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Legion Dungeon Race Rescheduled; Sylvanas, Healing Design, & Helmet Fixes in Legion; 6.2.3 Hotfixes

by - 8 years ago

Today, we put together a quick recap of Warcraft news we didn’t cover throughout the week. Click any of the below for more:

  1. Legion Dungeon Race Rescheduled to February 9
  2. Helmet Display Update Incoming for Legion
  3. Sylvanas’ Armor Design Changes Discussion
  4. Healing Design in Legion
  5. Hotfix for Windwalker Monks

Legion Dungeon Race Rescheduled to February 9

The Legion dungeon race was rescheduled to February 9. You can read more about the upcoming live dungeon race between worldwide Warcraft personalities in our original post.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

UPDATE: The Overwatch closed beta is returning on February 9. In order to allow our players and Twitch viewers to experience both events, we’ve rescheduled the Legion Alpha Dungeon Race to Thursday, February 11 at 3 p.m. Pacific time. We’ll see you then!

Helmet Display Update Incoming for Legion

Helmet displays will be adjusted for the new high-definition models for Legion. While the designers work on it, they’ll be temporarily disabled in the Legion alpha. (*cough* although some of us just turn them off all the time to see our characters’ pretty haircuts *cough*) 

Originally Posted by Lore (Official Post)

Hello everyone! We wanted to give you a quick heads-up on a temporary change in the current Alpha build that could use a little extra context, to avoid confusion.

Our art team is currently working on some updates to the way helmets are shown in the game, which will ultimately make them look a lot nicer on the high-definition models released with Warlords of Draenor. That work is still in progress, and as a result, head-slot items are in varying stages of work-in-progress. In order to keep things looking sensible – and avoid generating a whole lot of unnecessary bug reports – we’ve hidden that slot from displaying on all characters temporarily while our artists put their finishing touches on things.

Thanks for your patience!

Sylvanas’ Armor Design Changes Discussion

warcraft sylvanas models legion

Sylvanas has had many models over the years in World of Warcraft

Sylvanas’ new armor design for Legion has the fandom abuzz on both more conservative and provocative viewpoints. Nethaera responded to a growing thread on the subject this week, bringing back up important dialog on female representation in the game.

Originally Posted by Nethaera (Official Post)

I think you’re misusing the word “Censored” here for one. For another, I personally love her look. I like knowing she has on armor that may actually protect her from the battle she’s digging herself into. She’s a strong character (to me) no matter what she wears. I’d think if I were her, I’d want a change of outfit now and then too.

Characters evolve and change. Their armor and outfits are going to change. Thrall is just one example of how what he wore was a reflection of the changes he went through. Other characters are bound to see evolutions and changes as they make sense both in their visual representation and in their stories.

These types of discussions while generally welcome when kept clean, are often just minefields for some inappropriate discussions. I’d like to please caution everyone to not get into the quagmire that results in personal attacks or mud slinging. Art is subjective and what one person interprets something to mean or be may not be what someone else interprets something to be. What one person likes, may not be what someone else likes. That’s OK. Just remember that there’s no place here for venom toward anyone for those likes or dislikes.

Can’t help but think that the change was made from the pressure I mean you’ve tried to make it official in hots and ended badly when people complained about it on the forums now you do it instantly without showing preview or anything

I think people have a stilted point of view on what they see as “pressure”. Things change. Times change. The balance between male and female players in WoW is actually much closer than you think and has been for a long while. The topic of what women like or don’t like, or play, or have done in the past isn’t cut and dry either. I’ve been playing games (and liking “geek” things) since I first played the Atari as a little girl. I like PvP and blowing things up. Other women may not. Some women like their character to look ‘practical’. Others have a different ‘fantasy’ of what their character should be like. I would never claim to represent “all women” that would be preposterous.

The same can be said for men. You can’t paint everyone with the same brush. It just doesn’t work. This is a more complex issue than what should be on these forums. We’re getting into dangerous territory here and I’ve already had to remove some pretty disparaging remarks aimed at others. This community is smarter than that.

Perceptions of what is and isn’t over the years have always baffled me. It seems to go in waves. Each new generation believes fervently that it is or was different for them or has changed ‘over the years’. Perception is an amazing thing. It’s your perception that this and all other related changes are because of ‘x’. Could that be a part of it? Sure. Nothing is being taken away from you or the character with this change. If this was an awards show, you’d be asking her who she’s wearing rather than, what she plans to do when she faces the Legion with her people. 😉 I have a feeling she plans to lay some smack down.

Healing Design in Legion

Game Designer Sigma responded to healing feedback for the Legion alpha. The discussion mostly revolves around mana costs, Holy Paladin talents and traits, and utility for hybrids. You can read more about the Legion healing tuning and changes in our previous post.

Originally Posted by Sigma (Official Post)

Thanks for all the feedback. A few things:

1) It’s definitely still intended that you consider mana costs in choosing heals. I wouldn’t agree with the characterization that any changes (recent or otherwise) reflect an abandonment of this. It’s widely accepted among players that mana became overly abundant at high ilvls in past expansions, which did in some cases undermine the resource management aspect. But the spell selections of each class are still made with the intention of mana being an important factor. They are in Legion just as they have been in the past, with the main change being to avoid having mana grow excessively generously throughout the expansion. Jumping ahead, trinkets are indeed one place where we may provide opporunities to invest in more mana. But mana regen will not be passively increasing by a large amount simply due to gear advancement, largely for these reasons.

6) Tranquility and Divine Hymn should still deliver significantly more healing than those players would typically do in 8 seconds. Having these sorts of spells (both the channeled and instant varieties) do “significantly more” than usual, as opposed to the overwhelming strength they have on live, might take some getting used to. But there is no reason they won’t be strong and helpful spells to use either at specific high-damage encounter moments or simply because the player needs to catch up in a bad healing situation. In both of these cases, the intention is that the cooldowns don’t completely supplant the normal healing gameplay, but give a boost to output at a key moment. On Tranquility and Divine Hymn in particular, the 8-second channel causes the biggest problem in the dungeon context, and both of these spells will do increased healing outside of raids to account for that.

The Aura talent row, Aura mastery spell, and corresponding artifact trait are all reworked in an upcoming patch. Among other things, we agree the trait giving Aura Mastery the effect of all three Auras eliminates too much of the significance of the talent choice.

7) We understand the importance of utility. I want to point out that on live, the dominance of Disc Priest and Paladin in the highest-level raiding is primarily due to their core healing function and not to unique non-healing utility (exception in some cases for Hand of Protection, but the removal of Clemency from all specs in Legion reduces that problem significantly). Avoiding a repeat situation where some healers feel left out of the most optimized Mythic healing groups is likely a question of balancing the actual heals, not of more incidental utility buttons such as Wind Rush, Tiger’s Lust, Innervate and so on.

The artifact trait granting a 5% haste aura will also be changed before Holy Paladin is playable on alpha.

To illustrate with numbers: if 100 DPS is incoming and you have to choose between spending a little bit of mana to do 50 HPS, a medium amount of mana to do 125 HPS, or a large amount of mana to do 200 HPS, the correct choice is 125 HPS, but then every 5th second there’s nothing to heal. All I am saying is that healers should be able to do something meaningful in this 5th second.

Note that even in your example, you could instead spend every 3rd second on your 50 HPS heal, and save a little mana over your solution (that never uses that heal and instead fills every 5th second with DPS). In any situation where healing and mana are a significant challenge, that gameplay is still present, and toolkits with different spells of varying efficiency provide opportunity for more skilled healers to know when and how much to use the cheaper options.

On 7) While I agree that HFC’s healer composition issues stemmed largely from actual healing issues, I still think that more effort can be put towards ensuring that every healer has things they can do that are useful and “cool” beyond filling health bars. Similar to the above, it is less about power and more that it feels bad to be asked to justify why your spec should be brought when another spec brings X ability and not have an answer. Currently I think that HPriest/Druid/MW all have difficulty answering that question and while it may not matter much to people that have a good understanding of the entire healing picture, this topic holds a lot of sway when it comes to the general community’s opinions on balance.

Again, nobody’s denying the value of utility abilities that are fun to use (defined as you did in the OP as things other than healing output or equivalent shielding/damage-reduction). Merely trying to avoid conflating it with major healer balance concerns. To your point, even the Disc Priest in Warlords didn’t justify being brought by some X factor that raid leaders had to have, other than their sheer volume of healing/shielding. Their extras like Body and Soul were comparatively minor. Similarly, something like Wind Rush isn’t intended to dominate the importance of actual healing when deciding what classes or individuals to bring to a raid, and we’ll examine it closely if it does. It likely won’t, as it’s somewhat weaker than the live spell Stampeding Roar (which hasn’t had such an effect)–much smaller radius and no snare break (also a 2min cooldown which I believe you haven’t seen yet).

Hotfix for Windwalker Monks

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

Class

Monk

  • Windwalker
    • Fixed an issue where elemental spirits summoned by Storm, Earth, and Fire mirroring Rising Sun Kick in PvP combat dealt less damage than intended.


Seth Harkins

PC gamer and lover of (most) things Blizzard. In his off time, he writes bad fan fiction, tends to his growing number of house plants, and enjoys a love-hate relationship with two cats.


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