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Author Topic: The "WoW in 2016" Thread  (Read 91208 times)
Merusk
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Reply #105 on: July 02, 2016, 06:56:33 AM

Class quests are making a huge comeback in Legion thanks to Class Halls and Artifact weapons.

Also, new expansion tech continues to blur the lines between why we even bother having realms in the first place:

If WoW were to launch today we wouldn't have realms. Distributed computing is a far, far different world now than it was 18 years ago when they were developing the server architecture.

(WoW was announced in 2001 here's the gameplay trailer so they had at least a few yars dev at that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzM9lRWtETE)

The only reason they keep them around is the playerbase still views Realm-name as a part of their identity.* Even though I haven't played since October and had a two year break before that I'd feel a loss if Alleria were to be merged into nothingness. Then you'd have people losing their names on top of it so they'd just fuck-off rather than come back. Happened to my wife now that the Islamic State has ruined the handle she used for 20 years. Stopped her playing entirely, she says it's not the same and she misses the name.


*Well that and the sweet, sweet character transfer fees.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
luckton
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Reply #106 on: July 18, 2016, 11:05:56 AM

The Legion pre-launch patch goes live tomorrow. So long, Garrisons!  awesome, for real

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
Ginaz
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Reply #107 on: July 18, 2016, 02:26:19 PM

The Legion pre-launch patch goes live tomorrow. So long, Garrisons!  awesome, for real

Garrisons aren't going away, they just won't be the source of gold they once were.
Merusk
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Reply #108 on: July 18, 2016, 02:26:52 PM

Same diff.  awesome, for real

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Soulflame
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Reply #109 on: July 18, 2016, 06:51:41 PM

Yeah.  It's MMO logic.  There's too much shit to do, so you focus on the most optimal tasks.

If garrisons aren't the most optimal way to earn gold, they will be largely ignored.
Merusk
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Reply #110 on: July 18, 2016, 07:05:50 PM

Factions,for example, haven't gone away. Nor has the endgame content for all previous expansions. When's the last time you went and did your Shattered Sun dailies? Or ran to Pandaria to farm your crops? (And that was just the last expansion.)

Garrisons are dead, like your farm. Long live the Class Hall.. until the next X-pac.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Ginaz
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Reply #111 on: July 19, 2016, 05:33:50 PM

Oh, man, melee hunters! Heart Heart Heart
Evildrider
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Reply #112 on: July 19, 2016, 07:56:06 PM

Oh, man, melee hunters! Heart Heart Heart

here come even more Drizzzzzzzzts   awesome, for real
Hawkbit
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Reply #113 on: July 20, 2016, 07:10:49 AM

I only managed to get one of my characters to 100 in WoD, the rest are stuck at 90. If I wanted to get a few of them to 100, is there a quick, non-pay-boosted way?
Xanthippe
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Reply #114 on: July 20, 2016, 08:00:20 AM

There's a medallion that boosts xp gain. Usually sells for 3k to 4k on my server. Personally, I just sell mine.

If you have a boost to 90, better use it before buying Legion, or it goes away (I found out the hard way). Or maybe it went away in the last patch. I don't know if it goes away because I now have a boost to 100 for buying Legion or because of yesterday's patch. EDIT: My 90 boost reappeared, so I now have 2 boosts, one to 90 and one to 100 (I never used the one I got last time).

Rested xp and questing is the only way I know to get from 90 to 100.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2016, 04:10:21 PM by Xanthippe »
Merusk
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Reply #115 on: July 20, 2016, 09:46:02 AM

Once Legion hits they'll sell boosts to 100. The CE sold with a L100 boost to begin with, didn't it?

Other than that, yeah, grab some of the XP potions from your garrison, use the medallion and your Heirlooms. You've got a grind ahead of you.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Hawkbit
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Reply #116 on: July 20, 2016, 10:35:47 AM

Thanks. It appears the best bet is stick to my 100 hunter or just not play. Shame; I have no desire to go through any guided WoD quest experience again.
dalien
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Reply #117 on: July 20, 2016, 03:16:03 PM

If you happen to have Draenor flying unlocked on your account you can level alts 90-100 pretty fast by just flying around and picking up treasures.  Get the Handynotes addon with the Draenor treasures plugin, it shows everything you haven't collected on your map and removes them as you collect them.  10k-40k exp per treasure and you can sweep them up pretty fast (protip: swap in stables for your large garrison building so you can loot everything while mounted).
luckton
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Reply #118 on: August 01, 2016, 04:07:25 PM

WoW Legion: Extended Preview Trailer

Basically it's a 2.0/remixed/extended version of the first "Feature Overview", but now using end of beta footage and finalized stuffs.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
luckton
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Reply #119 on: August 19, 2016, 01:00:07 PM

Dumping this here, as it's info that covers the overall grand plan in the short to mid-term future of WoW this year and next. From Fatboss.tv, an interview with Bliz regarding Legion, patches, and everything in between:

https://www.twitch.tv/fatbosstv/v/84480726

Notes taken from MMO-Champ:

Quote
Patch 7.1
-Patch 7.1 has three major pieces: Karazhan, a small raid, and additional quests in Suramar.
-We will get a lot more detail on Patch 7.1 after Legion launches.
-Patch 7.1 was announced now to underscore the team's commitment to patch content as part of Legion.
-Karazhan is a Mythic dungeon (not Mythic+) with a weekly lockout.
-Karazhan is a long enough dungeon that some people might do part of it one night and then come back to finish it another night.
-Patch 6.2.3 was a pretty successful patch for what it was, mostly a systems patch that revitalized existing content and gave players a reason to revisit stuff.


New Dungeons
-The old dungeon structure didn't give the team a good way to add dungeons that fit into the existing ecosystem of dungeons without stepping on the old ones.
-When ZA and ZG were introduced, they gave better loot than the older dungeons, so people went from running a diverse set of dungeons to running just the troll dungeons.
-With Mythic+ dungeons and Warforged/Titanforged gear in dungeons the team can add new dungeons that have a higher baseline difficulty and rewards that coexist the existing dungeons.

Raid Release Schedule
-There will be a blog post coming out in the next few days that has the full raid release schedule.
-The schedule will be similar to previous expansions, where everything is closed for the first three weeks, then Normal and Heroic Nightmare open, the PvP season begins, and Mythic keystones become available
-Nighthold is an early 2017 raid, towards the very beginning of 2017.
-In Warlords, it felt like Foundry came out too soon in relation to Highmaul for a lot of guilds and raid groups. The top end raiders were ready for it, but tons of other players were still working on it. Foundry came out and they felt rushed into that.

Mythic+ Dungeons
-The world first type raiders will be playing a lot the first few weeks of raiding. Instead of doing five split clears they may end up doing lots of Mythic+ dungeons, which isn't the end of the world.
-The average group will probably play through all of the Mythic keystones in the group and that is it. That might take 12 - 15 dungeon runs, which is longer than most guilds raid in a week.
-It would be easy to add a hard weekly lockout on Mythic keystones to prevent people from farming them for loot, but that would lead to people logging in on Tuesday, doing their Mythic run for the week, and being done.
-With keystones, if you log in later in the week and have a fresh keystone ready to go, people will be lining up to run the dungeon with you.
-Currently rewards cap out at Mythic+ 10, which rewards gear that is roughly on par with Heroic Nightmare gear. The real reward comes from the weekly chest, rewarding the mythic raid gear.

Legendary Items
-There is a little bit of tuning still to be done on the legendary items that are outliers.
-There will still be some items that are the best and some that are the worst.
-The legendary items are a chance to try out interesting effects that aren't just a damage throughput increase.
-If you are someone that never sets foot in a raid zone, getting a legendary item should still be exciting for you.
-There are some legendary items that are amazing in a raid over a long fight that aren't as useful for a player that is just soloing in the world. A more utility related legendary might be a huge deal for that player.
-There are plans to add more legendary items as the expansion progresses.
-The team decided not to start out with a system that allowed you to target a specific legendary item.
-As more are added, there will be some threshold at which there are so many out there that it feels like you can't reasonably expect to get any of the specific ones you want. At that point being able to target certain legendary items will make sense.

Artifact Weapons
-The team will avoid nerfing a spec from being a little too good to the worst so that you don't feel that all of your Artifact progression was a waste.
-Artifacts are something that will continue to grow and evolve so that Artifact Power matters for the entirety of Legion.
-Classes are balanced against each other without Artifacts or Legendary items. The Artifacts and Legendary items are then balanced against each other separately.

Melee vs Ranged
-In Mythic+ dungeons melee do really well thanks to their cleave and mobility compared to casters that have to stand still.
-Melee may be a little stronger in Mythic+ dungeons while ranged are a little stronger in raids, which is fine as long as the gap isn't too large.
-The team doesn't want to solve the melee vs ranged problem by making life boring for melee and making raid mechanics that don't target them at all.
-The community doesn't do a great job when something is 1% better and they claim it is the only viable option and everything else is garbage.

Ability Pruning
-You prune a plant to guide its growth in new directions that are hopefully more aesthetically pleasing. It is removing stuff to make room to add new stuff.
-One of the themes of Legion class design is to emphasize strengths and weaknesses of classes.
-A lot of the things that were removed were removed after looking back at classes over the years where the class designers had taken the easy route. The team was coming up with a new set of abilities for an expansion or needed new talents and asked themselves what that class needed. If a class wasn't very mobile, they gave them a talent row with mobility options. Players thought this was amazing and what they always wanted, but that led to a lot of homogenization.
-In a world where no one has weaknesses there are also no strengths.
-In Legion there is now room to add interesting utility, especially for specs that feel like they don't bring much beyond their throughput.
-Bring the player, not the class was a reaction to the hyper regimented raid structure of Burning Crusade where buffs were party based and synergy was more important than anything else.
-The team would like to get back to a place where if you are a PuG leader, you are looking at your raid comp and saying, "We could really use a Hunter, let's look for a good hunter", rather than "Let's look for any ranged DPS, especially the flavor of the month that is 2% better and thus is the only viable one". Obviously this isn't the case literally right now, but it is what the team is thinking about and would like to move towards over the course of patches and future content.

Expansion Launches
-There is a lot that has been done by the server team and how the world is designed that will make the Legion launch smoother than the Warlords launch.
-Zones scale in level so the population will be distributed across the different zones.
-Under heavy load there will also be multiple versions of the same zone on the same server to make sure that server performance is okay and gameplay feels good.
-One of the things that caused problems for servers at Warlords launch, especially on the Horde side, was the Spyglass that was needed to start the Horde Garrison. It was only usable by one player at a time, which caused a bit of a bottleneck.
-The team hotfixed the Spyglass to be usable by multiple players at a time, but something went wrong with the hofix and then no one could use the Spyglass!
-Horde players in North America were all stuck there for a few hours until the team could fix it, resulting in a big clump of players all hitting the garrison at the same time, making server problems much worse.
-Everyone on the server was doing Frostfire at the same time, resulting in a laggy zone and even more players building up there, making things even worse.

Raid Structure and Rewards
-The current raid structure didn't change this expansion because there isn't a huge problem to fix. All of the raid structure changes in previous expansions were targeted at solving a particular problem.
-Classic to Burning Crusade changed because the logistics of 40 man raiding were overwhelming for a lot of guilds, players were a cog in the giant raid machine. "Your job is to dispel this one person and that is your only job in this giant 40 player group". It was fun for the raid leader to plan all of that out but less fun for the players.
-The introduction of 10 player raiding allowed the team to let more types of players and groups experience the content.
-Flexible raiding is probably the best raid structure the team has done and is working well.
-Three difficulties plus Raid Finder means that there is a raid difficulty for all of the different groups. Normal for friends, family, and PuGs. Heroic for guilds that are formed for the purpose of raiding, Mythic for the extremely hardcore players.
-Mythic needed a fixed size so that tuning could be done in a way that is satisfying.
-Being able to split the raid into groups that could go off and do a mechanic and assuming that the raid had one of every class was part of the encounters that the team wanted to design for Mythic, so the 20 player size felt like the right number. A smaller group size such as 15 players might have also worked, but that would have been tougher for the groups that were already at 25.
-The team was worried that LFR was growing too much in prominence in some ways, so they wanted to make sure that players were doing regular group raiding didn't also feel obligated to do lots of Raid Finder to complement that. The team probably overdid this in Warlords by removing Tier sets from Raid Finder, so they are coming back to Raid Finder in Legion.
-Most of the players that are raiding competitively will already have set pieces before that Raid Finder wing opens, so they won't feel obligated to go and do it when it opens.
-If you have been really unlucky and want your set bonus, this gives you another chance to go and get that last piece.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
Paelos
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Reply #120 on: August 22, 2016, 06:49:02 AM

What's a mythic dungeon? How does the new dungeon/raid scaling system work now? I have been out since early panda.

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Rokal
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Reply #121 on: August 22, 2016, 09:44:56 AM

It's still the WoD raid difficulty system, but it's complicated because the names don't mean the same thing as they did in expansions past.



Instead I'll just tell you what they are now in reality rather than on paper.

All difficulties except Mythic raids are now Flex group size, which means they scale with your group size from 10-25. All difficulties except Mythic raids can be played in cross-realm groups with friends as well.

LFR is still LFR, an auto-formed group through the LFG tool.

Normal (aka the old "Flex") is slightly easier than "Normal" was in previous expansions, and is intended for PuGs or casual guilds.

Heroic (aka the old "Normal") is for dedicated raid guilds, and got increasingly harder as WoD went on. It got to the point where it was almost too hard for my raid guild, who didn't really have any issues with the "Normal" of MoP or Cata. Unsure how it'll be for Legion.

Mythic is locked at a group size of 20 and is for hardcore raiding guilds.


Dungeon difficulty had a bunch of changes.

Normal is for leveling. Dungeons scale to your level when you queue for them.

Heroic is for level cap. Very accessible, can be queued for via the LFG tool.

Mythic is the hardest difficulty available for dungeons. You need to manually form your group and it rewards better gear than LFR raids. The LFG tool does have a section to find other group members for specific content, searchable via category and keyword, which you can check out now if you want to run WoD Mythics or old raids, so it won't be quite the same trade chat spam fest. It's very handy if you are looking for transmog in raids that aren't soloable, etc.

Mythic+ is the replacement for challenge modes. If you played Greater Rifts in Diablo 3, you'll have an idea for what the mode plays like. The difficulty increases each time you beat a dungeon within a generous time limit, until you fail at which point you cash-out for the week. They reward raid-equivalent gear. There are also different modifiers each week, such as

Quote
Bolstering - Non-boss enemies will buff nearby allies' health and damage when defeated.
Raging - Non-boss enemies will enrage at low health, dealing double damage until killed.

It's a lot to digest and there aren't really any good guides about it yet. You can read a bit more about the modifiers here though.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20743006610#1

They won't be enabled on Day 1 Legion, in any case.
Merusk
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Reply #122 on: August 22, 2016, 10:11:21 AM

Heroic raids got ultra-stupid in WoD and were what fractured my old guild. (What broke them was the "no new conent" statement.)

When Hellfire Citadel (the last raid) issued we beat our heads against it for weeks, only getting past the first 5 bosses after about two months. That's crazy-hard for a guild that's dedicated to raiding and is doing it 4 nights a week for 4 hours.

We'd struggled with Heroic Foundry and only barely got a kill on Blackhand before it opened up. (And had also struggled on the last boss of Highmaul for a while, never hitting Mythic for the dungeon.) Prior to that expansion, the guild had hit the final tier on all raids, including clearing Mythic on all dungeons in Pandaria.

Blizzard just upped the difficulty so much it killed the fun for a lot of people. I wonder about how successful Legion will be if they keep that same difficulty curve. It's the same problem you ran into at the end of Vanilla when only 2-3% of the population got to even see Naax. When you're tuning content for less than 5% of your playerbase, you're going to lose a lot of them and generate ill-will.

WoW's old enough they can't rely on people to keep coming back because they're the only game in town anymore.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Rokal
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Reply #123 on: August 22, 2016, 01:16:37 PM

That story echoes what happened to my guild almost exactly. Struggled extremely hard on Heroic Blackhand (took 137 attempts for our kill) and barely finished it a few weeks before Hellfire Citadel launched. We finished Hellfire Citadel as well, but it was a long and unpleasant 5-month process. By the end everyone was miserable, and we won't be raiding as a guild in Legion.

This was a guild that, like yours, had no issues finishing the old "normal" raid difficulties in MoP and earlier expansions while the content was current.

It seemed like part of it was that they balanced Hellfire Citadel around everyone having the Legendary Ring, but whatever the case we felt the difficulty ramp in the expansion and it was much too much for us.
Paelos
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Reply #124 on: August 22, 2016, 02:07:38 PM

I plan on doing LFR at most, and probably some dungeons as the primary source of content. We'll see how that fares with my small group. I'm not built for the raiding game anymore.

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Merusk
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Reply #125 on: August 22, 2016, 02:59:21 PM

Since they're actually including sets in LFR once more it becomes a non-shitty option again. I'll be doing the same thing, since I can't do 9pm-midnight/ 1am raids during weekdays anymore and nobody does things on weekends.

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luckton
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Reply #126 on: August 22, 2016, 03:38:33 PM

There is also going to be an Order/Class Hall set that you can purchase after unlocking certain thresholds in your progress:

Helm - simple Order Hall quest
Wrists - Recruit 6 Champions for Order Hall.
Gloves - Honored with Nightfallen.
Leggings - Revered with 3 Broken Isles reputations.
Feet - Defeat the final boss of every Legion Dungeon.
Chest - Complete your Class Order Campaign.
Belt - Earn 50,000 Artifact Power.
Shoulders - Exalted with the Nightfallen.

The suits are pretty much re-colors of MoP Challenge Mode suits, so if you missed those, you can now get the knockoffs.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
Paelos
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Reply #127 on: August 23, 2016, 07:45:09 AM

Currently I'm making doing invasions and running legacy raids for transmog options. So there's that.

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Azuredream
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Reply #128 on: August 23, 2016, 08:53:28 PM

I'm really impressed by whatever technology they used with the invasions to make them scale to everyone's level. I think there are some hiccups where the scaling is broken but for the most part it works really well. I'm not sure if they've been doing it for a while or if it's new, but I hope they use this tech more going forward.

The Lord of the Land approaches..
ezrast
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WWW
Reply #129 on: August 23, 2016, 09:45:18 PM

Yeah, it's pretty cool that they managed to adopt the exact tech that City of Heroes had in 2005.
Ginaz
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Reply #130 on: August 23, 2016, 09:46:45 PM

I'm really impressed by whatever technology they used with the invasions to make them scale to everyone's level. I think there are some hiccups where the scaling is broken but for the most part it works really well. I'm not sure if they've been doing it for a while or if it's new, but I hope they use this tech more going forward.

I believe all of the new Legion zones will work like this.  Elder Scrolls Online is doing something similar for all of its zones in October, too.
Merusk
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Reply #131 on: August 24, 2016, 06:21:17 AM

Yep, you can start in any zone in Legion and it scales as you level-up. Makes things a bit more interesting as you can't just go back to old zones and slag things to get achieves/ missed treasures.

Yeah, it's pretty cool that they managed to adopt the exact tech that City of Heroes had in 2005.

Yeah, it's about time. Though Blizzard always gave the excuse they had more complicated stats than other games, and for the most part that was true. Now that things have really been homogenized down to one primary stat and Crit, Haste, Vers, Mastery they were out of excuses.  Now if only they'd extend it to old content so you don't have to raid/ run only the most-current dungeons.


Oh and speaking of Missed Treasures - IF you're going to play Legion and don't mind gameplay spoilers read this!

Everyone gets an artifact weapon. That weapon works like some of the old Final Fantasy skills systems. You accrue points, you buy nodes, the artifact gets more powerful. The item level however, only changes by sticking relics into three slots that unlock by running quests related to the weapon.

These are important to know. Why? Because the nodes are largely useless for leveling once you've got the weapon. You won't unlock enough of them as you go through quests and find treasures because you get only 10/ 20 "Artifact Power" at a time from the items you find. Plus the nodes increase in cost each time you unlock one.

The first is free via quest, the second is 300 AP, the third is 325 and it goes up from there in increments of 25. You can't move on to the next node until you've fully upgraded the one preceding it in the tree.

I was 102 when I got bored of Beta and I'd only gotten enough points to unlock one node and level it up one step. At that rate I might have gotten 3 or 4 nodes by the time I hit the cap if I *really* hunted for Treasures instead of just picking them up as I leveled.

However: At the endgame you get a bunch of quests that give you tons of artifact power. Since the system is meant to be an endgame system and power is focused there. Sucks for anyone starting late or alts, right?

Wrong: Blizzard has implemented a system called "Artifact Knowledge" that gives bonuses to these items and quests. You unlock the ability to research at level 108.  Each level gives a bonus to any Artifact Power you find, up to 24,900% at the cap.

http://www.wowhead.com/currency=1171/artifact-knowledge

SO! if you hold-off and do NOT pick-up treasures or start those quests until after you have a few levels of Artifact Knowledge under your belt you'll see HUGE gains in the amount of nodes you can unlock.

There was an exploit (just patched) that made the treasures 'upgrade' to your current AK level if put in void storage. They patched that out, but the treasure items are still affected by it.  So if you can delay gratification a bit, you'll be able to unlock things a lot better.

Those 10-50exp treasures become much more valuable if you have even just 3-4 levels of AP, and the quests which grant thousands of AP as a baseline are ridiculously more profitable with levels.

With Legion going live in a week I don't expect this to be changed soon. I do expect it to be changed once Blizzard sees the results of the first few large groups doing it. As always with Expansions the early birds will reap the rewards.

Of course nothing says you have to Min/ Max this way. I just wanted everyone to know so nobody felt feel cheated when they found out later.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2016, 06:25:38 AM by Merusk »

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
luckton
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Reply #132 on: August 24, 2016, 09:41:25 AM

/snip

Hate to rain on the parade, but Bliz is apparently playing 4D chess, and continues to be a step ahead of you lot.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20748135380?page=5#post-91

Quote
The fact that Artifact Power rewards from quests and treasures now scale with Knowledge is not a bug.

We started off the design of the system thinking along the exact same lines as many of the posters in this thread: We figured that we should make sure that one-time AP rewards did not scale, or else the "right" answer might be to delay completing key quests or collecting any treasures until you had higher Knowledge. And that didn't sound like much fun.

So we spent the first half of beta with all repeatable AP sources (world quests, item drops, missions, etc.) scaling, and all story quests and treasures flat. We added multipliers to things like Suramar or Order Campaign quests that tried to incorporate a likely expected Knowledge level at the point where players would get to that content. So, for example, finishing the third chapter of the Suramar campaign awarded a flat 10k Artifact Power, since by that point we expected players to likely have a ~14x multiplier from being around Knowledge Level 12, and we wanted to make sure that the reward still felt meaningful to that player.

But as we were actually playtesting extensively and getting into endgame ourselves and going through the Artifact Power and Knowledge progressions, we realized two things:
Artifact Power isn't a limited resource. There's always more available. There are world quests popping up every few hours, dungeons that can be repeatedly run, and so forth. And regardless of what we did with one-time sources, the vast majority of a player's AP over the course of the expansion would come from repeatable sources.
Even trying to account for an expected "par" Knowledge level, any time you came across a non-scaling reward that was aimed at someone with a lower Knowledge level, it felt pretty bad. Stumbling across a zone side-quest you'd missed and getting 100 AP from it when you needed 70k for your next trait felt like a waste of time. Opening a treasure to get 25 AP when you needed 300k for your next trait felt insulting. The system we'd set up actually encouraged trying to front-load all your AP while it still mattered (e.g. doing a full world tour to collect every treasure possible while still at Knowledge Level 1, since if you waited they'd no longer be worth the time relative to other activities).


So we started changing it. The first step was making treasures and level-up quests scale. That helped, but we still found that someone who delayed doing much in Suramar beyond the initial Friendly unlock, and instead focused on other content (dungeons, world quests, etc.), found all the rewards in the zone incredibly underwhelming once they got around to doing those quests. So just over a month ago, we also converted those rewards to be scaling sources.

Now, we haven't had a new client build since then, so community sites and datamining likely still show the values of the old items. That Suramar Chapter 3 capstone reward mentioned above is not a 10k AP item that gets multiplied by Artifact Power - that'd be pretty crazy. It's now just a 750 AP base item, which will give around 10k AP when you get there if you've been keeping up with your Knowledge.

It's not necessarily intuitive, since at first glance it seems like an obvious flaw in our system that if you wait until Knowledge Level 20 (a month and a half longer) to complete that quest, it'd give over 70k AP instead of 10k. Aren't you "wasting" 60k AP if you don't do that? The key here is that everything is relative. That Suramar quest capstone reward is equal to ~5 world quests. It'll be equal to 5 world quests if you do it ASAP; it'll be equal to 5 world quests if you do it two months later. And it'll contribute roughly the same amount towards whatever trait you're working on at the time.

Finally, it's also worth noting that the biggest one-time sources of AP are the Order Hall campaign, and the Suramar campaign. From a pure min-max perspective (probably the mindset most associated with the competitive raider), you really don't want to delay turning in either of those. The former leads to unlocking your third Artifact relic slot; the latter unlocks additional repeatable sources of AP (new world quests) and eventually access to the two Mythic dungeons, for an extra two Mythic clears each week.

tl;dr: Just get Artifact Power when you find it, as you find it. Enjoy the rewards and the immediate benefit, and you aren't hurting yourself in the long run.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
Merusk
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Reply #133 on: August 24, 2016, 09:53:49 AM

I'll note that post was made only 5 hours ago, AFTER this became a big topic on multiple sites. Note that they say it's not in the beta build yet but we're less than a week out. I'll wager because they've only just realized the problem.

Amusing, but at least it's being worked on. My info was current as of last night when I decided to post it here this morning. As I said it was a public service. There were HUGE gains you'd lose out on if you didn't do it the above method.

Also: Since they didn't even realize the void storage problem until a few days ago, I'm going to call bull on the "just over a month ago" part. That AP knowledge exploit thread is dated August 9th. That is the ONLY blue comment on it and it only happened after /r/wow and some other sites started focusing on this topic after the Void Storage exploit was fixed.

In the reddit thread someone posted directly to that AK exploit thread saying, "great you've fixed that but what about this?  Suddenly we have a blue post about a fix that's in a secret patch that just hasn't been deployed.  Ohhhhh, I see.

 Very little is coincidental in Blizzard land.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2016, 10:00:29 AM by Merusk »

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
luckton
Terracotta Army
Posts: 5947


Reply #134 on: August 24, 2016, 10:08:22 AM

At least it looks like they're trying to up their "we actually give a crap" game.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Now if we can just get Khadgar reigned from epic questing...

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild
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