We did a pretty poor job of communicating in advance exactly how the Warfront rotation was going to work, since it was very different on beta for ease-of-testing purposes. The gap between player expectation and reality didn't do us any favors here.

On a factual note, the whole cycle is likely to be more like 3.5 weeks, and not 5. There are basically three stages you progress through as an attacker: * 1) Donating to fund the war effort, turning in materials for AP (tuned to take 4-6 days depending on player contributions) * 2) Warfront active, able to queue, with a once-per-cycle 370 reward and then repeatable 340s (7 days) * 3) Zone control, can kill world boss for a shot at a 370 reward, 340s from the rare spawns (11-13 days, while the opposite faction does steps 1 and 2 on their end)

There are two reasons Warfronts are paced this way: First, it lets us give them generous rewards relative to other core content like dungeons, without completely obsoleting that content. Second, we want to make sure most players feel like they have a decent chance to participate in each step; if the Warfront were only available for 3 days instead of 7, the whole thing would move faster, yes, but someone who wasn't able to log in for a few days would miss the activity entirely.

We also do intend to add additional Warfronts over time, so that these cycles will be interwoven in a way that hopefully makes it feel like there's more to do, more often.

I wouldn't say that, no. It's more that we recognize that we're kind of "flying blind" with Beta feedback sometimes. So we make the changes we can, and do our best to get it right, but realize that the data we'll get once the game is live is most likely going to point us at areas where additional changes are needed.

Just to jump in here: it's important to recognize that giving each spec an area to excel in doesn't mean we want you to be dead weight when put in other situations. It's a very delicate balance to nail, but the goal is to create an environment where you can feel awesome when your ideal situations arise but still contribute otherwise.

There will probably always be environments where that can't be 100% successful, such as world first raiding where guilds are min/maxing raid compositions on a per-fight basis, but we're still committed to doing our best.

First off, some clarification on the M+ cache in particular. We wanted to make sure that M+-focused players could count on getting a reasonable amount of Azerite armor over time, and a purely random system would have too much variance. The way it worked on beta during the early Summer was that there were three independent chances to roll for an Azerite piece (rarely), a weapon (rarely), and then a guaranteed pull of non-Azerite, non-weapon loot. The chance to get an Azerite piece would increase over time until you got one (bad luck protection, in essence). The goal wasn't to make M+ more rewarding overall than it had been in Legion, since we feel like it's in a pretty good place. Being able to get an infinite amount of Heroic-raid-quality pieces (unlike raids which have a weekly lockout) and a guaranteed Mythic-raid-quality piece each week is kind of nice. The concern was with access to Azerite armor.

Anyway, that system was observed by people who experienced a range of 1-3 drops, and we did hear feedback pretty quickly that so much RNG felt frustrating. We knew that MOST people would get only 1 item per week, so we risked having the most common outcome turn into a feels-bad moment where rather than celebrating your 30 ilvl gloves upgrade, you felt like you got screwed because you saw screenshots of people who got a helm, an axe, AND gloves that week.

So we consolidated the loot table to a single guaranteed drop, but we kept the bad luck protection for Azerite armor in place. If someone ONLY does M+ as an endgame activity, we want to make sure that over the course of a tier you're getting a healthy amount of Azerite gear.

The other part of the question/concern ties back to my earlier reply on Azerite trait tuning. If you're exclusively looking for one or two traits because they're your BiS, then the potential for frustration is pretty large. But if basically every piece of 370 or 385 armor had at least one trait on the outer ring that was competitive, then an upgrade would be an upgrade. That's a problem we need to solve. If you have a 355 helm equipped, ANY 385 helm you see should make you happy, even if it's not your theoretical BiS item.

And as a final point, while I know this may not sit well with folks who really just want to focus on M+ as their sole endgame content, the fact that it's harder to target specific pieces of gear in M+ versus raiding is deliberate. As I mentioned above, you can run a huge amount of M+ dungeons each week without a lockout, and the activity requires four other people as opposed to coordinating and scheduling a full raid group. Each format has its advantages: M+ awards a far larger total quantity of loot, with a guaranteed top-end weekly reward, while raids have a finite quantity but offer more control over targeting specific pieces.

So, Ion's mostly referring to raw data here. As you can imagine, with a playerbase as large as WoW's, we're able to collect massive amounts of data once every player has their hands on a new expansion, content release, etc.

Put another way: we do our best to make educated guesses based on the data and player feedback we get during Beta, but once the game is live, we get a MUCH clearer picture. That lets us be much more precise with our tuning, and also get a much better sense of areas where we were just way off in our first pass.

I'm not trying to shrug off the concern of listening to feedback -- when players don't feel listened to, that's absolutely a problem -- just clarifying how data and feedback have different values.

Yeah, I recognize that right now, literally one month into the expansion to the day, a whole week feels like an ETERNITY, let alone waiting 2 full weeks to get a shot at it on your faction.

We're crafting systems with an eye towards the grand scheme of the game as it unfolds over the course of many months, and viewed each Warfront in the same vein as something like rotating events such as Timewalking, which comes around every third week. Island Expeditions were crafted as an always-available complement to core content, while Warfronts were envisioned as more of a periodic special event. (Again, saying that up-front would probably have been smart. But we clearly weren't.)

In two days, Alliance will begin their contributions, and a week from now you'll be jumping into the Warfront yourself. The initial rollout was regrettable, and we should have had a minimum item level requirement on the experience sooner. In the grand scheme of things, the number of true fresh alts that geared up during the ~48 hours when it was unrestricted is small, and from a competitive perspective, most folks who'd been doing other endgame content for weeks prior to the Warfront had little need for the repeatable 340s it offered. That initial window should never have existed in the first place, but we didn't feel like it was the right answer to leave an unrestricted source of 340 loot in place for the entirety of September just to make sure everyone got a shot, relative to the harm it would cause to the value of other content for fresh 120s, to say nothing of the degraded experience in the Warfront itself from having a bunch of folks wearing 280 gear and unable to pull their weight.

This is something we discuss a lot internally, and it's a massive challenge inherent in designing rewards and systems for a game that's as heavily analyzed and understood as WoW. Even without any sort of special effects, traits, procs, or the like, high-end players still sim (or use tools like Pawn) to decide whether a 10 ilvl potential upgrade with different secondary stats is actually worth wearing. I think we'd have to literally strip itemization down to stamina and primary stat and nothing else if we wanted it to be truly obvious without any external reference which was optimal. And of course that cuts directly against our own desire to craft interesting choices, and the community's desire for customization and progression.

The route we've settled on is trying to minimize the actual gap in performance between someone who obsessively sims every possible choice, and someone who makes intuitive decisions like always equipping higher-ilvl pieces or saying "hmm, that trait sounds like it's good for AoE, while this one makes my single-target finisher better, so I'll use this helm on Zul and that helm on Fetid Devourer." Where those gaps are unduly large, as seen with all the "this 370 helm is a downgrade from my 340..." examples, we have work to do on that front.

When writing tooltips, we balance trying to give relevant information with clarity. If the exact proc rate of Overwhelming Power were contained in that tooltip, would you honestly be taking out a pencil and paper and calculating its effective uptime based on that information, and weighing that against the alternative? As long as it's clear that it's a proc, as opposed to an always-on effect, or one triggered by an action, that seems sufficient.

Just want to confirm explicitly -- yes, we're increasing the drop rates of pets, mounts, toys, transmog items, and quest starters.

Each WoW expansion is larger than the last in terms of the sheer amount of data that goes into it, and human error along the way is inevitable. There have been over 30,000 bugs entered and tracked over the course of BfA's alpha, beta, and release. 95% of those have been fixed, with most of the open issues being ones that were reported recently and are either being worked on or will be resolved in our next major patch. Legion had very similar numbers, for reference.

Player reports, on PTR/beta or on live, are essential to our work, but they also come with an inherently high signal-to-noise ratio. We have tens or hundreds of thousands of people providing feedback, and we are just a couple hundred developers all in all, so we physically can't directly process all of it, so we rely on support teams and other processes to streamline major issues that bring them to our attention. When it comes to bugs, due to the overall complexity of WoW, what seems like an obvious bug to a player may actually require specific timing, or a sequence of events or interaction between multiple players, so when a QA analyst investigates a report saying "NPC X is stuck and won't follow her path so the quest can't complete" and spends an hour trying various approaches but can't get the issue to occur, that bug may be filed away as "Could Not Reproduce" as we move on to one of the other thousands of reports. Then when millions of people hit the quest on live servers, it may crop up again in a way that gives us enough information that we're able to actually isolate an underlying cause, and deploy a fix. That's how WoW has been made since 2004, and nothing significant has changed there, except for our capacity to hotfix issues directly to the live servers, whereas in the past we would've had to wait for a full patch.

When it comes to things like typos, those will mostly get fixed in our first major patch. Since our game is localized into many languages for global release, as we get to the later stages of development we have a hard cutoff (known as "string lock" internally - referring to text strings) beyond which we can't make changes to text. We have literal millions of words of text in WoW, so some typos are pretty much inevitable, as much as I hate it. Seeing things like "Ogrimmar" on a portal in Shrine for two months back when Mists launched hurt my soul.

Finally, I know there will be skepticism when I say this, but the pressure to release content is driven solely by our desire as developers to keep you all happy. That's all. Blizzard prides itself on maintaining high quality in its products, but one of the quirks of a live service is that quantity and timeliness of content ARE part of quality. We could literally always add more content, or polish things further, but at some point we have to draw the line or you'd still be on Argus waiting for the next thing to come. I know we have a history of endless final tiers, but I genuinely don't think what happened with Siege of Orgrimmar or Tanaan/HFC were acceptable, as a player or as a developer.

The only metric we care about as a development team is whether you're having fun. And even if you don't believe me and take a more cynical approach, from a business perspective, one of the nice things about the subscription model is that our only commercial incentive is to make a game that as many people as possible think is worth their time and money. Which pretty much comes back to us just wanting you to have fun.

If you feel forced to play far more than you want to in order to keep up, and you burn out, that certainly doesn't do anything positive for us, no matter how many minutes you might have spent logged in along the way. We certainly got our share of feedback during Legion from raiders with limited free time who vastly preferred the WoD approach where you pretty much could just log in to raid and didn't have to worry about character progression along any other axes. On the other hand, if you get bored waiting for new content and find something else to do, that's a problem too.

Part of how we design and pace our content is with an eye towards multiple player types, in a game with a huge array of different playstyles. Things like weekly lockouts on raid content have been part of WoW since the very start, to ensure that people who don't have unlimited playtime can progress at a comparable rate. These days, our systems tend to offer a balance of time-limited incentives that kind of are that system of diminishing returns you're mentioning. If you want to do world quests, then just doing your Emissaries will give you the best reward for your time if you just have a little while to play, or you can scour the outdoor zones more thoroughly. You can do one higher M+ and stop there and get a great weekly reward, or you can run as many as you want without any limitation for repeated rewards a tier down. Ditto for PvP. On the collecting side, people with less time can pretty efficiently do mount/mog raid runs, while those who want to spend more time have dungeons and other systems that are infinitely repeatable available, not to mention alts.

We've been working hard to get it done today. The earliest we could have the change go live is later this evening. If we hit snags, it could be Monday.

I'll update our Hotfixes blog post ASAP after it goes live, and tweet about it.

We're often torn when it comes to questions about alt progression, alt catch-up mechanisms, or account-wide systems. Philosophically, what's the point of an alt? For one group of players, the primary desire is to jump into participating in endgame activities from a different perspective (a PvP alt, or a healer alt for a change of pace from your usual DPS main, or whatever). In that context, almost any required progression can feel like a nuisance - an obstacle in the way to the desired endpoint of being raid-ready, or arena-viable.

For another group of players, an alt represents a fresh set of goals to pursue after reaching a point of diminishing returns on a main, whether that's someone who hits max level and then promptly begins leveling another character, or someone who doesn't have many available gear upgrades left on their main and hops over to an alt where progress can once again come quickly. For this type of player, the more things are account-wide, the fewer new goals they have to pursue.

On the topic of reputation, the main question I'd ask is why most reputations feel mandatory on alts. Champions of Azeroth is the obvious one, and we'll be adding catch-up mechanisms to that rep in particular in an upcoming patch, since as epic gear becomes increasingly accessible over time, it's frustrating to have your Heart of Azeroth lagging so far behind in power. Other than that, we've made several content unlocks (e.g. Kings' Rest and Siege of Boralus) account-wide.

For Azerite/AP, the ongoing weekly reduction in AP requirements should make catch-up increasingly quick, just as it did in Legion. It's a bit less obvious than the Legion version where AP rewards scaled up to the billions, but in BfA your is still essentially 30% more effective with each passing week. Soon a fresh 120 alt will be able to do their Expedition weekly and get ~3 Heart levels straight away.

We do want to strike a balance between offering meaningful progression, and wanting to avoid tedium on alts. The examples above are helpful, but I'd love to hear more about specific elements that feel like they discourage playing alts.

Finally, on the class front, I'm not sure any class has even been something we'd say is "finished" - there's always room for refinement, tweaking talents to improve unpopular ones or fix rows that feel dead because there's just one dominant choice, fixing awkward mechanical interactions, adding new tools, and so forth. We do have plans in the works for the classes you mentioned, informed by both these communities' feedback and data from the first month of BfA. I do wish we could have gotten to addressing this feedback sooner, and I'm sorry for that - it sucks to feel like you're last in line, but hopefully the end result will be worth it.

Right, it's valid criticism that DPS spec shamans don't feel like they have sufficient offsetting strengths right now. I wasn't saying that they do. We have work to do there.

This is something we've been discussing a bunch. On the one hand, we'd like to add a way to get at least Hydrocores through doing non-Mythic dungeons, so that the professions that DO have a use for them don't feel like they hit a brick wall in their crafting if they only do matchmade content.

On the other hand, it's awkward to be swimming in Sanguicells with no use for them as an Alchemist or Enchanter. I don't have a specific fix to announce right now, but we're discussing plans to address that problem.

No, we don't think that's healthy. It's a similar situation to the gameplay AMS used to yield for Death Knights. Defensives with a backlash component are an interesting space to explore, but when your "defensive" gameplay turns into actively seeking out sources of damage, that's pretty degenerate.

The Paragon system in Legion felt like a way to keep reputations relevant for those who wanted to continue doing outdoor content or missions later on in the expansion. We plan to reintroduce the system for BfA reps in an upcoming patch.

We do have further overall short-term balancing to do (via hotfix). We can't fix mechanics and rotational issues that way, but when it comes to numbers, we'll definitely be looking at shaman performance in the near future.

For some traits, numbers adjustments will be sufficient. Others, as you note, may require more redesign.

The requirements are staggered slightly based on slot, where one slot may require 16/19/22/25, another 17/20/23/26, and the third 18/21/24/27, such that an artifact level is more likely to unlock a new trait rather than just being a passive ilvl increase to the Heart.

When we make a new expansion, we look at the broader ecologies of the new zones and identify which creatures would make cool mounts. However, at the start of recent expansions before flying can be earned, we also avoid giving out mount models that really work best when flying. As it turned out, the Horde bestiary had a lot more ground-based models which led to the first wave of rep mounts being skewed. But we plan on rectifying that as the expansion unfolds. Speaking of which, that Bee is pretty wonderful, isn't it?

Thank you to everyone for the time and energy that went into all the questions, and thanks again to the r/wow moderators for wrangling this beast of a thread. I tried to refresh the thread and go down the list of Top-upvoted questions as best I could, but I know that I missed the majority of the questions due to the sheer volume. I apologize if I wasn't able to cover the topic you wanted to hear about. I also look forward to going back and digging into the reply threads underneath my comments later on, since it was a bit too much to process in real time.

When it comes to a lot of the questions asking for specific change, I know that my replies often trend towards explaining why we did a thing you're upset we did, rather than just saying we're going to change it immediately. At the end of the day, if it simply feels bad, an explanation from me probably isn't going to fix that. Change can and will still come to many of these areas, but that's something for the appropriate folks on the development team to discuss, and not something for me to just unilaterally declare here. From Azerite, to Warfront pacing, to Island Expeditions gameplay and rewards, to shamans and other classes, we have a lot to talk about.

As I mentioned at the outset of this AMA, this is a beginning of an ongoing conversation. In some of my responses today, I referred to plans for our upcoming content update. That patch will be coming to the PTR very soon, and we'll be doing a livestream on Tuesday, September 18 at 11am PDT on the Warcraft Twitch channel where we'll discuss the major pieces of content in the patch. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

Again, thank you so very much for your passion and feedback.

I'm not Ion, and I'll apologize in advance that I don't have a perfect solve for this ready to go, but I wanted to at least say that addressing this issue -- the feeling that we're ignoring your feedback -- is (and has been) one of our primary goals on the Community team.

We weren't happy with our communication in Legion (particularly towards the end of the expansion), and tried some new approaches for BfA, which were beneficial in some ways, but hurt our outward-facing communication a lot more than we expected. I could do some handwaving here about internal processes or organizational structures but the key point I want to get across is: We're not okay with that. We obviously have improvements to make, and probably always will, but it is and will continue to be a top priority for us.

Again, apologies that I don't have a silver-bullet fix to share today, but we recognize that the current state isn't working for you and that's not okay.