Bay sits down with 5 amazing guests for a very special "Square Table Chat" about the state of the game, predictions for the future and what worked/didn't work throughout Warlords of Draenor. Mostly as a live think tank to go around about 6 major parts of the game.
Give the YouTube Description Box a peek for more details on all the amazing guests!
Preach Gaming - Nobbel the Noble - Qelric - Bellular Gaming - Alt Chat
Bay is going to be streaming tons of the Warlords of Draenor Alpha with the intent and focus on actually testing, going over, trying out and digging into each and every class to see what has changed. This allows chat room to join in with questions and discussions about their upcoming changes in a very positive manner.
However, Alpha is Alpha, or Beta is Beta, whatever...and things are bound to go tits up.
Phew! What a week it's been, Mobs and Minions. Get ready to talk not only about Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes, but about how the developers and community managers are redoing their own methods of getting feedback to and from the players.
This week, Final Boss interviews Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig, Technical Game Designer, and Jonathan "Zarhym" Brown, Senior Community Representative. If you can't find the answers to any questions about Mankrik's wife, just remember: #BlameCelestalon #NotZarhym.
Zarhym is one of many conduits between the community and the company. Community feedback is really important to Blizzard, and Zarhym is one of nine Community Representatives in the North American region of World of Warcraft. Players know these conduits primarily from the Community Managers (CMs), but it extends to an entire team of representatives, and every game and region has its own team.
A few tasks for a Community Representative include:
Bay notes that Mists of Pandaria was perhaps a big testing ground for this watching and gathering of player feedback, and our interviewees confirm that the new "patch novel" of notes is an evolving new way of communicating changes to the playerbase.
Celestalon is a Technical Game Designer, which means he deals with everything involving the rules of the game. He works on the systems design team with 6-7 other people, a central hub that connection just about every design department to the other departments. The design process at Blizzard is iterative and collaborative with all team members working together on the same projects.
Celestalon got started at Blizzard through the armor penetration stat controversy in Wrath of the Lich King, when players boasted they could build better spreadsheets than Blizzard could. Celestalon primarily deals in combat mechanics and core concepts of gameplay like talents or Draenor Perks, but he ends up talking with a lot of other game designers on other concepts like:
Ana notes that it's really cool as a player to see that Celestalon is very direct on Twitter with answering player questions about specific mechanics. Rumor has it that the sparkly dragon never sleeps, as you can often see him still tweeting away at 4am when he's not at work. He wishes that he could understand more languages for even more connection to the player community, but for now will have to rely on Google Translate. Celestalon believes that the interaction helps the community understand what the developers are going for when changes happen and how mechanics are designed.
The recent Warlords of Draenor patch notes are not just an alpha set for the game, but an alpha for a new way of presenting the patch notes themselves to the community. The developers and community representatives are trying for communicating more context behind changes to the players. The team is going for a hybrid between blog paragraphs and bullet points, composing the "patch novel" in both broad and narrow strokes of words.
If players have any feedback regarding how patch notes are presented to the players, be sure to leave them in the blog comments themselves, as primary patch note writer CM Rygarius is watching carefully over there.
Before we jump into the technical questions for Warlords of Draenor alpha notes, here's a quick recap of some upcoming blog posts from Blizzard about the new expansion:
Item squish
Celestalon thinks the item squish will go smoothly. They were anticipatory about the response with BlizzCon testing, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive or no notice of the difference at all. Bay notes that if the item squish works correctly, it'll be like music in the movies -- it should not distract from the experience of the action around you.
Healing in Warlords of Draenor
Don't let Zarhym hear you say the bad T-word, but we're going back to a style of healing similar to Cataclysm, but without the bad parts, like being out of mana (OOM) all the time. The design goal is to make healing less one-dimensional and more varied in its toolkit use. Tank healing should gain more of a focus with the toning down of smart heals.
Raidwide Defensive Cooldowns
The use of raid cooldowns to offset healing challenges is out of control now, and the developers want to bring the focus of the raid's health back to primarily healer territory. The goal is to create a standardized amount of raid defensive cooldowns, which involves mostly nerfing or removing existing cooldowns from DPS, with a few exceptions of adding cooldowns to other DPS (e.g. Amplify Magic for mages). Not every DPS spec will bring a defensive cooldown, but the goal is everybody will have something significant to bring to raid.
Garrisons
Bay says, "I'm excited to play a Warcraft base in my World of Warcraft." Zarhym's excited as well about the new expansion feature, but it's different from player housing as presented in other games. Garrisons will evolve as you level, tying into the story and quests, even altering how you experience some of the zones when you unlock certain buildings. The developers are keeping a close eye on whether and how Garrisons could affect progression raiders.
NEW! Melee & Positional requirements
As our hosts are two melee themselves, the favored question was: can we stop having bosses turn around so much? Celestalon replies: what if the boss turns around graphically, but it still mechanically counts as hitting it from behind?! Bay and Ana go wild with that answer! Fights with major boss-facing phases for melee can also have the 3% parry possibly turned off if it becomes that big of an issue.
Stats TL;DR
Stacking buffs: movement speed and snares
The rules for movement speed buffs and debuffs are clarified by Celestalon:
Draenor Perks are not actually an offshoot of Path of the Titans. Path is a different project that is still on the idea board somewhere. You get all of the perks by level 99.
Profession & Racial Bonuses
Profession bonuses got removed because the min/maxing was detracting from the fun of professions.
Celestalon says that the initial feedback from the racial changes was the obvious Alliance celebrations and Horde dismay, but as players thought about the imbalance and how the changes corrected some balance, the overall feedback became fairly positive. There are still some issues like Undead don't have any healer benefit, but the changes are still being looked over.
Zarhym lets us know that the new night elf racial is still sending controversial feedback to the developers. Both guests report that in today's world on live realms, the night elf racial can't exist, but in Warlords, the stats are closer together (remember: there aren't haste breakpoints anymore!), so the fluctuation isn't nearly so horrible.
Pruning spell effects
We'll talk about ability pruning below in the After Show, but one of the concerns right now by 25-man raiders, particularly melee, is the overload of spell effects that go on at any given time in a boss fight. Everything from the boss's animations to player cooldowns to guardian pets to healing effects to ground effects can really impact a raider's game by inserting video and input lag. Graphical (& audio!) overload is one of many reasons to prune abilities.
Initial Raids in Warlords of Draenor
Did you really think a show about high endgame raiding is going to skip over questions about the opening raiding tier in Warlords? If only we could get Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Encounter Designer, on the show for an episode.
But what about the class questions?!
Don't worry -- we decided to put all the class-related Q&A in the After Show, so take a look below!
What's up with removing reforging?
Players should get excited about items dropping. Previously, some pieces didn't matter because customization could make up for it.
Players can always tweak their gear with the original customization method: swapping pieces.
Is the lesser coin / bonus roll system staying?
Bonus rolls could be improved upon, but yes, they are sticking around.
What about the Valor Points upgrade system?
It's gone. It didn't work out as planned, since players got to a point with valor where you could always upgrade an item drop, and then raids would start a whole 6 levels higher than intended.
Then what are Valor Points going to be used for?
Celestalon dodged the question. That's for the itemization team!
Explain the primary stat switching on items when you change specs, please.
OK. Example: all plate items will have both strength and intellect listed. If you don't use strength, it will be greyed out for you; that is, you'll receive the intellect from the item instead. But if you switched to a spec that uses strength, or if you're a warrior and a holy paladin rolls on that item, you can see that the item is still valuable because it has both strength and intellect.
Celestalon adds this about stats and item enhancements:
What's up with tertiary stats?
Why is it bad for professions to give combat bonuses, but it's fine for racials to contribute to stats?
Racials feel like they should impact player power; they need to feel important to the gameplay in a roleplaying game (which is what World of Warcraft ultimately is, as an MMORPG). The game loses something if the racials are purely cosmetic.
How do moonkin feel / Will moonkin get many changes?
Let's talk mobility: what's so special about hunters?!
Movement for ranged DPS is important to the balanced between melee and ranged. Moving is supposed to be a DPS loss, which turns it into a meaningful decision. The point is to be skillful about movement, not overpowered.
Don't take away my iconic ability, bro!
The goal of pruning abilities is not to dumb down the game. The point is remove abilities that didn't matter, like stacking all your cooldowns together in one macro because why would you ever not use them all at once. There is mostly positive feedback from players over the abilities removed so far, with a few fervent exceptions. A main point players make is the loss of a gameplay feeling or a cosmetic that's been a class staple.
Current controversially removed abilities the devs are aware of:
Finally, Final Boss asks each guest what's thing they are most excited for in Warlords?
As always, Final Boss and its guests love to answer community questions at the end of the show. You can ask them via the website: http://finalboss.tv/askaboss/ - via Twitter: @finalbosstv #AskABoss & via Twitch Chat during the After Show!
Final Boss airs on Twitch.tv/FinalBossTV every Sunday at 1pmPST/4pmEST/10pmCET.
- Poneria
2013 © Bay Productions
World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment.
