Wowhead Patch 10.1.5 Interview with Ion Hazzikostas - "Mandatory" Raid Specs, Chase Items, Rogue Rework

Live Posted 2023/07/05 at 5:00 PM by Squishei

Brief Summary

There are no current plans to adjust the acquisition or power of the Legendary Evoker weapon, but they are aware of the concerns from the community. There is a possible soft-tease of a future Legendary in this answer.

The goal for optimal Mythic raid comps is one of every class. They want to stay away from giving all classes "Mandatory Raid buffs" and use other utility or factors such as Grips from DKs.

More support classes are possible in the future if the community enjoys this one.

The Rogue Rework was moved to a later Patch. Be patient with Blizzard, especially with them trying to communicate their plans ahead of time, things will change.

Fewer tier pieces will start dropping from bosses next week as the Catalyst is out. 1 Tier Piece and 3 Non-Tier pieces on Mythic difficulty, but it affects all difficulties.

If it feels like you can truly ignore an affix and it's someone else's job, then they don't want that level of affix disparity in a group.

Blizzard understands that there are players who have spent millions of gold on the BMAH for T3 and if another way were to exist to get T3, it should take significant investment, dedication and gold to get it.

What Sword?

Legendary Evoker WeaponThe Legendary Evoker weapon was a great surprise when it first was revealed, but many players are now frustrated by the acquisition. Are there any plans to address this?We don't have anything specific planned for 10.1.5, but it's something that if we were to make adjustments, hotfixes are a reasonable avenue there. It's something the team is talking about a lot. There's a lot of lessons learned, and good feedback. Trying to figure out how to situate and what the role of an exciting Legendary weapon can be in a modern game, given player psychology and community expectation around it. We want to still continue to chase those sorts of cool thematic surprises where it makes sense story-wise, where it feels like a cool hook for a specific class, or a set of classes that haven't had one in a little bit, but at the same time are mindful that what starts out as a cool surprise for some people can over time turn into a source of frustration and become almost an expectation. We definitely don't want to be in a world where down the line months from now, if you're applying to Mythic guilds for the next tier, you feel like you need to have this Legendary to be competitive or to have a shot at being recruited, and that's out of your control. We know those are all concerns. No specific answers to announce right now, but it's a hot topic of discussion and I think lessons learned from this and how we handle it, would inform how we frame any future Legendary efforts down the line.Right now the Legendary Evoker weapon rivals item level 480 weapons. Are there any plans to adjust the power of the weapon in Patch 10.1.5 or in the future?Nothing specific I can announce right now. We look at a range of options, we often reign in the power of items from prior seasons like the Annulet to make sure they're not just continuing to stay too centrally important in later seasons. I think philosophically though, Legendaries may be an exception to that to some extent. Back in Shadowlands, you had the Sylvanas bow, you were using that for quite some time. It's tricky when it starts to feel like an expectation to be competitive and that is out of your control. We understand that. Augmentation EvokerAugmentation has some brand new log hooks allowing the damage to be allocated back to the Evoker. Are there any plans to implement these for spells like Windfury Totem, Chaos Brand, or Power Infusion?Not currently. Part of the key difference with Augmentation is those other examples you gave are not specs or classes that are balanced around that contribution. They are tuned independently and that is just a perk. If you have Mystic Touch, you might have multiple sources in a group and attribution becomes tricky then. It's not quite apples to apples in terms of the comparison. We understood that for Augmentation Evoker, both from a parsing perspective and trying to have clarity of who is playing the best at the high end, but also from a broader community perspective of just understanding what the Augmentation Evoker is contributing to the group, and being to break that out and quantify it was going to be important. Whereas with a Demon Hunter, you know what they're contributing to the group and then Chaos Brand is a perk on top of that, it's not quite the same. We'll see how this goes and having some of these hooks in place, we work with Warcraft Logs on them and it may be something we explore more in the future, but nothing else at this point. With the addition of Augmentation, there's been a lot of concern about "mandatory" or "raid-locked" specs in Mythic raid comps with some specs like Hunters and Shamans fighting for the very few remaining spots. Do you plans for this or do you feel like it's fine?It's something that we're certainly mindful of and pay attention to. Our goal for Mythic raiding is for the best composition, the optimal composition, the ones that we see at the high end, have one of every class out of the 20 slots available. When we're seeing deviation from that, we're going to look at why and ask what we can adjust to change it. We've tried to be resistant to every class bringing a unique "mandatory" buff that rigidly forces itself, some do, but for others, it's other types of utility or unique strengths that just make it a natural fit where just, of course you want a Death Knight somewhere for grips because that is just such a valuable tool over the course of a raid as a whole, that having one on your roster makes sense. Whether it's added or tweaking tools like those or in some cases, looking at numbers or looking at other types of buffs people might bring, our goal is to try to maintain that balance in representation and then give people flexibility; give raid leaders in groups, and give pugs flexibility in where they spend those remaining slots. If Augmentation goes well, could we see more Support classes in the future?Possibly. Who knows what the future holds in terms of entirely new classes or anything like that. It's unlikely that we would change existing specs to have this functionality. Even if historically, Enhancement Shaman may have signed up 15 years ago for this type of gameplay, if you're playing that spec today or in recent years, you're playing it because you like Shaman, you like playing melee DPS, you like doing big numbers as melee DPS. We wouldn't want to change that out from under people, but we're excited to explore new types of interactions and cooperation between players and as we think to new editions of the game going forward, if this is successful and players are telling us, they wish there were more flavors of it, like they wish they could be a melee version of this instead of just ranged, that's something that we would look to find a home for. Classes and Rogue ReworkIn 10.1.5 it was announced Rogue Reworks would be coming, what happened to those?That's not gonna be in 10.1.5 at this point, if that wasn't clear. We're planning it in a later patch coming up soon. Ultimately, and this is part of the peril of announcing stuff ahead of time - stuff changes, stuff moves around just based on... honestly something as simple as the person flagged to do the work may have real life situations come up, be out on an extended illness, and then we have to reshuffle things. Often it's better to wait for the right person, who's the expert to be able to do that work, than to have someone else pick it up, who may not be as familiar with it. We make those moves all the time, but with our faster patch cadence this time around, this expansion, we don't want to delay entire patches for small individual pieces, so we're going to be a bit more nimble in moving things around. Understandable that Rogues were led to expect something are understandably frustrated waiting for something that isn't coming yet, but I ask the community's patience and understanding - we want to be transparent and try to communicate upfront as to what our plans are, but it's the nature of the beast that maybe 10-15% of those plans are going to change. We'd like to keep communicating them, but also set the expectation that until you see something in the patch or PTR notes as a definitive part of what's coming, it's not set in stone.How do you feel like the additional 25% health increase went? Are there any plans to do that again in the future? I think well overall. There's obviously an initial period of adjustment but in terms of how the tier has played out overall, healing and HPS to player health and damage intake ratios seem to be overall in a healthier place. I don't think this is something we're currently planning on repeating, though as always we're going to keep an eye on combat time, time-to-kill, all that. As we might have mentioned when we rolled this out for Season 2, really in retrospect, we should have done this at the start of Dragonflight because looking at what the Talent system did to the game, and comparing Shadowlands numbers and Dragonflight numbers, the sheer amount of survivability on the defensive side and throughput on the healing side that got baked in to our classes just by having the talent system and giving people all of these tools that sometimes they couldn't have had simultaneously, it really just increased the power of healing in the game drastically. We realized that late in Dragonflight beta and kind of did the math and were comparing numbers and the size of the numbers were scary. The math was leading us to think that we should be increasing health by 60 or 70% and so soon before ship, we frankly just got scared. That's a very big change to make and so we split the difference and what we saw by the end of Season 1 was we really should have just done the whole 60-70% up front. What Season 2 represented was going the rest of the way there, but the way everything scales, the way our game is built, is just people getting more stats, throughput and health should increase at roughly similar rates, and so just because everybody is getting 30% - 40% more stats across the board, that shouldn't move things back out of whack, particularly without secondary "borrowed power" systems or other things that're probably auxiliary growth. We think we should be good, but as always, we're going to keep an eye on the numbers, keep an eye on player feedback. It's always telling when healers are telling us and healer influencers are making videos saying "Hey we think healing is too powerful right now." That will always catch our attention.Warlock pet customization coming in Patch 10.1.5 looks great. Will we see something similar coming for other pet classes in the future?That's certainly something we are open to, really looking at all vectors of visual customization; both for players themselves, their pets and minions. Warlock pets are such an iconic central part of the class, but they don't have as much customization control over, unlike Hunters that can choose from everything in the world to tame, that felt like a natural place to start. We've already heard a lot of great community feedback and suggestion as about where else we might apply this approach, and we'll see what the future holds there.What was the reason behind popular and iconic pets like the Observer and Water Elemental being removed?Those are slightly different situations. Observer was primarily about visual clarity. It was changing your Felhunter into something that looks nothing like a Felhunter, but has the same functionality. From a perspective of players trying to understand the game and what the classes around you can do, and what to expect when you see a pet summon - this thing looked a whole lot like a Darkglare but was actually a Felhunter. That said, we want to find ways down the line and hopefully in the near future to reintroduce a way to have that appearance, but probably not as a Felhunter - it's just too large a transformation in respect to gameplay purposes.

Water Elemental is a little different in that it's not totally gone, just summoned now as part of using Icy Veins as opposed to a standalone pet. The standalone pet summon had a very low pick rate to begin with, and thinking through interactions - is this a class we're trying to shoehorn into being a pet class, as opposed to just a pure ranged caster? Most players prefer to be the pure ranged caster, as we could see from the talent selection. Water Elemental is there as part of the original Warcraft III-era fantasy of what a Mage in Azeroth can bring to bear, and I think moving it to Icy Veins keeps it as part of that fantasy, makes it more impactful when it's around, but crystalizes Mage as not a pet class in line with how players have largely been playing it.Rewards and LootBefore Season 2 began, it was announced that the number of tier pieces that directly dropped from bosses would slowly be reduced. Is this happening in 10.1.5 or soon?That's planned to come in Patch 10.1.5, and it sounds on the fact of it like less tier dropping which sounds like a nerf, but obviously after the Catalyst is out, what we quickly realize is that it becomes the best route to obtaining those pieces and actually seeing a loot slot occupied by a set piece feels worse than other items that you might still be chasing. That's a change we're making at this point mid-season, and we're definitely going to think about whether there's a more systemic way to achieve these results going forward. It's always going to be a bit of a cyclical problem, as up front in the first few weeks of the season you're excited to see those set pieces, but once the Catalyst has been out for a few weeks, that changes - there should be a way for us to harmonize that a bit more than having to make a mid-season hotfix each time.And you're saying this comes out next week with the launch of 10.1.5?That's my understanding, yeah, that's the intent.So is it one tier piece, or are we just straight up getting zero at this point ?No it should be 1, like a 1:3 split kind of thing.How have you felt the Upgrade system has gone, and why did you add the Myth track in 10.1.5?We initially rolled out the upgrade system thinking conservatively. We wanted to make sure that the very high end of our gear range was something you still had to earn by doing the hardest content, and we wanted some safeguards there, but what that ended up doing was maybe counterintuitively devaluing that gear, because upgraded Heroic gear could get so close to its item level that we were hearing from players that it didn't feel worth spending the time to do Mythic raiding if you were only getting a 3-6 item level upgrade, even from later bosses. Adding that Myth tier is kind of making sure, reinforcing that the best gear available should be coming from doing the hardest content, not the second hardest and upgrading. That said, overall, as we move ahead to the next season and graduating out of this gear, we have to make sure that the upgrade system isn't overshadowing ongoing motivations - definitely some things to look at in terms of the overall rate of how upgrades play out. The ratio of Flightstones for players who play actively are just kind of omnipresent and not a consideration at all. We just want to think through how the systems played out on live, maybe making some tweaks there going forward, but overall I think giving players more gearing agency is something that was one of our main goals, we're excited and happy about how that's played out, and I think unifying our upgrade systems across different kinds of content, giving outdoor world players a progression track of their own, and giving raid players access to the Mythic+ style upgrade system that dungeon players have enjoyed for years, all of those feel like wins.How do you feel like general chase item acquisition has gone? With specific items like trinkets or very rare items, some players would like to steer things back toward Dinar or bad luck protection systems.It's a fine line there. The value of the chase is the chase, it's the excitement when you get the thing .We understand that across a playerbase of millions that will also lead to, by definition, a meaningful portion of the community that is frustrated at having not gotten the thing. Ideally, we would have more than one singular chase item and a variety of a few different things, such that almost everyone can feel like "ok I haven't gotten that thing, but I got lucky and got this thing!" so that there's some noise and asymmetry to it all, versus just have and have nots. The flip side of guaranteed short term acquisition, whether it's via dinar or another type of system is that there just isn't the same amount of excitement. There's satisfaction that I got the thing, but there is something time-honored, cool, and compelling about running up to see what's on the bosses corpse after you kill the boss, because there's something that you're hoping for or as part of your raid group you want to see your friend get, and that does require some amount of uncertainty. We're also looking at the impact of those items; when it feels like a specific item is make or break and there isn't any point in trying to play seriously as a given spec at the highest levels if you don't have that item, that starts to feel bad. We want getting them to be exciting, but we also don't want not having them to feel disqualifying. A lot of that is case by case, and looking at feedback, numbers, results, and tweaking some of the items, but we want to try to keep chase items in various forms.

Dinars are an experiment which I would not be surprised to repeat if we end up doing some kind of wrap-up recap season, kind of like Shadowlands. When you're cycling through multiple raids in a short season, then the math just straight up doesn't work out, and the majority of people would end up frustrated not getting the thing they wanted to get, despite their best efforts, which is not where we want to land. But over the course of a longer season, the majority of people seeking specific items should be able to get those items, so we'd rather let the chase play out and then see where things land, and where we end up in the latter weeks of the season.Dawn of the Infinites MegadungeonWhat is the overall tuning goal for this dungeon in terms of item level and progression time?In terms of targeted nerfs, we're definitely not looking for 10 minute encounters or anything like that. The goal is for it to be relatively challenging for a majority of players. Understanding that people are coming in with 440+ gear who are mythic raiders who are very high end running Mythic +20 keys, there should still be a fun experience there, some mechanics to figure out, stuff to puzzle through, a cool new take. The Hard Mode is there for an extra challenge with cosmetic rewards, but ultimately the core audience is that core Normal into Heroic Raid Group, people running Mythic+ in the teens who really don't have this type of experience otherwise. It is for that audience to have that 5-player progression feel. It's like a 5-player raid. We aimed a little bit higher with overall tuning this time around because we know it's coming in the middle of a season where players have more defined gear levels as opposed to the last few mega-dungeons that came out at the start where they might have been challenging before you had any gear from that season at all but they were often quickly overshadowed once you had a few weeks or vault or other gear under your belt. But also we know that this time in 10.1.7 not far from now, it'll be made available as 2 heroic wings for players to experience the story and see that way, so we can err a bit on the higher side for now recognizing that it'll be made more broadly available.Could we ever seen an item level capped version of a Megadungeon similar to challenge modes? These dungeons hit a different experience than typical Mythic+, but seems players will probably overgear it on live servers. That's an interesting idea. I never want to say never to those types of things. We're often leery of item level caps combined with challenge because what that turns into is a weird sort of optimization that the game really isn't normally designed for. We've seen it when people try to min-max Timewalking, where when item level is capped suddenly your standard gear choices become different and you're trying to optimize specific stats at a given level rather than just getting the best loot available. But one way or another, being able to opt into a challenge in some way for the folks who may have some of the best gear but want to test themselves is something we'd like to explore ways to deliver. It's not part of how Dawn of the Infinite is rolling out, though we feel that for the majority of active players today it's going to provide a satisfying and challenging experience. Mythic+ and AffixesHow do you feel like no Seasonal affix has gone? Overall I think we're really happy with Season 2's shift to focusing on just playing the dungeons and broad affix disarmament and having the dungeons really be the centerpiece of what you're doing over the course of the season. A lot of the problems that these systems were introduced to solve in past expansions, namely making dungeons feel fresh or more replayable when you're running the exact same dungeon for a year and half, well those problems just don't exist anymore. I think we're really happy with how the dungeon rotation approach has worked in Dragonflight. I recall many, possibly yourself via some Wowhead articles a year ago, were kind of leery only having 4 of the new Dragonflight dungeons as part of a Mythic+ rotation upfront because it definitely felt like something was being held back. We understood at the time that was a calculated risk, but that risk I think is paying off for the community as a whole as the community can look forward to jumping into a pool of 8 new dungeons and experiences that are fresh. That's also led us to reevaluating the role of affixes and how that fits together. The big thing that I think that we lost from not having a seasonal affix is just the thematic vibe to the season. It's something we'd like to recapture in some form, but there's nothing specific or concrete to announce right now. Overall though, we're happy with the focus on letting the dungeons be the centerpiece and letting the affixes be the side dish as opposed to how it often felt reversed in the past.How do you feel like the reworked affixes have gone? Do you like the "passenger" affixes of Afflicted and former Incorporeal?I would say overall, we're pretty happy with a couple of the new ones. Incorporeal I think is in a healthy spot and as does the team. Afflicted is one that's likely to see some further iteration after this season. Ideally, I think the term of 'passenger' affixes implying you being completely hands-off the affix is something the team would prefer to avoid. But it is deliberate that from week to week, the affixes may have more of a burden or direct impact on the gameplay specs or roles more than others with that averaging out over time. Part of the original design and philosophy of affixes going back all the way to origins of the system in Legion was to have a little bit of role specificity to some of them. The feeling of like this is an affix that is primarily meant to impact ranged players, or this one primarily impacts melee players, or tanks, healers or whatever else, just so that a group from week to week of friends or people regularly running dungeons together has some variety to that experience and some ups and downs; but recognizing that if it feels like in the pug scene some affixes make some classes mandatory or others totally undesirable, that's problematic and something we want to avoid. And also that if it ever feels truly like you can completely ignore an affix and it's someone else's job and have the memes of, on the one hand, the dude furiously pounding on his keyboard and sweating while the other is dancing, we don't want that level of disparity within a group. It's fine and I think healthy that it feels like some people are going to make talent choices that allow them to step up and handle more of the load of a given affix and let others take a bit of a backseat, but everyone should still be involved. Collections and Tier 3 TransmogWe've seen some datamining that indicates that T3 transmogs may be craftable, anything you can share about this? Yeah, datamining reveals some interesting things. It's something we've been exploring through the profession system broadly looking at no longer obtainable appearances. Old ones from ZG are ones we've touched on in the past. Enterprising adventurers and explorers who poke around in 10.1.5 looking at some of the related old content may find some interesting things there. When it comes to Tier 3, we're also very mindful of the fact of there are players out there who have spent millions of gold on the Black Market Auction House cobbling those sets together over years. There's also folks who have these as their most prized possession from having raided vanilla Naxx forever ago. Hypothetically speaking, if this were to be a thing in the game, we would take a much more judicious approach to availability of these crafts as to opposed to something like ZG. It should take significant investment and dedication as well as a bit of a gold sink to get all of this together so that ideally people feel like they have more control over chasing the appearances that they want from some legacy content. But someone who already got it all from the Black Market Auction House isn't looking at this and saying 'well that sucks and I feel like my investment has been devalued by this change'.The SwordWhat about the Sword?What Sword? What Sword... What?

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Comment by SundercatOh don't act like you care about those of us that got T3 the right way now. Go ahead, make it craftable, I want to see the BMAH posers cry.Comment by TheMaddestCowIs there a video link to the interview? I don't wanna readComment by WowvocateParagraphs and paragraphs of nothing.

'Things are looking good', 'we're happy with this', 'wait and see', 'no planned changes to that'

Ion's legal background really shining through in this one.Comment by LucarioFanatic13Can we please have a Gold Cap increase or removal?

Obsolete system =)Comment by WeryxIf it feels like you can truly ignore an affix and it's someone else's job, then they don't want that level of affix disparity in a group.Blizzard understands that there are players who have spent millions of gold on the BMAH for T3 and if another way were to exist to get T3, it should take significant investment, dedication and gold to get it.How do you feel like the additional 25% health increase went? Are there any plans to do that again in the future?
I think well overall.
So is it one tier piece, or are we just straight up getting zero at this point ?
No it should be 1, like a 1:3 split kind of thing.Comment by AedionMorrisThe sword meme is becoming my favorite thing.Comment by Divinee"The Sword
What about the Sword?
What Sword? What Sword... What?"

Hey Sargeras sword ! Yeah we talk about you and Old gods probably like CthuunComment by enheruI like that the devs just keep doubling down on PvPers being #$%^&s who can't understand that sometimes pets or spells have different appearances.

Maybe disable glyphs in PvP if it's such a big deal?Comment by NarhwalsBad decision for the legendary droprate. Bad decision for no seasonal affixComment by TOMRUSMany of his answers are very questionable and disappointing...Comment by Seb24285For the next interview could you ask blizz, if they are planning on doing a rework for the BMAH? Like bringing back Long Boi to the BMAH, since the mount got stealth removed or is bugged. Or bringing more items to the bmah like newer paragon mounts for example the two from Korthia (that I am still farming on multiple characters). Or maybe removing some items to put them in the trading post later on.Comment by moa285"Ideally, we would have more than one singular chase item and a variety of a few different things, such that almost everyone can feel like "ok I haven't gotten that thing, but I got lucky and got this thing!"

- Ion Hazzikostat

"..and if you're unlucky, you're f*cked.."

- MeComment by EarthenRastlinAs a mage main since BC. The ONLY reason that I've not picked Water Elemental over Lonely winter is the damage output. I loved having it around until Lonely Winter was too strong to justify not having it.Comment by madasswowReworking rogue when monk is in the state that it currently is is pretty disgusting ngl.Comment by moonsilverI'm fine with keeping rare transmogs rare but what about all the folks who raided in vanilla wow and had all of those items but got rid of them and they had no way of telling who had what items so those were lost to us?Comment by rezzykIon I.. I don't think that question about the Evoker weapon was over concerns about needing it to be running in a mythic guild next tier. I mean, maybe 0.1% of the population cares about that.

I think the question was hey - there's this cool class legendary - but it's terrible RNG to acquire. People who have been killing Sark since Week 1/2 don't have it, and very lucky people get it in LFR the first week. And multiple times a day the people who are failing to get it have to watch emotes about it in game.

There should be bad luck protection applied. Or in 10.1.5/10.1.7 the drop rate increases so all Evokers who want it can get it before 10.2Comment by StealingYourWiFiRogue is getting the next rework before Monk? LMAO.

And that has solidified my resub choice for the month. I'll see you boys in 10.3.5.Comment by Spanky2kI guess Ion doesn't know any players thar play healer in m+. Understandable, since there are so few now.Comment by DreadfuryDKdK uTilItY dEaTh gRiP sO vAlUaBleComment by 0VapyrPeople underestimating how much T3 actually goes for on the BMAH. It does cost millions for several pieces. Dreadnaught shoulders in particular are going for more than a few million on populated servers.

People can throw a temper-tantrum about tokens or people just playing the game as much as they want, but most people I've met with T3 got their gold through AH play, selling gold carries, or from heavy farming. And all of those are legitimate forms of gameplay, and deserve to be respected because it's a massive commitment. Something whiners don't seemingly understand because It's VidEo GaMe or something.

And on the topic of the item level capping for dungeons.
Part of the fun of those challenges is the gearing process. Actually having alternative methods of setting up a character for different types of content is fun— besides the bag space issue. When the builds and trinkets differ too, it just spices things up, especially in the middle of a season when the "main" content is done.
Mage Tower actually gave me stuff to do.

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