Sol

@FwoiblesWoW Asked this back in SOD, but is there any progress on OCE ping in raids if group/raid leader is Oceanic? I would take open world US lag if it didn't impact instanced content. Thank you

So being sassy aside, thought I'd fill in the blanks on why PvP realms in WoW always without fail slowly drift into mono-faction psudo-PvE realms and why Warmode ultimately happened instead. The tongue in cheek joke is that players don't really want PvP, but like to be on a PvP realm for that old school prestige, hrm, maybe for some but for most no, they just wanted to play with enough people of their faction to do the content they wanted. The slide towards mono-faction starts right at the birth of a realm, when we re-launched Classic most of the PvP realms landed somewhere around a 45-55 split, some realms pro-Horde, some pro-Alliance, that's decently balanced at a glance, but its also the seeds of their eventual destruction. Generally, no one wants to be the underdog, and even with a 45-55 split, that's a few extra guilds that the opposing side will always be able to field, every world PvP engagement is generally just ever so slightly lop-sided against you if you're on the 45% side. What we saw is that on these servers there were usually cornerstone guilds that held up their sides "PvP army", you know that one guild that was able to break through and actually let your faction raid Molten Core that night. Eventually, these guilds would get tired of the slog, and it only takes one of them to decide to move to a realm where their faction isn't the underdog and there would be a big swing in the balance of power around the PvP hot spots. That would trigger a much quicker exodus of the remaining serious raiding guilds who didn't want every raid night to get blocked by the opposing faction. When picking a new home, you don't pick yet another realm where you're slightly outnumber, you pick one where you slightly outnumber, you've had enough of that crap. This pushes the destination realm more out of balance, and the smaller faction there goes through the same process. As we watched Classic go through Vanilla, TBC this process accelerated because well, doing Sunwell dailies on a contested server where you aren't the big dog... sucked. By the end of TBC almost all the PvP realms were mono-faction, not because people didn't want to PvP but they didn't want to be on the more often than not losing side, there were no "balanced" realms to go to so mono-faction PvP it is. There was also the old realm caps, we've massively increased realms ability to accept players so this one isn't relevant now, but if you had an older Classic style realm that was balanced and queued, vs a mono-faction realm queued, well there was twice as many of your faction to group with on the mono-faction realm. This process is exactly what happened to Mainline WoW and why PvP realms ultimately were removed and Warmode created. Fun fact, Warmode, we totally made the same mistake too. At launch, we knew that overall Horde players generally participate in PvP more than Alliance so we knew that it was likely more Horde and Alliance would opt into Warmode. They wanted to make sure that each Warmode shard had some Alliance players so it spread out all the Alliance players between all the Warmode shards we needed based on player numbers. Uh-oh, er, there's like 40 Allies in the zone and 200 Horde. It was a blood bath, so Alliance stopped using Warmode. They then changed it to a max allowed delta, I think the split was 40-60 and then all remaining Horde would go into excess shards that were just all Horde and no Alliance. But... that's still you're always outnumbered if you're Alliance, participation from the Alliance continued to drop making things worse. Finally, it was settled to balance Warmode shards at 50/50 and all spillover goes onto single-faction Warmode shards which is where we remain today, if you're on a Warmode shard and you see the other faction, you should have an equal amount of back-up as they do. All this PvP mono-faction realm stuff is why for Season of Discovery we took our first stab at forced faction balance, it worked out stupidly well for how basic the system was at its heart, so we did it again for Anniversary and it'll likely be the norm for all Classic flavour PvP realms going forward. By preventing one faction from becoming notably the underdog it stops the slow drain and then route as one faction starts getting bodied constantly. Its not perfect, but it's had great results. Why didn't we turn this on in Classic Cata at the time? Since we're only gating initial character creation, it has no effect on already heavily unbalanced realms, that horse had already left the stables. Anyway, thanks for following along this random trip down memory lane.

@Zirene Necrotic runes off the dusty bags from bosses in Kara is 🔥

@Zirene @realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien Thanks for your time!

@StyxWoW @realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien They do not currently

@Zirene Do you know if a DPS will be able to swap out their dawn trinket for a tank variant of the same rank at any point? For example, if the whole guild is at trinket rank 8, and we lose our main tank, it would kill the entirety of progression without that ability.

@Zirene @realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien Thanks for the confirmation, last question while I'm playing with sims - any chance frozen runes have a method of acquistion outside of Naxx for pre-raid shenanigans?

@StyxWoW @realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien It won't. It counted as 1 sanctified because it was taking up an item slot previously. So originally a sanctified set up took up 13 slots. Then took up 8 (7 + trinket) and now still 8, (8 items)

@Zirene @realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien Will it still count as +1 sanctified despite no longer being a trinket?

@realharmen @mybpete @Austinalien Yes, it is no longer a trinket. Just an on-use item (not consumed)

@Zirene @spg1337 @oElementz @wowclassicdevs 2/2 PI was managed well by WCL with the increase DPS going to the priest, but this is very complicated. Suggest to make them raid/party-wide or trigger from AoE healing with reduction to the bonus or a CD.

- It will likely be unbalanced, and we're okay with that initially. We are doing some things to counter massive increases like some double dipping. - Unsure what you mean. - Unsure what you mean. - This is intended as Sanctified is to make gear always feel useful when it drops as opposed to previoisly people come in and only need a handful of things and complain. We're seeing what needing a full set looks like. - We don't see multiple sets for different situations as a bad thing, and already done a lot. We'll work and look at bag space if needed. - Unsure what you mean. Would love elaborations where I don't understand

@Zirene @spg1337 @oElementz @wowclassicdevs 1/2 Thanks for responding. RE fairness for parsing: The 4pc healer bonus buffs are wild and will be lopsided on specific players. They are also a generally unfun maintenance button from a healer perspective. We will see these being stacked before pulls and during fights.

@spg1337 @Zirene @oElementz @wowclassicdevs Big concerns with: - class balance from this system (mage, lock) - raid composition - loot itemisation - power of sanctified > set bonuses that have been spec enabling - multiple sets of gear inside/outside Naxx - fairness of such an iconic raid for parsers

@Zirene @oElementz @wowclassicdevs Maybe I'm wrong, but I think normal naxx being mop remix is a bad idea. I'm a guy who raids aq40 4x a week and likes to parse and I am so deflated seeing these changes, but maybe this just isn't for me anymore. I hope I'm wrong because I love this game.

@Zirene Boomkin: With the Sanctified+Seal trinket it'll be almost all Dreamwalker and overcapped 8/6 set because it's more of a gain than a set bonus such as 2.5 4pc. Can a mechanism be introduced to upgrade gear to sanctified?

@Zirene Fair enough thanks for the response on the key chain. I'm not saying there should be no cost for wbuff items, but perhaps a different cost. Any thoughts on changing the conditions to get the items you can share?

We will not be putting the world buff items on the keyring as they are buffs for everyone in your raid and can be spread around/coordinated as such. There should be a cost to your bag space to someone who carries these around to self buff in like BGs and world PvP/Farming. Also, the keyring actually has a limited number of slots on it

This is also something I want to prepare people for: These are NOT runes. They are consumables you use on your shoulder for a permanent enchant (stacks with shoulder enchants like ZG/ST/Sapphiron and have no duration/don't expire). **Why are they consumables?** - There are 206 of these, which is an average of ~23 per class. - The Rune UI on your character sheet would close to double and become muddied. - Completionists would feel the need to farm all of these to make the 35/58 in their RuneUI complete. **To alleviate this, they:** - Are permanent. So if you have an AoE set - you can put the AoE bonus on and leave it. - They stack up to 20. - They will be from an activity that you will be engaging in almost passively but can farm more of them if you wish, so it shouldn't be painful once they start coming in. I know them not being a full-on rune may feel strange from an optimal no friction gameplay standpoint, but it should end up being something you don't struggle to swap out, but you DO need to pre-plan which ones you'll want/need and how many. Which is a little more tactical. As for bag space, I'll likely move them to the key ring, but not this PTR. I know the keyring has a minor issue of not being an obvious place for people who aren't using an addon and it causes them to double purchase an item if it's non-unique, since they don't see it in their bags. So, I want to see just how many people engage with and hold onto, or if this is more of a put it on and never think about it again situation. I imagine there will be a min-max setup for different trash packs/bosses, but that most will enchant and leave it much like rune loadouts.

@AggrendWoW @wowclassicdevs Hoping to see a lot more polish for Classic+ raiding in future. There's a sentiment that there's no point raiding on release day because there have always been significant issues that soured 'the race' since ST.

Bumping this and re-pinning it. I've been a lot less active over here since we spun up the @wowclassicdevs account (which is great! go follow it!) and the vibe on twitter has been a bit weird for a while, so I think it's time to really make the move. Not gonna delete or private this account or anything, and I may still retweet or respond to certain things for reach, but I'll probably spend most of my (generally limited) social media time over there. I am hoping that I can get back to being a bit more conversational over there as that was always my favorite part about all this, just chatting about games, game dev, and other fun stuff with other nerds like me. So feel free to follow me on bluesky if you want to. If not, that's cool too. Really appreciate everyone who has followed, asked questions, given feedback (even complaints!), or has just stopped to say hi over the years here. Thanks!

@Exadra @FwoiblesWoW @AggrendWoW Cannot agree more, we chose Oceanic servers because of better performance. Taking that away entirely is not fair.

@FwoiblesWoW @StyxWoW @AggrendWoW As someone in a shadowstrike guild that frequently has 70+ people across multiple raid teams online on weekday nights, I really hope you guys consider keeping the oce servers up. It's really such a massive difference in ping that a lot of people will straight up just quit.

Aight, sorry for the delay there, a teeny tiny expansion got in the way. US SoD News -us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/realm… EU SoD News - eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/realm…

@FwoiblesWoW @AggrendWoW It is reasonable if we have the ability to seed an instance with Oceanic ping like how it works in AV. Is this an option? We get the increased players and it doesn't detract from instanced gameplay for Oceania.

@StyxWoW @AggrendWoW As of right now I was intended to include the OCE realm as its population is teetering on the edge of viable. I could use some strong opinions as I could still go either way. My thought though is an empty realm with a low ping is pointless if you can't scrape together a raid team

@Zirene @Kexman @AggrendWoW Personally very excited for the parry haste and death shenanigans this item will bring. Putting it on Raid Bingo. Some of the items that have been mined look really fun, great job team. I remember Woosholays was a game changer for Resto in vanilla, some of these are up there

@Kexman @AggrendWoW I also expect a Gladiator DPS Warrior to use Suzerain and walk in front of a boss's breath on purpose. So there IS a use for a specific dps spec in thematic situations. Again, these items will not all be universal for a class/specs, some are, but not all will be. 2/2

I'm so confused as to the design choices made for Warriors in SoD @AggrendWoW @Zirene Datamining a shield that has ZERO use for DPS and only has a proc that would work with very specific bosses. Compare this to what classes like Rogues and Shamans get, it's night and day.

@FwoiblesWoW Could you clarify if OCE is involved, or are we one of those inapplicable regions? A lot of players are unpleased with US latency. If so, hope there are plans to allow instances to be seeded by OCE (like AV currently is) so this won't detract from our gameplay.

Ok, starting with Season of Discovery - us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/seaso…

@AggrendWoW @ZombieAutopilot Juju Embers would be a nice little addition for spending those (or an equivalent).

@ZombieAutopilot We had some extra plans for these but pivoted at the last minute. We might find some use for them but I’m not super sure yet. Sorry if they are taking up space.

@AggrendWoW I know there's a relatively small chance you see this, but is there additional plans for usage of Firelands Embers beyond the initial FR upgrades? Maybe something like Fiery/Lava cores or something? They're just kinda stacking in my bags haha

@wowclassicdevs @joshcorbettpods @AggrendWoW @OptimusJones Really enjoying P4 so far, feels like there is so much to do with 0.5, FR gearing, dungeons, PvP and rep farms. Wanted to say thank you for catering to different players through difficulty modes. Hope to see that continue for future raids.

Check out @joshcorbettpods's extended interview with @AggrendWoW & @OptimusJones from our Classic team. Thanks for all the great questions, @joshcorbettpods! youtube.com/watch?v=9sib0l…

@wowclassicdevs [SOD][Shadowstrike] Bug report: AV weekend doesn't seem to be in the rotation, we're back to AB weekend again.