Patch 9.2.5 Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
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The release of 9.2.5 raises a near term issue for me that 9 months is a long time to live with systems issues that are recognized and being addressed in 10.0 but not addressed at all until then.

For me this part of an xpack is when I normally play a lot of honor BGs. It may not be too late for this particular issue and could be part of season 4 however the PvP season 4 gear that is on PTR indicates that the PvP gearing changes planned for 10.0 are not going to be part of season 4. It would be fantastic if they were!

Another item that would have been nice to see is that completing various campaign quest chains once on an account was sufficient to unlock the various things that are held behind them such that every alt doesn’t need to keep doing them over and over again.

I would have liked to see the renown boost item upgraded to an R80 boost, but R60 is better than nothing! As a casual solo player it would have been nice to earn renown in the activities I actually do; LFR (I assume this is included in “all raid bosses” which is nice to have if it includes LFR) and honor BGs. I don’t do M+, rated PvP or organized raiding. Since I’m over the idea of doing callings and the same quests I’ve already done I’ll be getting renown on my PvP alts by running them through LFR (that just seems silly).

Same server, cross faction mail I’m super excited about. This is fantastic! Also a big fan of the new hi-res larger cursors.

For me personally these are the biggest items I was really hoping for in this patch.

UPDATES:

The Lordaeron quest chain was great! I did it on both Horde and Ally. I’m a big fan of the idea of bringing Undercity and Darnassus back. I never liked that they were removed to begin with and never like it when parts of the world are destroyed and never fixed again later; just left in whatever mess a particular x-pack left it in. I’d love to see Vale of eternal blossoms’ default current state be something post visions and pretty again. Which brings me to my main point here. Once this quest chain is complete on the account why doesn’t the current state of Lordaeron change to this for every other character on the account? I’m certainly not doing this on every single character I have! Zidormi should have been given a new option to go back to the plagued state and made the new unplagued state the new current timeline for every character on the account. The title should also be account wide IMO.

Expanded iLvL cypher gear is a MUST for S4!!! (On par with Normal raiding as it is currently)

There are now updated BoA Equipment Chests for M+ and PvP. Why are there not the same types of chests for Outdoor and Raid Progression? M+ and PvP and raiding all also have vault options already. Outdoor content should have a vault as well or something that serves a similar purpose. The ability to pass items to alts in some manner should be allowed or not allowed for all content types and not just for some.

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9 months is a long time, and so far I’ve seen nothing about Havoc Demon Hunter yet, and I know there are more specs that desperately need changes. I personally only play Havoc DH in that regard, so I can only speak for Havoc.

Ever since double legendaries were introduced it has been said by a large portion of the community that the 4pc set feels bad and close to useless. Not to mention that any competitive PvE DH is shoehorned into a “keep this borrowed power dot up at all cost or do no damage” build. It’s 9.2.5 and we’re still here with 0 changes.

What irks me most is that there’s 0 communication and 0 mention on whether these issues are even considered issues. There’s no “we think Havoc is fine as it is” or “We agree but we don’t have a short term solution”, and that’s disappointing.

Here are some posts from the US forums that more than highlight the issues:

Me? I’ll be playing my Survival Hunter now because on ilvl 255 I do 70~90k dps on packs in M+ where I do 30~40k max on a 276 Havoc DH. I get to spam explosions instead of only pressing buttons to keep a dot up that’s not even part of my base kit and feels unimpactful.

I enjoyed Night Fae last season, and I will say what I’ve said before, we don’t need double legendaries, because they shoehorn us into very specific builds and unless tuned very precisely, just cause wild-growth of power for a few specs while the rest falls behind. Even Night Fae is relatively unfun now because I dislike Unbound Chaos, but with the NF legendary that’s pretty much a must-have.

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My thoughts on 9.2.5.

Cross Faction

Not allowing Cross Faction in queued content is extremely disrespectful and makes me feel like a second class player that Blizzard doesn’t care about. There’s a rather good chance I will unsubscribe in the coming months until Dragonflight entirely over it. I don’t want to support a company that tells me I’m not as important as players who do M+, Raiding, etc.

Cross Faction should have been all or nothing, not pick-and-choose. And if it wasn’t ready for all in 9.2.5, they should have delayed it until Dragonflight and used it as a selling point. Plain and Simple.

If they want to keep the opt-in nature for people, for those who don’t want cross faction? Simple solution. War Mode. Do not allow Cross Faction in War Mode. If you queue for a dungeon in War Mode? You’re opted out of Cross Faction, etc.

Season 4

Although Season 4 doesn’t start with 9.2.5, it’s a part of it eventually, and much like the above, they show they don’t care about the casual players.

Outdoor players have no gear progression in season 4. While every other group gets massive ilvl boosts, with Mythic Raiders going up to almost 310.

Heroic Dungeons will be 249, Mythic0 will be 262.

Outdoor players will still be capped at 252. We are going from being on par with Normal (9.2) and Heroic (9.1) raid gear, to being a measly 3 levels above Heroic DUNGEONS. How is this okay?

We have a direct quote from Ion himself that he supposedly believes outdoor players deserve gear progression, but that is not reflected AT ALL in 9.2.5.

Why did they not add a way for us to earn higher ranks of cypher gear? Or add an upgrade token to the Jiro vendor that we can buy for like 2000 Cyphers to upgrade a piece of our cypher gear to a higher ilvl. Etc.

Various Changes

Things like the Renown 60 boost should have been hotfixed in - there’s zero reason they had to hold it until 9.2.5. They hotfixed in the Renown 40 item and the Conduit catchup, so we know it’s possible. I’ve wanted to play a new toon for weeks, but I didn’t because I know that I’d hate grinding the Renown.

Then there’s things like, as Brem mentioned, the Unity belt still being locked behind doing the full campaign on every single character. Why is this not unlocked on the vendor on all your toons once you do it on one toon? Why is the outdoor player Conduit catchup locked behind Revered for every single character? Etc.

Then there’s the fact the heritage quests. First, they gave them to 2 races who already have them, which is silly, when there’s still races who have none, but then they did a vast difference in quality of them. Dark Irons have a 3 minute quest running around the city for items. That’s it. Blood Elves have a deep story, exploring the Blood Elf orphan from Children’s Week that’s now an adult, the scourge on azeroth, etc. Alliance won’t see any of that. We won’t have any idea what azeroth is like, but Horde will and that’s wrong. They didn’t even give Moira a “Stay a while and listen” to explain it to us.

In short, 9.2.5 reads as a massive “We don’t care about you” to casual/outdoor players, and it’s ridiculous.

23 Likes
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I don’t view this as disrespectful at all.

In my eyes the change is aimed at shorter times to find pug groups, which is a significant issue for alliance players right now. Implementing cross faction the way it will be today also allows people to retain immersion in the faction specific gameplay if they choose, because they can opt to continue to lock faction barriers when forming groups.

I’ve heard the war-mode argument many times for the open-world-non-cross-faction alternative, but I disagree with it. Because many players who still want the game to not have cross faction gameplay don’t want it to be a PvP world either. They don’t want to be friendly with Orcs while levelling night elves, but they also don’t want to be ganked over and over by max level characters.

The 9.2.5 implementation is the best way they could have handled a live trial run IMO. The people who use it will benefit from shorter queue times, the solo players like yourself, Maizou aren’t punished by not having it in the open world. Your game has not changed.

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Good for you. You’ll have less time.

But not casual players. We will still have the ridiculously long PvP queues as Alliance and PvE queues as Horde.

And yes, I’d take an increased PvE queue in exchange for lowered PvP queues.

We are innately punished by merit of not having access to Cross Faction in our content, period.

On top of this, you ignore the fact there are a ton of people who are faction changing to Horde after this goes live because now they can play Horde and still play with their Alliance friends in M+, raiding, and rated PvP.

Which will just by merit of how it works, increase queue times for Alliance and further imbalance the factions. Yes, there will be people who do the opposite, but not nearly as many.

And as I’ve told you and others, it’d be a completely different situation if Blizzard, AT ANY POINT had told us they plan to add X-Faction to queued/casual content in the future. But they haven’t. They’ve dodged the question, time and time again.

So yes, it is INCREDIBLY disrespectful. And as I said, I likely will cancel my account in the coming months over it, and I’ll be back for DF. You don’t get to treat casual players like they aren’t as important as endgame players then expect us to keep supporting you.

And considering you, Letholas, are in General Discussion constantly, you of all people should know that casual players feel ignored and like they don’t matter because of things like this. There’s at least a thread a day about something similar from different people.

EDIT: And just to add, the main reason Blizzard gave for Cross Faction was people wanting to play with their friends.

How on earth does that solve anything for casual players if there’s no casual content with Cross Faction enabled?

I can’t play with my Horde friends unless I want to do M+ (No), Normal+ Raiding (No), or rated PvP (Lolno). Why can’t I play with my Horde friends in the content I play?

19 Likes
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Just to touch on something unexpected from 9.2.5 - The Dark Ranger skin tones.

First, I would like to say thank you for listening to feedback on extremely desired customization options - I know a lot of people still hold out hope for a Darkfallen Allied Race, but I’ve seen a lot of people happy to at least have the ability to roleplay as one now.

Also, thank you for keeping things like the Dark Ranger customization and storylines secret until they day they were available. It was refreshing to not be spoiled months in advance.

However, the implementation is… much to be desired. Locking the Eye and Skin Color together prevents people from roleplaying as Darkfallen, as a lot of them don’t have Red Eyes. Grey Skin has also been a request from Void Elves - which is why I’m using the option, but I’m stuck with Red Eyes when I would vastly prefer the Void Elf eyes.

Also - Nightborne players feel excluded - if Void Elves were allowed the skin tones, then Nightborne should have been as well - especially since Nightborne were present during the War of Thorns, so logically there would have likely been some Nightborne that Sylvanas resurrected alongside the Night Elves. I assume this was likely done because Nightborne don’t have an eye color option, but at the very least, saying it can be added later would go a long way. (There’s also a few instances, like Night Elf Death Knights, where only 2 eye color options are available, so why wasn’t this done for Nightborne?)

That said, by adding the skin tones to Void Elves without establishing how, it leads to people having to create theories, or outright saying it shouldn’t be possible.

The same goes for allowing Blood Elf Paladins and Night Elf Druids to use the skin tones. This effectively canonizes Forsaken Paladins and Druids, unless you otherwise state they’re just for gameplay purposes. (Also, excluding Death Knights but not Paladins/Druids is a very odd choice, I might add)

There’s a lot of things that could have been addressed with quickly added in game text. For example (Just an example/) -

Add a dialogue option to Alleria in Telogrus Rift for Void Elves who have the account-wide achievement that unlocks the skin tones. A simple “I notice Dark Rangers here, what’s going on?” and have her reply that after Sylvanas left, some Dark Rangers felt ostracized by the Horde and she offered them refuge in the Void Elves. (The Dark Rangers feeling ostracized is actually stated by Velonara in the questline, so it’s not a farfetched assumption.)

As for Paladins and Druids - I can’t think of a simple explanation for how these work. But that’s part of the problem. You mentioned in the “All Races All Classes” interview for Dragonflight that you’re working there, but you want to create story for it - why was this not done for the Dark Rangers of different classes?

This leads to a simple question - if things like Dark Ranger Paladins, Druids, Void Elves, etc are just for gameplay purposes to make the coding easier or increase player options, why not just release a simple statement to this regard?

Likewise, why not extend this to all races, all classes when the time comes? Only canonize things that you feel should be canon, but still open the options for gameplay purposes and player choice. That way people who care about the story don’t have to deal with new lore they disagree with to explain Gnome Demon Hunters, because you make a statement it’s just for player choice and gameplay choices, but isn’t canon. That way the amount of annoyed/angry people is minimized. There will obviously still be some, but this would likely result in the lowest amount. This is not a perfect solution to all races/classes, but a lot of people feel all races/classes would spit on the lore of wow, even if new lore was created to explain them.

That said - if Blizzard/writers clearly believe all races/classes should be canon in the lore, then do what you feel is best. But the statement about it implied it was only being done to give players choice - in which case why not just state they aren’t canon, but are just being available for gameplay purposes?

7 Likes
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I feel that the Cross Faction grouping needs a lot more work to make it really a useful thing. LFR and Group Finder should be Cross Faction, pulling players from a combined pool of Horde and Alliance. I also think that raids and dungeons with specific Horde or Alliance content should be made cross faction and work on the basis that whatever faction the group leader is will be the faction for this raid.

The new quests were nice, I assume they will be vastly expanded on in 10.0. I am a bit disappointed that the present day Undercity is still closed, I was all ready to go back in after clearing the blight only to find the doors locked and that no one seemed to have the keys! Yes I know you can visit Undercity in the past, but after clearing the blight I was hoping we would walk right back in to the city.

I have experienced a few issues with killing legacy content, mostly BFA mythics, where some of the bosses feel a bit harder to kill, I suppose this could be down to class changes.

I am looking forward to Season 4, but I feel that more work is needed on the Cross Faction to really make this patch a good send off for Shadowlands

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I definitely agree it should be massively expanded. I would prefer the ability to just be friendly towards the other faction entirely with no limitations. It’d be pretty great!

As for the rest of 9.2.5 I enjoyed the storyline with the Forsaken, I think it’s a pretty good direction for them to go. Though I do feel we should’ve had a bit more build-up for the council members. I never really thought Voss fit as a leader of the Forsaken but now she is one of the ones calling the shots. I think this is the side effect of a lot of Forsaken Development only being piled onto Sylvanas not building up the commanding leaders around her. We got less of their culture as the story moved on and I hope to have a council lead them will have more development spread out more evenly.

The customization options for the Dark Rangers is a bit strange, as others have mentioned. Wish the skin tone and eyes weren’t solely tied together.

I am a bit underwhelmed by the night elf stuff we’ve gotten so far. It seems like the story is building to a conclusion but compared to the Forsaken it’s been a much longer slow burn with fewer overall storyline developments. The Forsaken got their city back but the Night Elves haven’t yet. It seems they own Gilneas as well, even though previously the Alliance was said to have reclaimed Gilneas.

I don’t know if that was an oversight or just a change. Or some more developments just happened off-screen we weren’t privy to.

Otherwise, I’ve enjoyed what we got and I hope to see more of this kind of stuff in the future for Dragonflight!

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My main issue with 9.2.5 is that I finished the Dark Ranger quest on my hunter, and when I look into the transmog section I still don’t have the Dark Ranger set. Now I believe I can get it in my class hall, and I keep forgetting to check, but this should really not be the case. We’re in Shadowlands, not Legion, so it feels really weird to make such a detour.

Once I finish the quest, I should get the appearance. There’s 0 information in the UI on where to get it otherwise.

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With regards to cross faction, I think there needs some work done to auto flag when you create a group for Battle for Dazalor (or other raids that are not cross faction) that its Alliance/Horde only based on what faction the leader is. Yes, I know the leader can flag it but so many forget! I have joined so many groups for this lately and people forget this raid isn’t cross faction, it’s a popular raid to run so this happens very very often.

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Friendly reminder that we got another big tuning post, retracting the changes for Dustrction Warlock, with an update on both Survival Hunter and Destruction Warlock for Season 4

Yet we still have not even a mention of Havoc Demon Hunter.

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Another “friendly” reminder that we’re another 2 weeks further and still not a single word on Havoc for Season 4. I did an M+ on havoc with friends, and those friends are the only reason I finished the run before logging back to an alt that does twice the damage for half the effort.

1 Like