Ghosts of K'aresh - Developer Interviews

Ghosts of K'aresh - Developer Interviews
Some outlets had the opportunity to ask the developers some additional questions. We've recapped some of the highlights below.

MMORPG
MMORPG had the opportunity to interview Stephanie Yoon, Assistant Lead Quest Designer, and George Velev, Senior Game Producer.

  • Manaforge Omega was set up to bring Dimensius back to life
  • Players will sneak into the raid and see Dimensius growing below them creating a sense of urgency.
  • Some of the rewards for the Manaforge Vandals' renown are debuffs to weaken trash in Manaforge Omega and various movement speed buffs.
  • The team generally does simpler set bonuses for the first season or two of an expansion to give players time to learn new systems, abilities, and talents. Season 3 is far enough in that they feel comfortable doing more complex set bonuses.
  • Warrants require players to gather materials to craft keys that will unlock a boss fight for a small group. If players don't want to do the gathering they can buy keys from other players on the auction house or just join a group for the fight.

MMORPG also talked to Assistant Lead Quest Designer Stephanie Yoon and Senior Game Producer George Velev in another interview.



  • The team wanted the story around Xal'atath to feel right, so they created a giant board to look at how events are going to play out so that players feel that they have no choice but to accept this alliance of convenience with Xal'atath. There was a weekly writer's room to make sure that they were true to all of the character's motivations in this story.
  • The Dimensius fight got a lot of attention to make it great. The team didn't want you fighting someone's toenails for 3 minutes or having a fight that goes on too long. They focused on different aspects of the gameplay in a fresh way.
  • Players will earn Renown from each boss once per week, regardless of difficulty.
  • The team was happy with how Dinar worked last season and took into account a lot of feedback.
  • There are lots of asynchronous features coming to delves.
    • Slayers - Creatures that have killed another player within the same delve. You'll see them, with a "Slayer of (Person)" title. You'll get a buff if you manage to slay them.
    • Gravestones - Mark where other players have died
  • The feedback for the latest Mythic Plus season has been overall very positive.
  • When the team brings back older dungeons for Mythic Plus, they want to spend the time to make sure it is up to the parity with the current dungeons. Expect more updates to keep the dungeon pool fresh.
  • The goal of class balance is to ensure that everyone is having fun. Making it so that people can do LFG, Mythic+, and PvP no matter what class or spec they are playing is important.
  • The team is trying to make sure that solo players aren't falling over constantly in Delves, especially if they are DPS.
  • There has been a lot of feedback about ways to improve Hero Talents and the team is looking to make some of those changes in Season 3.
  • Adding or removing buttons might not make everyone happy, but the team tries to do it between seasons so that people have time to react to the change.


But Why Tho?
But Why Tho? had the chance to talk to Assistant Lead Quest Designer Stephanie Yoon and Senior Game Producer George Velev.

  • Raid trash gives players a break between bosses, letting them hang out in Discord to talk to their friends instead of constantly being focused on a boss.
  • Players can skip The Soul Hunters once they no longer desire the rewards from it, but it is required for Hall of Fame status.
  • Nothing to announce about a third void spec for Demon Hunters. Just exploring some narrative beats around Demon Hunters in the raid.
  • There will be a new setting to control allied player visuals in a riad, reducing them if desired for performance.
  • Umbral Essentia was added after the team saw a lot of top-performing groups rely on Shadowmeld for certain strategies. It gives other players the opportunity to try the strategy without needing a race-change.
  • Phase lost weapons are discovered in phase diving and allow you to uncover transmogs. Once you collect all of them, you get a grand reward.


The Bench Podcast
The Bench Podcast had the chance to talk to Assistant Lead Quest Designer Stephanie Yoon and Senior Game Producer George Velev.


  • The Turbo Boost events turned out well.
  • Dragonflight Talents and Hero Talents added more hybrid utility, defensive, and self-healing tools for damage dealers. The team knows that it comes at a cost, especially when it comes to encounter design and how healers feel. No plans to reduce defensive skills right now, more likely to happen with an expansion.
  • There isn't an easy fix to get more players to play tanks or healers. They have tried to incentivize it with rewards and can probably do a little bit better there.
  • Tanks in the upcoming PvP season will be more impactful when holding a flag instead of relying on damage dealers.
  • Some players will do the new dungeon before the raid, but the raid epilogue and story tie-ins won't be visible unless you are on the epilogue. No spoilers if you do things in a different order.
  • There has been a lot of internal discussion about story mode, with the question asking if they would consider opening it sooner so players can see the story themselves before seeing spoilers.
  • The team likes when players can take on bosses without relying on external tools like addons.
  • There are internal discussions about how addons should work in WoW and how they can impact combat. No timeline on addon changes, but no major changes are likely in Patch 11.2.
  • Patch 11.2 raid tuning is focused on making sure that each boss feels like an approachable challenge after completing the previous encounter. Players shouldn't feel like they have no shot at the next boss after defeating one. It should be smoother curve than previous raids.
  • The team has been discussing ways to connect like-minded players across all types of content.
  • There are no planned changes to Resilient Keystones.
  • The one button rotation feature has had overwhelming positive feedback across all sorts of audiences. The team is happy with the current penalty in place.
  • The team really wanted to use Lorewalking to hint at where players would be going in Ghosts of K'aresh and provide some background lore.
  • Season 3 set bonuses are a little more impactful and complicated because Season 2 set bonuses felt a little too passive.
  • Over the course of an expansion, people learn their systems and the team can add more with set bonuses.
  • Set Bonuses also add another tuning knob for mid-patch tuning.
  • The team has heard feedback that between tier sets and other slots it feels like you don't have many real item choices. They avoided adding new cloaks in Season 3, but did add new cloak cosmetics for players to purchase.
  • The team wants to see broad spec representation across all content and roles, while still being able to explore unique reasons to bring a class or spec to a raid.
  • The team wants to see if they can carve out a space for Death Knights with Death Grip and maybe Anti-Magic Zone. They don't want to give everyone a 60 minute buff.
  • Encounter design tries to carve out opportunities for all classes and specs to shine.
  • When Anti-Magic Zone was changed, it was a flat value, so they'll take a look at it in Mythic+
This article was originally published in forum thread: Ghosts of K'aresh - Developer Interviews started by chaud View original post
Published on 2025-08-03 09:44 PM
29 Comments
Comments 29 Comments
  1. panda040's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by korijenkins View Post
    No writer on the planet could've written an alliance with Xalatath that isn't illogical and ham-fisted. It's also entirely unnecessary; we could've just beaten Dimensius without her narratively and had her show up at the very end to steal his power or something.

    Also I cannot understate how sick and tired I am of seeing "the team felt, the team wanted" there is no team, it's team leads making decisions that please suits and everyone else having to go along with it.
    Don't you get it? girls bosses can't ever be bad, not at blizzard! They are always the good guys! Sylvanas "bad" oh but wait her heckin soul was shattered by the jailer she was actually didnt do nothing! Xalatath will be the same or something similar.

    Trash writing for a trash narrative, the only appeal this game has is the combat which is decent.
  1. banur's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by noctim2 View Post
    That statement is nonsense, sorry.

    Sure, there are tanks who prefer a slower pace, but up until around +10 and sometimes even beyond [...]

    And let’s be honest: no regular tank has done those so-called “surgical single pulls” since Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King.
    It’s a myth kept alive by impatient DPS players – a relic from the Vanilla days that just refuses to die.
    Pretty sure that the "old days" the OP is reminiscing about didn't have M+. I had a recent levelling tank that would pull single packs and then wander off to mine a node in Deadmines. Pretty sure it was a new player though, so more patience there. But also a certain lack of awareness when you are in the tank role and leave the group to do a solo activity.

    Not that we didn't do that back in the day as well (Khorium) but it was a different gaming mindset and your group was manually assembled anyway and not a random bunch of strangers with different ideas and the only commonality is signing up for the dungeon.
    It's just that gaming culture as a whole has changed to be more goal oriented and focussed on being optimised.
    And going into a dungeon with a deviating idea and then having an ego will sooner or later irritate people and lead to being kicked.
  1. Schintus's Avatar
    Let's see how the future of WoW develops, now that Microsoft has butchered the WoW Dev Team, or parts of it...
  1. Zoura's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Schintus View Post
    Let's see how the future of WoW develops, now that Microsoft has butchered the WoW Dev Team, or parts of it...
    Been goated from DF and onwards, only gets better from here on. They listen to feedback alot more now.
  1. Glaziola's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Duese View Post
    We get 3 hours a week to progress on the raid bosses. My guild can't do more than one night a week. We have extremely limited amounts of time and we want to focus that time on the reason we are there, to kill raid bosses. When we're wasting 20+ minutes a night killing trash or even worse, we're ending a raid early because it would take too long to kill the trash going to the next boss to get any pulls, it's exactly the opposite of promoting fun and engaging content.

    We are going to talk with our friends. We don't need you to put trash in so we can talk with our friends. We can handle being humans on our own. What we can't handle is trying to be time travellers or have some ability to make 3 hours last longer than 3 hours.
    Dont worry. Im sure the pro's will find clever ways to skip trash almost entirely. Give them a few days to figure that stuff out.
  1. Skirdus's Avatar
    The team wanted the story around Xal'atath to feel right, so they created a giant board to look at how events are going to play out so that players feel that they have no choice but to accept this alliance of convenience with Xal'atath.
    Leave it to Blizzard to think that further removing any sense of player agency is somehow a good thing.
  1. Val the Moofia Boss's Avatar
    There isn't an easy fix to get more players to play tanks or healers.
    Add a cool healer spec. I don't want to throw sparkle magicks at people, and that's what all of the healer specs are so now I will not play them. Give us something badass like mogu anima golem spec to DKs who redistribute blood from their enemies to their allies back to their enemies, purifying allies of diseases and spreading them to enemies. I guess there was Holy Paladin who can technically fight but I never felt badass as one and wound up switching back to prot or ret pretty quickly.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by exochaft View Post
    Anyways, the reality is that the tank/healer roles have implied responsibilities that a DPS role just doesn't have (or can easily skirt), so the only way to draw people to it is to make things for fun for them. Granted everyone's idea of fun can vary, but most people's idea of fun isn't making a tanking/healing spec complicated with little returns when it comes to damage/performance while simultaneously making the content difficult to master.
    The solution is to give DPS responsibilities so that no role is that much more stressful than another and thus people are more inclined to try different roles. Case example: Final Fantasy XI. It had a skillchaining system (later copied by GBF, and then Genshin) where your different weaponskills would apply a different effect/element to the target. If a different weaponskill effect was applied, a combination could occur that would deal a magic burst. This magic burst would deal major damage if the enemy's elemental weakness. So DPS players had to be paying attention to each others' TP and holding their weaponskills and cooldowns until everyone was ready or was about to be ready, and then using their weaponskills in order within the time window to cause the burst. The other roles like healers and supports or rangers generally did not have to pay attention to this, so the responsibility for the DPS role was raised.
  1. vindicator782's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Val the Moofia Boss View Post
    Add a cool healer spec. I don't want to throw sparkle magicks at people, and that's what all of the healer specs are so now I will not play them. Give us something badass like mogu anima golem spec to DKs who redistribute blood from their enemies to their allies back to their enemies, purifying allies of diseases and spreading them to enemies. I guess there was Holy Paladin who can technically fight but I never felt badass as one and wound up switching back to prot or ret pretty quickly.

    - - - Updated - - -



    The solution is to give DPS responsibilities so that no role is that much more stressful than another and thus people are more inclined to try different roles. Case example: Final Fantasy XI. It had a skillchaining system (later copied by GBF, and then Genshin) where your different weaponskills would apply a different effect/element to the target. If a different weaponskill effect was applied, a combination could occur that would deal a magic burst. This magic burst would deal major damage if the enemy's elemental weakness. So DPS players had to be paying attention to each others' TP and holding their weaponskills and cooldowns until everyone was ready or was about to be ready, and then using their weaponskills in order within the time window to cause the burst. The other roles like healers and supports or rangers generally did not have to pay attention to this, so the responsibility for the DPS role was raised.
    I don't think WoW needs to take end game PVE notes from another game whose endgame no one takes seriously
  1. Relapses's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ashana Darkmoon View Post
    Is this some weird game libertarianism? The Invisible Hand of Azeroth will magically shorten queue times despite all evidence to the contrary?
    It's the type of deeply impractical thinking which frequently gets updooted over on Reddit: Thing = bad, so make thing = good and suddenly everything is solved. Everybody's dancing, lolipops rain from the sky and we all walk hand-in-hand into the sunset as WoW enters a new Renaissance with 85 gorbillion subscribers. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is that Blizzard has already tried the things that players think will solve the problem and there is mountains of evidence to support this approach not only not working, but actively making the problem worse.

    If Blizzard is going to retain the Holy Trinity (and they're going to let Aug stay dead) then this is the only reasonable path forward. I don't even think this is new news, either, so it's always weird to see devs say shit like this. c'est la vie.
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