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Ion Hazzikostas answered questions about Battle for Azeroth today!
Apologies
- This wasn't the smoothest launch. It wasn't the experience they wanted to deliver or that players deserve.
- In NA, there were a lot of issues with login and account servers.
- This was traced back to the one time process that was being run to convert a guild to a community when someone logged in to a guild for the first time. There were some edge cases with really old characters.
- There have been a lot of gameplay quality of life issues. Random abilities in dungeons are one shotting people, or things in old raids weren't scaled right.
- You shouldn't have to deal with these issues, the team is working to make sure they don't happen in the future.
- The past squish was a manual process that involved editing thousands of things by hand, which resulted in a lot of human error.
- This time around, the team modified systems to be more scalable in the future. This will allow them to more easily squish things in the future.
- The new system had some bugs, tens of thousands of bugs were fixed thanks to feedback submitted during the PTR and Beta.
- The team is fixing things as fast as possible when they are reported, hundreds a day.
- What you experienced yesterday is the worst it will ever be. Hopefully within a few days the scaling issues will be fixed.
- The more specific you can be with feedback, the easier it will be to fix.
- After things are fixed, the team will look at how they can do things better next time.
- Knowing that things can go wrong is why the new content is coming next week rather than this week.
Artifact Appearances
- Changing actual artifact appearances is a character specific thing. If you have a Monk and want to use an appearance that you unlocked on one Monk on your other Monk, you'll be able to do that when you transmog to an Artifact appearance.
Spell Animations
- The team is looking to expand the custom casting animations. Warlocks have a couple right now.
Dungeons
- There should be a bonus for daily random dungeons. If it says weekly, it is either broken or a display issue that will be fixed.
- End of dungeon objective XP is no longer there, it has been rolled into the final boss of the dungeon.
Personal Loot
- Mythic Raid mounts should be tradable on personal loot.
- Leather Azerite shoulders that are being looked at by multiple classes will have different powers for each of those classes. Normally everyone can look at the stats and see who it is better for, but it is complex to evaluate all of the different powers.
- The team doesn't want anyone to feel pressured to give away loot that is an upgrade for them.
- With Azerite Armor, item level is important, but there are many different trait combinations that you may want for your item sets. Not allowing it to be traded means there won't be any pressure to let someone else have it.
Mythic+ Dungeons
- There were some factors about the format of the MDI that made it not totally not representative of live servers.
- Through most of the rounds, player's entire gear sets were set to a fixed item level. Your Artifact was also the same item level as the rest of your gear, which is different than live. That heavily nerfed classes that rely on their weapons, which resulted in some classes being less optimal.
- Players were also able to pick Affixes or there was a limited Affix pool, so they would often avoid Affixes that hurt specific comps.
- The team wants to go further with how Affixes vary optimal compositions.
- Necrotic was supposed to counter the Blood Death Knight, but legendary items and AMS countered that.
- Some specs will be better than others with certain Affixes.
- The team wants to get away from their being one all around best tank like there was at the end of Legion.
- Patches are increasingly delivering data which is unlocked when it makes sense for the game as a whole.
- With Mythic+ seasons, the team wants to make it parallel to the other endgame seasons.
- New PvP season, new raid tier, and new Mythic+ season all at the same time ideally.
Class Changes
- Class development is an ongoing process. There will be ongoing tuning and balancing for the next few weeks to keep things sane, then focus will shift to making all specs viable at Battle for Azeroth endgame.
- The team will also tune Azerite Powers to keep them competitive.
- Larger changes will happen in Patch 8.1 and beyond.
Lore
- Horde loyalists, don't lose heart! You aren't wrong to be dismayed at the current situation, but there are some things that haven't been revealed. The heart of the Horde still beats, and there are plenty that will take up that banner for the Horde.
- The Horde is a set of different groups brought together by a common interest.
- The Orcs are all about Blood, Honor, Glory, and a savage existence. The Tauren, walking in the steps of the Earthmother. Other races, all working together.
- It's natural that there will be tensions.
- What is the Horde's purpose and guiding values?
- Both factions will have to look inward and reflect, what are they fighting for?
Stat Squish
- It would be nice if there was a way to avoid future stat squishes.
- Reinventing the entire combat system is a daunting task.
- Power progression is a core part of the game.
- There is a large number of content tiers, and the team has settled on a number of item levels between difficulties and tiers that makes the power increase feel meaningful.
- Defeating a challenging boss to earn an item with +21 Strength that replaces your +20 Strength one isn't great.
- The stat squish doesn't feel super elegant to the team, but they best thing they've come up with so far.
- The team didn't want to make leveling more difficult after the additional Patch 7.3.5 changes.
- Things feel slower right now, but that isn't intended. The team is actively investigating and will fix this. Leveling should feel just as fast after the patch as it did before.
- The team has considered doing a level squish. A brand new player might be deterred by seeing such a high level they need to attain to play the endgame.
- Sometimes you go too many levels before you get a new ability, which would be solved by a level squish.
- If you thought things were broken in the past few days, the risks are far greater for everything breaking with a level squish.
- It also might feel bad to log in and be level 70 again.
- If someone has been away for a few years and hears about a new expansion with a level cap of 80, that would be confusing.
- The time spent doing a level squish is probably better spent making new content.
Camera
- The team made a slight change to the camera anchor point for the short races to solve an issue with geometry in dungeons and raids.
- Gnomes had a camera anchor slightly lower than Humans. If you are against a wall with a lip in a dungeon, it wouldn't interfere with a Human's camera, but it would for a Gnome because your camera was slightly lower.
- If you zoom in the camera on a Goblin or Gnome, it goes towards a spot slightly above your head and then will snap to your head's level.
- Affix that makes you play in pro (first person) mode? This should be a thing!
Hati
- We may not have seen the last of Hati or other Artifacts that had unique companions or personalities.
Artifacts and Transmog
- The Artifact fishing pole wasn't instrumental in draining the power in Silithus. You can keep using it, but it is tied to Legion fishing.
- It's intended (for now) that transmogging an artifact applies the appearance to both hands.
- Artifact transmog is breaking the rules, so for now it will just override the appearance of whatever is in your hands.
- Eventually the team wants to fix this and add more customization.
- Feral and Guardian artifact forms are tied to the weapons as a result of how the Artifacts were built. For now that is the world we live in. Transmog is built on items and associated visuals.
- The team could add ways to earn other bear and cat forms for transmog in the future.
- The team wants to do better with fist weapons in the future.
Azerite Traits
- There are already a lot of Azerite traits that are gameplay modifying.
- Some of these traits are more powerful than a set bonus, approaching a legendary item, and you have multiple traits like that.
- There are some passive ones as well for players that don't want gameplay modifying traits.
- There will be more traits added in future patches.
- After you first few weeks with an Artifact, you didn't really get any more choices or see a lot of changes.
- Azerite Traits will allow you to make more choices as you get new upgrades and build different sets.
Classes
- There is a lot of depth with Azerite traits.
- There is bloat if the team keeps adding additional talent rows.
- The team keeps having to give you something new, just to give you something new. This adds bloat and increases homogenization. If this keeps happening, everyone will end up the same.
- The team is focusing on systems that are tied to a specific expansion, giving you dozens of traits that modify your gameplay. This will all be left behind next expansion with new set of traits and choices.
- There might be a new talent row or other permanent customization in the future.
- The team recognizes it is fun to get new abilities!
- In the short term, traits are less exciting than new abilities, but the long term health of the game has to be kept in mind. They can't afford to just think about today.
Solo Challenges
- The team is interested in doing solo challenges like the Mage Tower again in the future.
- Early on it was a very difficult challenge. It got easier over time as knowledge spread and players got more gear.
- It was a type of gameplay that many players hadn't experienced before.
- You didn't have to depend on others, it all rested on you and was a test of your abilities.
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