DH Interview, Audio Drama, Harbingers Preview, Mark of Honor, DK and Paladin Mobility

Patch 2.4.2 Roundup & Season 7 Countdown

New Card Reveal - Zoobot

The Nostromia Elo Hell Challenge & MMR Debate, Tracer Nerf Explained

Jeff Kaplan on The Summer Games and Exclusivity

Dev Interview - Demon Hunters
We had the opportunity to talk to Jeremy Feasel and Jonathan LeCraft about Demon Hunters today!


Momentum
  • Momentum is on the radar. There aren't any plans to change it immediately.
  • The team wants to let things go live on the 9th and see how it works out.
  • Obviously players won't have access to Momentum in the first few weeks, but they will watch how things are working out on beta and take that time to figure out where they want it to be before launch.
  • As with anytime a new class is added, there are a large number of things that will be up in the air during the first few months of a new expansion, so provide your feedback on the forums.

Mobility in Battlegrounds
  • Changes to Demon Hunter mobility in PvP is up to the PvP team.
  • There is some flexibility in place so that they can limit mobility while you are carrying the flag.
  • The team ran into many of these mobility issues when the Monk was introduced, so they are familiar with the issues that can occur.
  • One video showed a Demon Hunter using glide to cross half of the battleground which caused some concern.
  • At one point Glide kept moving at the same pace even when you were snared, but Glide was changed to move slower when you are snared.

Felbat Mount
  • There were a number of mounts added to Legion with no source yet.
  • The artists had a few days of mount-a-palooza, allowing them to come up with some cool and crazy mounts like the Brinedeep Bottom-Feeder, the Llothien Prowler, and the Bloodfang Widow.
  • The team ended up with more mounts than they were able to find reward sources for, which is a great problem to have.
  • There are lots of ideas for future patches and solid plans for some of the mounts that aren't assigned a source yet.
  • You may see the Felbat mount make a return in the future.

Warglaive Models
  • There aren't any current plans to make circular glaives like that ones that Maiev has, but as we progress through the patches there will be interesting and fun ways to vary up your Artifact look.
  • The circular weapon shape might be a little out of bounds for the Demon Hunter artifacts, but that is a nice glaive model.
  • Transmog gives the team the opportunity to make some really cool and crazy stuff that players can get to customize their appearance.
  • The team is only really scratching the surface of appearance customization at this point and there is a lot of depth there.

Metamorphosis Model
  • It is unlikely that the team will allow players to swap the Metamorphosis model that their spec uses to the one used by the other spec.
  • They want to keep the fantasy strongly tied to each spec.
  • One model is a somewhat Illidan like demon model while the other is more of a Diablo model.
  • One is unarmed and brutal, he looks like he can take a lot of damage.
  • The other model is a lot lighter weight.
  • The team has really pulled back on cosmetic glyphs, cross-class abilities and focused on class fantasy. They want to maintain that for a while.
  • Customization of your Metamorphosis form is a possibility. Right now it maintains your hair color and tattoo shape, but not the tattoo color or horns.
  • The Metamorphosis form has a specific horn on them, so it may not be something that can be easily translated from the normal player model.
  • The team will be looking at character customization for a long time to come.

Felblade
  • The team wants to keep the basic rotation very simple, without any procs that you have to respond to. Just press the buttons when you have resources.
  • Additional complexity can be added through talents.
  • This does make players who want this additional complexity feel like they only have one talent choice for that tier, but that is how opt-in complexity has to be delivered.
  • There are players that raid at the top end that will want to play a Demon Hunter, but at the same time there will also be lots of other players that want to play a Demon Hunter as well. They had to approach it from an initial position of simplicity.
  • They are looking forward to feedback from when you get in to the highest end raids. What would you like to see be a little bit more complicated with this class?
  • There are a large number of other classes in World of Warcraft and some of them are very complex and have a high skill cap, which may make them a little bit more appropriate for a player that wants that additional complexity.

Metamorphosis Gameplay
  • Making Metamorphosis a little bit more interesting is something that the team has constantly looked at. "How can we make this even cooler?"
  • Right now it delivers on the fantasy of making you attack faster and hit harder.
  • There could be a talent that adds additional complexity or a modification to the spell if there is a simple solution.
  • For now Metamorphosis is going to be one of those things that are released and then re-examined.
  • It is easier with a large and vocal community to add things later rather than taking something away.
  • This means starting from a place of a little bit more simplicity so that they don't end up taking away things players got used to or liked.

Demonic Communication
  • Demon Hunters should be able to communicate cross-faction with Demonic. If they can't right now on beta it is a bug.

Tanking Niche
  • Demon Hunters have a lot of utility and movement abilities, so they are fairly strong in Mythic+ dungeons.
  • Having an AoE fear and an AoE silence and all of their mobility abilities really make them stand out among the other tanks.

Survivability
  • The team has been looking at survivability every day since the Q&A to see what they should do.
  • They have talked to people internally that are doing beta PvP and found that the mobility gives them a lot of survivability.
  • They will see how it works out first at Level 100 and then at Level 110.
  • There is a chance that a few tweaks will be made before Legion release.

Wings and Hovering
  • When you apply wings to your character, usually the camera is behind and above your character, in the perfect position for wings to block your vision of the character.
  • This covers your tattoos and armor, detracting from your character's experience.
  • Illidan is your leader and a little bit more powerful than every other Demon Hunter, which is why he has the wings and can hover. They don't want to get rid of this while we are in the middle of his big story arc.
  • Adding some way to let you occasionally show off your wings isn't something planned right now, but maybe in the future.

Demon Hunter Armor
  • Demon Hunters having more revealing armor is a tool that the team has, but it isn't something that may be necessary to do for every Demon Hunter armor set moving forward.

Feedback
  • As with every expansion that adds a new class, unforeseen things will pop up during launch, so provide feedback via Twitter and the forums!


Dev Interview - Demon Invasions
PCGamesN had the chance to talk to the developers and find out a little bit more about the demon invasions:

  • For the first week, invasions will happen every four hours in a couple of the more remote invasion zones.
  • This will increase 300% every week for two weeks until all of the invasion zones are active all of the time.
  • Invasions will start in the more remote zones like Tanaris and then the Legion will get closer to the main cities.
  • When the Legion starts to invade the Dark Whispers event will start


Legion Audio Drama - The Tomb of Sargeras - Part Three: The Tomb's Fury
The third part of the Audio Drama has been released! You can download the script here and the MP3 here.



Harbingers - Illidan Preview
The final Harbingers episode will be released tomorrow, focusing on Illidan and the Illidari!



Addon - MaxCam
If you want to enjoy a higher max zoom setting one last time before it is hotfixed, give the MaxCam addon a try.



Raid Testing Schedule - August 5
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
On August 5, we will be conducting another focused raid test of two Heroic bosses.

Remember that Heroic difficulty scales for any group size between 10 and 30 players, so feel free to assemble and bring a group of any size within that range.

Friday, August 5

Ursoc - Heroic Emerald Nightmare
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

Krosus - Heroic Nighthold
15:00 PDT (18:00 EDT, 00:00 CEST)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the bosses being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

PvP Stat Template Changes
PvP stat template notes have been updated!



Marks of Honor
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
I wanted to pop in and talk a bit about Marks of Honor. Marks of Honor are a secondary reward system that provide a way for you to get old sets of PvP gear for transmog purposes. They are not the primary way you get gear from PvP. With the dawn of the new transmog system, we knew a lot of players would want to gain access to old PvP looks. These sets used to cost Honor Points (the currency) which was removed in 7.0.3. We considered changing the cost of this gear to gold, but felt that would make obtaining these looks trivial. So, we added Marks of Honor as a way to earn your way to old PvP set transmogs. There will not a vendor selling gear for level 110 characters for Marks of Honor. In addition, any items that have no impact on transmog (like necks, rings, etc) has been removed from the current tier of vendors.

In addition, with the launch of 7.0.3, many of Legion's systems came online including changes to PvP rewards. In Legion, level 110 players are rewarded Honor. Players below level 110 are rewarded XP. Unfortunately, during the pre-patch phase, Level 100 players do not benefit from XP. So, it's expected that right now, at level 100, the reward structure feels a bit incomplete. Once Legion launches, level 100 players will earn XP, Marks of Honor and gear rewards. At Level 110, players will be earning Honor, Marks of Honor and gear rewards. Players will be rewarded Honor or XP based on their performance and the score in a battleground. Players on the losing side can increase their chance to receive better gear and more Honor or XP by keeping the match as close as possible.

We're really excited to see your reaction to the full system at level 110. Please keep the feedback coming, we love reading everything you have to say.

Death Knight and Paladin Mobility Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Death Knight Mobility
Death Knights are meant to have lower mobility than other melee classes, but feel very strong once they’re in range. That said, we agree that they need a little help with their on-demand movement options. In an upcoming hotfix, we’ll be lowering the cooldown of Wraith Walk to 45 seconds, so you can close those gaps more regularly.

This change will give Unholy a bit too much mobility, thanks to the passive 15% movement speed increase from Death’s Advance. Unholy’s already been a little stronger than intended, so to make up for the Wraith Walk buff, we’ll be removing Death’s Advance. The end result of these changes is that all Death Knights will have higher on-demand mobility, and Unholy will have lower passive mobility.

We’ll be applying these changes via hotfix very soon. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Paladin Mobility
We’ve been hearing your feedback about Paladin mobility, and agree that it’s a bit lacking at the moment, especially for Holy and Retribution. In the very near future, we’ll be making the following changes:

  • Divine Steed is now baseline for ALL Paladins (not just Protection)
  • A new talent, Cavalier, replaces Divine Steed in the Holy and Retribution talent trees:
    • Cavalier: Divine Steed now has 2 charges.
  • For Protection, Cavalier replaces the Blessing of Salvation talent, which is no longer available.

Prior to patch 7.0.3, this change would have required a new patch in order to apply. Fortunately, we have some exciting new behind-the-scenes tech that allows us to make changes like these via hotfix! As a result, we’ll be pushing this to live servers in the very near future. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
6v6 RBG: Main Competitive
We like the idea of a 6v6 format and we've had internal tests on our existing battlegrounds. We didn't feel that enough of the battlegrounds worked well with 6v6 to support it. To do that format right would require us to create new battlegrounds specifically designed for 6v6. Certainly an idea we like but not one we are currently working on. (Official Forums)

Full Moon
Full moon has been nerfed into the ground, it does about 60% of what it used to do in pvp...
We like Full Moon as a spell that requires a lot of setup but does a lot of damage. Allowing it to be instant meant we would have had to end up nerfing it's damage. We'd rather see the setup rewarded with a big payoff. (Official Forums)

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Sometimes we poorly time hotfixes so that they go live after most people have left for the weekend, leading to slow hotfix notes. Apologies. (Celestalon)
This article was originally published in forum thread: DH Interview, Audio Drama, Harbingers Preview, Mark of Honor, DK and Paladin Mobility started by chaud View original post
Published on 2016-08-04 05:58 AM
34 Comments
Comments 34 Comments
  1. risingforce's Avatar
    As a Brewmaster it just feels like we've been deliberately neutered whilst others continue to have extra utility and flavour poured on them.

    My monk feelings aside, those Paladin changes are pretty awesome!
  1. kileased's Avatar
    With the amount of mounts they designed and still don't have a source, why not make more class mounts? I think every class should get a class mount. Even flying class mounts will be pretty sweet and make it a epic quest line reward like the green fire quest line.
  1. TyrannicalPuppy's Avatar
    God fucking dammit, all they need to do for revealing DH armour is make Sandrene's Invisible Vest transmoggable. This is getting fucking infuriating.
  1. Soeroah's Avatar
    Hrm. Once every four hours on my long weekend. That blows, I'd rather have that last one active then...

    So if I'm correct, next week will be once every four hours, week after that is once every hour, and the week after that is constantly?

    I sure hope this isn't a general "once an hour the Invasions activate" sort of thing and you can at least do them once an hour on, say, three characters, rather than having to choose a character to do them on once every hour.
  1. thilicen's Avatar
    Am I reading that full moon quote right? It's instant cast now?
  1. mmoc6a909ad927's Avatar
    When will they make cordanna's armour available. I so want it on my dh!
  1. Phaythos's Avatar
    They fixed all the melee mobility.
    I was wondering when will arrive the casters' turn.

    Mage excluded it's a mess....
  1. Phaythos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tiase View Post
    They keep repeating that the rotation for DH is meant to be simple and talent choices can make it more complex, I get it, but it's TOO freaking simple. Are they seriously telling me that it is too hard for some people out there to react to a proc?
    Yes it is. And you will see it in legion. Old players will cry blood...
  1. mmoceb1073a651's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kileased View Post
    With the amount of mounts they designed and still don't have a source, why not make more class mounts? I think every class should get a class mount. Even flying class mounts will be pretty sweet and make it a epic quest line reward like the green fire quest line.
    This would be a cool thing!
  1. EternalBany's Avatar
    Sooooo

    There is no use in hoarding marks of honor for legion pvp gear?
  1. Kahrgan's Avatar
    I really don't see how mobility is a means of survivabilty when DH has less mobility than monk, Monks have more survivability CDs, 3 self heals, and more burst. Hell even the most hated melee spec has more survivability than DH, and thats ret.

    You can't move yourself out of being DoT'd to death.

    Idk who's the manager in charge, or the devs, but they really need to get their head out of their collective asses.
  1. mmoceb1073a651's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tiase View Post
    They keep repeating that the rotation for DH is meant to be simple and talent choices can make it more complex, I get it, but it's TOO freaking simple. Are they seriously telling me that it is too hard for some people out there to react to a proc?
    I prefer buildung up and releasing resources (like combo points with rogue or embers with destro warlock), because procs are RNG and I hate when my performance is too much dependent from RNG, the RNG thing is softened when you have some control over such procs via a CD (like generating finger of frost procs via elemental or talent with the ice mage).

    Thing is, not everybody has a perfect reaction time, especially if there are other things to watch at the same time. Reaction time decreases to some degree with age, for example, but it also depends on your health and acuteness of mind / degree of sleepyness, and your overall experience with the game. So, the more classes depend on the perfect reaction time to procs to be played optimally, the less number of people will be able to play good. This is a biological / medical constraint.
  1. Slashnox's Avatar
    I need the Illidan cinematic already, been waiting since 2007
  1. Ausr's Avatar
    They could easily fix the max camera thing by making it baseline but that'd be sensible.
  1. mmoc30274401ab's Avatar
    Slightly disappointing if that's the last part of the audio drama. I thought for sure they'd include him finding Illidan...
  1. thilicen's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sarithus93 View Post
    Slightly disappointing if that's the last part of the audio drama. I thought for sure they'd include him finding Illidan...
    Would be surprised if there isn't one more.
  1. mmoc30274401ab's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by thilicen View Post
    Would be surprised if there isn't one more.
    I spoke to soon. I was sure there was only going to be three but I just checked the Legion site again and it lists four. Good news!
  1. Mhyroth's Avatar
    I said back at BlizzCon when they announced Demon Hunters their mobility would be an issue in PvP and PvE (advantageous way) yet everyone said it'll be balanced and would be fine.
    Now after the Q&A I see they have concerns but "want to see how it plays out", thus basically saying "let's see how bad it is before we actually change things."
    I'm already kind of sick and tired of all the Demon Hunter hype everyone pushes everywhere (some people act like 2 year old who can walk for the first time), especially Blizzard who deliberately removed abilities off other Classes to give them to Demon Hunters and make the Class out as the single most important thing this expansion has to offer.
    Different people play the game for different reasons, and overhyping something might give the opposite effect (look at WoD), so I'd personally be really careful with hyping things up this way or you'll end up with quitters again.
    This is in no way a representation of (most likely) a big chunk of the community but merely my own and those are the impressions I have ever since the announcement at Blizzcon. You can disagree with it for all you want, but it won't change the way I look at things ^^.
  1. Sokinas's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sarithus93 View Post
    Slightly disappointing if that's the last part of the audio drama. I thought for sure they'd include him finding Illidan...
    looking at the legion site, there will be one more audio drama =)
  1. Stormwolf64's Avatar
    How great for blizzard to have a selection to put up on the store..... Eugh....
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