WoW: Dragonflight: Season 1, Talents & Class Design – Interview with Morgan Day
The time leading up to the release of WoW: Dragonflight is stressful for developers. Some work overtime to get features done, others rush from one interview to the next. Just like Associate Game Director Morgan Day, the Liquid guild boss Maximum answered questions in an interview.
While we players rush from one event to another to level up our twinks, or from one world boss to the next to take advantage of the increased drop chance of rare mounts, Blizzard’s chief developers rush from one interview appointment to the next. Ion Hazzikostas in particular, who was available to us in the interview for WoW: Dragonflight, is a sought-after man. But his deputy, Associate Game Manager Morgan Day, is also more in interviews than at his desk these days.
In an interview with Maximum, the guild leader of Liquid, one of the best guilds in the world, it is of course mainly about the raid, loot and the design of the classes. But other things came up too. Why they chose focus testing this time in the beta, or why a mage talent is the direct result of a Battle for Azeroth failure.
We have summarized the most important findings of the interview for you.
Morgan Day in an interview with Liquid guild boss Max
- The decision to focus test was made early in development when discussing what to expect from the alpha and beta and what information to get.
- The socket stones in Korthia (shards of dominance) were actually intended as a long-term motivation. However, the developers had to recognize that there is a difference between an “option” and a reinforcement with no viable alternatives.
- Because of this, developers are paying more attention to giving players choices on how they want to spend their time. A first step is, among other things, the account-wide charging of the upcoming catalyst (animal set production). An adjustment to the Great Treasury is also in the pipeline to equip it with a kind of catch-up mechanism.
- The treasury between PvP and Mythic Plus is intentionally different. A system where the Mythic Plus reward is based on the M+ rating is something the devs don’t want. You want to keep players on the hardest content. Don’t make them run a lot of 2’s after a 20’s checker.
- Dragonflight Season 1 will have a bravery point cap. How high that will be has not yet been determined.
- Even if you can create animal sets, the raid should remain the easiest and, above all, fastest way to get the set parts.
- Talents will be closely monitored during and after release and adjusted as necessary. Without Borrowed Power, this is the easiest place to adjust the balance.
- Introducing new talents into the tree, the developers prefer to be careful. Because it quickly leads to bigger problems in the future.
- The decision between Utility and DpS is not good. Hence the two talent trees. However, the problem cannot always be completely avoided.
- There were technical reasons for limiting the talent loadouts. Ten felt like a good number for “normal” players. Hardcore players would have the know-how anyway and would use addons that bypass the limitation.
- The goal of season affixes in Mythic Plus dungeons was previously to require teams to make a change in route. Thanks to the new philosophy that all eight dungeons are exchanged in Season 2, this is no longer necessary. Instead, the new affix should be more playful and give the groups plenty of room to min-max.
- The developers know the Shadowlands patch cycle hasn’t been good and have a lot of plans to do better with Dragonflight.
- The BfA adjustment to put cooldowns on the global cooldown should actually devalue the macros a bit. However, it only resulted in us getting different macros and activating multiple cooldowns in a row before we could do any damage. This felt bad as the cooldowns initially did nothing. Arcane Surge The Mage’s is a direct response to this and an attempt at what it feels like when a cooldown has a high initial effect before it then has an amplifying effect over a longer period of time. So far it has been well received by players.
- The developers compare the classes as a whole in terms of balancing and design – not individual skills. Even if these have a similar effect, they should still feel different – for example god shield vs. ice block. If all abilities worked the same, all classes would be nearly the same.
Here you can also find the interview in video form (from 02:52:06)
What do you think of Morgan Day’s statements? As for the patch cycle in particular, we’d probably all agree that it wasn’t very good in Shadowlands. But how much trust can you have in Blizzard developers? “A lot of plans” is certainly good, but hopefully they had them for Shadowlands – and we know how it turned out.
Reference-www.buffed.de