Legion Q&A with Paul Kubit liveblog

In just a few short minutes, another Legion Q&A will be kicking off on Twitch. Senior Game Designer Paul Kubit will be answering previously-submitted questions on the Brawlers’ Guild, Micro-Holidays, Timewalking, and Professions.

In this liveblog, you will need to refresh the page to see the latest updates. Please be aware, depending on the pace of the Q&A, the liveblog will not include verbatim quotes unless otherwise noted. While we will strive for accuracy in the information presented, nothing should be cited as a direct quote from the developers.

1:01 p.m. We’re getting started!

…I was too busy making goofy tweets in Paul Kubit’s general direction and missed the first question. Professionalism! The general gist of Paul Kubit’s response, however, is addressing the ongoing viability of professions. How will they stay relevant with all of the gear flowing in from other sources? Items will continue to be upgraded and professions will receive new fun things in the future.

Q: Can we expect to see new recipes?

A: Yes! Primary and secondary professions will see new stuff in the future. Always checking the forums etc for feedback and cool ideas.

Q: Will you be tuning the Brawler’s Guild to a specific item level or will it scale to be more alt friendly? (Question was asked before patch 7.1.5 launched.)

A: The Brawler’s Guild bosses are at a static difficulty, with early bosses being easier than later bosses. The earliest bosses should be approachable for someone with at least decent gearing. They don’t scale to ilevel, but have a progression system.

Q: Brawlers’ Guild: Will there ever be boss HP adjustments based on current player spec? Eliminate the need for healers to go DPS spec, for example?

A: It’s a cool idea, but not right now. There are some advantages to being a tank, lending additional survivability, but there certainly are DPS checks and healers get left out. They’re thinking about ways to bring healers into the Brawler’s Guild and this might be the way to do it, but there might be other ways, too. Kubit cites the Zagarmarsh micro-holiday as something that favors healers and they’d like to reward healers in further ways.

Q: Will additional fights be added to the Brawlers Guild later in the expansion?

A: No specific plans at this time, but maybe. Kubit mentions Pandaria’s progression system as new raid tiers were added and that might happen with Legion progression, too. To be determined.

Q: Favorite Brawlers Guild idea that didn’t make it in?

A: Almost every idea makes it into the Brawlers Guild because they can stretch the idea of a boss fight in WoW. Anything goes. There was a Super Mario tribute that didn’t make it in. A Mega Man tribute didn’t make it in, either. A fight called “Strange Thing” involving what is essentially a bad trip almost didn’t make it in. They eliminated it as a progression fight because it set off motion sickness for testers, but still included it as playable.

Q: Can we get an item level bump to Timewalking gear as Legion goes on?

A: Yes. Item levels are going up in other content and there’s no good reason Timewalking ilevel should stay low.

Q: Any possibility of seeing the revamped Scholomance make it into the Mists of Pandaria timewalking roster at some point?

A: In the case of Scholomance, no. Mists of Pandaria Timewalking is specifically directed at looking back at Pandaria. While Scholomance came out in that expansion, it doesn’t fit the feel of the event. It’s possible they could do vanilla Timewalking and loop Scholomance into that.

Q: Any plans for vanilla Timewalking?

A: Not right now, but it is possible. Many of the older dungeons don’t hold up to player scaling. Some of the revamped dungeons do, but the oldest ones aren’t particularly challenging even when the numbers are ratcheted up. It’s not out of the question entirely, though.

Q: Any chance for Timewalking raids?

A: They like Timewalking to remain at the current expansion minus two. They can’t do Warlords Timewalking yet for that reason, so what do they do instead? Timewalking Raids is a distinct possibility. They’ve talked about it. Sometimes they’re just a matter of scaling, but in some cases, things might need to be rebuilt such as the Molten Core event they held.

Q: Why is it so hard to get Hardened Felglass, then have the stats on the goggles be random? (Engineering.)

A: Kubit doesn’t necessarily agree that it’s super hard to get Hardened Felglass. RNG is a factor in drop luck. The goggles are the highest ilevel crafted item in the game, so spending time getting the materials is one of the costs. Hardened Felglass is able to be traded, though, and the goggles can be sold, too.

Q: Are there plans to make talent tomes cost less on the AH?

A: Yes, they believe they cost too much right now. It isn’t the fault of the Scribes putting a huge markup on it, but the materials required might be too high. They’re going to address it.

Q: Did the Obliterum quest requiring wrists of each armor type hit its mark? The cost of the Wrists on the auction house outweighs the benefit of opening the Obliterum Forge.

A: Yes, he thinks the quest hit its mark. They saw a lot of trading of bracers, the quest encouraged social interaction. However, we’re a few months into the expansion and fewer people are looking to make that trade. Turning to the auction house for inflated prices is becoming the only option. They’ll likely remove the requirement at some point in the future.

Q: Any plans to make skinnable mobs multi-tappable and skinnable when not looted by someone else?

A: Yeah, they want to address this. Legion’s tapping rules made it even worse, so it’s on their radar. That said, skinners can essentially create their own crafting nodes. If you can find a spot with beasts by yourself out in the world, you generate your own resources just by killing stuff. They do still want to make the change, though.

Q: Why do you think materials are so much more expensive than the end product of crafting?

A: The garrison in Warlords made material costs hit rock bottom and players don’t have that ease of access anymore. They’ve also cracked down on bots which often flooded the market with materials. Materials have a time component, too, where the profit you make from materials is dependent on how much time you invest in it. However, with crafting, the time investment is minimal and maybe it makes sense the profit margins are slim. They do want to bring these two aspects back in balance down the road, though.

Q: Could we see a leveling micro-holiday in the future? A 1-2 day event where leveling is heavily rewarded, emulating a new server?

A: Kubit emphasizes micro-holidays won’t give out anything super collectible because they’re so short. They want to make it painless if you miss the event for some reason. However, bonus XP is a good way reward people without others feeling like they’re missing out. The upcoming Scarab holiday rewards a “beefy” amount of XP and you can start contributing at level 55-58. If you can get to Silithus, you can participate.

Q: Considering any chances to how Cooking profession works in Legion? What was the intent behind Nomi RNG research? Any ideas for making him less frustrating?

A: They wanted every profession to have content that made you feel like you were part of that profession. For primary professions, those were questlines. For secondary professions, they were little activities. Archaeology had a timed quest every two weeks. Fishing had a fishing pole artifact. For First Aid, it was… administering First Aid. For Cooking, they felt they could “flavorfully” incorporate the Work Order mechanics of Warlords in a way that wasn’t too painful. However, they do feel the RNG was too high. Nomi is getting a little better over time. He burns food much less now. As of patch 7.1.5, he gives recipes much more often and giving him your materials might be worthwhile again.

Q: Why were rank 3 shoulder recipes locked behind rated battlegrounds rather than regular battlegrounds? Any plans to remedy some of the RNG issues when it comes to getting rank 3 recipes for some professions?

A: When designing the system, it was a new thing, a total blank slate. The rarities could be whatever they said it was. Ranks could be 100% drops, or super rare drops that made you feel awesome when you got them. They erred on the side of rarity. If it didn’t work out, they could ease up. It’s much more difficult to later decide they should be more rare. They put the shoulders into rated battlegrounds because they wanted it to be pretty tough to be an armorsmith who had rank 3 efficiency. They wanted it to be special.

They’ve heard feedback from the people who don’t PVP and are upset they can’t get the recipe, but they’re curious if there’s anyone who went out of their way to get it and feel good about it. It’s their first try at it.

They’re more concerned about rank 3 gathering than rank 3 crafting. Rank 3 in gathering can make a huge difference, but the efficiency in rank 3 crafting isn’t as big of a deal.

Q: Archaeology is no longer about discovery. You do a quest every 2 weeks and then ignore digsites until the next quest. Can we go back to being able to find rares and uncommons while digging without needing a quest?

A: They’ve been talking about this internally. They recognize some things may have been lost, but they tried to solve the problem of having tons of mostly worthless solves to churn through in the hopes you get the few cool things. They wanted to boil it down to just the cool things. However, Kubit says he’s been working on some Archaeology things to make it attractive again and maybe reclaim what’s been lost. That’ll be in patch 7.2 which will be on the PTR “pretty soon.”

Q: Will you consider removing the dungeon requirements for professions please?

A: “Because you said please, okay.” Actually, no. They started designing these quests before they decided to scale all of the Broken Isles with your level, so they leaned on dungeons because, at the time, they at least knew dungeons would scale. If they did this again, making professions with significant questchains, they wouldn’t go as heavy with dungeons.

Q: Can gathering professions be made separate from crafting professions?

A: It’s a request they’ve received since Vanilla. They can’t do 1 Gathering / 1 Crafting because many players have had dual crafting for years and taking one away from them would be wrong. Should players be able to have all gathering skills? Then what differentiates each character? Characters feel less focused. You have to pick a class. Picking your professions are part of your character focus, too. They talk about this a lot, but doubtful they’ll change it.

Q: Any chance for an item we can use to reroll secondary stats on crafted items like the ones in Warlords of Draenor?

A: “NOPE!” (His tone was joking.) They took the repeated crafting into consideration when setting the material costs, expecting players would need to craft items over and over again. And the Obliterum Forge exists so you can churn up your garbage and make it useful garbage. The system in Legion was designed with the repeated crafting in mind.

Q: The emphasis on Artifact Weapons has really deflated the weaponsmith fantasy of Blacksmithing. Plans going forward?

A: Kubit agrees this is an issue. They leaned on Weapons a lot to make crafting professions cool. They tried to replace weapons with relics. Blacksmith can make four types of those. It doesn’t fill the fantasy of the weaponsmith, though. Plans going forward? Not making weapons, because artifacts. They do want to continue adding cool things, though. Patch 7.1.5 includes some quests to learn how to craft legacy weapons. Legion includes the items such as horseshoes, etc. They want to do more like that.

Q: Can we separate Timewalking from other weekend events? With so many weekend events, it’s over two months between seeing your favorite again.

A: It’s an interesting idea, but they want Timewalking to feel special. The specialness is baked into the rarity of it. If you could do it more frequently, it would be less special. However, when they add new ones, they could remove less interesting ones. It’s not something they’d never consider, but they aren’t considering it right now.

Q: How about a better New Years Eve/New Years Micro-Holiday?

A: “How about you watch your tone?” Kubit is getting punchy as this thing winds down. (Again, he was joking.) In terms of micro-holidays, they don’t want them to be analogous to real holidays. They’re more about Azeroth. What would Azeroth celebrate? They were concepting Murloc New Years prior to this Q&A. They do agree, however, the in-game New Years could use some polish.

Q: Will Reeves from Engineering ever get a bank access function? So far Jeeves are way better than Reeves.

A: It’s a cool idea and something they’ve looked at. It was one of the things on the list for Engineers in patch 7.1.5 that didn’t quite make it in. They don’t want to make any of these tinker fellas too good or else you’ll be farming materials for them for years down the line. Do engineers want to farm Felslate years from now? Or do they reserve features for future toys? They’ll consider it, though.

And that’s a wrap!