Wrath Classic Feedback and Decisions

Hey everybody!

Now that we’ve announced that Wrath of the Lich King Classic will release on September 26th, I want to give you an update on some of the items we’ve been collecting feedback on since our Beta began.

Raid Lockouts

We’ve decided that lockouts should be shared between Heroic and Normal versions of the raid, but NOT between 10/25-player versions of the raid. You’ll be able to do both the 10-player and 25-player version of each raid every lockout period but will have to choose between Normal and Heroic for the raids that offer that choice.

Our original concern was with players feeling “required” to do the same raid multiple times per week in order to “keep up,” but that came more from the original experience of Trial of the Crusader than from Naxxramas. Trial of the Crusader’s original release allowed you to run four different versions of the same content in a single week, all of which provided better loot than anything that had been previously available, which created enormous pressure to run all four versions in order to leapfrog over the Ulduar loot. Making the Normal and Heroic versions of Trial of the Crusader share a lockout does a lot to mitigate that, by cutting the number of weekly runs in half.

Additionally, players have pointed out that in many cases they want to be able to run the 25-player version of the raid with their guild, while pugging the 10-player version. Ultimately, that positive social aspect of having raids of various sizes available each week is compelling to us, and fits our goal of providing a vibrant social ecosystem, for friendships to form and develop in. You might, for example, find yourself pugging 10-player raids with a few of the same people from time to time, and end up inviting them to fill an empty slot on your main raid roster later. By contrast, if you could do both Normal and Heroic in the same week, you’d be incentivized to push your existing group to run them back-to-back, which isn’t the same sort of positive social experience.

This was recently bugged on the Wrath Classic Beta, and both 10/25-player version of Naxxramas appeared to share a lockout, but that was unintended and will be fixed before we launch.

Related to this, we also plan to make any trinkets with both Normal and Heroic versions (such as Death’s Verdict) share a Unique-Equip category, so that you can’t have both versions of the same trinket equipped at the same time. While it was originally possible to do this, it was never intended, and motivated us to create the Unique-Equipped categories back then. Prior to creating the Unique-Equipped categories, we could only prevent characters from wearing two copies of the exact same item.

Race and Faction Change

While it won’t be ready for our launch in September, we have changed our minds on this, and we’re working on adding the Race and Faction change as a paid service in a future patch.

Originally, we planned not to offer Race and Faction change at all, because it felt like it removed some of that fantasy feeling of having dramatically different physical attributes that affect your gameplay. We were also a little worried about players chasing the “flavor of the month” in terms of racial abilities However, we’re convinced by the argument that being able to play with your friends is more important, and that you should be able to bring your accomplishments with you when you do. This turns out to be the same tradeoff provided by transferring between realms, which is already available as a paid service, so it makes sense to make the same decision with respect to Race and Faction change.

In short, this fits our aim to nurture and protect social experiences, so we’ll work on it for an upcoming patch.

Character-Based Mounts and Achievements

As before, we plan to have mounts and achievements be per-character, rather than on the account.

This originally came up in response to our plan to not include Race and Faction change, as a suggested alternative way for players to preserve their accomplishments when re-rolling. Since we’ve been convinced to allow Race and Faction change in an upcoming patch, we’re going to focus our efforts on that, and preserve the original Lich King behavior of keeping mounts and achievement associated with the character that earned them.

LFG Tools

We continue to iterate on the bulletin-board style Looking for Group tool, and we do not have plans to add the Random Dungeon Finder.

For players, this has probably been the hottest topic of discussion since our announcement, and we welcome all the continuing feedback on how to improve the tool and make it better. I know this will be disappointing news for some, but we want to settle this topic before launch so everyone knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

We remain hopeful that our recent anti-boosting changes, especially on Fresh Start realms, will invigorate the lower-level dungeons around launch. We also expect the LFG tool to help facilitate long-term friendship formation for players who are looking for it.

2v2 Arena Achievements and Titles

We’re going to award achievements and titles for the 2v2 Arena bracket, just like we did in Burning Crusade Classic.

Originally, Wrath of the Lich King dropped achievements and titles from the 2v2 Arena bracket, but due to popular demand, we’re going to preserve them in Wrath Classic. When we originally stopped awarding titles and achievements for 2v2s, it was because 2v2 was difficult to balance. Nowadays, rather than try to make all classes equally capable in all brackets, we want to preserve the existing class balance and celebrate the unique play style for the classes that perform well in each bracket.

We’ll always continue to listen to feedback on these and all topics. I hope this answers many lingering questions about what the state of things will be when we release.

Thanks, as always, for your interest and support!

133 Likes

Thanks for the update! :+1:

10 Likes

What about name changes?

13 Likes

Best way to make it better, is to remove it and put in RDF.

526 Likes

Amazing update. Love all the agreed upon changes.

6 Likes

Thanks! The Classic community appreciates the love you are putting into Wrath.

15 Likes

Thanks for the update, least we know what to expect.

But

this is not a good idea.

2 Likes

Any ETA on Pre-patch? Or Fresh servers.

27 Likes

Appreciate the update. If you can improve the LFG tool yall are working on , which you said lol , then I’ll give it another shot of the improve version of it whenever it releases.

Again thanks for the update. :slight_smile:

1 Like

yep, add another problem to the faction imbalance! faction change! greaaaaat…
I hope you guys in blizzard are taking into account the problems with the imbalance you can generate by adding faction change (I don’t really care about race change since it doesn’t have any impact in gameplay whatsoever).

6 Likes

:man_facepalming:

We already told you, make it retail like.
What you have given to us now is absolute garbage and only adds an extra step to use 1/LFG channel. Do you not see how useless it is on PTR?

I really don’t think you guys understand the purpose RDF serves.

280 Likes

Thanks for a Update on this. Still though please make the RDF a feature rather than yeeting it completely. Even adding it in during a later patch would be better than what is current.

150 Likes

10000%

Why fix what isnt broken.

14 Likes

I would still recommend adding RDF for 1-70 at least. You can still get groups to queue up and get in faster. Just make it server wide and not across all servers and it will be fine. It being WOTLK classic most people want to play WOTLK. That way people can quest and just queue up and get to leveling. That’s just my opinion. You can still do the bulletin board style LFG for WOTLK content.

Edit: The reasoning for this is I’ve gone through classic…many times. I’m here to play WOTLK. Boosting would have still existed but I feel like with RDF it wouldn’t have been as bad at low levels. Just help me level through old content faster so I can get into WOTLK on a couple of characters.

113 Likes

I know… I know… Best to just brace ourselves lol as i said I’ll give the LFG tool they have another try

1 Like

This is all great stuff but we still want RDF. This LFG tool is no good.

133 Likes

I feel raid lockouts are being over thought. it was ONE raid that had 4 lockouts. ICC had dynamic difficulty and that’s fine, the raids before ToGC had only normal (and hard modes you activate there).

togc should have dynamic difficulty like ICC as opposed to still having 4 but being locked out of 2 of them

24 Likes

Suggestion for the tool. When you enter yourself into the LFG tool, you can select an “auto join” option and it looks at other solo players in the tool with this option turned on and in different roles. Then selects 1 tank, 3dps and 1 healer and then asks if you want to join them in the selected dungeon. You hit join, you all pop into a group and you run to the dungeon.

156 Likes

Blizzard still being tone deaf and say continue giving feedback just to COMPLETLY IGNORE IT.

Did all the retail devs come to classic to be blockheads that dont listen?

GG The more things change the more they stay the same

Give us RDF Jesus Christ

181 Likes

ORLY?

:popcorn: :sunglasses:

I’m coo with that.

31 Likes