Rearranging and Removing Portals, Upcoming Beast Mastery Changes - Patch 8.1.5

[chaud]

Patch 8.1.5 - Rearranging and Removing Portals

As we read most everything posted here (and elsewhere) about next week’s content update, we can’t help but be impacted by the subject of transportation portal removal. It’s a subject that’s approaching 5000 replies in one thread alone, and the question raised there, repeatedly, has been, “why?” Here’s the answer to that question.

From the beginnings of World of Warcraft, game designers have had a number of guiding principles. Sometimes these notions change quickly, and sometimes they evolve slowly, but a few guiding principles have remained more or less the same throughout WoW’s history. One such lodestar has been “don’t overuse portals between locations in the world”. Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.

Of course there’s an equal and opposite design consideration—“don’t make it too inconvenient to get from most places to most other places”. Some amount of convenience is vital. Not every visit to a wondrous landscape is your first. We know when it’s your 100th visit, you don’t want the flight over to be the bulk of your time spent. And of course, some players have chosen to play as Warlocks or Mages specifically because those classes offer unique means of transport.

With new expansions, we’ve made a tradition of removing some of the portals from the previous expansion’s cities. The goal with that is to encourage transportation flow through newer places where players are more likely to interact with other players. We neglected to do that initially following Legion (and we never did that following Mists of Pandaria for various reasons), but we feel that we should have. We’re correcting that now.

Boralus and Dazar’alor will continue to offer portals to a full range of capital cities, as well as to Silithus. The portals to Cataclysm zones will remain intact, and many other modes of transportation, such as Dalaran Signet Rings, Karazhan’s ring, the Timeless Isle trinket, Coordination Cloaks, and boats and zeppelins between many regions, will all be retained and functional.

However, we’ve seen how updates to the game can leave the means of accessing different areas feeling increasingly chaotic. For example— today if you go to the Cleft of Shadows in Orgrimmar, you’ll find it dotted with portals in a way that almost looks sporadic. We’re cleaning that up, and we see this as an opportunity to consolidate a lot of travel into a consistent venue with a consistent look and feel, and room for future growth when needed.

We’ve processed a lot of feedback on this, especially feedback about specific locations that feel like they’re going to become disproportionately inconvenient to reach, and we’ve followed that feedback through to the conclusion that you’re seeing on the PTR. We believe that the numerous remaining means of quick access in the game make most locations quite reachable.

If there are any specific locations that feel as though they’re about to become unreasonably inaccessible, we’re certainly open to adding additional means of travel in the future.

Upcoming Beast Mastery Hunter Changes - Patch 8.1.5

There’s a significant set of changes to Beast Mastery coming in the content update next week. These were shipped off toward the PTR yesterday, but haven’t appeared there yet:

• Barbed Shot damage increased by 125%.
• Barbed Shot’s bleed damage now ignores the target’s armor.
• Cobra Shot damage increased by 25%.

For the Heart of Azeroth:

• Feeding Frenzy’s tooltip damage displayed has been lowered commensurate with Barbed Shot now ignoring armor. Its total effective damage remains unchanged.

As always, you’ll see these (and everything else) in the final update notes, which we’ll publish just before the update goes live.

[javierdsv]

In other words:

We know you don't like this, but we are going to do it anyway. Thank you next.


Oh, and nice BM buffs right there. Good to see them get some love.

[lasheric]

wow Bm going to be scary again.

[tripleh]

There trying to convince players/keep players while still pushing the change to live. If more players leave my guess would be some devs or cms might be on the chopping block next round of layoffs. There using the same argument as they did with pathfinder/anti flying. Trying to say it makes the world feel bigger. Vote with your wallets unsub, we know right now that activision is paying attention to how players react. If you allow the devs to win it will only cause them to change more things for there own benefit, not the players. Removing portals is just there way of avoiding fixing meaningful things in game. Classes and other bugs for example. Don't let them lie to you.

[Poe]

Let's buff the only 100% mobile spec in the game so it can do more damage while casters who are punished for movement.....

BFA getting worse by the week

[Telomir]

kek (10 char)

[Sting]

What the actual fuck are they doing to this game. Removing quality of life from an already failing expansion? Who the fuck is making these absolutely retarded decisions?

A portal room? Great stuff. A portal room with a lot of the old ones missing? WHY? Who thought of this shit, really. The first thing that would come to my mind were I to be working on this feature would be "It's gotta have all the portals." Did they design the room first and then run out of space to put in the rest?

[Very Tired]

"You think you want portals and convenience, but you actually don't."

Most people have played this game for years. We're already well aware of how big the world is. Thanks.

[UnholyGrazer]

Let's buff the only 100% mobile spec in the game so it can do more damage while casters who are punished for movement.....

BFA getting worse by the week

You are completely ignorant to what is strong right now. Casters are perfectly fine.

[Varixdos]

We know how you want to have fun better than you do.

[Railander]

some players have chosen to play as Warlocks or Mages specifically because those classes offer unique means of transport.

i know i haven't played in a while, but what kind of means of transport are warlocks supposed to have??

[Joker of Muerte]

Yep, they shouldnt have said that. That just stirred up the hornets nest in that 5k+ reply topic even more.

[Fabled]

i know i haven't played in a while, but what kind of means of transport are warlocks supposed to have??

Other than lock closet and their short distance gate thing, not much.

[Sting]

i know i haven't played in a while, but what kind of means of transport are warlocks supposed to have??

I think he was talking about summoning but it makes so very little sense I didn't bother trying to figure it out anymore.

[Sigxy]

Eh, I see some good and bad with these changes.

Yeah, it's a bit annoying that we're going to need to spend longer going to certain places which isn't all that great.

On the other, people have kept asking for the WORLD of Warcraft to matter more so hey, at least you get to see some other people now when travelling around!

[tripleh]

Wait until they increase the cooldown time for your hearthstones. There purposily trying to destroy the game, could it be to get out of there contracts. To be able to work for a different comapny? Quite a few have left blizzard already, the remaining ones seem to be stuck there until released.

[Eleccybubb]

Oh look at that the usual "we hear you" from Blizzard and yet they actually don't.

Seriously they can't revert removing the portals? What a joke this company has become. They are literally just spitting at the players and saying deal with it.

Thankfully there are MMOs where the devs actually respect the players.

[Grizelda]

Yes because so many amazing things happen to me while taking the long ass trip out to whatever expansions old content I happen to be farming a mount in. What fun would be missed!

What will actually happen is I will just stop logging on to do the very few things I actually still log on for.

[Benedictu]

Roll a Druid. They can do everything. I don't know why everyone doesn't main a Druid. We have almost as many ports/teleports as a mage.

[Mr. Smith]

I understand wanting the world to be big, which is why I'm so excited for WoW Classic. The problem here is that the majority of modern WoW still won't encourage players to go out in the world. I'll still queue for raids, dungeons, BGs, IEs and Warfronts from my capital city, get summoned to them, clear them out with a group of people I'll never meet again, then Hearthstone back and log out, while occasionally spending 20 minutes in a specific zone for a handful of World Quests. Spending 5 minutes auto-flying to a legacy raid isn't going to solve any of the systemic problems affecting how big the world feels.

This change is effectively trying to stop the Titanic from sinking using a small cup...after it's already sunken to the bottom of the ocean. I'm cynical enough that it seems like they just want to increase participation metrics with a paper-thin gameplay justification.