MrGM Interview with Brian Holinka - New Class/Race Combinations in Dragonflight!
MrGM recently had an interview with Brian Holinka with some great new information.
- Evoker Class
- Utility may include Blessing of the Bronze, an ability that lessens the cooldown of party/raid members' movement abilities.
- Evokers provide great off-spec healing utility.
- Evokers use a resource called Essence, which regenerates on its own over time.
- Racials for the Dracthyr include a Wing Buffet cone knockback and a Tail Swipe knock-up.
- Chosen identity is the racial that allows them to switch into their visage form.
- Changing between the Dragon and Visage form will likely look like Wrathion's switch with the puff of smoke.
- The Preservation healing spec is supposed to fill a new niche, providing good AoE clumped healing and preparing for damage with time magic.
- You can hold a fully charged empowered cast for up to 3 seconds before it will cast on its own.
- The design philosophy of the empowered casts is to provide thought to the payoff such as longer HoTs/DoTs duration or more targets hit. The goal isn't to have you always want to charge it to full as that is essentially just a long cast-time ability.
- Soar is the ability that lets you hover in the air for a duration while casting abilities on the move.
- The team is still working out how to provide Evokers will talent points during the starting zone, but might just give you abilities and points from questing in a manner similar to the Demon Hunter/Death Knight starting zones.
- New Race/Class Combinations
- The team wants to move towards a world where the race of a character is not an inhibitor to what class you can play.
- Rogues, mages, and priests will be available for all races on launch of 10.0
- Classes that require more work with custom forms and animations will most likely be thought of and added over time.
- Classes that have strict lore adherence will likely need more set-up.
- Talent Points
- A Sharing talent builds feature for outside of the game will likely not be available at launch.
- The new talent system is laying the ground work and will be iterated on based on player feedback and how they use the system.
- The goal is to make some talent trees available to look at via blogs before Alpha.
- Talent trees will require a certain amount of points spent before accessing certain gates to move down the tree.
- The final point in the tree isn't always the most exciting ability in the tree.
- It is still being iterated on whether interrupts will be in the talent trees.
- The abilities earned in Exile's Reach will remain the same and not accessed through the talent trees.
- Abilities like Pickpocket and Eyes of the Beast will not be part of the talent trees, but just given in the spell book.
- Specializations are still a choice to make at the end of Exile's Reach. Picking one unlocks the specialization talent tree.
- Certain Covenant abilities will be added in different places on the talent trees, allowing for situations where you can have multiple Covenant abilities at once.
- The team is still iterating on what abilities to bring over from Covenants into the talent trees.
- Legendary abilities and popular passives from multiple expansions will find their way back into the talent trees.
- New flashy active abilities will not be very prominent in the talent trees as of now.
- PvP
- New Brawls will be added overtime in Dragonflight.
- World PvP areas such as Blackrook Hold or the Highmaul Coliseum from Draenor might be added as new Brawls.
- The PvP team has grown quite a bit recently.
- Entry level PvP gear will be crafted by Professions. It will have a high PvP item level, but low PvE item level.
- There will Dragonriding customization from PvP.
- The Gladiator mount will be a custom Dragonriding dragon mount.
- Quickfire Section
- You can only make a Dracthyr Evoker initially by purchasing Dragonflight.
- The first Dracthyr Evoker on an account with Dragonflight has no restrictions.
- You can only make additional Dracthyr Evokers as one per realm, and you must have a level 50 character on that realm first.
- Dracthyr are their own racial mount.
- Gladiator Stance for Warriors is likely not returning. It caused problems by being in a tank role, but actually being a DPS through a talent.