Patch 7.2: Act 1 Scene 1

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
Mark Twain

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Patch 7.2: Act 1 Scene 1

While we sat down to enjoy an engaging story and to do some fun audience participation; everyone is distracted by the angry mobs flaming the Developers. And for good reason, the Broken Shore has unrelenting demons who swamp you as you try to move from A to B.

The ilevel scaling issue is being solved this way:

• We’re removing the increase to damage dealt by creatures in the world. Our overall goal with this change is to keep the amount of time it takes to kill a creature from getting ridiculously short, and increasing the damage they deal is unnecessary for that goal. Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent.
• We’re significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level. Again, all we’re trying to do here is prevent cases where monsters die too quickly for players to react to their presence, particularly around World Quests. Our initial tuning was far more aggressive than it needed to be, which could make it feel like your upgrades weren’t actually helping. This change will make it very clear that you are still becoming noticeably stronger than your enemies as your gear improves.

And it was all our fault:
It should also be noted that this change was on the Patch 7.2 PTR (and has been since January). We didn’t communicate anything about it initially because we wanted to get testers’ raw and honest feedback about it when they encountered it themselves, rather than attempting to pre-empt or otherwise influence their opinions ahead of time. When that feedback never came, we assumed that meant it was an acceptable change – i.e., those who hadn’t noticed it weren’t bothered by it, and those who had noticed it thought it was fine. Clearly that was a false assumption, and we should have drawn attention to it later in the PTR cycle, so that we could have caught these issues before Patch 7.2 went live.

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Bad first impressions are a bitch. It certainly has dampened my enthusiasm for the Broken Shores. Where my anticipation was the fun building of a Mage Tower and running around and exploring the new zone; I feel like the game is tired – same old grind. And even worse, the same old grind with the sole motive of flying with the feeling that the Devs can “get away with it” because we’ll do anything, no matter how crappy, to fly.

AND — with that said, I’m over it. Back to the Broken Shores, lets try again. One can hope that the interactions with the world have me feeling powerful and heroic. I’m over being grumpy, it is time to rekindle some enthusiasm for my favorite game.

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The Wailing Caverns Pet Battle Dungeon is fun! I did the “easy” mode last night and it is well designed and made me laugh and bite my nails and curse again at the original bad lay-out of the Wailing Caverns from ten years ago. How cruel to choose this evil dungeon design! Today, time pending, I’ll make a go at the Big Bad version and test my luck and skills. With 550 rare pets at 25, I’ll get through it eventually … right?

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I’m looking for the rhythm of play in 7.2.
We now have a timeline, thanks to a blue post:
We’ve seen some confusion around the availability and timing of various aspects of the 7.2 patch, and we’d like to clarify our plans for releasing the remaining pieces of Patch 7.2’s content:

• Week 2: (next week): Legion Assaults begin, first PvP Brawl becomes available
• Week 3:
• Chapter 5 of the Class Order Hall campaign unlocks, which activates new followers, new Order Hall upgrades, and class-specific World Quests
  Week 4-11:
• Ongoing story pieces unlock, leading up to the eventual opening of the Tomb of Sargeras raid, and the ability to earn Class Mounts

I wonder what Chapters 1 – 4 in the Order hall are, did I do them already?

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Keep the peace!