wow Patch 7.1 Goes Live Oct 25, Legion Q/A Recap

[Stan 5,020]

Patch 7.1 goes live on October 25. Ion Hazzikostas has been answering your questions in the latest Legion Dev Q/A. Check out our recap!

Patch 7.1 Release Date

Patch 7.1's release date has been announced during today's Legion Q/A. It will go live on October 25. This is somewhat unexpected as many of us anticipated the patch to release a little later.

Blizzard Entertainment

Mark your calendars and get ready to make your Return to Karazhan on October 25! Patch 7.1: Return to Karazhan will take you further into the ongoing stories within Legion and bring with it new and exciting challenges.

Are you brave enough to step through this dark tower's doors once more?

(Source)

We've Got You Covered!

During the PTR testing phase of Patch 7.1, we've been preparing previews and here are some you may be interested in:

• Karazhan Preview
• Trial of Valor Preview
• Blood of Sargeras Vendor
• Action Camera Possibly Returning

Legion Q/A 

A Legion Developer Q/A took place today and here's a recap. Ion Hazzikostas has been answering all your questions!

Legion Developer Q/A

Class Balance

• The team is happy with balance, but admits there's still a lot of work to do.
• We should expect some class balance changes before and after Patch 7.1.
• Numbers players are looking at to gauge balance are a reflection of actual people playing the game, not a reflection of sims.
• A large community portion that plays the "strongest thing". Those are the same players that are min-maxing and trying to play the cutting edge.
• Whichever spec is played by most of the people is going to get a natural bump in results.
• Frost Mage was set as an example, He's way better in game than logging sites suggest and that's because a lot of top-notch mages are playing Fire.
  • If the Frost specialization received buffs and became the best spec, plenty of Fire players would feel frustrated with how much effort they devoted to their gear and Artifact weapon.
    • The very same players that made Fire look strong in logs would start switching to Frost.
• The team is trying to avoid wild swings in class balance.
• Bring the player not the class is the main concern, but the game drifted a little to farm from bringing the class.
  • This statement dates back to Sunwell Plateau raiding during late Burning Crusade where you needed a melee group. The Rogue needed a Warrior, the Warrior a Shaman and suddenly there were only two spots left in the melee group.
    • This was a problem and got solved with raid-wide buffs that eliminated mandatory interactions between classes.
  • The plan is to re-introduce abilities that allow to fill special roles or give utility.

Shadow Priests

• There are currently issues with Surrender to Madness. It was supposed to be high risk/high reward, but instead, ended in playing too much of a role in class viability.
  • The team wants to offer other robust alternatives to it, but this won't happen until after 7.1.

Fury Warriors

• Changes are coming in Patch 7.1.
  • These changes are only a band-aid and a future redesign will be necessary.
• The damage penalty is being reduced from 30% to 20%.
• The team admits they should have listened more to the feedback from beta, but better late than never.
• The extra damage taken feels frustrating, because there's no way to control it.
• Ultimately, the fantasy is to giving up some defense for extra damage, but having some control over it.

Protection Warriors

• Should be a combo of tanky and mobile with abilities like Heroic Leap and Intercept that help achieve it.
• Some of the rage from damage taken was a throwback to the old warrior days.
  • Getting punched makes you angry and you use the anger to fuel your attacks.
  • It was a replacement for Vengeance and Resolve.
• It's important for your tankiness to  scale with the content you're doing.

Balance Druids

• Have great utility in Mythic+ Dungeons.

Marksmanship Hunters

• Barrage
  • The team's working to make the ability more consistent, but they need to make sure you can still stand on a hill and hit mobs below you.
  • It may be changed to a cone that is cut in half so that you don't pull things flying high above you. 
  • The talent is currently the best choice in its tier, making it hard to pick an another talent.

Secondary Stats

• The way primary and secondary stats have played out is one of the biggest issues of Legion.
• There are disparities between the value of secondary stats for certain specializations.
• While it's great to have a best/worst stat, items that don't have your best stat shouldn't be worthless.
  • This is something the team wants to fix but in such manner that players won't feel that all of a sudden their item choice is invalid.
• At no point in the game's history have Primary stats been less valuable than Secondary stats.
  • It was caused by being really weak with low crit levels and reaching a soft cap on crit levels towards the end of an expansion.
  • Secondary stats are front loaded now and the issue will get fixed with higher item level gear.
• Even though item level should be a good upgrades indicator, in reality, it isn't. It's especially bad with the personal loot trading system being based on item level.

Crafting Costs

• The team wants to see how the economy's affected by the Blood of Sargeras vendor.
• Expect a huge supply of mats as players will be able to turn their Blood of Sargeras into gold.
  • Despite that, crafting items will still be more expensive as in Warlords.
    • In Warlords prices for Flasks were the lowest in the game's history.
  • There has been a large influx in supply materials as players realized how much demand there is.
    • This is a part of a healthy player economy.
• The consumable psychology needs to be reexamined.
  • Players during Warlords were pre-potting on every pull during progress and farm.
  • But will a single potion REALLY do the magic during learning boss mechanics?
• Certain consumables were designed to be used when they're useful rather than throwing them away without thinking.
• The price of consumables will go down throughout the expansion and if this doesn't happen the team will be making adjustments.

Legendaries

• When it comes down to Legion Legendaries, it's all about the "moments of excitement".
  • Placing Legs on a vendor would feel like a painful grind and once you're done, you'd feel relief, not excitement
• Systems are in place that prevent extremely bad luck.
• Legendaries are altering your gameplay.
• They are a direct complement to Artifact Power.
• Blizzard is aware of player frustration.
  • There are still lots of players who haven't had any luck yet to see a Legendary.
  • Another case is where Legendaries are simply bad and not as good as the team expected. 
    • These will get buffed in a not so distant future.
• Prydaz, Xavaric's Magnum Opus simply feels bad for tanks, but changes could be made to make it better.

Legendary Item Bad Luck Prevention

• No time component associated to how it works.
• If you got a Legendary, you were lucky.
• A single digit percentage of people who got their first leg did get a second one but it didn't have a big impact.
• The team should also have implemented good luck protection for legendaries to address the non-functional perception of the system.
  • Players can randomly get 3 legs without the system being broken, it's RNG.

Raids

• Trial of Valor
  • Won't open on October 25, but two weeks after Patch launch (after BlizzCon).
• Mythic Emerald Nightmare
  • The team isn't satisfied with how they tuned Xavius on Mythic difficulty. Ideally he would have taken at least a few days to kill.
  • The rest encounters had a nice ramp of difficulty.
  • Top guilds are doing a lot of split clears, which result in clearing the raid with a higher item level than other guilds.
    • The developer team would like to find ways to dis-incentivize things done by top guilds like split clears that players don't enjoy, but consider them necessary to stay competitive.
• Karazhan
  • The attunement will be an account-wide unlock and requires followers of item level 850.

Action Camera

• Is making a return  in Patch 7.1 and will disable itself every time you log in.

Bonus Roll

• The Bonus Roll can't award anything else apart from Gold if you get no loot.
• The system needs improvement (e.g. rewarding Artifact Power), because Gold reward feels more like an insult rather than consolation prize.

Mythic+ Dungeons

• There are no current plans to increase the item level rewarded from Mythic+ with the release of Trial of Valor raid.
  • The item level will be increased with the release of the Nighthold.
• While admitting ninja-leaving in Mythic+ is a frustrating experience, the team can't think of alternatives that wouldn't result in a serious abuse of the system.
  • If player swapping would be allowed, what would stop the leader from kicking people and bringing his friends?
  • If the keystone was restored if somebody leaves, every group would make someone leave if the run went bad.

I feel the sudden urge to add my personal opinion here. Like how hard is it to implement a Leaver Penalty that would render the leaver unable to join Mythic dungeons for x days? The penalty would have a multiplicative nature, increasing by +24 hours with every additional leave. Problem solved?

Mythic Dungeons & Class Balance

• The team is aiming for areas of strength and weakness. Not every class can have strong consistent AoE.
  • E.g. a Feral Druid is great at single-target DPS whereas a Demon Hunter does high AoE damage.
• AoE is an important tool for speed farms, which was especially the case during dungeon farming prior to the Emerald Nightmare release.
• If we say "Strong AoE" Shadow Priests probably aren't something you'd think of even though a Shadow Priest was in a group performing well in a Mythic+15 keystone clear.
• It's hard to find a group (regardless of how good you and your spec are) if your spec is perceived by the community as being bad.

Relics

• Unlike other items, item level is what matters when you're evaluating upgrades. The team is perfectly fine with that.
• Relics not being destroyed would result in bags full of relics that players would constantly swap.

Emerald Nightmare Trinkets

• The team is looking at EN trinkets that aren't as powerful as they should be so expect buffs.

Artifact Power & Knowledge

• There are no plants to allow moving AP from one weapon to another.
• AK makes it easy to keep up with your other weapon.
• The team didn't want to have a hard weekly cap. It would feel like a responsibility to hit the cap and after hitting it there'd be no motivation to play.
• Research rates for alts are a little shorter to help them catch up.
• Drastic catch up measures might be necessary in a few months to get you quickly caught up.

World Quests Variety

• Overlapping world quests aren't handled well now.
• The system tries to avoid overlapping and prioritize WQ that haven't been seen recently. 
  • If another quest is still active in that area the system can't put the new one up.
• Quests up often are the only ones available in that area.
• Once UI & gameplay fixes are made, multiple world quests will have the option to appear in a single area, reducing quests that appear too often.

World Quest Rewards

• Rewards aren't adjusted to your loot specialization.
• It'd be annoying if the map changed every time you switch specs.
• Having to cycle between different specs to see different rewards isn't good.
• It allows you to get items for off-specs without having to change your loot specialization.

Hidden Artifact Appearances

• The team's avoiding a singular approach.
• The hunter appearance being on a vendor was implemented to give Hunters an alternative option that wasn't a gun. 
• The Fury Warrior appearance being only from a World Boss is a valid concern and will be addressed in the future.
• If an appearance is hard to get, it's more prestigious and impressive.
• It was fun watching the community come together to find hidden things, hopefully there's more of this in the future.

[Darkjester79 47]

I cannot wait.  I love Kara and everything I read here has me excited!

[Donir 8]

What can I say, hate the speed Blizzard is taking to release patchs and everything. I was hoping that Emerald Nightmare would have more than one month of life.

Probably the expansion with most content and the expansion that most quickly is going to end, is sad for me and probably any other player that like to take his time to play.

Hope Legion doesnt end in one year.

[Kirbyzki 0]

On 10/15/2016 at 7:27 AM, Stan said:

I feel the sudden urge to add my personal opinion here. Like how hard is it to implement a Leaver Penalty that would render the leaver unable to join Mythic dungeons for x days? The penalty would have a multiplicative nature, increasing by +24 hours with every additional leave. Problem solved?

This is a common solution in most games and I think it would be even more successful in wow. But BL if you get dc :P

Great write up thanks a lot

[Valks 2,373]

On 10/15/2016 at 4:12 AM, Donir said:

Hope Legion doesnt end in one year.

To be fair, if they didn't have the new raid, we would have had 6+ months of EN. Doesn't exactly sound that fun, especially for those that have cleared Mythic already. This isn't exactly a big raid either, EN will definitely still be run by many guilds. Loot is the same item level as well.

[Valks 2,373]

18 hours ago, Kirbyzki said:

This is a common solution in most games and I think it would be even more successful in wow. But BL if you get dc :P

Great write up thanks a lot

Surely people could just not leave the group then? They can AFK in the dungeon instead until you kick them or jump around and not participate. If that kick invokes the penalty, people can then abuse it and give people leaver's penalty for "being bad". 

It's a bit more complicated than people think, IMO.

[Kirbyzki 0]

4 hours ago, Blainie said:

Surely people could just not leave the group then? They can AFK in the dungeon instead until you kick them or jump around and not participate. If that kick invokes the penalty, people can then abuse it and give people leaver's penalty for "being bad". 

It's a bit more complicated than people think, IMO.

Yeah you're right there is no black / white way to do it otherwise Blizzard would have already had a system put in I suppose

[demonardvark 556]

how sad, despite the desperate pleas, petitions, and post limit reaching forum posts, nothing about DK scaling or ability fixing at all, shame shame :(

[PatrickHenry 293]

...

On 10/14/2016 at 3:27 PM, Stan said:

The system needs improvement (e.g. rewarding Artifact Power), because Gold reward feels more like an insult rather than consolation prize

You're not just whistling dixie there, pal.

 

[Valks 2,373]

On 10/17/2016 at 1:26 AM, Kirbyzki said:

Yeah you're right there is no black / white way to do it otherwise Blizzard would have already had a system put in I suppose

This often seems to be the case with a lot of things, where there are just so many small things to consider that people can often very easily overlook!

I really do hope they find a solution in the future, but I wouldn't hold my breath!

[Valks 2,373]

On 10/17/2016 at 2:40 PM, PatrickHenry said:

You're not just whistling dixie there, pal.

Literally had to google this because I had no idea what it meant :(

[PatrickHenry 293]

6 hours ago, Blainie said:

Literally had to google this because I had no idea what it meant :(

;)