World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

With hotfixes that we are currently deploying to all WoW Classic realms, we are substantially increasing the number of players that can be simultaneously logged in and playing. We expect this to result in smaller queues for realms that have large queues, and some realms should no longer have queues at all.

We will closely monitor performance and stability throughout this process.

Thank you very much.

In order to deploy an improvement to the game service, we will perform restarts of all WoW Classic realms in this region at 8:00 a.m. PDT, August 28th.

Realms should be unavailable for about 15 minutes. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Dungeons and Raids

• Siege of Boralus
  
  • Corrected an error during Mythic Keystone Dungeon instances that caused a pack of enemies to not appear in Upton Borough if the World Quest “Breaking the Alliance” was active.
    

Items

• Fixed an issue that prevented Dribbling Inkpod from inflicting damage on targets under crowd control effects or that were not in line of sight.
  
• Anu-Azshara, Staff of the Eternal’s Potency buff should now respect line of sight.
  
• Leviathan's Lure should no longer break enemies out of crowd control effects.
  
• The Map to the Last Worldvein no longer shows up as a quest reward when finishing the weekly Island Expedition quests “Azerite for the Alliance” or “Azerite for the Horde.” The item will still have the same chance to come from the quest as it does now.
  
• The Rank 4 Essence items that drop from Mythic Queen Azshara (Vitality Conduit and Azeroth's Undying Gift) now display red text for classes that cannot use them.
  
  • Developers’ note: This should help Mythic raiders who wish to trade an Essence to a different player verify that it’s compatible with that character’s class.
    

Mounts

• Siltwing Albatross mount scale increased by 25% for most races; 50% for larger races.

WoW Classic

• Realm populations are now measured against a realm’s absolute capacity.
  
  • Developers’ note: This system now measures each realm against a realm’s absolute capacity. Medium indicates a healthy total population on a realm—well in excess of what we considered Full in 2006—with room for more players to log-in. You’ll now see a High label if the realm is close to having a queue, and a Full label if the realm currently has a queue.
    

Thank you all for testing Classic Alterac Valley with us on Thursday afternoon and posting the feedback above! It was fun to reminisce about the Alterac Valley of olde while we got more information on issues that we can address:

• There were some NPCs (notably Durgen Stormpike) who weren’t the correct level. We’ve fixed this issue and other related bugs players have reported.
• We hear you about the item-level of rewards from Classic AV, and we’re working on increasing them. We’ll let you know what that looks like once we’ve made a final adjustment.
• We really appreciate your feedback on specific NPCs you thought were too easy or too tough, and we’re going to take all of it into account as we make a final tuning pass.

We noticed some players had questions about the specifics of this event battleground that haven’t been answered yet, so here are some additional details:

• Players can queue up from level 10 to level 120, and will be set to level 60 in the instance.
• Lower-level players will earn experience from monster kills, completing quests, and participating during events in the battleground, so we hope it will be a fun way to level characters during the World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary event.
• Rewards are intended to be appropriate to your level.
• You can queue up with a party or even a complete raid!

Thanks again, and we’ll see you again in Alterac Valley.

With a hotfix to WoW Classic a few moments ago, we’ve changed how the realm population labels work in order to display realm populations in a more meaningful way.

How it worked before this hotfix
As we explained here, the system previously calculated the population labels by comparing all realms to the most-populated realm. This could result in a very crowded realm (with a lengthy queue) showing up as “Medium”, since it was being compared to the realm that had the highest population and a potentially massive queue.

How population labels work now
This system now measures each realm against a realm’s absolute capacity. Medium indicates a healthy total population on a realm – well in excess of what we considered Full in a 2006 – with room for more players to log-in. You’ll now see a High label if the realm is close to having a queue, and a Full label if the realm currently has a queue.

We will continue to monitor this system closely and take further steps if necessary.

Thank you very much!

We have opened new realms in this region:

Thunderfury - PvP - Pacific
Azuresong - Normal - Pacific
Windseeker - Normal - Eastern
Benediction - PvP - Eastern

We recommend that players looking to avoid queues on Full realms move to this new realm for a smoother experience.

Thank you!

We have opened a new realm in the Oceanic region:

Felstriker - PvP - AEST

The other two PvP options in the Oceanic region are currently experiencing significant login queues, so we’re bringing an additional realm online to handle demand. We recommend that players looking for a smoother experience strongly consider moving to this new realm, which should be drawing upon a population base that is easily sufficient to support an additional healthy Oceanic PvP realm community.

Thank you for your patience!

Why does Herod still have a 900 person, 8 minute queue when it’s showing Medium population?
The way realm population display currently works once the servers are live is that High, Medium, and Low are determined dynamically, in terms relative to the most crowded realms. So a realm with pretty rough queues (say 4k-5k) might end up showing as Medium because you aren’t Faerlina, Herod, etc.
This is how it’s worked for a long time, but the unprecedented size of the queues on the handful of outlier realms is skewing the algorithm. The team’s first priority is stability and getting new servers online as needed, but beyond that, we’ll look into changing this logic to be more intuitive (i.e. showing “Full” when a server has a queue, for starters). I know, this is technically not #nochanges, but then again neither are 20k people waiting to log into the same realm... (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

You MUST have known there would be long queues. Why the hesitation to have servers in place to handle extra players? (not characters)
I understand the frustration: Anticipating and planning around jumping back into this world we’ve all missed, only to be stuck in a long queue, is not the experience we want anyone to have.

But from the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours. But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible.

Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.
We’ve released over 20 new realms worldwide so far since launch, and we’ll be up around the clock continuing to do so until everyone who wants to experience Classic is able to. But even still, as we bring new realms online in a given region, we wait for them to fill before opening new ones, because we want to make sure that each and every realm has a healthy population in the long term. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Where are the Zeppelins/Boats?
Are they not working or something? I have a bunch of people asking in general chat, but they’re just not showing up? Are they timegated or bugged?
There is a known issue that’s causing zeppelins and boats to be unavailable on certain servers (mainly the ones brought online after initial launch), which is obviously a major concern if you’re looking to switch starting areas to meet up with friends, or are getting to higher levels and have quests sending you across the sea. The upcoming regionwide restarts (4.5 hours from this post for NA/OCE) will fix this going forward. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Put your best battle pet teams to the test with this week’s event. To get in on the action, open your Pet Journal (Collections Shift+ P) and click the “Find Battle” button to be match up with an opponent with their own team of well-trained companions.

Look for the following all week long:

• Chronicler Shoopa in Zuldazar and in Boralus has a quest for you – The Very Best. Or, if you forget to pick it up there, you can start it within the Adventure Journal.
• Quest requirement: Win 5 pet battles versus other players with a team of three level-25 pets.
• Reward: One Ultimate Battle-Training Stone.
• Passive bonus: All Pet Battle experience gains are increased by +200%

Every Week
The Bonus Events system consists of a rotating schedule of different activities, currently scheduled to run each week beginning on Tuesdays. Each Bonus Event grants a passive bonus to a particular game activity and offers a once-per-event quest with a noteworthy reward for accomplishing a related goal. The in-game calendar can serve as your one-stop reference for the event schedule. The Adventure Guide also offers a direct link to active Bonus Events, allowing you to easily accept any associated quests.

With the release of WoW Classic mere hours away, I wanted to provide a few updates on what will happen with the Classic sections on the forums:

• Individual Classic Realm forums will be opened prior to launch.
• Starting from 27th August, all WoW Classic sections will require an active subscription or game time to post in.
  
  • The current Classic Discussion section will also be archived tomorrow and a new one created so we start from a clean slate.
• For now, we will not be adding Class or Profession sections for Classic. We encourage you to use the existing sections and prefix your thread title with [Classic]. We will monitor these sections over the coming weeks.

Not long to go now!