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Ion Hazzikostas answered World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth questions today.
- Class Tuning
- The team is not done with class tuning. They don't think things are perfect, but want more data to make broader changes over multiple specs instead of just band aid fixes.
- Arms mastery and feral druid AoE were so out of whack that it was almost useless for them and so they changed it immediately.
- The end of the first week of September is the target for the first significant balance tuning.
- Mob Scaling
- Outdoor world scaling has not changed since 7.2. Blizzard has not changed anything. Argus had the same system.
- Outdoor world mob scaling is done because the world remains relevant and rewards increase as your item level progresses, so the world should keep pace with you but more slowly.
- Before world scaling, players would become so strong that it would disrupt the outdoor world experience when killing mobs too fast for others to tag them.
- Creatures only end up with about 3-4% more health at higher gear levels after dungeon gearing.
- There are some outlier mobs that scale too much, but these are addressed as they are discovered.
- Mob Scaling while Leveling
- Lack of progression while leveling is something the team understands and wants to address/do better in the future.
- Before the world scaled to level, the increased challenge of mobs was not felt as much because it was understandable that mobs in higher level zones would increase in difficulty.
- Mobs being more challenging at max level that were easy at lower levels is not a good feeling.
- World PvP Level Scaling
- A hotfix was deployed to lessen the scaling issues of lower levels against higher levels in world PvP.
- The team wants higher level characters to have the clear advantage over lower level players, but they don't want the lower level to simply fall over.
- Item Level Increase at Max Level
- The reason item level increases rapidly right after reaching max level is to make sure upgrades feel relevant and noticeable.
- There has to be a big enough increase to upgrades to help with the tougher content that is coming soon.
- They have tested many different progression levels and are pretty happy with where they have landed.
- Removal of Auto Accept and Group Finder Add Ons
- The team felt that the auto accept and group finder add ons were turning into a button to auto complete world quests.
- They want us to actually socialize and group with players to work together instead of just pushing a button and using each other.
- Automating the process makes world quests essentially just traveling around the map and pressing a button. This is not a fun experience.
- The trade off of having auto accept would be making world quests objectives take longer to offset the ease of the automated process and that isn't fun either.
- World quests are balanced around many different play styles including solo players who don't group often.
- Auction House Lag
- Auction house and guild bank lag on popular servers is a hot button issue being discussed internally.
- They are looking at optimization upgrades on the engineering side.
- There are some tweaks coming in the next few days to the PTR to make deposits for certain trade skill items larger for single stack listings.
- Guild Permissions/Communities
- Players can once again edit their notes and add/change ranks.
- The team is still collecting feedback about what needs to be addressed and added/readded to guilds. Let them know what problems guilds are having with permissions and they will be addressed.
- There will soon be a way to block people from rejoining a community that they have been kicked from.
- The team wants to see how people use communities and not dictate how they use them. They would love to hear more feedback on communities to guide where to go from here.
- Island Expeditions
- There was a bug that was fixed which caused less artifact power rewards from winning an Island Expedition.
- The weekly reward is there as an exit option for the player so that they don't feel compelled to keep doing islands all week.
- Island Expeditions remain the best source of Artifact Power and are repetitive, however, there needs to be a drop off at some point.
- Artifact Power Requirements
- The team wants you to be able to use your outer ring pretty much right away, but the other rings are goals to work towards.
- Artifact Power Knowledge will start next week. This means that each rank will need less artifact power to level up. It will continue to decrease every week.
- Azerite Gear
- Azerite Gear will be tradable after a coming hotfix. It should be an option by reset next week.
- Azerite Gear will be tradable if you have a piece with the same item level or better in that slot.
- It was a mistake to not allow trading Azerite Armor. The reason behind why they originally chose this option was to avoid social pressure that comes with personal loot. However, these downsides aren't enough to justify the annoyance of not being able to trade the item.
- War Mode
- The War Mode bonus is something that they are being very careful with as they don't want people to feel they need to have War Mode on.
- There are changes coming to address faction imbalance in War Mode Shards.
- The reason War Mode sometimes feels imbalanced is raid world quests groups that scatter and remain in the shard after being brought into it.
- War Mode on role playing realms is essentially your own sever except during popular play times. They are considering sharding RP realms with other RP realms if they see huge issues.
- PvP Rewards
- Conquest rewards are there to guarantee that you can work towards rewards on top of getting random ones.
- The first conquest reward will be an ilvl 340 weapon.
- Dungeon Trash Mobs
- There are no plans to lessen the amount of trash mobs in certain dungeons.
- Dungeon completion times are about the same as they were at this point in Legion.
- World Quests and Emissaries
- The team is ok with mythic players graduating out of feeling the need to do world quests for rewards as they outgear it.
- Because the Horde and Alliance have completely separate factions this creates different rewards between them for certain emissaries.
- Worgen and Goblin Model Updates
- No new info except that they are coming.
- Quests
- Certain wanted quests do not give reputation for both factions. Horde is not the only one who has world quests without reputation rewards.
- The team is looking into making sure each factions' wanted quests give similar amounts of reputation and will address it if they find it to be an issue.
- There are a lot of side quests in the new zones in order to make the zone feel more alive and organic instead of just a single story.
- The team wants to improve on making it obvious which quests are the main story.
- Faction War Impacts
- The team plans to explore how the war affects the different factions of Azeroth as the story unfolds.
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