Druid Class Changes Feedback, Layering - An Alternative to Queues?, DLC #722

[Lumy]

Shadowlands - Druid Class Changes Feedback

Responding to miscellanous questions/topics:

• Astral spells getting double benefit in CA is currently intended. We’ll have to see if the mastery double-dip is too much.
• AP costs and generation are generally slightly reduced to allow for better pooling (a few weren’t, such as New Moon, with the intention of buffing them). Starfall instead got a big damage increase, so you cast it less often but it’s more of a moment when you do. Stellar Drift’s utility may still be too good with the new Starfall.
• Bloodtalons: The goals of Bloodtalons were 1) to keep the things we think people saw as cool about it (adding some planning to the rotation, snapshot bleeds are a good payoff for a bit of complexity) while getting rid of the weirdness of using Regrowth as a trigger. Many people dislike the latter, and frankly we think it’s pretty weird too. We don’t have an exact further revision to report yet, but the feedback is making me think it still needs to somehow buff spells other than Rip.
• Stampeding Roar can still be used in Cat Form.
• The “30 sec ICD” on individual Eclipses sounds like it’s drawing more attention than intended. The goal is to make Eclipses alternate while in continuous combat, but allow restarting with either Eclipse after any break. Since Eclipses often last 16 sec, plus a short gap between them, the idea of an “ICD” that matters while you’re in combat shouldn’t be too relevant or need to be tracked. There might be a clearer way of doing this.
• Swiftmend will try to consume Regrowth, then Wild Growth, then Rejuvenation, so that its behavior is predictable.

Layering - An Alternative to Queues?

The circumstances of the last few weeks have led to an unexpected increase in both the numbers of players that have been playing WoW Classic, as well as the length of their play sessions. This has caused some of the most-popular realms to see queues again. While free character moves can act as a relief valve for players who just want to play a particular character regardless of the realm it’s on, that’s not the only tool in our belt.

It is possible to temporarily raise the population cap on a given realm by turning layering back on. While I can only name half-a-dozen realms in this region that really have extended queues right now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more realms experience queue growth during this remarkable period we’re living in. So my question for you is this:

• If your realm was experiencing one-hour (or longer) queues during peak play times every day, would you want your realm temporarily increased to two layers, to shorten the queue? How do you think that would change your gameplay experience?

As always, thank you for your feedback.

Dark Legacy Comics #722
DLC #722 has been released!

[Alkizon]

would you want your realm temporarily increased to two layers, to shorten the queue?

Ah $hit, here we go again...

They FU launch with it. Literally: one of main reasons why “they” have an alleged problem now is their negligent approach during initialization. I understand that they would want to have everything cheaper and with less work, but this is the most important part on which it's categorically prohibited to save in principle.

Also, I’m curious, but how did they FU your lunch?

To know that you should read these links above. However, if neither you nor they understood that launch was F'dU then, so a fortiori it makes no sense to explain all necessary forming conditions now.

- technically, not “mine”, but “every” of participants, I had to wait quite a while until they removed this nonsense from the game, but consequences... something that we have to live with now; C19 situation only aggravated stuff, made consequences more pronounced, question in this case was not in "what", but in "when", which didn't even require any special gift of "prediction"

You put lunch, not launch, and then even misread the post where I kept your same mistake.

Oh, thanks, I suppose, it's because of rush
- correction makes me stop and review my message again, which is generally not bad, so thanks again, be my guest in the future

[Eapoe]

would you want your realm temporarily increased to two layers, to shorten the queue?

Oh $hit, here we go again...

They FU lunch with it. Literally: one of main reasons why “they” have an alleged problem now is their negligent approach during initialization. I understand that they would want to have everything cheaper and with less work, but this is the most important part on which it's categorically prohibited to save in principle.

How was it negligent? The servers dropped off like they predicted it to do, but due to things like the Coronavirus is now keeping people at home with nothing to do. It’s truly negligent that Blizzard didn’t predict a pandemic happening.
Also, I’m curious, but how did they FU your lunch?

[iosdeveloper]

How was it negligent? The servers dropped off like they predicted it to do, but due to things like the Coronavirus is now keeping people at home with nothing to do. It’s truly negligent that Blizzard didn’t predict a pandemic happening.
Also, I’m curious, but how did they FU your lunch?

why didn't they predict a pandemic?
even spider-man game did

society falls when its poets fail to warn about coming hardship

[Eapoe]

would you want your realm temporarily increased to two layers, to shorten the queue?

Ah $hit, here we go again...

They FU lunch with it. Literally: one of main reasons why “they” have an alleged problem now is their negligent approach during initialization. I understand that they would want to have everything cheaper and with less work, but this is the most important part on which it's categorically prohibited to save in principle.
To know that you should read these links above. However, if neither you nor they understood that lunch was F'dU then, so a fortiori it makes no sense to explain all necessary forming conditions now.

- technically, not “mine”, but “every” of participants, I had to wait quite a while until they removed this nonsense from the game, but consequences... something that we have to live with now; C19 situation only aggravated stuff, made consequences more pronounced, question in this case was not in "what", but in "when", which didn't even require any special gift of "prediction"

So, apparently jokes are lost on people that either (a) are foreign and English isn’t their first language, or (b) have absolutely no idea how to spell.
You put lunch, not launch, and then even misread the post where I kept your same mistake.

- - - Updated - - -

why didn't they predict a pandemic?
even spider-man game did

society falls when its poets fail to warn about coming hardship

Trying to resist feeding the troll, but they’re so cute it’s difficult to do.

[Appelgren]

How bout that. They completely ignored the massive amounts of critique about survival instincts being removed from ferals toolkit.

Can’t say I’m surprised tho...

[erifwodahs]

Layering did not destroy communities. It saved it. So many guilds would been ripped and torn in the first months if it was not the case.

[Qnubi]

People still rather play Classic vs Retail it seems.

[Tomana]

Hmm... the druid class feedback thread is the only one where the devs replied, ironically.
You can clearly see what class the devs are playing and favoring... -_-

[Niwes]

Hmm... the druid class feedback thread is the only one where the devs replied, ironically.
You can clearly see what class the devs are playing and favoring... -_-

lol. besides the fact that this sounds like a statement of a 12 year old kid, i just wanna add:

if blizz favor this class, they for SURE would not do that BS to Balance and Feral. Instead they would remember, i.e.

- why Starfall was changed in the past (Spoiler: It was for a good reason).
- not going back to that shitty Eclipse mechanic, nobody liked.

So, no. No sane person that favor Druids would do that shit.

[This One Time At Bandcamp]

"To buff spells other than rip"

How it works in theory:
Apply all bleeds -> Moonfire/sunfire -> Use CDs -> Spam Solar Wrath

[Tomana]

- why Starfall was changed in the past (Spoiler: It was for a good reason).
- not going back to that shitty Eclipse mechanic, nobody liked.

So, no. No sane person that favor Druids would do that shit.

They're prolly all playing resto I guess, which is why it is so OP for several expansions in a row.

[twothe]

I am surprised by all the misinformation about layering and the constant rumor that it is "heavily abused." First of all: there is no definite way to switch layers. You can join a group and hope to get to the other layer, but there is never a guarantee that it will happen, because you not only have to be grouped with someone in a different layer, you also have to be close to that player to actually do the switch. Now "professional" abusers will have their chars ready to do the switch when needed, but those are a minority of players.

Secondly: layering has a cooldown. If you hopped to layer 2 you can hop back instantly to layer 1, but from that point on you get a cooldown. So no matter what you do and how you do it, after a few hops you are stuck to your layer, even if your entire group is in the other layer right next to you. The only way to abuse both layers is to have different chars farming, one parked in each layer.

And then layering does not magically make Black Lotus or similar appear out of nowhere. It effectively doubles the spawns, no more no less. People often forget that since people are equally distributed across both layers that if you hop layers on a BL spawn that doesn't mean there is one waiting in the totally empty other layer for you. Chances that someone has already looted that other BL on the other layer is pretty damn high. So even in a worst-case scenario the amount of resources simply double. But that doesn't mean that afterwards the price is cut in half, that's not how the market works.

What will happen to the market is that the price for rare commodities like BL will of course drop a bit, but not that much, as people who were not willing to buy BL at the current price will start buying BL if the price drop and therefore cushion the drop significantly. On highly populated servers you can expect something like a 10%-20% price decrease and that's it.

Also that rumor of countless bots that ruin the economy... I am playing on Everlook, a very populated server, and I have not seen a single bot in the entire time I've been playing, nor has anyone from my guild. That "army of bots" is simply fake news.

[lollerlaban]

I am playing on Everlook, a very populated server, and I have not seen a single bot in the entire time I've been playing, nor has anyone from my guild. That "army of bots" is simply fake news.

I saw over 20 bots while levelling less than a month ago and that was just in the lower pop areas. Just because you can't distinguish real people from bots doesn't make them fake news

[Resheph]

Also that rumor of countless bots that ruin the economy... I am playing on Everlook, a very populated server, and I have not seen a single bot in the entire time I've been playing, nor has anyone from my guild. That "army of bots" is simply fake news.

Even if there were bots, those purists wanted a genuine Vanilla experience, and I can tell you the place was infested by bots in those days. So I'd argue by stopping the bots Blizzard is actually detracting from the real experience XD

[Queen of Hamsters]

How about, they do what is right and dont look for feedback from the crowd least likely to be reasonable.

People still rather play Classic vs Retail it seems.

Half a dozen full servers on Classic vs 60+ on Live in EU alone.

Hah.

[Big Thanks]

So, apparently jokes are lost on people that either (a) are foreign and English isn’t their first language, or (b) have absolutely no idea how to spell.
You put lunch, not launch, and then even misread the post where I kept your same mistake.

Please dont tell @Alkizon to make even more detailed posts...and lose even more time in each post he/she makes.
I have no idea how he does it...but is incredibly detailed...always

[blankfaced]

They need to not do these posts where they answer a classes specific questions while not doing it for every class. It leans hard into the idea that they have some form of favoritism. (They're humans of course they do but can they not show it so blatantly?) Wait till you have a compiled list of issues and questions and answer them in a large article or across multiple posts in each class forum.

[Naraga]

Layering should not be turned on. It is cringe to see that for most people in that thread their desire for layering doesn't even stem from queues but from greed "Yes turn layering on so I can buy black lotus cheaper haha!"

It's also cringe that Blizzard is even considering turning layering back on just because there are a few servers with queues while there are other servers out there on which the players would literally offer up their souls to have more people play on their server. If you don't like the queue, transfer to one of those servers. If you don't want to transfer, enjoy your queue. You can't just demand to play on super population servers with player numbers tens to hundreds of times over the intended Vanilla player population AND have Blizzard cater to you to not have any queues.

[Super Kami Dende]

How bout that. They completely ignored the massive amounts of critique about survival instincts being removed from ferals toolkit.

Can’t say I’m surprised tho...

>provides targeted feedback on a few skills

>"HURR DURR YOU DIDNT MENTION EVERYTHING STRAIGHT AWAY!!"