Tides of Vengeance Season 2 - Live Developer Q&A

[Smeller]

•Kul Tiran Humans and Zandalari Trolls
•They will release with Patch 8.1.5
•You only have to get the war campaign achievement to unlock them, which you obtain before the quest to go into the raid.

Wait, that's ALL we need to unlock them? The war campaign achievements? That would be too good to be true, I've been grinding Loremaster of Kul'tiras and all that shit, but if I don't need it, then tell me now and I'll stop because I really don't feel like finishing all of Drustvar.

Drustvar is literally the best zone on Kul'Tiras. It's so easy to complete and it is extremely straight forward. It doesn't have many random quest hubs like Stormsong Valley were you can't further the zone storylines.

[Alkizon]

Have no problems understanding their reasoning since it's all the playerbase fault. I played on high pop pretty balanced PvP servers from open beta classic up until WotLK. It was great before Battle Grounds got cross server, you encountered the same people in BG's as you did in world Pvp, to the point that people joined the same TS-channels etc.

Then, due to people faction swapping or transfering to servers where their faction had an edge things got skewed and most often unplayable for the other faction. Now they try to balance player populations with people that actually like world Pvp, and not only turn it on due to there being no risk to it.

This is a means to an end, balancing the populations to bring back the good world PvP. Granted the incentives is poorly timed atm. with the ilv rewards weighing in on PvE progress, but I can see the overall plan.

What would be your solution/incentives to make player populations more even in War Mode?

It wasn't supposed to be any WM here, because interactions "just happened" according old game design philosophy. So may be the only right decision would be to go back since it worked "just naturally" without artificially direct pushing (rewardless) everyone to it? What they say isn't even a half-measure, it’s just a “made-up” excuse. In fact, this is same thing that they sang about "class fantasy" in Legion and I'm not talking exclusively about particular phrase, but about all purpose/story of WM appearance.

They're literally justifying about why they had to change “crutch handle”, and not why they needed it fully at first.

[eduwneso]

Oh, so the Heart of Azeroth will work like Artifacts did in Legion? Just with worse perks (because of course). Seems like they are ditching their whole new BFA Azerite system, omg, they are doing something good for a change.

And the Mythic + issues of people leaving can be so easily solved I can't believe there are even engineers working for them... Just add a "reason for leaving" option in which if 2 or more players in the same party choose "can't continue" then there are no penalties.

The problem would be the trolls, and people who would fuck over others because it's fun, they can't give tools to them. If humans were less shitty and assholes, then your solution would be perfect.

- - - Updated - - -

He is a lawyer that's why.

I could do it and I'm not a lawyer, got anything else?

- - - Updated - - -

A new Q&A, quick get your pitchforks!

I actually liked this Q&A they talked about a lot of things that interested me.

- - - Updated - - -

It was way better than any other Q&A they've done so far.

Agreed, especially the part for 8.2 and scaling down external rewards to 385, they should have done that with darkshore too and it would all be "perfect" but oh well, that happens in cicles of 2 weeks if you have luck with the boss.

- - - Updated - - -

Get some one with personality to do them. Shit can Ion and Lore

I actually like Ion personality, so let's flush down the toilet your judgement on someone you don't know.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh look, a new Blizzard PR account made just for this

Oh look, a hater with no personality!

[wewe]

Holy moly. The WM balance reasoning sounds yikes.
They want Horde players, that are not PvP inclined, to turn off WM but on the flip side they are pushing ALL alliance players to turn on WM by giving really good rewards. How does this make sense !?

If the goal is to only have PvP players participate woulden’t it be easier to just give rewards that are not valuable to the majority of the PvE players on both sides....

[Drusin]

Character Slots and Alts

They might allow the cap of 50 characters total to all be on the same server.
There might be a way for you to transfer War Resources from your main to your alts in 8.1.5.

Uh, hello? Drusin here, can you lemme get more than 50 character slots on my account? I don't care about per realm thanks. -Love Drusin

[eduwneso]

Just... Fire... Ion... PLEASE. No severance pay, no party, no thank-you card. Just burn him off like the leech he is.

Are you ok? need some tissues for your tears? are you even human? need help finding you psycological problems center? so many questions.

[JacobMarley]

I don’t get why they’re so afraid to just revert all their GCD changes. It’s literally what made WoW feel really unpleasant to play. He’s totally right about popping CDs and it actually feels like you’re losing healing. Sometimes life hangs in the balance for a second, and that second is really important, and you’d love to pop a CD to rescue it, but if you do that they might jut die before you can even heal.


Also on an arms warrior, there’s like 3 damage power ups you can do I think and you essentially stop doing damage for that 3 seconds while you get it all going - I don’t know why they see popping everything in one button as a bad thing.... People love that shit - see how popular the swifty one shot macro was... even when it wasn’t a one shot anymore, people love their character going red and EXPLODING instantly.

[Sinaa]

What variety there is barely any new armor sets?

[artam]

Development and Design

The biggest challenge of WoW is designing for the many different audiences that play the game.
The game is richer for having a variety of audiences over the team focusing on designing for one archetype.

And that, ladys and gentlemans, is why this game will continue to lose year after year. You can´t develop a game to be jack of all trades master of none, all lose, no one wins.

[Trumpcat]

The part where there are no class overhauls is most disappointing. Although I did not expect there to be, but still would have been a very needed thing. Classes are dull,
We have no advanced or varied mechanics, no any ability that feels like design thought went into it. Look at every other popular MMO or even MOBA games or even Diablo and its clones, look at any RPG. WoW class abilities visually and mechanically are the worst. Press A until it procs B, press C whenever it is ready, while they are all essentially the same - does X amount of damage.

So an example of a more diverse mechanic: in WoD a Mage could conjure a crystal which absorbs all damage done to it for a certain amount of time, then explodes dealing the absorbed and augmented damage into an AoE.

Not crying for the crystal back, but for variety and complexity that break up the spamming 2-3 buttons at a target.

Playing the game itself is dull when the classes are progressively dulled down. They are not adding novelty and variety to a very old game that needs it to maintain interest. They are doing the exact opposite.

Do we have to wait until 8.3 for Azerite to add anything interesting to classes that should have been there at start?

[Gadzooks]

I don’t get why they’re so afraid to just revert all their GCD changes. It’s literally what made WoW feel really unpleasant to play. He’s totally right about popping CDs and it actually feels like you’re losing healing. Sometimes life hangs in the balance for a second, and that second is really important, and you’d love to pop a CD to rescue it, but if you do that they might jut die before you can even heal.


Also on an arms warrior, there’s like 3 damage power ups you can do I think and you essentially stop doing damage for that 3 seconds while you get it all going - I don’t know why they see popping everything in one button as a bad thing.... People love that shit - see how popular the swifty one shot macro was... even when it wasn’t a one shot anymore, people love their character going red and EXPLODING instantly.

They can't do dramatic shifts when a new esport tournament is starting in two weeks. They're committed, at least until they're over, with what's in the game now.

[Supmotto]

Titan Residuum
Residuum funneling is only done by the most extreme guilds.

Yeah and people that play with friends that gear each other up, jesus christ what a short sighted change.

[Sencha]

As the time passes more Q'n'As are being released and less brain cells remain live in Ions brain. Half the things they shove in these "meetings" are the least fucking interesting things in the world (transmogs, all the fucking time, how the fuck is this topic still even a thing!?) and the other half are just plain kick in the nuts for any reasonable player. Fuck these people.

Couldn't agree more. The game is more focused on cosmetics, pets, toys, etc. than important stuff like class design for instance. That's also why I stopped playing.

[sirethas]

"They don't anticipate the item level 400 reward quest happening every week because there are a lot more Alliance participating in War Mode."
"They agree that item level 400 is a little too high at the beginning of a raid tier. It won't be changed this week, but next week if it is available again it will be reduced to 385 and another form of reward will be added, such as war resources."

What is this 400ilvl quest and where do I get it?

You can get it only if you are Alliance on NA servers, there's like a quest for alliance to motivate them to turn on Warmode, this quest requires you to kill certain amount of Horde players if I'm not mistaken.

[Lei]

The extra rewards were meant to encourage more Alliance to participate but also to make Horde who did not like PvP to turn it off.

Strange. I would have never thought the devs see war mode on/off this permanent. I thought they meant it to be fluid "hey, it's monday, let's kill some xy scum!" / "hey it's friday, let's chill and turn it off". I also thought they would want everyone to participate in warmode by default, not to force .. I'm sorry inb4 triggering ppl... discourage people from using it.
This is fucking weird to me. But like Jackie Chan wtf meme weird

[Damianff]

Just resign to your position ion, quit it already!

- - - Updated - - -

JUST RESIGN TO YOUR POSITION ION! QUIT WOW ALREADY AND DO ALL OF US A BIG FAVOR!!
Thanks

[Sigxy]

Enough with this “dosgning wow for all the different audiences”. Stop pretending like it didn’t start going downhill since the end of WOTLK and the dumb “accessibility” philosophy and please go back to old Blizzard. This is ridiculous now. This jack of all trades watered down master of none is infuriating.

Yeah, this is definitely one of the biggest problems...

I don't see why Blizzard doesn't go back to how it used to be when they had a much more narrow audience (which wotlk proved it worked if you look at the sub numbers). And if they want more players? Don't just open up the game to be for more audiences - make the other audiences come over and try be part of the audience they already had! If it doesn't work, no biggie. If it works, great, a person who didn't know he'd have fun with WoW, has fun with it!

[meowfurion]

"Class specific sets were removed for now to allow more variety and distinct sets from different locations over more iterations of class themes." No, because you're lazy....

[Lurker1]

What variety there is barely any new armor sets?

Armor sets are all over the place now islands,warfronts,and raids so im not sure what your talking about here.

[Aestereal]

I wish I could show off my unique utility in M+, but it seems they've fixed the Atal'Dazar warlock gate trash skip after Vol'kaal.