Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas

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Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
Ion Hazzikostas is here to answer your World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth questions.

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• Class Tuning
  • The team is not done with class tuning. They don't think things are perfect, but want more data to make broader changes over multiple specs.
  • Arms mastery and feral druid AoE were so out of whack that it was almost useless for them and so they changed it immediately so that they could be useful.
  • The target for the first significant balance tuning is aimed for the end of the first week in September.
• Mob Scaling
  • Outdoor world scaling has not changed since 7.2. Blizzard has not changed anything. Argus had the same system.
  • Outdoor world mob scaling is done because the world remains relevant and rewards increase as your item level progresses, so the world should keep pace with you but at a slower pace.
  • Before world scaling, players would become so strong that it would disrupt the outdoor world experience by killing mobs too fast for others to tag them.
  • Creatures only end up with about 3-4% more health at higher gear levels after dungeons.
  • There are some outlier mobs that scale too much, but these are addressed as they are discovered.
• Mob Scaling while Leveling
  • Lack of progression while leveling is something the team understands and wants to address and do better with it in the future.
  • Before the world scaled to level, the increased challenge of mobs was not felt as much because you were usually fighting creatures in the higher level zones which felt understandable.
  • They are aware and agree that these more challenging mobs at max level that you had an easier time with at lower levels is not a good feeling.
• World PvP Level Scaling
  • A hotfix was deployed to lessen the scaling issues of lower levels against higher levels in world PvP.
• Item Level Increase at Max Level
  • The reason item level increases rapidly right after reaching max level is to make sure upgrades feel relevant and noticeable.
  • There has to be a big enough increase to upgrades to help with the tougher content that is coming soon.
  • They have tested many different progression levels and are pretty happy with where they have landed.
• Removal of Auto Accept and Group Finder Add Ons
  • The team felt that the auto accept and group finder add ons was turning into a button to auto complete world quests.
  • They want us to actually socialize and group with players to work together instead of just pushing a button and using each other.
  • Automating the process makes world quests essentially just traveling around the map and pressing a button and not an experience.
  • The trade off of auto accept would have to be making world quests objectives larger to offset the ease of the automated process, and that isn't fun either.
  • World quests are balanced around many different play styles including solo players who don't group often.

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