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Feedback: Death Knight Updates
Feedback: Death Knight Updates
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Season of Discovery - Class Changes Feedback
Are we approaching a Solo Raid WoW Experience?
World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies
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Published on 2016-06-19 05:28 AM
Week 3 - Maybe We're Prepared?
Blizzard has given us some beta keys to help you prepare for The Legion! This week you will need to earn or already have earned either one of two achievements to enter.
- This giveaway is for 500 US/EU Legion Beta keys!
- This giveaway runs from June 17 to June 24
- To enter earn Explore Draenor or The Legion Will NOT Conquer All and then log in to the contest site.
- You will need to log in with your Battle.Net account (It's safe!) so that we can confirm you have earned either achievement.
- You can be sure that you are entered by checking the contest status page.
- Winners will be selected by June 27
- You will need to check the contest status page to see if you have won and claim your key.
- Winners will have 72 hours to view their key. After that another winner will be selected.
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Published on 2016-06-18 07:39 AM
One-Button Authenticator, Headcrab & Crowbar Transmogs, Crusader vs Demon Fanart
Asia-Pacific Spring Championships 2016 - Decklists, Meta Breakdown, Information
Gul'dan Confirmed & Model Info
Dev Update: Jeff Kaplan Talks Competitive PlayCharacter Boost and Class Trials
Legion adds a Class Trial system that allows you to test out a character before deciding if you want to use a character boost on it. You can play through a short intro, the Broken Shore, and Artifact intro quest.
Patch 6.2.4 Hotfixes - June 17
Legion Profession Q&A - Submit Your Questions
BlizzCon 2016 Contests Now Open!
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Warcraft Movie - China Box Office Update
Ticket sales for the Warcraft Movie continue to slow in China.
Brawler's Guild: Last Chance to Rumble...For Now
Don't forget that the Brawler's Guild is going away in the Legion pre-expansion patch!
Beta Character Copy - Updated 6/17
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Blood of Sargeras
You will also see Blood of Sargeras from Disenchanting Rare and Epic items in a future beta build, as well as an increase in the cadence and quantity of Blood of Sargeras from Crafting World Quests in the Broken Isles. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
PvP Stat Templates
I've mostly been testing warrior/rogue/DK, and when compared to out in the world, I lose nearly half my health when joining a BG but hit just as hard. Armor seems silly low. Sitting in Org, my warrior has 2361 armor, but only 590 in BGs. In my last BG, a lock said they only have like 450 armor.
If stamina was doubled in the templates, and armor raised at least 3x, melee might not be so ridiculous. EG, if those 150k+ mortal strikes were brought down to 110k via more armor, and health pools were closer to 500k (as on live) than the current 220-250k health we see on PTR, it might not be so bad.
This is helpful, thank you. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Frost Mage -- Legion Beta Feedback
Thanks for all the feedback on Frozen Orb. There are some pretty significant changes coming next build that should address this (edit: as those of you watching the Q&A stream with Watcher are hearing about just this moment, as it turns out). In particular, Frozen Orb will return to the role that it had in Warlords: a 60-second cooldown that you use for AoE or for a burst of Fingers procs, not a spell prompted by a rotational proc. We are adding a new single-target spell to fill the rotational role of interacting with the Brain Freeze proc.
Note that the wording of Ice Floes was recently changed to specify "cast time less than 10 seconds", to clarify that it's not intended to work with Ray of Frost. The gameplay of Ray of Frost is that it's a ramping damage burst that rewards you for anticipating when you can remain still for 10 seconds (or at least, 8 or 9 out of the next 10 seconds).
This is nice to hear as far as concerns about Brain Freeze go, but I'm still worried all of the current issues with Orb are going to maintain just now we'll only have to deal with them once a minute. Will patiently wait to get to play with the build before complaining or anything, but I hope the actual core issues with Orb are going to be addressed in addition to this change.
We will also be bringing Frozen Orb's Fingers of Frost chance up, and making it no longer speed back up after the first time it slows down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
You will also see Blood of Sargeras from Disenchanting Rare and Epic items in a future beta build, as well as an increase in the cadence and quantity of Blood of Sargeras from Crafting World Quests in the Broken Isles. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
PvP Stat Templates
I've mostly been testing warrior/rogue/DK, and when compared to out in the world, I lose nearly half my health when joining a BG but hit just as hard. Armor seems silly low. Sitting in Org, my warrior has 2361 armor, but only 590 in BGs. In my last BG, a lock said they only have like 450 armor.
If stamina was doubled in the templates, and armor raised at least 3x, melee might not be so ridiculous. EG, if those 150k+ mortal strikes were brought down to 110k via more armor, and health pools were closer to 500k (as on live) than the current 220-250k health we see on PTR, it might not be so bad.
This is helpful, thank you. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Frost Mage -- Legion Beta Feedback
Thanks for all the feedback on Frozen Orb. There are some pretty significant changes coming next build that should address this (edit: as those of you watching the Q&A stream with Watcher are hearing about just this moment, as it turns out). In particular, Frozen Orb will return to the role that it had in Warlords: a 60-second cooldown that you use for AoE or for a burst of Fingers procs, not a spell prompted by a rotational proc. We are adding a new single-target spell to fill the rotational role of interacting with the Brain Freeze proc.
Note that the wording of Ice Floes was recently changed to specify "cast time less than 10 seconds", to clarify that it's not intended to work with Ray of Frost. The gameplay of Ray of Frost is that it's a ramping damage burst that rewards you for anticipating when you can remain still for 10 seconds (or at least, 8 or 9 out of the next 10 seconds).
This is nice to hear as far as concerns about Brain Freeze go, but I'm still worried all of the current issues with Orb are going to maintain just now we'll only have to deal with them once a minute. Will patiently wait to get to play with the build before complaining or anything, but I hope the actual core issues with Orb are going to be addressed in addition to this change.
We will also be bringing Frozen Orb's Fingers of Frost chance up, and making it no longer speed back up after the first time it slows down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The European 2016 Road to BlizzCon
BlizzCon Party - Con Before the Storm
The Kickstarter for the BlizzCon party run by AskMrRobot and friends is almost over! Last year over 4,000 people stopped by to take a look at the art, enjoy some drinks, and meet other Blizzard fans.
Overwatch Passes League of Legends in Korean PC BangsOverwatch is now more popular than League of Legends in Korean PC Bangs!
Final Boss - Beast Mastery Hunter Spec Preview
Final Boss is back with a second round of spec previews.
by
Published on 2016-06-16 05:50 PM
Legion Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
The Q&A next week covers professions.
Pre-Expansion Patch
Personal Loot
Healer Leveling and Talents
Content Droughts and Expansion Development Timelines
Thal'dranath
Suramar and Storytelling
Professions
Obtaining Loot
PvP Gear
Legendary Items
Pristine Servers
Alt Characters
Artifact Knowledge
Weapon Transmogs
Weekly Events
Squish
New Animations and Visual Effects
Item Rewards
Flying
Class Tuning
Interface Options
Legendary Ring
The Q&A next week covers professions.
Pre-Expansion Patch
- The pre-patch date isn't finalized yet, but the timing will be similar to other expansions, some number of weeks before Legion release.
- The demon invasion event is live on both beta and PTR.
Personal Loot
- Players liked the social feeling from group loot and being able to pass along items they don't need to other players.
- In Legion, if you get an item from a dungeon or raid with personal loot that isn't an upgrade for you (lower or equal item level for that slot), you can trade it to another eligible player.
Healer Leveling and Talents
- The team put effort into improving healer damage and healer soloing in Legion, so players are now able to level more as a healer more efficiently than they were able to in previous expansions.
- A Holy Priest and Shadow Priest won't kill things at the same speed, but the overall difference in time to complete a zone is not meaningfully different now.
- DPS still has a small advantage in leveling speed, but healers no longer take 2-3x as long to kill enemies.
- There are talents and Artifact traits that will help you level faster as a healer.
- You can change your talents around freely when you queue and arrive in a new dungeon, so there is no need to go back to town.
Content Droughts and Expansion Development Timelines
- Not having content droughts is a priority for the team. They know that they still haven't managed to eliminate them and that actions speak louder than words here.
- When the team set out to make Legion, the goal was to solve the content drought problem by making expansions faster than they have before.
- The team made sacrifices along the way to try and make Legion faster.
- They discovered along the way that there is a certain amount of time that goes into making an expansion that is up to par with what players expect and deserve.
- If an expansion was just some new zones and dungeons, like a bigger patch, they probably could make them faster.
- When the team starts adding new systems or classes, it takes time to iterate on the new things and get them right.
- The team was too ambitious with their targets when planning for Legion.
- The team has learned their lesson and accepted that they can't produce an expansion faster, so the plan moving forward as they start working on the next expansion is to make sure Legion has a lot more patch content.
- They want to build on the stories that they are in the middle of telling in an expansion, giving players something to do while they work on the next expansion.
- Yearly expansions wouldn't be the best thing for players. Longer expansions give us time to explore the world that was created and time for the team to get the next expansion done right.
- The team occasionally talks about adding a Ulduar style harder mode to a boss when it fits a fight. They did it in Terrace of Endless Spring with the different and harder kill order for a boss, but not many guilds did it.
Thal'dranath
- Thal'dranath will not be part of Legion.
- It won't be a reduction in content delivered to players, just that the team had a better and way cooler idea.
- Thal'dranath was yet another ancient elven ruined island that has a heavy Legion presence. There is already a lot of that in Broken Isles.
- There are cool new places to explore in the patch content and once players see it they will agree that it is cooler than what Thal'dranath would have been.
Suramar and Storytelling
- New content will be added to Suramar during Legion.
- There is a good portion of the story of the Nightfallen and Nightborne in the initial release, but there is more of that story to tell.
- There were lost opportunities in Warlords, such as the story of Shattrath, the Shadow Council's assault on Shattrath, and the Arakkoa.
Professions
- In the next beta build there will more more Blood of Sargeras sources.
- There are players that are double crafting professions wishing they had a gathering profession now and to some extent that is how it should be.
- Double-crafting is absolutely a viable path that offers some advantages. But even if 2x-crafting has advantages, you should still have a bit of gatherer-envy; if not, gathering is probably undervalued. (WatcherDev)
- With Garrisons everyone was self sufficient and there wasn't much of a reason to trade or interact with other players.
- The value of BoP crafting materials is that it gives some market power to the crafter.
- When you can trade all of the materials used to craft something, all you do is push a button and hope for a tip.
Obtaining Loot
- One option is completely deterministic loot acquisition. Loot is on vendors, so you grind out a currency and then go and purchase the item you wanted. This often feels like a grind.
- With randomness, there is a chance for surprise, excitement, unexpected outcomes, and variety.
- In Warlords, if you were going to daily quests or run a dungeon you knew at the start of that session that nothing exciting could happen. Warforged, Titanforged, and legendary items should help to add the possibility of some excitement.
- There aren't any dungeon sets in Legion, but it is something they are keeping in mind for the future.
- There is an Order Hall set that is obtained by doing a wide variety types of content.
- World quests should occasionally reward Relics, there was a bug in previous builds that prevented this.
PvP Gear
- Randomness with PvP gear in past expansions didn't work well, as you needed a full set to be competitive.
- In Legion, you have normalized stats in PvP, so gear is far less important.
- Being unlucky when gear doesn't matter as much might make a one item level difference, meaning a fraction of a percent power difference.
- The gear you get from PvP is now the same gear you can get from elsewhere in the world, so it is useful for a variety of content.
- The team wants to encourage more people to try out PvP, especially if they have written it off in the past because of the time investment or bad experience from being undergeared.
Legendary Items
- Legendary items can come from world quests, dungeon bosses, raid bosses, and PvP strongboxes.
- Legendary items are attempting to recapture the spirit of world drops from early World of Warcraft. You could randomly get a really awesome item.
- There is some bad luck protection for legendary items, so that you have better odds to get one the longer you go without getting one.
- The team doesn't want people to be able to target specific legendary items at launch, but later in the expansion it might make sense to add targeting a specific legendary item.
- The team decided to allow legendary items from the start of raid progression because WoW is a RPG and the power you get from items should matter. The team wants to let you use the items you have when possible.
- The cap of one equipped legendary should help to prevent lucky players or outliers from distorting the overall progression race.
- The legendary items are powerful, but not out of line with other power disparities from past progression races.
- In Hellfire Citadel, if you got a few Heroic Warforged trinkets and some nice weapons during your first Heroic clear, you had a 10% ore more power advantage over another group that didn't get those drops. That is larger power gap than having some legendary items and not in most cases.
- The race won't be won or lost because of a legendary item.
Pristine Servers
- The pristine server idea was not aimed at the audience that wants Vanilla servers
- The ideas from pristine servers such as the social aspect of the game, need for community, and speed at which you progress through the content are things that the team is attempting to improve on live.
- The team has made some improvements to the leveling experience and there are more improvements they can continue to make in the future.
- The leveling experience should let you take your time and enjoy a well paced experience if that is what you want, as well as allowing people to equip heirlooms and rush through it.
- Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder make content very accessible, but they also diminish the need to form social ties to engage in cooperative gameplay. Things like Mythic dungeons and other content that aren't super hardcore will allow the team to reintroduce the need for community.
- The team continues to talk about all of the pristine server ideas, and is learning a lot from the discussion, but their main focus is Legion.
Alt Characters
- Legion is going to be the most alt-friendly expansion in terms of the diversity and replayability of the content.
- You won't be going through the same thing each time you level an alt.
- There are different Artifact story lines, different Artifact progression, different Order Hall campaigns, different leveling zone order.
Artifact Knowledge
- Artifact Knowledge is not account wide. It applies to all Artifact weapons on a single character.
- After Legion launches, it will become faster and faster each week to earn Artifact Knowledge. It applies to all characters, so alts and returning players will be able to catch up.
- There are a couple dozen levels of Artifact Knowledge to progress through.
- If you focus on your primary weapon and are 20 traits in, you might have to choose if you want one trait in your main weapon or five in your off-spec weapon.
- It should be pretty easy to keep off-spec weapons up to around 80% of your main spec weapon. Anything beyond that will require more effort.
Weapon Transmogs
- There are no plans to further loosen transmog restrictions across different weapon types.
- The remaining restrictions are mostly due to animation constraints.
- There are custom animations like Mutiliate that only exist for daggers. so if you transmogged your dagger into a mace, your character would be trying to stab people with a mace.
- Some of the artifact appearance unlocks give you a different weapon type to help players that don't like their Artifact weapon type.
Weekly Events
- Time-walking is awesome and the team will continue to expand upon it going forward.
- There will be a World Quest bonus week that grants a 50% bonus to reputation from world quests.
- Weekly events will be taking a month long break when Legion launches so that players aren't pushed to focus on one type of content right away.
Squish
- DPS numbers are getting up to where they were in Mists of Pandaria, so next expansion will probably have a squish again.
- There will also be a chance to look at the combat system, stats, and scaling to see if they can come up with a better solution than repeated squishing.
New Animations and Visual Effects
- The team added new animations and visual effects to melee combat for Legion release.
- New animations and visuals for casters are coming up next. These changes will come in patches and expansions rather than holding them to release all at once.
Item Rewards
- Titanforged gear can come from world quests, dungeons, PvP rewards, quest rewards.
- In previous expansions, there wasn't any reason to do content once you have passed the item level rewarded by the content.
- In Legion you can get a range of item levels from content, so older content still has a chance to give you something relevant.
- In theory, you could kill a normal dungeon boss and get a Mythic raid item level item! (That has a very very tiny chance of happening)
- he fact that someone who does normal and heroic dungeons has a small chance to have a mythic raid quality item doesn't destroy progression at all.
- No one is going to confuse the player running normal dungeons with a mythic raider because of the one item they got.
- Getting that powerful item will make the day of the player that runs normal dungeons and give everyone doing harder content a reason to do some content with that friend.
- It gives everyone a chance for a surprise upgrade when they are doing content that would normally not reward any upgrade.
- At the end of the day, if you do harder content you will have better gear and occasional exceptions don't change that.
- Valor and Valor Upgrades are something that could come back towards the end of Legion, but no plans for it right now.
Flying
- Flying will be unlocked roughly in the middle of Legion. There will be more patches that come out after flying is unlocked.
Class Tuning
- The team is mostly focusing on tuning now, so there won't be lots of bigger changes to mechanics.
- It doesn't feel satisfying to use Frozen Orb as your Brain Freeze cooldown reset mechanic when soloing.
- A new single target nuke is being added that takes the place of what Frostfire Bolt used to be.
- In Legion, Holy Priest is the traditional healer spec while Discipline is more of a healer and damage hybrid. There will be a much bigger difference between the specs than ever before.
- Tanks are great at leveling and soloing. They may kill things slower when killing them one at a time, but they can pull more and survive.
- The team is also trying to get tanks involved in PvP in a non-obnoxious way. Tuning is still ongoing on that front.
- There are no plans to add another spec to Demon Hunter at this time.
- A Demon Hunter healing spec didn't make sense and splitting the cool and iconic things from Demon Hunter into two specs doesn't feel great.
- All of the specs for each class should be mostly competitive with each other, but some specs will have a niche where they are a little bit better.
Interface Options
- The UI options have been pruned. The team added a few back that a lot of people asked for.
- Options were removed for clarity, so that you could find the important options that you are looking for.
- There were a lot of options that very few players actually changed.
- Most of these options can still be set through console commands.
- Addons also still have access to the options, so someone could make an addon to control the options.
- The UI should be an accessible mainstream default that applies to a majority of players. Players that want more customization have the opportunity to use addons.
Legendary Ring
- The power of the legendary ring proc and passive will decline as you level.
- You may use the ring for a little while at Level 110, but it isn't designed to be powerful in raids.
- The pre-expansion patch will stop players from starting the legendary ring quest.
- At Legion release the legendary ring questline will be removed.
by
Published on 2016-06-16 05:23 PM
Introducing the One-Button Authenticator
Here at Blizzard we take account security seriously, which is why we recommend all accounts have an authenticator attached – but we also understand the importance of being able to access your account easily. Enter the One-Button Authenticator! This update to the current Mobile Authenticator will allow you to securely log into your account by simply clicking Approve on your mobile device instead of entering a security code. Should you wish to use a security code to log in that option still remains available.
Whenever* a log in attempt occurs on your account you will be notified via the app and prompted to Approve or Deny the request. You can also approve log in requests with notifications on your mobile or smartwatch without even opening the app! We hope this will help ease the log in process for those of you that already have an authenticator and encourage those of you who don’t to give it a try. You can find out more about authenticators on our Battle.net Authenticator FAQ.
The Mobile Authenticator with the new One-Button feature is available now on iOS® and Android™.
*Please note that by default you will only need to approve a log in attempt once a week per device. You can change this setting on your Battle.net Account Management page.
Whenever* a log in attempt occurs on your account you will be notified via the app and prompted to Approve or Deny the request. You can also approve log in requests with notifications on your mobile or smartwatch without even opening the app! We hope this will help ease the log in process for those of you that already have an authenticator and encourage those of you who don’t to give it a try. You can find out more about authenticators on our Battle.net Authenticator FAQ.
The Mobile Authenticator with the new One-Button feature is available now on iOS® and Android™.
*Please note that by default you will only need to approve a log in attempt once a week per device. You can change this setting on your Battle.net Account Management page.
by
Published on 2016-06-16 11:31 AM
Diablo Patch 2.4.2a PTR The Angry Chicken #156: That New UI Smell Medivh Released! Hero Week & Spotlight, Season 1 Starts Tomorrow, This Week's Sales Jeff Kaplan on The State of Overwatch Development - New Content, Improvements, ProgressionLegion - Dev Q&A Today
Check back later today for the first weekly Legion Dev Q&A! We'll be recapping it for those of you unable to watch.
Warcraft Movie - China Box Office Update
The Warcraft Movie continues to drop off in China, with the total now at $169.5M.
Raid Testing Schedule - June 17-20
Demon Invasion Event Test June 16-17
Current PTR Content Available
PTR Character Copy
Blood of Sargeras Sources
Blood of Sargeras is a BoP Legion crafting reagent. There aren't many ways to earn it outside of gathering and occasional world quests, but that is changing.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Final Boss - Marksmanship Hunter Spec Preview
Final Boss is back with a second round of spec previews.
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