Raid/Dungeons Q&A w/ Watcher and Lore

by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Lead Encounter Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas and Community Manager Lore took to Twitch to take on questions from the community about raids and dungeons, and Watcher dropped a TON of science.

Biggest moments for me?

• It seems highly likely that the Timewalker dungeons mechanic might be talked about soon. Expect an article out of me soon expanding on why that’s awesome.
• No trolls on Draenor means no troll dungeons in WoD.
• LFR is easier than heroic dungeons because it’s of who it’s targeted at. That said, they do want dungeons to have a longer shelf-life.

There’s a ton of information to get into, so dig in!

NOTE: This is generally a paraphrasing of Watcher’s responses. Once there’s a video of the discussion, we’ll get that linked up in a future post.

1. Do you guys ever plan on adding any new realm first titles?

Watcher: Likely not for that type of accomplishment. Realm-first achievements were like proxies for whoever was first to the max-level, which didn’t feel right. Death’s demise has more prestige, as an example. Realm first should be guild achievements, not personal, since it’s not cool to be someone who was benched for the kill. Prestigious titles for hardest difficulties still have prestige in the moment, even if they’re still accessible when the content is no longer the top challenge.

2. How much does gear itemization actually affect a group’s ability to progress through content?

Watcher: Gear affects it tremendously. Any guild can attest that having a higher iLvl/setbonuses/legendary ring is a drastically noticeable increase over time. However, itemization in terms of what STATS are available isn’t as important, since it all averages out over the course of a raid.

3. When’s the next troll dungeon? Are you bringing Zul’Farrak as the new level 100 dungeon next patch?

Watcher: THERE ARE NO TROLLS ON DRAENOR. No troll dungeon in the next patch or Draenor.

4. Has there been any thought in making raids require more tanks? It’s hard to find a raid spot as a freshly-leveled tank. 

Watcher: We’re going to stick with 2 tanks (maybe 3 in some Mythic or certain other fights). We want to avoid the opposite problem of not having enough tanks. Require more tanks and suddenly all of the raids need to find another tank in order to even raid. Four Horsemen is not a pleasant memory. Tanks can find/make their own groups pretty easily.

5. Do you feel that BRF normal/heroic is overtuned for 10/15-man raids?

Watcher: Generally no. Things should be proportionally difficult as you add more people to it. SoO’s flex mode was a lesson in avoiding breakpoints. It’s still an objective to make it accessible to everything down to 10 players.

6. Any plans for new dungeons/raid quests from the Inn/Tavern? (Gotta find Alleria!)

Watcher: Nothing to announce right now, but we’re always looking to add content throughout the expansion.

7. I have managed to get my alts past ilvl 630 rapidly without max-level content.

Watcher: Great question, we’ve struggled with it a great deal. It’s not new/different for Warlords. We’d have catch-up content that would outstrip earlier content, e.g. Timeless Isle. We used to have Valor Points to prop up older content, but that didn’t really feel good. We want players to focus on content that’s appropriately difficult for their gear level. Challenge modes are a place for more challenging dungeon content. If you’re a fresh 100 in 630, you can find that challenge in CMs. It’s not enough, you can’t queue for them randomly, but it’s something.

8. How does the team feel about the tuning of the now 3 different raid diffuclties? Anything easier/harder than intended?

Watcher: Pretty happy with it so far. Smooth curve in Highmaul and BRF. Almost everybody who cleared Normal in Highmaul progressed smoothly into Heroic. We like how guilds have been comfortable with moving on. There was some concern about going back to ToC, but now there’s no obligation to go back to lower difficulties once you’re geared enough.

Lore: We can diversify a bit on our off-raid nights and go back to Highmaul for a change of pace if we like.

9. Why are there so many changes to CMs this expansion/season? There’s ladders and ranks! These are supposed to be competitive.

Watcher: EMBARASSING CONFESSION: I learned about the collision issues in Skyreach/Everbloom myself when 6.1 came out. They’re bugs. Every patch has 1000s of undocumented bug fixes. Some of them are high visibility, some aren’t. There wasn’t any note about saying “this bug shouldn’t fixed because of the impact on CMs”. We’re still figuring out what to do, we might wipe the boards, might rollback the change, but we’ll keep discussing and see.

10. Why no challenge mode teleports this expansion? Was a nice perk. 

Watcher: If you’re referring to the teleports that you get for clearing gold, you still get them. They’re in a different flyout than they have been previously. Warlords Path is the spell flyout to look for.

11. What tank performance and representation trends have you noticed in HM and BRF? What are your thoughts?

Watcher: There have been some shifts. Most guilds are going with their main tanks, and our goal is to make sure all tanks are in the same ballpark, and we’ve been successful with that. At the high end, we’re going to see more shifts because that’s the nature of the highest end. We’re seeing Brewmasters being useful in BRF, but that’s really about abilities interacting with boss mechanics in specific fights. Stagger/Guard can be really powerfully deployed, but you can still get success even if you’re not using a Brewmaster Monk.

12. Are you okay with the prevalence of 3-tanking certain encounters in Mythic?

Watcher: We’re okay with it. It’s not exactly prevalent. There are some fights where we encourage three tanks. It was never reasonable to expect 3-tanks in 10-player raids, and we’ve fixed that in the past. In Mythic we feel we can expect that in certain fights, especially with dual-spec.

13. What was your thought process behind removing recolored tiers in current LFR content? Will it ever return?

Watcher: Creating a visual differentiation in terms of prestige and incentive for engaging in more challenging content was the goal. One of the biggest ways players show off is the armor they’re wearing. While there were diff. recolors, it wasn’t reasonable to expect players to know which colors meant that someone’s a badass. We have re-added LFR-specific sets, but the general art direction is likely what we’re going to continue with. Normal is easier to get into now, so getting that look shouldn’t be hard if that’s what you want.

14. All the 2H weapons are on tier or endbosses WHYYYYYY

Watcher: I wouldn’t read too much into a weapon being on an endboss, since some of them are more accessible than others. It’s just how it shook out this time.

15. Why is LFR easier than heroics but gives better loot?

Watcher: A crucial fact is that LFR has a weekly lockout, heroics don’t. We want LFR to be a way to experience the content for players who can’t join raid groups. At the same time we want them to get meaningful rewards for doing that. It’s about progression and story and content. If LFR gave worse loot than what you get from heroics, you’d see people going through LFR far less, which impacts queue times.

16. When designing raid bosses, do you start with Mythic and remove mechanics or start with normal/heroic and add mechanics? 

Watcher: We start with heroic and test it internally. Then we think about what to add for Mythic, and then what want to tone down for Normal. We don’t usually remove anything completely for Normal. Occasionally we aim for designing a heroic fight, and accidentally make it mythic, and THEN we’ll remove stuff for the n/h version. We’ll tune things properly, but sometimes the only way to tune it is to remove mechanics to make that happen. We’re always looking to avoid fights that get into “mechanics soup” of having too much going on for even a coordinated raid to handle.

17. How can you really balance encounters on a per fight basis in world where specs have niches? Leads to balance druid dilemma.

Watcher: We aim for diversity, which means not perfect balance. Perfect balance is attainable, but it’s potentially pretty boring. We’d prefer to get to a point where different specs can shine on particular fights. It does average out: for the overwhelming majority of players, it’s that simple; the guilds have rosters, with a balanced raid composition, and across the whole raid zone it’ll balance out.

At the BLEEDING EDGE, are they going to take advantage of niches? Of course they are. I don’t think we could stop that. Is it possible with a reasonable composition? Just because a guild did Mythic Hans/Franz with 6-7 hunters doesn’t mean you can’t do it with 1-2 hunters. If something ends up favoring a niche too heavily, we’ll alter appropriately. We want players to have the moment where they say “wow I feel awesome.”

18. How do you feel about Garrison Missions getting Mythic BRF gear without stepping into Mythic BRF?

Watcher: IT’S FINE. If you haven’t stepped foot in the raid at all, you’ll never get better than Normal gear. If you’ve got some heroic raid experience , and you get a couple mythic pieces, IT’S FINE.

19. What the general opinion of the LFG tool? Any chance we’ll get more expansive filtering options in the near future?

Watcher: Overall, we’re pretty happy with it. As far as filtering options, we’ll continue to iterate and improve on it. We didn’t want the system to have a lot of compartmentalization; we wanted some large buckets. Now that we’ve seen what those buckets are like, that’s a new problem we’re happy to solve.

20. Which encounter was the most well-received, that surprised the team? 

Watcher: Wasn’t one where we were surprised; we don’t usually put out fights that we think raiders are going to hate. We’re happy with how most of them have turned out. Operator Thogar is one of the winners for me. You’re fighting on train tracks! Trains make everything cooler!

21. Can the kick player system be revisited in both raid and dungeon content in reference to in-combat scenarios? It’s being exploited by griefers.

Watcher: YES. we’re looking at that. Some of those rules existed from when LFD was implemented. Now that loot is personal and will be mailed to you before a boss dies, there’s less reason to be concerned about being kicked out of the group, or for people to try kicking you to improve their chances of loot.

22. Can you talk a bit about the design phase of Kromog? Were you anticipating people bringing zero melee DPS?

Watcher: In the original incarnation of the fight on Mythic, the stalagmites were far from Kromog, so we hotfixed it so that the pillars were closer so melee players could cleave to Kromog, and we’ve seen melee-heavy comps succeed, so it’s cool.

23. Is there an approach we could take so that the community would be less adverse to trying the personal loot system even when it’s already mathematically viable?

Watcher: There’s no reason not to use it, but we can see how players might be concerned about it still. We’re looking at the way personal loot plays and feels in future patches. Where we can offer more consistency where the system generates an amount of gear consistent with master loot but then assigns it personally.

24. Community generated raid?

Watcher: I think we take pride in hand-crafting our content, in putting the Blizzard stamp of quality on it, and we listen to the community when there’s good/mad mechanics to guide us. To an extent every raid is community curated, but that’s admittedly a bit of a stretch.

25. Should we expect 2 raid tiers or 3 for this expansion?

Watcher: Our goal is to reduce the content gap. Whatever the right numebr of raids tiers is to avoid that gap, that’s what we’re aiming for. 6-7 months for a solid raid tier is what we want. 13 months like for S0O is unacceptable.

26. What’s the point in Warforged gear since there’s a fixed raid size for mythic? No 10/25 split makes it obsolete.

Watcher: The extra WF gear in Mists was to prop up an old system that we knew wasn’t sustainable. Warforged gear, along with bonus sockets or tertiary stats, are still a useful thing because possible upgrades are still a possibility and that’s more exciting.

27. How well has the new loot system for dungeons/heroics working out?

Watcher: Really well! Turns out the benefits of making LFD runs with randoms into a cooperative experience rather than a competitive one outweighs the problem of diminishing the ceremony of killing a boss, but we’re going to spice up killing a boss to address that ceremony. (Preserving the ceremony of clicking on the boss corpse was the reason why personal loot was disabled, but we realized quickly that was a mistake.)

28. Why do so many instances have elevators? Where are the slides and rollercoasters?

Watcher: Elevators are a convenient way of going up/down. We can explore other means of conveyance.

29. Can we have more balanced loot drops for LFR in next tier? At least a full set for all specs?

Watcher: Creation of item tables has a lot of different needs in order to provide full coverage. I think it’s an area where we can do better, and we can work on that in the future.

30. Any news about Timewalking?

Watcher: This is something that we’re working on. Maybe something we have to talk about in the not-too-distance future. ((OMG YES))

31. Why was the Black Iron Microcrucible removed from healer loot table?

Watcher: Non-Spirit issue for healers. The issue with the personal loot/caches is that this felt like a bug when tanks/healers got items without spirit/bonus armor. We’d rather make spirit better for Holy Pally/Mistweaver than make them want dps trinkets. The problem is we’ve made you not want a spirit trinket, that’s a real problem. We don’t want to create items that are BIS for 12-15 different specs. Something drops and half the raid rolls? That’s a bad feeling.

32. Do you feel like raid cooldowns are still too strong? Most fights seem to be just matter of which CD do we use when?

Watcher: We don’t think that’s as much of an issue. The answer to burst damage in MoP was “bring more rogues for smokebombs” and by removing some of those going into WoD, it’s not going to make or break survival because it doesn’t make enough of a difference. Something like Tranquility feels more impactful than Holy Radiance, and we can balance those against each other better. But sometimes leaving the raid CDs for oh-crap moments is part of the feeling of raiding.

33. It feels very harsh to climb the raid difficulty strata in BRF. For ex. Normal BRF is more punishing for people in LFR gear than Normal Highmaul.

Watcher: We’re monitoring success rates. It’s important to bear in mind that this still the same tier. Kargath was tuned around coming in with dungeon blues. Entry bosses in Foundry assume you have Normal Highmaul gear or BRF LFR gear.

34. Will Blizzard have a sanctioned World First race for raiding or leave it as is?

Watcher: We like the community-driven race so we’re likely to leave it as is. Trying to ensure perfect fairness might create impossible expectations. We want players to rise to the challenge of our content. Disadvantage: so much of the competition happens in secret that you can’t follow it very closely.

35. Can we please have something like a Mythic 5-man dungeons? Something tuned for 650 ilevel that drops 665 loot?

Watcher: It’s a good suggestion. We don’t have anything specific to announce right now. We’d like dungeons to have greater longevity. Just wondering out loud: is increased iLvl enough? Would we need to add mechanics? Or is it just Heroic + 20%? Does that feel like it’s worthy of Mythic?