wow Live Developer Q/A Round-up: Feb 23

[Stan 5,020]

Game Director Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas was answering player-submitted questions, dealing with a wide-variety of topics such as Legendary items, Artifact Power, 7.2 relics, Mythic raiding and more. Our round-up covers most of the discussed topics.

Artifacts

• Balance of Power appearances won't be account-wide. Effort requirements will be revisited.
• Hidden Artifact appearances have bad luck protection since 7.1.5.
• Artifact appearances aren't cannon, they're only cosmetics, so alt-friendliness isn't important.

Artifact Power

• The goal is to offer progressing of your character providing choices during the process.
• The developers don't want AP to be the only reward you're looking out for. 
• Repetitive farming of Mythic+ isn't fun, which is why a lot of AP rewards were removed from chests and redistributed elswhere.
• In addition to that the amount of AP gained from the weekly chest has been increased.
• Devs want to add diminishing returns to bring players to a point where there's no desire to farm AP any longer.
• They don't want the final 7.2 trait to feel mandatory.
• You won't be able to use items that grant AP that you got with Artifact Knowledge 25 or less to avoid grinding before 7.2.
• New catch-up tomes will be added (similar to those you can buy now).

Datamining

• Game files contain a lot of placeholders, abandoned data or developer ideas. Their removal would cost time that is spent elsewhere for designing new things.

Mythic Raiding

• The devs think there's a lot of grinding, but some issues should be addressed in 7.2 (chain running Maw was specifically mentioned).

Legendary Items

• It wouldn't make sense making legendaries change based on your spec, as they have a fantasy behind them.
• Further bad luck protection improvements down the road for 7.2.
• The system will evaluate how many legendary items you acquired for a specific spec. If you don't have any for spec X, you'll have a higher chance to get one, even though you have more for spec Y.
• Guilds benching players for bad legendaries based on sims aren't making a right choice.
• Crafted legendary items in 7.2 were introduced to keep professions relevant, not to address issues with Legendary items. They can be sold.
• Crafted legendaries aren't intended to be best Legendary items you can get, they provide a "solid middle ground" and don't count against bad luck protection.

Patch 7.1.5

• Changes to secondary stats were a success, but Unstable Arcanocrystal is an exception. The item won't be used that much when item level increases with Tomb raid in 7.2.

PvP Q/A

• In a few weeks, there will be a PvP Q/A with Holinka including an esports 2017 announcement.

Relics

• Order Hall research in 7.2 has two additional tiers and the 7th tier adds a secondary trait to relics.
• These relics narrow down the difference between best and worse relics and offer exciting relic rewards from a variety of bosses.
• The secondary trait will always be a throughput trait and different from the first one.

Tier 20 Set Bonuses

• Still in development, nothing's final and they will change before release.
• Legion Tier Sets went to 6/6 to allow equipping of Legendary items and the team thinks it's cool to have a cloak matching your set.
• No plans to make 2-piece bonuses from different Tier Sets exclusive, but if they find out it's the only option they will take a closer look at the issue.

Trinkets

• Players prefer trinkets with stats not active abilities.
• Trinket tuning for 7.2 is still in the works.

Below is the VoD to the Live Developer Q/A

[Wierdone4 0]

What does it mean for the artifacts hidden appearance to have "bad luck protection"?