Patch 7.2 Launches for WoW; Fails Miserably

[Paragon Fury]

Well, I think Blizzard finally did it; they may finally have broken me of WoW. And I think others may finally follow.

As of yesterday, Blizzard launched Patch 7.2 for World of Warcraft, launching the Broken Shore zone, a new dungeon and at a later date a new raid for the game. But all has not gone as planned:

Literally every single item of the expansion past the initial hour-long quest and dungeon is time gated; meaning you cannot physically access or do the content no matter what you do. This includes the new Class Order quest lines, the new PvP brawls, the Legion Invasions, Artifact Power upgrades AND the content you need to do to unlock flying on the Broken Shore.

The patch broke multiple boss fights in several dungeons and raids, making them impossible to complete (Trillax for example, insta-kills the raid with his laser beam regardless of position, and Elisande's orbs are not visible to all players in a raid, wiping the raid due to players not being able to do the mechanic).

Mob tagging has been broken as well in the new zone, as only 5 people, even in the same faction, can get rewards from an enemy - even if that enemy is supposed to be taken on by more than 5 players (IE: A Boss).

The base-building aspect of the patch is also broken, as even after a full day of the patch being available in some regions, most regions/servers are only 6% of the way to having ONE building done - and each building is built independently of the others. And even when a building is completed, it only lasts for 3 days before being destroyed again.

The worst part is perhaps the unannounced change; Blizzard has made all world enemies scale with your character's iLvl, meaning that a brand-new 110 in green gear actually has an easier time completing World Content than a Mythic Nighthold raider (dungeons and raids, thankfully, are untouched). This is something Blizzard explicitly stated TWICE that they would never do...and they did it.

Literally the only good things are that the new Dungeon is good, Mythic Karazhan is good and a couple of the QoL features actually work and are nice.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

Speaking of bugs...
You can't queue up for heroic Karazhan unless you're already attuned for the mythic version.
Kind of defeats the purpose.

Anyway, while it's expected for patches to come with their fair share of bugs, those that have showed up with 7.2 are particularly noticeable and numerous given the amount of time it spent on the PTR. While I also expect those things to be addressed fairly quickly, there really isn't much excuse for the time-gated, slow release of content (which seems to be a last minute decision and wasn't on the PTR). We knew the raid wasn't going to show up immediately, but order hall advancement and legion invasions were expected and those weren't released because reasons.

Eh, I had a bit of frustration yesterday, it's not enough to make me quit, considering time-gating, rep-grinding and RNG have been the name of Legion. I think tonight though I'm going to do some WQ for legionfall and then log off and play Breath of the Wild.

Had some good fun with Cathedral of Eternal Night on mythic though, got some really creepy looking shoulder armor. The aesthetic design this expac has been A+

Edit: And nethershard drop rates were just nerfed. I guess people where a bit too efficient with their grinding, can't have that now can we.

 

[Jandau]

The worst part is perhaps the unannounced change; Blizzard has made all world enemies scale with your character's iLvl, meaning that a brand-new 110 in green gear actually has an easier time completing World Content than a Mythic Nighthold raider (dungeons and raids, thankfully, are untouched). This is something Blizzard explicitly stated TWICE that they would never do...and they did it.

Wait, WHAT? That's pretty much the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Seriously, what? That HAS to be a mistake or a mixup of some kind. And if it's not, I'm feeling really good about my decision to drop WoW two months into Legion...

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

Wait, WHAT? That's pretty much the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Seriously, what? That HAS to be a mistake or a mixup of some kind. And if it's not, I'm feeling really good about my decision to drop WoW two months into Legion...

Yes and no, apparently the decision is deliberate, but perhaps Blizz got a bit too enthusiastic in the process of implementing something they said they're not going to do and ended up breaking it in the process.

Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider.

We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty.

But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher?

To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die.

Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.)

The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing.

Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion.

To be fair, it's not that dramatic, world enemies still die rather easily. I think more people are just upset about Blizzard saying one thing and then turning around and doing the exact opposite and then not even bothering to mention it in the patch notes.

There's already a lot of dissent in the community with some of the decisions Blizzard took within the life of WoD[footnote]Flying, I mean flying[/footnote], going into Legion and their apparent change in focus on how the game should be played [footnote]Ability pruning, spec killing, RNG to name a few[/footnote]. How they've gone about implementing 7.2 can't be helping matters.

 

[Paragon Fury]

The worst part is perhaps the unannounced change; Blizzard has made all world enemies scale with your character's iLvl, meaning that a brand-new 110 in green gear actually has an easier time completing World Content than a Mythic Nighthold raider (dungeons and raids, thankfully, are untouched). This is something Blizzard explicitly stated TWICE that they would never do...and they did it.

Wait, WHAT? That's pretty much the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Seriously, what? That HAS to be a mistake or a mixup of some kind. And if it's not, I'm feeling really good about my decision to drop WoW two months into Legion...

While most regular mobs are fine and just take longer (sometimes x2-x3 as long as before) its the Elites, Bosses and any enemy that can apply a DoT stack.

Elites and Bosses that used to be solo'd now truck players, and any enemy that can apply a DoT stack can and will annihilate even a player in full Mythic Titanforged Nighthold gear.

Still ignoring the fact that this is something that they expressly said they would never ever do.

 

[Cold Shiny]

It really stinks that you are not enjoying it.

I'm just sitting over here thinking "WOW sucked 10 years ago and it sucks now" lol.

Also, every single expansion that comes out, a ton of fans insist that "WOW is officially dead now", and "We're never coming back"

I always get super hopeful. "Maybe WOW will finally die now."

But no, the game chugs on, because its fans will just crawl back to it. Every. Single. Time.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

But no, the game chugs on, because its fans will just crawl back to it. Every. Single. Time.

Hence the half-joke/half-cry-for-help nickname WarCrack.

I've got a couple friends I used to play WoW with that decided WoD was the last straw, and they were done with WoW. That lasted about a month, then they were playing on a private Vanilla server. When that private server died, they moved to a private Wrath server. Then a BC server. Now they're back on another Vanilla server. They're just replaying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

As for me, I quit about a month into WoD. Reading about stuff like this only solidifies my decision that the game wasn't worth my time anymore. I honestly question how many players are even still playing actively, now that they keep that info a secret. The last time I played during WoD, my raiding guild (which during its prime had around 300 players) generally only had two or three people online during peak hours, all the guilds that my guild regularly worked with were pretty much gone, and the world felt mostly empty (in large part due to garrisons). I can't imagine it's gotten much better since then.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I always get super hopeful. "Maybe WOW will finally die now."

Your thirteen year fixation on a game you tried once and didn't enjoy is kind of confounding, to be honest. I'm not sure that's the kind of thing I'd be in a hurry to tell anyone about.

As for me, I quit about a month into WoD. Reading about stuff like this only solidifies my decision that the game wasn't worth my time anymore. I honestly question how many players are even still playing actively, now that they keep that info a secret. The last time I played during WoD, my raiding guild (which during its prime had around 300 players) generally only had two or three people online during peak hours, all the guilds that my guild regularly worked with were pretty much gone, and the world felt mostly empty (in large part due to garrisons). I can't imagine it's gotten much better since then.

WoD was poorly designed and a low point. Legion was considered a return to the game's halycon days, however much that is possible for a game older than some of the people playing it.

With each subsequent expansion the game will run out of steam a little faster, for the simple reason that the core gameplay loop has not and cannot really be changed. No game can outrun father time forever.

Generally I enjoy it at the launch of expansions, then rapidly remember I have a job and a girlfriend and a pet and hobbies and shows to watch and other games to play and I don't need a second job waiting for me at home. The launches are fun, though, just like all grindy MMO launches are fun. Kind of a "land rush" feel. You eventually end up in the trenches with the jobless wonders and singularly focused autists who play 20 hours a day, though, and the sheen falls away.

 

[CritialGaming]

I had to quit WoW because it prevented me from enjoying any other games. I was in a raiding guild and every time I sat down to play something that wasn't WoW, I was overcome with guilt. Because I wasn't farming for food, or elixirs, or grinding rep for extra gold and gear, by not playing I was ultimately not doing my job to be the best raider I could be. It made me feel like I was always letting my guild down.

I had enough and I couldn't take it anymore. Too many other games called to me and I wanted to enjoy them more than I wanted to raid in WoW. So I left.

I still keep tabs on the game though, watching how it morphs contineously into this hideous blob of a game that is just a constant cycle of the same fucking shit over and over again.

 

[TilMorrow]

Yeah it's bit of a major disappointment after all the stuff they've been saying would be available from the get go and the constant comparison to Timeless Isle and Tanaan when it's literally nothing at all like them. The only thing I'm debating now is whether to cancel my sub refresh before the 5th of April and then focus on P5 when it comes out or to try subbing for a month and seeing if they fix everything. Alternatively I could sub to FFXIV and actually have a bunch of stuff to do again.

 

[CritialGaming]

Yeah it's bit of a major disappointment after all the stuff they've been saying would be available from the get go and the constant comparison to Timeless Isle and Tanaan when it's literally nothing at all like them. The only thing I'm debating now is whether to cancel my sub refresh before the 5th of April and then focus on P5 when it comes out or to try subbing for a month and seeing if they fix everything. Alternatively I could sub to FFXIV and actually have a bunch of stuff to do again.

You can play FFXIV for free until level 35 now. No time limits on the free play time.

 

[TakeyB0y2]

I only "play" WoW for RP so most of the new content doesn't really interest me and I probably won't end up touching much of it, if any. If anything I'm mostly just annoyed with how new content causes the RP community to go dead for days/weeks as everyone changes focus back to the actual game.

I'll agree that it sounds like a really buggy awful nightmare, but honestly most WoW players complain about WoW in general. Everyone I talk to that raids and does PvE seem to really hate this game that they sink ungodly hours into, but when I ask "Then why do you play?" they always say "Oh no no no, I complain all the time about it but I actually enjoy WoW, WoW is love, WoW is life..." I dunno, just something I'll never understand I suppose.

 

[Cold Shiny]

I always get super hopeful. "Maybe WOW will finally die now."

Your thirteen year fixation on a game you tried once and didn't enjoy is kind of confounding, to be honest. I'm not sure that's the kind of thing I'd be in a hurry to tell anyone about.

As for me, I quit about a month into WoD. Reading about stuff like this only solidifies my decision that the game wasn't worth my time anymore. I honestly question how many players are even still playing actively, now that they keep that info a secret. The last time I played during WoD, my raiding guild (which during its prime had around 300 players) generally only had two or three people online during peak hours, all the guilds that my guild regularly worked with were pretty much gone, and the world felt mostly empty (in large part due to garrisons). I can't imagine it's gotten much better since then.

WoD was poorly designed and a low point. Legion was considered a return to the game's halycon days, however much that is possible for a game older than some of the people playing it.

With each subsequent expansion the game will run out of steam a little faster, for the simple reason that the core gameplay loop has not and cannot really be changed. No game can outrun father time forever.


Generally I enjoy it at the launch of expansions, then rapidly remember I have a job and a girlfriend and a pet and hobbies and shows to watch and other games to play and I don't need a second job waiting for me at home. The launches are fun, though, just like all grindy MMO launches are fun. Kind of a "land rush" feel. You eventually end up in the trenches with the jobless wonders and singularly focused autists who play 20 hours a day, though, and the sheen falls away.

I just have this pet peev concerning things getting praise and success that don't deserve it in any way. Annoys me.

 

[shrekfan246]

I just have this pet peev concerning things getting praise and success that don't deserve it in any way. Annoys me.

That kinda sounds like a personal problem, considering you don't get to decide what other people think deserves praise.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Literally every single item of the expansion past the initial hour-long quest and dungeon is time gated; meaning you cannot physically access or do the content no matter what you do.

They probably did this to counter all the people who blast through the content and then complain that they're bored.

The worst part is perhaps the unannounced change; Blizzard has made all world enemies scale with your character's iLvl....

...now THAT is stupid. It smacks of artificial challenge; nobody liked it in Elder Scrolls games, and nobody's gonna like it in WoW.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Yeah, it's pretty depressing right now. If I wasn't in a guild that needed me, I'd probably be out the door too. I honestly won't be very surprised if some members of the raid team quit and we stop raiding altogether, which won't make that sad as I will be able to unsub with a clear conscience.

 

[Zhukov]

Well, I think Blizzard finally did it; they may finally have broken me of WoW. And I think others may finally follow.

I'm sure they're going to lose dozens of players.

Dozens I tell you!

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Well, I think Blizzard finally did it; they may finally have broken me of WoW. And I think others may finally follow.

I'm sure they're going to lose dozens of players.

Dozens I tell you!

Something heard every. single. expansion.

And this is coming from someone who was done with the game at Pandaria.

 

[Fappy]

My guild quit prior to 7.2's release. Gonna catch up on single player games and play FF14 with them casually for now. Legion is just way too grindy, and burned us all out. 7.2 looks like it has only increased the grind.

Might come back in the Argus patch if the catch up mechanics are good enough to allow me to raid casually with some success.

 

[Pyrian]

Something heard every. single. expansion.

Well, it's usually not wrong. Cataclysm, Panderia, and WoD each lost millions of subscribers. Then Blizzard stopped publishing figures, presumably to prevent the "WoW is dying" meme from becoming self-fulfilling.