Looking ahead to 10.0

Community WoW Community Council
1

With 9.2 on the horizon now, and the knowledge that it is the final patch of the expansion, I want to get an early start on the discussion for 10.0, specifically related to systems, classes and balance.

There will always be a “BiS” class for a certain situation. If everything was always good there would be no class diversity. But there are a few things going into 10.0 that I would like to address and get some feedback on. So here we go!

Talents

I cannot speak for every spec in the game, but I’m sure that between my fellow council members we can cover all 36 specs. I’m curious to know what talents are chosen in 0-5% of situations. Basically never used, and would be fit to be replaced/reworked going into 10.0.

I feel comfortable enough talking about 3 DK specs and MM hunter.
Blood DK - Per row

  • Row 1: Tombstone
  • Row 2: Rapid Decomposition & Consumption (Not necessarily bad talents, just Hemostasis is SO good)
  • Row 3: Fowl Bulwark
  • Row 4: Mark of blood

Unholy DK - Per row

  • Row 2: Ebon Fever
  • Row 6: Defile (again, overshadowed by Unholy Pact here)

Frost DK - Per Row (I talked a lot about Frost DK talents here: Feedback on Frost DK - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

  • Row 1: Icy Talons
  • Row 2: Horn of Winter
  • Row 4: Frozen Pulse
  • Row 6: Hypothermic Presence

MM Hunter - Per Row

  • Row 1: Serpent Sting
  • Row 6: Lethal Shots
  • Row 7: Calling the Shots

Please add your perspectives for the classes you’re familiar with. Quote the following sentence to simplify things: "0-5% pick rate talents for:"

Systems

Next I want to turn the conversation to systems. We’ve had a lot over the last few years. From garrisons, to artifact weapons, azerite necklaces, covenants, and the list goes on.

Grindable systems aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But intentionally gating things from the start when the overwhelming feedback is to open things up for a better player experience just causes frustration from the playerbase. These systems are bad enough the first time on a main character, but then you add alts into the equation and its awful.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Shards of Domination may be the worst offender ever. Please don’t take us back there. Please tell us you learned.

In 10.0, I still want there to be systems, but I don’t want to be locked into a choice that determines power or a futile grind against RNG. Not changing covenants easily would have been fine if there was no power gain. If only the covenant ability existed (Steward, DoS, Soulshape, Fleshcraft) and no class abilities, and covenants had been just cosmetics, I think it would have been fine to have a hard time switching. But, when covenant choice was as powerful as it is, the current system of switching should have been in from Day 1.

I’m sure we’ll get details about systems as an announcement makes its way to us in the coming weeks/months, and we can talk in depth then, but please focus on the player experience with these systems.

Balance

Some games are easier to balance than others, sure. Games like League of Legends have very frequent tuning patches to ensure balance, but in those games, players aren’t progressing a character and have to start from scratch if their spec is nerfed into the ground, or falls behind.

In an MMO, this is a real issue. Players have thousands of hours invested in their characters, and no one likes being at the bottom of the barrel.
These days though, class tuning is so infrequent that some classes are at the bottom for months, if not longer. And some classes are always near the top. Now, I know that some classes are more utility focused and therefore do a little less damage, but pulling those classes up to be closer to the top more frequently would be very welcome.

And here’s the great thing about frequent tuning. 2 weeks later, if it was too much, you just pull it back a little bit. Find the balance in balancing.

Not only will this lead to less disparity between the top and bottom, but in my opinion, people will play the spec they want to, as opposed to the one they feel forced into because their spec of choice just isn’t good for an entire 200+ day raid tier, M+ and PvP season.

It’s ok to tune PvP and PvE differently

This might be a hot take, but if DK is crushing it in raid, but not at all represented in PvP, then just buff their PvP damage a little bit. Buff some PvP talents, throw a % damage dealt increase here or there. PvE and PvP tuning don’t have to be the same. People should be able to play their favorite spec at any level, in any game mode.

A few last thoughts

It’s ok for a class to not be represented if they don’t bring the right toolset for a specific fight or M+ run or Arena/ RBG comp. But they should shine on another fight or composition. Classes need to feel unique. Not everyone needs to have every bit of utility available. Not every class needs an immunity, a dispell, interrupt, or 8 minute DPS cooldown. They need to feel immersive and exciting to play.

I loved some of the ability revival we got at the start of SL (Hello, Kill Shot), that stuff was great because they were exciting abilities that were missed.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation leading into 10.0!

22 Likes
2

I’m going to lump these two together, because I think they are intrinsically linked. Talents are a shade of class customisation and playstyle, and so are the added systems added on top of it - to varying degrees. Legendaries, covenant abilities, soulbinds, conduits, even tier sets and domination shards all work together in order to let you play your class the way you want it to (usually there’s an ideal solution to it as well). My personal opinion on this, is that too much of our classes has been broken away from the character and has been inserted into these systems.

I don’t think rebalancing talents to make them better is all that it takes, I think what needs to be done is a complete revamp of the system; one that can let us shed our over-reliance on borrowed power without necessarily removing the depth that borrowed power lets us explore (although much of this depth is often very surface-level). We have been using the current talent system since Mists of Pandaria, and I quite like it, but classes have been incomplete on their own ever since Legion came and introduced the artifact weapons.

I don’t necessarily think the classes themselves, or their abilities, need to be redesigned. I quite like most of the specs and their identities, which are by and large the same ones they’ve had since Legion. I would consider a talent system redesign an additive process, perhaps one that could bring back a wider range of customisation of classes too?

But, I don’t think that abolishing all the systems and instead putting them into the classes is going to be good either. Progression in endgame content is good, actually. Tier sets, for example, are cool. I like legendaries too, even if they have really lost their luster in Shadowlands by being both a heavy gold investment and practically just an extra talent that you buy. Bring back legendary questlines of the past, like the legendary cloak or ring from MoP and WoD respectively.

Pantheaeu brought up in another thread about M+ could use some sort of progression system tied to running M+, and I quite like that idea. Similarly, something like this could be applied for raids - domination shards were an attempt at this that sadly failed, moreso because it forced you to equip certain items and get lucky with loot drops than the fact you could get stronger over time. I’m not sure how it would work for PvP, but I’m sure something could be worked out. An existing system all of these systems could be modeled after is the Box of Many Things. Progression is timegated, but you can catch up by participating in the content you would otherwise get stronger in anyway. These are just some random thoughts I’ve had, though. A system wouldn’t even have to look remotely close to any of this to be good; the importance lies in the philosophy of them: they are seasonally locked. You don’t need to engage with these systems when the next season comes around, there’s no need for catchup (aside for latecomers and alts of course).

I really like a lot of the zone-wide progression systems we’ve gotten in Shadowlands. Korthia and now Zereth Mortis seem to build on this sort of idea, and it’s been very succesful in my eyes. I also hope we can see more of this in the future, perhaps even baked into the leveling zones as well.

One system I would like to see revamped is flying. It’s not something I will talk too much about here, there’s another thread where I go into detail about it, but the TL;DR is that flying is too powerful, therefore it is restricted, and this restriction feels bad.

I have lots more to say about 10.0, but I think I will leave that for now, since this discussion was mostly about systems, classes and balance.

5 Likes
3

To be fair, this is mostly because of the Legendary that casts it automatically even without the talent. It may not be a problem in 10.0. Can’t say for sure though.

Talents:

Out of the specs I play at 60 (I don’t feel comfortable commenting on 50-59, even if I know the spec well) I’ll include a small explanation when I can. Even if I feel other talents need fixing, I’ll only comment on talents that I think are borderline useless, at least in the content I play.

Survival - Per Row:

  • Row 1: Terms of Engagement. - I actually -love- this talent, but unfortunately, the other 2 are just genuinely a dps gain. Terms requires killing to reset, and you have to be at range to use Harpoon for the extra focus, which in turn often just nets a neutral gain. This -might- have a use in arena, but can’t comment on that really, and if it was a PvP talent, then it should probably be made into a PvP talent.
  • Row 2: Murder of Crows AND Steel Trap - They aren’t bad, per say, but Bloodseeker is just too good and passive to justify not using it.
  • Row 6 Flanking Strike - I think it’s technically better than Tip of the Spear, but it needlessly complicates the spec to the point I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone use it. I still believe they should remove this as a talent completely and do what they did in Legion - Replace Kil Command with Flanking Strike. If they want us to be able to use it as range, then have it function as Kill Command if we use it at range.
  • Row 7: Chakrams - I’ve seen a few people use it, but in general, the other 2 talents are just too good to not use one of them. The 2 recommended survival specs on icy/wowhead are literally based around those 2 talents.

Also to note for hunter in general, I fully believe that either Camouflage or Trailblazer should be made baseline. Trailblazer is the most likely candidate, as we used to have Aspect of the Cheetah baseline. It feels really bad losing out on Trailblazer if I need stealth or vice versa.

Natural Mending has its uses in end-game content, but as I don’t do that, I stick to one of those 2 lol.

Destruction - Per Row

  • Row 2: Shadowburn - The use for it, as an execute, doesn’t really work, as it does low damage, even with the increased crit chance. The fact it costs a soul shard further complicates that.
  • Row 6: Grimoire of Sacrifice - This… confuses me. We were told they purposely made this talent a DPS loss as they believe warlocks should use pets. So… why do we have the talent in the first place? (This is for Affliction as well). I loved not using a pet, but I can’t justify the dps loss.

I main Demonology, but honestly, 90% of those talents need to be fixed. There’s pretty much one set talent per each row that is viable. Though in 9.1 a new build popped up for more simple rotations, but still less dps.

I can’t comment on my other 3 60s, as I’m either not comfortable enough with them to comment or I use the talents other people don’t, as they work for me personally. (here’s looking at you, Light’s Hammer)

Systems:

Most of the systems aren’t bad, per say, just poorly implemented. I understand Blizzard wants the power to gradually increase, and not punish people for not playing 24 hours a day, so I don’t personally have a problem with the “timegating” on systems only. (Timegating in general is a whole 'nother can of worms)

Something that for me worked well, but not perfect, was Tower Knowledge. You have a set amount you could earn a week, and if you missed a week, you could earn that in following weeks.

However, it lacks any form of catchup, and that made me lose all interest in Torghast on my alts.

So in a perfect world, if we have another system with a “Power” we have to collect, I’d love this type of system. Set a cap you can earn each week, and each following week, if you missed it, you can get the previous week’s as well. But, make it so the grind isn’t as bad if you do it all at once. So like, every week you have stored up, you gain increased power gained, until you are at the current week, which will gain at normal rate. That way if you’re behind, you can catch up easier with grinding, but won’t have an unfair advantage to people who have been from the start.

Likewise, having catch-up items for alts like the incense of infinity or the Renown 40 item from the start would be great. AKA once you earn it on your main, it becomes easier on your alt.

Balance:

I think Blizzard needs to rely less on their in-house parsing and start looking at community parsing on warcraftlogs and such. Many specs (Feral, Survival, etc) have been at the bottom of the charts consistently for years. And although they get minor buffs here and there, it’s never enough to move them out of that bottom. And then there’s random nerfs they get on the PTR before live, like Feral just got, and Survival got a couple weeks ago. It made no sense.

I get that if the classes are played how Blizzard expects them to be played they will probably be even, but Blizzard needs to adapt to how the players play the specs. A good example of this is Final Fantasy 11. It was initially designed with 2 tank classes, Paladin and Warrior/Monk (People really dont know which one was meant to be the second tank). However, Japanese players adapted and used Warrior/Monk as a DPS. Then the first xpac came and Ninja was introduced, meant to be a 4th role, debuffer. However, players realized how it could be used, and turned it into a second tank spec.

Instead of changing the toolkits so the classes were how Square envisioned them, they rolled with what players liked, and turned Ninja into an official tank and started reinforcing the others as DPS. (This later also happened with Dancer, introduced as the second official healer, but players essentially turned it into a damager that can backup tank lol)

And yes, it’s very much okay to tune PvP and PvE differently. They went through the trouble of changing the code so it could be done, but rarely utilize it, rather opting to nerf both for the sake of PvP and it’s just confusing.

10 Likes
4

Agreed, but even without that legendary I don’t pick that talent.

5

Balance between PvP and PvE will always be bad until they understand why it needs to be better. Most PvErs dont PvP and vice versa so things get really complicated when they are heavyhanded with nerfs. I know that during certain expansions brewmaster would be absolutely balanced but would over perform certain specs on magic damage taken in PvE and get hard nerfed causing my PvP experience to suffer heavily but it didnt matter to them cause PvE stuff was fixed. They created the vacuum for magic damage for my spec and totally ignored how it effected PvP because im sure the person who made the decision didnt understand the overlap for PvP to PvE.

Its a big problem

9 Likes
6

With the announcement of the… announcement… I hope this can be a prominent conversation between the Council and Blizzard. Hopefully we can help create a player experience in the new expansion that is immersive and rewarding for every playstyle.

Can’t wait to see what’s in store and give feedback!!

7

On the announcement of the announcement: I’m really glad they decided to announce it now, so that we have a good idea of when we can expect it. It’s always great to have a good idea of when we’re going to get new information.

8

the best part is coming and thats the cinematic

9

I’m excited about receiving information about the next expansion on April 19th.

It’ll be nice to get back to the land of of the living. I want an end-game zone that doesn’t try to make me leave after being there for 5-6 minutes. I want to have a sense of immersion, story progression, not feel like I’m doing chores.

I hope we have things in place where it’s not punishing for our alts like it was at the beginning of Shadowlands.

Less systems, less restrictions, less borrowed power and more focus on gameplay and just having fun.

I can’t wait to hear more.

2 Likes
10

On the announcement of the announcement:

I find it odd the announcement is the same day LFR Jailer unlocks, but it’s being announced before anyone will have a chance to kill LFR Jailer.

So if the announcement was done on this day so LFR players who don’t look up spoilers aren’t spoiled, it’s not really going to accomplish that goal.

2 Likes
11

A brief note to make… there are a few systems I would love to see a complete overhaul or rework of leading into 10.0.

  • Talents
  • Gearing
  • Raid and Dungeon Loot
  • PvP gearing
  • Legendaries (if they return in any form)
  • Rep grinds

I think these systems have become stale. Probably the biggest issue in here is the need to re-acquire the same pieces from M+ each season. Some of you readers may recall my IQD problems in 9.1 (Yes, I still have the 226 one equipped, despite being over 255 average ilvl on my main). Would have been great if I could have used my copious amounts of Valor Points to upgrade the old one, instead of fishing for a fraction of a chance in a box.

In addition to those reworked systems, a few other things I’d like to see addressed.

  • Targeting loot
  • The patch-to-patch power gains
  • Loot distribution & Trading restrictions
  • Player choice
  • Reforging?

Finally, a few things I would love to see return:

  • Great Vault
  • Tier sets
  • Single player or group content like Jailer’s Gauntlet
  • Pocopoc.
9 Likes
12

Letholas’ post above is a great starting point.

To add to that there are also probably some things that need to be removed in their entirety.

Personally I have found all of the borrowed power systems to be unfun, unnecessarily burdensome, create nothing but chore hurdles and just really do nothing to contribute to playing my leveled and geared character in an enjoyable manner. I just want to level my toon, jump into some content and progressively add power to my character through gear acquisition.

I often look at my little army of alts and think it sure would be fun to play that toon in (insert content here) and then I look at all the crap I have to do just to start doing the thing I want and just log off.

Ditch the daily, world quest, rep grind chore fest as well. It’s just WoW homework. I want to PLAY fun things, not accept that my WoW progression is me just mindlessly repeating time sucking tasks to very, very slowly creep toward something … oftentimes lately there isn’t even anything very compelling at the end of these grinds just something I need to have well, because…

13 Likes
13

Following the RWF, I have some new ideas about loot I would like to discuss and get feedback on, specifically relating to loot.

No one loot system will ever be perfect. Over the years of WoW there have been options for looting. Free for all, Personal, Group, Master Loot, to name a few.

Each of these systems have their shortcomings. As everything does. But each also work well given the right scenario.

TL;DR

  • We need to revamp the loot systems for 10.0.
  • Let Master Loot be voted on.
  • Personal loot works, in niche scenarios, but trading restrictions need to be changed.
  • Group loot has its place as well.
  • Use personal loot coding to prevent useless items from dropping.
  • Look at drop rates of items such as necks/rings/trinkets in raids.

Master Loot

Most players have an opinion on Master Looting. Some love it, others despise it. Those who love it want to use it to be able to delegate loot to specific players to help them gear up faster, those who hate it, in many cases were at the bottom of the totem pole for loot. There are also plenty of examples in WoW’s history of Master (Ninja) looting occurring. This sucks for sure.

My suggestion for Master Loot is require a unanimous vote within the group to be able to use it. There have been suggestions in the CC forum about making it available for guild groups only. I was one of the people to make that suggestion, but this new idea would require everyone in the group to be on board with using that loot system. In effect, if the group/raid leader selects master loot as the loot system, there would be a popup to the effect of:

Letholas has selected Master Looter for this group. Do you accept this loot system?
Yes / No

This would make it clear to everyone in the group what is happening and unless there is a unanimous vote the system cannot be used.

Personal Loot

Personal loot works great in systems like LFR and Premade Group Finder (Including World Bosses), everyone has an equal chance to receive loot, which is tradable if certain requirements are met. These requirements are the main pain point of this system. I understand why they are there, but in so many cases pieces of loot that are upgrades for people in the group are getting disenchanted or sold because the looter can’t trade it, even if they aren’t going to use it. This very thing happened in my raid last week. It sucks. This is a system that needs to be fixed for 10.0. Please.

The one advantage to Personal Loot is that if a group killing Sylvanas had no hunters in it (lol jk I know that never happened), the bow is not in the loot table.

But could this not be applied to Master Looter and Group Loot? Let the code determine what loot is dropped based on the people in the raid (just like it is with personal loot, but instead of assigning those items to individual players, they are all attached to the boss to be distributed as the group sees fit? This seems like a “best of both worlds” option to me.

Group Loot
Great for less hardcore groups that don’t want to use personal loot, but also don’t want the hassle of master loot. Let people roll on what they want, pass on what they don’t, etc. Keep the class restrictions if you want to even.

Necks/Rings/Trinkets

This is a problem closely tied to personal loot. Every spec in the game can loot a necklace off the boss due to stamina being the only primary stat on the item. There is no str/agi/int to prevent certain classes from using it. With the way personal loot works there are just way too many of these items in circulation that people see multiple copies of the same ring before seeing the item they really want off the boss. If there are no changes to the way loot works we need to look at the drop rate of these items to make it more consistent across all items.

Conclusion

Going into 10.0, we need to revamp the loot system. The RWF has proven that guilds will push themselves to the absolute limit to get every tiny advantage they can and break the systems to gear their characters. I don’t advocate for changing the entire game for the top 0.01%, but it affects more than just those players, it affects players like me in the middle of the road who just want an upgrade, but the player in my raid can’t trade it even if they want to.

5 Likes
14

Great ideas all round! The loot system can be pretty janky and it’d be great to see a revamp of some sort. I like these suggestions a lot, I’d probably look for an entirely new system rather than bringing back old ones with modifications, but I also don’t know exactly what that would look like. Things like tier set crafting and vendors could be neat to build on!

The only problem with this is that if master loot becomes the most popular system in PuGs, those that don’t like master loot might be forced to use it, or get kicked if they vote against it. Voting mostly just means that instead of players leaving because of master loot, they get kicked. Or it can be a more democratic process if the raid leader is open to hearing what the group has to say, but I haven’t really experienced that much in PuGs :<

15

I thought of this too, and yeah, it is an issue for sure. One that I’m not sure what the right answer is for. Maybe ML can still be restricted to full guild groups and then be voted on?

And you may be right here as well, I’m just not sure how that new system would work. I think the idea of using personal loot coding to prevent unusable items from dropping is a good one, but then how should it work after that? Maybe we just need fully tradable personal loot? No restrictions at all?

16

Honestly, I think you’re really on to something regarding fully tradable personal loot. I like personal loot best; but if I decide I don’t want it for whatever reason, even if I just want to help out my buddy, I should be able to do that. It’s my loot I should be able to do what I want with it. The only limitation I think should continue to exist is that only people who where part of the group when the loot source was available are eligible. One of the best experiences a player can have in a game like WoW is when a complete stranger or good friend, for no other reason other than they want to, gives you something really great that makes a big difference to you. That mutual feeling that comes from giving and receiving is one of the things that creates good feelings of community and defuses toxicity.

Personal loot coding is something I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about. I think in concept this is a fantastic idea and at it’s best would go a long, long way to taking away those terrible feelings of being the victim of RNG. From my years of coding a MUD I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how this could actually be implemented and everything I come up with involves the storage of giant pools of data that needs to be sorted through. Basically the game would need to add a bit(s) into a personal item structure that counts how may times you’ve seen an item drop compared to how many times you’ve had the opportunity for that item to drop. If you wanted to be more granular about drop sources you would need multiple independent counts. Each character would need a duplicate list of the enitre list of items that exist in the game and to track drop opportunities. That’s a TON of data. So we might have to choose only a limited number of items that would have “smart” drop algorithms enabled. Every time a loot table is parsed in the code to generate the drop/don’t drop decision the algorithm has to use new logic processing steps to read those bits, make decisions based on the bit values, possibly compare the values to other values in the same structure to eventually converge on an “intelligent”, “randomized” solution that essentially makes it a lot less likely that you see the same exact bracer drop twice in the raid and once in the vault all within the first two weeks of the tier. This is what happened to me. When you have thousands of drops occurring every second in a game the size of WoW the processing overhead may become very high and cause lots of problems, lag being one that players can experience directly. Maybe this is something the WoW hardware and software can handle or maybe it would be a challenge. It’s what goes through my head when I see the same darn thing drop week, after week, after week.

17

I can’t believe I forgot about this until now, but I’d also love to be able to sling any 1h weapon on my back instead of on my hip!!!

5 Likes
18

So we’re going to have to wait about 2,5 weeks for the next expansion announcement, and I think it’s important that we start to talk about one of the things that really wrought havoc in Shadowlands: the ripcord.

(For those who aren’t familiar, Ion Hazzikostas said in an interview that if the systems they were making in the Shadowlands weren’t going to work out they would consider ‘pulling the ripcord’ and get rid of them - this obviously didn’t happen and Blizzard was playing catchup for most of the expansion as a result.)

If there are going to be big, new systems - and even existing systems moving into the new expansion - there needs to be a ripcord put in place, so that we’re not going to be stuck with a game that requires constant attention from the devs so that everything can be fixed and tinkered with over the course of the expansion. I’m okay with having new systems, old systems, complex systems, even things like borrowed power… but they need to be done properly, and if they’re full of holes and leaking all over the place, there should be an emergency option to scrap these systems so that we’re not all burdened by them for the rest of the expansion.

3 Likes
19

I mean, poorly designed systems that need tons of fixing shouldn’t go live in the first place. One major case this expansion were covenants, and they should’ve been ‘‘fixed’’ before 9.0 went live, especially after all the feedback, and not in 9.1.5, halfway through the expansion.

I understand that complex systems are going to need tuning and adjustments over the course of any given expansion (which is normal), but major issues such as restricting covenant swaps, or the obtainability of legendaries in Legion, shouldn’t take months to be fixed. A lot of players nowadays have this mentality where the game is only enjoyable in the final patch of an expansion, as all of the systems are now ‘‘fixed’’.

4 Likes
20

Yep, that’s the point of the ripcord. If they really had pulled the ripcord in the Shadowlands beta and dismantled covenants, we would’ve have been stuck with them forever. I really hope that whatever new systems we’re going to get are going to learn from the previous expansions’ systems, but I also don’t want to make the devs feel like the ripcord is going to be something that limits their creativity. I hope they experiment a bit and see if something great comes out of it, but if it doesn’t pan out, they just have to be willing to axe it.

3 Likes