Getting TBC RIGHT! Devs NEED To Consider These For Launch!

hello ladies and gentlemen willie here today i wanted to put all the big concerns for tbc launch and beyond into one place this will be much more geared towards asking questions and looking into how tbc will be rolled out rather than trying to provide answers for everything feedback if you will on how classic has gone what known issues there are with tbc and what new issues the format that classic has followed will enable i'll also be doing a written version with everything i go over here bullet pointed and hugely condensed down as an alternative means just as a different way to get the information across as i've heard that can be helpful i did also ask my viewers of what kind of issues they expected a bit earlier on and they largely matched up with what i thought were concerns as well so thank you all so much for your comments getting more into the pool is always helpful and one final thing before we do start the actual fact that there was a poll from blizzard on how we should move into tbc was great i think things like that are really appreciated by the community and they love giving feedback as much as they can so poll everything that you can really starting off then how do we move from classic to tbc i'll be briefly touching on it it was something that was brought up quite frequently by viewers and just what i hear are generally though blizzard are gonna have the survey results likely they've pretty much already decided on how this will be done based off of that and their own internal investigations i've heard from a lot of players that they would prefer to progress straight to tbc horizontally if you will having level characters expecting this new content basically option one in the survey and though there is certainly a desire to stay on classic from certain players it's inevitable that one side of the player base must either transfer or copy to the new classic only servers should that be the case and i strongly believe there will be a much larger volume of players wishing to continue on to tbc one side of the player base has to take the hit it makes sense to do it with the smaller one moreover this presents an opportunity to merge the existing classic servers where there'll be less players remaining secondly server population size our servers are dramatically larger than anything that existed at this point in the original game which is very much expected to have several knock-on effects to areas of content within the burning crusade is layering still the right answer to this i imagine if we ported our player base to the burning crusade now that given no further changes the population would be a far greater topic of discussion reasons for this include it being a smaller world there being more open world content raids and dungeons near every single zone more world objectives gathering in every zone for level cat players more grinding locations dailies questing or just the returning or new player experience furthermore leveling is linear in tbc and this will be especially big on launch in classic we had six different starting zones and many different low level zones on top of that like the barons silver pine forest lot medan westfall and so on in the burning crusade i go from hellfire peninsula to zangamarch to terracar and so on savvy players will dungeon grind or find alternatives but the average player will encounter bottleneck after bottleneck after bottleneck especially with the gather or kill specific mob type of quests vastly more so than was the case in classic server locks did alleviate issues in classic at certain point throughout its life cycle but as somebody who played on a locked server it didn't feel like a great solution recruitments for raids began to thin out somewhat although there are 25-man raids in tbc so this may not be as much of an issue but there should be more raiding guilds overall less players were engaging with the end game content and encountering others in levelling became even rarer than it already is with the prevalence of boosting i've heard discussion of server caps as well though tell me this how do you determine an active player on a server who will count towards the cap do you have to force transfer inactive players what if you took a two-month break and being informed you need to find a new realm that doesn't sound good at all are our servers already too large to take this step arena team is forming and battle groups will highly encourage players to move towards the more competitive servers as well faction caps as far as i'm concerned also have issues more alliance players want to play pve more haul players want to play pvp as we'll go into later this would just lead to realms where there's basically only one relevant faction thirdly faction balance in classic alliance are largely considered better for pve content because of paladins salvation and kings are a big deal not only scaling with raw stats but allowing you to push a lot harder before aggro becomes an issue horde can certainly match up in this regard but they generally have a harder time doing so in player versus player content horde are considered better having better racials like hardiness will of the forsaken and war stomp which are much more tuned to make a consistent difference against other players also there are a lot of players out there who don't like the aesthetic of horde who are all these big and monstrous looking races but now they have a pretty bored race to play the prettiest some would say and this is a big factor when players are considering a re-roll already what's exciting about the blood elves is they're kind of the first pretty race that the horde has gotten a lot of the horde characters are very monstrous which turn off a lot of players we a certain demographic only likes to play really attractive looking characters so the blood elves will bring a prettier face to the horde this on top of the fact that horde have been the dominant pve faction in retail for many a year now and blood elves are the most played race in the game the writing is very much on the wall for history to repeat itself here in the burning crusade orc is the best race for every class it can be now that blood fiori also gains a spell power component despite hardiness being nerfed from 25 down to 15 it's still very powerful undead will of the forsaken remains unchanged from vanilla however the pvp trinket in 2.1.2 was made to remove all loss of control effects these two do not share a cooldown this creates a scenario in pvp arena combat where one race has the ability to fully negate and overplay their hand into fear effects knowing that they can instantly immune it off no other race can do this without investing their pvp trinket on top of this undead just so happen to have access to be rogue mage or priest one of the three's combos which is well known to be the strongest blood elves game mana tap as well as arcane torrent being a two second aoe silences silences aren't on diminishing returns in tbc making this extremely powerful in all areas of content and also add up another thing to make blood out paladins outshine alliance in many cases pulling casters in dungeons as protection or as a follow-up to hunter justice as cc in arena and so on it has a lot of different applications smaller world size also plays into this we already know from our player generated data that a much greater volume of hall players are on pvp servers as well as there being considerably more servers overall for player versus player reasons like this is why i am personally against anything fresh or at level 1 or 58 the game would all but have one faction that being the horde without massive changes taking place with more players already choosing horde combined with their greater racial bonuses in tbc combine this with less overall alliance players and a much more active open world and the game may just become very difficult to actually be playable as alliance on a pvp server there is a real chance that players from the 60 plus pvp servers across western regions may overcrowd the 20 pve servers that there are through transfers or just re-rolling this also plays into whether layering is the best answer moving forward still character attachment will go a long way to keep people on the alliance but something more may be needed for example all prescott fear ward in patch 2.3 whereas up to then being a dwarf priest on the alliance had a very unique niche and power only blood elf paladins have seal of blood which has been proven to outform the alliance's seal of vengeance in the majority of cases could both paladins have both seals as was the case in wrath of the lich king consider whether additional changes are needed to shore up the fact that as it is at present alliance are the less well-performing faction and even if the content is quite solved that won't stop players from competing with each other especially in arenas which are heavily skill driven next up the content rollout pacing so in tbc the pve content was extremely front loaded on launch in that we had tier 4 karazhan grueller mcveridan's mcveridensler tier v serpent shrank cabin and tempest keep and technically mount hyjal were all available from launch black temple was 2.1 zuluman 2.3 and somehow plateau 2.4 the real delays put in place by the system were the attunements which had high difficulty spikes on pre-nerf kel'thas as well as vash mag therid and grulslow were no joke either as was pre-nerfed karazhan also the achievement for high gel up to 2.1 was bottlenecked by the vials of eternity quest which reportedly only dropped one bile per raid which was moved to 4 in 2.1 that's as per research here this effectively locked players out of mount hyjal until patch 2.1 this is backed up by the date of the world first kills i'll go over in a moment to put in perspective how front loaded the content was in the burning crusade the black temple and mount hyjal world first kills were both in june 2007. sunwell plateau in world first kil'jaeden was may 2008. that's nearly a solid year between the raid tiers though somewhere plateau bosses were time-gated as well furthermore in 2.4 achievements were removed for earlier tears heroic dungeon keys were dropped down from revered to heroic as well as many many many nerfs to raid and dungeon content between launch and then to make it more accessible for players to catch up tier sets are all more spread out in the burning crusade it's no longer one tier from one raid like how you get tier one from molten core tier two from blackwing lair and so on the burning crusade could easily be three content phases but it would be so much better as five or six similar to classic this would also make it easier to segment the four pvp seasons to match up with the power growth of ray gear i think even with pre-nerf content players and how much they are inclined to min max and learn about their character in the game will still power through it it makes sense to slow things down a bit for the sake of having more progression through the course of the expansion speaking a progression progressive content or 2.4.3 this is another big one which has been a big learning point from classic until now so we launched classic on 1.12 which had some pretty big effects in terms of nerf raids both player power in terms of itemization and talents yet it also gave us a much more functional game as many many bugs and changes were made to get us from then to where we are today in tbc should there be the full patch info from 2.0.1 all the way to 2.43 would progressive content be worth a look i have heard from many players that they would enjoy seeing such a thing there's a lot to take in for progressive content though in terms of it's not all good we have a lot of bug fixes for abilities or problems that may exist on an earlier patch but aren't a thing later on certain classes will be overpowered or underpowered at certain points throughout the game but change later we'll be lacking a lot of convenience factors which are implemented later on launch we don't have mage table we don't have locks summoning inside of instances we don't have soul well you can't summon in never storm and so on there are also more negatives launched karazhan gear was worse than heroic dungeon loot world buffs were still a thing as well as consumable stacking from vanilla up to patch 2.1 this really cannot exist anymore from tbc pre-patch and onwards i just can't overemphasize this enough look at this method world first lady vashkil here you can see them stacking zanzas on easy g buffs and so on with the new tbc buffs i think when people say progressive what is fundamental is that we play the content how it was when it was originally put into the game preener heroic dungeons raids full achievement quest lines until the patch when they were actually toned down as well as revered for heroic dungeon keys does everything have to be progressive as well well 2.43 classes may just be the easiest option but keep pve content as it would have been patched by patch and itemization wise as well if possible should the data exist also launching on 2.43 would mean the arena meta would be set in stone from day one and it would become very stale after you've ran into your 422nd triple undead rogue mage priest so that's something else to consider if anything else was polled and i do encourage blizzard to pull as much as they feel they can the community might be rough but they love giving feedback poll options for progressive if blizzard are able to and what their options are for their consideration gold next one in classic for some people the end game is pvp ranking others opposite speed runs in pve some people like levelling outs or collecting random items and then there are people who like gold lots of gold hundreds of thousands of gold there are players who have amassed such a fortune it would have been completely unimaginable back in vanilla and they've taken their game knowledge invested and farmed heavily early on played the auction house watched price trends on online resources integrated sophisticated add-ons to price their items and over time gradually some players have even hit the gold cap now doing it to this extent is a real niche thing but many a player just has a lot more currency than they ever would have back in vanilla back then an epic mount was an epic feat nowadays well not so much gold has been inflated hugely by how heavily players invest within the game in terms of consumables farming and so on our server sizes definitely have something to do with this as well on top of this many thousands of raw gold every day are being poured into the economy by how frequently players opt into boosting for levelling overall gold farming for levelling via mages airwing down entire dungeons with tbc to come we already know all of the big investments and what we need artisan riding is 5000 gold that's a solid amount for many players but tbc is also heavily profession driven and it's from professions that many best in slot items come from and it's seeming quite likely that many items will be priced out of the average players means very quickly by those who have farmed extensively in classic gold is quite different in this regards my tier three naxxramas gear will be upgraded my pvp achievements in classic will be outdated odds and ends will become a fond memory gold though yeah gold doesn't work like that it's one of the few things that gains value hugely as we move forward should there be a limiting factor here is it right to set players back who enjoy farming gold to an arbitrary amount gold is different to other things which are replaced so should it be treated differently as well or will it be inconsequential as the same players will become vastly wealthy again in a short space of time something to consider finally spellbatching and melee leeway so these two mechanics were added as part of classic to more accurately recreate spell and ability interactions between players however over time it's been found to cause more than just a few frustrating interactions such as delay from heels where they land and a target still dies feign death or vanish just straight up not working if hit on the server loop and so on and so forth and whilst the effort to aim to recreate these interactions was certainly appreciated come the start of classic now i think the vast majority of minds have changed towards this subject please look into lowering the batching loop considerably or enabling the server response time used on the retail version of the game this is especially true for pvp content making clutch plays is exceptionally difficult with spell batching and often it feels like a fleeting effort when you know in the back of your mind your big cooldown could be wasted because you just pressed it at the wrong time and had bad luck with a server loop or for example you fake cast somebody begin casting again and they still get you on the recast due to the batching window i can imagine issues with the current window like getting hit by spells consistently through cloaker shadows using mass dispel on bubble and it doesn't hit getting hit behind pillars and so on despite this it would still be important to preserve certain interactions using shadow where death to prevent cc being able to vanish abilities the same very much goes for melee leeway or spell batching with being hit straight up through pillars if you are both moving it has a lot of potential to cause problems i think our modern hardware has superseded the need for either these mechanics in the game and it would be much more compelling as a result if they should be both toned down or completely removed furthermore arena has enormous esport potential in the burning crusade so i'd very much say it would be in blizzard's best interest to make it the most competitive that it possibly can be which doesn't include leeway or batching those are the main points to consider at this point i believe certainly all that can be addressed pre-launch and as i mentioned i'll attach a written version that's shortened down quite a bit with bullet points to make it a bit easier to read than just the shorthand versions of everything i've gone over here do let me know your thoughts as well and whether you think i covered all important bits maybe we can do another one of these moving forwards there are also plenty more ideas i have for actual balance changes not just so far as how it should be rolled out as well so i'd stay tuned for that later on thanks all so much for watching and i will see you all in the next one very soon if you like what you see do give the video a like and subscribe as there will be plenty more to come thank you guys all so much for watching and i will catch you in the next one you

Channel: WillE

Views: 111,859

Keywords: the burning crusade, tbc, phase 6, naxx, naxxramas, aq40, top 10 wow, grind, wow, gold, gold guide, best farm vanilla, World of Warcraft, WoW Classic, classic, shadowlands, pvp, pve, raiding, tbc beta, blizzard, twitch, mage, rogue, shaman, warrior, paladin, hunter, druid, warlock, priest

Id: 8xBJny9k4wQ

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/realWillE]

Hello ladies and gentlemen, WillE here.

So I don't usually post my videos on Reddit – what's the difference today? Simply put, although there is no Blizzard confirmation of TBC, now is the time to be talking about the new issues it may present moving forwards. At worst its some lost time, at best its going to be valuable feedback.

I've put together what I believe will be the main points and wanted to share it here, because more input on this earlier on can only ever be a good thing in my opinion.

Can't watch a video or prefer to read things? No problem – here's a written version. I did end up adding a few extra points to the written version actually. https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srenr3

Cheers, Will

[u/Aeceus33]

Batching? What will they do with that?

[u/WarlordZsinj]

My realm is gonna need like 15 layers at launch and probably at least 5 after the first few months. Leveling is gonna be really bad if we don't have enough layers, and once people start hitting 70 we are gonna need enough layers to allow farming and so the horde dont completely chase the alliance off the server.

[u/NerdEgghead]

100% agree on pre-nerf content being essential for TBC Classic, it would be an incredible disservice to the playerbase to release early raid tiers in their 2.4.3 state. I would go even further than that and recommend overtuning of numbers to add more of a challenge and progression element to raids, similar to what has been successfully done on numerous private servers. I actually think that time gating the content wouldn't even be required if it was overtuned such that full T4 gear was required to progress through T5 raids, etc. I very much enjoyed the progression gated system of original TBC back in the day, where the reward for completing a raid was access to the next raid. This clearly can't work in a #nochanges world or else everything through Hyjal will be cleared right at launch by the sweaty raiding community, but overtuning can make it work.

Nerfing drums and JC/enchanting re-rolls is something I hadn't considered and potentially a very good idea. I think the playerbase at large will be happier if they aren't pigeonholed into specific profession choices to be competitive. The large variety in professions and their importance throughout the entire expansion is an excellent element of TBC, and it would be a shame to see the player choice there effectively eliminated.

One potential alternative solution to faction balance issues: make arena rating faction-specific. That way there's no inherent disadvantage to playing alliance in PvP, you're competing on an equal playing field. I think the PvE differences are being overstated by content creators and won't be enough to skew the balance to unhealthy levels, it's arena that will ruin balance.

[u/redsoxman17]

My main hope is that they allow people to level the new races during the pre patch. I want to play a paladin but having to start at 1 while everybody else is cruising through Outland dungeons is a tough call to make.

[u/NakSFC]

Thank you for bringing us another great video, good work so far.

[u/Neat-Camel-9976]

Everyone always talks about Pre-nerf TBC, thinking the 30% actually happened in TBC - But it didn't. Raids were harder and more bugged before 2.1. But before 2.1 you could still use worldbuffs in raids, so that more than evens it out.

If they want the content to be harder they should nerf the OP specs/classes/professions to try and prevent stacking. Buffing the raids while leaving balance intact will only encourage stacking, which is bad for the game.

[u/HolypenguinHere]

With how inevitable it is that every PvP realm is going to be grossly slanted in terms of population, it's sad to think that PvP objectives like Halaa and the Hellfire towers are going to be largely deserted, with no real contest over them. World PvP is honestly going to be a lot more enjoyable on a PvE server for that very reason.

[u/vvwwwvvvvwwwwvv]

Any attempt to limit gold transfer into TBC will only benefit bots and gold sellers which have the resources to circumvent any limits. That would really be a stupid decision