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WatcherDev answered some questions today!
Classic
- WoW Classic won't be moving away from the community and inconveniences, the question is what point in classic should the game be set in.
Tier Sets
- The Azerite armor system adds a lot of depth and customization to armor slots traditionally used for tier sets.
- The role of tier sets has changed significantly over the years. In Classic it might take you many months to assemble your set, if you were able to do it at all.
- Today, you often get your tier set bonuses within the first few weeks of a new tier. Once you have it, you are locked into those armor pieces.
- Currently you can have tier slots and legendary items locking you in for most slots, making them not available for customization and choice.
- In Emerald Nightmare, the armor was recolors of the Tier set. These didn't feel like they had a connection to the zone.
- For years, the team has spent all of the art time on making sets for classes, then recolors for the rest of the loot table.
- When you go into the new raid, the new sets will fill like they fit with the Troll, Titan, Corrupted vibe.
- If you want that iconic Paladin look, there are lots of existing sets out there to transmog to.
- The team is adding art variety to the world in this expansion. There will be more options than ever before, rather than a 22nd take on the Priest fantasy.
- What would an Old God themed Paladin set even look like?
- The team will get back to class based art eventually, but for BfA variety is being added.
- There will be one appearance per armor type per zone, but more variety across zones.
- This is the first time that non class set armor will get the full high fidelity treatment. The additional 3D armor pieces and other details that go into the normal Tier sets will be applied to these new sets.
- There will still be unique trinkets and other things only available from raids that are very attractive.
- There will also be properties on the Heart of Azeroth slots that can only be found in a raid.
- There will be unique things that affect gameplay that are only from raids still.
Patch 7.3.5
- Scaling world, post Antrous story, Ulduar timewalking, preview of Silithus battleground, assorted smaller stuff.
- Coming to the PTR quite soon.
Races
- The team's focus is on factions, rather than the story of the races inside the factions.
- As we venture to different areas of the world, there will be cool stuff for different races.
- There could be a race heavy expansion down the line, but BfA is a faction heavy expansion.
Allied Races
- For the Nightfallen, Exalted is required, but in practice you can play through the Suramar campaign and unlock them. The barriers to the story have been removed.
- It is more story driven than grinding driven.
- Years from now that is something that the team could revisit, but for now it feels appropriate.
- Transmog is generally account wide, so once you have earned the Dark Iron Heritage armor, so you can probably use it on any Dark Iron character on your account.
- The team is looking at what races make sense to join the factions, then what classes make sense for those races.
- Death Knight and Demon Hunter are hero classes that start at a high level, so right now the focus is on the story and Allied Races starting at Level 20.
- Thrall was an example of an upright Orc, so it was a thing that existed. This is why upright Orcs make sense.
- Darkspear Trolls are hunched and it is part of what they are. Zandalari Trolls are a different story.
- More upright options is something the team could look at eventually, perhaps in a future Allied Race.
- Combat forms of Zandalari Trolls will not change to other animals, just the travel form.
Honor and Prestige
- The team isn't going to add many more Prestige levels and expect returning players to grind through them all.
- The team is still looking at how Honor Talents worked out. It feels like you are operating with a penalty for the first X hours of PvP, so they are reevaluating this decision.
Artifacts
- Currently the plan is for Artifacts to be spec restricted when it comes to transmog.
- Artifact appearances earned today will be account wide, you will be able to use them on a new alt of the same class.
Legendary Items
- If there are legendary items in the future, there will be far fewer compared to Legion.
- The team is open to doing them similar to older legendary items, where something is very special and unique.
- There are currently no plans for any legendary items in BfA.
Mythic Raids
- There are no plans to change the Mythic raid size at this point.
- Managing a Mythic roster is challenging and managing raid rosters has been challenging throughout the game.
- Should Mythic raiding be flexibile size? Probably incompatible with the cutting edge tuning that Mythic is all about.
- Tuning for just a single size Mythic raid is already challenging.
- If the raid has to be a fixed size, what is the right size? A size of 20 allows for a wide variety of classes, splitting the raid in more ways, and adding more complexity in coordination.
- If the team was to drop the Mythic size to 15, many groups would be happy, but your roster would shrink over time, and you would eventually be back to the problem of not having enough people once again.
- The team would like to look at opening cross-realm Mythic raiding earlier than the next tier. It is important to protect realm firsts and other things, but after being open for a while there are reasons to let cross-realm mythic raids occur.
- Tomb was probably a little too difficult on Mythic on the last 1/3rd of the instance.
- Having too many binary instant pass/fail mechanics in a fight can really wear on you. It feels better if mistakes are punished in a way where you can only get away with so many, rather than one person making a mistake 4 minutes in that causes a wipe.
Aman'Thul's Vision
- You'll find out how Aman'Thul's Vision will drop in the future.
- It would be cool if you went into a raid and found loot that wasn't datamined.
- There are places where advance notice is important, but how this item drops isn't one of them.
Mythic+
- When Mythic Antrous opens, Mythic+ will advance similar to every other time a new raid unlocked.
Item Upgrades
- Warforging and Titanforging will continue in BfA, but probably a little less often.
- A hard cap on Titanforging that kept it from going into the Mythic item level space would be very restrictive.
World PvP
- The team is creating a place where players interested in World PvP are more likely to run into each other.
- Having a world where everyone, regardless of realm, can opt in to World PvP means that the team can make outdoor World PvP content. In the past, the team ran into the question of what outdoor PvP content would mean on PvE servers.
- The team recognizes how important community is on RP realms, which is what CRZ is turned off in some instances.
- You can be on an RP server, opt into PvP, and see other players that have opted in from your server. The team may need to re-evaluate that in the long run if there aren't enough players opting in on RP servers.
- The team doesn't want to split up RP servers or mix them.
- There aren't specific plans to encourage raiding of capital cities, but this would be a cool expansion for it, as it fits the story.
Class Changes
- The team will have more to share on this in the future when Beta ramps up.
- There are going to be fewer class changes than there were in Legion, as it was probably the largest set of class change ever.
- Demonology Warlock was not a fully successful experiment. The master of demon fantasy is great, but the execution wasn't right.
- Demonology, Survival, and other specs will probably see more significant changes.
- Replacing dead talents, binary choices (AoE vs Single target talent swapping), and filling the gaps Artifact abilities left are all something the team is looking at.
- Class specific utility is a thing that the team likes.
- There are plans to add some of the Artifact traits into base abilities, talents, or in some other way.
- Mobile Tranq is probably not something that should move forward into BfA, but that decision hasn't been made. Resto Druids are already very mobile in most aspects of their gameplay.
- Hati is very closely tied to Titanstrike, unlikely to be carried forward forever. It is odd to require a new player to go back to Legion content to get Hati. There is something cool about having multiple pets as a BM Hunter, so that is something they could expand on.
- Updated Warlock animations are coming in BfA, probably in the pre-launch patch.
Zone Scaling
- There are no immediate plans to make old world zones relevant to current content, but they could do so in the future.
Relics and Weapons
- The plan is to go back to weapon drops. Compared to the old days, there are so many more sources of loot, so it isn't as hard as it used to be to get a weapon.
Underlight Angler
- The plan is to carry the Underlight Angler forward.
Character Slots
- Characters slots per server will be increased.
- Total character slots per account will not be increased from 50.
- The team would like to hear from players that are actively using 50 characters.
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