Developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas

Developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas
Ion Hazzikostas answered some questions today!




Patch 7.3 Content Release Timeline
  • The team learned a lot from how Patch 7.2 unfolded. It wasn't clear what you were supposed to do after the intro.
  • Argus has five chapters and three sub-zones and a ton of stuff available right away.
  • You will be able to play through the first two chapters on Day 1 and unlock world quests and other world content.
  • Week 2 unlocks Chapters 3 and 4, which includes Mac'aree, invasion points, and new world quests.
  • Week 3 you get the final chapter, the dungeon, and Netherlight Crucible.
  • There is a lot to do on Argus and the team wants it to be clear what you should be focused on rather than having many things competing for your attention right away.
  • Many players mostly care about power and would race through the content to unlock the Netherlight Crucible if they could do it on Day 1.
  • The first few weeks allow you to experience all of Argus and then on Day 14 it is a short bit at the end to unlock the Netherlight Crucible.
  • Many of the content unlocks on Argus are account wide, such as the dungeon, travel to the sub-zones, and the Netherlight Crucible.
  • There are some specific world quests that won't or can't be unlocked account wide

Artifact Unlocks
  • In Patch 7.3, as soon as you hit Level 110 on a character, all of your relic slots are unlocked right away.
  • You no longer have to do the Broken Shore quest line to allow your artifact to go beyond 34 points.
  • As soon as you hit 110 in Patch 7.3 you will have Level 41 Artifact Knowledge. After that it will increase weekly automatically, no more research required.

Legion Invasions
  • Invasions will remain active in Patch 7.3.

Order Hall Champions
  • There will be catch up tokens from missions and chests that help you quickly increase the item level of your followers.

Netherlight Crucible
  • The Artifact Trait tree is a steady form of progression.
  • The team wanted to offer two trait relics in Patch 7.2, but ended up removing it.
  • Relics point to a trait by index (1-9). Each class and spec in the game has a relic that maps to trait 5, but that is a different trait for each class or spec. This means relics can't be customized as much as the team wanted to.
  • Relics in the Netherlight Crucible solve some of the problem of Relic availability. Any relic can now have another trait that you wanted.
  • In Patch 7.2 players didn't have enough choice or control over the RNG.
  • In Patch 7.3 you can use the Netherlight Crucible to make a choice, giving you some level of control instead of total randomness. You won't have to have your worst trait, because you can choose not to pick a bad trait.
  • You won't be able to get the same trait twice on one Relic.

Reforging
  • Reforging had lots of downsides, such as trying to perfectly get the hit or expertise cap and reforging all of your items every time you got a new item.
  • Every item that doesn't have your best two stats you would reforge to have your best stat. This didn't really make for interesting choices.
  • This also narrowed the distinction between items, making them feel more similar.
  • It also made it harder to evaluate upgrades, as you had to look at the item in its current state as well as how you could reforge it.
  • There were some good parts, such as giving players choices to make.

Artifact Power and PvP
  • The Netherlight Crucible traits don't work in Rated PvP.
  • The item level upgrades (+5) from the Netherlight Crucible do work in Rated PvP, but it is a very small power bump.

Artifact Appearances and Transmog
  • The team doesn't want you to feel like you have to rush to collect all of the Artifact appearances on your alts before Legion is over.
  • The team is looking at a different system that allows you to unlock the appearances by completing Legion content in later expansions, as well as keeping the appearances you already have unlocked.
  • The exception to this is the appearances from the skill challenge and the +15 Mythic ones.

Artifact Appearances
  • The team is done creating new Artifact Appearances.

Prestige and Artifact Appearances
  • Prestige isn't account wide because PvP on different characters means something different.
  • The experience you have when playing a Rogue vs a healer is very different.
  • Unlocking things per character reflects the experience you had on that specific character.
  • If prestige was account wide, you would probably focus on getting a high rating on one character, but what would you have to work towards on other characters if everything was already unlocked?

Mythic+ Changes
  • The team is very satisfied with the changes they made to the Mythic+ system in Patch 7.2.5.
  • Now the most challenging content gives the best rewards.
  • If you wanted the gear from doing a +8 or +10, you previously needed better gear than was rewarded by the +8 or +10.
  • Mythic+ participation is up across the board in all regions.
  • People are actually doing higher keystones now.
  • The system was structured differently than challenge modes because they didn't want it to be about speed runs again. All that mattered previously was cleave and AoE, making the single target specialists not valuable.
  • There has been a lot of positive feedback from people doing higher keystone runs.

Mythic+ Rewards
  • Tier sets have always been one of the things you can get from raiding. Even if you can get similar item level loot from other sources, you had to organize a larger group to earn the sets.
  • There are mini-sets from Mythic+ dungeons that you can earn, such as the items from Court of Stars.
  • Raids and Mythic+ dungeons are parallel but not identical loot systems.
  • The team doesn't want to remove too much of the incentive from raiding by providing the same rewards to players doing Mythic+

Mythic+ and Older Content
  • The team isn't currently planning on expanding the Mythic+ system to dungeons from older expansions.
  • The Mythic+ system allows dungeons to remain relevant during the entire expansion.
  • This is something that could be expanded on in the future, maybe tying it in with Timewalking.
  • It would be strange to do Mythic+ Underbog as part of your weekly Legion activities.

Augment Runes
  • There is a permanent Augment Rune in Patch 7.3 from Exalted Army of the Light.
  • Augment Runes are there for the top end raiders, something that people running Raid Finder to sell.

Timewalking Raids
  • Raids should let you pick up where the leader left off, just like normal raids.

World First Race
  • A week and a half to two weeks is a reasonable time for the world first race.
  • Heroic Ragnaros took around that long to kill and people thought it was a well tuned boss, but Paragon was the only one to kill it in that time. Otherwise he would have lived much longer.
  • The main goal of the encounter design team is to create fights for the broad audience.
  • When the team tunes the last few Mythic bosses of a new tier, they are keeping the world first race in mind.
  • Those bosses should be hard enough to allow the top guilds in the world to distinguish themselves from each other. This is a very hard target to hit and evolves over time, especially as guilds do more split runs or stack classes.
  • The internal testing team has lots of people that pushed for world firsts in the past.
  • Mythic Kil'jaeden was overtuned. They made it a little too hard, allowing them to nerf it. Hundreds of hours of testing took place internally.
  • This tier increased healing requirements across the board by increasing raid damage, but they went a little bit too far.
  • The internal testing team was better than anticipated on the Mythic Kil'jaeden fight and has been getting better over the years, so when they increased everything by a percentage to make it challenging for the top guilds that was a little bit too much.
  • Should the team tune the end bosses to be very challenging for the world first race and then nerf them a bit so that regular guilds can kill them?

Raid Damage
  • Fights are designed and then mechanics are added or removed to address problems.
  • There wasn't enough coordination between encounter designers, resulting in similar solutions (lots of soak mechanics) to problems.
  • The team realized this too late, but it shouldn't be a problem in Argus.
  • The team was happy with the individual fights in Tomb, but want to create a more diverse set of fights in the raid.

Nethershards
  • Nethershards will continue to be used on catch-up gear and cosmetics.
  • The Relinquished vendor is moving to Argus to find Argunite that he will trade for item level 910 items. He also allows you to target a specific relic, like a Holy relic.
  • Existing Relinquished items won't be expanded or upgraded.
  • Don't hold on to Nethershards or worry about them, Patch 7.3 has a new system.

Class Design
  • If your role is damage dealer, you can compete as a damage dealer.
  • There is a disparity between the utility different specs bring. The team would like to address this by shoring up the utility of some specs.
  • Rogues have individual survival utility, which can be useful for the group if they use them to soak mechanics.

Spec Damage Auras
  • Rather than manually adjusting all of the abilities for a spec, they now use a single aura to increase the damage on all of those abilities.
  • In previous expansions the team would focus buffs on specific abilities, but that would change how things played.
  • The team still targets individual abilities when the ability needs to be changed, but there isn't a need to change all of the spells individually to bump up damage by a few percent anymore.
  • Changing all of the individual spells resulted in errors in the past, so this also helps to reduce errors.

Class Balance Changes
  • The team is mostly happy with how often class balance is tweaked.
  • Cathedral of Eternal night probably took too long to nerf. It probably could have been done faster and more aggressively. The team wasn't sure if it was new and unfamiliar or just too hard initially.
  • The team doesn't want to make players feel like their spec or class is constantly changing due to hotfixes.
  • Changes are bundled up to make all of the hotfixes happen at once rather than adjusting things more frequently.
  • If a certain spec is seen as being slightly better, all of the best players will switch to that spec. This makes the other specs look significantly weaker, as the people logging other specs aren't as strong of players.
  • Balance is always a moving target.

Raid Finder Difficulty
  • Keeping all of the mechanics for Raid Finder difficulty but making them weak didn't feel great. There were a lot of mechanics that you could just ignore.
  • The team's biggest balance concern is for the people that are only doing Raid Finder difficulty.
  • Instead, the team moved to having fewer mechanics but making them meaningful and challenging.
  • There is no longer a desire to make Raid Finder a tourist mode.
  • The team is hoping to make difficulty closer to Mists of Pandaria difficulty than Warlords. There are some fights that are too easy still.

Challenge Artifact Appearances
  • Any unlocks that require doing a thing while using another appearance are being changed to doing the thing after earning the base appearance.
  • Now you can get your 10 Rated Battlegrounds wins as any spec or appearance.

Split Raids
  • Both the developers and players don't enjoy split raids.
  • The team wants to make sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease.
  • This is a behavior that takes place in a tiny percent of the playerbase, maybe a couple thousand players in the world and only takes place for a few weeks.
  • Sharing loot lockouts across difficulties would have a big negative impact.
  • The team doesn't want to punish the entire playerbase because of the actions of a few.

Worgen and Goblin Models
  • The team hasn't forgotten about the new models.
  • The priority right now is the new casting animations, but Goblin and Worgen models are still on the high priority list!
This article was originally published in forum thread: Developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas started by chaud View original post
Published on 2017-08-03 06:03 PM
183 Comments
Comments 183 Comments
  1. mmocefc9cb3cf7's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Valmorte View Post
    Who cares about the goofy looking wolf men and gobs... straighten the danm spine of the male orcs!
    Orcs' spines were never straight to begin with.
  1. Gadzooks's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by hyphnos View Post
    Artificial delays generate longer subs and more money. It's not necessarily developer thinking, but it's business thinking.

    Everything they do has to be looked at in light of how many hours of player time it will consume and they have to skirt the fine line of wasting just enough time to maximize their metrics without making people see the man behind the curtain and quit.
    You're right, but we're also talking about a dev team who's leadership under Ion are obsessed with engineering every aspect of the player's experience in the game, and controlling it as much as possible - what you can do, when you can do it, and the only freedom they allow is loot drops, which have been handed over to the RNG team, because that's "fun". (It's also part of the addicting gameplay that brings people back, pulling that slot machine handle. Diablo II was based on that entirely.)

    Other game studios encourage "out of the box" playstyles, and even reward it. WoW's team seems dedicated to stamping out any of that they find. That's why the game is less fun now, and more of a grim grind towards goals that can only be accomplished ONE way.
  1. mmoc23d2295e3f's Avatar
    Where do they get those ridiculous ideas from?
    Prestige can't be account-wide because different character means something different? So how is raid titles, raid-mounts account-wide? Why is everything else I achieve on a character account-wide? It's always done with a certain character and it's as prestigious or even more than this honor farm stuff.

    I don't play pvp for the prestige, but because I want to play pvp. And no, it's not prestigious it's a grind that keeps me subbed. There you have your honest reason, Blizzard.
  1. markos82's Avatar
    So we will have at least 4months at AK40? You have got to be kidding. 9.4b for 63 points is insane amount of AP.
  1. Valqt's Avatar
    So does that mean M+ will be gone after Legion? RIP the best game mode..
  1. mmoc8b13f609fc's Avatar
    So many overthinking but none of acts, so many brains in teams but so little understanding from them, so many energy wasted in wrong directions, so many mistakes but more on the way, so many things in window but nothing in room, Blizzard 2014-2017.
  1. hyphnos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Gadzooks View Post
    You're right, but we're also talking about a dev team who's leadership under Ion are obsessed with engineering every aspect of the player's experience in the game, and controlling it as much as possible - what you can do, when you can do it, and the only freedom they allow is loot drops, which have been handed over to the RNG team, because that's "fun". (It's also part of the addicting gameplay that brings people back, pulling that slot machine handle. Diablo II was based on that entirely.)

    Other game studios encourage "out of the box" playstyles, and even reward it. WoW's team seems dedicated to stamping out any of that they find. That's why the game is less fun now, and more of a grim grind towards goals that can only be accomplished ONE way.
    I agree 100%. they are total control freaks and any time players deviate from what they "expect" they freak out and stop it. Never mind that maybe players are having fun. Nothing they didn't "intend" is allowed because anything players like is immediately regarded as suspect, too rewarding, and has to be stopped.
  1. Lexxia's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Professional Extra View Post
    Where do they get those ridiculous ideas from?
    Prestige can't be account-wide because different character means something different? So how is raid titles, raid-mounts account-wide? Why is everything else I achieve on a character account-wide? It's always done with a certain character and it's as prestigious or even more than this honor farm stuff.

    I don't play pvp for the prestige, but because I want to play pvp. And no, it's not prestigious it's a grind that keeps me subbed. There you have your honest reason, Blizzard.
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this
  1. elvor0's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by genbag View Post
    I love how they can't even fucking accept for once that they fucked up, with KJ MM.
    "Mythic Kil'jaeden was overtuned." That's literally them saying they fucked up.

    Quote Originally Posted by genbag View Post
    DARE say that their internal testing team is so much stronger that WF guilds
    That's not what they said. They said their internal team is better than previously, and then when they increased the numbers to make it challenging for WF guilds, they increased it too much.
  1. mmoc86367d26cc's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by RussW210 View Post
    I'm not following any of this logic and actually it makes me upset because I see a pattern with their approach on PVP:

    "
    Prestige isn't account wide because PvP on different characters means something different.
    The experience you have when playing a Rogue vs a healer is very different.
    Unlocking things per character reflects the experience you had on that specific character.
    If prestige was account wide, you would probably focus on getting a high rating on one character, but what would you have to work towards on other characters if everything was already unlocked?
    "

    The only benefit to prestige right now, outside of unlocking the initial talents, is achievements mounts and small toys. The gold is marginal from every few times you ding a level.

    Everything about these comments would suggest that prestige actually has some impact on the way you play your class or the feel of playing something different. How do achievements mounts and toys change your gameplay experience?

    On his last comment, that someone would gain a high rating with account wide prestige then have nothing to work toward... all the current system is doing is forcing someone to play one class. Just like the "100 wins in each battleground" achievements. Blizzard can't be so blind to not see that we want to play different classes but feel like we're stunting our progression if we do. This is 100000% the reason why I log in the game and don't play PVP casually. If I'm not working toward something (aka playing my prestige-locked class) then I'd rather be doing something else. PVP for me is simply logging in, doing the PVP world quests (time-value) and stopping. It's sad and unfortunate that they think people are excited about "working toward prestige" when they are actually feeling obligated and turned off.
    especially when you get the reward second time, it gives you nothing
  1. Psygon's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by zlygork View Post
    The whole point is for it to help people come back into the game and catch up, so yes.

    - - - Updated - - -



    Cuz the whole point is to bring people back.
    No one is "coming back" to this old, moldy game.

    I LOL'd.
  1. zlygork's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Psygon View Post
    No one is "coming back" to this old, moldy game.

    I LOL'd.
    Hello there, edge lord. Are you playing on a private server? The salt desert has been flooded since cata.
  1. mmoc2469da80bf's Avatar
    Lets hope they keep their promise about LFR . But i fear the minute the LFR guys lose interest and start unsubbing by the thousands their concerns and desires will go out of the window pretty fast .
    Then they start preforming backflips for a fast buck , as usual .
  1. Jasper Kazai's Avatar
    Oh, finally getting another permanent rune. I know they won't, but I really hope they do away with this terrible system next expansion. It's a pointless moneysink that adds next-to-zero value. The whole "gives LFR players another source of income" is not a good reason to keep around a lame buffing item. I'm lucky that I haven't been in a guild that required using them this expansion, so I've used like 6 at most.
  1. ElDoorO's Avatar
    I think MoP level difficulty was pretty good. It meant about 2-3 weeks of frustrating LFR before it got on easy farm. I've been saying this for a while.
  1. off3nc3's Avatar
    Oh look typical blizzard trying to mop the sh1t they pushed in on us , it's too late dudes no matter how much you give everyone maxxed artifacts , lol @ reforging haha . This expansion cannot be saved unless they revert the pruning , the gameplay is so stale and bad might aswell just play a moba !
  1. Asaliah's Avatar
    Please give us reforging back so we can erase this damn versatility on our gear
  1. Osmeric's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tyrven View Post
    They have gone back and forth on people being able to acquire skins down the line. They have been very clear on the fact they do not want to and do not plan to have artifact weapons continue after Legion.
    Prediction: the skins will end up available in the store for $$$.
  1. Aggrophobic's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Bamboozler View Post
    I guess. I think this actually promotes the opposite. "I'll quit paying my sub, and even when I come back, I'll be on par with everyone else with AK."

    I understand it might lure some players back, but I think it would also make people more comfortable with what they'd be losing if they stop paying for the game. I think that's something Blizzard wouldn't want.

    If 7.3 content doesn't bring you back, you're telling me automatic AK research will? What type of players do we want coming back, exactly?
    This.
    No point in playing untill AK is maxed out. Might as well stay unsubbed.

    Really odd idea. I don't see the point in having AK at all to be honest
  1. Osmeric's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by clevin View Post
    That's what team leads/project managers etc are for. Even if each encounter designer doesn't realize this someone should be looking at the raid as a whole. That they don't have this AND don't communicate between designers is laughably amateurish.
    I think the raid design team was mistakenly thinking the raid was called "Tomb of Soak Your Ass".
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