Well done! we are seeing large changes to dragonflight looting, this is going to be some impactful stuff that you will feel and a bunch of it is what people have been asking for beyond that then we’ve got an update on the state of testing a change to how death works in the World of Warcraft and just a whole bunch more details.
Now of course if you missed it we do have a release date, season one changes and a few other things which were in a video a few days ago so check that out if you're out of the loop, with that said let's get stuck in!
Loot Changes
Okay then this is a truly massive change for Raiders, group loot is returning! we already knew that but we’ve now found out via blog post from smart art that personal loot will not be active in raids uh well at least for gear, some profession items and things like that will but nope for gear it will just be group loot the need and greed UI will return along with some new rules on how players can roll, I think getting those new rules right is uh that's going to be the thing that is make or break for this.
They've also removed item level trading restrictions, now this is pretty ballsy, I think this is what a lot of established Raiders will have wanted right it just means so much for people who raid together right we will now be able to distribute loot to who needs it the most, we can work that out as a bunch of friends playing the game together so for stable guilds who actually want to work as a team this is really fantastic, it puts loot distribution back in your hands.
Now Master looter will not be returning so look if you know the loot it drops on the boss the need grade stuff happens, if you win the roll I mean it is yours unless you trade it right so with this system there is no single you know uh raid leader who can just run tyranny at least on paper.
Now an issue that the dev team found with personal loot is that it was somewhat exploitable right you could just stack the same armor type or the same weapon type and this would just mean more of that loot because personal you just guaranteed that the loot would be usable so that is something that was kind of like I've often gained to funnel loot to characters which is a bit odd, it also kind of punished mail wearers by default because there were fewer mail wearing classes now then loots you know it just drops on the boss if a bow drops from the boss and you don't have a hunter that’s that and this is actually how loot worked for the vast majority of the game right it's not a bing bing Wahoo you know slot machine, every time you kill a boss it is your team killed the boss this loot is on the bus what will we do with it I think that's something that’s more fundamental to well just the fantasy of an MMO so with a system like this it does give everyone the same chance of getting loot uh usable overall dropping for the team of players than uh well you know then maybe a group comp but otherwise uh have and of course it also does incentivize rolling a diversified set of classes so you do cover the loot that can drop.
Now with this you could say that there may be some winners and losers right, now since Master loot will not be returning you will never have a master loot pug where the raid leader just steals gear, that won’t happen, pugs will use need greed and there will be restrictions of course on who can actually roll need, that’s something that I think in the comments a lot of people have perhaps forgotten like you can't need on stuff that’s not going to be useful for your character and we don't have any situations like we do say Wrath of the Lich King where a hunter will be rolling for a main spec melee weapon, obviously a survival Hunter will want a melee weapon but you know what I mean the old Hunter loot memes right so that sort of thing you can't need stuff you're not going to use so it's really not much of a difference really.
The chances of you on average getting loot are pretty much the same, the difference with personal loot is that all those roles just happened behind the scenes and you get informed about the result and then have to deal with trading restrictions so really not a massive difference in pugs but uh it will you know it'll be great for us that's it, for the pugs though this uh enhanced visibility into loot distribution will interact with more toxic players in a fun way.
Now as for who the winners are it’s obvious it's well people like me right, it is people who raid in a guild, I’ve raided with the same group of people since patch 8.3, yeah routine we constantly like nearly every raid tier multiple times would get super annoyed at the item level trading restrictions they sucked they were so annoying for doing good loot distribution so we've pretty much got what we asked for, now I don't think people were super hard advocating for removing personal loot altogether and that said as was proved by raids in Legion.
There are definitely negatives to having two different loot systems working right, they each have their own quirks and features and doing loot tables that blizzard have actually went into this in the past doing loot tables is a little bit of a nightmare with that but I think here there are cases where personal loot can kind of suit well enough but uh I mean really here it just is the thing you kill the boss the boss dies the loot’s on the basket you roll for the loot, that said if someone can't use a bit of loot they're not able to roll need therefore assuming the rolling rules are good then the whole situations there and this works and it's a good thing so yeah that’s good.
Raid Loot Changes
So each raid difficulty will have three tiers of loot up from the two that we previously saw right, so as an example for normal Vault then you write the first four bosses dropped 389, middle three dropped 395 and final two drop389, interesting.
Purples are basically the sort of mid-tier wall bosses likes sludgefist, calandris and painsmith, they're really cool bosses players love them I certainly actually loved all those bosses, but they didn't reward players for that increase in difficulty, blizzard basically think if you're doing a harder boss you should get a reward that's in line with that challenge so fair enough.
I think this could make progress feel pretty good as well as potentially will their next big change and that is the blizzard are experimenting with bosses having special items these may even have a higher item level, now this ain't Titan Forging, it's basically a bit like Sylvanas daggers where it's a special item it's really powerful but there's a problem with the Sylvanas daggers, they were more powerful than their item level suggested so blizzard basically things that loot like this is fun but they want it to be more clearly communicated and be part of the game so these new special items can have unique effect appearances or could just be a particularly cool trinket.
You can also expect lower drop rates on these I guess I could almost call them like mini legendaries within it here just cool rare loot drops overall then I actually think this is pretty damn good, now it could maybe be annoying for the people who are just entirely like devoting their whole existence to chasing that orange Parse on Warcraft logs but I think that considering that this is a big old MMORPG the idea of there being a big super powerful piece of railroad that's uh that's actually fun right so if this lets them just make more memorable interesting wacky designs then that's really good.
And another good thing is that this could be quite nice for the longevity of raids Plus in a world where Mythic plus can seem like it’s gobbling up a lot of the loot progression in the game. This gives raids something special and yeah I do like that.
BoE’s Changes
The next thing then is boes, they are getting revamped and uh oh boy they're very different now so you know those sort of names of Lieutenant mini bosses that you find within a raid trash, well they're going to drop boas and the number of boes that drop that will scale with raid size and assuming the full clear of the raid they will be guaranteed so these are going to be more common item, they're even going to put more important slots like weapons on this.
Now I guess the idea of auction housing weapon is uh is a bit weird there’s obviously a large asterisk on this that we’ll get to but what it is from blizzard though is a clear move to make Trash feel more worthwhile, I think that given how we all just death skipped trash and Sepulcher they pretty much thought right we either Nerf the [ __ ] out of trash do far less of it and just let the players do the bosses like they seem to want to or they decide we keep trash but we actually make it be properly dependably rewarding because they said their stated goal was to make the raid environment almost feel like a ninth boss.
Alright I guess for me if it's more you're killing like cool Lieutenant mini bosses that's great but if it feels like just walls and walls of Health like health bar sponges and it’s really boring then that just isn't going to feel great for pacing yeah and obviously there's a massive wow token sized elephant in the room and that's the challenging thing right, an MMO is strong when there's a good virtual economy I mean hell just look at all the cool new things they're doing for crafting professions But ultimately wow token does codify the whole time equals money thing that we've talked about a whole bunch and theoretically it does mean that somebody could just drop a whole bunch of uh a whole bunch of gold and buy a Mythic weapon, that feels kind of weird.
But I suppose then again for the player who actually gets that Mythic weapon and decides to put it on the auction house it'll feel pretty good to them yeah so look I'd say this is a clear win if it weren't for the wow token bit okay.
Resurrection Sickness Changes
Another big change is coming res sickness, it's only going to last for one minute but it's going to damage your armor by 50 percent up from 25, essentially blizzard want to keep the death penalty which is fair there should be one but they think that a 10 minute debuff it just makes people log out, that’s definitely true I mean I never really use Spirit healers because of the 10 minute debuff now knowing that I could get a negligible debuff and just take a bit of an economic hit but Mount up repair and then get back into the game well to be honest I think that’s better.
That said it will cost more gold, I don't really see it as being something worthy getting furious over though um we really don't use the spirit healers to Res much at all and I think this just means that if we do want to do that we're not going to feel like we should just log out.
Next then a funny situation, so imagine your beta has a bug but suddenly you’re being showered with praise for that bugs now imagine how people react if you fix the bug, that is what happened to blizzard so a bug appeared on reputation vendors that would let people purchase transmog appearances for all armor types off these rep vendors, now people love that this is about cool you know you got the wrap you just buy all the armor ensembles then it was fixed but it's not as bad as some people think.
The unlocks are account bound but you need to be an armor type that can use the ensemble in order to buy it so that effectively just means you’ll need to log on to your alt to buy The Ensemble for another armor type, that’s it, the rep track rewards are in fact still unlocked account wide.
Now blizzard said they did it this way because they don’t want people to be confused at vendors right now, the idea of just you hit the wrap you see you know one for each armor type and you're like oh no I can only equip one of these that's not a big problem I really don’t think that's too confusing to people it's just a little frustrating that you’ll need to log into a bunch of characters and go buy the thing again but at least the you know whatever renowned level required to unlock the thing won't be required on your Alts because that is account wide at least the renowned level isn't but the unlock the ability to buy the thing that is now.
Sadly this is not retroactive and that does actually mean that for shadowlands governance yeah you've got to do the Renown track on a character of the armor type that you want and uh that kind of sucks okay.
Other News
Other dragonflight news, we do have some neat things, well one thing we've got our wish grid snapping is now enabled for the new ui's edit mode and combined with the grid being scalable it basically means you've got all the tools you need for a clean setup but without having buff debuff filtering, I do feel that many will be left wanting more from the now sticking in UI blizzard have actually had an Xbox, PlayStation, and switch controller icons um so there's not much of a functional change here because the controller compatibility was actually added with 9.0 and that meant that wow actually does work natively with a Gamepad, you don’t need to use a third-party tool like wow mapper anymore, overall this is good I mean for uh the add-on console Port which is fantastic this was all very handy as for the mapping these icons it could just be there for if people plug their controllers in.
Who knows I mean maybe one day blizzard will have a Final Fantasy 14 like feature set I mean for the Bean counters while being on consoles would certainly be a no-brainer for engagement and making number go up and ff14 does show that that can work and quite a few people play that game on a PS4 but uh look admittedly there are challenges the wow team have never designed with controller gameplay in mind and that said it's not as bad as you think far from it, If you look at my old console Port investigation videos it’s surprisingly good actually so there’s that.
Over to testing then, so Vault of the incarnates raid testing is about to begin basically that and Mythic plus are the major outstanding things to get tested so we really are getting there and that's nice and that's also made clear by another announcement from the class team they said that they are moving away from spending time on developing new talent trees instead they are focusing on fixing bugs and tuning things which given that the expansion comes out at the end of November earthy definitely need to stop those things and get what they've got in a good state for launch.
Now a lot of the time that could be kind of disappointing because it does mean that at least until the game comes out that's it for major reworks and so many of those major works that we've got have actually been quite good but this is where there's a bit of a change they said that with the overall changes to classes and talents being so large in this expansion that we can actually expect to see them continue actioning on class design feedback throughout the expansion so this at least does suggest a degree of them not leaving problems for a whole expansion right that they actually will respond to design feedback so maybe a new patch comes out and with it comes a bunch of class changes.
I mean as an example right, just of this not going well the balance Druid changes that came in recently are essentially addressing feedback about balance Druids then I noted in shadowlands Alpha shadowlands was quite a while ago now also sneaking in and around the same time as that news there was a large preservation of evoker change and that is a 30-yard healing range up from the previous 25 that it shared with devastation.
Basically Blizzard's idea here was to have a potent highly mobile but slightly restricted healer so the idea is you know they're zooming around the place dishing out loads of healing and in order to compensate for their potency and their movement speed, they have less range so interesting enough it’s trying to fill a different Niche, that said they have increased that range this has just been done to make the range feel less prohibitive when also combined with the overall frequent casting of empowered spells.
On the topic of empowered spells they’re increasing their cooldown and they’re also increasing their power at least of the empowered healing spells so you won’t use them as much but when you douse them they will matter Moreso overall I think this is for the best, I think 25 was maybe just a just as midge small they still are clear that their commitment here is to a mobile mid-range healer so that's the plan, they will have a lower range but it's one that will be compensated for by other strengths and you might think oh it’s only five yards less that's not much but remember there’s a relationship between diameter and volume right, like the air not volume like you know the area covered so 30 instead of 35 is actually quite impactful in a real world situation okay.
That's it, there's a few other nice tidbits um one of them was leveling alts, once you've got your first character through it will basically work a bit like threads of Fate where you can just do the zones in any order including like the side quests and the world quest so that should be pretty good and the other than that we just had like Updates you know like the background art for the talent windows and yeah stuff like that.
