Joyous Journeys - Summer XP Buff Event
As we continue work on Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we want to celebrate the defeat of Kil’Jaeden and the Burning Legion (again!) with a bit of a special event to help get players ready for their adventures in Northrend.
In the coming weeks, we will implement a global buff that we’re calling “Joyous Journeys”. During the time this buff is active, all sources of experience points will award 50% additional XP.
We haven’t locked down the specific timeframe for when this buff will activate, but we expect it to last for at least 6-8 weeks; beginning a few weeks before the 3.4.0 Pre-Patch and persisting right up until the day that Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches. This buff should provide a great opportunity for everyone who may have fallen behind the leveling curve, or anyone with alts they want to prep for the next adventure to jump in and get caught up to level 70 ahead of the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
This will also be active on Wrath of the Lich King Classic fresh start realms as well, so it should be a great jumpstart for any players who want try to level up quickly during pre-patch and participate in the various Wrath pre-patch events such as the Zombie Plague or special time-limited bosses such as Balzaphon in Stratholme or Tenris Murkblood in Karazhan.
While we aren’t quite ready to announce specific dates around Wrath Classic, we felt it might be helpful to let you know ahead of time that this buff event was coming. We’ll have more to share around Wrath of the Lich King Classic launch plans in the coming weeks.
Thank you!
Adjustments to Dungeon Creature Behavior and Group XP
One of the most common pieces of feedback we’ve received (and observed ourselves in our own adventures) is the concern about pervasive sales of dungeon boosting services in-game. It often overpowers chat with advertisements and makes certain channels hard to use for their intended purpose.
It’s also no secret that the gold from many boosting groups is used for illicit activities such as Real-Money Trading (RMT), as much of the gold that players pay to boosters is then sold for real money back to other players.
Now that we’ve seen the final major content release of Burning Crusade Classic, we will soon adjust the behavior of creatures in most dungeons (including the new dungeons coming in Wrath of the Lich King Classic) to make it significantly more difficult to endlessly snare and kite enemies. Additionally, we will implement a reduction to group XP earned when there is large disparity between player levels in the same group.
We’ve experimented with similar changes to most dungeons on our Season of Mastery servers, and we’ve found these changes to be very effective at reducing the efficiency of boosting groups. We plan to roll out these adjustments to Burning Crusade Classic realms at the same time as the Joyous Journeys XP buff, which should happen sometime in the next several weeks. Stay tuned for more information about that and when you can expect to see these changes hit live servers.
This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone that spamming chat channels with advertisements for boosting services outside of dedicated Trade channels is against the Terms of Service, and you should take every opportunity to report players that you see advertising for boosting services in channels such as General and Looking For Group.
We’re really looking forward to players joining us very soon in the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta, and hope to be able to share more about that very very soon as well!
Classic - Looking for Dungeon
As we all know, there’s an infinite amount of ground to cover on this topic. I’m not sure how much I can say that hasn’t already been said before, but what I can assure you of is that our team is extremely committed to finding good solutions to player concerns that don’t compromise on the things that make Classic loved in the first place.
And speaking of solutions, I’ve come bearing some good news: we are actively developing a brand-new Group Finder UI for Wrath of the Lich King Classic! Here’s a small sneak preview of some of the features we’re aiming to deliver.
- New Look, Modern Code: We’ve rebuilt the UI to be easier to read and more inviting than it was in Burning Crusade Classic. Behind the scenes, we’re using our modern Group Finder code, ensuring stability and performance.
- Roles: We’re introducing roles into the UI in Wrath Classic. Partial groups can broadcast which slots they have open, and individuals can specify whether they’re willing to tank, heal, deal damage, or do multiple of the above. Roles are intended to expedite communication – not stifle gameplay creativity – so for the moment we’re keeping all roles open to all classes.
- Solo Listings and Multiple Activities: We envision this Group Finder as a “bulletin board” where players can list activities they want to do and discover others who want to do the same. To that end, we’re supporting listings from both solo individuals and partially filled groups. And if you can’t decide which dungeon you want to run, that’s okay! You can list yourself for more than one.
- Request Invite and Suggest Invite: To smooth out group formation, we’re adding Request Invite and Suggest Invite features. Just remember: a quick “Hey there” is always preferred over a silent and sudden ninja-invite!
- The Single Source for Your Group Finding Needs: We’re aiming for this Group Finding UI to be a one-stop shop for all your group-finding needs. To that end, we’re reviving an old rule from the original Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King: sending messages in the Looking for Group chat channel will require being listed in the UI.
You might be thinking, “no one likes restrictions”. In an ideal world, each individual player would build their groups using whatever tools they deem best for the job. However, we’ve observed that group finding is a social coordination problem, and there’s value in funneling everyone through the same system. If we can create a single “source” through which all group finding is done, all players will reap the benefits.
We’re aiming to have our new Group Finder deliver an effective, efficient, and enjoyable group finding experience, and we want the help of you and other players in getting there. We’ll have a fully functional test version of the Group Finder available on day 1 of the Wrath of the Lich King beta.
We look forward to hearing your feedback!
Patch 9.2 Hotfixes - June 21, 2022
Creatures and NPCs
- Fixed an issue where Princess Tess Greymane would not be present in the Hall of Shadows.
Dungeons and Raids
- Sepulcher of the First Ones
- Halondrus
- Fixed several visual issues with the environment disappearing during the encounter.
- The Necrotic Wake
- Surgeon Stitchflesh
- Fixed an issue causing Festering Rot to not scale its damage properly when cast by Surgeon Stitchflesh's first Creation.
- Reduced the maximum applications of Festering Rot to 15 on Mythic difficulty.
- Developers' note: Our goal with this change is to address an issue that caused Festering Rot to act inconsistently without inadvertently increasing the difficulty of the encounter.
Quests
- The Ilskahorn horn visual should now be removed upon abandoning or completion of “Focusing the Eye.”