World of Warcraft: Current Year

Azerite Armor

• An extra outer ring that has two spec specific traits per spec.
• You'll have access to 3 traits of the 6-7 available.
• In Season 2 and the new raid, all of the new gear will have a new outer ring that is spec specific traits only.
• The goal is more customization, more access to traits you want, and more choices.
• Set pieces in past expansions were an exception to the standard rules when it comes to items. It felt odd to need multiple of the exact same item to cover multiple specs with a set bonus.
• If you look at how most items work, if you want to play another spec, you want another item for that slot.
• Azerite armor is more flexible than normal items, as you can change the traits.
• There is value to having a bit of friction when it comes to changing specs.
• Someone that is dedicated to a spec should have a small advantage over someone who is constantly switching.
• If you don't have the perfect gear and traits for another spec and you switch, you'll only be slightly less effective. This matters for the people racing to world first, but doesn't matter nearly as much for everyone else.
• Spec switching is easier in most ways in Battle for Azeroth than it was in Legion.
• When it comes to the cost of changing Azerite traits, if you need to change specs long term, that shouldn't feel punishing or overly restrictive.
• The team didn't want players to have to swap Azerite traits between each fight during a raid.
• Every time you respec, the cost of changing again doubles. Every 3 days, the cost will become half of what it was.
• Unlike a lot of items, which are for a specific spec, you have the ability to change the item, just not endlessly without restriction.
• The team will be able to reset the cost to change traits for Patch 8.1.
• Mythic+ items will get new traits, you won't be stuck with the same ones forever.
• Only getting Azerite armor from the Mythic+ chest isn't great. The team is trying to come up with a solution that is a middle ground.
• There has to be some kind of restriction on how you can get Azerite armor, so it can't just have a chance to drop from every Mythic+.
• Most people only do one or two Mythic+ dungeons each week.
• The team wants to provide some way for you to target items from a specific dungeon, but they don't have a great solution yet.
• If the endgame was just Mythic+ dungeons, the team would just allow drops from the end of run chests.
• You shouldn't have to go and research what traits do, tooltips should explain them.
• The team is adding a number of new traits and retiring/replacing some traits across various specs that haven't been popular or successful. Some of those traits can be fixed with tuning, but some of them just need to be retired.

Not sure still why it's so bad these drop from M+, it's like they are trying to make this system stick and nobody gives even a single fuck.

Tanks

• Tank balance is something that the team is looking at.
• Brewmaster and Death Knight have too much survivability compared to other tanks.
• Protection Warrior and Guardian Druid are lagging behind. Some of that is numerical tuning, some (with Prot Warrior) has to do with rotational flow. Changes coming to the PTR in the not so distant future.
• It's important to remember that tanks bring different things to the fight.
• When evaluating tanks, keep in mind what they are bringing to a fight as part of their toolkit.
• A lot of the elements that make a tank skilled aren't quantifiable in terms of damage taken or mitigated.
• Numerical stuff matters, but at the end of the day tanks shouldn't be in constant danger of death (outside of some exceptions). Feeling like you did everything right but your tank just fell over and died isn't great.
• Bosses could literally two shot a tank in the past if they had a bad avoidance streak. That didn't feel great.
• There are things such as Spirit Link that are desirable that aren't reflected in HPS logs.
• Ancestral Vigor is another thing that just doesn't show up in HPS logs.

So the idea that other tanks are too strong scares me into thinking they are just gonna nerf shit instead of bringing the other up. The idea of what other tanks tool kits bring is a big fuck you. Let me bring that warrior self healing, the warrior battle rez, the warrio mob moving, ect ect. You cunts.

PvP Balance

• Unholy DKs and Affliction Lock survivability is on the team's radar.
• The team is looking at the current pace of Arena matches.
• There should be a place for burst comps and slower comps.
• Some recent changes in BfA made Affliction more single target oriented, the team wants to pull them back towards multi-DoT.
• There should be a balance between quick reactions to feedback vs letting the metagame evolve and new comps emerging to counter what is strong.
• If this season is known for a faster pace and more burst, and future seasons shift, that is a valid approach to take rather than trying to change the meta right away.
• Hybrid healing is something the team will continue to address via hotfixes.
• The team is looking at Shadow Priests too.

WoW PvP is aids so lol don't care

Warfronts

• Patch 8.1 will have Alliance doing the Warfront right away.
• The two Warfronts will have their independent contribution cycles.
• Technically both could be active at the same time, but players tend to contribute to whichever is more complete.
• The team did internal tests with full raid groups queuing for Warfronts. The problem is that with a full raid group you would steamroll the map objectives and get far ahead of the base building and other pacing mechanism. If you get too far ahead of the pacing, it isn't as fun.
• If you have done the entire map and have to wait 15 minutes for your siege engines to progress, that isn't very fun.
• The team has been looking at adding another version of Warfronts that is tuned for a raid group.

This is the dumbest fucking non-answer we have ever heard. Who gives a shit if people run your faggot welfare content as a raid and even more so why you are faggots time gating it. If people can steam roll it let them. Stop trying to tell us what is fun.

Allied Races

• There aren't any plans to update the Death Knight starting area for Allied Races.
• In Patch 8.1, the team will roughly double the amount of reputation awarded by Legion world quests for the Allied Races.

I guess thats nice for the people who didn't do Legion but really stop locking this shit behind rep

Raids

• As of now, the team is going to call the raid Battle of Dazar'alor.
• The 9 bosses that exist may be in the same order for both factions. Alliance may play through the entire battle, then have the recap of what they missed. Horde players may get their flashback moment during the middle of the raid.
• In practice, Boss 9 may be the same boss for both factions.
• There will be mechanical differences and differences in the experience for each faction.
• The community will figure out which World First matters.
• It's always amazing watching the best raiders in the world play the game, but the team is building raids to tell a story and provide an epic experience for millions of players.
• The team won't throw out a cool idea just because it might cause controversy over the World First.
• The World First race isn't something that Blizzard created, that was all the community. It's up to the community to determine how the World First will work in the upcoming tier.
• There are a few good trinkets in Uldir. In the Dazar'alor raid there will hopefully be better tuning and trinkets.
• The community values trinkets from non-raid content over raid trinkets. This is due to how those trinkets are budgeted for. Raid trinkets are created to be more interesting, maybe themed after the boss that drops them.
• A straight strength proc has more interactions with player skill and other actions than a debuff that a trinket applies.
• Sims assume that you are playing perfectly, which makes the straight stat proc trinkets more powerful than they really are.
• The team has moved away from raids being the only/best endgame PvE content. There are plenty of people that are enjoying Mythic+ dungeons.
• Tier sets were a unique raid reward, but players could jump into a PuG and usually get that set within a few weeks of clearing the raid. Tier sets aren't like they used to be, with a year long journey to get your entire set.
• The team could have smaller 2 piece sets, or items with flavorful effects added across the game.
• Each system should have some flavorful and unique rewards that aren't available from other systems.

Not sure why this is a valid excuse for raid trinkets to suck shit?
The team "could" have smaller 2 piece sets. Well why don't you move the could and fucking do it. There were more 2 piece sets in Court of Stars than in this entire fucking expansion.

Island Expeditions

• Killing creatures will always be part of Island Expeditions, but the team wants to add more events and objectives to the islands.
• Extraction points will let you set up an extractor to defend, granting a steady stream of Azerite. You'll need to prevent the other faction from taking it, or recapture it if they do.
• Islands change weekly, but players have seen the giant Azerite Golem more times than they wanted.

How about unfucking the drop rates and not locking the mounts behind arbitrary bullshit that are just people guessing.

RP Realms and Sharding

• Except for the new content zones, there is no Cross realm zone tech enabled.
• In the newest zones, sharding is necessary. A zone doesn't support 1500 people in it trying to do World Quests.
• Normally sharding tries to keep players from the same sever together. War Mode discards that and tries to maintain faction balance over everything else.
• People from other realms also join groups and will appear on your RP realm.
• The team can look at the numbers and try to understand if specific servers could support a healthy gameplay experience on their own.
• Realms with a high faction imbalance can't stand on their own, as it wouldn't be a great experience.

Sucks to be on an RP Realm I guess. They have been trying to force that CRZ shit on as much shit as possible since they learned to do it.

Group Finder and Mythic+

• The team is still working through design questions, but they want group finder to allow you to list keystone level, search range, bringing your keystone, looking for a keystone, etc.

You faggots have been talking about this for 2 years. If you useless cocksucks are going to do it then fucking do it. It shouldn't be hard to add some basic fucking improvements without making us wait a decade.

War Campaign

• Alt friendliness is important in Patch 8.1.
• When you finish story chapters, you hardly get any reputation. The team is adding significant amounts of reputation to each chapter, so you'll be able to play through them without a lot of extra farming.
• Horde and Alliance assaults will provide additional ways to level alts, as well as Island Expeditions. Characters leveled this way may lack flight paths and gear.
• The team is working on making a BoA book so you can learn flight paths on alts that you already know on your main character.

Sometimes it's hard to read this bullshit. I have heard so many of these same promises before. (Don't worry guys, lessons were learned meme)

So some items are good to hear if they fucking do it. Like the BoA book for flight paths, why did they ever stop doing that shit to begin with. It's also nice to heard they are making the rep easier to obtain through the story but how about instead let me skip the fucking story after the first time all together. I don't care about Princess Zulu and her soon to be dead father.

The addition of assaults would be nice if they are similar to legion.

I still hope Ion gets dick cancer.

Noodleface said:

I think they got rid of tier because they were tired of people wearing previous tier because it was better. Plus they can cheap out in cost not designing 11? 12? New outfits

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This is most likely the correct answer.