June 25 Hotfixes, Hellfire Citadel Loot, Ashran Hotfixes, Strongboxes, Blue Tweets

Death Knight
Frost

• [Hotfix in testing] Frost Strike and Obliterate have been reduced to their pre-6.2 damage levels.
  
  • The change to Might of the Frozen Wastes remains in place and is a significant buff to Frost Strike damage while dual-wielding.
  • Obliterate once again deals full damage to players.
• [Hotfix in testing] Howling Blast damage has been reduced by 13.5% but is still a slight buff from its pre-6.2 damage levels.
  
  • The change to Howling Blast's area damage remains in place, and continues to deal full damage to all enemies within range.

Hunter
Beast Mastery

• [Hotfix in testing] Improved Focus Fire should now correctly increase attack power.

Shaman
Enhancement

• [Hotfix in testing] Lava Lash now deals 20% more damage.
• [Hotfix in testing] Stormstrike now deals 20% more damage.
• [Hotfix in testing] Windstrike now deals 20% more damage.

World Environment and Events
Tanaan Jungle

• Enabled a graveyard much closer to the Throne of Kil'jaeden area to no longer require completion of the quest "The Assault Base".
• Looted Bleeding Hollow Treasure should now contain more Garrison Resources.

Midsummer Fire Festival

• Burning Blossom's Fire Festival Fury effect no longer stacks with flasks.

Creatures and NPCs
Tanaan Jungle

• Savage Whale Shark has migrated to a savage new home in the waters around Ironhold Harbor.
• Players should no longer be seeing zone wide messages from rare creatures or NPCs that are not in their area.
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to block the beams to activate Varyx the Damned.
• Fixed an issue that could cause players to not receive loot after defeating Supreme Lord Kazzak.

Quests
Garrison Quests

• If At First You Fail, Try Again!: Fixed an issue that could cause players to be unable to complete the quest.

Tanaan Jungle

• Tooth and Claw: The quest now awards 100 Blackfang Claws on competition (up from 25 Blackfang Claws).

Legendary Ring Quest Line

• Legacy of the Sorcerer Kings: Tracking and credit for obtaining Abrogator Stones should be working correctly once more.
• The Shadow War: The location for quest turn-in should now be updated correctly if Khadgar has moved to a new location.

Raids and Dungeons
Hellfire Citadel
General

• Increased the chance for non-boss enemies (“trash”) in Hellfire Citadel to drop epic items.

Hellfire Assault

• Contracted Engineer now has roughly 5% less health on Heroic difficulty.
• Gorebound Felcaster now has roughly 5% less health on Heroic difficulty.
• Hulking Berserker now has roughly 15% less health on Heroic difficulty.
• Iron Dragoon now has roughly 5% less health on Heroic difficulty.

Kilrogg Deadeye

• Fixed an issue where players that died during the encounter while the raid group completes the achievement "A Race Against Slime" was not receiving Ariok as a follower.

Shadow-Lord Iskar

• Fel Bomb should no longer be incorrectly removed by Mistweaver Monk's Revival if the player is not holding the Eye of Anzu.

Socrethar the Eternal

• Soulbound Construct while it's under player control should no longer be affected by Rallying Cry.
• Sargerei Dominators now have a very brief delay before attacking after being spawned.

Fel Lord Zakuun

• The number of players chosen for Seed of Destruction should now scale correctly based on raid size.

Mannoroth

• Players should now be able to see a buff on Fel Iron Summoners to indicate the type of portal being opened during Stage One of the encounter.

Archimonde

• Defeating a Hellfire Deathcaller should now correctly only remove a single stack of Death Brand on the target.

PvP
Ashran

• Decreased the maximum number of players on each faction to 40. To compensate for this change, we've also increased the number of Ashran instances.
• [Requires a realm restart] If a faction repeatedly loses at an Ashran event, they will now receive an invisible progressive buff that increases their damage, healing, and damage absorption by 5% per stack. This effect can stack up to 10 times. A stack of the buff will be removed each time the losing faction wins an event.

Items

• Saberstalker Teachings: Trailblazer should now be usable by players that already have learned Treasure Map: Tanaan Jungle.
• Sassy Imp should no longer have a chance to summon a stable master.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause players to be dismounted while on a quest flight path.

Unless you were Doing It Wrong™ your Garrison has/had a Salvage Yard. That's not an interesting building choice, and clearly the rewards it provided were just too good to value any other potential options. Buildings providing clear benefits at different stages through character level and Garrison progression work out, but the Salvage Yard was just the only correct answer for everyone.

I totally get that the rewards were really good, and now they are not as good, and... that's bad because we all like good rewards for little effort, but the goal of balance is not to have one clear path of least resistance, especially considering the gameplay it involved were simply Garrison missions. It was impactful enough a change though that we waited until 6.2 instead of changing it earlier through a hotfix.

We have a couple hotfixes in the works intended to improve the player experience in Ashran, and wanted to bring them to your attention.

First, we've reduced the maximum number of players per side to 40. We've also increased the number of available Ashran instances, to compensate for having fewer spaces in each Ashran. Since Ashran was changed in Patch 6.2 to automatically place players in a raid group upon entering, we feel that having 40 players on each side makes more sense, instead of splitting players into two separate raid groups. This hotfix went live yesterday.

The second hotfix is intended to limit situations where one faction is unable to win events for extended periods of time, by increasing their damage and healing. Once this hotfix is in effect, a bonus will be granted to the faction that has been losing the most events in a particular Ashran instance. For example, when the Alliance are winning more events, the Horde will have the bonus, and vice versa. The bonus is decreased or increased in increments of 5% for every event that faction wins or loses, up to a possible maximum of 50% increased damage and healing in extreme cases.

In other words, every time your faction loses an event, it will be 5% easier for you to win the next one. If your faction currently has the damage and healing buff, it will go up by another 5%. If the opposing faction has the buff, then it will go down by 5%.

Please note that, due to the nature of this hotfix, there is no visible buff on the player that shows you what benefit you're currently receiving. We may be able to add a visible buff in the future, but that would require a patch, and we didn't want to delay getting this hotfix out. It will go live the next time realms are restarted.


Hello everyone, I'd like to address some of the common points I'm seeing mentioned in this thread.

First, I want to stress that the intent of Ashran is to provide a very different play experience than Arenas or Battlegrounds. The vision is a large PvP space where players are moving throughout the zone, competing for rewards, in a faction themed conflict. As many of you know, there hasn't been enough fighting in Ashran, for a number of reasons and we're looking to change that.

One of the most important factors driving player behavior in Ashran is the reward structure and how efficiency drives group behavior. Specifically, I mean that when the same reward is available in multiple locations at the same time, the two factions avoid each other. It is easier and more efficient to not fight for an event if killing a rare offers the same benefit. Right now, at the launch of 6.2, we are in an atmosphere where the primary concern for most players is earning Honor. Honor can be earned throughout Ashran in a number of ways and as a result, there isn't a lot of competition going on.

The new season will begin soon and inevitably players will turn their attention to earning Conquest. There are only two ways to earn Conquest in Ashran in 6.2. The first is to complete the quests to kill the faction leader and win 4 events. This will put both factions in direct competition with each other over events and the Road of Glory. The second is to kill 200 players of the enemy faction. Obviously, this drives players to kill each other. Our expectation is that if players feel they can compete for these rewards they will.

We're obviously concerned from comments we've seen on these forums and within the game that the Horde feel they cannot compete at events and the central road. When it comes to PvP, players will only participate if they feel they can compete. This is the primary motivation behind the mechanic Lore explained above. When a faction falls behind, it is easy for everyone to go their separate ways and never engage the enemy. This buff should help players win some engagements and hopefully build the confidence (and numbers) needed to compete in the larger battles.

On a related note, I've seen comments that the Horde think they are outnumbered in Ashran, but this just isn't true. We strictly enforce faction balance numbers in Ashran. If there are ten Horde players in Ashran, we will not let an eleventh Alliance player in. We've looked at the data several times and it is clear. The number of Horde and Alliance players in any given Ashran is the same at all times. However, there are a lot more Alliance waiting to get into Ashran. Since we enforce faction balance, the only way to get more Alliance players into Ashran is to get more Horde players into Ashran.

As a small note, I know some people have compared this new buff to Tenacity, but the situation is very different. Tenacity was a buff that scaled based on how lopsided faction balance was in the zone at any given time. Players would have several stacks of Tenacity but they would be terribly outnumbered. We don't allow either faction to be outnumbered in Ashran. This buff is primarily in place to help the faction that's losing recover and hopefully win the next big fight.

Finally, we've have seen the feedback about the desire to see premade raid groups return to Ashran but we don't think this is a good idea. Ultimately, it led to a situation where if you knew to use the premade group finder, you would wait a long time but get into an Ashran where you were guaranteed to win. Unfortunately, if you didn't know about the premade group finder, you would get in immediately but were almost guaranteed to get demolished. We don't think this is a healthy environment for the zone to be in.

We appreciate how passionate everyone has been about the zone. We'll continue to monitor your feedback here and in-game. Thanks for playing and we'll see you on the battlefield!

We've been seeing some confusion about how Strongboxes are awarded in Random BG's, so I wanted to take a moment to clarify.

In point-based Battlegrounds (Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm, Battle for Gilneas, Temple of Kotmogu, Silvershard Mines, and Deepwind Gorge), Strongboxes are awarded based on how many points the losing team was able to earn before the match ended. Earning 500 points will award a Bronze Strongbox, and earning 1000 points will award a Silver Strongbox.

In capture the flag Battlegrounds (Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks), Strongboxes are awarded based on how many times the losing team was able to capture the flag. One capture will award a Bronze Strongbox, and 2 captures will award a Silver Strongbox.

In Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest, Strongboxes are awarded to the losing team based on how many reinforcements the winning team had remaining when the match ended. If the winning team had 300 or fewer reinforcements left, the losing team will be awarded a Bronze Strongbox. If the winning team had 100 or fewer reinforcements left, the losing team will be awarded a Silver Strongbox.

In Strand of the Ancients, Strongboxes are awarded to the losing team based on how far they were able to progress before their turn ended. Destroying either the blue or green gate will award a Bronze Strongbox. Destroying the yellow gate will award a Silver Strongbox.

Of course, winning any Battleground will award a Gold Strongbox. In addition, Strongboxes are awarded to every player on the team that earned them, as long as they are still in the game when the match ends.

The goal of this system is to ensure that, even if you think your team is likely to lose, it's still worth your while to put up as much of a fight as possible and stay through to the end of the match.

A couple days ago I was in a SotA where my team attacked first. We captured the relic, but then the other team captured faster on their turn and we received a Bronze strongbox. Intentional or oversight? Seems like it ought to give a Silver based on those guidelines.
Hmm. You're correct, it sounds like you should have gotten Silver. We'll investigate.

Can you look at adjusting this? Maybe I've just been an anomaly, but a small portion of my CTF games have ended as a result of 3 flag caps, the vast majority being 1-0 or 1-1. It doesn't seem fair that a 0-0 game for 14 minutes with a good play to make it 1-0 results in a gold strongbox on one side, nothing on the other. It's even more unfair when one team holds a 1-0 lead for the majority, gives up a point to even it up at the end, and gets a Bronze strongbox despite holding a 10 minute lead and losing 1-1.
We agree that the system isn't working perfectly for CTF games at the moment. I can't promise any incoming changes as of yet, but it's something we'd like to improve.

I thought the confusion was why we were getting old (redundant) gear in the boxes?
We're looking into this as well.

"Return" button on mail removed in 6.2? Why?
For some reason you can no longer "Return" mail as you could before 6.2.

Any reason this was removed?
This wasn't intended. We're looking into it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Another Expansion?
I can't answer on the timing, but we do have more story to tell and more ideas to share. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Art
Will the unarmored Wolf and Hippo mounts' animation speed also be fixed for 6.2?
Very similar issue, but those will be fixed in the next mini-patch after 6.2. (WarcraftDevs)

Character / Items
When can we expect the illusion "Holy Infusion"? Many are still waiting for it since is was announced for 6.1
It likely won’t happen. Scaling the graphic in ways that looked good on most weapons we wanted it to work on was problematic. (WarcraftDevs)

Have there been considerations for rebalancing tier token class distribution? Protector has felt too saturated for a while now
There are no plans for this. (WarcraftDevs)

PvE
Quick question re: Timewalking. Will mastery still work as though we were 100 in BC dungeons?
Yes, you still have your mastery, and the stat will still increase its effectiveness. (WarcraftDevs)

Was it ever decided it level 100 would earn a reward during Timewalking events? Seals of Tempered Fate was mentioned.
Yes, the Bonus Event quest for Timewalking will award the new Seal (of Inevitable Fate). (WarcraftDevs)
Will it count in the 3-total of week or be extra like the garrison mission?
It’s a bonus Seal; doesn’t count towards the weekly cap. (WarcraftDevs)

Lore
I know this one too! Void Rev's are the remnants of a species overtaken by Void. Not undead, misclassified. (Muffinus)
but aren't spirits undead lol?
Dave stated NPCs can have more than one classification lore-wise
Well, yes, Mannoroth is an undead demon. Demons know how to raise undead, and he was a demon previously. (Muffinus)
do imps possess necromantic knowledge?
No idea, I personally like to think of imps in the Discworld sense, e.g. they will tell you exactly as much as you need to know. (Muffinus)