Legion Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas

Feedbot · Dec 8, 2016

Legion Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
Ion Hazzikostas is back once again and answering your questions today!

If you are a player with 47% crit, you are probably only going to lose a few percent crit after this change. You also got some extra primary stats, so your power shouldn't have changed significantly. It was a shift to move some power away from secondary stats so that a +10 item level piece of loot is almost always an upgrade.
Overall your raid group should have the same or a slightly easier time compared to the week before the patch came out.
Overall the team is mostly happy with balance on live in Patch 7.1, except for a few extreme outliers.
In Legion the team flatted out how secondary stats scale throughout the expansion so that you started the expansion with a reasonable amount of crit. On jewelry there are no primary stats, so it scaled less well than every other item slot. This made it so that it became important for jewelry to have the right secondary stats. Patch 7.1.5 changes jewelry scaling to work in a better way.
Primary stats give tanks avoidance, which isn't super valuable for tanks. In the longer run the team can make primary stats be more important for tanks. You will get more Armor and Stamina as a result of the Patch 7.1.5 changes. The team is still working on this.

Class Changes

The class changes coming in Patch 7.1.5 are a result of the large sweeping changes that came with Legion. Some classes were stripped down and rebuilt in a new way, which resulted in some things being wrong. The team didn't want to leave things wrong until the next expansion.
Legion dropped a boulder in the lake, making ripples (class changes). These ripples will get smaller as the expansion goes on.

Warlocks

Warlocks have a few issues that hinder each spec. Affliction got some mechanical and numerical improvements in 7.1.5.
Demonic Empowerment is a source of frustration, you spend a lot of time building resources and ramping up, you feel like you are juggling a lot of things. This is a larger problem that can't be fixed with tweaking some numbers. The team needs to think about how the rotation flows, make changes, and continue to iterate.
Patches like 7.1.5 and 7.2.5 are targeted to come out around 10 weeks after the last major patch, containing whatever can get finished by that time. Shadow Priests and a few other classes got a lot of attention this time around. Warlock issues will get fixed during the expansion, but the team didn't feel like they could get the changes done in time for this patch.
Destruction lost something with being unable to generate partial Embers. The team wants to try to let Destro Soul Shards behave like Embers, allowing you to generate partial Embers.