Greek Community Dev Q&A, December 13 Hotfixes, Heroes Developers Switching Teams

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Which is even sadder that we couldnt tell a QA from 5 months ago from whats going on today in game. . . . thanks for driving that point home. Now my opinion of Blizzard is even worse.

I didn’t think this was recent, you could Proabbly post a Qa from legion and no one would notice because there to busy being salty.

[Projectmars]

Or FF14 where you have player housing

Technically you do, but the demand is so high for it that you generally don't get a chance to try to get one since they all get snapped up unless you camp out in front of the plot when it goes back on the market (which is about a month after the last time the owner logged in, iirc.)

[Niwes]

normally i agree to a good degree what ion says. some of their mindsets are well thought and developed over time (i know that a lot of ppl would disagree, but maybe this ppl dont play wow since 2005 without interruption).

but in this case, i will not get it. the stance on professions is utterly wrong in that case imo.

no crafter is interested in „this guy one can do x and that guy can do y“. professions are simply not based of this. and there are way too many crafters to get some uniqueness. instead you have 3000 crafters that can do x and 3000 that can do y. there is nothing special in this.

but on the other end, the result of that shit he said just is that every crafter is frustrated. collecting recipes are for completionists. professions always were in that category. hard RNG to get all reciepes is ONLY frustrating for every crafter, but has no gain for everyone else.

besides that, crafting was never intended to be a form of uniqueness.

what is this for a fucked up shit stance ? how out of touch can devs be ?

wtf... ???

[RuneDK]

"If you have high mobility, you should probably go down more easily if people are able to focus on you."

As a DK player before I quit this is beyond laughable....Rogues can take down a DK no problem and have more sustainability than a DK....this is such a shitty thing to say..it's like they don't play their game at all.

EDIT: Oh it's an old Q&A.....makes this even more laughable. I'll take Ghostcrawler back for 500 please.

[Projectmars]

I my opinion even OW is not doing as good as Blizzard wanted.It is no where near the Fortnite's popularity and even CS:GO is by leaps and bounds more popular than OW.It is again the 3rd wheel in fps genre like Hots is in the moba genre.

Fortnight is losing popularity while OW is still fairly popular. CS:GO is just an established name though so good luck dethroning that. (Although Valve certainly tried with their recent move that got the game Review Bomb'd.)

[oldgeezer]

What would then? And this is entirely serious question, without an irony! I am hanging in between...

If you want something hardcore, go play Wildstar.

There's no money in catering to the minority. This is why LFR exists.

[RuneDK]

If you want something hardcore, go play Wildstar.

There's no money in catering to the minority. This is why LFR exists.

Too bad they can't go play wildstar anymore lol

[Niwes]

"The team isn't quite there yet."

The team isn't even close to be anywhere near where it should be with professions lol

lol yes

- - - Updated - - -

Doubling down on the stupid new buff structure and personal loot. /sigh A lot of stuff I disagree with here, such as 30 item levels per tier. There is a reason we keep getting inflated super fast and have had to do two stat squishes...

same oppinion here.

- - - Updated - - -

Wtf is that design philosophy?

yep. there is literally NO SANE PERSON out there that can understand such a stance

[Pannekaker]

I think the questions were submitted before the launch, but answered fairly recently. It certainly seems like it by the way he says for example "Battle for Azeroth Ranked PvP has worked out well so far"

[Niwes]

when i read the announcement about HotS it reads like this for me:

„we accepted that HotS hasnt played out that well as we thought and DotA and LoL are still on the throne. so we are stripe down future development on this and just sustain and support it. because no money for us in that corner.“

and know what ? i like it. maybe bracks first and good descission. take some prof devs from that team and give it to the D4 team or the WoW team and make things better there, instead supporting a game that no one has ever needed. imo.

[Lady Velvet]

I don't get it... why would they answer questions t hat were submitted before the expansion started and call it a new Q&A... Q&A should address recent problems... this makes zero sense...

[Nebron]

If you want something hardcore, go play Wildstar.

There's no money in catering to the minority. This is why LFR exists.

Not really sure what you try to tell me. I simply think there is no way they can keep up their actual philosophy and make the game entertaining. Well, that's what I feel, thus I asked you, what's your thoughts on that, since you cross out the idea of coming back to the roots.

[Pannekaker]

I don't get it... why would they answer questions t hat were submitted before the expansion started and call it a new Q&A... Q&A should address recent problems... this makes zero sense...

I'm pretty sure the live Q&A is still on for today, roughly 3.5 hours from the time of this writing. It will focus on 8.1.

[oldgeezer]

Not really sure what you try to tell me. I simply think there is no way they can keep up their actual philosophy and make the game entertaining. Well, that's what I feel, thus I asked you, what's your thoughts on that, since you cross out the idea of coming back to the roots.

In terms of spread of content I think BfA is in a pretty good place. There's everything from WQs to those playing for 15 minutes per night, right up to Mythic/+ content for those taking it more seriously, with something for everyone in-between. There's no shortage of stuff to do in game, no matter your skill or time constraints. This is good. Narrowing the game down so that it only appeals to the 5%, or less, is not the way forward. Jeff Vogel, who knows a thing or two about game design, wrote a blog about it.

[Smeller]

Why PL is bad:
So you run in a raid where you're one of the only ppl to wear cloth. You are nearly on your own and have to rely on the mercy of loot luck. Then a trial comes along and he has tremendous loot luck. Getting items left and right. Normally you would get at least a few pieces of the loot but not with PL. So your raid basically gifts a player that may or may not join the raid all the gear while your main raiders are fucked. That just shifts the problem into another direction.

[Reachie]

So what the fuck is the point of this entire segment?

Personal Loot
Overall, the team is happy with how Personal Loot is working out so far.
The best geared raid groups are still the ones doing the hardest content.
The benefits to removing personal loot are three things:
On the lower end, there are lots of guilds that churn through a steady stream of trials. Historically, guilds wouldn't give trials any loot, causing them to not have any progression.
On the highest end, there are guilds running multiple groups in parallel that would funnel loot to specific characters using Master Loot. This made it 4-5x faster to gear up compared to regular groups that were just doing one run. This led to more and more guilds to start running split raids.
Split raids made it difficult to balance raids for everyone, as the top end guilds were overgeared compared to average guilds.
If you want to be competitive and try for the Top 100, you can just focus on gearing up your main roster and maybe some backups rather than running split raids.
The team is able to itemize differently with Personal Loot. With Master Loot, the team had to design loot tables that didn't have niche items that would only be useful to a spec or two. Now the team can better cater to a wider range of itemization, with more fist weapons, range weapons, shields, and more.
For tight knit social groups that weren't abusing any of this, there is something that was lost with these changes.
The change for the game as a whole is a step in the right direction. Once you are past the first few weeks of a new raid tier, tradability helps offset these changes.
The team is trying to make item level a better guide for what is an upgrade.
Personal Loot is here to stay, so let's talk about how we can improve it rather than rolling it back to Master Loot.

Lets talk about why personal loot sucks and why removing it is good, and then end by saying "personal loot is here to stay; and we aren't rolling back to master loot"

What a fucking joke.

[Laerrus]

Alright Ion, what about a special Q & A for all the other ethnic groups? I demand that someone wears lederhosen, while playing the bagpipes and eats kimchi during the next Dev Q & A

As a Greek myself, I was half expecting to see Ion start answering these in Greek. :P

I am not Greek and that is also what I was thinking.

[Voltsmasher]

Wtf is that design philosophy?

Don't you feel empowered -rather than slightly relieved - when. You use less mats per potion that barely sells for more than the mats.(simply because you proceed for 2 being made)

[Lei]

The ML/PL part is a complete bullshit. Trials do have bonus rolls as well, they can get some loot if they're lucky, I mean doesn't "getting lucky" coincide with everything Ion said before this question? Yet, what did they do? They made it so you have only 2 bonus rolls and not 3 you used to have, yet keep mantra-ing the same bullshit about poor (possibly guild hopper?) trials not getting stuff in new guilds.

[Tomana]

The professions section made me facedesk so hard I broke my desk.
Ion, you owe me a new desk... and revamped profession would be a nice gesture as well.