March 28 Hotfixes, Undocumented Changes in 7.2 Including Mobs Scaling with Item Level

posted 2017/03/28 at 7:18 PM by Squishei

Tomb of Sargeras Survival GuideMobs Scaling with Item LevelWoW ForumsRedditLegion Developer Q&AQ: Do World Quests scale with item level, or will they just become trivially easier for greater rewards?

A: Once you're max level, the world isn't scaling with your gear. There would be problems if we tried to do that - what do you do with a fresh 110 and a raid-geared 110 fighting the same mob in the same place? We could some kind of scaling I guess, like leveling, to normalize it? But I think that would go too far in undermining the core sense of power progression that is part of an MMO. The stuff that was challenging for you in Suramar, that was challenging when you first hit 110 in greens...when you come back in Mythic dungeon gear, you should crush them a bit. The intent is that the content is is something you outgear, outpower eventually.

That said, that's why we add new content.responded to a thread

Blizzard

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.

Blizzard

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.

March 28 HotfixesAhead of the Curve: Gul'dan

Blizzard

Here you'll find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to World of Warcraft: Legion. Some of the hotfixes below take effect the moment they were implemented, while others may require scheduled realm restarts to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch update. This list will be updated as additional hotfixes are applied.

Additional information about the expansion can be found below.

March 28

Hotfixes

Creatures

Skittering Demons and Sister Silkreaver should no longer randomly evade.

Dungeons and Raids

The Nighthold
- The Achivement Ahead of the Curve: Gul'dan can once again be earned. It will be available until Tomb of Sargeras opens.

Quests

Completing World Quests that award reputation should again bring you across the threshold from Revered to Exalted.
Gryphons should be easier to shoot during “The Splintered Fleet”.
Players should now be able to turn in "The Final Judgement" after completing it.

Zone

Players who die in Xylem's Tower or the surrounding area are now placed at the closer tower graveyard.

Patch 7.2: The Tomb of Sargeras is live! For more details, click here.

UI Changes

World quests now have a yellow border around them if they count towards and active emissary

If you don't have enough currency for an item, it is greyed out on the vendor.

When you look at a character, your character turns to stare at them now.

7.2 User Interface Improvements guideReputation

Reputation tokens for factions can only be used up to Exalted status.

You can complete any leftover story missions for Paragon reputation.

Paragon Reputation guideClass Order Halls and Champions:

Rank 1-6 of the Order Advance is now cheaper and faster! More details in the Order Advancements Overview.

Missions required for the first part of the Class Hall Campaign are now faster. See the Class Hall Campaign guide for more information.

Old follower items such as Heavy Armor Set, can only be used up to Item Level 850 for Champions.

All champions can be leveled up to Titled and gain a third equipment slot. More details in the Class Hall Mission Guide.

Soul Prison of the IllidariSoul Prism of the IllidariJegethyReddit thread.Custom Lag Tolerance/console SpellQueueWindow #/dump GetCVar("SpellQueueWindow")Karazhan Attunement

Blizzard

From my understanding, for Heroic, this is a bug that we are in the process of hotfixing - Return to Karazhan (Heroic) should not have an attunement attached to it.

Return to Karazhan (Mythic) will continue to have an attunement attached to it and players will need to complete "Power of Corruption" before entering.

Comments

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Comment by InterestAdvancedInterfaceOptions has just been updated to allow proper setting of the cVar as well. That was pretty quick, but damn was it a little annoying to do the scenario with ~400 ms of Lag Tolerance.Comment by IntervencionAs usual, lot of undocumented ^^" ThanksComment by WanderingfoxThank you for mentioning the cvar... apparently it got reset and that's why the scenario felt like playing while underwater.Comment by AllesaHow's this for undocumented: you can't get exalted with any faction right now. It freezes you at 20999 rep.Comment by ThranduelI was able to use two different 250 rep tokens, and it appeared to count towards the new post exalted stuff. I got both after the patch dropped. I'm not sure if that's the difference.Comment by Aggressor1000It's worth noting that Wonerous Wisdomball toy reward, from the quest, Enemies Everywhere is no longer able to be sold on the AH as its soulbound and reclassified as a pet. Kinda bothered me, since it was selling for upwards of 130,000 Gold. Just an FYI.Comment by RedXian37Broll Bearmantle has finally learned Guardian Form.Comment by auriliagilneasAnother change that I've not seen listed anywhere: Female Blood Elf weapons are now larger, scale increased by about 20-25%.Comment by ChocoboValentineWell, mobs scaling with my gear totally takes the fun out of NOT HAVING MY ASS KICKED CONSTANTLY because I'm CLOTH. If it scales, what's the point? I mean, ok--I can do later content, but the feeling of progression and getting stronger than the rest of the world as you fight these really tough things in raids is part of what drives an MMO. It's that false sense of accomplishment and reward that leaves us craving more, lol, and drives us to pour hundreds of hours and dollars into getting MORE of that feeling.

Also, the rep thing is leavin' me kinda :| honestly. I did all the story quests everywhere. I did ALL THE THINGS. So all that rep that just went off into the aether I can never get back, and it leaves me with fewer opportunities to get the paragon stuff. It feels like I'm being punished for having explored the content. :\Comment by orca1375xI noticed today when I was in the water..the sharks were not swimming they were staying in one place..which I thought was hilarious..lol..then went i aimed my char down to swim downwards i wasnt going down..now..im a scuba diver in real life..i was like thinking I dont enough weight to get down and asend..rofl...the water btw is so beautiful and clear I wish our oceans look like that..love it...10000 percent visibility..woohooComment by solithaDruids prowling now use the run animation rather than the fast walk. I hope this one was unintentional and gets reverted. The Dreamway got prettied up - the grass has a lovely patterning to it now.

Also, they broke quest ignoring :-(Comment by natyarafdnI noticed when you're from a pvp realm and join a pve group your pvp is insta shut off, no 5 min waiting like before.Comment by helladin mobs appear to be scaling up based on player item level in 7.2.Comment by lankybritI'm still doing Draenor:

Preserved Mining Pick no longer gives instant mining to those without mining.

Shipyards now seem to have a max of 25 ships instead of 10.Comment by IvniinviDid anybody else lose a seal of broken fate when they updated?Comment by EvraelMobs Scaling with Item Level... this is gonna get ugly... really ugly, so you kill off the reason why people grind for gear which is pretty much the so called reason for playing mmo's and it wasn't even on the official notes.. apparently a certain team in blizz is having professionalism issuesComment by omedon666All I wanna say on the potentially intentional ilvl scaling is that Blizzard were careful to say that we should be able to overgear and "crush" world quests "a bit." We are well past a gear disparity in the realm of "a bit" for content that must remain entry level friendly while still preventing team mythic+100 from unintentionally living after pulling all of the broken shore at once. Things need to stay alive long enough for everyone to tag and participate, and access to scaling rewards and gear-agnostic rewards like AP, resources and now building stuff and nethershards is within the realm of putting a reasonable lid on just how OP you're allowed to get.

Maybe it's just a bug, but if not, I think Blizzard are in their rights to decide "no, you can't play like a reckless idiot and still live." Anyone who was running heroics at the end of 7.1.5 knows what happens when you allow for that level of overgearing and it's bloody ridiculous and not even remotely entry level friendly, which both overworld and queueable 5-mans must always be!Comment by PitchifusCrushing minor content is a small price to pay for keeping one of the core MMO mechanics alive.
Player power increase is the reason for gear acquisition. Get rid of that, and player motivation will plummet.

Dangerous move. Let's hope this is a bug.Comment by Zawodowiec1532Okey, but what SpellQueueWindow is default in 7.1.5?Comment by Manathcan you not learn the pet then cage it?

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