[WotLK News] A live chat with Devs

[Duralli-atiesh]

In this discussion one of the CC members already said they brought up concerns with class balancing to the devs, which is quite an important factor to play into this.
It does look like they are pushing back, but in reality there is only so much they can do.

[Samualjacksn-azuremyst]

Because “class balancing” in WotLK is the most important topic with the community on the forums right now?

kek

[Bricklethumb-aerie-peak]

Then Blizzard should remove the farce of a program that was only set up as a publicity stunt.

If they do not give the CC actual power to address change then its moot.

AND if the members of the CC do not represent the players then its moot.

It’s truly a pointless system.

[Duralli-atiesh]

if you change the ilvls of raiding tiers that very much would affect class balancing. Which is very important since one of the reason classes like warrior scale so much is due to the current itemization.

[Samualjacksn-azuremyst]

Please point out all the forum posts asking about that topic. Now refer to RDF, which the WCC “didn’t have time for”. Oh yeah, they are really “pushing back” on Blizz.

kek

[Duralli-atiesh]

This entire forum topic is about that. There ya go, I pointed it out.

[Samualjacksn-azuremyst]

So the people talking about it post when the WCC “had their talk” with devs, means it was asked about by the community before the talk?

kek

[Ziryus-pagle]

@Samualjacksn-azuremyst

Because “class balancing” in WotLK is the most important topic with the community on the forums right now?

kek

Class balance was pretty good in wrath so not sure why it’s even an issue being discussed at all.

[Duralli-atiesh]

Well per what they said (also in this forum that you clearly didn’t read) blizzard had topics they wanted to discuss. It doesn’t look like they gave them much of a choice on talking points.
My guess is blizzard has been thinking of this change for a while and wanted to gauge people about it.

[Orene-grobbulus]

@Ziryus-pagle

@Samualjacksn-azuremyst

Because “class balancing” in WotLK is the most important topic with the community on the forums right now?

kek

Class balance was pretty good in wrath so not sure why it’s even an issue being discussed at all.

Some argue it’s the most balanced ever was. Good point.

[Duralli-atiesh]

I’m only bringing it up in relation to the ilvl scaling changes they were talking about, which is fairly relevant.
*edit - here is a good post that also brings up things about raid comps changing due to scaling for example:
The post-Ulduar gear iLvl squish suggestion is a bad and lazy idea - WoW Classic / WoW Classic General Discussion - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

[Samualjacksn-azuremyst]

It’s just an excuse to ignore more important topics being discussed by the community. This whole WCC “talk with devs” is a farce meant to gaslight the community. It’s honestly an insult to intelligence that they even attempt to pass this off as sincere to the community.

[Seouloflron-shadowstrike]

I get that everyone is malding but I have a serious question that many of my scholars and dentists are wondering the answer to. Do these changes make Death Knights stronger? If so, OMEGAROLL, if not, sadge.

TY in advance.

[Samualjacksn-azuremyst]

@Mispeled-benediction

I understand the frustration regarding RDF but this isn’t what this thread should be about.

No lol. It’s about RDF now. You know. The topic making up most of the forum posts. Good job doing PR work for free.

[Ziryus-pagle]

@Duralli-atiesh

I’m only bringing it up in relation to the ilvl scaling changes they were talking about, which is fairly relevant.
*edit - here is a good post that also brings up things about raid comps changing due to scaling for example:
The post-Ulduar gear iLvl squish suggestion is a bad and lazy idea - WoW Classic / WoW Classic General Discussion - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

The bigger issue is that it would dramatically impact raid tuning if ToC/ICC/RS don’t get rebalanced as well to account for it.

[Duralli-atiesh]

And that’s what I’ve been reading as a concern. A friend of mine also discussed this a bit with me on the side.
In the changes talked about they didn’t even bring up rebalancing the raids, they only talked about the ilvl squish.
Which if not handled correctly could vastly impact a ton of systems.

[Grasstamouth-jom-gabbar]

@Pathbloom-benediction

@Mispeled-benediction

There was a live chat between the Classic Community Council members and the Classic Devs yesterday and I wrote a list of what was discussed here .

I am reposting here for visibility and to have a place for people to discuss it.

None of theses are guarantees, don’t shoot the messenger and we only had 1 hour so we didn’t have time to cover other topics such as RDF, cooldown resets, arena rating/points, etc.

Please try to keep it focused on what was discussed, I understand the frustration regarding RDF but this isn’t what this thread should be about.
Thank you.

I thought you guys were supposed to represent the community, not be talking heads for the devs? You know as well as anyone else and from your other posts in this thread that by far the largest issue is RDF. I am frustrated that the devs met with the community council members and RDF was not discussed.

Community Council members should represent the community. I know you felt like you would burn bridges if you pushed the agenda on them… but sometimes you gotta play hardball.

Exactly why Community council members are a joke

How do you NOT ask about RDF lol

[Bricklethumb-aerie-peak]

@Aggrend-1483

Thanks for posting these notes and commentary, Vay, Cleavis and Mispeled. Was really great talking with you and the rest of the classic community council folks yesterday.

I wanted to chime in and talk about the “ilvl squish” in ToC/ICC a bit more, and provide even more context for anyone who is reading this who may have some questions about this idea (and I do want to stress, it’s currently just an idea)

There’s actually several goals, here, with two being the primary:

Give Ulduar time to breathe

Going to start with a little history recap here; In original Wrath of the Lich King, Ulduar occupied an interesting design space as even the normal modes for many of the bosses were a pretty large cut above Naxxramas 10/25 in terms of difficulty. For many people just joining World of Warcraft during at the start of Wrath of the Lich King, Naxx was potentially their first raid and as Naxx was so accessible, it had huge participation. Ulduar however, had much lower participation and many groups that were successfully clearing Naxx and the other Tier 7 raids suddenly found themselves struggling.

Overall a few different things were tried including some nerfs to Ulduar as well as trying to get a new raid out to players to bridge the gap between Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. This raid was released around 3 1/2 months after Ulduar, and was released with gear equivalent to another full tier up from Tier 8 gear, with the addition of heroic mode which provided an even larger ilvl jump over normal mode than rewards for defeating hard mode encounters in Ulduar were. By early World of Warcraft raid tier standards, Ulduar had a relatively short run before being effectively replaced and outclassed by significantly better rewards from a much more accessible raid in Trial of the Crusader.

As years have passed, we think its safe to say that Ulduar is now regarded as one of the best and most unique raid experiences in WoW, and those that enjoyed it undoubtedly felt like it was cut quite short. We want to make sure that Ulduar is front and center during its time in Wrath Classic, and still has healthy amount of time to breathe before Trial of the Crusader is released, and by extension, Season 7 for Arena is introduced. This bridges to the next major goal for this change…

Don’t Cut Arena Season 7 Short

Early on in discussions to plan Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we knew we wanted Ulduar to have a good long run, and the first Idea we considered was simply making the Trial of the Crusader tier (Tier 9) much shorter, potentially up to half as long as Ulduar (Tier 8). However, the major problem with that plan is that we’d then need to either start Arena Season 7 right in the middle of Tier 8 and create a situation where PvP gear would be in many cases BiS to PvE raiders for multiple months, or start Season 7 late and have it be a very short, truncated season.

Arena seasons need a certain amount of time to breathe as well and this idea of a truncated season did not sit well with us at all. By going ahead and releasing Trial of the Crusader at a time that makes sense to line up with Arena Season 7, that feels much better for PvP-focused players.

In addition to the goals above, we also had 3 other main secondary goals:

Encourage Older Raids to remain Relevant and worth doing for Alts and PUGs.

One thing we really like in Classic and Burning Crusade is that older tiers of raiding continue to see participation even when that content is no longer current. This means that there’s a large variety of things to do for your alts or on off-nights, and due to the overall flatter nature of gear and ilvl progression in those earlier versions of wow, this makes these older raids more appealing to continue to run. By lowering the ilvl of ToC slightly, this makes running Ulduar hard modes appealing and a worthwhile investment for longer than it otherwise might be. As mentioned above, Normal ToC gear is so much better than even Ulduar hard mode gear, that most guilds would very likely drop Ulduar completely, and it would be less appealing to alts much faster.

Allow us to increase difficulty slightly in later tiers without changing bosses or the mechanics themselves.

We have a ton of reference and respect for the encounters in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and wanted to make as few adjustments here as possible. Slightly lowering overall player power going into a raid like ICC allows our modern, more savvy Classic players to have a bit more of a challenge in that raid without needing to make risky changes to the encounters themselves. And with the progressive raid buff system that comes in later in ICC, we still feel like this raid will be accessible to raid groups of varying skill levels after some time passes.

Curb a bit of the wild scaling that occurs with such massive iLvl jumps between tiers

Kris Zierhut was one of the designers responsible for planning itemization during original Wrath of the Lich King, and he’s back on our team now working on the Classic version. He often times says that a stated goal of gearing and scaling in original Wrath was to avoid the situation we got into at the end of The Burning Crusade where certain classes and roles scaled so well that they had to make major systemic adjustments to Sunwell Plateau to compensate for this. The most notable example of this is “Sunwell Radiance” which effectively reduced the avoidance of all tanks by a flat, massive amount. While effective, this debuff never felt great because it meant that the progression of your character meant little when you got to Sunwell, as there was a global debuff that negated the benefits you got from your hard-won gear across the board.

As alluded to above, Trial of the Crusader’s injection into the overall design of raid progression in Wrath of the Lich King conflicted with those original goals and intent, and ultimately led to the same type of scaling problems that were faced late in The Burning Crusade. We feel that an adjustment here could help with this concern when we get to ICC, and add up to a more interesting experience overall.

We totally understand that at face value “nerfing” gear is a scary prospect, but we are committed to taking extreme care to not make too many waves, and ensure that in relative terms, classes and roles that excelled later in the expansion will continue to feel powerful as they progress.

Thank you for reading if you got this far, and apologies for the length of this, but floating a change like this really needs a thorough explanation and reasoning for context. We wanted to start this with a focused group of community council members, and we’d love to get feedback on this in the coming weeks. We still have time to make further adjustments to this idea.

Thanks!

Posted here for the rest of us.

[Balerinka-atiesh]

You mean 3.3.5?

[Endivius-bloodsail-buccaneers]

The thread that had the posts concerning only one server being released was responded to by a blue within a few hours because it blew up almost instantly.

You don’t see that with RDF. No matter how committed they are for it, there just isn’t enough interest in it.