9.2 Double Legendary acquisition

#1 - Jan. 13, 2022, 11:35 a.m.

Hello everyone,

I want to talk a bit about the double legendary acquisition and a potential time gating.
In the latest iteration of the PTR we got access to the Double Legendary and learned that we have to be revered with the Zereth Mortis faction to get the Belt and the Runecarving pattern.

First, I want to talk about the Reputation Grind.

We don’t know if everything is working as intended at the moment with the Reputation, the Campaign doesn’t give a lot, we have some rng involved with the Daily Quests and we are not sure if rares and treasures will give reputation at the end.

But overall, I don’t think we should be forced to do a grind like this for such an Important Power Gain. A lot of people are tired of repetitive grinds like this that doesn’t respect player Time very well and solo open world content is for a lot of people not a very fun content and feels like a chore. I would prefer it a lot more if Power Gains like this were part of a cool Storyquestline and not locked behind a forced grind.

Another point with forcing people to play Content outside of PVP, Raid and Dungeons shows the past with systems like Island Expeditions or Torghast where it got a chore and unfun for a lot of people at the moment we were forced to play it, because it was mandatory for player power that was required to anticipate in the normal endgame Content like PVP, Raids and Dungeons. And at the point you force all players to play this content you lose the opportunity to make it challenging for the people that would love to play content like this. We saw this with Torghast were you had to nerf it into the ground. I would prefer it a lot more if you would change the Reward structure there and reward people with Cosmetics, Toys, Titles or a ladder for systems like this. So, people can just anticipate for fun, the challenge or the other rewards but not because they are forced to be able to anticipate in the three main Endgame Systems.

The second Part is about a possible Time Gating of the double Legendry’s.

Double Legendry’s are a very big Power spike for most of the Specs and in general for your Raid Comp. Its not only a Power spike it also enables some Spec-Covenant combinations.

At the moment we don’t know when we will get the double Legendary’s but it might be possible that we get it not pre–Mythic Raid opening or the worst case in the second Mythic week.

That brings a lot of Problems that are not only bad for the RWF, its also bad for everyone that likes hard and well-tuned Content and for the Encounter team to balance everything right.

The most Important point with the timing for me personal is that we should have access to all the possible Spec-Covenant combinations at the beginning of the Progress because that is the most fun part of the new Raid.

My second point is that I don’t think its good for the Game to hard nerf the Raid with Legendry’s during the RWF or shortly after. We saw this in the latest Raid with the upgrades of Domination Shards where the Bosses got stomped at the moment, we got such a big Power increase. It takes a lot of the fun away when you try to beat a Boss and then it got stomped the next week just because you get double Legendry’s and every single damage check is gone. I would overall prefer a System like a Buff that you can enable or disable at a later point during a Season to nerf the Content, or changes to Bosses where needed but not nerfing the challenge into the ground just by a Power System like double Legendry’s. Another part of nerfing the content that early is, that we don’t have the chance to play the same Bosses like the people that anticipate in the RWF. The Bosses often plays a lot different when nerfed like this. That takes a lot of fun away too.

My last point is about a possible acqusation of the double Legendry’s in Week two of Mythic.

I know the Race to World First and the Guilds that anticipate are a minority of the Player base. But it’s the biggest Event for World of Warcraft with a huge Viewership. And we already have the no global release controversy. I don’t think we need to destroy this Event with something like this big Power spike to come when NA starts the second Week. Or force the Raiders to do Open World Content when they just want to Raid and we want to see them in the Raid and not doing World Quests. This Race is a big hyped Race because we have the first time the last three Bosses hidden till the Mythic Week. So please Blizzard let us enjoy a good and well-tuned Race to World First and celebrate World of Warcaft with it. It’s your opportunity to celebrate together. And if you really want to time gate the Legendry’s, just time gate them to a point after the Race to World First.

Thanks for reading this, have a nice day everyone.

Skald

WoW Developer

#29 - Jan. 22, 2022, 12:50 a.m.

Hello all,

Thanks for everyone’s feedback on the Enlightened Legendary belts and memories, and on the issue of when you can obtain them and what activities they require. We have some changes coming to a future PTR build that I’d like to talk about a bit.

First, what are we doing? The Belt of Unity is moving from the Enlightened reputation and into the campaign quest for Zereth Mortis. You’ll be able to obtain it at the end of Chapter 7 of the Zereth Mortis campaign, which we hope will feel like a nice crowning accomplishment. The Memory of Unity is remaining on the Enlightened reputation vendor, and will remain an account-wide unlock like other Legendary Memories from Shadowlands, but will now additionally require that you’ve completed Chapter 7 in order to purchase it. This Memory means that when your second, third, or tenth character is ready to start Eternity’s End that they’ll be able to craft an Enlightened Legendary right away. The new questing requirement is being added to head off any feeling of needing to rush ahead to Revered for progression on your main character. We’re also still debating some other possible changes to the overall structure of Zereth Mortis rewards, but I don’t have concrete details to share on those yet.

Some folks have asked why there’s a delay in acquiring a second legendary at all. The answer there is that we have goals for your characters to grow over the course of the patch, allowing them to overcome challenges they couldn’t initially overcome. One specific example here is the difficulty of Sepulcher of the First Ones: by keeping the Enlightened Legendary a little bit in The Future from the raid’s launch, we can tune the raid at a difficulty that allows early progression to be bolstered by additional power once players start hitting stumbling blocks. If this power was instead available to your characters on the first day, tuning would have to take that into account for people who expect the first few weeks to be challenging, and that would in turn deprive many raids of what we think will be a fun and enjoyable boost in power after striving as far as they can without it.

It’s important to us that there’s a pretty level playing field with the Enlightened Legendary in terms of when different players obtain it. We want it to be an impactful moment of growth for your characters, getting to change the rules of how they play the game for the rest of Eternity’s End. Our initial plans of putting it on the Enlightened reputation had this intent, in that we were planning to distribute most of the reputation gains on campaign quests and on quests that players would do once or twice a week, but we hear you that this structure still felt unsatisfying for players whose free time lends itself more to periodic long sessions than for frequent shorter ones. We feel that moving the Enlightened Legendary into the quest campaign will be even more egalitarian while still providing a very satisfying growth moment.

As always, we’re still open to and listening to feedback here, so once the changes go up, please do continue to tell us how you feel about them.

Skald

WoW Developer

#43 - Jan. 22, 2022, 1:15 a.m.

Good point, yeah, sorry about that. Chapter 7 will be available on the third week after the Mythic raid opens. So there will be two full weeks of Mythic raiding during which nobody can have two legendaries, after which they should be available to everyone.

Skald

WoW Developer

#56 - Jan. 22, 2022, 1:27 a.m.

Totally fair question. We looked at what slots players have crafted legendaries in, and tried to pick the slot we thought would disrupt as few people as possible. Also, given that tier sets are back in Eternity’s End, we want to avoid putting this new Unity legendary in any slot that conflicts with tier gear. As with many things in design, there’s not an objective right or wrong choice here, but that was the thinking behind picking the Waist slot.