One of the most exciting Runes heading into World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery was Metamorphosis, but the controversy surrounding its method of attainment has recently overshadowed the positives.
Metamorphosis is a Warlock Rune that transforms the character into a demonic form, buffing armor by 500%, threat by 100%, reducing incoming crit chance by 6% and increasing mana gain from Life Tap. This colossal class alteration should give Warlocks the tools they need to Tank in the game successfully.
The method of obtaining the Rune was one of the last to be discovered, as would be appropriate, bearing in mind the scale of the power boost. Unfortunately, players were immediately unhappy with what they had to do to get the Rune and made their feelings known online.
Now, one of the most senior developers behind Season of Discovery has responded to the furore.
Blizzard wants to avoid a repeat of the Metamorphosis Rune in Season of Discovery
In a response to complaints about the Rune on Twitter, Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield wanted to apologize to the community for the implementation of the Metamorphosis Rune.
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Being honest, you are quite right, and that’s not super cool of us. This discovery is an outlier and broke a few of the rules we set out for ourselves for class discoveries, and we’ll do something for this for later phases to not require the raid.
— Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) December 4, 2023
Protestations arose because the Rune quest required Warlocks to work through the new Blackfathom Deeps raid to obtain it. Their protestations came from the fact that they wanted to Tank this instance but could not until they had been in the instance (and subsequently locked out for three days.)
Blizzard has now deployed a hotfix that places the mobs required to obtain the Rune outside the raid. This has placated many who hope Blizzard take into account the overwhelming negative feedback heading into future phases of the game.
In a response to Greenfield’s tweet, one user said: “The Raid as a part of the quest chain might be too much. However, the hunt for the Rune and all the surrounding speculation was very fun, and I hope other runes are as complicated as we thought the meta rune would be. Even though it turned out to be just bugged.”
With at least three further phases to come, the developer has plenty of time to learn lessons from this moving forward. Outside of the Metamorphosis Rune, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and Blizzard will take additional confidence from the enormous concurrent player numbers.