The Raids and Dungeons Live Developer Q&A will be starting soon. We’ll be liveblogging the Q&A in this post!
- Realm first titles are not likely to come back. Realm first achievements moved away from personal achievements and went over to guild achievements.
- Gear progression is a core factor in progression, over time it will allow you to continue to progress if you’re stuck.
- There’s no troll dungeon in the next patch. There are no trolls in Draenor, they are all Azerothian.
- They’re going to stick to needing 2 tanks in general for raiding. Sometimes you’ll need 3 on mythic. If they would increase the number of required tanks then guilds would have to recruit for them right away, just so that they can raid again.
- They do not feel BRF normal/heroic is not overtuned for smaller size raids.
- There is nothing specific to announce for new quests from the inn from your garrison.
- They’ve struggled to define the use of Heroic Dungeons, gearing up past 630 ilvl gear is very easy without even doing dungeons. They realize it’s a valid concern. You can still do challenge modes. The gear the daily CM quest rewards was updated in 6.1 to stay relevant.
- Tuning 3 different difficulties has turned out well for the development team. In Highmaul the progression curve felt good on the different difficulties. Heroic progression focused guilds did not do normal Highmaul for long.
- There are many changes to CMs this season: The reality is that the lack of collision before 6.1 were bugs. Players were not supposed to be able to skip content like they did. They’re still evaluating what to do with the CM ranks and whether or not the collision should be removed again.
- The representation of tanks within raiding has become more stable. In high-end guilds tanks tend to reroll to min-max their composition, but the guilds still vary in their tank class usage.
- In mythic mode there are a couple of encounters that are designed around having 3 tanks. Due to having the possibility with offspecs and gear working for multiple specs it makes it a lot more reasonable to design such encounters.
- They moved away from just recoloring raid gear on different levels so that there was a differentiation between the difficulties and their rewards. It also gives players an incentive to try harder level content.
- LFR gives better loot than heroic dungeons due to multiple factors: The one per week lockout and time commitment are two examples. They also still want to reward players for participating in LFR. By adding the reward more players are also interested in running LFR. Without it, the queue times could be longer.
- They design raid bosses around heroic difficulty. After testing and tuning it they start thinking about how they can increase the difficulty for mythic, and reduce it for normal raiding. Sometimes after designing a fight they realize they designed a mythic fight and then reduce the difficulty for heroic and then for normal difficulty.
- Their goal is diversity, not perfect balance on every encounter. If they would go for perfect balance they would have to remove certain class abilities and make encounters more boring. However they feel that for the overwhelming majority of players it does feel balanced. On average over the entire raid zone the classes and specs are equal. When it feels like it makes it a whole lot harder to do a fight without a certain spec for regular guilds, that’s the point they take another look at the fight or spec.
- The goal of garrison missions and the gear they offer is to always offer useful gear for the type of content that you play. This means that if you’ve killed heroic bosses and you get a few mythic pieces of gear, it’s ok.
- They are very happy with how the LFG tool has been used. They are going to continue to look at improving the system. (More filter options were asked about)
- They are happy with how the encounters have turned out in Blackrock Foundry.
- The kick player system is something they are looking at. A lot of the rules were added when the dungeon LFG system first went in patch 3.x. Since then a lot of changes have happened within the system. Now that loot is personal and there is no reason to kick someone during the fight (to steal loot), they can revise such rules.
- There is no reason not to use personal loot right now, it is as equally rewarding as group loot/master looting. They are looking at improving the way personal loot feels and plays.
- A community created raid would be interesting… but definitely not likely. They take pride in putting blizzard values into the design of their raids.
- Their goal is to reduce the time between the final raid tier and the next expansion. Whatever the number of final raid tiers is, is determined by that goal.
- The point of warforged gear, just like bonus sockets and tertiary stats remains the same. It’s an extra bonus, so even if you’re farming bosses you wouldn’t normally need loot from, you might get extra bonuses from rekilling bosses that otherwise would not provide any more useful loot.
- They might make alternatives to just elevators in dungeons/raids.
- They will work on providing meaningful loot tables in LFR.
- The timewalking feature is something they are working on. They might be able to talk about it more in the not too distant future.
- They don’t think raid cooldowns are too strong. They are not seeing guilds stacking certain classes for cooldowns.
- They are keeping an eye on success rates on different types of groups in BRF. But players have to keep in mind that normal BRF fights are tuned around having normal HM gear.
- Blizzard enjoys the current community driven race for world first. They would like to leave it as is.
- Mythic dungeons are still an interesting idea. They have nothing concrete but they still are looking for a way to make dungeons interesting later in an expansion.
Q&A has ended.