#1 - Sept. 14, 2018, 9:10 p.m.
I'll do my best to grab them all. Please try not to make too many duplicate threads on each answer if you can.
Does the dev team agree with the above characterization of the state of Azerite armor? If so, what sorts of things are being thought about and planned to address the issues with the system, and what sort of time frame are we looking at to see those changes landing in game?
How do you plan to resolve the issues that Shamans are facing, both with performance for healing and DPS, and with the actual class design itself? (Examples include: Significant mobility issues, poor defensive options, lack of spell interaction, low rotational complexity for DPS specs, QoL fixes locked behind talents or removed with artifacts)
How to you plan to rebuild trust in Blizzard from the Shaman community, a group that has felt sidelined or antagonized by Blizzard for years (Going back as far as the Bus shock incident in Vanilla or Dot shock incident in BC as examples)?
Island expeditions
The rewards seem lackluster and the expeditions themselves are extremely repetitive.
Are there any plans to make improvements or changes to the expedition system?
Edit: beyond the changes to drop rates that were announced 10m ago - more gameplay wise.
I'm the owner of <Big Dumb Guild>. I've spent a lot of time studying every detail of your game, and I'm hoping you can talk about internal processes and system design decisions. 2 Questions:
1) Raid QA Testing: With Fetid being mathematically impossible for the first 10 hours of progress on US realms before receiving 2 round of substantial nerfs, I'm hoping it's possible to shed some light on your internal QA process for cutting edge raid bosses?
2) WoW's "System Homogenization" Problem: Previous 3 expansions fought against "Class Homogenization." What are your thoughts on the continuous "System Homogenization" in WoW? I'm talking about things like:World Quests (random rewards, WF/TF, chests)
Mission table for 3rd expansion in a row
M+ (random rewards, rolls, keys, affixes)
LFR (bland, no player connections or even shared experience)
Artifacts (neck/azerite are the same as artifacts/relics)
Forced personal loot (less loot agency, not more)
Forced camera distance
Rewards having 3 levels of RNG across the board: If they drop, who they drop for, and what ilvl/sockets they have
Forced abilities onto GCD (adds artificial depth, in reality interrupts flow & creates frustration)
Is the tremendous downtime of Warfronts and the reset for world boss/rares intended? Such as it is, there's just a huge amount of time where nothing is happening. Any thoughts about allowing us to contribute during the attacker phase or something? Because as an Alliance player, it really sucks that after our one evening of killing rares and a world boss, we're sitting around with nothing to do while Horde players do stuff for two weeks.
Regarding the M+ weekly cache:
Three of the people in my consistent M+ group received 370 Azerite pieces that are not worth using over our 340/355 items due to having inferior traits. I can assure you this felt just as bad as only getting one item instead of three.
We're also in a position that the dungeons are the source for a lot of the strongest traits for a lot of the classes - further making it likely that the Azerite piece you may, or may not, get is likely to just be a waste of your weekly cache.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the cache is the most reliable source for a high item level weapon due to their inability to Titanforge.
Would a better solution not have been to have one Azerite piece and one other piece of loot drop from this chest? smoothing the RNG whilst also making the cache feel more rewarding as was the stated intention
The only real problem is how long it feels, that more or less fixes itself if there’s 2-3 more warfronts.
How am I supposed to solve the problem of what is my best gear to wear, without a program that simulates all of the possible combinations of traits and items?
As someone who participated in the beta and personally submitted multiple bug reports and feedback about various issues, I can't help but feel that i wasn't the only one who's testing feedback was ignored. Let's not even talk about how it feels that every fifth quest or item has a typo of some kind, almost like it hasn't been proofread... So i wanted to ask - what was the reason the game launched in the state it was, despite the issues being known?
If these issues were reported, why was the expansion still pushed forward in the state it was in? The beta testing period for BFA was much shorter than for previous expansions - and it shows. Was it just an overestimation on the development team's part, or?
Going forward, do you plan to continue with the goal of "faster expansions", or is there any discussion about return to the previous method of "slower, but more testing" approach?
Hey Ion, can you explain the reasoning behind the excessive time gating that seems to be present in BFA (and in older content as well).
1: What do you plan to do to eliminate Rep grind on alts? It has been stated before Blizzard has no plans in this area but we have reached a point where 82+% of the of the community agrees that Rep should be Cross-Account. Several others have suggested compromises like previous systems in place from other expansions as seen here.
2: Many players are dissatisfied with your current the new Azerite systems. Some players think the new abilities are boring, but most people agree that they are too grindy to unlock especially with an alt. Many players are sick of the carrot and a stick approach to the game which feels like it is directly designed to keep people subscribed and grinding to keep stock holders happy rather than designed to be fun. What plans does blizzard have to alleviate this issue?
3: Why are classes pushed forward clearly unfinished? The two biggest classes that jump to mind are Shadow Priest and Shamans. Edit: Adding Feral Druids to the list from a comment below.
Are defensives like Touch of Karma and Shield of Vengeance intended to be a major part of a specs damage? For example, it’s easy to find Windwalker raid parses of a variety of skill levels where Touch of Karma is 10-15% or more of their overall damage.
Do you think that's healthy for the game?
Are there plans to address this?
What happened to paragon reputation? It seemed like a decent concept, even if there was room for improvement (You can farm legion WQs for the better part of a decade without getting a paragon mount). Right now though i am already exalted with 7th Legion (Gotta get my dark iron!). Island Expeditions, War fronts are mostly meaningless due to this. But i still get 7th legion follower missions just as i still see those obnoxious supply quests in Boralus. Zandalar is mostly useless aswell.
Half the expansion zones, and several expansion features, expired by a single reputation farm. Seems like it could be improved.
Some professions have no use at all or limited use of Expulsom, Hydrocore, and Sanguicell. Do you have future plans to make the aforementioned reagents usable by more professions?
shamans get trounced in damage, mobility, and soaking/immune ability by hunters. What's the offset? Shamans have a healing class? DPS spec shamans can heal a tiny bit while sacrificing even more damage?
What is being done in the immediate future to prevent shamans from further sliding down this slope of irrelevance and can we get some details on what to expect?
Do you see under-performing traits as something that will just be buffed in some way, or do you think some will see reworks to change the power to be similar but work more effectively than they do now? Some traits like surging tides have very little pve use because it requires trying to actively snipe healing to get it to work at all, where if it worked something like Deceiver's Grand Design and consumed the riptide buff for the shield upon hitting the hp threshold, it'd be more competitive with something like swelling streams for example. Every spec seems to have traits where they're just considered to be not worth considering and it really seems like the system would greatly benefit from more balancing to give players more choice in how azerite powers get used without feeling like they're taking a massive power hit to do so.
Additionally, is there a design reason why two armor pieces with the same ilvl require different heart levels to unlock tiers, even if they are largely similar traits on both? It feels weird to see two 370 pieces and have it require 1-3 extra heart levels which can be an extra week or two to see the same amount of unlocks for minimal gain.
Do you plan to go back and retool the Alliance's BFA mounts?