Liveblog of the Shadowlands Sloot Interview (Dec 14) with Ion Hazzikostas

Posted 2020/12/14 at 7:25 PM by Squishei

HighlightsSloot's Twitch streamHow have you felt the launch of Shadowlands has gone?How do you feel Covenants have gone?How do you feel about Conduits and spec restrictions?How do you feel about the speed in PvP?Why are you so hesitant to just buff Tank Threat completely?Where do you see Tank damage?Can Legendaries be Socketed?Is that Loud Sound when entering the Maw going to be fixed?Master Looter. Any thoughts?Duplicate Conduits?World Boss Rotation?Any plans to add more checkpoints in the dungeons?Any plans to incentive faction balance?Any plans to fix old raid tuning?How do you feel regarding Gearing, especially in Mythic+?Why are you so hesitant to add Vanity rewards in mythic+ that aren't added to Mythic+?Any updates on Tier Sets?

Collection and Completion.

Class Based Transmog.

Any plans to get better Calling Rewards?Any plans to make Layer Unlocks Account-WideLeveling in Torghast?Twisting CorridorsWhat happened to unlimited Torghast?What is the next step for the Maw?What can be expect from Mythic tuning?Any plans to improve the UI for the Mission Table or balance some of the Covenant followers?Any final Legendary Tuning?

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Comments

Comment by Thoreya

Removed(##RESPBREAK##)272##DELIM##Uchur##DELIM##Stiring up fights

Comment by Wepstar

What about legendary prices?
For example mail shoulders 210 lvl on small populated realms cost 100k (2/3 from token)...
While 235 lvl does not exist at all....

Its like Blizzard FORCES us to transfer on populated realms.

Comment by Itacolomi

This is utter nonsense. What's the point of getting stronger if you can't even cheese old content.

Lore wise you are NOT GETTING STRONGER! Just give time, gear yourself a little

Comment by Itacolomi

Give time... not many people can do those stuff

Comment by Mussy

How do you feel regarding Gearing, especially in Mythic+?
Ion should be fired for this one comment alone. Yet another expansion where 5 man group content is useless.

Covenants - Just find me a single person who thinks covenants are a good idea.

If I want to tank Mythic+ covenant 1 is the best choice. If I want to tank Mythic raid covenant 2 is the best choice. If I want to do PvP covenant 3 is the best choice. If I want to heal covenant 4 is the best choice..... And I'm not talking just a percent or two difference. The Kyrian sigil for my tank DH does over a third of my damage.

Then there is the stupid ass timegating. 2 weeks after I cleared De Other Side 20+ times I get a quest that puts me in the timeline before knowing anything about De Other Side. 2 weeks after we all know that souls go to the Maw, I get to be shocked by my Kyrian campaign revealing this big secret that souls go to the Maw... Ok.

How exactly is 5 man group content useless? Its the fastest way to gear up and you can get almost as equally good from doing simple 5 man content than doing harder raid content. If you are in the business of getting gear as fast as possible in an easiest way possible, you do 5 man content.

Well the majority of the playerbase thinkgs covenants are a good idea. All the covenants are completely viable for all the content. You just have been missled by either yourself or someone else that you must do the covenant that sims (if you can even trust sims, which you mostly cannot) for specific content, when at your level and skill level you won't even notice the difference.

Like some of you people should try to understand how the game works before complaining.

Comment by Mussy

They don't force you to do anything. You don't need 235/210 ilevel legendaries at this moment.

Comment by Mussy

Ion is delusional, legion raids are broken at 60 have they even tried themselves...

Calling rewards are flat out terrible is just a gold and rep farm at this point doesn't even reward anima.

Covenants are also poorly balanced. Yeah i choose necrolords because i like the zone and the look but the abilities are flat out trash, they get some utility in torghast from powers but mostly fleshcraft is rubbish.

As someone who basically gears from heroic, wq and lfr i don't really mind the wq rewards as it suits my content. Would be nice if Torghast had a better incentive to solo though.

Wrong. Covenants are quite balanced now. They are all viable. If you ever find yourself struggling with a problem in wow, the covenant is not the problem. Its your skill level.

Fleshcraft is quite powerful. It can save your life if you use it correctly. But for people that die all the time, I assume it makes no difference.

Comment by Mussy

Typical Ion, no clue about the Game.

Master Looter. Any thoughts?

Personal Loot all the way through this expansion. They've heard the feedback -- at one point Guild Groups could opt into Master Loot, but there were a couple of challenges. Part of the issue is how they can build loot tables knowing that personal loot is a thing. Even in organized guilds, and for a large number of guilds, the amount of control that gets exerted over loot ended up being a negative experience for a large number of players. Getting people to move away from Master Loot is difficult when the players in charge of determining the system for their guilds are the Master Looters themselves.

Thats just a lie. Most of the guilds never had problems with Masterloot, PuGs had and in Legion it was perfectly addressed. Complety #$%^ if you have 2-3 Plate player in your group that the rest of the Raid can't loot Items for em. Dont babysit people. Its working fine in Classic, it worked fine till BFA.

How do you feel regarding Gearing, especially in Mythic+?

They're happy with how gearing has played out and how the Great Vault has played out for real. They know how it's going to work from modelling, but they also want the raw emotional feeling feedback.

Oof, again. Do they even play this game? Its a joke that M+ gives only 210 ilvl and not heroic itemlevel (no 99,9% are not grinding 14+ at the moment). Its the slowest way to gear up for higher itemlevel BY FAR. in 4-5 weeks no one cares about 210 loot, because everyone got enough items through the vault Mythic and Heroic raid or rated PvP. M+ is such a joke itemwise. Yeah now at the start auf the expansion its nice, cause all have %^&*ty gear, but thats for ~2 weeks. Did they smoked something if they are happy with it? And if Tier Sets making a return, 4-5 Slots from M+ are again looked and you have to raid to get competitive gear. Also 3 Items for a 20 man raid is a joke. Should be 4 at the very minimum. Its not nice do do 5+ Dungeons or the whole raid without getting any loot.

Any final Legendary Tuning?

There was just the Balance Druid legendary and that was a conservative change. They want to be hands off right now and tune Legendaries say on the PTR wit the first patch where they can give lots of notice. But if there's a Legendary that is so far ahead they'll probably do tuning, but if they need to nerf it by 40% to get it "balanced", they may only nerf it 20%.

Yeah nice, a "final notice". Just refund the Soulashe for nerfed legendaries.

How do you know what problems most guilds have or don't have? Who are recieving the feedback and GM tickets and reports. Is it you or Blizzard? People like you should stop pretending your own narrow experience is the objective truth for everyone else playing the game. And about mythic+ you don't have any idea what you are talking about. Mythic+ is by far fastest as you can repeat those dungeons over and over and over as many times you want, but you are locked weekly to raid bosses.

Why should they refund soul ash for nerfed legendaries if the legendary is still serves its function? I don't understand. Please explain. You are making no sense. Does the legendary stop working completely or what?

Comment by SaltyRisto

Any plans to fix old raid tuning?

They're curious to hear specific examples. There was a bug in the first week of Shadowlands where the scaling benefit against Legion content went down as you leveled. That should be working as intended. Players who compared themselves at the end of the last expansion and the beginning of this expansion and find that it's talking longer is an unfortunate thing about leveling up in WoW and the way combat ratings work.

Legion raids become like 3 times harder in 9.0 prepatch at lvl 50 as well as after leveling to 60 and they still can't figure it out...

i dont get how hard it is for them to understand this. its 2 expansions old for gods sake, it shouldnt be harder than torghast. they are so blind

Personally I don't think it should HAVE to be 2 expansions old, BFA is old content, we should be able to breeze through that too but Blizzard seem to hold onto us not being able to solo last expansion stuff.. like it's not been around for 2 years anyway, people have the t-shirt for it...

They really need to fix this Legion issue though, I went into NH/Antorus and got deleted by the first boss on a 190 ilvl DPS character,

Comment by Gh0stGaming

Comment by MrXtrm

Any plans to make Layer Unlocks Account-Wide

No plans right now. Your lower item level alt may not be able to clear the same things as your main. In the future, when there's better catch-up gear there will probably be a skip or catch-up mechanism.

Who cares? If you can't clear higher levels you can just pick a lower floor. It's not like you're wasting anything except time by trying and failing a higher floor on a new alt.

Comment by nik666

So, when are we going to talk about the terrain design?

Comment by BlurH

Removed(##RESPBREAK##)272##DELIM##Uchur##DELIM##Have nothing in common with the post

Comment by Link1213

When it comes to faction Balance I think the damage is done and their isn't really anything that could be done. Anything you do to get ppl to go to the Alliance will bring all the World first raiders over and scew it in favor for the Alliance rather than the Horde. So its the same probably just on a different faction.

So the only reason people should play a faction is because "I want to play that faction for that race" or even "Just because".

Giving the Alliance actual races people have been wanting, High Elves for example, might bring some of the players that swapped to Horde because of Blood Elves, back to the Alliance. A step has been kinda made with the Void Elves, but they still don't fill the void (hehe) left by what High Elves should've brought, Elf Paladins on the Alliance. Of course this is just 1 of many (as well as the loudest) examples of a race being added to the Alliance to bring people to it. But other than races, I can't see any way to bring players over without it skewing the population to much to one side. Racials shouldn't bring people to the Alliance or the Horde, aesthetics should.

But even this idea of aesthetics over performance only works so well. The best players will always choose the better races with the better racials. And ofc no one wnats to say "I am the part of the best Alliance Guild in all of WoW!" when that guild doesn't even hold a candle to even the top 100 guilds on the Horde. The best of the best don't want to play on Alliance for just because, although being the top guild in the entirety of all of WoW (aka limit) but being on the Alliance, could be pretty cool, but until Faction pride steps in and the Alliance guilds get seriously competitive (or until are racials become just as good as the Hordes) there wont be anyone over here on the Alliance to play with because the entire player base will be Horde because that's where everyone is.

Best solutions I can think of is to either remove passive and active racials all together or to allow every race to choose any passive and active racial in the game. (Flavored to their chosen race ofc.) Then it truly will be a matter of Aesthetic preference and maybe the Alliance will acquire some new blood because that player that just picked up WoW and started playing for the first time thought our races were cooler.

Comment by Chungtao

Balance things aside, some of SL storytelling is definitely wacky as all hell.

(Spoiler alert for those that didn't do Venthyr campaign yet)

The best example would be, why and how do we enter Dinathrius' castle when even Venthyrs are not prepared to face him yet?
No introductory questline for the raid, no foreshadowing in the campaign, just fast forward 3 weeks, you are ready now!

Comment by Caleb95

As someone who enjoyed doing World Quests for most of the last 2 expansions. The WQ rewards and callings have been very underwhelming.

The calling reward is @2k gold daily by selling the greys, I'll take this over 200 war resources any day.

Comment by evodas

Reading the comment about old raids made me completely loose faith in Ion. They are taking away one of the most fun activities in WoW from some players for NO reason whatsoever. Glad that it's not just me at least, but I'm afraid that Ion is too blind to see that they went to a completely wrong direction with old content. This feels like they want do make WoW into Skyrim - where everything scales to you. It works for Skyrim and games like that but I can't even imagine a worse direction for WoW.

Comment by Grenyn

Then there is the stupid ass timegating. 2 weeks after I cleared De Other Side 20+ times I get a quest that puts me in the timeline before knowing anything about De Other Side. 2 weeks after we all know that souls go to the Maw, I get to be shocked by my Kyrian campaign revealing this big secret that souls go to the Maw... Ok.

In that same vein, important stories that every player should be able to experience without alts is being locked behind covenants. Every Alliance character has witnessed the start of Tyrande's descent into madness, but if you actually want to learn more about what's going on with her in the Shadowlands, you need to be Night Fae.

Damn near every WoW player has heard of Uther, but if you actually want to experience his story after his death, guess what, you should have been a Kyrian.

I'm guessing this will be the same with Garrosh and Kael'thas, considering no one even had any real intro to Castle Nathria barring maybe the Venthyr.

I can deal with needing an alt to get the Horde stories. That's been the case from the start. But then all of a sudden, Blizzard is telling us we need 3 alts to experience the content they're putting in the game. I don't like alts, and I never have.

Comment by Deathisi

Nothing so far on Normal/Heroic tuning of raids? (other then Sludgefest)

Comment by hotaru251

Faster paced, higher lethality PvP is probably better for WoW PvP overall but getting killed before you get a chance to react isn't great.

which favors melee over casters...

melee burst is so massive even tanks can get melted let aloen a caster who has to actually cast spell and hope dont get cc'd or interupted/silenced AND not LoS by melee moving through you at last second.

Threat should matter and exist but shouldn't be something that tanks are actively having to worry about.

My druid (and friends bears) worry about threat every pull.

due to devs makign bears fragile w/o IF means you NEED to get the rage quick to get a stack so u dont die...but you also need to do less rage gen attacks to generate threat on all the enemies.....you cant do both at start and you either risk your tankiness or you risk a dps beign nailed by the mob(s).

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