Liquid Maximum Post-Aberrus Interview with Morgan Day and Michael Nuthals

Live Publié 07/07/2023 à 15:35 par Archimtiros

Gear and its Impact on the Raid

Gearing was insanely fast this Season compared to the past, with week 1 average item levels approximately equal to week 4 of previous tiers for high-end guilds like Liquid. The goal was to create a system to unify separate systems from Mythic+, open world, PvP, while addressing the fact that there was no upgrade path for raiding, and while they achieved that goal, the rate that high-end players "finished" gearing was measured in the first 2-3 weeks, which felt too fast.

Gear plays a very critical part in their raid tuning plans, assuming that there's a long tail of gear progression, so that the roadblocks reached a week in are smoothed out after a months worth of gear. These organic nerfs are important to progression, rather than just hitting a roadblock and having to wait for the fight to be nerfed. Ultimately it is a system they're happy with and will move forward with into Season 3, but they can expect some tuning and tweaks to happen.

In a lot of ways, gear helps achieve the promise of an RPG - gearing up and getting better helps progress through an encounter; a natural sense of progression over time that makes encounters easier, rather than reaching a hurdle and feeling like they have to wait for the designers to nerf it. They want players to have that chase and progress their characters over time.

Speaking of tuning holistically, one thing Morgan would have liked to do is perhaps swap Rashok and Magmorax's position in the raid.

Regarding Very Rare loot, they made two high level adjustments to those drops in Season 2. First, was creating interesting options that not everyone necessarily wanted - in Season 1, you wanted 30 Eranog/Broodkeeper rings, but most groups don't feel the same way about Black Dragonscales, while Nelth trinkets were split out into three versions that were exciting for some specs but not necessarily something everyone universally wanted. The other major adjustment was how you get them - they increased the chance of bosses dropping those items, while reducing the frequency of their showing up in caches or the Vault to make actually killing the boss more impactful. It's too soon to say if the very rare loot is something they'll carry forward into future expansions, but they do think the concept hits a lot of their goals. There are still problems, but the team thinks they are solvable and will continue to make adjustments in Season 3.

Solving Problems with Weak Auras

Regarding Private WeakAuras, the goal was for players to engage in the game world - focusing on communicating with other players, rather than having addons solve the problem for players. They're fine with informational addons showing a list of who has what debuff is fine, but they're not as keen on computational weakauras which put a square on a players head and direct them to the square marker in the corner of the room (the popular map weakauras for Neltharion are a bit of a gray area for Morgan).

That said, there are lessons learned, particularly from Neltharion - it was cool watching RWF streams with RL calling out which player goes where, but they probably could have been more lenient on the amount of time and space players had to work with. They also could have made Volcanic Heart specifically a lot more obvious. Max mentions that a lot of players use WeakAuras as debuff bars, and the game making it more obvious that something horrific is about to happen with those very important effects would be helpful to reduce the burden.

Spoiler! In 10.1.7, they're adding a contextual ping system similar to DotA or League, which shows up directly in the game world, on a player, or on an enemy, so that you can quickly and easily share information with the rest of your group - they see it as an accessibility feature, but also think it'll help allow quick in-game communication that may put less reliance on automatic WeakAuras. The tank can ping where they're going to pull adds to, the Raid Leader can ping where to take a debuff, etc. Maximum is very excited about this.

Raid Tanking

Tanks can be a singular point of failure in a group, so they have to be careful about creating situations where there's too much pressure on them - especially early in a raid, as it can put too much pressure on 1-2 players and they don't want it to block progression too early on. That said, they want to create encounter mechanics where every role gets a place to shine, and with tanks that usually comes down to movement and positioning.

Contextually, how hard enemies hit tanks really depends on the encounter - later encounters usually truck tanks a little harder, because they expect them to have more gear and more coordination with externals. Traditionally tank healing is a strength of some healing roles, though they've moved a lot further toward tanks as fully self-sustaining players, so sometimes they crank up boss melee damage just to remind healers that they're supposed to be healing tanks too.

Shorter Encounter Length

Bosses were much shorter this tier, particularly Sarkareth as the end boss at ~7.5 minutes. This was inspired by Blackhand (which was in turn inspired by Siegecrafter Blackfuse), as a fight which felt like it "hit the gas and didn't let up until it ended" and they wanted to try to recreate that feeling of heavy execution for a short amount of time. They do think that they want a little bit more attrition on end of boss encounters so that guilds could really showcase their skill and expertise in learning the ultimate encounter, and Sarkareth could have been a little bit longer in that regard. 7:30 isn't exactly the new benchmark, but they are trying to shift it down - maybe 10 minutes as an upper bound, while 15 minute fights could probably just become two fights (e.g. Sylvanas could have been split into two fights similar to Carapace and N'Zoth).

Both Zskarn and Sarkareth died as the designers intended. They expected players to use the down phase to avoid dangerous elements, and they envisioned that players would run out of room by the end of Zskarn, having only a small area left to finish off the encounter before they die, so the team was excited to see the fights play out the way they thought they would.

That said, they didn't intend players to sit in the safe spot the entire fight. In hindsight, they should have been much faster to fix that particular strategy, and when they did change it, they should have treated it as less of a tuning change and more of an exploit - doing it on reset and restricting guilds ability to extend that week, since that became a common strategy. This also calls back to how fast gearing was this season - normally, extending that early in a raid tier would be pretty punitive, but because of how fast gearing was this tier, it actually ended up being incredibly benign, with Sarkareth already in striking distance. If gearing hadn't been so quick, we might not have seen so many guilds extend so early and avoid having to reclear.

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