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Season of Discovery Hotfixes - 23 April
Season of Discovery Hotfixes - April 23
Recent Forum Posts
41 kills and two seasons later still no Evoker Legendary.
Season 11 Featured Builds - Haedrig's Gift Edition
New Card Revealed: Meat WagonPatch 7.3 - Darkmoon Dirigible Mount
Patch 7.3 adds the Darkmoon Dirigible mount. It is sold by Lhara on Darkmoon Island for 1,000 x Darkmoon Prize Ticket.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Protection Paladin Tier 21 Set Bonus
By any chance are we getting a change to our active mitigation in 7.3 to address the downtime and gaps in our shield of the righteous compared to other tanks active mitigation?
The current plan for the new set bonus, numbers are not final:
2p - Block chance increased by 10% (additive).
4p - when you are not affected by Shield of the Righteous, the effect of the 2p is increased by 100%.
I don't have any information to share regarding active mitigation plans for any of the tank specs. I'm just commenting about the set bonuses.
The goal of a set bonus is not to "fix" all of the potential weaknesses of a spec.
If you have concerns with the base toolkit of a class, that's totally fine, but is not something I am going to resolve or comment on in a thread specifically about set bonuses. You are better off starting, or adding onto, a thread in the Class Development forum. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Raid Testing Schedule - July 28-31
Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
There was a recent situation where world mobs were changed to scale with the players’ ilvl, instantly causing a HUGE backlash as it was intentionally left out of patch notes, because “they wanted players to experience the change organically”. The timing here was very unfortunate as, not that long before, Lore had gone out of his way to explain how they NEVER intentionally hide changes since it would eventually be found anyway. What are your thoughts on this kind of player info throttling?I am going to answer in a more general sense. You’d have to ask Lore about this specific situation.
In general, when I say that it is pointless to try and hide information from players, I’m referring to the concept of “stealth nerfs.” The (somewhat specious) argument goes that when we developers want to nerf something, but don’t want to deal with player backlash, we might choose to be all sneaky and just try to hide the nerf. But in reality, it’s pretty easy to poke holes in that kind of strategy. First off, players more than likely are going to discover the change anyway through data-mining or experimentation, so you’re not really hiding anything. At best, you may just be delaying any backlash that might occur, and it might be worse because now players feel deceived as well.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean every single thing needs to be documented in patch notes. For starters, on LoL (and it was true on WoW as well and I assume still is today), we generally make far more changes and bug fixes than we document, typically because they are trivial, and we want the patch notes to be somewhat focused. Also, sometimes you do want players to be surprised. If we put some kind of Easter egg in the game, we wouldn’t document it. We would want players to discover it on their own.
It’s also true that sometimes we just forget to document a change. It’s really challenging to stay on top of each and every data or code change that gets implemented patch to patch. We have systems to try and capture all of these for patch notes, but they are managed by humans, and humans make errors.
Once in awhile we will make a change and choose not document it because we don’t want to bias perception. For example, sometimes we’ll make a matchmaking improvement that will speed up queue times, but we want to see if players notice (i.e. was the fix worth it?) before listing it out. This kind of thing is really important for player behavior, where perception can be everything. You just have to be really careful with this line of thinking. You could easily corrupt it into nerfing a champion just to see if players notice. I would not advocate that.
If you’re a developer writing patch notes, my advice would be to put yourself in players’ shoes. Is it more fun for the player to know about the change or not to know about it? (Source)
Man at Arms - Roadhog's Chain HookRecently an episode of Man At Arms: Reforged showed how blacksmiths would create Roadhog's Chain Hook.
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