High End incentives and a more helpful Tenacity.
Hello Citizens of Dalaran,
There are a few things we would like to talk about in this post, they are going to involve several upcoming changes for both, PvE and PvP.
Let's start with PvP as they are already active on Algalon - we have received several reports about a tendency of leaving in the middle of a Battleground if things aren't going as expected. In order to reduce these actions, we have decided to increase the Battleground Deserter debuff up to an hour.
We have noticed that the Balance System implemented for Wintergrasp is not enough. Therefore, we have reworked Tenacity's formula and how it works in order to provide a more helpful aid to the faction with the fewest players within each Wintergrasp battle.
We have put a lot of work and effort into PvP and the overall Tournament (and we shall keep doing it, in fact, we can't wait to tell you more about our work in the next zone of action: Venture Bay), but we feel like PvE also needs some fresh ideas. So, after receiving several suggestions and feedback from players, we have decided to perform some steps, gradually.
This post is not to provide a full list of changes, but to let you know our intentions and what we are currently working on.
We have many ideas and as mentioned, they are going to be deployed to Algalon progressively, we will keep you updated with every step.
For now, the more imminent change to PvE is a small nerf we are going to apply to Deathbringer Saurfang (update: only normal mode). For a very long time, this boss has been quite a wall in ICC, generating many 3/12 runs due to its difficulty. We believe it is going to be quite healthy having more casual players being able to progress through ICC.
Nerfing Saurfang is quite sad for me, as I personally have a very fond memory of this encounter as a pretty tough boss when I was playing around 11 years ago. When I started programming this boss's mechanics for Dalaran back in the day, it was mostly tank and spank everywhere else, so I put a lot of effort into details for it to be as properly scripted and challenging as possible so I could share this memory with all of you.
But anyways, next Friday, 18th of June, Deathbringer Saurfang will have a significant nerf so it is less unforgiving, allowing the attuned players to go further.
Now, we are currently working on something that we call High End incentives. Thanks to some players' ideas and suggestions, we are developing a way for both casual and more hardcore players to obtain some extra rewards by doing ICC, while not being intrusive with the blizzlike feeling.
We will post a separate announcement with a proper explanation and all the details about it before deploying it. However, we would like to briefly give you a quick peek.
One of the features under the "High End incentives" section that is going to be available for the players raiding ICC, is a new token system. These new tokens will be a currency that will have a chance to drop from ICC bosses, depending on their difficulty, etc.
This new currency will allow players to acquire within ICC a variety of rewards - from unique prizes given in the past through PvE Tournaments (mounts, pets, tabards...etc), other WoTLK raid epic recipes / patterns, arena points, or even costumes (like deviated fish or different ones from the shop), to account bound tokens that will be exchangeable for a reputation or profession rate bonus that will last a certain amount of time.
We are also considering increasing the current ICC area buff, but for that, we need more feedback from the current player base. If anyone wishes to give us their opinion and their guild's, please contact us via ticket or email. (update: we have received a lot of feedback about this and, after that, we totally abandon this idea. Thank you everyone!)
Again, don't worry, we will be giving a detailed list with every single change and how everything will work before deploying it to Algalon.
As always, we are really grateful for your suggestions and support, without them we could not really know what our community thinks. This way we can keep improving our home for you.
Thank you very much.