BfA Patch Speculation thread (8.3 and later).

[huth]

And what I'm trying to say is that question doesn't matter. At this point it's player expectation. It's pretty much what's assumed by majority of players and that's the perception Blizzard has given, whether unknowingly or knowingly.

Though I'd wager they're not dumb enough to not realize they've done that.

That doesn't mean they can change their plans to accomodate it. These things are decided months to years in advance.

[Chickat]

Is this the "Art Team Q&A" leak? Or did I miss one that actually sounds good?

That sounds amazing to me.

[Funny day]

Maybe it won't appear more ,umm~~~

[Chickat]

It's got a LOOOOT wrong. Likeable is one thing, Believable is another entirely.

I'm 99% sure it's wrong, but I still like it. We will know if its wrong soon. Maybe with the raid cinematic, and for sure with the worgen armor. If it's scary in Worgen form and knightly in human form it's basically at least partially confirmed. Could be some red Herrings in there.

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I think 8.2 is one of the better patches. Ignoring the issues with BFA, 8.2 has a lot of content. I think as a standalone patch its better than all patches except for 5.2, and maybe 7.3. Its on Par with 7.3 imo.

I don't know why, but I enjoy the mix of dailys and world quests. I'm enjoying my time in Nazjatar. Mechagon is cool. Haven't done the dungeon, but I've heard its good, and the raid seems at least passable if not good. It might not be a Dazaralor or Throne of Thunder, but it seems as good as Tomb.

[rda]

I think 8.2 is one of the better patches. Ignoring the issues with BFA, 8.2 has a lot of content. I think as a standalone patch its better than all patches except for 5.2, and maybe 7.3. Its on Par with 7.3 imo.

On my scale: 7.3 > 8.2 > 7.2.

I heard the coming dungeon is mythic-only, and if so, that's a big turn-off, too. (Why the hell do they do it? I am not going to do anything mythic because I am way past manual groups. If something has no queue, I am not doing it, it waits for when I can solo it.)

[Sondrelk]

On my scale: 7.3 > 8.2 > 7.2.

I heard the coming dungeon is mythic-only, and if so, that's a big turn-off, too. (Why the hell do they do it? I am not going to do anything mythic because I am way past manual groups. If something has no queue, I am not doing it, it waits for when I can solo it.)

It is mythic only because that is what the forums have wanted for years and years.
Eventually it will be Heroic as well, but until then you can think of it as having to wait for LFR.

[rda]

It is mythic only because that is what the forums have wanted for years and years.
Eventually it will be Heroic as well, but until then you can think of it as having to wait for LFR.

May I ask why the forums wanted that? I obviously think this is a bad idea, but in this case I cannot even see why would anyone want it to begin with? (I thought it was Blizzard who wanted it to be mythic-only. With the idea being to nudge people into doing mythic and then hopefully mythic+.)

[Sondrelk]

May I ask why the forums wanted that? I obviously think this is a bad idea, but in this case I cannot even see why would anyone want it to begin with?

They want it because having something not be available by random queue makes teh achievement of getting it more prestigious, and also allows Blizz to make it more difficult than they usually would.
Consider for instance why Mythic raiding is a thing, and why you rarely see the forums complain why LFR is not available instantly, and completely supplants Mythic raiding.


Forums want loads of different things, which is why any single person complaining on the forums will never get anywhere. It takes getting many rational people arguing it over a long time to get significant changes done. Simply throwing ones hands up and saying it is the worst thing ever just makes the person part of the same white noise that most forumgoers try to ignore.

[rda]

^^ Got it. Well, this is a classic case of being penny-wise but pound-foolish. All this closing of the doors before others in the name of "prestige" accomplishes is deprives the game of players who just have less things to do. If mythic+ had a solo queue and was part of the endgame for, say, 70%, the game would have been much healthier than it is now. And if we had a rated solo queue for PVP, oh boy, maybe we wouldn't be losing millions of subs.

[huth]

No, that would just make M+ not work properly. Challenging content is poorly suited for queueing.

On my scale: 7.3 > 8.2 > 7.2.

I heard the coming dungeon is mythic-only, and if so, that's a big turn-off, too. (Why the hell do they do it? I am not going to do anything mythic because I am way past manual groups. If something has no queue, I am not doing it, it waits for when I can solo it.)

Mostly because it is the same scale as Legion Karazhan on release, which isn't very suited to autogrouping. They'll probably divide it into two parts and add it to LFG in 8.3.

[rda]

No, that would just make M+ not work properly. Challenging content is poorly suited for queueing.

I believe I made a post or two on this in this thread, and this is perhaps not the right thread for involved discussions on that, but I'll just note that I disagree completely and I think solo queue for mythic+ is completely doable and would have been a huge boon to the game. Same triply so for solo queue for rated BGs, etc.

[Nathanyel]

It's got a LOOOOT wrong. Likeable is one thing, Believable is another entirely.

What do you mean by "wrong"? You can question its legitimacy, but there's nothing in that leak that Blizz couldn't do or stated they'd never do, or anything that completely contradicts previous story/gameplay (except the Bolvar part, but that may be something explained in the meantime, or simply something the artist understood wrong)

[Sondrelk]

I believe I made a post or two on this in this thread, and this is perhaps not the right thread for involved discussions on that, but I'll just note that I disagree completely and I think solo queue for mythic+ is completely doable and would have been a huge boon to the game. Same triply so for solo queue for rated BGs, etc.

Just for a second, consider what would happen if Mythic raids were solo queueable.
LFR is already as easy as content like that cna possibly go, and it still managed to produce groups that fail to pull their weight.
Mythic is 3 stesp above that. Normal raids are already entry level raids designed for LFR players who want ot take their first foray into proper raiding, and with the group finder from WoD it is as easy at it could be.
HC is difficult enough for casual raiding guilds. And then we have Mythic a few notches in difficulty above even that.

Challenging content and solo queue simply do not work in an MMO.
It certainly has its places, for simple dungeons it works perfectly fine, it allows players to experience the content in a low stress enviroment, and LFR was made with the same intent.

Every game needs something prestigious to accomplish, this can be as simple as making a difficult game like Dark Souls, or gaining rewards from collecting stuff, like what mount collectors get with the mount achievement mounts.

WoW has several avenues of prestige. It has collections. It has Mythic raids. It has Mythic+ dungeons and the invitational. And it has rated PvP.
Each of these cannot be designed in a way that makes it more accessible, because that would be contrary to the intent of being prestigious. Each one has a different "in" to get started. Prestigious mounts can be as simple as my first foray into it when i decided to grind Darnassus rep for the mount. It can be LFR, which whet my appetite for raiding, leading to me getting into it. Or it can be random BGs, which quickly tell people if PvP is something they want to commit time to.


There is already a large part of the game solely dedicated to low-stress, low-time activites one can get into. But you cannot expect every part of the game to work like that, or there would be nothing to build to.

I don't get the 400 mount achievement because i bought all the basic ground mounts from each Alliance city. And i don't get Jaina's elemental mount because i defeated her in Normal, if i want that i need to put time and effort in.

Mechagon is mythic only for the same reason. Had it been available for everyone instantly then the prestige of the rewards would be mostly lost. It will be attainable easily eventually. In the same way that getting 200 mounts is really easy compared to WotLK, and farming Garrosh mythic for the shoulders is far more trivial now than even the most smooth LFR run was back in the day.

If you want prestigious awards you need to put time in, if not you need to wait like everyone else.



This is definitely a bit off topic though. So hopefully this should be a satisfactory explanation.

[rda]

OK, my opinion of what we'll have in 9, in broad strokes:

First, a general idea. Things aren't going to change much.

When I look at 8.2 I see a lot of small things which try to be visible and produce some effect, but which are (a) disjoint, don't follow any pattern, don't follow any big overarching ideas, and (b) small and incremental, low-effort. It's like they had a couple of guys crawling up and down the code trying to make things that would be visible and produce some gameplay, but that wouldn't take too much effort. Because doing 20 small disjoint and not terribly creative, but still visible things in a month is better than trying to do 1 good cohesive idea. Because 20 small uncreative things will still produce some gameplay of some known quality, but the good cohesive idea might turn out not to be so good in the end.

I believe it is going to be the same for 9 - apart from one-two of the bigger things where they will try to do something new because hey, it's still a new expansion, have to have something new (but even those things wouldn't be terribly daring, much less daring than before).

So:

1. We'll have a traditional new continent, traditional instances / raids, etc. A new BG maybe (who cares about that when it is the backbone of PVP that is broken). One or two instances taken from previous expansions and remodeled for the new expansion, perhaps.

2. We'll have no world revamp. That's too big and pointless. We might have one or two more zones like Darkshore / Arathi remodeled for the new style. Maybe they'll redo starting zones for blood elves / draenei, they don't have flying enabled to this day.

3. We'll have no level squish. (Oh, god, please no level squish. This is the shakiest item because I can see them committing to this and wasting one more expansion to achieve very little, with the leveling not suddenly becoming enjoyable, but with the endgame being even more barren than it was in BFA.)

4. We'll still have factions, as in, there will still be Alliance and Horde. But we might have cross-faction groups for instances / raids, and perhaps for PVP as well.

5. I don't know what's going to be the kind of big thing that they will try to do in the new expansion. There has to be something, but it cannot be awfully large. Maybe they will make persistent AI companions which you'd take to some new special mode of instances - you'd probably have more than one companion to pick, could perhaps gear / talent them up a little, then do the instance, maybe have some competition on clearing speed or whatever. Maybe they will do something else. We'll hear about it at Blizzcon. It will probably appear in the slides larger than it really is, they exaggerate everything.

6. (Forgot about that initially) They will make specs better, but not so much better that they are some super-success story worth talking about. There will be warts, people will disagree about a lot. After a year of heated opinions and exchanges, when things settle down, we'll perhaps be able to conclude that 9 kind of made specs good enough so that they are no longer the clearly visible huge problem like they were before but that they merely became not the biggest problem.

So, that's about it. No big splashing changes. Some BS in the lore, the game trodding along.

The single real big question on each Blizzcon is going to be whether they are still going with sub-based one-expansion in two years plus shop model, or whether they are altering it. They can alter it in multiple ways. First, and obvious, they can go F2P = give up the sub cost. Or repurpose the sub as "premium". Second, they can alter the one-expansion in two years thing, eg, they can start issuing basically patches the size of 8.2 and selling them for like $30 but do that more often - twice a year or so. Come on, they could have made mobs in Nazjatar / Mechagon and in the coming raid levels 121-125, that's basically what new expansions could look like.

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Just for a second, consider what would happen if Mythic raids were solo queueable.
LFR is already as easy as content like that cna possibly go, and it still managed to produce groups that fail to pull their weight.

Add ratings and it is all solved. This is a big topic, if you want me to explain what I mean at more length, say so and I will do it. But solo queues work for far more challenging content than all mythic+ in WoW put together.

[Sondrelk]

-snip-

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Add ratings and it is all solved. This is a big topic, if you want me to explain what I mean at more length, say so and I will do it. But solo queues work for far more challenging content than all mythic+ in WoW put together.

I cannot imagine Blizz will go F2P until all the other MMOs on the market are gone.
It is well known in the industry that an MMOgoing F2P is a tacti admission that the game is dead and that they will keep it alive for as little money as possible in order to squeeze the last pennies out of consumers.



As for your idea for LFR. that would only further stratify LFR. Mythic as content requires a large time investment. Most mythic raidingf groups i have been with spend hte entire night trying ot get down a single boss if they have to.
"mythic" LFR would basically be persistent groups that go on for potentially DAYS in hope that the few groups with high enough rating would get a single boss down.
Which leads to a separate problem. What happens when a boss is already killed on this hypothetical mythic LFR, would you just cross your fingers and hope that the ones that show up have any interested in the new boss. Bosses could take hours to get down, so you have to make LFR wings single bosses to prevent groups falling apart from fatigue after a single boss, leaving the rest to stay unkilled.

Of coursed, you could have premade groups that agree to stay together to defeat the bosses, which is the only way to guarantee that those around you have a similar time investment, but you would still have to have someone stay in the instance to not make it reset.

And suddenly we are back to where we started, the players who are willing to get the prestigious mythic LFR awards would simply band together in something we might call guilds, who specialize in doing one of several types of content. While the lowest ranks of LFR would be worse than you could ever imagine unless bosses were stripped down to single abilities.


Not to mention, how would ranking work? Is it based on winrate? Because then a single evening of Mythic raiding would lower you back to abysmal numbers.


Prestigious awards are better off staying like they are, because the alternatives is a worse version of what we already have.

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Just to further iterate a bit on my point.

I assume you mean that each separate version of raiding would still be different, but just all the solo queueable. But who would want to do mythic raiding with a bunch of people who for all you know could be absolutely awful at the game.

What happens when a bad player gets lucky and presumably clikmbs up the ranks to a higher rating than he would have normally gotten. Mythic raiding can require twitch coordination with a response time of less than 5 seconds.
Would the group have to lose rating because some player got carried up ot that point? Or would there be a way to blacklist anyone random from entering hte group, because then you would never get into a Mythic LFR with any chance of winning.

[rda]

I was talking about solo queue for mythic / mythic+ instances. Raids work worse due to their size / expectations from how difficult / gimmicky the individual encounters must be (as you say, there is this perception that "normally" you should be progressing at something like one boss a week or so, else it isn't a true raid or whatever - of course that gets in the way of queues, by definition). That's not an insurmountable problem, but instances are just easier and more natural.

(In general, raids in WoW are a dead-end in terms of gameplay, it has been clear for years. They exist in WoW not because they are particularly successful, people prefer other forms of content by a mile. They exist in WoW because WoW devs are themselves raiders and because they think WoW equals raids on some level.)

[Sondrelk]

I was talking about solo queue for mythic / mythic+ instances. Raids work worse due to their size. That's not an insurmountable problem, but instances are just easier and more natural.

(In general, raids in WoW are a dead-end in terms of gameplay, it has been clear for years. They exist in WoW not because they are particularly successful, people prefer other forms of content by a mile. They exist in WoW because WoW devs are themselves raiders and because they think WoW means raids on some level.)

We already have Heroic dungeons. That is basically what you are asking for. Mythic dungeons were made solely for hte purpose of having a higher level of content than what players were used to with the intent that it should be more prestigious and give better loot.

M+ cannot really be solo queueable because you would end up with the same problems as i outlined above. There would be a hypothetical cap on how far pugs could go and you would end up groups who premake the group before queueing to prevent having ot deal with players with inflated rating.


Overall though i simply cannot understand what you really want here.
The basic gist i get is that you want to do prestigious content, but not have to deal with what makes them prestigious in hte first place. Very much like players asking for Jainas mythic mount because they did Normal. Or complaining about the Gladiator mounts because PvP is too hard.
Prestigious content is prestigious because it is difficult and requires time. If you remove all prestigious content then the game is basically dead, because the only possibly thing carrying you forward is more stuff to get shoved in your face over time.


The last week i farmed the 8.2 pet battle meta-achievement for the baby naga pet.
If prestigious rewards were not difficult to access then i would have gotten no sense of achievement from completing that achievement. Sure, i would have removed the annoyance i felt from 2 hours of trying to find the last pet i needed, but the prestige would be gone. I would have just logged in and found the pet in my tab, presumably already conveniently levelled to max.



You cannot backtrack that some content should stay prestigious and other shouldnt when there is no discernible difference between different things.
Mythic raiding has just as much reason to be prestigious as getting the Gladiator mount.
Mythic dungeons have just as much reason to stay as they are as M+ having the feat of strength for doing all the dungeons in time with a +15 key.

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Quick as well. Pretty bold statement that only a minority enjoys raids. Do you have any facts to back this statement up? Or are you conflating your personal experiences with common knowledge?

[rda]

We already have Heroic dungeons. That is basically what you are asking for.

I am asking for mythic+ instances because they are more challenging and provide more gameplay (and more rewards).

M+ can be solo queueable. Add ratings and it is. Ratings solve the problem of "I am getting noobs who don't try hard". At the levels of difficulty where you have to have a cohesive setup, add picks and allow players to pick among their alts - or give them a generic alt of the spec you want with their gear level. High level mythic+ players have multiple alts for their roles - this would work the same way.

What's the problem I am trying to solve? The one of manual grouping. For each player who is willing to do manual grouping there's 50-100 players who would do the exact same content if only they could solo queue. More partners, more mindshare, vastly bigger ecosystem producing tons of fruit like guides / feedback for future encounters, the game is profitable, win.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Already said it once but... I don't think the factions will dissolve. Not the way people seem to think. Cross communication? Sure.

[rda]

Quick as well. Pretty bold statement that only a minority enjoys raids. Do you have any facts to back this statement up? Or are you conflating your personal experiences with common knowledge?

Yes, the proportion of players who raid at max level is about 50%, but about 40% of these is LFR. Mythic is less than 1%. See achievement counts on this site / stats on wowprogress, etc.