World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Just made a new piece, the recharge timer was usually 7 days/a week but now it’s 4 days.
Con confirm. That’s a Texas-sized 10-4. The recharge time is reducing as expected/intended.

Pitter patter.

Title is self explanatory, it appears Blizzard forgot to flag H MGT as a heroic because:
a) People are completing heroic and not getting saved and are farming it repeatedly,
b) The loot that drops in heroic is not tradeable.

This most likely is not intended. Blizzard has a very inconsistent history when it comes to banning people for exploiting this kind of error. Personally I’m going to err on the side of caution and not do it more than once per character.

Good luck gamers.
We’ve got a hotfix for this coming soon to a realm near you.

Dungeons and Raids

• Sepulcher of the First Ones
  
  • The Jailer
    
    • [With realm restarts] All trapdoors close in Phase 3 on Normal and Raid Finder difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased knockback of Decimator on Normal and Raid Finder difficulties.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased knockback of Misery on Normal difficulty.
      
    • [With realm restarts] Decreased rate of growth of Defile on Normal difficulty.
      

Items and Rewards

• The Antecedent Drape is now properly eligible for conversion at the Creation Catalyst.

Player vs Player

• [With realm restarts] The Conquest and Valor caps has been removed.

Burning Crusade Classic

• Dungeons and Raids
  
  • Black Temple
    
    • [With realm restarts] Defeating the Shade of Akama encounter will unlock the door to the Den of Mortal Delights.
      

I hope you all had a great weekend! Here are some more specific answers to questions since my last post:

Sorry, in general I just wanted to note that optional reagents can raise or lower difficulty, depending on their effect on the recipe.

Ah ok! Are these effects similar in nature to the new ones we’ve seen added in 9.2 where you can add combat effects to gear?
Philosophically, we like how optional reagents give lots of different ways to customize crafted gear. We will be trying out various types of optional reagents to see how they feel, so nothing set in stone yet, but I will say we like the way the 9.2 optional reagents let you do something a little more custom with your gear than just set their stats or modify item level.

So Inspiration will be another secondary stat? or is it a tertiary stat?

IIRC from the DF announcement, they’re not part of regular gear and is only found on profession gear, so I assume it’s sort of like a primary or a secondary stat, but only found on profession gear. (and enchants, consumables, etc. as was pointed out!)
Just to confirm, Halite is correct. Profession stats are not part of regular gear, but exist on profession gear and in other areas of the profession system. To clarify further, we’ve been thinking of your profession “skill” (e.g. blacksmithing skill) as your profession “primary stat” and these other stats, such as inspiration, as your profession “secondary stats”.

Speaking of cross profession interaction. Is there any possibility of increasing the number of professions that can be learned by 1 character?
We recognize that lots of people see value in increasing the number of professions learned by a single player, and it’s something we have definitely discussed. Currently we have no plans to expand this number though. For Dragonflight we are adding significant amounts of new depth and gameplay to professions, so also increasing the number of professions that you can learn on a character at the same time could be a recipe for potentially being overwhelming.

We’d like to see how it feels with these deeper professions. After Dragonflight we all (developers and players alike) might feel very different about multiple professions, as this is going to be an all new experience!

Are there any changes to how the DMF crafting quests work with this? Because I can see these as being potentially interesting (albeit time-specific) specialization options in this system. Or will these remain simple +5 base skillpoints?
Very cool idea! We’re definitely looking at older sources of skill, skill points, and other profession interactions to figure out how we might want to update them in Dragonflight. The main focus is definitely on Dragonflight professions, but something like updating that DMF quest could go very well with the overall update!

The huge focus on group content here worries me. There are a lot of us who don’t do group content for many many reasons. I have a whole thread about it. Professions are one way to really engage, develop a character, and be a part of the WoW world, without the group content. It can be a fantastic alternate path to an “end game” for some people.

Exactly. Please be sure that crafters can still do max level crafting with the mats others bring to them, even if they don’t do group content themselves.

I want to be able to use that huge 17 year list of tailoring patterns for others. I also want to be able to really focus on my profs vs group content as a viable long term activity.

Will that be possible or will crafting skill on my end be locked behind group content like in Legion?

Im not sure if Im remeber correctly but couldnt you get all the profession stuff from LFG or the AH?

I really really really don’t do group content. Especially not LFG with strangers.
Thank you for your questions Mirasol. This is a tricky needle to thread (insert tailoring joke here) as we want to reward players for doing group content. Instances are a major part of the game, and professions are meant to span pretty much every part of it. We also recognize that, as you say, professions are a great place for those less interested in group content to find a lot of gameplay.

Given that, one of our general goals for professions is that a player can be very successful without needing to set foot in an instance. We recognize that just because you want to craft the dragon head into an epic helmet, you don’t necessarily want to be the one to slay that dragon. Those are two very distinct fantasies and splitting those activities has a great deal of value. This is particularly because we want you to be able to think of yourself first and foremost as a scribe, a leatheworker, or any other profession. For some players ideally, their professions should be able to be the most important part of their identity, and where they can choose to spend the majority of their energy!

Given that, we are discussing how to achieve both the goals of having group content being rewarding to a player with professions, and avoiding it being required to be successful in your profession.

You will absolutely be able to max your professions’ skills, and very successfully specialize without setting foot in an instance in Dragonflight. The vast majority of recipes will continue to be acquirable through outside play as well. It is possible though, that some recipes will come from dungeons or raid. These are great places thematically to acquire some recipes, and become a cool reward for doing that content. That said, we are currently thinking that perhaps many, if not all of these recipes will not be soulbound, so you could ask someone to go into an instance to get them for you, or buy them off the AH.
Will guilds have dedicated crafters that don’t even raid with them, but are there fulfilling the fantasy and role of crafting awesome gear for their guild? We don’t know, but that would certainly be neat!

Anyway, I hope that answers your question in a way that is satisfactory!

Today, we’d like to share some of our rewards plans for Season 4 regarding the acquisition and effectiveness of Raid gearing overall. As we head from 9.2’s Class Sets & Creation Catalyst into Dragonflight, our team has been doing a lot of thinking about our rewards philosophies, including acquiring loot and how it might be improved. Season 4 presents a unique opportunity for us to try some experimental changes that might be too volatile for a regular season, but could still provide us with valuable data and feedback we can use to improve the game long-term. It’s worth noting that the systems we’ll be talking about today are designed around specific goals to fit with Season 4’s shorter runtime - it’s very possible that even if they’re received well, they may undergo significant iteration to match the cadence & intended progression of a normal season of content. Regardless, we want to show that we’re interested in continuing to approach rewards from different angles, and listen to player’s desires for increased bad luck protection and making sure in-game rewards feel like they’re matching player’s efforts. Without further ado, let’s get into some specifics!

Raid Vendors & Limited Currency

Season 4 will feature a trio of broker vendors suspiciously skulking around the Great Vault. Each of these brokers has wares from one of the three Shadowlands raids: Castle Nathria, Sanctum of Domination, and the Sepulcher of the First Ones. They will sell trinkets, weapons, and other special items from their respective raid. Each of these items will have the same price: a single Puzzling Cartel Dinar each, with a catch. You will only be able to get 3 Puzzling Cartel Dinar for the entire season. After spending your last Dinar, the brokers leave town and take their wares with them. Items sold by these vendors will be at the Season 4 Normal ‘Fated’ item level range of 278-285, depending on the item.

To acquire them, enter any Shadowlands Raid after Season 4 begins to start a 3-part questline. These quests will require you to kill a certain number of unique Fated bosses while the Season 4 Raid Affix is active. The quests reward you with one Puzzling Cartel Dinar upon completion and will progress to the next part of the quest (To clarify, unique means killing the same boss during that same week won’t give credit - killing the Tarragrue on Normal and Heroic in the same week will only give 1 kill). At the moment, this is set to require 30 kills, 20 kills, and 10 kills, making your 2nd and 3rd coin come even faster as time goes on - ending up at week 3 being the earliest instance of receiving a Dinar, and week 6 being the earliest you could see the last one.

This system initially came about to mitigate the rotational nature of Season 4’s raids. Each player has fewer chances to see any individual piece of loot when Fated Sylvanas or Fated Jailer is only killable every three weeks, so we really want to see how players respond to the idea of having a limited but deterministic way to target individual pieces from raids. We all have a story of going months and months on end, killing a specific boss every week without ever seeing a desired item drop, and our hope is this goes a long way to curbing extreme bad luck in the worst cases. At the same time, we don’t want to shortcut the experience of actually playing the game - it shouldn’t be possible for someone to simply buy their Best in Slot setup from a vendor week 1 of a given season - and it’s very possible that this implementation still undercuts some of that sense of progressing your character. That said, we’ve heard calls for something like this, and feel Season 4 is the best time to try it out.

Heroic & Mythic Upgrade Items

Additionally, we’re exploring ways for Raiders to upgrade Raid loot as they move up in difficulty. In Season 4, killing bosses on Heroic or Mythic difficulty will drop a ‘shard’ of an upgrade item, and upon collecting enough (currently 20) will combine to upgrade Fated gear to their Heroic or Mythic versions respectively. Unlike the Puzzling Cartel Dinar above, which has a quest you must complete to earn them over time, these upgrade shards will begin dropping on Day 1 of the season and at a 100% droprate, allowing you to capture effort progressing week over week from the get-go. These upgrade items will work on any item with a ‘Fated’ tag, including those sold by the broker vendors previously mentioned. The upgrade system combined with the Puzzling Cartel Dinar vendors will allow players to effectively buy up to 3 pieces of Heroic or Mythic raid gear, assuming you’re doing difficult content enough to build reserves of upgrade shards to begin with.

While having a Heroic or Mythic upgrade item still requires you to have the base item drop for you in some way, this means that the option of running other raid difficulties to get your desired piece is available for people wanting to go the extra mile. Similarly, this allows guilds that start from Normal and move into Heroic, or Heroic and move into Mythic the ability to carry some of their favorite items with them as they progress. Often, if a guild can’t hit a specific breakpoint while progressing (like say a new boss kill, or a Great Vault threshold), it can feel like the time spent reclearing up to those points can be wasted effort. We hope that this creates more value for simply killing bosses with your group, while also allowing those who dip their toes into higher difficulty (like, say, a guild that can only do 3 mythic bosses per week) the ability to ‘save up’ to a moment of excitement that both rewards your effort over time, as well as making it easier to make deeper strides into achieving your raiding goals.

Season 4 is an exciting time where we’re trying lots of things WoW’s never done before, and we’re similarly excited to see how these systems play out for raiders engaging with the new Fated affixes when it all goes live. We’ll be monitoring feedback closely and answering more questions in the thread, so let us know what you think!

Dropping in to clarify a few common trends of questions I’ve seen around, then will get back to combing. I want to keep my responses to things related to the Raid rewards as outlined in the post:

What about Tier Sets?

• Your 9.2 Tier Sets are still active in Season 4, and the Creation Catalyst will remain on with all of its accumulated charges. Tier Tokens won’t be added to Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination, as you’ll be able to upgrade any item you get to a higher ilvl piece of Tier just like you can on live right now.

Domination Sockets

• Shards and Domination bonuses will be disabled entirely for Season 4. We didn’t want to place extra pressure on the tuning of specifically Fated Sanctum to require it, and there was enough of a class/armor type disparity at which specs/classes could potentially wear a 3-set Domination Bonus and their 4-piece vs others that it would create a weird imbalance on those weeks. We’ve also heard from player feedback that it would feel unfair for players who didn’t hold onto Domination Gear to be at such a disadvantage.

LFR/Outdoor

• Looking for Raid will have a Season 4/Fated Difficulty, and all wings will be available at the start. This is to say if the rotation begins with Castle Nathria being the Fated raid on rotation, all of LFR Nathria will be replaced with Fated LFR Nathria, at higher item levels. LFR also counts for quest progress, so players who don’t full clear a raid for the week can collect what leftover bosses they need from there.

Additionally, the World Boss related to whichever raid is currently Fated will also be scaled up - more difficult, and dropping ilvl 285 Fated gear.

Why only Weapons/Trinkets?

• As others in this thread have mentioned, neither of these systems are intended to replace the primary method by which players acquire gear - having all of an expansion’s raids be at current item level is something entirely new to WoW, and will create both a lot of powerful combinations of items, as well as a lot of frustration at not receiving them. We wanted the Vendors to be targeted at the pieces of loot we’d already seen are most impactful to a player such as to create an intense negative reaction when situations arise like the post mentions. Many players feel if they can’t get an Edge of Night, they can’t play Rogue in 9.1/9.2. Rarely do players feel they can’t play because they are missing boots or bracers. Focusing in on these higher-tier items keeps these vendors special, and the system focused on that protection, rather than being an alternative/replacement gearing method (which it is not).

Great Vault integration?

• A common idea so far is if the Great Vault tokens could integrate some of these. While we’re not interested so far in extending the amount of Dinars a player can get in the season, offering some of the heroic or mythic upgrade shards in some form could absolutely be possible, though we’d still want to make certain you can only purchase Heroic or Mythic upgrade shards if you’re actually raiding some amount on those difficulties. Not a guarantee, but not an impossibility.

Mythic Dungeon International Season 3 Format

The Mythic Dungeon International is back! Some might say it never left because it’s been living in our hearts and memories since last season. The fun begins April 22 with the same format as last season: 24 of the top teams from the Time Trials are sorted into three illustrious groups of eight, with a different group competing for $30,000 in prizing each weekend. The top two teams from each group will advance to the MDI GLOBAL FINALS!

After three weekends of INCREDIBLE DUNGEON RUNNING ACTION, we get even more MDI goodness with The Last Stand Tournament beginning May 20. Following a final open Time Trial, six teams will have 15 hours spread over three days to make a mad dash through dungeon after dungeon to achieve victory, with only one team securing the final spot in the Global Finals! Sign-ups for the Last Stand Tournament are still open, along with the opportunity to earn the Encrypted Banner of the Opportune! If you think you have what it takes, click here.

All seven teams will join the top team out of China at the Global Finals, where they’ll run for their lives to achieve immortality as the MDI Shadowlands Season 3 champions while taking home a share of the final $300,000 prize pool!



Competing Teams and Groups



Casters

At the desk for all weekends: Dratnos Naguura Tettles Xyronic

Joining the desk as a special guest for Group A: DoA Mr.X

Joining the desk as special guests for Group B: DoA Meeix