BlizzCon 2016 Day 2 Recap

The second day of this year’s BlizzCon event has come and gone, and Blizzard Entertainment has wrangled up two separate recaps of what was revealed as part of their most recent panel sessions. The first is a recap of Diablo-related content, while the second is a recap of what’s next for World of Warcraft and its Patch 7.1.5 update:

New Items, Enemies and More

In addition to the above, we’ll also be adding in new enemies, improving Rifts and Greater Rifts, and – of course – adding brand new Legendary item powers for you to enjoy. Plus, you’ll soon get a free additional chance to upgrade your Legendary Gems in Greater Rifts if you complete one without dying.

And there’s more! We’ve got a change that’s to dye for – Myriam the Mystic now has a new tab in her interface that lets you change colors on your gear quickly. Hunting down vendors and taking up inventory space with pots of dye will soon be a thing of the past.

Explore All New Zones

There are more places to see in Sanctuary, and you’ll soon be discovering a few of these in Adventure Mode which come with their own new Bounties and events.

The desolate, fog-enshrouded Moors have been occupied by armies and empires over time. Beneath them lies the Temple of the Firstborn – a place of evil unlike anything you’ve seen before. Catch a glimpse of these two new areas below, and look forward to exploring them next year.

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Legion featured one of our biggest class overhauls yet, and since launch we’ve been listening to feedback from the community and making balance adjustments—but we’ve been somewhat limited in terms of what we could change in our hotfixes and first patch. Most of the changes up to this point have been constrained to hotfix-based numerical tuning. Patch 7.1.5 is when we’re really trying to tackle some of the broader class issues.

We’re taking a look at are talent rows, so we can increase the diversity of talents. For example, in the Barrage row for Marksman Hunters, it feels like there is only one option in the row that you must take regardless of your play style. There’s room for fine-tuning, and we to make it so everyone feels like they can customize their character to their liking.

We’re also looking at the relative weightings of secondary stats such as Haste, Mastery, and Crit. These are often pretty disparate for different specs and this disparity can sometimes make it feel as if an item that should be an upgrade with a higher item level isn’t as desirable as we would like. We want to make sure the gaps between best and worst aren’t so large that they distort gameplay. We’re going to be making a lot of efforts toward that end in patch 7.1.5.

This patch also allows us to make some tweaks to specific rotations, look at how things have played out since Legion, and find where there’s room to improve the overall fluidity and feel of the different specs.