On Saturday, June 6th, at 2:00 PM Pacific time, I’ll be sitting down with Lead Game Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas to answer your questions about Warlords of Draenor — including the upcoming 6.2 Content Patch, as well as lessons we’ve learned throughout Warlords of Draenor’s development.
We’ll be sharing more information, including how to submit your questions, in a full announcement on Monday, but wanted to give the community as much advance notice as possible regarding the date and time of this upcoming Q&A. We’ll see you there!
We went onto the PTR again on Tuesday night (which we livestreamed) to check out the Mythic dungeons. Currently on the PTR your item level gets reduced to an average of 660, to test the difficulty of the mythic dungeons. We found that beside a few abilities that could nearly 1 shot (which need to be interrupted), the dungeons were not that hard on mythic difficulty.
What are Mythic dungeons?
One of the features coming in patch 6.2 is the Mythic dungeon difficulty. Each of the 8 Warlords of Draenor dungeons will have this difficulty. On this difficulty the bosses will drop ilvl 685 gear and they have a chance to upgrade to ilvl 700 gear. Mythic dungeons have a weekly loot lockout. This means that you can do the mythic dungeons as many times as you want, but you’ll only be eligible for loot on your first kills within the mythic dungeons every week.
There is also a weekend event to go along with this difficulty. During the Draenor dungeon weekend event you’ll be able to pick up a quest that will reward you with a heroic Hellfire Citadel cache. It will require you to do 4 mythic dungeons.
Mythic dungeons will work a lot like Challenge Modes when it comes to starting the dungeons. You will have to get together your own group as there is no random mythic dungeon queue. You can of course use the LFG tool to find a team though, as the mythic dungeons are cross realm enabled. Once you have your group together you will need to physically walk to the entrance of the dungeon and zone in. Don’t forget to put dungeon difficulty on mythic before you do so!
Welcome to Mezzy Talks! The editorial where I take a look at something within World of Warcraft culture, game design (which has been moved to the design corner) or anything else WoW related.
“We’ve reached a point in 6.2 testing where going forward, builds deployed to PTR are going to be flagged as “release” versions.”
This makes an end of June / start of July release a lot more likely.
Original Article:
Recently the first bit of patch 6.2 hit the background downloader causing a lot of speculation as to when the patch will be released. As it’s a quiet Sunday night, I thought it would be good to tackle the subject of the release of patch 6.2.
Since the background download has started there have been 2 camps of speculation. The first one being that the patch will already be released within the next week or two. You’ll mostly find these players in-game in the trade channel, whenever the background downloader gets mentioned.
The second camp is one you’ll more likely come across in the online community and social media. You’ll more likely hear from this camp that it’ll take 1 month – 4 weeks for patch 6.2 to be released. Let’s take a look at each of the speculations and then I’ll do some speculating of my own.
Speculation of 1 week
When it comes to addressing this particular time frame we can be done pretty quickly about it. Before a major patch is released there is always at least 1 release candidate pushed to the PTR, if not more than 1 candidate. We’re currently getting 1 new PTR build a week and the content itself isn’t done yet (which we’ll go into more deeply shortly). There is no way in the emerald nightmare that we’ll see 6.2 release in 1 or even 2 weeks.
Speculation of 1 month
Another factor – timewalker (and raid) tuning
One month – 4 weeks would seem more reasonable, but at the current state of things it would mean just a meager 4 more PTR builds. They could (and likely will) increase the amount of new builds they do per week, but there’s still a lot that has to be done to make the 6.2 patch complete.
The shipyard can’t be upgraded to even level 2 yet, the quest(s) to get more than 2 ship blueprints still do not work properly (beyond having used a bug in previous builds to obtain the submarine), the way shipyard missions work still don’t seem to be final (the mission requirement changes in the last build indicate that at the very least) and the new reputations for Tanaan Jungle Watcher recently talked about in an interview haven’t even made it onto the PTR yet. In fact, they’re still being fleshed out. They’re not even fully designed yet.
So while 1 month seems reasonable and puts 6.2 at a end of June release, I feel it’s unlikely with the amount of time and effort that undoubtedly still needs to go into 6.2. After all if there’s one thing we learned from the delayed release of WoD, it’s that game design takes time.
Neither
So if it’s not 1 week, 2 weeks or even 1 month, when can we expect the release of 6.2? Well given the pattern Blizzard has shown in the past, I feel there are 2 possibilities that take the “soon” comment from the recent interview into account.
The first possibility is mid July which would put the wait time at 6 to 7 weeks. The second possibility is mid August. Which would put it at another 10 to 11 weeks. So you might be wondering, why the gap? Well at the start of August Gamescom takes place from the 5th to 9th of August. Whenever these events occur, the week before and the week after nothing usually happens.
Speculating the release of a new patch is a very inexact science. No one actually knows how far 6.2 is in the development process outside of Blizzard themselves. So while we as a community enjoy the guessing, in the end we’ll just have to wait for the official announcement. 1 month is possible but unlikely, let’s just hope it isn’t actually another 2,5 months!
One of the events that we have come came across in Tanaan Jungle is the Blood Moon event. It has been slightly bugged in past PTR builds, and even now the event icon will not go away even when the event is not active. Obviously bugs are part of the PTR, but it was good to see it finally working. As such we’ve got a preview video of how the event will work and what the reward is when you complete it!
Polygon recently interviewed lead designer Ion Hazzikostas about 6.2 and the future of WoW. You can read the full interview here. Below is a summary of the new bits of news:
They will add a couple of reputations for players to earn from multiple factions in Tanaan Jungle.
You can gain these by defending certain areas that come under attack or by hunting rare creatures.
Awards will include cosmetic upgrades, some player power items and some convenience items.
There will be no flying in Draenor. And there might not be in future expansions.
“The world feels larger, feels more dangerous. There’s more room for exploration, for secrets, for discovery and overall immersion in the world. At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”
There might be flight options in specific expansion ideas or zones that would benefit from it
Patch 6.2 will not be the last content patch of Warlords of Draenor.
“We’ve got plenty of more story to be told after this”
The Timewalker dungeons are active on the PTR again, this time they’re The Burning Crusade dungeons! We took a look at two of them today. These seem a lot easier than the Wrath of the Lich King versions. Other than a few trash mobs that really could hurt, it was a walk in the park. So there is likely still some balancing to be done, after all it is the PTR!
On the last preview article the question was asked if legendaries can be used in these dungeons. They can! Both Tokk and Mezzy used their Thoridal bows during the first run.
What are Timewalker dungeons?
One of the features coming in patch 6.2 is the Timewalker event. It’s one of 7 possible weekend events. One is for The Burning Crusade, and one is for Wrath of the Lich King. During the event there is a quest you can do to get 1 extra raid loot bonus roll coin that does not count towards the 3 per week cap. To get this you will have to do 5 random Timewalker dungeons. You can pick up this quest in your garrison.
Other than the quest the bosses also drop timewalker items that look like their original TBC/WotLK counterparts. These have the “timewarped” tag. At level 100 these have an item level of 660. If you do the timewalker dungeons as a level 90, these will have a 463 item level. You’ll be able to do timewalker dungeons if your level is atleast as high as the original dungeon’s requirement. This means level 70 for TBC timewalking and level 80 for WotLK timewalking. The item level of the loot will adjust to your level when it drops.
In World of Warcraft Patch 6.2, we’re making some changes to our Raid itemization with the goal of improving the Personal Loot experience, creating more interesting distinctions among items, and providing rewards that more closely reflect the challenge players face to earn them.
Personal Loot Improvements
The Personal Loot system offers several advantages to certain group types, but there are still several areas where we think we can make improvements. Our goals with Personal Loot going forward are threefold:
Make Personal Loot more consistent and rewarding.
Bring Personal Loot up to be competitive with Group Loot, so players who prefer Personal Loot receive rewards comparable to those you get from groups using Master Loot or Need/Greed.
Celebrate rewarding Personal Loot within the group in a way that captures the excitement of receiving rewards in Group Loot.
First, rather than treating loot chances independently for each player—sometimes yielding only one or even zero items for a group—we’ll use a system similar to Group Loot to determine how many items a boss will award based on eligible group size. As a result, groups will receive a much more predictable number of drops when they defeat a boss. In addition, set items will reliably drop in Personal Loot, just like they do in Group Loot today. The end result is that groups using Personal Loot will acquire their 2- and 4-piece set bonuses at around the same time as groups using Group Loot acquire theirs.
We’re also increasing the overall rate of reward for Personal Loot, giving players more items overall to offset the fact that Personal Loot rewards can’t be distributed among group members. We know that finding that one awesome specific trinket to round out your gear set can be difficult with Personal Loot, and this should help increase your odds.
Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!
These Personal Loot improvements aren’t limited to Hellfire Citadel—we’re updating all of our Draenor dungeons, including Mythic dungeons, to use the same system.
Loot distribution underway here
Secondary Stats
In the early days of World of Warcraft, Raid bosses didn’t have that many items to drop—there were only 150 items in all of Molten Core, and more than half of those were set items. This small amount of total gear in a Raid meant there might only have been one or two items per slot in an entire tier that were appropriate for your class—and if you were a Hunter or a Shaman in a place like Molten Core, that meant your only option for a belt in the entire Raid zone was your class set piece. On top of that, if an item wasn’t class restricted, it was shared between many other specializations with wildly different ideas of which stats were good or bad. When very few items were available to fill any given slot, the desire to make sure they were useful for many specs led us to keep from straying too far from a 50/50 split on secondary stats.
…we’ve decided to shake things up with how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch.
As the game has evolved, we’ve increased the number of items that bosses drop per kill, as well as the variety of items they drop. We’ve made secondary stats more competitive with one another, and we’ve reduced the frequency of oddball items that were only useful to a few classes. This made more items useful to more people, but eroded the distinction and sense of identity that items held in the past. Too rare became the situation where you knew for sure that this drop was your awesome piece of equipment, and that feeling of finding a truly special item came less often than we would have liked.
To help bolster that sense of excitement, we’ve decided to shake things up when it comes to how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch. Inside Hellfire Citadel, you’ll see a wider range of high and low secondary stat values on items than you have in a long time. Alongside some tuning adjustments that should ensure your attuned stats are the right choice, this change should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.” Our goal is to help make Hellfire Citadel Raid items more distinct and meaningful to you, and we hope you’ll let us know how things feel once you start collecting your new gear.
Item Level Ramp
As this expansion has progressed, it’s become increasingly apparent that there is a mismatch between challenge and reward for guilds that delve deep into large Raid zones. When the Item Level for rewards across a given difficulty of a zone is flat, a caster staff from Heroic Imperator Mar’gok is largely equal in power to one from Heroic Tectus, despite Mar’gok being the far more challenging boss. We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots. On top of that, many guilds move on to higher difficulties before they fully complete a difficulty, because Heroic Darmac loot is stronger than Normal Blackhand loot—and you can get it for much less effort.
To address this, we are structuring Hellfire Citadel so that the Item Level of the loot awarded by bosses increases as players proceed deeper into the zone, culminating in Archimonde—providing both the ultimate challenge and the ultimate reward.
… it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone.
We’re doing this for a few reasons. First, it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone. One of the more prominent pieces of feedback we got about Blackrock Foundry was that it felt unrewarding for challenging bosses like Iron Maidens to drop loot that was just as good as—or possibly worse than—Gruul’s.
This also breaks up where your best items are in a good way. The power of the items that you can get in a particular slot will differ based on how far through the zone you are. The best boots for you will likely be different if you are on Normal Gorefiend than they would be if you’re on Heroic Mannoroth, which would be different than if you’re on Mythic Iron Reaver, and so on.
We can’t overstate how much we appreciate your feedback on topics like this, especially when you’ve taken the time to join us on the Patch 6.2 PTR and experienced the changes for yourself. As always, everyone’s encouraged to join us and other testers in the 6.2 PTR Discussion forum as we prepare to unleash Hellfire.
