The Dragonfight pre-patch starts next week Oct 25th, with Dragonflight itself coming on Nov 28th! Here is our roadmap for the release of the new expansion.
Pre-Patch (Oct 25)
Pre-patches for expansions are always a bit awkward. Many of the new game mechanics are in place (in this case, new talent trees), but old mechanics are still around… like your soulbinds and conduits. It’s going to be weird since a lot of the new talents overlap with existing covenant abilities and legendaries. Balancing is going to be all over the place, and since it only lasts a couple weeks, nobody spends much time “figuring out” pre-patch optimization.
Supported Pre-Patch Features
Best in Bags
Best in Bags will be functioning in the pre-patch. The addon will read the new talent configurations and you will be able to edit them on the website as well. The optimizations will be pretty rough, but they should be good enough for messing around until Dragonflight. A few notes:
We will not rank or optimize soulbinds or conduits anymore. You won’t even see them on the UI since we’ll be using the Dragonflight version of our code.
We will not rank Shadowlands legendaries anymore; the optimizer will leave on whatever legendaries you have equipped and work around them
T28 set bonuses have been disabled by Blizzard for the pre-patch
Most Shadowlands trinket rankings should still work reasonably well during the pre-patch
Best in Slot
Best in Slot will be available as a way to preview Dragonflight gear. You will need to use one of the provided level 70 generic characters. Don’t worry too much about the actual optimization – it is going to be off! Many of the new items aren’t even implemented yet on beta, and we still have a lot of work to do to dial in our Dragonflight optimization models.
Worst in Bags
Worst in Bags should still work fine as a way to help you clean up your bags going in to Dragonflight.
Upgrade Finder
The Upgrade Finder will be temporarily disabled during the pre-patch. We’ll bring it back with Dragonflight, and we hope to expand on the behavior of some popular searches like the Great Vault and Catalyst.
Dragonflight (Nov 28)
We will have more details as it gets closer, but all features will be fully functioning on launch day.
The first raid releases on Dec 13th, and Blizzard usually does significant bug fixing and balancing leading up to the raid and during its first couple weeks. As usual, we will continue to tweak and update our optimizations through the first weeks of the expansion.
A quick update – we plan to get something posted for the pre-patch sometime during today’s server maintenance, or end of day at the latest. This includes a new version of the in-game addon that can read the new talent trees.
As mentioned above, the optimizations will be a bit rough during pre-patch as we figure everything out – we will post more details later in the day when we get the update live.
While every spec is functioning, this is far from the completed optimizer for Dragonflight. A few things to note during the pre-patch:
Some of the options might not be fully functioning. While settings like target count and fight length and whether or not to use Bloodlust will adjust the optimization to an extent, they are not fully implemented yet.
Many new talents are only partially implemented. We expect the month leading up to Dragonflight to see a lot of tuning, so we are still working on adjusting the optimizations for all the new talents.
As mentioned before, the optimizer won’t pick Shadowlands legendaries or conduits for you – just use what seems like fun during the pre-patch!
Some of the % upgrades shown in the scores might have the magnitude a bit off right now. Don’t worry about it – it will all get smoothed out as more of the Dragonflight mechanics are implemented and as people approach level 70. Lower-level optimizations are always tricky and lead to weird scaling issues.
Best in Slot is a straight-up preview of some of the new gear, and is far from complete. Don’t worry about the score or what it picks. There’s also a lot more gear to get into the lists, like new crafted gear, etc.
New Talents
This version of the site/addon should import your talents, and it will also import all of your saved talent loadouts that you create with WoW’s new in-game talent editor. You can then choose any of those loadouts on the website to quickly update the talents on a setup.
If you choose a loadout on one of your setups and then don’t change any of the talents, that loadout will be associated to that setup. If you manually change a talent, you’ll see the loadout picker goes blank to indicate that you have customized your talents.
When you import from the addon, any setup associated to one of your talent loadouts will be updated with the latest talents that you have saved to that loadout in-game. This is an easy way to keep your setup on the website in sync with a talent loadout you have saved in-game.
Coming Soon:
We plan to add a lot more features for helping people with picking talents in Dragonflight. We’ll have more details as Dragonflight gets closer.
As we tune things for Dragonflight, we plan to add a lot more customization options as well. We’ll always have good defaults for people to use “out of the box”, but we really want to give some easy, flexible options to let you tailor your gear for more varied in-game circumstances. We think that things have become too rigidly focused around this “patchwerk” style max-average-damage perfect simulation scenario over the past several years.
Quality site and done in a timely fashion. Have used your site for years (in fact paid for our officers to use it as well for Shadowlands). After a year off from WoW started back up with you all about a month ago. Good job and thanks to all of you!
We don’t need glonet right now, correct. We are using the simulator a little differently to help us generate data for this first release. There are so many potential talent builds… the amount of sim data needed for the gearing strategies was going to get out of control.
We are working on our optimization models day and night - these talent trees have forced us try out some ideas we’ve been kicking around for a while - I think the results will be good for the optimizer.
Thanks for the clarification. I was a little concerned that I couldn’t get the client to connect during a time when y’all are usually running glonet hard.
I get the not ranking legendaries, but if I try to build a set with a different leggo, when I select the other legendary it disappears, and puts a different piece of gear in there. Is that intentional behavior? That means I can’t manually build sets for other specs with a legendary in place.
Could you provide a snapshot where this is happening? In theory it should not move a legendary, just leave them alone as you have them from the last data it imported from the game for that spec.
Perhaps I am just missing something but I cannot get my talents to “save” per spec. I have different talents for raid and mythic setups and when i go in game and swap between the two specs they just will not swap to the spec saved for that gear set. Can anyone explain to me what I am missing or doing wrong? I have it setup on Mr. Robot on the website which talents to use for which gear set but they just arnt translating to the game.
We don’t have talent swapping working in the addon yet. It’s “one way” right now – we’ll read your saved talent setups and current talents from the game, but won’t pass anything back into the game.
We’re working on that – it’s a lot more complicated in the addon API now.
In the meantime, set up your talents in-game and save a loadout using the in-game talent features. Then choose that loadout on our website in the picker at the bottom of the talent tree. If you want to change talents, do it in-game, save your loadout, export again. It should update on the website as well the next time you export.
So, click the gear slot, click the higher (resto) legendary, go away from that spec, return and the lower one is still there. Export it, and it’s got the wrong one.
Best in Bag is ignoring item locks at the moment. I guess that’s the behavior which tox911 is also explaining. When i’m setting a specific item on a slot (like an other legendary) and clicking “re-optimize” afterwards or switching to a different spec or itemset and back, BiB is switching all items to its former state again.
I’ll take a look – I think the pre-patch code to keep your existing legendaries is taking a higher priority than you locks, when it should be the other way around.
