Now, Lore gave me a list of questions that we didn’t get to on Saturday, and I’d like to take a stab at answering a few more. Some of these are things I could probably ramble on about for pages, but I’ll try to stay concise to keep the responses in line with the content of the rest of the Q&A.
Q: “How has itemisation in WoD worked out thus far? Are you happy with new stats? Bonus gear properties? Enchants?” - @MagdalenaDK A: Overall, we’re happy with how most of the changes have played out. Bonus gear properties in particular keep “farm” content potentially rewarding and create some extra moments of excitement, as designed. Tertiary stats were too weak initially, but since the 6.1 changes they’re in a good place – I’ve seen people get more excited for a huge Speed or Avoidance bump on a primary gear slot than they would have been over a socket, which is pretty cool. As far as stats go, and this may surprise players somewhat, we’re pretty satisfied with how Versatility has turned out – it’s a simple baseline stat that’s easy to understand, and has some depth to it especially in PvP. It may not be the favorite stat of any damage-dealing raiders, but that’s okay – it’s a solid baseline. Multistrike is probably the weakest of our current stats from a design perspective. Mechanically it’s very similar to crit, except where we’ve added specific class mechanics to hook into it and bolster it as a stat. There may be a visceral feel at times to firing extra missiles, but when you’re firing a ton of projectiles all the time, that also comes at the expense of lessening the impact of each individual missile and cast.
Q: Any plans on another stat squish? This last one didn’t seem to do much. - @RippleTideWoW A: Well, players are currently dealing damage roughly on par with what we saw at the end of Dragon Soul almost 4 years ago, which is fairly significant. If not for the squish, we’d be seeing DPS values in the millions, player health well into the millions, gear having 5-digit amounts of each stat, and so forth. So the squish did do quite a bit. Experience has shown, however, that if a full tier of gear doesn’t increase player stats by at least 10-15%, upgrades feel unrewarding. The compounding nature of that growth does mean that numbers will get unwieldy over time. We don’t see the need for another stat squish in the very near future, but we’ll likely end up doing one again eventually.
Q: Will the kick tool be improved to be less prone to abuse? - Evangelia A: The vote-to-kick system in our Group Finder is definitely due for some improvements. The system was designed alongside the original introduction of the LFG tool years ago, in a world where the default loot method was Need/Greed and a major issue was people abusing the kick feature to eliminate competition for loot. Nowadays, there are far fewer selfish motivations for initiating a kick, and so it makes sense for us to reevaluate that design. In Raid Finder in particular, one person who is griefing is having a negative impact on the gameplay experience of up to 24 other players, and we should make sure we’re weighting the protections provided by the system accordingly. We are working on making some subtle adjustments to the logic involved that should address some of these issues: for example, just because you’re in combat doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to kick someone who deserves it – that restriction used to be in place to prevent loot abuse, but now loot is mailed to players who aren’t around to receive it. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the system and make additional tweaks aimed at reducing player frustration.