Developer Interview - Morgan Day

[Kolvarg]

There are 2 choices:

Choice A: no enter fee, meaningless rewards N’Zoth invasions style
Choice B: enter fee with meaningful rewards

There’s no way you’ll be able to solo that all day AND receive near to max level loot every day.

And so we fall back to this, as usual: Bring back valor points.


Also, I'd prefer to have a few days lockout on being able to get the max level loot, or something similar, than having to farm an entry fee. Entry fee nearly completely kills all interest I had in the feature. And it was the one max-level feature I was actually interested in for Shadowlands, so it doesn't bode well for me.

[LordVargK]

There are 2 choices:

Choice A: no enter fee, meaningless rewards N’Zoth invasions style
Choice B: enter fee with meaningful rewards

There’s no way you’ll be able to solo that all day AND receive near to max level loot every day.

Or choice C: Enter as much as you like, only get meaningful rewards if you paid a fee in advance.
That's the system which is used for raids at the moment (you don't pay obviously; you only get loot once a week but you can run a raid as much as you like).
I did not ask for loot. I asked for the opportunity to run Torghast without having to be scared of losing my investment. A fun mode, so to speak.

[Enter Name Here]

You pay the same sub whether you play for 1 hour a week or 10 hours per day.

you're right, but i'm talking about number of payments required for a given objective.
by stretching the time between torghast runs significantly (= grinding the key) they can eventually squeeze out another payment before a player achieves what he/she was aiming for.

an example:
let's say you need 50 runs for an achievement X.

without key:
tryhard johnny imba burns through them in like 2-3 days. that's one payment. johnny imba unsubs. investors sad

with, let's say 1 key/day:
tryhard johnny imba is quite annoyed about that but still dedicated to get said achievement. he does them in 50 days. that's two payments. +100% income $$$! investors happy.

[Azerate]

"Battle for Azeroth waited to turn on Mythic+ but the team probably won't wait as long this time."

Confirmed, m+ will not be availible on day one.

We will once again be stuck with a weekly lockout on dungeons..

Which is a good thing. Couple weeks of a breather at expansion launch is very welcome so you can settle in and complete basic stuff like main reps etc.

Lets all welcome the new endless grind: Thorgast

The guy literally said you will be able to get what you want from it quickly and stop doing it if you dont enjoy it. Whether you believe him or not is another thing, or if it actually releases in the state he claims, but that's what he stated.

Azz from HeelVsbabyface is the worst interviewer, one time he said DKs (my class) were good when they weren't three years ago.


Seriously though, the lack of focus on class changes in favour of prioritising borrowed power tuning knobs has me really worried Ion's "no more big changes" was pr code for "don't expect anything but numbers tweaks".

Can't say if this is serious or a troll follow-up to someone saying people mistake Preach with Heelvsblabla

I find their stubbornness over the GCD changes completely baffling.

Keeps the game from turning into a button masher and lowers the skill cap. There is no GCD problem. That's something purely in the heads of an extreme minority of the playerbase

[Aphrel]

Which is a good thing. Couple weeks of a breather at expansion launch is very welcome so you can settle in and complete basic stuff like main reps etc.

The breather is now old man!

Months and months of it.

When the expansion launches i want to play the game.

Main reps are gated, they have been for several expansions and i don't expect that to change.
Mythic0 dungs has a 1week cd, thorgast is apaprently gonna be gated aswell, probobly in a similar way to how visions was considering they way they said it.
Raids is obviosuly not going to be open at launch nor is arenas..

What left is there to do? Id appretiate having m+ open, even with a capped ilvl on drops it would still give me something to do, explore the dungeons. Its the only repeatable content in the game, it would be very much appretiated to have it active at the start when theres usually so little else to do.

[Blackmist]

The team learned lessons from Horrific Visions that will be applied to Torghast.

How much you can play Torghast depends on how much you are playing the game.

So the team didn't learn anything then?

The cost of a failed run should be my time was wasted. Not my time was wasted, plus a limited weekly resource, thus more time, and potentially setting my progress back a week.

[deplorable]

a game mode we haven't seen in WoW, but other MMOs have used it, so we thought now was a good time to acquire it and pass it off as our own.

[chiddie]

Or choice C: Enter as much as you like, only get meaningful rewards if you paid a fee in advance.
That's the system which is used for raids at the moment (you don't pay obviously; you only get loot once a week but you can run a raid as much as you like).
I did not ask for loot. I asked for the opportunity to run Torghast without having to be scared of losing my investment. A fun mode, so to speak.

Fun mode with no rewards could be also a third option but I fear only 1% of player base will be interested in a norewards mode.

[Yhvh]

Maybe Mirror Images could become a talent again. A survivability or utility button rather than another damage cooldown.

Please! Mirror Images was never known for it's dps capabilities, and was always taken for the leveling mage that needed to peel stuff off them. The best course of action is to move MI to the defensive talent row... Or if it is baseline, make the damage negligible (while being able to pull threat off the mage) so it would be worthless to be used as a dps cooldown.

[Daedius]

No updates on Shadow Priest yet.

Hope that means they ARE doing something for it, and aren't complacent in it's current state...

[Eapoe]

you're right, but i'm talking about number of payments required for a given objective.
by stretching the time between torghast runs significantly (= grinding the key) they can eventually squeeze out another payment before a player achieves what he/she was aiming for.

an example:
let's say you need 50 runs for an achievement X.

without key:
tryhard johnny imba burns through them in like 2-3 days. that's one payment. johnny imba unsubs. investors sad

with, let's say 1 key/day:
tryhard johnny imba is quite annoyed about that but still dedicated to get said achievement. he does them in 50 days. that's two payments. +100% income $$$! investors happy.

Or, as catchup mechanics has always worked with Blizzards games in the last, Johnny waits until later on when he can get them and do them all at once over a week or two, giving only 1 month sub.
Also, as I’ve pointed out in multiple threads about this topic, if Johnny is staying subbed to raid/m+/PvP/world quest with his guild members/friends/solo, then he’s staying subbed regardless of a perceived timegate, making the timegate for sub time argument meaningless.

[plz delete account]

Azz from HeelVsbabyface is the worst interviewer, one time he said DKs (my class) were good when they weren't three years ago.


Seriously though, the lack of focus on class changes in favour of prioritising borrowed power tuning knobs has me really worried Ion's "no more big changes" was pr code for "don't expect anything but numbers tweaks".

Blood and UDK were among the top.
Blood as a tank was pretty good, and UDK as a mixed use DPS was pretty good.
Azz is still a complete moron tho.

[goldentforce]

1. Little sad about class changes not being in works but understandable. They have to give a full picture for the best possible feedback. As long as they acknowledge there are issues (and not just at the extremes of mage/spriest/feral) that they are willing to give the time all good.

2. People seem a little confused, morgan announced that they were working towards a mode with no player power rewards given that you can spam more and play with friends with rewards like cosmetics. This is what people wanted, the option to play the content as much as they want if they enjoy it. This is good, and not blizzard gating it behind content you don't want to do (even though we don't even know if open world content will be as bad as bfa). Don't see much negative here they are trying to do what players want.

3.When preach asked about the covenant abilities and balance the answer was ok saying they know the tools players can have, but unless they hit it absolutely perfect, the hinted at worry of preach is a mechanic were something like the venthy tp makes an immensely difficult mechanic trivial and everyone has to reroll. Have to wait and see.

4.With the gcd brought up again, it seems very obvious that they are more willing to try and rework/remove abilities instead of take them off the gcd when it comes to cd's. as long as the dev time is put in to solve every instance, its at least workable but the philosophy here seems to be something they are willing to die for. When it comes to utility/defensives they are prob more open, but again they can try to rework abilities. (i.e sloot said when he brought up hand of protector ion said if its off gcd then it can't be used on other people).

5. Them primarily focusing on class abilities instead of spec abilities for torghast is probably one of the more upsetting answers. A lot of specs don't have the same level of cross over such as the druid example preach brought up. The abilities a bear uses is very different to a balance druid, torghast should imo create unique playstyles and interactions unique to the bear, at least to a significant degree. If not torghast can get really dull where a majority of the factors across you class is shared by the specs, so a lot of unique qualities of torghast feel the same across runs of different specs. It just seems unneeded when the argument for this to exist is SL focuses and boosting up the class and not the spec. That doesn't mean every piece of content has to be class first. I can't see how variety in torghast hurts anyone when thats a core part of rogue like runs. Only thing I can see if dev time being an issue here cause the philosophy seems weak.

6. Preach brought up a great point where a good portion of hybrid covenant abilities can seem dull and weak because they are trying to work for every aspect of the class. An ability like divine toll enhances something unique for all 3 specs, but ashen hallow is damage and healing, so there is an issue and a tough issue for the devs to solve. Another example is vesper totem vs chain harvest, where vesper totem has 3 instances of damage and 3 instances of healing where the player has control of which situations to use and to get both benefits out of it as a choice they have to make, whereas chain harvest is just healing and damage on one cast, and is imo less unique. Hopefully with feedback the more dull ones (and even worse cases like kindred spirits for druids) can be made as great as some the best examples but is hard.

Great interview and a lot of nerd stuff about encounters in here which was great to hear from morgan, as well as philosophy which is great to have insight into on how they make decisions. Understandable that some people might of not cared about this stuff, but I enjoyed it, and a lot of concerns and questions of players were answered as well. much love to morgan and preach for making this happen.

[LordVargK]

Fun mode with no rewards could be also a third option but I fear only 1% of player base will be interested in a norewards mode.

I think that depends on how expensive an entry into Torghast will be. If its pretty expensive, then I imagine that many players would want to train before using their valuable entry.

[Saltysquidoon]

1. Little sad about class changes not being in works but understandable. They have to give a full picture for the best possible feedback. As long as they acknowledge there are issues (and not just at the extremes of mage/spriest/feral) that they are willing to give the time all good.

*snip*

6. Preach brought up a great point where a good portion of hybrid covenant abilities can seem dull and weak because they are trying to work for every aspect of the class. An ability like divine toll enhances something unique for all 3 specs, but ashen hallow is damage and healing, so there is an issue and a tough issue for the devs to solve. Another example is vesper totem vs chain harvest, where vesper totem has 3 instances of damage and 3 instances of healing where the player has control of which situations to use and to get both benefits out of it as a choice they have to make, whereas chain harvest is just healing and damage on one cast, and is imo less unique. Hopefully with feedback the more dull ones (and even worse cases like kindred spirits for druids) can be made as great as some the best examples but is hard.

I'm more then a little sad about the lack of spec changes, in BFA most specs feel like worse versions of legion specs and in SL they're going to feel worse again at launch because you'll be losing the traits and essences. Specs need work and if they're only going to do that type of work during alphas then it need to be a priority not constantly taking a back seat to all this borrowed power tuning knob nonsense.

As for the covenant abilities, it's just going the be the nature of the beast for the 'super hybrid' classes. The ability has to work for dps, tanks and healing, it's not so much a problem for tank/dps abilities because tanking and dps are simply more closely related then healers.
There's only so many ways to skin a cat and if you have to skin a cat three ways with one button that button's obviously going to have a less defined fantasy as a result.

[goldentforce]

I'm more then a little sad about the lack of spec changes, in BFA most specs feel like worse versions of legion specs and in SL they're going to feel worse again at launch because you'll be losing the traits and essences. Specs need work and if they're only going to do that type of work during alphas then it need to be a priority not constantly taking a back seat to all this borrowed power tuning knob nonsense.

Yeah personally I'm against so much power and class choices being tied to borrowed power and would prefer spec overpasses especially to talent trees every xpac to classes feel fresh whether in new talents, some baselining where applicable, improvements to talents so that they compete better,etc. then making of borrowed power but as long as they do the passes after, its at least acceptable. Just not bfa where the borrowed power system was failing internally, in addition to gcd making many specs terrible to play, and them having to do quicks passes over several specs to bandage some issues but also not giving fair time to the ones that did get some fixes, with others getting zero fixes to their issues (enchance). important to be skeptical but they did say they have specs on the radar. My issue is they recognize big issued specs like dps druids, shadow, mages but what about the other specs that also have pain points. Sure there are specs that are good enough but there are definitely many that have problems especially in talents. Don't want them to say well theres one game changing build for a spec that works so its good enough for now (frost dk as an example).

[JacobMarley]

You'd probably be able to get your head around it if you played M+ in Legion. All you did was stack up as much trash as possible and blow ALL your CDs at once while interrupting everything with Arcane Torrent (almost like rounding it all up and stacking rogues/dhs/uhdk). Fun gameplay... if you're a zoomer with zero patience and Fortnite is your life.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know about that. I appreciate that’s pretty dull but I’ll also tell you my experience of the GCD change as a PVPer which perhaps you haven’t experienced.

Say you have someone in a tricky spot in PvP they’re on 30% hp and they’re getting healed. In the past you could pop say.... Avatar to go for a kill or increase pressure. There’s a 2 second window where you’re not actually doing any damage which is plenty of time for someone to be picked up to, say, 50% at which point you won’t be able to get into execute range.

So actually using your CDs takes pressure off of the player you’re trying to finish off. That’s just 1 CD, most classes have 2 CDs to pop and it’s even worse for them in these cases.

[Tiwack]

Slightly worried they're spending way too much time on torghast for what it is and how interesting it ends up being...

[Arainie]

That’s interesting, I didn’t know about that. I appreciate that’s pretty dull but I’ll also tell you my experience of the GCD change as a PVPer which perhaps you haven’t experienced.

Say you have someone in a tricky spot in PvP they’re on 30% hp and they’re getting healed. In the past you could pop say.... Avatar to go for a kill or increase pressure. There’s a 2 second window where you’re not actually doing any damage which is plenty of time for someone to be picked up to, say, 50% at which point you won’t be able to get into execute range.

So actually using your CDs takes pressure off of the player you’re trying to finish off. That’s just 1 CD, most classes have 2 CDs to pop and it’s even worse for them in these cases.

I guess that feels bad when you're in that situation (and PvP is something I don't do that much of), but essentially you can also argue that you should have planned your CD usage together with your team/group based on how your opponents are playing and made sure your CDs are actually up and running by the time everyone goes ham. I'm not saying you're wrong either, some people prefer reactive gameplay and some prefer gameplay that rewards planning ahead, and me being in the second group certainly means I'm biased.

[Teroch]

Not in this context!

But Bards are roguelike in D&D, and that's what I'm sticking to!

Roguelike is a game genre, not "A Bard is Rogue-like class in D&D."

It's a game that's generally short, is meant to be played over and over, is different on each playthrough either due to RNG or player option choices, and often has personal practice and lessons learned from previous playthroughs as part of your game progression.

"Bards are Roguelike." Come on, dude.