Blizzard Posts: Group Finder Addons Changed, Brewmasters and Discipline in 7.2.5

Posted 2017/04/27 at 7:53 PM by perculia

Volunteer Guard Dayliveblogged the 7.2 Q&A

Blizzard

Since the release of Patch 7.2, we’ve been working to resolve issues with realm performance that were causing players to experience heavy latency and/or disconnects on the Broken Isles. As our investigation has continued, we’ve discovered that many of these issues were being inadvertently caused by addons intended to automate the creation and joining of groups via the Group Finder, even for players who were not using those addons.

Today, we’ve changed what addons can do when interacting with Group Finder, in order to address major performance issues with the game service for players—not just for those using these addons, but for others as well.

In order to alleviate those issues, we’ve recently applied a hotfix that changes how addons interact with the Group Finder. Players will now need to give a manual confirmation when an addon attempts to:
- List and delist a Group Finder group.
- Search for and request an invite to a Group Finder group.

Addons that are affected by these changes will need to be updated to comply with this new restriction. We understand that this is a relatively sudden change, but it was important to resolve the performance issues as quickly as possible.

Note: If you are not using an addon that modifies the Group Finder feature, you should not encounter any issues resulting from this change.

GorefiendGorefiendtransmogBrewmasters in 7.2.5yesterday's 7.2.5 PTR build

Blizzard

Lots of great feedback here on the latest build so far. Thanks.

Latest thoughts:
Spitfire - It's a fun playstyle option for people, but having both defensive (even without it being an increase to Hot Blooded, it's still more Elusive Brawler stacks) and offensive value (more Breath of Fires for damage), it's hard to fit it anywhere in the talent tree, and it complicates artifact trait values. We're going to just cut if for now (may return at some point in the future when it fits in better). Niuzao will return, and will simply deal more damage to make him competitive with the row.

Blackout Combo - Yeah, the 2sec rotation is problematic. Some people like the frantic gameplay, but we think other talent combinations deliver on that better anyway. The main problems with it are that it invalidates a ton of other talent choices, actually *reduces* rotational choice because you just combo everything instead of having to choose what you combo, causes energy capping issues, is a massive buff to the talent potentially upsetting talent balance, and is too fast-paced without any other contribution. We're going to return it to 3sec, where you can pair it with other GCD-filling talents to create the frantic playstyle if you prefer, without causing the above issues.

Hot Blooded and Dragonfire Brew - Baseline, Hot Blooded is very strong. 1% DR per bronze trait is already on the extremely strong side. The Legendary chest was created with Hot Blooded in mind as its defensive benefit. But that gets a little out of hand when we added 4th points to Bronzes, and you min/max relics, increasing it to the massively-OP level of 7% DR for a legendary. Then the 7.2.5 changes also add more Elusive Brawler stacks to that. We're going to adjust these two traits in order to better balance trait and legendary values: Dragonfire Brew will also increase the duration of Breath of Fire's DoT by 100%, giving it defensive value. Hot Blooded will now be active the whole time, instead of ~half the time without the Chest, and so is changing to 1% DR per point to compensate.

EDIT: Overall Tuning - As always, overall tuning happens late in the process. Don't worry about overall power level of Brewmasters when giving feedback on these changes.

Thanks all!
I have a feeling theres a disconnect between how much the monk community value those elusive brawler stack and how the Developpers value them.

First off, as said many times, dodge doesn't do anything VS magic damage or VS any kind of boss threatening ability as they are undodgeable even if physical (ex: spellblade annihilate).

From a mythic raider point of view, those dodge stacks hardly do anything, as bosses auto-attack (the only thing that's dodgeable) are the least threatening form of damage we have to face.

From a M+ dungeon point of view, those stack comes and go so fast nobody will notice the buff... having 100% dodge chance for 1 auto-attack out of the 5+ weak mob training you hardly change anything...

It's also one of the reason people hardly, if ever, use blackout combo to empower purify.

Elusive Brawler7.2.5 Discipline Priest

Blizzard

Thanks for all the feedback. As I mentioned last week, there was a lot of rapid iteration going on so it was hard to give any detailed updates. This build is a more complete set of changes that seems to be going in a good direction, though there are still some issues to work out.

--Talent balancing. In particular, Evangelism is an idea we like, but finding serious competition for it as a raid talent might be hard. It probably needs to be against heavier hitters like Power Infusion (especially if that helps it be less of a one-note cooldown stacking build). There will likely be further iteration on talent arrangement to better accommodate the new additions.

--Mana. The spell whose cost is most important for balance purposes is , because it is now the most efficient way to convert excess mana into Atonements. We reduced the cost so it would make more sense when compared against and Radiance, but have to keep an eye on whether that leaves mana as a reasonable limiter on how much Atonement you can spread over the course of an encounter.

--Overall Atonement count. The changes in the last build helped fix a lot of mechanical issues, but also added a lot of raw power to the spec, particularly in terms of Atonement spread/uptime. And particularly Evangelism returns a lot of the burst-Atonement coverage that currently dominates Disc raiding. That's not necessarily a problem if everything else about the spec is working well, and it's good to continue having a bit of a niche that Disc is used to in Legion. But as discussed in my first post, if it's as easy to blanket the raid as it is on live, that limits the spec somewhat.

While this is something we'll monitor throughout PTR, especially with more internal and external raid testing, there is definitely a worry that in order to balance the spec at this point, the Atonement transfer % would have to go down, which is the opposite of the stated goal. We don't want to be in that position at the end of PTR when it's harder to make other changes.

Comment by natyarafdnOooh! I was wondering why my World quest group finder keeps giving an error message. That explains a lot.Comment by tolimanI'd say that the silent join/unjoins when you enter into the WQ trigger boundaries were going to cause issues especially given how automated it is. Even if they now require a manual JOIN GROUP popup, which will be annoying, it's not half as annoying as half of the world quests themselves (Looking at you, "Magic of Flight" Kirin Tor WQ's)

I'd probably have gone the other way and made it a game feature, but i'd guess that blizzard would be accused of grafting the feature from older MMOs to enforce community or nannying/pushing people to be anti-social...

Given how ridiculously better the experience is with WQGF, i'm surprised they haven't integrated it in 7.2-7.3 with a few tweaks for public / guild & friends / never options, with G&FL as the default.

or giving you the opt-in to soft-join guild & friends when in the same quest zone (outside of cities/raids/instances)Comment by DKong27I've thought about getting an add-on for premade groups, but I only really use it for world quests, and I just click the button they added to the quest objective list. Of course, most of the groups I actually join are created from those add-ons, so I depend on them in a sort of a roundabout way. The best feature is that the group descriptions tell if you are joining a PvP or PvE realm group, would be nice if the new quest button gave more information than "Doing the quest ".Comment by InterestThere's probably going to be people unhappy with the addon change, but I'm going to have to say I approve of it, and not just because of improved performance. Consider the following:

There's some addons out there that make hopping very, very quick and it makes any sort of grouping, especially with auto accept active, a miserable experience of players joining then leaving the group a couple seconds later. It's gotten notably worse since Broken Shore came out despite attempts to curb the behavior (where players have to share the same zone to actually "hop") and will likely happen in the future. These types of addons mess up listings and takes spots from people who might actually want to do the same objectives to a degree normal, manual hopping cannot match.

I know people can use WQGF or some other addon to somewhat circumvent this but people will still try to join the group and it doesn't work on non-WQ groups. Besides, it seems screwed up to have to download another addon to combat server hopping addons. In addition, default functionality for quickly making WQ groups has been added (if you use Find Group from the tracker, then cancel the find and try to Start Group instead, it'll automatically list a group for you) and I suspect Blizzard wants it to see usage since it does kind of obsolete WQGF. In fact, I'd say it works quite well when there aren't 20 hoppers trying to join every Broken Shore WQ I try to make a group for.

Anyways, hopefully the performance issues go away as well as excessive realm hopping.Comment by AyvalenI use this addon and while I'm disappointed in some of its functionality being stripped I 100% understand and support it. Realm stability is far more important than functionality from an addon.Comment by RayythI suspect that the fact that server hoppers piggyback off of WQGF has a lot to do with this. It's unfortunate for people who used it for the real reason it exists (finding cross realm groups for quests only) but if it kills server hopping (for gathering/farming and other such things, not for social and questing reasons) then I'm all for the change and I say that as an enthusiastic user of WQGF.

to those server hoppers out there, I say "this is why we can't have nice things". You broke it, happy now?Comment by InterestI suspect that the fact that server hoppers piggyback off of WQGF has a lot to do with this. It's unfortunate for people who used it for the real reason it exists (finding cross realm groups for quests only) but if it kills server hopping (for gathering/farming and other such things, not for social and questing reasons) then I'm all for the change and I say that as an enthusiastic user of WQGF.

to those server hoppers out there, I say "this is why we can't have nice things". You broke it, happy now? There are addons that make hopping so ludicrously fast and easyComment by jamesevarts3so is wqgf a dead addon now?Comment by BanquettoSpeaking of Hellfire Citadel, is it still impossible to solo Archimonde due to Nether Banish?Comment by KrougherA thought for healers that will not be doing WQ anymore.

so is wqgf a dead addon now?Comment by FengorrI'm not sure if I should be concerned about the mandatory change to WQGF, but it sounds like all there is now is a button between myself and queuing for WQ groups.Comment by hulduI think the real problem with the hopping is that unlike a year or more ago you actually returned to your "server". That is not the case nowadays. You're actually stuck on the "other" server until you log out or hop to another. I do believe *this* is what causes all the issues. Just trying to band-aid the situation by making it harder for the people using the addon seems quite counterproductive. The system is still in place, I mean it was merely using the group finder it wasn't doing anything new that didn't already exist.

I wouldn't mind soloing the invasion wq's(this is what I used the addon for), they were horrible to do solo as a 100-109 player. They were so poorly balanced and it was quite a struggle just killing the mobs. They're a complete joke at 110 with any decent item level. Of course I used the group finder to find groups doing the wqs. That's also how I ran across the addon since it was spamming in chat every time someone completed a wq. It just made it *easier* to find a group - not harder.

Hopefully we can find some sort of middle ground here. I don't want to be "soloing" tough wqs if I don't have to for whatever reason. I thought we were playing a mmo for a minute there but apparently it's a glorified single player game.

so is wqgf a dead addon now?I use this addon and while I'm disappointed in some of its functionality being stripped I 100% understand and support it. Realm stability is far more important than functionality from an addon.Comment by KenjiT28RIP brewmaster spec, I will stick to healing on my monk though I would rather tank.Comment by likwiddSeriously blizzard. Breaking WQGF is going to make me not want to do WQs...

I already am burnt out on mythic+, I refuse to do sentinax carpal tunnel farming, what are you thinking :(

At least roll the functionality properly into your own code or remove CRZ or get rid of long ass spawn timers. Players finding solutions to aggravating issues is a sign that you've got to fix things on your end.Comment by DONalexi wonder when they will fix cross realms on high pop servers like draenor so i wont get ported from my server to other servers and stop seeing people from other realms other then mine.
In my opinion that is the real problem.Comment by SckharAnd once again blizzard has to screw up what players like and use.
Not really surprised.Comment by InterestHopefully we can find some sort of middle ground here. I don't want to be "soloing" tough wqs if I don't have to for whatever reason. I thought we were playing a mmo for a minute there but apparently it's a glorified single player game.Comment by Wombat62Speaking of Hellfire Citadel, is it still impossible to solo Archimonde due to Nether Banish?Comment by iceman994I cant use any group finder addon. Blizzard killed legion.Comment by ToraziyalArchimonde is soloable in normal, if using all dps cooldowns and potion at 40%. At least I managed on my 905 rogue. Was quite close though. With Tomb gear (even if LFR) it should be doable for most classes. Heroic and mythic... well, that might take a while longer to be soloable, but that's ok i guess.
I hope they don't forget Hans + Franz, when they go about fixing WoD raids. They despawn a few seconds into the fight due to picking up the tank, which also makes Flamebender and Kromog inacessable.