WoW Developer AMA Transcript
by JR Cook - 9 years ago show comments
Today’s AMA on Reddit yielded a bunch of new information, principally in the form of what will and won’t get fixed in Patch 6.1.
The short short version, of course, is that you should not expect any of the following in 6.1:
- Transmogrification improvements
- Flying mounts in Draenor
- Class accessories
- Race-specific garrison buildings
- Remodels for Moonkin, warlock pets, and bear (Bear? Really?)
- Full-on rework of Shaman as a class
- Updated spell visuals
- Endgame scenarios
Stuff we should expect in 6.1 and/or soon(tm)?
- Alchemy updates
- Heirloom collection system
- Improved flight pathing for faster taxi service
- Improvements for alts regarding Garrisons
- New garrison content
- Ability to customize Garrison music
- Improvements for low-level PVP battleground rewards
- Upgrades for crafted gear relevant to Tier 18
- …and a surprise involving Grommash being the final expansion boss.
Read on for the full set of questions and answers, along with plenty of context and insights from the devs and CMs who participated.
When do we get the new Heirloom system?
Mumper: We are currently planning to have this system ready for patch 6.1.0.
Any plan to get a better system for transmog? like the D3 system so we can use the “skin” of the item without having to go and get it from the void store or bank. Maybe en ETA if there is something coming?
Mumper: This is something we hope to do do in a future expansion. We love the idea!
Thanks for doing this AMA guys. The team talked a lot going into Warlords about how they wanted stat decisions to be interesting and fun. Can you guys explain the logic behind versatility, given this? It seems to be simple a +betterer stat, and feels neither interesting or fun.
I play a prot paladin, where versatility is an effective stat, but it seems to go against the philosophy that was stated.
Kalgan: Yeah I’m not sure that we actually accomplished that goal TBH. We’re trying to strike a balance between the goal above and also the goal that we have enough variety in items, but I think we wound up with more secondary stats than we really need. This will be something we continue to refine in the future.
What’s the deal currently with your stance on flying, any new developments, or insights?
WatcherDev: Overall, we’re happy with how ground travel in Draenor has played out thus far, and we’ve heard a lot of feedback to that effect as well, though we of course recognize that there are players who feel differently. We’ll have more to announce about our 6.1 patch plans in the very near future, but as the focus of our endgame outdoor content remains in the main Draenor zones, our reasons for disallowing flight in 6.0 continue to apply in 6.1. Whether you’re navigating your way to Orumo the Observer in Shattrath Rise, trying to reach a treasure cache atop a column in Spires, or working your way around the ledges encircling The Pit, you’re engaging in gameplay that simply would not exist in a world with unfettered flight. It was never our intent to make large-scale navigation of the world inconvenient, and in 6.1 we’re going to be improving our flight path system to always take the most direct route between two points, even if you have not discovered some of the intermediate nodes. Please keep the feedback coming – if you’re unhappy with the design, some of the most helpful feedback would be specific examples of situations or systems that feel frustrating without being able to fly in Draenor.
Can you comment on the changes you did to mob pathing with WoD? As a tank player I find myself annoyed by that quite often when trying to position mobs properly. They seem to react much more twitchy to my own movement than they did in MoP.
Devolore: We actually didn’t change mob pathing directly — we made a ton of improvements to server responsiveness, which means the server (and thus, the mobs) have a more precise idea of where your character is currently standing than they have in the past. The end result is that there’s a noticeable difference in the feel of how certain mobs move around, especially for tanks. There really isn’t a quick fix for this, but it’s something on our radar for sure.
How about randomizing secondary stats on Apexis Crystal gear? Same way it happens with gear from all other sources. Also adding something like a 1000 crystal re-roll thingy will make it worthwhile. As of right now it seems kind of un-competitve compared to heroic and crafted gear.
Kalgan: Fair point, probably would have been a good idea to do so in retrospect.
Any update on class accessories? 🙂
As someone who is all about in-game vanity, I’d love to see this happen!
Mumper: The idea is still alive! We actually just had a meeting about this a few weeks ago. It’s not on the table for Warlords, but we are certainly discussing it for a future expansion.
Are there any plans to better integrate garrisons across a player’s account, or perhaps even just realm/faction? Love the garrisons, but they put me off from playing my alts. It is daunting to have to build a new garrison as well as gather and level new followers, etc. Perhaps reduced cost of resources for alts, or shared follower pool, or similar changes?
Also, will we ever see a “family” system for alts? Would be great to have alts mill about the garrison, etc. Thanks.
Mumper: We agree with you on this. We are going to try and find ways to make Garrisons easier on alts though the patch cycle.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions in this point in time. Things must be really busy at the office with Highmaul released to the public and the world bosses giving trouble to EVERYONE. I have a couple of questions that trouble me a lot, they are the following:
- Why does the amount of Missions decrease substantially when all the active followers are level 100? The amount of missions I could do before this happened were about 25 to 30 per day. Now I am limited to 3 or 4 missions, which leaves me with 16 to 17 followers doing nothing at all, making the barracks level 3 upgrade a bit pointless as well. This also brings a bit of a problem with the Salvage yard.
- Is there a chance that we could have an option to stop moving background in certain dungeons/raids? Grimrail Depot causes 2 of my guildmates to have motion sickness when we are doing the second and third bosses, and it doesn’t help when that instance is needed for the legendary ring quest.
- This is a lore question, but I think it could be game related as well, where on Draenor is Dentarg? I have not seen him at all.
- Are there plans to expand the garrison further than level 3? The phase where the garrison is seems to be a little bit big for what they are.
- How many of you actively play the game outside of work hours and now many reached level cap in this expansion? (My take is that I’d feel sick of seeing the same game on my work hours that I’d play something else on my free time, not related to the previous questions in terms of context.)
- How long does it take to create, test and ship out a raid instance at this point in time? I remember watching the 10 year anniversary and hearing that Molten Core took a week to create is something interesting to hear.
Again, thanks for your patience and time. Keep up the good work.
Kalgan:
- We were hoping not to have a bunch of irrelevant missions spamming up your mission list. We didn’t plan well enough for the fact that those missions aren’t really irrelevant when the salvage yard is OP. It’s definitely an issue we talk about here, but solutions are complex and can have a lot of ripple-effect consequences on the rest of the system/game.
- Ugh, sorry to hear that. =[ Not sure that we have a quick/easy solution for that, but we’ll take into consideration.
- Good question, I can’t say I have a good answer that I wouldn’t be making up on the spot.
- There are plans to do more with garrison building progression in patch 6.2. Details at a future date since we’re still fairly early working on 6.2.
- Almost all of us I’d say. It’s actually a very different experience playing at home with friends/family than it is playtesting at work, so it doesn’t feel like “work” when playing from home. For example, even though I’ve run missions like crazy for the better part of a year, it has still been a blast logging in every chance I get to make sure my followers are being used efficiently. =]
- The anniversary video was talking specifically of the encounter creation part of it (a week didn’t encompass the environment and creature art time). No doubt that was still a feat though, it was amazing to see it come together so quickly. Certainly, the production value of the raid encounters these days is significantly higher (environmental gameplay, visual effects, encounter mechanics, flex difficulty, etc) so it takes many more hours to make an encounter today than it did back then. So, lots of time!
Thoughts on having race-specific garrison buildings? The current garrisons look nice, but I’m sure there are players who would appreciate having, for example, gnome/Draenei architecture instead of standard human architecture.
edit: This question was pretty Alliance-centric – I’m sure Horde players would also like to see some variety in their architecture too.
Kalgan: The art resources for this definitely come directly at the expense of other new content like dungeons or raids. So, while we all totally 100% agree this would be awesome, and we’d likely steer more in that direction if we could, it’s not likely for the WoD garrisons. If we were to do an updated version of garrisons in a future expansion, it’s much more likely (and would probably be an important goal for us).
Why is the loot table on level 3 salvage crates so damn big?
WatcherDev:
A common misconception is that large tables necessarily mean more randomness, or that items are competing with each other. There are lots of ways of constructing treasure tables to avoid this. After many reports from players concerned with seemingly poor yield of follower rewards from Level 3 salvage crates, we took a really thorough look through the data and tested extensively to make 100% sure we weren’t missing something.
A level 3 salvage crate actually gives you a guaranteed direct pull from the level 2 salvage loot table, PLUS additional chances to get transmog, legacy, or current items for your character to use or sell. The loot table is large to offer tons of variety, and there are definitely some jackpot items in there (Everburning Candle says hi), but it’s not coming at the expense of the core follower items or resources you got from level 1 and level 2.
Garrisons at the moment are fantastic. Because WoD will undoubtedly last more than a year and a half minimum do you guys plan on improving upon garrisons every patch e.g more buildings, more plots, extra interactions (similar to invasions) and more customization (faction guards) to prevent the garrisons from becoming stale?
Mumper: We plan to add some form of Garrison content in every patch, we want to keep it fresh too.
1. The music in the garrison is too intense. It feels way too “chaotic” when you’re just hanging around doing missions or herbing/mining/fishing. Can we get an option to switch over to a more relaxed theme of music, like the Teldrassil soundtrack?
2. I love the garrison system. I have heard that you are not planning on “continuing” with it in future expansions though.. this is not good news to hear! It is understandable that we will not have Lunarfall magically teleported to whatever the new location is, unless it was something Dalaran floating city-styled of course… BUT! Would it not at least be possible to continue the trend of creating something like a garrison again – and then also providing some long-lasting benefits to players who continue to keep up their garrison in the interim? Something like; “You had a level 3 tannery in the WoD garrison, and so when you create your “new-xpac garrison thing” you will have discounted costs for building the new super-tannery..” Again, I love the garrison and want to see it continue to be useful in the next xpac!
Mumper:
Let me grab a couple out of this list.
- We are working on a way for you to have custom music in your Garrison. Hoping to get this into patch 6.1.0. I am personally super stoked about this!
- Thanks for the kind words! In regards to Garrisons carrying forward, we need to wait and see how it plays out. We designed the system in a way that it can be left behind, but we could also choose to take certain parts or technology and carry them on to new expansions.
Why do some Garrison work orders count towards such achievements like Working More Orders and others do not? Mines and Herbalist work orders don’t seem to count.
Mumper: This is a bug, we are working to hotfix it ASAP.
It seems as if a lot of the elements of Garrisons (follwer missions, work orders, etc.) were designed with the mobile Armory in mind. Will we be seeing an update to the mobile app to include Garrions features?
Devolore: Not likely. It’s a really cool idea (one we’ve heard a lot), but as the Garrison is intended as a Warlords-only feature, there are several other potential improvements we could make to the mobile app that would have more long-term use, if we decided to expand its feature set.
Garrison: Any more info about how the Mine is supposed to work in regards to Carts? I seem to be getting Mining Carts with or without a follower, just that after your recent hotfix to the mine, where we’re supposed to be getting more materials from it, kind of made them not spawn in such great numbers as they used to. On the same subject, can we get those carts placed on the minimap right along mining nodes?
Mumper: Carts showing up without a follower parked is a bug on our end. The carts are bonus you get based on having a Mining follower parked at the Mine. We reduced the overall number of carts but increased the amount of loot you get from each one. Thanks for the questions!
Are there any plans for Moonkin remodels, bear remodels and warlock pet remodels? (Looking at you Felguard.)
WatcherDev: We hear you – primary focus for Warlords was on the main player models, but this is definitely something we want to do.
With the loss of Ancestral Vigor and Mana Tide and the output of other healers, it seems R Sham’s only justifiable presence is the ability to continue to heal during HTT. Do you have any ideas to remedy our plight? A la Vigor or SLT in Cata?
Ancestral Vigor was honestly a stopgap measure at a time (mid-Cata) when Resto Shaman was by far the dominant arena healer, but the weakest healer in raids. We used AV to prop the spec up and help ensure they’d usually have at least a single raid slot while we tried to sort out the thornier balance issues with the spec. At this point, however, we feel that the overall Resto healing toolkit holds up against other specs head-to-head, and there’s no longer a need for Vigor.
1) Do you agree that the Shaman class has lost much of it’s identity over the years?
2) Do you feel that Shaman-balance should take the form of number tweaking, or is the sudden outcry for an all-out rework justified?
3) What would you like to tell Shamans who feel like second class Druids?
WatcherDev: (Wasn’t dodging this question, just tackling some more bite-sized queries first….)
Alright, shaman.
1) Do you agree that the Shaman class has lost much of it’s identity over the years?
Probably the biggest blow to shaman identity came in Wrath (2008) when most buffs were changed to raidwide and were generally standardized among classes as a result. There was certainly something cool about bringing unique buffs like Windfury, and having a large number of those buffs that you could call uniquely your own. But it was quite a bit less cool being the Fury warrior who was only a viable endgame raid DPS with a shaman in your party, or being the raid leader playing party Tetris and cycling Bloodlusts through the melee group, or the elemental shaman who didn’t get a raid spot because the spec’s damage output was mediocre and they were only worthwhile if there was an open spot in the warlock/warlock/warlock/spriest group. I don’t think returning to that would be the answer.
So, yes, the shaman is no longer a buff-bot. What, then, is the shaman identity? We do see totems as remaining a large part of that identity, and tried in Mists to remove passive buff totems and refocus them as more concentrated and intense effects that do something powerful in the short-term — Capacitor, Tremor, Grounding, Healing Tide, etc. (not going to argue that Searing fits into this model or is particularly sexy, though). I’d be curious to hear (from you, from everyone) what it is about the shaman class that most resonates (or resonated, in the event that you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling) with you.
2) Do you feel that Shaman-balance should take the form of number tweaking, or is the sudden outcry for an all-out rework justified?
We’ve already made some numbers tweaks, and we’ll make some more as needed. There’s no question that Enhance and especially Elemental were weak during the initial days of Warlords, but at this point we’re seeing both specs performing very solidly in dungeons as well as a range of encounters in Highmaul. We’ll of course continue to watch balance as gear and strategies evolve, and watch PvP representation and success as the arena/RBG season really gets underway. In the short term, I would not expect a drastic overhaul. Drastic overhauls of classes are something we do rarely, and then almost exclusively with expansions and not patches. There are plenty of shaman out there who are having fun who don’t want to log in to find their class completely changed overnight. But that doesn’t that there isn’t room for improvement. A number of the points above regarding talents are very valid, and there’s definitely room for more differentiation through that avenue. And the Call/Persistence/Projection row is terrible.
3) What would you like to tell Shamans who feel like second class Druids?
Druids are cats/bears/turkeys/trees; you are mail-clad warriors of the elements. Have faith, and try to focus feedback in a constructive way that focuses on specific areas of discontent. We’re listening.
One more question: Shaman earthquake, I recently discovered that no one can see this but the casting shaman. Any plans to change the animation so our aoe isn’t wasted when the tanks move out of an earthquake that they cannot see? Thanks =)
WatcherDev: Very much so. The current situation is an unfortunate stopgap measure until our next patch – without an alternate toned-down visual to show other players (an oversight on our part), the base Earthquake visual was making melee gameplay pretty miserable for people who had to fight and perceive hazards in the middle of that graphic. So we hid it temporarily, recognizing that it’s clearly a problem for tanks who want to position mobs inside the Earthquake. Will be fixed, though.
How well do you think the charge system works for spells, verses the more traditional cooldown, and are you planning on converting any more spells to be charge based?
WatcherDev: We’re pretty happy with that system. The major advantage of that system is the way it allows for more open-ended decisionmaking in spell use that doesn’t penalize a player for not using an ability the instant it comes off cooldown. It also lets you deliberately plan ahead and pool usage. I’m not sure we’d want to extend it to ALL abilities, but for abilities that commonly run into the two issues I just outlined, it can really improve usability without needing to add additional mechanics.
My question applies to talent trees, and I will be using the Rogue tree as an example. What are your thoughts about the current system of talents in WoD? Are you satisfied with them or should we be looking forward to changes that make each tree more personalized and dynamic, much like the warrior tree?
Desvin: One thing we like about the talent trees is the variety they provide. But often, it’s a matter of picking the right tool for the job. WoW is a very big game, with a lot of different activities. As a result, some talents perform far better in certain situations (dungeons vs. raids, battlegrounds vs. arenas) and we’re okay with that. In the end, every talent doesn’t have to be equally viable for all activities. But it is certainly something we try to do when we can.
Hi, thanks for giving the time to do this. I have a few concerns, in regards to healers and holy paladins in particular.
1) Spirit as a secondary/primary stat. It’s super discouraging that we as healers don’t have any enchants, gems, or flasks with spirit. The nerfing of that crystal recently you get in the inn was hard hit also. My question is: What is spirit? Secondary stat or Primary stat? Why can’t we have it on either gems and enchants or flasks? It should really be treated as one or the other. It just seems unfair as the odd one out, when tanks even get a stam flask to use.
2) Healing overall in Highmaul, even on normals (at least as a holy paladin) is hard. Everyone seems to take a considerable amount of damage at the same time. If the fights are relativly short it’s something that is handable. But any fights that last beyond 4 minutes and holy paladins have a hard time keeping up. There is very little AoE healing going on as a paladin. Our 2 AoE heals without a cooldown either cost way more mana and heal for little, or cost no mana and heal for a little more. I can’t keep people up using Holy Radiance or Light of Dawn. Eternal Flame as a finisher is way better to use then Light of Dawn, especially with Beacon of Faith and spamming Flash of Light is the only way holy paladins can keep up with the other healers AoE wise, and it causes me to run on fumes for at least 1/4th of the fight. Is this a concern seen by the Dev team? I know we are supposed to use Holy Light as much as possible, but it’s just too slow.
WatcherDev:
No problem – it’s always fun to chat about this stuff.
1) It’s your best secondary stat as a healer, similar to what Armor is for tanks. Early on in beta, you actually could get Spirits gems/flasks/food, but we found that it undermined part of the point of consumable philosophy. We removed primary stats from gems and enchants in order to add some player choice and allow players to customize their secondary stats in a post-reforging world. If you want to try a crit-heavy build or want to stack mastery on your healer, you can use our profession system to accomplish that. But if Spirit were an option, it would clearly be the correct choice, and you’d never for a moment consider using any of those other secondary stat options. So in the interest of preserving some interesting choice, we removed Spirit and Armor food/gems/enchants and balanced healers around that change.
2) We’re keeping a very close eye on healing overall as raiding begins. From personal experience, observation, and talking to other healers, a lot of what we’re seeing is a mix of learning new fights (and thus people in general taking large amounts of avoidable damage) and healers getting used to not panicking when someone is at 60% or 70% health. Both of those are things that should improve over time. We recognize that it’s one of the risks of a more deliberate healing pace: in Mists mistakes might have been instantly lethal due to spikier damage, while in Warlords they’re survivable in the short-term, but are bleeding healers try in the long term. If you aren’t cleaning out the stands on Kargath, or people are triggering arcane mines on Mar’gok, that might not instantly wipe you, but it’ll absolutely lead to your healers running out of gas eventually. That said, raid healing in particular tends to lend itself towards more specialization, and raid leaders may find that it makes sense to have their paladins focus a bit more on single-target healing, which is a clear niche thanks to Beacon, while other classes blanket the raid.
How long does it generally take the art team to cook up new animations for spells?
There are a lot of spells out there that could really use some love, like Fire mage (Fireball, Pyroblast), Shadow Priest (Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Pain, and some others) and a lot of the effects for the melee classes are pretty poor, too.
Do you guys have any plans to overhaul them all at any point? I’d really like to see some of my favorite classes get a facelift, especially the ones that already have spell effects in the game on bosses that could be used, like Shadow Priest and all of the awesome Shadow spells you see in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds.
Thank you guys for reading 🙂
Kalgan: The time required can vary quite a bit depending on the particulars of the spell. We’d definitely like to take a look at some of the older spell visuals and update them though.
Will there be balance changes throughout the PvP season or will we have to wait whole seasons again for things to get adjusted?
Desvin: We’ll be tuning classes throughout the season. Early on in the expansion, we realize we’ve made a lot of big changes to classes and balance will be rather volatile. So, you could expect more changes early on and then the rate of change tapering off towards the expansion’s end.
Looks like my question hasn’t been asked yet, yay!
In regards to the ability pruning, I know that the most iconic abilities tended to be spared, and yet… Protection Paladins lost Avenging Wrath? Not to be harsh but prot was popping wings for threat long before ret paladins were even generally viable. I miss it terribly when I’m playing my favorite pally spec. Why was it removed?
Desvin: We felt like both the Guardian and Wings were cool and wanted to keep them but thought it was a good opportunity to have some spec variation.
AMA question – Does Blizzard think PvP Healing -in general- is OP? If yes, what ways you’re looking to adress it? For example, nerfing classes’ healing individually, Resilience/Battle Fatigue or just gonna do it with ‘turning bit of healing into kill buffs’.
Desvin: We don’t think healing -in general- is OP. We do think that certain specs and spells are too strong. We recently removed the healing benefits of Predatory Swiftness from Ferals and halved the benefits of Heart of the Wild in PvP. Today, we have a hotfix to reduce the healing of Paladin Flash of Light by 20%.
But at the same time, I think people often get overly fixated on the scoreboard. Healing is one type of defense a player can use in PvP, but there are a lot of others that don’t show up on the scoreboard. For example, we have no “damage mitigated” column to show that a Warriors Defensive stance is effectively reducing a significant amount of damage being done to them. We also can’t quantify the defensive benefit of a Warlock teleporting behind a pillar when they get in trouble. Some classes do not have strong escapes and their only strategy is to heal through the pressure.
Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t continue to look at healing (specifically self-healing and off-healing) as way to tune PvP balance. We want every class to feel like they can compete.
Hey guys, great job on Warlords so far. I haven’t had so much fun in WoW since WotLK.
Anyways, could you talk about the design decisions behind the balance of racials? I know I’m not alone here when I say it feels like the Alliance has a definite upper hand compared to the Horde. You can see signs of this in the PvP ladders. The first time you see a Horde team in 3v3 is on the 5th page (credit for /u/GlenThen[1] for pointhing this out). – http://us.battle.net/wow/en/pvp/leaderboards/3v3#page=5
Desvin: Thanks for the question. We realize this is always a hot topic for players. But, it isn’t simply a question of racial balance, there are significant social elements at play. Specifically, you cannot play arenas with someone from the opposite faction. A lot of top PvPers tend to play together and as such, they will all end up on the same faction. Collectively, they are going to make a decision on which set of racials is better and then all move to that faction. Last expansion, the NA region all played Horde. In EU, they all played Alliance. The racials were the same in both regions, but the high end players collectively made the decision to be one or the other.
It’s very easy to mistake high-end representation as strong evidence one way or the other with respect to game balance. But there are a lot of other factors at play. Representation is a measure of popularity not necessarily strength.
What are some of the changes you’re looking to do with Ashran now that you have more player feedback? What are some of the things you learned from Ashran?
Desvin: Some things we’ve learned our: – We haven’t educated players enough about the benefits of the outer parts of the zone. The best way to earn honor is collecting fragments and there are a lot of powerful buffs littered out there. – We could use a good system for automatic raid management in certain areas. We don’t put everyone in a raid in Ashran because not everyone is in the middle. Players that want to focus on the middle usually take care of that themselves. But we could do a better job with this. – We don’t have any “doppleganger” servers so trying to balance factions by pairing servers is hard. In China, there are a lot more Horde players than Alliance. In other regions, PvP servers are mostly Horde players. PvP servers tend to be far more polarized by faction than PvE servers. It creates a lot of problems bringing people together. But we really wanted Ashran to feel like a zone attached to your server more than just a battleground you go to.
Hello! I just have a quick question about leveling by doing PvP! 🙂
Any plans on making PvP and Battlegrounds a more viable way for low level characters and alts to level from? As I love PvP I’d love to be able to level up by doing what I love without it feeling tedious and slow. Maybe add strongboxes/loot/better experience rewards for playing low level Battlegrounds? I cant stress enough how some of us absolutely love PvP and would love to have it as a viable way to progress with both levels and gear ingame. Currently leveling by doing PvP and Battlegrounds do not feel up to par with PvE at all, I really hope you have more in store for us that want to level up the PvP way! Once again I cannot stress enough how many some of us want to be able to have leveling through PvP and have it as a valid way to get loot, gear and experience! 🙂
Desvin: Unfortunately, some changes we made to battleground rewards broke some of the biggest contributors to XP in low level battlegrounds. We’re working on a fix but it may not be available until 6.1.
Our original plan was to use strongboxes at all levels, but we weren’t able to get it done in time. We think this could make it a fun experience though.
When will Kronos be fixed in Ashran?
The whole standing still thing and doing nothing.
Desvin: We’re working on it! We tried some new things with the AI for NPCs in Ashran’s center road. Unfortunately, a lot of those techniques haven’t stood up to large player counts. We’ve been hotfixing them and simplifying their AI. Before, they would try to navigate to whatever capture point was active. Now, they’ll just get pissed and head straight for the enemy base attacking any enemy they come in contact with.
Generally, we acknowledge Ashran has both design problems and technical ones (queueing). We’re continuing to work to fix them.
Creating a PvP zone for 200+ people is a really unique challenge and the way that rewards influence behavior is pretty profound. We’re seeing a lot of different problems than what we saw on beta.
What are you current feelings overall about the state of PVP. What’s good, what’s bad and where to from here?
Desvin: We had three big additions to PvP in Warlords: Skirmishes, Ashran and the Strongbox reward system. I think Skirmishes and Strongboxes have worked out really well, but Ashran has some definite problems.
With respect to class balance in Arena and RBGs, we’re evaluating it and making adjustments when appropriate. It’s important that in each new expansion, we give classes cool new toys. The addition of new talents/abilities/glyphs and changes to tuning really rattle the status quo in terms of balance. Our first focus is to ensure that the general gameplay environment is fun (i.e. people aren’t invincible or dying in a global). Then we move towards balancing out outlier classes. But, classes are going to have things that feel “too strong.” We just need to make sure they have weaknesses as well.
My question: LFG and LFR have significantly increased play-time vs. down-time, but as a result have also changed the way we experience the community in-game. It’s removed the interaction between players forming groups, and pairs them with people from other servers that they’ll never see again.
How do you feel about this shift over time, and have you thought about any new ways to inspire the growth of closer-knit communities and cameraderie, like your addition of the Premade Group Finder and Guild Achievements?
Kalgan: We feel like it’s crucial that we support both the “easy in, easy out” gameplay of dungeon/raid finder for players that are just in the mood to quickly run some content. However, the addition of the group finder is a first step toward improving the other side of the coin, as we also want the game to do a better job of fostering cooperative play and enabling longer-term relationships to be created. We have more stuff in mind for the future to continue to make this better/cooler.
Scenarios were a great thing for DPS to jump in a quick queue for and do for slightly less rewards than a heroic. Is there any chance we will see end game scenario queues even if it is for the leveling scenarios already in game? Not needing a tank and healer was progressive feeling, even if the content was trivial. As a pure DPS class with long queue times and long run times as well doing dungeons during the week with my 1-2 hours of play time a week night is prohibitive.
Kalgan: That was definitely one of the great benefits of the scenarios for sure. We don’t anticipate having queued scenarios for WoD atm (although I wouldn’t rule them out for future expansions), and we do have some ideas for how we can significantly improve dps queue times, but they will take some time for us to make happen.
There seems to be a lot of people that have an issue with Garosh’s father being the last boss in WOD. Is he definatelu the last boss or may there be a surprise for people? Oh great job by the way. Enjoying the xpac so far.
Kalgan: There will be a surprise, and we’re looking forward to players hearing more sometime “soon”!
I am concerned about the economy. It seems that some professions, especially gathering, are unable to earn money due to very high supply on the AH as a result of garrison gathering. Mining and herbalism are especially hurt by this. Luminous shards are pretty much worthless. And ore cannot be prospected for gems, further decreasing its value.
Was this a deliberate design decision? If so, what was the reason behind it? Do you tend to concern yourself with economics (other than gold sinks) or simply let the “market” do as it thinks best?
Kalgan: Definitely agree we need more things players can use core gathering materials for. In retrospect, we would have liked for there to have been more crafted items that use those materials without requiring the time-gated resources, so this problem is something we’re hoping to address going forward.
Whats the go with Alchemy? Why does it have no transmutes anymore, no upgradeable class items etc etc.
Mumper: We are working on some Alchemy updates, more info should be coming along soon.
Do you have any plans to allow crafted gear to continue to be upgraded as new raid tiers are released?
Devolore: Still discussing if we want to do anything for Tier 17, but we’ll almost certainly have some sort of upgrade for crafted gear with Tier 18.
