World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Hey all!

As you are undoubtedly aware, Winter Veil is soon to come to Azeroth, bringing with it a season of good cheer and high spirits, as well as a time where we gather together with those who we hold closest to us - family, friends, and colleagues.

In the same spirit, winter is upon us, and we wanted to take this chance to share some notices on our activity throughout the remainder of the holiday season and on into the New Year.

• There will be less Blizzard employee activity and engagement across most World of Warcraft forums, especially the PTR forums and General Discussion.
• There will be reduced activity and engagement on World of Warcraft's social media, particularly notable is WarcraftDevs, which will have reduced activity through to the new year.
• Customer Support staff will still be hard at work during the holidays - if you need to contact Customer Support for any reason, you will be able to do so through the Blizzard Support site. Please take note that there will still be Support staff monitoring the forums and assisting with moderation, and our Customer Support forums will remain active through the holiday season!

It’s important to note that we will still be going over threads posted during the holidays when we return, so continue to share your thoughts and feedback while we’re away!

We’d like to thank everyone for their understanding as we step away from our keyboards and take time to travel and visit with our loved ones. We look forward to returning after the holidays in 2017, for what looks to be an amazing year for both Blizzard and World of Warcraft.

From all of us here at Blizzard: Happy holidays, happy New Year, and we will see you in 2017!

Developer Communication
I think there is still a lot more work to be done to develop a feedback cycle that effectively nurtures constructive discussions.
The "feedback cycle" is one of the hardest things we are working with at the moment. There is just a ton of feedback all the time, and it never ends, so as soon as you, say, send a dev and email and explain the state of the feedback, its probably already changed ten-fold. :P

It's not an instantaneous fix, but more of a long term solution that will take a lot of changes to how we function doing certain processes internally. I think there's some good solutions for this that I'm working with Lore on into the beginning of next year. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 7.1.5 and Nighthold Release Date
They have said before that 7.1.5 and Nighthold release are independent of each other
They are independent of each other.

As another note, this means that Cutting Edge: Xavius and Ahead of the Curve: Xavius will become unobtainable with the release of Nighthold on January 17.

You are still going to release Nighthold with the state of the PTR as it is?
Nighthold =/= 7.1.5

Edit: To clarify a bit, and expand on something I should have mentioned originally - with this I meant the PTR is in flux, and there's a lot of tuning to be done still prior to 7.1.5 and Nighthold's release - but we also don't agree that the state of the PTR is bad. We wouldn't drop a patch with major class changes in the middle of a raid tier, as even we agree that would be silly. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Lore
is Elothir a mortal druid that took shape of a tree? If so, is he a Night Elf or Tauren?
Elothir is an ancient. (Alex_Afrasiabi)

Misc
Should make a permadeath WoW server.... hmmm. (Muffinus)
How about just no way to release, you must be resurrected. It would be fairly permanent if you didn't have living healer friends.
.Either way all of your loot definitely drops on the floor when you die and other people can take it (Muffinus)
Meanwhile, gamers around the world start shaking uncontrollably
.Imagine the race for world first Helya if death was permanent. Hahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhaaaaaaaaaa (Muffinus)
*does dungeon healer afks tank pulls too much, everyone dies* ragequit WoW
But what if there were no dungeons and it was only open world questing... (Muffinus)
sounds like vanilla when I had no one else to play with lol
The true vanilla experience is getting owned repeatedly in STV until you cry (Muffinus)
I know you're mostly kidding, but I always thought an official Iron-Man-Challenge mode would be cool to have.
Until a 65 PKs your 30 and you have a sad/forum thread. Do the kids still say PK? What do you say? (Muffinus)

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)