Dev Interview - Hellfire Citadel is the Final Planned Raid of Warlords of Draenor

[chaud]

Dev Interview - Hellfire Citadel the Final Raid of Warlords of Draenor
MamyTwink had the opportunity to talk to Cory Stockton (@mumper) recently. We have recapped the more interesting parts below, but watch the full thing for more context!

Expansions and Raids

• Hellfire Citadel is currently planned to be the last raid of the expansion.
• It wraps up things and it is hard to beat Archimonde as a final boss.
• Players saw Tanaan Jungle at the start of the expansion and are wrapping back around to it now.
• Anything can happen between now and whatever the team does next, but Hellfire Citadel is the pinnacle of where players are getting to.
• There isn't anything to announce about future patches, but part of that comes down to how Patch 6.2 plays out. How far players progress in Hellfire Citadel and Tanaan Jungle will give the team an idea of how long the content will last.
• Some expansions had four big patches, some had three, Warlords had two big patches with Patch 6.1 and 6.2. As the team gets closer to hitting the goal of a small gap between expansions there will be less large patches in each expansion.
• The team isn't happy with players having to wait a year for new content.
• Long waits aren't something they ever want to do, but the team was working on the new expansion and they weren't going to release it until it is at the right quality level. That isn't an excuse for the long wait, but it is better to wait two more months to have a great expansion rather than releasing it earlier and ending up with many issues.
• Farahlon was a cool idea, but it didn't really fit into the story being told.
• Tol Barad didn't make it in the game until Cataclysm, but the team was talking about adding it during Wrath of the Lich King. It just didn't fit the story until then.

Garrisons

• The Mage Tower has felt underpowered for a long time. The power it offers in terms of completing naval missions may not be exactly where they want it yet.
• Similar to Battle Pets, followers don't need more levels. Followers are content themselves, so more content is added by adding more followers and missions rather than requiring more upgrades.
• Overall, the team is happy with garrisons. There are things that they would have done differently though.
• Moving forward they will look at the parts of the garrison system that worked well to see how they can offer new gameplay that is exciting.
• Building a building, assigning a follower to the building, and sending followers on missions felt new and fresh, but in the end players figured out how to optimize it.
• The team wants to continue to engage players in new ways, so not every part of garrisons will move forward, but the things that players really liked might.

Legendary Items

• The team is currently making legendary items that everyone has access to, but that doesn't mean they will never go back to the old model for specific classes. They are just trying something different for now.
• The concept right now is to have an item that is updated with every patch and then reward something really good at the end of the expansion. Earning it requires playing through all of the content in an expansion.
• Earning the legendary item right now feels good, but it doesn't have the same feeling as the old legendary items.
• The journey of earning the legendary item is on each character, so making the item account bound rather than character bound is unlikely.
• Raids are not tuned around everyone having the legendary ring. The team can estimate how many people will have the ring on average when the raid comes out and then tune the raid around that. If the tuning is off, it can be hotfixed right away.

Misc

• The WoW Token has worked out well. It lets players with extra gold safely buy game time for gold and players with extra money but no time safely purchase gold from other players.
• Mythic dungeons need a little bit of tuning, but overall the tuning is sufficiently challenging.
• Completing 5 Timewalking Dungeons could give players a Normal difficulty cache in the future in addition to the extra Bonus Roll.
• The team would love to do more things with Gul'dan in the future.

Mythic Hellfire Citadel Progression
Method is moving quickly today, already at 7/13 before the day is over. Midwinter and Paragon are close behind at 6/13. So far nine guilds have killed Kilrogg, putting them at 5/13. You can keep up with the latest progress on WoWProgress, our forum thread, and Manaflask.

[DesMephisto]

#FailLordsOfNOMore

This is entirely bullshit, 6.1 is a big patch, lol.

[Gatsbybutters]

Warlords had two big patches with Patch 6.1 and 6.2

My eyes rolled in the back of my head so hard I can't finish the rest. Well shit...

*edit* eyes fixed themselves. The whole things bullshit,
tldr: "fucking stupid players, it's your fault you can't play our game the way we want you to play it, and you're all a bunch of assholes for playing the game optimally. Eat dicks" <3 blizz.

[rejer13]

So this is the last big patch before a new exp?

[Backjauer]

I'm disappointed. means we pay more for less overall. WoD was more expensive than previous expansions yet offered the fewest large patches.

Bullshit.

I'd rather have more large patches and longer between expansions than one and a half big patches.

[Arbs]

6.1 was a big patch?!

*Grabs Popcorn, this gunna be good.

[Jeina]

Welp, looks like 18+ months of HFC.

[merex760]

Yeah, that 6.1 comment is going to fly well with people. I'm done until some drastic changes are made. FF14 has my full attention.

[Whiteboard]

Twitter integration and selfies are apparently as big a content patch as a raid in dev eyes.

[raps]

I've played through all the crazyness that was this expansion, but I guess WoW is over for me. 2 raid tiers just isn't enough for me to buy an expansion and play. There are too many other options out there, and this game is turning into something that feels more and more generic.

[Lubsin]

Twitter integration and selfies are apparently as big a content patch as a raid in dev eyes.

lol. You forgot to mention the bloodelf character model update!

[Coldfire989]

Man they really have zero clue at Blizzard or they dont care anymore or both.

[sololux]

So we get Grom on the cover. Grom maining the cinematic, and we get Archimonde as the final boss whom we haven't even hardly heard of in the in-game cinematics and story?? sounds like a lazy cop-out to me.

[Collected]

Reading between the lines of those points above it sounds very close to a confirmation that 7.0 will arrive before November 2016. It has to.

[Backjauer]

Welp, looks like 18+ months of HFC.

More than likely. So not only do we have less content implemented during the expansion, I expect we're still going to get a shitty long wait anyway.

[MikeBogina]

It wraps up things and it is hard to beat Archimonde as a final boss.

This patch didn't wrap up anything. So many unresolved stories.... I think im done if this is seriously how Blizzard is gonna go about their game.

[Thelxi]

They delayed firelands an entire patch because "people had not finished progressing" on t11. I think they are just setting up the excuse for at least another year of HFC. Bad news.

[Fanuilos]

"Well we could deliver this content, but we're not going to." Seems to be the main message from Blizz these days.

[lunchbox2042]

Here comes a year of HFC. Fewer patches does nothing to reduce the length of time between final tier and next expansion.

[Deleted]

Hope you are ready for 18 months of farming the same lfr over and ooover again...