Thank you Blizzard, I currently main a Venthyr Warrior and I love the armor sets and mounts I have for Venthyr. On the other hand I have been wanting to go Night fae since their warrior ability is best for M+. Now I dont have to lose all my cosmetics and I can still play with the Nightfae ability. Best change in Shadowlands thus far.
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The QoL changes are really appreciated, but please continue to make changes to pvp
“ Lower item-level PvP gear will now scale to a higher item-level in PvP situations than before. This should reduce the power level gap so that new characters can feel that they’re able to compete in Battlegrounds and Arenas more readily. This change will not affect high item-level PvP gear.”
This is a good change, but ultimately without the upgrade system this fix isn’t necessary in the first place. You can only apply so many bandages before you have to deal with the injury
It’s incredibly tempting to be positive about the changes, because they look good. However…
“We still know better than you.”
This tells me there was no actual future lesson for Blizzard here. They didn’t and won’t change things due to player feedback in future expansions, and this helps me bypass the thoughts of playing again.
It never did. This is what I mean by you guys not actually learning.
It is a different story, and the fact that it took this long to admit what you already knew is a mixed bag of feelings from me. On one hand, you admit to being wrong; on the other, it’s incredibly difficult to trust lead devs who think it’s ok to keep such a system for so long.
Good for character, but doesn’t help my faith in competency.
The change? Good. However, your explanation to me sounds like “the expansion has been out long enough and we’ve milked this system enough, so we can make it reasonable now.”
Ultimately, very little in the grand scheme of things is changing; you’re still only changing things in a good way faaar into an expansion. You’re making it clear to me that the only time worth playing WoW would be the first couple months of an expansion, and then .1.5 or .2/.3…not that I myself will be playing anymore.
Until you have this attitude from the start of the expansion, I don’t care.
If WoW was still somehow a big part of my life, I’d choose to primarily see the positives here, but the main problem here…is that this is par for the course. You always wait way too long to give any attention to these things.
Instead of starting in a middle-ground, you go from overly limiting systems, to completely open and free systems. Why is a middle-ground early on so hard to consider?
I’ll be honest, I was happy reading these notes, but then I realized you guys weren’t actually saying you were wrong with anything outside conduit energy, and that this is a repeat of every other expansion.
To those who love the changes, that’s great; the game is improving for you, and I’m glad it’s able to positively affecting you. I’m too cynical at this point, but more power to you.
Will spell-check at a later date if I get around to it…
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Thanks for posting this, and thanks to Blizz for these awesome changes! I’m actually excited about a minor patch!
No. I’m tired of this cycle. You ignore feedback, then fix it a year down the line when you realize you were wrong. I’m not doing this dance again. What I read from your reply, is that you still think you were right, but because of the end of the Sanctum of Domination, it’s no longer applicable. If you are so into fixing things, why not start with your dev’s atitudes?
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Yeah no. A lot of us players who “ignore the system” are actually also negatively affected by it because we are aware that we can’t mess with it. Early on I wanted to test something so I swapped specs and conduits with my only decent soulbind, then swapped to a different arrangement a couple times because as I said I was testing and wanted to see what felt best.
I didn’t have enough conduit energy to switch back to my main spec and was essentially punished for trying to explore different specs as putting their conduits in a different soulbind would still incur the same penalty, and after that I learned to never touch my conduits again because even just switching once and back used my whole week’s allotment of energy.
All of us players ignoring the energy aren’t unaffected, we have been taught by your horrible system to not touch it or suffer the consequences.
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I’m going to say the bigger problem is not being transparent or communicating. There’s NO excuse for Conduit Energy, ever. So I won’t harp on that. But narratively, it makes since for the Covenant restrictions. The issue is when we were complaining alongside Preach and in interviews was telling Ion, “This feels bad.” He shouldn’t have said “If we need to pull the rip cord, we can.” He should’ve said, “Currently, the covenants act separately from each other. If there comes a time they can put aside their differences and work together, It will be removed.” If an expectation was set from Day 1, Ion could’ve made me wait till 9.3 and I would’ve been fine. What you don’t do is play off our feedback as “wrong” and then do it anyways later down the road. Be honest. Say: eventually we plan to or can if it doesn’t work, but for now we want to try it this way because it makes sense for the story we’re trying to tell.
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So may good things! I love new Nightborne customizations, adding flexibility on covenants, and Legion Timewalking!
Nah. No apology from me.
It took over a year to listen to the community, and ONLY because they’re hemorrhaging subs. This will bring some back, but the damage is still done.
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Pimp community.
One carrot in-front of a donkey at a time.
Blizzard. Are there any plans to do anything with the nameplates this expansion?
After the hotfix for the classic servers during BfA (around September 2019), retail were also affected and the distance HARDLOCKED to 60 yards. No amount of CVar changes helps.
And also, nameplates are visible from out of line of sight or even different floors (Tol Dagor were a pain, for example).
How long will it be ignored?
You should have left this out because it shows how out of touch the developers are with the game. Players ignored it because of conduit energy. Even within the same spec there are times I have wanted to swap around conduits whether it’s to test or swap up my “template” for various content. You guys really did not learn a lesson from Azerite armor. This is actually sad.
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Blizzard will Achievement “On the Offensive” (Part of the meta “Breaking the Chains”)be accountwide instead of toonbased?
Wait, what even is this statement? We have literally 1+ year of data which shows that 90% of the playerbase always went with the best-performing covenant for their spec, and the devs STILL think it was a meaningful choice that carried “weight”? Wtf? What level of denial is this?
Speaking of strange philosophies, this raises an even more important question: Are the devs still clinging onto the notion that min-maxers are evil, and must be forcibly prevented from constantly optimizing their loadout? Internally are the devs still clinging to the belief that this is a “problem” that needs to be “fixed”? We need to know, because it was a completely non-existent problem that Blizzard pulled out of thin air and then started trying to “fix” for no reason. That’s how we ended up “solutions” like conduit energy, and exponentially-increasing gold cost for switching azerite traits back in BFA (remember that?), etc.
If the devs still think that giving players freedom to min-max and optimize their loadout is a huge problem that needs to be stamped-out, then there is no hope for future systems. Please be transparent and let us know if the devs are still operating on this philosophy.
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Please were give us jet black as a color option for void elfs !!! Why is there 3 blonde shades ??? Like I seriously that can’t be the only options you give us as “natural” colors it makes no sense not to have a jet black color for darker elfs hello???
Also
Can we get a skip intro for korthia aswell? the intro is so boring and long on alts .
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Because of the covenant swapping basically being arbitrary can we just freely pick out soul bind and then that just puts us tied to that covenant?
It’s a good change to get rid of the penalty but also please make it as accessible as possible.
Please don’t make us have to go to oro is each time to swap then to the respective sanctum to rebind soulbinds.
Or at least put one or the soul bind things in oribos to make it even easier.
Just add that extra QoL
Thanks for this update!
The communication is really heartening to see, and the list that we’ve got here makes it clear that the team has been paying attention to player feedback. In the spirit of providing feedback to build a better Shadowlands, I have a few additional questions / areas of concern:
Covenant Swapping:
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Will we be able to do this anywhere, or only in Oribos?
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Will my renown be tracked separately for each covenant, IE am I going to to need to grind to get my Maldraxxus renown up if I’ve spent the whole expansion as Night Fae?
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Will I be able to buy each covenant’s cosmetic rewards?
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Will I need to grind out the anima for all four covenant sanctum upgrades in order to purchase ensembles and other rewards? (I REALLY don’t want to have to spend 100,000 anima or the like three times in order to get all the transmogs.)
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How will the Mission Table work? Am I going to be able to / feel compelled to track four different covenant mission tables?
I ask a bunch of these questions because currently the four covenant sanctums are completely separate. If I deposit 10,000k anima into my Night Fae reservoir and then switch to Revendreth, my anima stays with the Night Fae. Similarly, when I swap covenants all the progress I made on my sanctum is gone.
Personally, I think it would be pretty great if Sanctum progress was account-wide. Meaning that, sure, I have to level up all the sanctums once, but once I do it on one character it holds for every character on my account. But these are the most immediate questions of concern that I have in hearing that covenant swapping will be a thing.
Are you really still trying to justify your terrible game design decisions?
I wonder when Blizzard will ever start an apology with “We’re sorry”.
Anyways, the renown requirement is completely pointless when you’re already going this far with opening it up. I’d suggest the free win of removing that requirement…I think we all know you guys could use some wins that cost you nothing besides your pride.
Take that as a last gesture of goodwill from an extremely long time fan that has unsubbed.
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The factions have been united against the bosses of the various expansions for some time. Letting groups exist regardless of faction would be a welcome change, and would erase the faction imbalance issue.
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