Legion Pre-Expansion Patch Hits - everything changes

[Azuredream]

I heard a theory that they rushed the release of this patch to coincide with FF14s recent patch. May or may not be bullshit but this patch with all its bugs and seeming lack of things to do screams rushed to me.

[Ironwood]

Rokal, that sounds beyond awful.  Particularly the iLevel thing.

I'm just going to continue with SWToR which is at least upfront about when it's fucking you.

[Xanthippe]

Hah.. morons and fanbois in charge now.

Indeed. This is why I never played EQ - because my perception of it was that it was punishing by design.

Now WoW is too.

[Xanthippe]

Here is Game Director Watcher's explanation:

Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider.

We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty.

But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher?

To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die.

Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.)

The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing.

Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion.

and later in the same thread where players are expressing their dislike of this:

To be clear, it's unacceptable to us for the "right" thing in any form to ever be equipping weaker gear, unequipping items, or doing things that in any way lower your "absolute" power. There are a couple of loopholes where that is true currently, and they'll be high-priority fixes for us in the next day or two.

Also to be clear, scrapping the entire system is certainly still an option. My post was not meant to be a "too bad, get used to it" proclamation.

But I did want to lay out what we consider to be the very real problem we're trying to solve here. I also understand that to many folks it doesn't appear to be a real problem at all, and it seems like we're just trying to throw up pointless obstacles.

Power always feels good. It feels better to kill something in 5 seconds than in 10, especially when you remember when it took 10. Even better when you can do it in 2. Better still when you can kill 4 or 5 things in that time. But is there a point where that goes too far? We think so, and we're just looking to ease up off the gas pedal a little bit. We don't want to halt the power curve, and certainly never to go in reverse, but rather to take a bit longer on our road to an endgame world where everyone effectively walks around death-touching mobs for quest credit.

So basically, "we released a tiny bit of content to stretch this expansion but with ilvl scaling the old content will feel stronger, and didn't think we ought to tell you."

I just cancelled. I don't want to struggle through the rest of this with my disc priest, which already kills shit slow enough even at ilvl 867.

[Ironwood]

That's a lot of fucking words to say essentially fuck all.

Basically, we don't want to release new content, we want you on this hamster wheel forever, so we removed the horizon for it and you went and fucking noticed, you filthy fucking wallets.

Oh Dear.

[Merusk]

I wouldn't go that far, but it's still pretty near to it.  This is a fundamental change in the game function and mechanics that stretches back to inception. It's not something you roll-out in a mid-game patch, and certainly not something you change without big announcements so you get enough testing feedback to make good decisions.

While I understand the sentiment; we want content to remain relevant and not have players 1 shot it with a weak ability - you don't make that call without a feedback cycle. You don't get to arbitrarily decide, "you weren't having fun one-shotting things. trust us!"  Hubris and arrogance writ large there.

[Rendakor]

They sure make it easy not to resub.

[Rokal]

They've made a couple changes after the patch backlash.

-Enemy damage scaling with ilvl has been removed.
-Enemy HP scaling with ilvl has been reduced by about half of what it was, so stuff is back to dying pretty fast.
-They've increased the resource contribution build speed for the "server shared" Broken Isle buildings, so it should take 4-5 days to build each instead of 1-2 weeks.
-They fixed whatever was causing rare mobs to not spawn or show on maps, so they're pretty prolific now.
-Additional non-daily Quests are very slowly starting to open up.

On the downside, I've done Broken Isle World Quests for 3 days now, ~4 quests a day, and have already seen several repeats. It sounds like the quests are supposed to be diversified as buildings are finished and class-based WQs are unlocked, but for the time being the Island still feels very boring and unsatisfying.

They also released a content schedule:

    Week 2 (next week): Legion Assaults begin, first PvP Brawl becomes available
    Week 3: Chapter 5 of the Class Order Hall campaign unlocks, which activates new followers, new Order Hall upgrades, and class-specific World Quests
    Week 4-11: Ongoing story pieces unlock, leading up to the eventual opening of the Tomb of Sargeras raid, and the ability to earn Class Mounts

I'd definitely hold off on resubbing even if you enjoyed the previous Loot islands, as there just isn't much to it yet. They called this "The largest content patch in WoW history" in interviews and, as it stands, it feels significantly smaller than several older content patches. Some of the major features they hyped up, such as Class Mounts, are seemingly not going to become available for months.

[Merusk]

Months should surprise no-one. They haven't even spoken of the next expansion at this point, so it's 12 months minimum before it releases. The usual year between last patch and next expansion at this point.  They know this so dragging it out as much as possible should be their goal.

[Goldenmean]

Months should surprise no-one. They haven't even spoken of the next expansion at this point, so it's 12 months minimum before it releases. The usual year between last patch and next expansion at this point.  They know this so dragging it out as much as possible should be their goal.

Except this isn't the last patch, so that argument doesn't really apply (at least not yet). Blizzard have fumbled some things this expansion, like always, but they've actually been releasing content at a fairly decent pace.

[Xanthippe]

I don't care if the content they are releasing is stupid moronic bullshit like mobs scaling to ilvl.

This is so bad that it makes it easy for me to break up with WoW without looking back.

[Paelos]

It's a time-gated loot island. There is barely anything to do right now, and little loot to be had: no chests, no rares, just a couple world quests in a very densely populated zone. They've said they are going to roll out patch features and quests over the next 11 weeks+, so you probably shouldn't bother checking it out now.

Finishing the WQs allows you to contribute towards a server-wide building on the loot island that gives you a few more activities, but the process is so slow that it's going to take 1-2 weeks just to build a single building, which the Legion will destroy and reset after 2-3 days. It currently feels like the AQ war effort, if you remember that, in that you are doing boring tasks to contribute like 0.0001% towards the progress of the server's goal. Only this time instead of permanently unlocking the raid, the reward is unlocking a non-permanent building.

Another intentional stealth-change joy this patch brought: world mobs now scale with your ilvl, meaning enemies you fought pre-7.2 may now have several million more HP, higher damage, and take longer to kill. If you're trying to do WQs in a healing spec or a tank spec, you'll notice it takes forever to kill anything now. When doing the new artifact weapon trait unlock quest on my raid-geared shaman last night, I was taking 30-50 seconds to kill each single mob.

The solution to this, which they've implied they are going to hotfix out, is just to remove a piece of gear to lower your average ilvl. Removing a ring on my shaman dropped mob HP in Broken isle by over 33%, which is roughly what it was before patch.

Great patch guys  

Holy shit, that's not even B-team. That's D minus team.

[Polysorbate80]

The mage tower building opened on my server today. 

In fine Blizzard fashion, all of the quests it gives out seem to be tuned to a level of gear they haven't introduced yet 

[Goldenmean]

You guys keep putting me in the weird position of defending Blizzard. I finished the mage tower challenge today on my main spec. I used to be a hardcore server first raider back in vanilla, but at this point pretty much sign in once a week and do the casual/alt heroic raid and that's about it. I'm ilvl 896, so not even close to pushing the limits of even current gear, and I managed it. It was hard, but easily in my top five favorite things I've done in WoW.

With that said, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do that challenge as some of the other specs that have access to it.

[Polysorbate80]

I like the wowhead comment description of the resto druid challenge:  the tank isn't geared for the fight, uses no active mitigation, and can't peel or interrupt mobs.  The rogue spends the whole time standing in shit.  The hunter is always shooting the worst possible targets.

And it's the healer's fault when they fail.

So a pretty regular day for a healer overall 

[Zetor]

That's pretty much how the healer Proving Grounds always worked, except the tank used aoe stuns overlaid with your own (like shaman capacitor totem), the rogue and mage would try to interrupt things but regularly blow their interrupt at the same time, and the hunter would always ALWAYS stand in fire (to the point that the mage would yell at him ever so often, and then he'd finally move).

Most importantly, the mage always (ALWAYS) talked trash when a wipe happened. "Oh, did you forget to heal yourself?" "When we're taking damage this quickly, you need to use your fast heals!". Well OK, I think the tank would sometimes whine too to the effect of "I can't take this much damage!". So yeah, WOW has had a pretty legit PUG simulator since Pandaria.