Legion - World Quests
Blizzard gave some additional clarifications today about world quest availability, as well as the original design notes. Please keep in mind we have only had a few days to test it, so the following information could be incomplete or incorrect:
- World quests become available at Level 110.
- These quests have a limited duration, with some as short as a few hours and others as long as a week.
- One faction has a set of emissary quests every day, requiring you to complete four quests for that faction to earn some gold and a cache of loot.
- Each set of emissary quests will be available for three days, so you can have up to three at once.
- Quests appear all around the Broken Isles, with markers on the map:
- Possible rewards include:
- Artifact Power
- Rare item level 805-825+ gear
- Gold
- Pet Battle-Stones
- Order Hall Follower Equipment and Resources
- Crafting Reagents
- Pets and Mounts
- Reputation
- There are several different types of quests:
- Regular, Rare, Rare Elite, Epic, Elite, and Epic Elite World Quests
- Profession World Quests, including Herbalism, Skinning, Mining, First Aid, Fishing, Cooking, and Archaeology
- Dungeon World Quests
- PvP World Quests (Not required to complete Emissary quests)
- Battle Pet World Quests
- The quest icon helps to indicate what type of quest it is. Swords for PvP, Profession icons, Battle Pet icons, and then different rarity colors and borders around the normal quest icon. The dragon border usually indicates a group is required.
World Quest Availability
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Yes! One of our major design goals for the endgame of Legion is getting players out into the world with friends to do activities.
A few things help accomplish this:
1) Everyone in your entire region will see the same World Quests. Invite your cross-server friends, you can all do the same activities!*
2) Similarly, everyone will see the same loot (or a fallback). If a world boss spawns and is going to drop a mount this week, everyone will see (on the World Quest UI) the mount.**
*Some World Quests may be gated behind personal quest progression (e.g. Suramar), though.
**There will still be random, rare toys/mounts/pets from a variety of activities, this is simply a philosophy for World Quests.
We want to make it easy and fun to coordinate an adventure with your friends, no matter where they are in the world, and what item level they're at.
Legion and the Salvage Yard
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
just saw he salvage crate nerf on MMO-C, will that take effect on prepatch, or will we be able to keep our boxes for wardrobe?
In 7.0, Salvage Yard will give a new crate. Pre-existing unopened crates will not be affected. We’re not THAT cruel.
To clarify, changes like this are being made so that you don't feel obligated to run Draenor missions in Legion. (WarcraftDevs)
To clarify: we're going to make sure you can still get the transmog gear sets. The intention is NOT to remove that gear or make it otherwise inaccessible. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
On Pruning, PvP, and Our Goals for Legion
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
So, let’s talk about pruning. I’d like to give some clearer insight into what we’re trying to achieve, and the type of feedback we’re looking for. Warning: there are likely to be many, many words here.
What you’re seeing in Legion falls under one of two different goals:
- Refocusing each spec around their core concepts
- Reduced reliance on cooldowns, both offensive and defensive
I’ll explain these one at a time.
On refocusing: Over the years, as we’ve attempted to add new toys for every class in each expansion, we feel that the gameplay of quite a few specs has drifted away from the philosophies and ideals behind them. For some classes, such as Rogue, the specs don’t really feel very different from each other. For others, such as Priest, the differences are purely mechanical; Discipline uses absorbs, and Holy uses direct healing, but it’s not really clear why.
So, in Legion, we’re taking a hard look at what each spec should make you feel like when you’re playing it, and making sure that the abilities you’re using tie into that. When we talk about “class fantasy,” that’s more or less what we mean. It’s also made us realize that, frankly, we’ve made some mistakes over the years. Each spec is supposed to have some strengths and weaknesses, and as we’ve added abilities to shore up those weaknesses, we’ve diminished the value of their strengths.
Compare a Mage to a Warlock, for example. Mages were supposed to be highly mobile, but very squishy if you can lock them down; Warlocks were supposed to be able to take more direct punishment, but have a harder time getting away. But then we started giving Warlocks more mobility, which meant we had to give Mages more survivability, and nowadays those differences are subtle at best. The two classes should feel a lot more distinct than they do, both to play as and to play against. That means dialing back the mobility for Warlocks, and dialing back the survivability for Mages.
End result: Yes, you’ve probably lost a couple tools in Legion. But so have other people. So, when we get feedback along the lines of “Now I don’t have any way to deal with X”… we might actually think that’s a good thing. In PvP, this means you’re going to rely on your teammates a little more often. In a raid or dungeon, it means you might not want to purposefully stack Warlocks just because “they have the best numbers.”
On cooldowns: We’ve gotten a ton of feedback over the past couple of expansions that players feel like they aren’t able to do much without cooldowns active. When a Ret Paladin uses Avenging Wrath, Holy Avenger, and Execution Sentence all at once, they hit like a freight train carrying a truck full of bricks, but as soon as those effects end, they just kind of… keep themselves busy until their cooldowns are back up. “Your class is fun and exciting 17% of the time” isn’t awesome.
We’ve also gotten to the point where there’s entirely too many “get out of jail” cards in PvP. The Mage is in trouble… Ironbark. In trouble again… Nature’s Swiftness. Then Ice Block. Then another Ironbark. Then a trinket. Then Nature’s Swiftness. Then maybe, if you’re really good, you can get the Mage’s second Ice Block before Ironbark comes up again. He had to use Cold Snap, what an amazing play!
I’m obviously exaggerating here – most of the time, your goal is to force several of those cooldowns at once – but that kind of illustrates the point. In order for a kill to ever happen, things have to get excessive. So, in Legion, we want to chill out on just how strong those cooldowns can be, so that we can let you be more effective once they’ve worn off. Theoretically, we could accomplish that by just making the numbers on those cooldowns lower, but that quickly gets to the point where each individual cooldown just feels flat. “Increases damage by 5% for 20 seconds” just isn’t that exciting. Our only real alternative is to reduce how many cooldowns you have available, so that the ones that are left can still feel substantial.
Now then, on feedback: We recognize that all of these changes are pretty scary, and we’ve been in the MMO business long enough at this point to know better than to assume we’ll get everything right on the first try. So, let’s talk about feedback, and what you can do to help us make Legion an amazing expansion.
Many players have already been providing great feedback and bringing up good points of discussion, which we’re extremely grateful for, and have already made several changes that were influenced by that feedback. For example, pretty early on in the Legion Alpha, we decided against our original thought of removing resurrection spells from non-Healer specs (such as Shadow, Enhancement, or Balance). A lot of you thought that felt weird, and we agreed. More recently, several PvPers have expressed concern that Legion is currently too focused on simply dealing damage, and there aren’t enough opportunities for a skilled player to shine. That’s a big concern of ours as well, and one we’re doing our best to avoid.
However, sometimes good feedback gets so bogged down in hyperbole that it’s hard for us to tell if the point you’re making is based on actual concerns and testing, or if you’ve just been misinformed. For example, one complaint we see a lot is that “classes only have 5 or 6 spells in Legion.” That’s simply not true – as of this post, most specs have between 20 and 25 baseline abilities, with talents, Honor talents, and your Artifact active skill adding up to 5-10 abilities on top of that (and yes, we recognize that not all of those skills will be useful in all situations).
So, the biggest thing that can help us understand your concerns is to be as specific as possible. “I have too few abilities” is certainly a reasonable opinion, but that doesn’t tell us why you feel that way. Instead of leaving at that, try to expand on it a bit:
- What specific ability do you miss, and why do you feel it’s important?
- If you’re concerned that your spec will be too weak in a given scenario, what makes you feel that way? Do you feel you shouldn’t be? Why?
- If you want more abilities, but are taking passive talents instead of active ones, why is that?
- Are the new abilities your spec has in Legion not doing it for you? Why not?
Those are obviously just some examples, but that’s the sort of feedback that lets us really understand what your specific concerns are. And while there are certainly going to be cases in which we just disagree (we’re always going to do what we feel is right for the game), pointing out the underlying issues goes a long way towards making sure we recognize when we need to improve.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Broken Shore Scenario
Thanks for the feedback! What you're seeing is a consequence of the current beta concurrency. The Broken Shore Scenario supports up to 20 allied players at once (and eventually, 20 Horde as well).
New tech allows you to queue and be placed in the scenario immediately, without waiting for a full 20 players. For the first 20 seconds of the boat ride, other players can be placed in the instance, up to the cap of 20.
This will allow you to play a player-filled scenario during the first few weeks of the expansion launch, and continue to play Broken Shore much later in the expansion when less than 20 players are present in the queue.
This also means that the scenario should be fun for both groups of 20 and solo players, please let us know your thoughts! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Raid Testing Schedule - April 15-18
Schedule update: We'll only be testing Tel'arn on Monday.
High Botanist Tel'arn - Heroic Nighthold
14:00 PDT (17:00 EDT, 23:00 CEST) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
FEEDBACK: Artifacts in a Raid Context
So for today's raid tests (and going forward), we have artifact traits fully unlocked, and are scaling item level down a bit to offset the extra power. Please use this thread to offer feedback and discuss concerns regarding artifact traits in a raid context. That can be anything from bug reports, tuning issues, conceptual concerns with trait design, reports of traits that can break or trivialize mechanics, and so forth. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Discipline Priest Feedback -- Build 21466 -- 13-Apr
What kind of trinket rules should we be able to expect? Anything that does spell damage = atonement? Or only holy/shadow spell damage?
Not finalized yet. Worth pointing out, there is something to be said for the option of not letting any of them Atone, which would let us tune them around damage alone for Disc. That would probably mean a minor proc rate reduction compared to casters, rather than a very substantial one. And it would maintain the use cases for trinkets more clearly and consistently with other healers--healer trinkets for healing, DPS trinkets only for DPS use (so rarely in serious content). Either is an option; we want to see how it plays out in testing.
The main point above was that, in ether case, we don't want caster trinkets to be better for healing. Disc can get caster trinkets (necessarily, since Shadow uses them), and they can have some damage or damage+healing value, but they shouldn't be desirable for main role use in challenging content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
World Quests - Time Remaining
Thanks for the feedback. We will be swapping it to the same notation as buffs are currrently (a single number, like "2h" or "49s"). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
[Feedback] Flightpaths
Final continent wide taxi pass is in progress right now. This should be improved soon™ (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Elemental Shaman Feedback -- Build 21466 -- 13-Apr
Chain Lightning consumes all 3 charges of Stormkeeper
Thanks, this should be fixed next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
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