Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
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.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas started by chaud View original post
Comments 279 Comments
  1. Varitok's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ninthbelief View Post
    What a miserable Q&A. One or two real questions over an entire hour. Complete joke.
    He's a lawyer, what do you expect? The masters of giving long, drawn out nothing answers to questions that they pick so they can avoid anything difficult that the community actually cares about.
  1. Kyphael's Avatar
    I understand this guy may be good at behind the scenes number crunching or raid design and whatnot, but FFS, why the hell are they putting him in front of streams to answer questions? At least have somebody more charismatic and with less of a dead fish gaze be the spokesperson of your company.
  1. korijenkins's Avatar
    His "3-4% increase on mob health" statistic is shit. Mobs that had 40k health when I hit 120 now have 50k health after getting myself gear.

    Must've come from the same guy that said only 5% of players were affected by server issues during the launch.
  1. kaid's Avatar
    I think one thing they maybe missing in the scaling issue currently is in legion everybody had their artifact weapon. That alone ment you were nearly guaranteed to have a better than average weapon for your level even if you just came fresh out of leveling. In BFA if you are having bad luck you could hit 120 with a green weapon thats like 266 ilevel. The jump in mob HP is a much harsher impact when weapon quality is WAY more variable this time around.
  1. Dystemper's Avatar
    On the plus side, this is likely ions last Q&A be ause he will likely be fired soon. Sorry, moved on to other opportunities. Everything he said pretty much confirms that the devs ignored all the beta and alpha feedback.
  1. Kallisto's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by zito View Post
    I honestly just want to slap ihim

    they want more data from raids for balance changes

    like.... did beta raiding not even matter?
    Honestly no. Most people are there in beta to find ways to cut corners, cheese mechanics and fund ways to beat content faster. The amount if players doing their job in beta is minimal at best.
  1. bledgor's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dystemper View Post
    On the plus side, this is likely ions last Q&A be ause he will likely be fired soon. Sorry, moved on to other opportunities. Everything he said pretty much confirms that the devs ignored all the beta and alpha feedback.
    Unlikely becasue i found the Q&A nice, and I am thoroughly enjoying the game.

    Also how are people killing things slower now? I dont get it, I went from 300 to 340 and I definitely notice things dying faster, so
  1. korijenkins's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kallisto View Post
    Honestly no. Most people are there in beta to find ways to cut corners, cheese mechanics and fund ways to beat content faster. The amount if players doing their job in beta is minimal at best.
    And the people that are there doing their jobs are largely ignored anyway. Only the most major of bugs get fixed, but minor things slip through the cracks. Blizzard seems to prioritize function over fun.
  1. mmoc596a18f574's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zantos View Post
    This is also a lie. Scaling has never been this bad in the outdoor world. On Argus, I truly felt stronger with gear. Didn't see people wanting to remove gear in legion just to not be gimped.
    It was a thing in legion. Removing cloaks or wrists made mobs weaker as your average ilvl suffered, but meanwhile statbudget did not suffer so much. Mobs are way weaker for me now, than it was 40ilvl ago, so... I have no reason to think that something has changed.
  1. Jasper Kazai's Avatar
    I thought one of their major points for forcing personal loot was that it was to avoid social pressure? So why are they now mentioning the pressure of personal loot?
  1. Dystemper's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kallisto View Post
    Honestly no. Most people are there in beta to find ways to cut corners, cheese mechanics and fund ways to beat content faster. The amount if players doing their job in beta is minimal at best.
    You got a source for that because I saw and gave lots of great feedback for beta. All of it was ignored
  1. KainneAbsolute's Avatar
    So if ilevel scaling is the same of Legion and i felt really powerful to take elite mobs and big groups by myself in Argus (being dps), clearly the items we got were more powerful
  1. IIamaKing's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by bledgor View Post
    Unlikely becasue i found the Q&A nice, and I am thoroughly enjoying the game.

    Also how are people killing things slower now? I dont get it, I went from 300 to 340 and I definitely notice things dying faster, so
    Even from 300-320 I notice faster kill times. Its all hyperbole.
  1. Varitok's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dystemper View Post
    On the plus side, this is likely ions last Q&A be ause he will likely be fired soon. Sorry, moved on to other opportunities. Everything he said pretty much confirms that the devs ignored all the beta and alpha feedback.
    Don't get my hopes up please.
  1. Cernunnos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by A Chozo View Post
    Yeah those players wanting their "I Win" buttons back for World Quests simply need to git guud and play the game! Hah hah hah!

    - - - Updated - - -


    One gave me 250 reputation points.
    Yeah that seems to be my experience as well. The alpha wolf quest in stormsong valley did. I dont recall any other ones giving rep though. 1 quest gives rep. Seems broken, but ok blizz.
  1. Mr. Smith's Avatar
    His justification for killing auto-accept is absolute garbage. I've never spoken a word to anyone while in a WQ group, and being invited manually doesn't change that one bit. The Group Finder itself is what causes the lack of social interaction, for WQs to be "social" you'd have to remove it altogether.
  1. IIamaKing's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by KainneAbsolute View Post
    So if ilevel scaling is the same of Legion and i felt really powerful to take elite mobs and big groups by myself in Argus (being dps), clearly the items we got were more powerful
    Of course they were, at this point in Legion you were pretty lucky to have legend yet, By argus most people had 2. It was later in the xpac than it is now. Better trinkets, set bonuses. Most people now probably dont even have that 2nd ring open.
  1. The Stormbringer's Avatar
    Worgen and Goblin Model Updates
    No new info except that they are coming.
    I swear, if we don't hear something by BlizzCon, we won't see them at all this expansion unless it's the very last patch. Fucking hell...
  1. zrankfappa's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Easo View Post
    "Creatures only end up with about 3-4% more health at higher gear levels after dungeons."

    Yeah? 3-4 percent? Who are they kidding? I am pretty sure I am seeing 40k HP increase for the rares.

    "They are aware and agree that these more challenging mobs at max level that you had an easier time with at lower levels is not a good feeling."

    This kinda contradicts previous stuff, but... In the end, they do admit it, but again, why, WHY do you keep letting this happen in the first place? Where is the real problem? Too big egos in team leads, unable to see bad ideas/their own faults? Too big corporate greed? What/where is the problem?
    Just imagine for a moment you wanted to slow the consumption of content in not so obvious ways. Then consider these design choices again. Hint: it isn't greed.
  1. Varitok's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by IIamaKing View Post
    Even from 300-320 I notice faster kill times. Its all hyperbole.
    You're just factually incorrect with how this scaling works with ilvl. It's a placebo.

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