What were the thoughts behind the decision to retune the Depths of Darkhollow™ items?
After Depths of Darkhollow launched, we saw a lot of feedback from players that non-raid loot rewards weren't appropriate for the difficulty of the content. Carefully evaluating the cases players brought up led us to audit the model that has been used for itemization for several expansions now.
The old itemization model was based around the top end single group gear being roughly 50% of the stats of top end raid level gear. This worked fine when it was first implemented, but as stats have increased, so too has the gap between raiders and non-raiders. Since content is tuned with player power in mind, this has caused a growing gap in the difficulty of expansion zones, in turn leading to the problems players have been reporting.
After a lot of evaluation on the potential impact, we decided to change the itemization model to bring single group gear closer to the level of raid attainable gear. Beyond providing more tangible upgrades in the expansion, this change should also have a number of positive effects on the game as a whole and is something we will continue to use when making items in the future.
How many items did you change?
These changes affect roughly 1000 items from the Depths of Darkhollow expansion.
Does this retuning involve anything other than changing the items?
Yes. In addition to looking at many of the expansion items, we also took a look at the difficulty of the zones and missions and made adjustments to provide a smoother progression of difficulty through the expansion. In many cases, lower level missions early in the expansion became a bit easier and higher level missions that are further into the expansion became a bit harder.
If we have previously done a DoD mission and deleted the one-time completion reward, will we be able to get it again after it is upgraded?
Yes. We changed the way the mission reward mechanic works so when you complete a mission it will now give you the completion reward again if you don't already have that item anywhere on your character (including in the bank). This will allow players who have previously done the missions to return to those missions and get the items again.
Could you give a few examples of items that are being upgraded?
Here are a few examples of items from different parts of the expansion. They are fairly representative of the overall changes we are making.
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When will these changes show up on live servers?
The changes are currently on test server and we are expecting them to go out to normal servers with the patch on November 16th.