BlizzCon 2019 - Developer Interview

[Lurker1]

Imagine like gathering 2 set pc for passive 200+ armors
Imagine like gathering 4 set pc for passive 20+ Primary stats
Imagine like gathering 6 set pc for passive 10% mount movement.

You get the idea :-\

Yep the bonuses where getting boring as well.

[Teekey]

Weekly Loot Chest There will be a tremendous number of factors that influence the weekly loot choice. Factors include how far you made it in a tower run, what Mythics did you do, what dungeons did you run, what World Quests did you do, what did you do in PvP, and many more.

This actually sounds kind of...eh...

[jellmoo]

How on earth can you be so ridiculously oblivious to the fact that millions of people play this game and a large portion of those people actually like titanforge? I don't care if it stays or goes personally but quit acting like literally everyone hates it.

How on earth can you be so ridiculously oblivious to the fact that the mechanic has been panned and panned heavily across a ton of different channels by the most passionate members of the playerbase? To the point that the devs themselves seem to understand that the RNG gearing system is a losing one. Until they become uncertain about whether to get rid of one of the worst offenders for some reason...

[Xilurm]

"If you want to go back to Pandaria and farm for transmog or rares, you wouldn't want the zone scaling, so you need Chromie Time to scale it."

I'm confused, what does this mean? You wouldn't want the zone scaling but you need to scale it? Huh?

I just assumed that if you're lvl 60, every other expansion outside of Shadowlands will be capped at 50. So you can just farm everything and everything will be 10 levels below you.

[tru]

Quick question did they not have a band play

[MachoSasquatcho]

Right it's the story that makes the Tier Sets bad?

[glowpipe]

"If you want to go back to Pandaria and farm for transmog or rares, you wouldn't want the zone scaling, so you need Chromie Time to scale it."

I'm confused, what does this mean? You wouldn't want the zone scaling but you need to scale it? Huh?

I just assumed that if you're lvl 60, every other expansion outside of Shadowlands will be capped at 50. So you can just farm everything and everything will be 10 levels below you.

What they mean with this is that you don't want it to be scaled if you are hunting transmogs. So they needed chromie to scale for those who want to level there at a lower level. This way its only scaled for those who turn scaling on, Not for the ones going back to hunt transmogs.

If everything is scaled to 50 and you are 60. Many things will take longer to kill then now. So vanilla content which is capped at 60 today. will be capped around lvl 20 in shadowlands. Unless you talk to chromie and she scales it to from 10-50

The entire world will be just like it is now, but at a lower level. vanilla will be capped at around 20. tbc wrath at around 25-30 etc. But if you talk to chromie, she will scale the world for you and it will scale from 10-50 everywhere. including bfa

[Gourami]

so they are not making new class in favor for some dwarf tattoos and asian looking humans. cool

[Weslicus]

Will tier sets return? Maybe. The team likes the tier sets a lot, but made the choice to go away from them in Battle for Azeroth because it doesn't make sense for the story anymore. They were great in Legion because it was such a class focused expansion, but Battle for Azeroth changed to a faction focused expansion, so the armor sets were more faction or raid oriented.

I think blizzard doenst understand when we ask about tier sets, we dont care what they look like or themed around. Most people tmog it away anyways. When we ask about tier sets we just want to know if there will be powerful gear with set bonuses that affect our gameplay that drops from the raids.

[daedgaem]

Holy shit, seriously? How on earth can they be so ridiculously tone deaf on this?

Removing titanforging is like removing world quests. It adds so much replayability with almost no dev time. The only scenario in which we see titanforging gone is when they stop trying to maximize user "engagement" which is bs for the amount of time they can pressure someone to play their game. This won't happen any time soon as it's the only metric, other than possibly microtransactions, which they are able to present to shareholders as some affirmation that their company is worth investing in. The later part being correct as they can be the a terrible publisher from the perspective of their users, but since they're not the worst in the industry, along with the fact that their IP is insanely valuable, it doesn't matter that they're milking users for their time. Blizzard fanboys will continue to play Blizzard games. Look at EA and Ubisoft. They routinely screw their customers who cry about it up until the next game is released. Kotick ran Blizzard to the ground for a big paycheck and stock options. Cata and on is his doing which is why you see subscribers plummet a bit after the Activision merger. They started to turn away from MAU in favor of time played and microtransactions.

[Biggles Worth]

How on earth can you be so ridiculously oblivious to the fact that millions of people play this game and a large portion of those people actually like titanforge? I don't care if it stays or goes personally but quit acting like literally everyone hates it.

Literally everyone does hate it though.

[MachoSasquatcho]

They seem to think that the game can't be fun without massive amounts of "RNG on top of more RNG" loot. Personally, if I wanted to play Diablo I would.

[Edlarel]

Literally everyone does hate it though.

I know at least four people and myself who don’t mind, so you’re wrong. Glad we could clear that up

[GreenJesus]

Starting to believe that every interviewer wasn't actually asking questions, Blizzard just gave them questions to ask the devs. This interview asked the exact same things everyone else did, and missed asking about player housing and guild halls, which was literally the very first response in the community questions thread.

There isn't player housing or guild halls in shadowlands
so that is just a waste of time of a question. They have had people tell them they want it for over 15 years. I'm pretty sure they dont need a q and a to have the revelation that players want it.

[ArynZhalgas]

Weekly Loot Chest There will be a tremendous number of factors that influence the weekly loot choice. Factors include how far you made it in a tower run, what Mythics did you do, what dungeons did you run, what World Quests did you do, what did you do in PvP, and many more.

This actually sounds kind of...eh...

Excuse me can you tell how to make a post/forum here?

[Gadzooks]

Based on past experience and the vagueness of these developer interviews if I were a betting man I'd say many of the features they are referring to won't actually make it into the launch edition of Shadowlands and some may never see the light of day. It's a huge effort to redo the levelling experience, let alone "unprune" classes and implement what appear to be 2 types of AP grinds (Covenants / Torghast - and yes I know that's a zone thing), plus add all the new 50-60 areas / content and normal max lvl content.

Shadowlands release will either be delayed for an extended period of time or rushed out half-baked to meet the deadline - there's no way they're capable, based on their past performance, of doing everything they say they are going to be implementing and getting it out the door on time and in full.

Oh, and that outdoor challenging content in the Maw - getting nerfed to the ground a few weeks after release - Cata says hello

Preach and Josh's interview with Ion kind of summed it up for me - more "we hear you", a LOT of "we don't know", and the followup commentary is they're hearing December 2020 for release. And, long term, if they're building this like Legion and BfA, patch 9.0 content will be left behind for 9.2 content, then that left behind for 9.3 content, so who knows what they have in store for the whole life of the expansion? It's not like the tower is expected to last the entire way, it's just for 9.0, 9.1, if it's anything like the last two expansions. (And Dragon Isles/something being released later as a surumar/timeless isle type content) The tower seems to be the central feature of the beginning of the expansion, but that's all.

I'll state up front it might just be me, but I'm not seeing a lot of confidence from the devs. The mood is definitely different when they talk now. I think BfA was a wakeup call for them, and not in a good way, like they thought they could sell anything, and "yeah, wow, that didn't work out how we expected." They're being REALLY cagey about talking about much of anything past what was already shown, same for Diablo 4. Now, it's possible they are doing that because so much is undecided, and don't want two years of "YOU PROMISED", but...again, it feels off. Less confident. More "like this, please?", and less "YOU'RE GONNA LOVE THIS" from past years. What's shocking is how little is done - what have they been working on, the whole while of BfA? They added more devs, even announced it to offset the layoffs last year, and managed to announce less, and it will take longer? Huh?

The most damning thing is, it looks like another year before anything comes out of their games, except Hearthstone. WoW Dec 2020 (Hope you love N'Zoth, 'cause that's all you get for a year), Diablo 4 is years off, and Overwatch, who knows? If I were an investor, I'd be a little concerned with that, and be asking where the income is gonna be coming from for 2020. So, yeah, warm that cash shop up, it's going into overdrive, folks.

[Uselessrouge]

is it me or does it sound like bullshit when they say "oh no sets did not make sense for that part of the game"

like wtf does set items have to do with anything . i like having a set.. guess its not making "rp" sense for what ever reason

[kevincuomo]

Titan Forging is a cancer eating away at the game, the fact that the DEV's don't see it is scary.

[Cerus]

“ The intent is that the Maw will remain challenging throughout the expansion, you shouldn't outgear it. One of the things players really liked about Classic is the outdoor challenge. The Maw should have increased challenge and fun!”

First of all - stop putting classic fanboys wishes into retail. Second - they clearly haven’t learned from the massive complaints over endgame I’ll scaling and not being able to outgear the world.

Guess they’re doubling down on that crap yet again.

[dlh]

Tier sets are a fundamental part of WoW classes and your character. In the past they were unmistakable and defined patches and raids, moving further away from them just seems to damage the player experience in my opinion. This choice in BFA made the game feel more hollow as a member of a class.

Overall absolutely loving the Shadowlands reveal but I feel like tier sets are too important to ignore