a tabard. What we don't want to repeat is the design that let players max out every faction reputation just by wearing a tabard while doing other content. So instead of endlessly getting reputation for every dungeon, maybe you only get a bonus once a day. It doesn't allow you to skip dailies altogether, but you can at least pad your rep gains a little bit.

Another cool part about this idea is that we can probably make it work through the UI, rather than requiring you to wear a tabard you may not think matches your bracers (teehee). It could be as simple as making it so that you champion the faction you selected to show as your XP bar.

And since it's brought up a lot, I completely understand the existing concerns players have about earning Valor through other sources and being locked from spending it for reputation rewards. It's something we'll continue to talk about -- be precise and feel free to suggest improvements!

It's worth throwing out there that it really doesn't take many daily quests to hit Honored with Golden Lotus, and you can easily hit Honored with The Klaxxi before you even unlock their daily quests. So it doesn't take much to give you a bear minimum of two ilvl 458 blues to spend JP on, and two ilvl 489 epics to spend VP on. That's a pretty fair boon if you're climbing to ilvl 460.

Important! I want to make sure it's totally clear one last time. I'm not saying our model is perfect and your feedback is incorrect. I'm trying to offer counterpoints so we can all signal in on the root of some of the popular concerns within the community. Operative word: TRYING.

Will say it again, what is wrong with killing 500 mobs in dungeons when you kill that much or more while doing dailies? What difference is there between months worth of dailies and hashing out instances? Bring back frequently dropped items like sunfury signets, arcane tomes, relics of ulduar. What is so wrong with letting us get rep the way we want? we pay to play your game.
Paying to play the game doesn't inherently entitle you to get what you want the way you want. We take player feedback very seriously, but this isn't design by democracy.

To answer your first two questions, the difference is there is a reward structure in place for dungeons, and a reward structure in place for reputations. You want full access to rep rewards and dungeon rewards without putting effort toward both. Purely from a player standpoint, in terms of getting what you want with as little hassle as possible, it's understandable you might not see anything wrong with that.

But here's a design problem in the Cataclysm model you want back:

• Doing dailies over time unlocks access to rep rewards
• Doing dungeons gives you a shot at loot drops, in addition to points you can use to buy gear (in case RNG hits you hard)
• Wearing a tabard while doing dungeons gives you a shot at loot drops, in addition to points you can use to buy gear, in addition to access to rep rewards

You may not like daily quests. But that alone isn't justification for making daily quests irrelevant for those running group content. By running dungeons with tabards, you effectively got to double-dip in Cataclysm by gaining access to rep rewards, VP rewards, and dungeon drops. It was super convenient, and also left players with a system that didn't really reward you for doing more than the bare minimum of raiding and running seven dungeons each week.

Now there is incentive to vary the content you do. The idea that, "I have a tabard so this endgame content doesn't apply to me," is gone.

Do you take this to the Dev team? What I mean is do you collect the discontent and address it higher?
Absolutely! We chat with them via IM and email daily, we meet with them at least once a week to ask common questions from players, and we do a very in-depth global community report every week that breaks down all of the hot topics in the community and offers action items if applicable. Every community report is read by the game's lead designers, all the way up to Rob Pardo and Mike Morhaime.

Some of the topics we cover might not be as easy to openly discuss with the community, but rest assured that's because the necessary discussions and meetings are taking place to really dig into the hot topics/questions so we can form a more concrete agenda.

Zarhym, I get your point about the old tabard model. I do. But there's got to be a happy medium here. I ran dailys a lot during Cata, and WotLK on multiple characters. They were quick, easy, tasks, where each hub took no more than 30 minutes. Completely solo. In fresh 80/85's in quest greens from 2 or 3 leveling zones back. I'd run them on multiple characters in the same day even.
I personally agree about needing to strike a better balance, happy medium, or some form of compromise (beyond the Revered bonus in 5.1).

MoP dailys on the other hand are much, much more difficult, tedious and frustrating. Hence, for most of us casual players, they are too time consuming. Golden Lotus? Takes me an hour to do them. Klaxxi? Another hour. Shado-Pan? Haven't even unlocked those yet. Or August Celestials for that matter.

Doubling the rep gains from dailys is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't fix the problems I mentioned above with the MoP dailys. The mobs hit to hard, have too much life and are too packed in. The quests themselves simply aren't enjoyable for this reason. Whatever happened to that molten front model you said you were going to stick with for dailys? The dailys we have now are nothing like those.
It's difficult to tackle the "fun" factor compared to previous daily hubs. That's very subjective and I, in fact, disagree with you on a personal level.

But comparing the new daily quests to the Molten Front, in terms of difficulty, isn't totally fair. When we said we wanted to stick to that model, we meant allowing the quest hubs to have some story progression for each character over time, and having a large pool of daily quests to really randomize which ones you get each day.

I remember doing Tol Barad dailies when I first hit 85. Those were pretty brutal until I geared up. When I was first doing Golden Lotus it was kind of rough too. But by ilvl 450 they were noticeably much easier, and I could complete them much faster. You might be forgetting how good your gear was when you were doing Molten Front dailies. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)