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. mmoceb1073a651's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Spykel View Post
    Can you not give the more serious players one small thing? Its literally the ONLY thing in legion you actually have to either be good or outgear to get. I did the challenge on the same day it released, if you cannot finish it within a Year of the time it came you just dont deserve it, simple as that.
    Im dreaming back to the day where if you didnt obtain something in time you would never be able to get it (old tier and benediction etc).
    You could use gear upgrades to complete Warlock green fire challenge easier (and clever use of game mechanics, aka special potion), and you could use specifical BIS gear for MoP and WoD CMs. So, I don't mind that these challenges get easier if you get better gear. Especially since they have not implemented scaling to a specific item level from day 1.
  1. mmocc90ca60fd1's Avatar
    Yes? I literally said you could outgear it, which is fine, During Legion. What i dont want is for it to be open untill people have 1600 ilvl and can afk through it.
  1. mmoceb1073a651's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Spykel View Post
    Yes? I literally said you could outgear it, which is fine, During Legion. What i dont want is for it to be open untill people have 1600 ilvl and can afk through it.
    For this case, I would prefer them downscaling the character in a similar way as we get in TW, tuned somehow to the difficulty level of end of the Legion expansion.

    I don't like removing content, and since they have scaling technology, I would want them to use it to keep the content somehow equally challenging.
  1. mmocc90ca60fd1's Avatar
    Its either getting removed, good, or its gona stay and get smashed. Scaling a "challenge" like this is basicly impossible and requires tons of resources which could be better spent somewhere else. ilvl, templates, talents, current spells, legendaries, tier and trinkets, just way to many factors to make it work. The healing challenge (part 1 which is the hardest part (arguable) for some healers) is already mundane if you just get a glaive trinket from tos :/.
  1. huehuehue's Avatar
    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.
    Problem was that 7.2 was really in beta on live servers. The activities were clear enough, the problem was that they were hotfixed repeatedly and players were unsure what was going to be rewarding that day when they logged on.

    Argus has five chapters and three sub-zones and a ton of stuff available right away.
    but not all chapters or zones. At least it seems to all unlock in a much shorter time than 7.2, so that's good.

    You will be able to play through the first two chapters on Day 1 and unlock world quests and other world content.
    Quest for a bit and then do dailies again. wait for next tuesday for story, cool. At least the scope is much larger than just an island.

    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.
    I guess this is what they learned from "The team learned a lot from how Patch 7.2 unfolded. It wasn't clear what you were supposed to do after the intro". They go from thinking they didn't show us what there is avaiable properly to "actually, we don't want you to make decisions, so we're now your tour guide. Please stay on the marked path." There's tons of middle ground between the two.


    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.
    Why is that a bad thing? Why are you not letting those players enjoy the game how they want? Solution: Don't gate the crucible behind the story. Unlock it day 1 and weave what the hell it is into the chapter quests.


    Many of the content unlocks on Argus are account wide, such as the dungeon, most of the Argus world quests, travel to the sub-zones, and the Netherlight Crucible.
    This is very good news, thanks for thinking of alts.

    idk, this game didn't become so popular through gated content, is all. Whether it's just a shitty end-of-the-game-cycle content-"lengthening" stall tactic or just how games are these days, not letting us choose how to play is definitely is a worse experience.
  1. mmoc9edb066cd1's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Spykel View Post
    Can you not give the more serious players one small thing? Its literally the ONLY thing in legion you actually have to either be good or outgear to get. I did the challenge on the same day it released, if you cannot finish it within a Year of the time it came you just dont deserve it, simple as that.
    Im dreaming back to the day where if you didnt obtain something in time you would never be able to get it (old tier and benediction etc).
    Those days were vanilla?
  1. Soeroah's Avatar
    Allowing people to earn the artifact appearances post-Legion except for Mythic +15 and the Challenge mode ones seems like the best and most fair option. I hope they go for that.

    Got no problem with high-skill cap players getting unique appearances, but stuff that just requires a time investment shouldn't be artificially made "prestigious" by making it time-limited. All that does is turn the game into a chore.
  1. Lupinemancer's Avatar
    New Worgen and Goblin Models coming eventually!
    That was the only interesting thing about this, and I can't wait. Hope it's gonna be soon!
  1. mmocc90ca60fd1's Avatar
    100% correct. Not that i want vanilla gameplay etc but the fact that nothing in this game is unique anymore is sad :/ ooh you've got mythic Gul'Dan mount, "Yea i pugged him last night for funZ"....
  1. Redecle's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Spykel View Post
    If you care this much about transmog/apperances do you not want them to be special?
    Why does stuff need to be special or unique? What does it matter or affect a person if you have something no one else does.
    Bragging rights, ego boost, virtual length of epeen. Why does anything other people do matter? In general and in a game, specially in a game? It's not like one is here to spend thousands of hours to look at what other people are doing, no you're spending those hours to play yourself. Unless you're literally not playing and watching someone stream a game.
    If you want something you get it because YOU want it, not because someone else has it.
    If after something is removed someone else has something you don't, well I guess good for them. It doesn't make me respect or admire them anymore than I do, which I don't. Everyone is of same flesh and bones, status is human made garbage.
    Same deal even if stuff is not removed, if there's someone walking around in full mythic tier set of current tier or in full raid gear back in the day, don't get anymore respect from me, that required time consumed to get, nothing else, behind they are the same shitty ass human i am, who happen to play the same game i am, for.. I guess for fun, since it's a game. I don't need to feel unique in front of others, I just want to have fun, which transmogging the things that look good to myself not others is in this game. If another enjoys the same skin, good for them, use it as you please. Don't really care if you do it or not.
  1. Tornwar's Avatar
    The team hasn't forgotten about the new models.
    YAY! I am excited for this. Sure, the current models are OK and aren't too oldschool. But they are still using the old-ish models design. They can obviously become better. I doesn't have to be priority at all, but I really hope they will come soon!
  1. mmoce8c8600613's Avatar
    I love how they can't even fucking accept for once that they fucked up, with KJ MM. They fucked up SO BAD that the first 2 or 3 hotfixes haven't even been documented. The bumps and damage were not even humanly doable. How can they DARE say that their internal testing team is so much stronger that WF guilds where they are still capable to produce totally useless classes because of balance, or in KJ case, bosses that are so incerdibly overtuned. They go with all their "bring the player" bs and yet they produce shit bosses/raids that make it easy proportionally to the number of immunities you have.
  1. Valmorte's Avatar
    Who cares about the goofy looking wolf men and gobs... straighten the danm spine of the male orcs!
  1. mmocc90ca60fd1's Avatar
    I get your point of view and in mostly agree, its not about showing of my epeen But, its not fair, simple as that. I've played the hardest content throughout Legion and always done what i can to min/max and therefore when i enterted the mage tower at release i got it done within 3 hours (Nelf holy priest), am i not allowed to feel good about my achievement then? It simply doesnt Mean anything if everyone can get it, if LFR was the only raid in wow nobody would play the game because there is no challenge, and where challenge exists dont you think there should be a reward at the end? a reward simply for the ones the completed the challenge. For the mage tower challenge you can Already outgear the Shit out of it but for the sake of peoples alt play which i totally respect i see no problem having it open till next xpac but after that its obsolete content and should not reward the same as it once did.

    Atleast for myself, and almost all my friends all our insanity to push to the limit came from back in vanilla when you saw people running around with full tiers and you stood in awe with all your green gear and said "i want to be like that guy", theesedays everyone can be like that guy, just play the game one expansion behind and cakewalk through everything.
  1. RussW210's Avatar
    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.
  1. quras's Avatar
    "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.

    Many players care about power so lets design the game to hinder what many players like to do.

    I really hate that kind of developer, designer thinking.

    I'd rather not waste a few weeks and a "short bit" and be "allowed" to experience all of Argus just to open the Netherlight Crucible. It should be up to the player how slow or fast they want to get there.
  1. hyphnos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by quras View Post
    "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.

    Many players care about power so lets design the game to hinder what many players like to do.

    I really hate that kind of developer, designer thinking.

    I'd rather not waste a few weeks and a "short bit" and be "allowed" to experience all of Argus just to open the Netherlight Crucible. It should be up to the player how slow or fast they want to get there.
    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.
  1. Pallamouna's Avatar
    Allen change your haircut ASAP
  1. cafecito820's Avatar
    Barber: What can I do for you?
    Josh Allen: Yo, can you imagine if someone were to make a helmet out of King Kong's pubes?
    Barber: Say no more, fam.
  1. Galateacyc's Avatar
    This sounds like so much business as usual from Ion. It's depressing. But hey - at least they are happy with everything - that's what's most important.

    - They are repeating their mistake from 7.2.5 about content pacing on Argus. Two weeks is a long time for something who thinks they got new content to be content with doing a handful of intro quests and a bunch of world quests.

    - Split raiding could be solved very easily by locking the first 2 weeks of a new tier to personal loot only across all difficulties.

    - Players have made clear they want reforging to get rid of the endless RNG, yet they still trot out the lies that it's too complicated (post hit/exp removal). No - the current system where you have to simcraft on yourself only to find out the item that's 30ilv lower than what you received is better than the new "upgrade".

    - Damage balance has been a sad joke and struggling specs have been left out to hang for entire tiers.

    - Class stacking is happening because of the inane ability pruning they did. I wager they try to solve the problem they created by nerfing class with immunities instead of giving back the abilities they stole during pruning.

    - and, of course, avoided most of the questions like ilv scaling, no-flying, etc where they don't want to explicitly say: "yeah, well, f- you all, that's why".

    I'm glad I quit.
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