The live Q&A with Lead Game Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas has ended. Check out the VoD or our summary of new/interesting information below.
- The addition of flight in 6.2.x instead of in 6.2 is because of development reasons. There are a bunch of bugs that need to be fixed now that flying will come to Draenor.
- All the reputations required for the Draenor pathfinder quests will be available at the same time. To get them to revered will take you about 3 weeks if you do the dailies in Tanaan every day.
- The solution for flying is seen as a blueprint for future content. So you’ll first only have ground mount access and then after playing the content you’ll earn flying. Of course they will have to see how it initially works out in patch 6.2.x.
- What to do with flying in Draenor was a difficult decision to make for the team. When 6.2 was on the PTR the team felt they had to make a final decision. Both within the community and in the development team there was a lot of discussion for both sides of the problem. “Never” was a big word.
- The reputations in 6.0 are not going to be defended. Originally they weren’t going to be in Draenor at all, but they were added for the Trading Post. The 6.2 reputation design is a lot more of a modern design for reputations.
- The idea behind the apexis dailies has promise but it didn’t pan out right. The idea was that you’d do different things such as killing mobs and destroying items in different areas. You’d be able to do different types of things to get progress for your daily. By removing quests entirely there was a lack of story, and the reward structure was not a success.
- In patch 6.2 there are more daily quests and the apexis crystals earn you more rewards. You’ll be able to upgrade items all the way to item level 695.
- They approached Garrisons making sure they rewarded you well as they were a core part of Draenor. A lot of systems tied into it because of that. Including outdoor systems. Even though there was content out in the world, the Garrison kept you in your Garrison as it rewarded stuff like profession items.
- They’re looking to do some Diminishing Returns on an account wide level for the gold earned via garrison missions. They’re going to do this because of the pressure players feel to maintain alts to earn a lot of gold via their alts for their mains.
- To get players out of the Garrison they’re putting rewards back into the world. For example Felblight needs to be looted instead of being earned via the garrison.
- The Shipyard is different in that you have less ships and the rewards mean more per naval mission. You won’t continually need to check back in your Shipyard to send ships on new missions.
- Garrisons are just tied to Draenor. You won’t bring it over to future expansions. However the core gameplay (a base, followers) might be taken into future expansions. It will not be exactly the same.
- The transition for 10 player heroic guilds to 20man mythic was certainly challenging. But there will always be guild that come and go. They still feel changing to the flexible structure and 20man mythic mode was a good idea. The 20man experience is better due to being able to tune specifically to just 20 players instead of 10 and 25, and then failing to balance them exactly the same.
- Having Mythic mode is justified, it inspires players to progress their character. Mythic design only takes 5% to 10% of the time to create raids.
- Timewalker dungeons are weekend events to make them more condensed events. You’ll be able to focus on quickly gearing alts for example. There’s also the context of where does timewalking fit in? Why would you do other Draenor dungeons if Timewalking gives you better loot? By keeping it limited it allows them to make Timewalker dungeons give higher item level rewards.
- Dungeons became irrelevant pretty quickly. It’s another regret of the developers. There was no reason to keep returning to the dungeons due to a lack of a reward system. Mythic dungeons are a way to salvage the dungeons themselves and keep them relevant. Mythic dungeons give 685 – 700 item level loot.
- They’re going to look for a way for dungeons to scale over time so that they still matter.
- They don’t see Timewalker dungeons as content instead of new dungeons. Timewalker dungeons are a feature that they’ve wanted to do for a while.
- On Demonology warlock nerfs: They have concerns about how Demonology plays mechanically as a spec. At the same time an increasing amount of warlocks felt like they were forced to switch to Demonology. They intend to change Demo mechanically in the future. Demo is still viable but it’s not the best. For now it’s Demo’s turn to be the worst spec.
- Ability pruning did not go too far. In some cases it did not go far enough. That does not mean they did not prune some abilities they shouldn’t have. Moving forward they’re looking to increase the fantasy of being your class. Being a fire mage, being a rogue.
- The game is less dominated by absorbs (healers) than in MoP. The problem is the niche of absorbs needs to be scaled back. Currently it feels like you need a disc priest + another healer. Absorbs also stop the fun of throughput healers, they stop the health bars dropping, which throughput healers want to fill back up.
- Professions will be changed in the future. In 6.2 you’ll get a lot more profession items from the daily cooldown and once again Felblight can only be obtained by going into the world.
- The duration of a (mythic) fight depends on the encounter. An encounter with the same mechanics through the entire fight should take 5 to 6 minutes. When there are phase changes you can expect them to be a bit longer. And then there’s the classic example of end boss fights with multiple phases and transitions, those will be 10+ minutes. Mythic Imperator did take too long.
- Is the game becoming too convenient? That’s a tricky question to answer. They don’t want inconvenience and nuisance to be the things that stop you. There are different risks and rewards. The random group finder helped you find a group a lot quicker and you didn’t have to stand in Stormwind for 90 minutes to find a group. But it did take away social aspects.
- For patch 6.1 there wasn’t a lot of time to get a lot of content in it. It might have been better to name it patch 6.0.5. The patch wasn’t meant to be a major content patch.
- On Tier 18 PvE and PvP art recoloring: Instead of it being a PvE and PvP set it’s a regular set and “elite” set. So that there’s a differentiation between the gear that’s the hardest to obtain and somewhat easier to obtain. Hence Mythic and Elite look the same with recoloring and the other sets look the same with recoloring.
End of Live Q&A