Duncan Jones: Way back when, the script that I was shown was obviously a pre-existing project that was worked on for a while, was very human eccentric, and my take was that the beauty of the game is that there are heroes on both sides.
Duncan Jones: The story is about, that in a conflict like this, there are reasons that go beyond good versus evil, a lot of it is about a situation that just doesn't seem to have any peaceful resolution.
Duncan Jones: Everyone wants to make the same kind of movie again, and I didn't want to do that. Some of you may know that i'm a gamer from a long time and the opportunity to take a true world building project, on this kind of scale and start it from scratch, not do a sequel, and actually be there from the beginning, I just wanted to do it.
Duncan Jones: I wanted that build up, we have seen an awful lot of films that they spend, you know, fifteen, twenty, twenty five minutes, watching epic battles, and not actually being invested in any of the individual participants, and I wanted to have something where you really cared about an individual and how it builds up for them personally.
Duncan Jones: For me personally it was always about making a film which stood in its own right. The biggest challenge for us, isn't about getting Warcraft fans to come and see this film, it's opening the minds of people who haven't played Warcraft before and make them feel comfortable, that this is a movie that they're really going to enjoy even if they know nothing of the Warcraft world.
Watcher
Obviously we've been experiencing significant technical issues. We've been trying to diagnose them, but they're beyond the scope of anything that can be addressed in the short-term (infrastructure/back-end issues, as opposed to just a simple code bug that can be fixed). As such, we're canceling today's tests. They'll be rescheduled.
I realize it's frustrating to carve time out of your schedule and then be unable to actually play. If there were anything we could do to prevent this, we would, but an alpha/beta environment is inherently less stable and polished because of how things are changing constantly, both in obvious player-facing ways but also in terms of behind-the-scenes tech. I apologize, but I honestly can't say that it won't happen again - it might. The disclaimers that accompany each raid testing announcement aren't just empty words.Watcher
Thanks for the great feedback so far, and lots of useful data. I haven't heard much about the Volcanic affix - any thoughts on how that one played out when it was active?
In the next build, Necrotic should stack a bit more slowly, but now also reduces absorbs taken as well as heals. Decay seems like it's probably more of a nuisance than an engaging challenge right now, yes? We're still thinking through possible changes with that one. Otherwise, the other affixes seem to have played out largely as envisioned, in terms of modifying gameplay.
We're keeping an eye on melee-unfriendliness concerns. We specifically avoided making any affixes that felt particularly punitive to melee players; it may be an issue with some specific Halls of Valor mechanics. It's fine if some bosses, or even some dungeons, are less favorable for certain specs or classes; it's not acceptable if the same specs are at a disadvantage in most or all of them, though.
Not much is likely to change in the next alpha build, but the next steps after that will be porting this system to the other 8 dungeons (Violet Hold will not be part of the keystone system - wave events and timers don't really play well together in a satisfying way).
Bolster in its current state where it effects boss encounter adds is a little bit more situational but leads to the same problem in fights where there is no way to avoid killing the adds to progress/survive the encounter. The most obvious examples of this are Helya and Cordana.