World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

We were hoping it'd be available today, but don't worry folks, Mischief is coming soon! Keep an eye on the news page for when this fel kitty invades!

The changes to secondary stat ratings in 7.1.5 have a few goals, and certain pieces are not yet in the current build.

Goal 1: Increase the importance of item level as a guideline for upgrading items. Moreso than in the past, large item level increases are not a reliable indicator of an upgrade due to the variance in power of secondary stats on an item. Increasing the amount of rating that you need per percentage of a secondary stat tips the balance of an item’s power more heavily toward primary stat. We’re okay with very small item level upgrades being a tougher choice, but some specs are currently passing up 15+ item levels in favor of secondary stats. That shouldn’t be something players are encouraged to do – with the occasional exception on rings and necks, which brings us to our second goal.

Goal 2: Improve rings and necks. The removal of primary stats from those slots on Legion gear means that your choices of secondary stats there are impactful, which we like. However, they still suffer from the problem of secondary stat distribution dominating the choice of which item to equip. We’ve increased how heavily item level affects the amount of stats on Legion rings and necks in 7.1.5, which will make significant item level jumps a clearer indicator of an upgrade on these slots. You’ll still find situations in which secondary stat choice is more important than item level for rings and necks, which is intentional; we’re just dialing it back a bit.

Goal 3: Don’t lower player power. This is a key part of the overall strategy that isn’t yet complete. Right now, on the PTR, player power is definitely down a few percent compared to live. The next build will have changes that increase the total amount of stats given by all items above level 800 to account for this gap, such that the overall power of your equipped items should be about the same (if not slightly higher) than it is currently in 7.1.

As you might expect, these changes will affect some classes more strongly than others. More overall character power will come from your primary stats than it did before, so all of your abilities will hit harder, even if they crit less or happen less frequently. Additionally, as we continue tuning for Patch 7.1.5, we’ll make adjustments as necessary on a spec-by-spec basis.

Apologies if I'm reading this wrong. But it sounds like the plan is to make us require more of a secondary stat, then provide us a higher value of secondary stats on existing gear. Isn't this counterproductive or am I just derp?
It's a tough bit of mathematical gymnastics that's tough to explain succinctly, but the long and the short of it is that the way that the item's primary stat (or sheer amount of secondary stats, in the case of rings and necks) make the higher-ilevel piece an upgrade more often.

I think they need to look into specs that rely on extreme cases of secondary dependence and adjust those specs accordingly. This blanket nerf is going to cause more problems.
That's what I was getting at in the last paragraph

Sorry for the delay in replying to this. Long story short, we agree with the concerns laid out in this thread: Waylay as a damage mechanic isn’t playing well, and the increased trap cooldown is a nerf that undermines other utility upgrades. We’ve been discussing exactly what we want to do about it, and can share some details:

For starters, the Trap cooldown is going back to a baseline of 30 seconds, just like it is in Patch 7.1. We had initially increased it to 40 based on some concerns that Hunter crowd control might end up too powerful in some situations, but after further consideration, we don’t think that’ll be necessary.

Regarding Waylay, the original intent of the passive was to reinforce Survival’s niche as trap experts (especially with other Hunter specializations getting traps again) by rewarding clever placement of traps when you’re able to anticipate your enemy’s movement. After all, the very nature of a trap is a hazard set ahead of time for an unsuspecting victim, whereas traps today often end up feeling more like lobbed explosives. However, in group gameplay, the movement of your targets is largely outside of your direct control, and any sort of rotational damage benefit of Waylay is likely to be far more frustrating than fun. We’re going to remove the damage-increasing benefit that Waylay provided to Explosive Trap and let its bonuses focus purely on utility. With the Freezing Trap and Tar Trap cooldown now unchanged, this makes Waylay simply a new utility perk over what Survival has on live, and we’re excited about some of the potential ways Hunters can make use of it in both PvE and PvP.

As an aside (and this is relevant to all classes and specs), part of our goal to keep patches coming at a steady pace in Legion means that you’re likely to see more half-completed ideas and strange experiments on PTR than even veteran testers might be used to in previous expansions. Just because a change shows up in a PTR build does not mean that it’s something the team views as a final design (or even a design we’re necessarily happy with). This has been especially true with 7.1.5, and we’ve done a poor job of communicating that thus far. We’d like to apologize for that failing, and it’s something we’re actively working to correct.

To maybe give a little more hope, we had several meetings and discussions yesterday about ways to improve our internal processes so that we can converse more freely and immediately on in-development changes. Some of those improvements have already been made, and I'm personally hoping the difference will be noticeable over the next few weeks.

As a guy who works in Dev, the amount of reasons for silence, from "We have no solution and don't want to bring it up without one" to "Policy to not talk about changes until finalized", is sometimes ludicrous.
We've typically shied toward the former more than we probably need to. Historically we've wanted to be able to say how we're fixing an issue before we say anything, but I think that "we're going to fix this, just haven't decided how yet" is still a good message to get across in the meantime.

Just a side suggestion: Why not follow the HotS, OW and SC model, and do small explanations with each change in the changelogs? Is it because there are just too many different specs in wow and too many changes for it to be viable?
That's part of it. We typically do add those explanations for major hotfixes or release notes. Agree that we need more of that for PTR changes.

With today’s announcement of the end of Legion’s first PvP season on December 13, we’d like to clarify a few extra details.

The Elite PvP gear appearance will be the same in Legion Season 2 as it is in Season 1. If you are unable to complete your set in Season 1, you’ll still be able to collect your missing appearances during Season 2.

Additionally, after Legion Season 2 concludes, we’ll be adding the ability to purchase the complete Elite appearance set from a vendor. This will only be made available to players who have earned access to the Elite set by reaching a PvP rating of 2000 or higher in any Rated Battleground or Arena bracket during Legion Season 1 or 2.

Finally, we’d like to clarify that the end of Legion Season 1 and beginning of Legion Season 2 are not tied in any way to the release of Patch 7.1.5. One of our major goals for Rated PvP in Legion is to have PvP seasons change over more regularly, which means we can now transition between seasons without requiring a patch. This transition will occur prior to the release of Patch 7.1.5.

We're opening up the Nighthold raid on PTR, with Skorpyron, Chronomatic Anomaly, Trilliax, and Spellblade Aluriel available on Heroic difficulty. We'll be leaving these bosses up for a couple of days. Please use this thread to for feedback or bug reports on any of the encounters. When providing tuning feedback, please note the nature of your raid group (e.g. Mythic guild group, PUG, etc.).

Watcher explain why we should test your dungeon you don't listen to feedback
Well, part of the point of opening Nighthold and leaving it open for a longer period of time is to let groups get in and give contextual feedback on class mechanics, as well as to gather data to help with tuning. If we were solely interested in polishing the encounters, we'd be doing short 1-hour tests that could be observed by the encounter design team in their entirety. But this approach lets a lot more people get in and try things out.

Basically no numerical tuning based on 7.1.5 changes has been done yet: in test builds and development, the primary initial focus tends to be on qualitative design changes, both to allow for time to iterate on them, and because there's a much smaller development window during which we can make large changes to text in tooltips (since everything needs to be translated for the game's different regions before a patch can be finalized). Numbers changes are best done when designs are closer to final (there's little point fine-tuning something that may get ripped out entirely next build), and can be done very late in the PTR cycle. Raid tests like this help tremendously with that process.

The past couple of weeks have been full of distractions, with a long holiday weekend in the middle, and we haven't done a great job of communicating regarding the 7.1.5 class and systems changes. We'll be working to correct some of that in the coming days, but I understand that there's more than a little frustration and distrust to overcome.

In the meantime, I'll rename this thread, and make a new one for Nighthold. Please try to keep that one clear for feedback and logs from the instance, so that everyone can have a more polished experience in the long run. Thanks.

Feedback: you're leaving the warlock community out in the cold. Please communicate with us. We are extremely desperate.
We agree with a number of the core concerns raised, but don't have immediate solutions (or those solutions will take more time to design, implement, and test than the 7.1.5 PTR cycle affords). A couple of examples off the top of my head:

• Steady/predictable Ember generation suited the Destruction rotation well, and something important was lost in the course of unifying the class to use a single shared resource, but fixing that at this point isn't just as simple as rolling everything back to Embers.
• Mechanics like Demonic Empowerment and Soul Effigy are cumbersome to manage and while they have strong spec-specific theming, the actual gameplay of using them drags down their respective specs.

We're probably too reluctant to acknowledge problems for which we don't yet have a solution to present. But the fact that we haven't yet changed something doesn't mean that we think it's perfect as-is.

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!