World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

As the holidays approach, we wanted to take a chance to share some information on an upcoming raid tuning adjustment as well as the release date for Nighthold.

Trial of Valor will see a set of tuning adjustments next week, focused mainly on Heroic and Mythic difficulty, which should help groups overcome the challenges of the Trial as they prepare for Nighthold.

Which brings us to the release date for Nighthold itself: We are aiming to unlock Normal and Heroic Nighthold on January 17, 2017. Raid Finder wings and Mythic difficulty will release during the weeks following, which we will share more specific details on at a later time.

We look forward to seeing you in the Nighthold!

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. There was a bug with players who reached Honor Level 50, Prestige Level 4 where honor earned was still being accumulated past the cap. When the Prestige Level was increased yesterday, the accumulated honor was applied and the character progressed through those new Prestige Levels.

The rewards were legitimately earned through playtime, however, so we won’t be removing them. This bug should be fixed in 7.1.5, so that others in similar situations will earn those rewards immediately, and so that this will not affect future seasons.

Dungeons and Raids
Helya

• Resolved an issue where Helya's Taint of the Sea on Mythic difficulty would sometimes cast at incorrect times in Stage One.

Player versus Player

• Players can now reach Prestige level 8.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• (Assasination) Agility increased by 5%.
  
• (Outlaw) Agility increased by 5%.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• (Affliction) Intellect decreased by 5%.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• (Frost) Stamina reduced by 10%.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• (Windwalker) Strike of the Windlord now deals 60% damage in PvP.
  
• (Windwalker) Fists of Fury now deals 85% damage in PvP.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Atonement effect increased by 10% in PvP.

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• (Restoration) Fortified Bark (Honor Talent) now increases the damage reduction of Ironbark by 15% (was 30%).

As we mentioned this during the live Q&A last week, we feel the biggest shortcoming of the current Legendary system is that, for some specs, there are some items that are clearly better than others in nearly all situations. As a result, players who have received a different Legendary item feel unlucky, as they didn’t receive the “best” one.

So, we’re making some fairly substantial changes to Legendary items intended to bring them more in line with each other. Items that give a raw throughput increase (without significant situational restrictions or drawbacks) are having their overall power reduced, and we’re taking another pass at several of the more niche items to make sure that, when they’re usable, they feel powerful.

Essentially, we feel that if a Legendary is only usable in certain situations, it should feel extremely valuable in those situations. Conversely, if a Legendary is nearly always going to increase your overall performance, that increase should be relatively smaller. Up until this point, we’ve made the mistake of allowing several items to be both extremely impactful AND always useful, which has made other Legendaries feel “bad” by comparison. It’s also caused some specs to feel as though they need a particular Legendary in order to compete. Those are the issues we’d like to solve.

We’re actively working on these changes right now and expect to have them ready for the next PTR build. We’ll be doing additional class tuning where necessary as a followup, once these changes are in place.

Instead we are faced with the daunting possibility that we may simply never get a useful legendary. That is not fun, its repeatedly disappointing.
We agree. The problem is that some Legendaries don't feel useful. That's the issue we're looking to solve here.

I really hope you guys learn from the system and the next iteration of legendaries is purely defensive/utility and no outright dps legendary affixes. They would be much more fair/balanced if they were that way.
There's definitely a lot we've learned here. Ion even said pretty much exactly this in the last Q&A - if we did it all over again, we'd probably only make "Utility" Legendaries.

With some, as the instructors fourth lesson for Unholy DKs, it is MANDATORY. This legendary is -required- for us to perform even remotely on par with other DPS classes.
Right. As I said, that's another problem we're trying to fix. If a spec is only competitive with a specific Legendary, then we need to bring up their numbers. To do that, we need to also nerf that Legendary.

Just use a legendary token system. Problem solved.
Disagree. "Just let me pick the best Legendary" doesn't solve this particular problem; there shouldn't be one or two Legendaries that are far and away the best one in all situations. With the way these items are in 7.1, if we add such a system, everyone will just pick the best 2 for their spec and the rest will still suck. We'd rather that none of them sucked.

And just to be clear: something like what you (and others) are describing here is not off the table. Ion even mentioned at BlizzCon that we may end up doing something along those lines in a later patch. It just doesn't solve this problem.

Another problem not mentioned here is being spec-locked because of legendaries. I have X on my spec, so can't freely switch without feeling behind. AP already contributes to this problem but at least can be caught up -- legendaries, with soft caps and what not, just make it impossible to switch.
Yeah, we definitely share your concern here. We don't have a solution yet (and aren't likely to for 7.1.5), but it's something we're talking about.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Upcoming Unholy Death Knight Changes
Quick note on a small upcoming change: in the next PTR build, Apocalypse will burst up to 6 Festering Wounds (instead of 8). However, the damage of the summoned ghouls will be increased by 33% (which will not be obvious from data), keeping the total the same. This is also a large buff to the damage of Army of the Dead. Finally, in a separate change, the damage of the summoned Gargoyle and Val'kyr will be increased.

However, will apocalypse continue to burst 4 wounds in pvp?
Yes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Any consideration for a pet battle related tint to the new artifact appearance tied to solo content?
What would a "pet battle related artifact appearance" even look like? Accepting all ideas. (Muffinus)

Attention all Arena and Battleground competitors! On December 13 at 6 a.m. PST, Legion PvP Season 1 will come to a close. But the battle will pick up just two hours later at 8 a.m. PST, when Legion PvP Season 2 begins!

Season 1 – End of Season Rewards
If you participated in Season 1, in order to ensure you receive the rewards that you’re due, please keep the following in mind:

• Refrain from transferring your character(s) to another realm or faction until after Legion Season 1 has ended.
  
• Legion Season 1 titles and mounts will be awarded approximately two weeks after the season ends.

Season 2 Begins
With Legion Season 2, the maximum number of times you can Prestige will increase from 4 to 8. Furthermore, weekly Rated Quest rewards will increase to the following values:


*Item levels 890 and 900 above will become available when the Nighthold raid opens.

The item level of PvP gear rewards from Skirmish, Battleground, Arena, and Rated Battlegrounds victories will increase with Season 2, but the transmog look will remain the same as Season 1.

Faction-based Rewards
Don’t forget—end-of-season rewards are based on your faction nowadays. The top 0.5% of Alliance PvPers will be awarded the Gladiator: Legion Season 1 achievement and mount, and the same will go to the top 0.5% of Horde PvPers. If you transfer your character to the other faction, you must have 50 wins after your transfer to receive the reward.

Now get out there and fight to the finish!

All week, open Group Finder (default hotkey: i) and then select Dungeon Finder to queue for any Legion dungeon on Normal or Heroic difficulty. Alternately, get a group of veteran dungeoneers together and travel to one of the Legion dungeons on Mythic difficulty:

• The Arcway
• Assault on Violet Hold
• Black Rook Hold
• Court of Stars
• Darkheart Thicket
• Eye of Azshara
• Karazhan
• Halls of Valor
• Maw of Souls
• Neltharion’s Lair
• Vault of the Wardens

Look for the following all week long:

• Archmage Timear near Violet Hold in Dalaran has a quest for you.
  
  • Quest requirement: Complete 4 Legion dungeons on Mythic difficulty.
  • Rewards: One loot box containing a piece of gear from Heroic difficulty Emerald Nightmare.
• Passive bonus: The final boss in each dungeon drop additional loot on all difficulties (except Mythic Keystone difficulties).

Some good feedback here. I'll try to address your points as best I can.

On Twitter: Disagree that it's always the wrong approach, but it's definitely not always the right approach either. 140 characters is a blessing and a curse - it's harder to get a complete point across sometimes, yes, but it also forces things to be presented more concisely, which is great for certain types of feedback. We're not going to stop using Twitter, but we're continuing to learn about when it's not the right platform.

Also just as an aside, every account other than WarcraftDevs should be treated as someone's personal account and not as the correct place to provide feedback or look for answers. That also means that it's completely their choice if they decide to mute or block someone.

On the Q&As: I agree that the experiment in the last one to answer more spec-specific questions didn't go well. I honestly don't think the live Q&As are a good way to answer those questions at all. Even if we were to somehow narrow it down to only "legitimate" questions (aside: what criteria determine "legitimate" anyway?), there's far more to answer than we can possibly fit into one Q&A, so we're always going to leave something out.

Secondly, it's important to remember that not everyone follows fansites closely, or saw the BlizzCon panels, or even the other Q&As. AK alt catchup is a great example - despite all of the other places we talked about what's happening in 7.1.5, it was still one of the most-asked questions. I'm glad that you had already heard about it, but clearly a lot of others had not, which made it absolutely worth answering.

I do agree, though, that the Q&As work best when we either stick to broader topics, or focus the entire thing specifically on one topic (like we did with the Professions, PvP, etc. Q&As a few months ago). As a whole, it's a format we're still experimenting with. I can't promise they'll all be great, but I can promise that we'll learn from when they aren't.

On Interviews: Mostly agree, although it depends on the interviewer. You're not likely to see the hard-hitting questions coming from a major gaming publication, but you might from a community site, podcast, etc. Personally, I actually think we need a lot more interviews with those community sites, especially those that focus on more niche playstyles - it's a great way to get answers to those people without "wasting" everyone else's time.

On the forums: I actually completely agree with you here. Our forum presence sucks. It's a big issue that we're working to fix. That's part of why I'm here, posting this, and will continue to be around these forums as much as I can. Resolving this issue will take some time - if it can ever be completely resolved - but we're working on it.

It's worth mentioning that part of the issue - the general lack of dev posts - has been because they've been focusing as much of their time as possible into working on the game. Part of trying to keep patches coming at a good cadence means we need all hands on deck to get the work done, which means less time for the dev team to spend on the forums. That in turn means that, when the devs do get time for the forums, they spend the vast majority of it just reading, so they can absorb as much feedback as possible. So, the community team (including myself, but many others as well) need to step in to fill that gap, in a way that doesn't make you go "Ooh, a blue post! Ugh, it's just a CM." We haven't been, but we're going to.

On Reddit: I also like AMAs, and agree with your thoughts here. I do think that there are some topics where they might work much better than the Q&As, and while I don't want to say what those are for fear of over-promising, it's a cool idea that I'll circulate around.

On Patch Notes: I think a lot of the issues with patch notes are actually symptoms of some of the above issues. The designers' notes are definitely a good addition, but those are intended as little snippets of explanation for the player who doesn't really keep up with fansites, interviews, forums (well, when there's posts on them), etc. It shouldn't, whenever possible, be the first place that the person reading this thread heard about something, unless it really only needs a couple sentences to explain. If we need to give more detail, we should be doing that ahead of time and just referencing that explanation in the patch notes.

We've also heard loud and clear that you guys want PTR Patch Notes back. It's a tough situation for us to solve, though I don't think it's an unsolvable one. The PTR, especially under Legion's development structure, is much more experimental and incomplete than it's been in the past. Having official patch notes makes each individual change - any of which could be reverted at any point - feel a lot more "final" than they really are.

Our approach for 7.1.5, then, was "let's focus on what it'll be when it's done" - that was clearly the wrong choice. Official PTR Patch Notes might not be the answer we need, but we definitely need a way to keep you more informed of what's happening, especially for class changes. Even something as simple as "Class Notes for PTR Build ABCXYZ" might fill the gap.

At any rate, thanks for this - it's given us a lot to think about. I know there's a big difference between saying we'll do better and actually doing better, but threads like this really help us actually improve things.

I have an idea for your Q&A that should get you the questions that people want answered most

Make a thread about the Q&A first and specifically state that the most upvoted questions in this thread will be adressed/responded to in the Q&A when it happens. Do this everytime you have a Q&A, that should help people get the questions they want to see and hopefully the answers they want to see
We briefly debated this early on but decided against it, for a few reasons:

1) We don't always have an answer for something - if a highly-upvoted question is going to get "I don't know" or "We're not sure yet" as an answer, is that acceptable?

2) Sometimes the answer lies in something we're not ready to talk about yet; for example, if "When will you add Demon Hunters" got a ton of upvotes prior to Legion's announcement, how do we handle that? Do we dodge the question (which says just as much as answering it)? Do we lie and say we have no such plans? There really isn't a good outcome there.

3) It's pretty easily abused - if I want my question to be answered, it makes sense for me to ask all of my friends/guildmates/etc to upvote my question and downvote others, even if they don't care about the answer.

4) It heavily favors playstyles or classes with the highest overall representation; it's likely for there to be entire aspects of the game we never talk about again just because there are going to be fewer people upvoting those questions.

Because of the above (and probably a couple other reasons I can't recall right now), we decided that our best approach was to just ignore upvotes/downvotes entirely.

Yes, not only is it acceptable to say, 'We don't know," or "We aren't sure yet," but that kind of transparency is absolutely necessary for quality feedback and communication. Those are great jumping off points to get good feedback from the community. Of course, hopefully you would give us more than just those statements. Hopefully, you would explain why you haven't been able to come to a decision yet, what you perceive to be the pros and cons, and why it is so difficult to make that particular call and then MAYBE the community could help you actually make the decision.

Even if our feedback won't help make the decision easier, understanding your thought process will make it easier to accept the decision once it is made.
To be clear: I agree that "we don't know yet" can be a good thing to say. I don't think a time-limited Q&A is the right place to do that - would rather spend that time on a question we actually have an answer for.

Tab Targeting Changes
So, in 7.1, we actually reverted the tab targeting logic back to what it was prior to Patch 7.0. It should be functioning now exactly like it did during Warlords. I've personally found it much more reliable; if you're still having issues with it, did you have similar issues during Warlords? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Reputation Catch-Up for Alts
We talked about this idea briefly on the Q&A the other day, but I'm interested in hearing more feedback. What do you feel you need access to that's locked behind a reputation for your alt? Most of the "big" unlocks - e.g. World Quests, access to Suramar dungeons - are now account-wide.

So, let me clarify my thoughts a bit, and why I asked for specifics:

Quite often, we see feedback that focuses on the solution instead of the problem. That's not a bad thing (in fact, it's quite natural and in many ways polite for someone who's trying to be helpful to suggest a fix for a problem), it's just that it occasionally means we have trouble tracking down what the actual core issue is that's causing you to present that solution.

Looking specifically at this topic: many of you are suggesting the MoP-style rep tokens as "the right fix." And maybe it is! But if we were to implement something like that, we need to know what it's fixing, because we might have a better way to solve the same problem. Or maybe we don't see it as a problem at all.

To use a dumb analogy, because I love analogies: say your roof has a leak, and every time it rains, water drips down through your ceiling and your carpet gets wet. You could keep a pot nearby that you put under the drip when it rains - that'd certainly solve the issue of damp carpet - but it's kind of inconvenient, and the leak is still there. It'd be a much better solution to fix the roof, so the leak stops happening entirely.

Or, you know, maybe you're actually in a gazebo and the carpet is supposed to get wet because it's weather-resistant and... okay, so this analogy isn't perfect. But hopefully I at least illustrated why I asked for specifics: maybe the solution is that the thing you want via rep should just be account-wide. Maybe it's already supposed to be account-wide, but there's a bug. Or maybe having to gain the reputation on your alt is an intended part of playing a second character.

This is mostly just me musing - there's some great info in this thread already that we can definitely talk about - but I thought it might be interesting or helpful to clarify. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)