Wowhead Exclusive Interview with Ion Hazzikostas and Morgan Day - Private Auras, Raid Difficulty, Defensive Creep

The War Within Publié 19/06/2024 à 17:59 par Squishei

RaidWhat is the goal of Private Auras in TWW? Do you think the ‘Macro’ solution is a good solution for players to work around them?

Ion Hazzikostas

We developed this new tool in Dragonflight as part of our efforts towards our philosophical goal of wanting to limit the computation power of addons and reestablish more room in encounters for players to coordinate and communicate, and to allow us to give them more time to react and process mechanics as opposed to unavoidably having to tune around a world where when addons can solve a problem for players, we know at Heroic and Mythic difficulty, players will rely on addons to do that. So Private Auras were this new tool that we developed to put certain buffs and debuffs out of the reach of addons. Through using that tool, and we've been guided by feedback from the community, what it's good at and what it's not so good at. And I think there are plenty of applications of Private Auras over the last couple of tiers that were pretty innocuous. They're just debuffs that require an immediate reaction from players that you're handling on your own, or a couple of people are running out of the raid with something that people just watch for and handle it accordingly.

What we've seen though, is that when we try to use Private Auras to apply to raid wide coordination mechanics, where the entire raid needs to solve a problem together, and the rewards effectively for doing so are more significant, players will find cumbersome workarounds involving creating manual macros that they could then communicate that information to the addons that would solve the problem for them. When the advantage of doing it is great enough, people will do that anyways. In that case, the cure is definitely worse than the disease, there's a reason why we pulled out the Private Aura treatment auras like those from Fyrakk's first intermission because we understand, we're not actually helping here -- we're not improving the player experience. So I think we've approached War Within, with a desire to refine our continued use of that tool; to steer clear of applying it in areas that we know are going to cause more annoying frustrating behavior and continue to use it in areas where we think it can allow for room for player decision making and creativity that isn't going to delegated to addons automatically.

Morgan Day

A lot of what it boils down to is reclaim some design space. There's a lot of fun mechanics or interesting design elements that would be really hard to do nowadays and we're reflecting on this, as we discuss this problem internally a lot. And there are a lot of boss encounters nowadays that have a lot of swirlies on the ground that you just really need to dodge and when you take a huge step back and reflect on that, I think you can say a lot of that is because that's a design space that addons haven't solved, you just have to have some amount of personal responsibility where you can dodge the mechanic. That's become more of a baseline, where if you take a step back and look at older bosses, that was almost like an archetype; like a Patchwerk was an archetype, the dodge lots of swirls used to be an archetype. That's kind of where we start now and then try to add layers of interest on top of that. That's something that we're going to continue to use, but refine the usage of it. Philosophically that's a direction that we want to continue to move in.

Mythic Amirdrassil was probably one of the hardest raids ever created in WoW. Many players felt that the raid was tuned for the RWF, but never nerfed to reasonable levels for the majority of the playerbase. How does the team feel about Mythic Amirdrassil’s difficulty and all the one-shot group mechanics that ended up in the raid?

Ion Hazzikostas

Looking back on Amirdrassil, there are a couple of misses there. We can all agree that the spike in difficulty going from Smolderon to Tindral was too great and that's true in basically all versions of the raid. No matter how many nerf passes were taken, the overall mechanical complexity and execution demands meant that for every guild progressing through Amirdrassil, no matter when they were doing it, getting a 7th boss down meant you were staring at a brick wall. We prefer to have a smoother ramp in difficulty that sets players up, each boss being something which feels like a manageable step up from the next one.

The other piece of that is the timing of nerfs. The reality is, it's no secret that across the Mythic playerbase, you're looking at the range from the RWF competitors to "mere" Hall of Fame guilds to those who are getting Cutting Edge in the middle of the Season to those who are squeaking in under the wire at the end of the Season. There is an incredible range of coordination and skill, frankly, in the game and we're trying to deliver a satisfying progression experience for all those groups. Some amount of nerfing is going to be required to achieve that, and that's something that the WoW team has done with our raids for as long as WoW has existed. You can go back to Black Temple and Illidan more accessible 17 years ago. But we probably could have been more aggressive with a couple of them and drop them a bit sooner. The thing we do need to be mindful of when we do that though, is we always want to make sure that we're not undermining guilds' progression experience that are already partway through the fight. We actually were urged by a number of Hall of Fame level guilds going into the end of last year, not to take too heavy a nerf bat to those last couple of encounters because they were enjoying the challenge. They just wanted to make it a bit more consistent, but they didn't want something that was suddenly going to undermine all the effort that they've put in getting as far as they had. So those are all factors that we take away from Amirdrassil and we apply to all of our raids going forward.

Morgan Day

Ultimately, with Tindral, it kind of reminds me of Tomb of Sargeras where Fallen Avatar almost felt like an end boss in itself. I think there were probably some of those really big swings that we took later on, we could've moved up where we might've made those adjustments, like the double soak. The end point of where we got was really good for the broader audience, but timing wise we could've looked at where that landed.Many guilds reached the maximum item level due to the upgrade system before getting to the final boss and thus, there was no power to be gained to overgear bosses, making farm very difficult and on the level of progression (outside of nerfs). Are there any plans to adjust this to allow guilds to significantly overgear bosses further in the season?

Ion Hazzikostas

Item level progression is something that we continue to talk about a ton. It's important that people across all playstyles feel like they have meaningful rewards and forward progress available to their characters. We don't want to string that out too much so that it feels like rewards are few and far between early on, but at the same time, I think there needs to be meaningful goals to pursue for as long as the season runs for more players. That's something that we're still working through, though I think it's more the mid to late expansion problem. I think the first Season of the new expansion kind of always has a pretty significant gearing curve to it because everyone is going to be starting with pre-raid dungeon gear; everything is an upgrade, every epic item you see from any source early on is an upgrade. So I think there's a lot of room for guilds to continue to grow and power item wise.

At the same time, we recognize that raid progression itself has kind of a life, an arc, of its own apart from the rest of the game. We do want to make sure that there are ways for raid groups that are progressing over the course of a season to feel like it's not just Blizzard nerfing the content to bring it within reach, but they are gaining power. There are a couple of ideas that we're exploring in that space, one of which that we hope to roll out with the first season of War Within.

Morgan Day

There was a really fantastic forum post a few months back from a pretty prolific Mythic guild. Their guild leader made this really great forum post and we ended talking about that post at length but a major part being the feeling of progression and like Ion mentioned, ultimately, we want items to be the thing that is nerfing the raid over time. But as we discussed, especially when it comes to Mythic raids, there's just multiple audiences -- I think I could argue there's probably 3 different audiences that are experiencing the Mythic raid at different times and when they get to different bosses can depend on what the tuning for them to have a greater experience should look like.

Ion alluded to it, but I'll talk a little bit more about it. We're discussing introducing a system that has similar vibes to Reorigination Array back in Uldir, the first raid tier of BFA, except we'll be leveraging the quest system. It'll buff players over time. Right now we're looking at the buff capping out at about 20% increased player power while you're within that raid and that will also apply to your Warband! That'll be cool, that'll be something that if you come in later with your alts, you can have that extra player power across everyone on your account for that content. Depending on how that's received and how well that achieves our goals, we'll look to expand that system or try to tie it more closely with our itemization system. There's a lot of ways we could expand that itemization, but we wanted to try to do something for War Within. Mythic+ Affixes have continued to be a controversial topic. At this point, it seems that the closer that we get to an affix that does nothing, the happier people are. Do you still think that Affixes are needed to change week to week combat? If so, what changes would you feel like affixes need to make in order to be more fun for players?

Ion Hazzikostas

This has obviously been a huge topic in the community in recent weeks, it's been a huge topic within the team in recent weeks. We're far from done when it comes to the current state of Beta, we're looking to roll out a couple more pretty significant swings in how we approach Affixes and the Mythic+ system. As testing continues in the coming weeks, I don't want to get ahead of spoiling what all those will be, but stay tuned for some forum and blog updates in the next couple builds.

Part of what we've been talking about is the increasing divergence in the approach that the Mythic+ audience takes to the content. We look at affixes, like Bolstering and Raging, and for the "average" Mythic+ player (to the extent that there is such a thing is the person who is just running Mythic+ for loot, for filling out their Vault row, and just to have fun running dungeons with friends) if you're running a Mythic 8 or whatever, we're seeing consistent participation and success rates, week over week. For that audience, affixes continue to serve a valuable purpose in varying that experience week over week, slightly changing the puzzle that the group needs to solve. We've heard feedback from the community that asks "If there's just there to add difficulty, why are they needed? We have health and damage increases to add difficulty." And we agree, the primary purposes of purposes is not to add difficulty, it's to add variety.

Now for people who are playing Mythic+ at the highest end of the system -- people who have long since gotten Keystone Hero and all their teleports and are pushing potentially for the Season titles or to improve their personal best, the only thing they're playing for in the system is raising that bar, is raising that personal best. And so, at the cutting edge of the limits of any system, when you have variation from week to week, there will be some outcomes that are more favorable than others. For groups that are pushing their limits, if they realize that they are able to achieve a new best on a Push Week, like Bursting or whatever, and the next week cycles in and even though they could complete dungeons, they know they could not beat their absolute best time this week. It makes the whole week feel dead and it feels dead because of that affix, and who is responsible for that affix? Blizzard, the World of Warcraft team. They very rightly give the feedback that this is frustrating, this is getting in their way of enjoying the experience. We understand that, and we agree. I don't think the right answer is to remove affixes for all players. However, we are discussing some solutions that may allow players who are focused on the competitive optimization and perfection aspect of the dungeon system to have less randomness and variation in their week over week experience. This is something that we've seen across dungeons in other forms over the past. Going back to past expansions, dungeons like Arcway or Waycrest Manor used to have different routes from week to week or even from run to run in some cases, to vary the experience so it feels like for players running the dungeon, you are exploring a dynamic environment. But we understand that if you are in an Esports setting or absolutely trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your group, variation is unwelcome.

So those are some of our broad philosophical thoughts right now and we look forward to sharing the plans we're working on with the community in the next week or two and continuing the conversation and getting tons of feedback.With the recent affix changes, the community has reacted to seeing Bolstering and Sanguine still in the rotation. These affixes seem to go against the mantra of “minimizing the mechanical overlap between affixes and dungeon trash design”. What was the thought process for keeping these 7+ affixes and can we expect more changes to these affixes to make them more fun line or are these slated to be replaced in the future?

Morgan Day

The changes that we're discussing certainly right now are pretty big swings. We're looking at this from the point of Mythic+ is really trying to serve multiple audiences and trying to come up with a one size fits all solution to that has caused some problems in finding the correct solution. We're taking a step back there; what are the affixes and what are they achieving week over week -- for the audience that is less looking to push rating and be extremely competitive -- and what is the excitement when you have this new affix introduced week over week.

To speak to the post that we made, I think one of the major design goals there that we could try to reiterate on more is that we were trying not to create new Nameplates in the gameplay space, we're not trying to create things that might be considered an ability or mechanic on a boss fight -- you're not spawning a new add, there's not Quaking or Volcanic where feel like these mechanics that are kind of just happening. The things that we wanted to focus on were things that felt more like a overarching rule change, like all trash in the dungeon behaves in this way or reacts in this way and you can plan for that really easily, it's not something that would surprise you. You can hopefully approach the pulls differently or approach the dungeon differently to combat those affixes. That was really where we were focusing on when we did keep some of those affixes that were in those current level 7 bucket. But like we said, we're taking a big step back and revisiting all of that with our next iteration.

Ion Hazzikostas

Again, looking at the data that is informing our decisions, there are meaningful differences in how people experience the content based on the level that they're running it at. An affix like Storming that was considered a free affix by very high end players had a noticeable impact on these success rates in the lower ranges. Something like Bursting, that again is considered far easier than Bolstering or Raging in terms of pushing keys at the higher end, has a heavier impact on key success rates than Bolstering or Raging at the lower end because the strategies that are being used are different. And so I think for players at the high end, a lot of what is fun about the system, at least as we understand it, is pushing their limits and employing really aggressive strategies to try to fight as many things at the same time and move through the dungeon as quickly as they can, and affixes that maybe feel more punitive to the particular strategies that are most effective at that high level, end up being the most frustrating ones. But players who are playing at a different level, at a different meta, using different approaches to the dungeons are having a totally different experience and so that's a lot of what we're trying to navigate as we think through how to evolve Mythic+ going forwards.

In Dragonflight, “stops” (Disorients, Stuns, etc) have been used to cancel almost all casts in Mythic+ dungeons. This has put a significant imbalance on classes with and without AoE stops and players who use and don't use them with the damage intake between a group who uses stops and groups who don’t is massive. How do you feel about this and are there any changes for these in War Within?

Ion Hazzikostas

This is also something we've been talking about a bunch. The role and importance of "stops" in Mythic+ is something that has kind of grown organically over the last couple of expansions. The ability to stop casts from completing is something that has always been part of WoW, but generally an enemy that was knocked back or whatever would instantly begin that cast again. You had to use a kick or Counterspell to truly put it on cooldown, so those were more limited in value in the past.

The team had started designing specific abilities in dungeons to go on cooldown when the spell cast began, no matter what, so if you stopped that cast in any manner whether it was Death Gripping the mob or CC'ing it, it would go on cooldown just as if it had been interrupted. That is still appropriate in some circumstances, but the increasing proliferation in dungeons is what kind of created this incredibly powerful utility that has been seen to dictate perceived optimal comps in the last couple years. So we've been designing War Within dungeons to move back closer to how things used to be in that regard, still doing it where it's appropriate, but not defaulting to have all abilities go on cooldown when the cast starts. These tools should still be tremendously powerful tools for disrupting, for managing, for relocating enemies in a dungeon but they shouldn't be the answer to nearly every problem that you're presented in a way that reduces viable comp diversity.

Morgan Day

It also just creates a disparity between how the game works and how Mythic+ and dungeons worked in same cases. Spells only have a cooldown when they're kicked or when they complete their cast; that's my expectation as a player, that's how my character works. As Ion mentioned, taking a step back and essentially reevaluating not treating that as a different experience from how the rest of the game works also provided an opportunity for us to look at this and evaluate other things. We don't want to just make this change in a vacuum, we wanted to look at "alright these spells that are considered Must Stop, what's their cast time? What's their recast time? Let's make these changes and look at how dangerous these spells are with more intentionality". Because it's very easy to just have them recasting or have quick cast times when there's interrupts that are being thrown around more commonly.

Classes and CombatWith the removal of increased melee range in War Within, are there any plans to change how bosses can parry melee abilities, especially with the increase of the number of raid bosses that have mechanics that require melee to DPS from the front?

Morgan Day

No, that's something we like to evaluate on a case by case basis. There's always those big raid bosses that are standing on the side of a ledge and in cases like that we can very easily disable parry when it makes sense in that case. Ultimately, "what is your positioning?" is something that we feel like is an important part of core WoW combat and if there are cases where it does feel unfair for the player because they're dodging mechanics or because the boss is rooted or something like that, then we can always reevaluate that, but not looking to change the core fundamentals of how creatures in WoW work.

Raid Buffs incentivizes class diversity and the feeling of being more powerful when you are in a group. We’ve seen more classes get raid buffs in Dragonflight with Paladin getting a second and Hunter’s Mark, leaving just DK and Shaman. Is there a reason that these classes don’t bring anything specific buff to the raid?

Ion Hazzikostas

Ultimately our goal is broad spec representation and class representation across the different roles. I think we're hesitant to add still more raid buffs that might risk feeling redundant and yet another thing to manage or that might too heavily force less choice in composition forming. Ideally though, if you're a PUG leader, if you're putting a raid or Mythic raid group, you should want one of every class and then once you have that covered, you should look at who's available and how you want to fill out the rest of your roster based on your people and the content that you're facing.

We need to look at diversity and want to make sure that classes like Shaman and Death Knight are bringing tools to the raid that make them valued members of a raid group or valued in dungeon groups. That's not to completely close the door on a new raid buff ever coming to them, but our hope continues to be to use the other knobs that the team has at its disposal to get them to a place where they feel equally valuable without just needing a raid buff.
Class balance is an important aspect of the game to many players. What do you look for when deciding how to balance classes and when?

Morgan Day

We touched on this briefly as we were discussing raids and raid adjustments coming. We actually try to create a pretty consistent cadence for when our combat team looks at class balance and sending hotfixes as a season progresses and we will continue that philosophy going into War Within -- we feel like that was very effective in Dragonflight. In terms of what do we look for, we often talk about, not too dissimilar from what Ion was just talking about, different strengths and weaknesses for classes. We'll often ask the question, "If we can wave a magic wand, what should this look like -- whether we're looking at a specific raid encounter, what should the damage meter look like? What should the healing meter look like? Who should be winning this and are they?" We'll often come up with these high level philosophies that really guide our tuning in terms of where should this class be on this: Is this their strength? Should they be winning here? and letting that direct what kind of adjustments we would make. Hero Talents are one of the premier features of TWW with some of the specs having some fairly stunning visuals attached to these new spells and abilities while others it's a bit more subdued. Will we see additional visuals coming to those specs with fewer new animations? Could we see more hero spec integration in visuals and cosmetics in TWW, something like tier sets, or hero spec weapon transmogs?

Morgan Day

That's a super interesting idea. I'll talk about the first part, Hero Talents are an evergreen addition to World of Warcraft. The same way that we might revisit some existing class spells to bring them up to modern standards, we totally plan to revisit Hero Talents and add some additional polish in future War Within patches. So that's definitely something that's on the table.

We actually want to be really careful -- one of our anti-goals, as it were, early on was to not create a multiplicative number of specs; we don't want to end up with 108 specs in the game. So we want to be careful not to do too much there that will make it feel like I am a Herald of the Light Paladin, I'm not a Ret Paladin. It's something we want to be really careful to avoid, so while adding awesome new visuals is something that is in the cards, how we leverage that new fantasy is something that is really deliberate and careful on as we move forward.
We saw some late-expansion changes to healers in Dragonflight and healing has been mentioned as being a problem. What is the design goal of healers in TWW to further address these issues and/or to make healing a more fun role in WoW?

Ion Hazzikostas

Healing continues to be a major topic among the combat team and the encounter team; those are the two sides of the coin here. We've taken the opportunity to do something that we weren't able to do mid-expansion during Dragonflight and rebalance the overall size of health pools that players have relative to incoming damage, their healing tools, their personal percentage based heals, and so forth in a way that effectively is nerfing healing. It's always one of the paradoxes of this debate, that nerfing healing sounds like a bad thing. It sounds like a thing that should make healers unhappy, but reducing the relative power of healing in this case, as players have done a great job of highlighting, has improved healer gameplay overall because it slows down the pace at which healers are emptying and refilling and allows for more triage and decision making about where your healing is going, as opposed to a world where players can top others off with a single GCD or two. Then the only way to threaten players lives is by damaging them even faster than that, or creating situations where healers have to react, or players have to preemptively use defensive cooldowns in order to survive. That's something we're keeping a very close eye on over the course of raid and dungeon testing on Beta. We're also looking at players self-healing and it's proliferation across specs and roles. I think the team is in the process of looking at the Leech stat and making adjustments to the throughput it delivers, because that's often just the passive self healing that people are bringing to an encounter that makes encounter designers have to add unavoidable pulsing damage to offset it. At which point, let's just take a step back and mutually disarm here and let healers be again in the spotlight.

It's also really fascinating for the team looking at Classic, as Classic continues to play out in its different forms, in the different expansions, and to see a direct contrast -- a point of comparison -- the pace of healing and how healing played out in different eras of the gam. At times, it can be easy with a series of incremental changes to arrive at a place that's meaningfully different than where you started and not necessarily one that you intended to arrive at, but being able to look back in time and how different systems and sets of tuning values interacted can help inform the discussion on how healing should feel today. At the end of the day, we want healers to be responsible for the health and well being of their parties, assuming the Tank is keeping things under control, but not overly stressed in doing so. They should feel powerful in their ability to save and correct the mistakes that their group has made, but also that they're not spinning so many plates at a given time that if they make a single mistake or take a breath for a single second, something is going to collapse. That's the space we're continuing to navigate, testing continues, but healing stats and breakdowns are something that the team is looking at every day.

Many content-creators have been talking about a defensive creep in the game and many Hero Talents add more defensive power to classes. The delta between players who do use defensives effectively and players who don’t seems to have gotten very large, leading to a very large delta in damage taken and survivability, sometimes even removing the need for healers altogether. Do you feel like “defensive creep” is real and are there any plans to do anything about it before the launch of the expansion?

Ion Hazzikostas

It is definitely real in some forms. I think objectively Dragonflight and the talent system added the ability to opt into more hybrid utility, more defensive and self healing tools for DPS specs that may be part of hybrid classes in particular. On the one hand, I think there's some cool fantasy there and underscoring the utility options that are available to a class and the fact that the solution to every problem shouldn't always be damage even if you're a damage dealer. There's a lot of value in world content and in smaller group content, certainly Delves in War Within to having those tools and really being able to manage your own survival better. At the same time, I think we're also keenly aware of the pressure that places on encounter design and on healing at the very high end where we need to assume the players are making use of all the tools available to them and there's a point where if having a defensive means that all the encounter designers have to hit you harder to assume you're using the defensive, having a defensive isn't necessarily making your life easier or better as a player. In some ways it becomes a little bit of a tax. So I think we're not in a position where we're gonna go through and rip out a whole bunch of abilities for War Within in the coming weeks. But I think we are looking at what an ongoing disarmament there might look like. I think it's important that all players have some outs to situations, tools that they can use, but they shouldn't have so many that we're assuming that one is always up and they shouldn't be so potent or so frequently available that they're overshadowing the contributions of a healer to keeping you alive in a group setting.

Morgan Day

Another area we're looking at here where I actually think there's a bit of an outsized impact is actually Augmentation in Mythic+ in particular. We look at a lot of their representation in raids and their damage contributions and it's significant but it doesn't feel outsized the survivability benefits that they bring. Especially in smaller group sizes it's really significant to the point where it might take something that could otherwise be unmanageable by a group, even a group that is using their defensive really effectively couldn't do that, but with that extra bump from Aug maybe they can. So that's another area where the team has been looking pretty closely at that and that's a space where we'll look to maybe make some adjustments also before the launch of War Within.
A mid-expansion release of a new spec was certainly a first for WoW with the introduction of Augmentation Evoker and its support playstyle. From a design perspective, how successful was the addition of Augmentation into the WoW landscape?

Ion Hazzikostas

I think overall, we remain happy with the experiment of trying to reintroduce a very support style damage dealer in the vein of what Shadow Priest or Enhancement or Ret were in WoW 15+ years ago where a huge portion of your contribution was just amping the capabilities of the people around you as opposed to doing the damage directly yourself. I think it's no secret and we've said it on multiple occasions, obviously, we came out more than a bit too strong in terms of the overall tuning there. We have, I think, reined in Augmentation a couple times and our goal is for them to see representation comparable to other damage dealers. We're definitely keeping an eye on an Augmentation representation in dungeon groups, as Morgan alluded to, and the defensive tools that they can bring. If you get to a point to the very, very high end of keys where they're making the difference between just a binary pass fail check of you can do it versus you will die if you don't have the Aug, that's not ideal and that's a problem. But broadly speaking, it's a fun play style that a lot of people have embraced. And I think we want to make sure that we continue to preserve that while not having too rigid a comp situation in content like dungeons in particular.How do you feel like the reduced range for Evoker has played out in practice?

Morgan Day

Yeah, this is something that comes up on occasion. I know the team recently was discussing this as it was a hot button topic and ultimately, this gets back to what we were discussing about creating unique strengths and weaknesses, especially as we continue to expand. New classes in World of Warcraft; sometimes you have to carve out new design space in areas where we can find fun gameplay for a spec or a class. And ultimately, we're pretty happy with where that's landed. I always like to point out to the team if the reduced range feels like a significant detriment to the class, then let's make sure that the strengths counterbalance that. Let's make sure that when there is an area where we're a little bit clumped up or the fight space is a little bit more close quarters that they really shine in those circumstances. And then also making sure that as we add Hero Talents and as we expand other classes utility that Evokers continue to feel like they are a highly mobile class and they're not falling behind in that aspect either. So it's definitely something that we think has created some fun gameplay and some really unique design spaces for the team to chase and we continue to want to pursue that.Some specs seem to still be reeling from the AoE cap tuning in Battle for Azeroth, especially on large pulls. Are there any plans to look at the AoE caps of all the specs again?

Ion Hazzikostas

No current plans overall. We're continuing to tune specs against each other, to the representation against each other. Understand that in dungeons in particular at the high end, as pull sizes trend towards that upper end of the spectrum, that can cause balance issues. If loosening or recalculating how AOE caps work for specific specs ends up being the right way to address some of those imbalances, that's a decision the team is gonna make. But I think from a philosophical, top down perspective, the way we're looking at it from our positions, we're not looking to overhaul the way that works across all of WoW. It's more of a surgical spec by spec basis, ensuring that there are different damage profiles from single target to cleave to sustain, to burst AOE to sustained AoE. The different specs have strengths and weaknesses and that no one is so far outshining the others that it feels like it's the only solution to a given problem players may face.Visual ClarityRegarding visual clarity, are there any plans to create an improved “swirly” graphic that still signifies get out, but has a clear border that doesn’t expand with the size of the swirly?

Morgan Day

Yeah, absolutely. We're always looking to improve visual clarity there and we're actually cooking up some stuff for the War Within that might not necessarily be in for the initial launch. But, we are looking to make improvements over time with that. I alluded to this earlier, but those visuals used to be a bit more rare than they are now. So as we use them more frequently, we want to kind of view not only how the player experiences them, but also how we build them ourselves. Fun inside baseball talk -- from a tech perspective, we build all that by hand, right? Like the individual designer who says I want this damage to be this size, has to by hand, kind of match the visual. And sometimes we call it getting taken to a design court where I got hit when I wasn't supposed to. Ultimately, that's something that like that should just be more kind of programmatically solved and will create a more consistent experience for the player as well. And that's areas that we're looking to improve also. Visual distinctions between friendly AoE effects and Boss AoE effects seem to overlap often. Is there a way that you are planning to make them more distinctive?

Ion Hazzikostas

Yeah, I think taking a pass on visual language is something that is something we talk about a lot and that is an active, ongoing effort on the part of the team. A lot of those changes, unfortunately, that we're working on likely aren't going to be seen right at the start of War Within other than specific one off raid mechanics that we are designing to be as readable as possible. But that broader solution to "How does this look like something you're supposed to soak? How does it look like something you're supposed to get out of? How is this friendly versus hostile?" We have some subtle cues there and players who've raided in recent years probably recognize the vertical element to a soak mechanic that goes away once you're standing in it and when you see that little like vertical fiery wisp across the raid, you're yelling at someone to go cover it, but that's not necessarily as intuitive as we want it to be. It's not as obvious as we want it to be. So I think there's a lot more that we can do there. We've at times perhaps been too conservative, too cautious when it comes to we have a focus on preserving the fantasy of player abilities or enemy abilities. But at the end of the day, just because you're fighting a fire lord on a floor that looks like fire and all the things you need to get out of also look like fire, that is thematically accurate and it is in keeping with the fantasy, but it is poor gameplay. And so we know we need to do better there. And that's something that's a focus going forward.

Morgan Day

And finding a way to thread the needle on our side like Ion just mentioned, the Fire Lord. But what if it's a ice monster? That's gonna be a blue visuals probably and we've been working really hard collaborating amongst our different art partner teams to make sure that if I do know this is an ice monster, can we also make sure the floor isn't the exact same color as the VFX? And we really do want to avoid the situation where just everything has those big red, almost UI very gamey aesthetics that are overlaid on top of our ice visuals. We feel like we can try to find solutions to those problems using more in game fantasy forward cells.Are there any plans to add visual filters, allowing you to turn off friendly spells that are just visual clutter?

Morgan Day

Yeah, we're definitely still doing a pass for some of these, especially some of these new visuals that we're adding. I was doing a dungeon on beta recently and there was a Holy Priest that was using what looked to be like a pulsing priest Halo visual, that was just kind of going for quite a while. And I was like, "Do I need to see that? I feel like I don't need to see that". And that just speaks to work that is still ongoing, where the team often takes a pass at a lot of those visuals once things have become a bit more finalized. And we're also looking to improve our systems for this. You're essentially asking for player defined filters, but we also feel like we could have better tools at our disposal to leverage some of those aesthetics that maybe don't need to be seen. Often we've found there are only a couple culprits that can really lead to a lot of visual clutter and confusion in the game space and sometimes we can strategically hide those for other people. But we're also looking to improve our own kind of tools in our tool belt there to reduce some of the visual noise that might be in an encounter, especially when you get into larger raid sizes -- you're at 20 to 30 people, there's just a lot going on. We actually have a lot of really great tools when it comes to performance and making sure that your performance isn't taking too much of a hit. So potentially leveraging some of that on a more intentional design perspective, not just when performance starts to take a hit are kind of some of the areas we're looking to improve.This expansion had a lot of large bosses and players used Dust to turn the boss translucent in order to see mechanics under the wings/behind the boss. This was disabled later in the expansion. Why was this done?

Morgan Day

You know, that's a very specific example. Dust was something that would affect other players, not just yourself. And we really wanna make sure that you are not impacting other people's experience. So we wanna give players the tools for them to kind of create, the best gameplay experience for themselves without negatively impacting others. We have actually added some pretty cool new options in the War Within. There will be an option to add a highlight if your character is like behind some collision ingame. So if your character is very obscured behind a wall, there will actually be an option to add a highlight for your character on that as some new UI options to affect when your camera will change positions. So sometimes maybe if you're fighting that tree boss, you can have a little bit more control over your camera and how that affects or is reacting to some of the gameplay spaces. So that'll be fun to get those tools into the players' hands. And those are things that you can change for yourself rather than, the solution like dust that is affecting it for everyone.CollectionsWith many unobtainable collectables coming back, could we ever see old Elite transmogs have some way of acquiring them again, even if it’s a low drop chance or having to hit Elite in a season?

Ion Hazzikostas

I've learned never to say never about things. I think we have no plans right now to change that. We've over the years made a lot of no longer available, things available again, even some stuff that people never figured would come back like the legendary cloak appearances from Mists that you can get today by playing Remix. But yeah, I think where we've drawn the line generally has been very niche prestige rewards that required extreme skill to get at a moment in time. So, the challenge mode weapons and armor kind of in that same general bucket. That's not to say that will never change. But I think our thinking there remains where it has been in the recent past.

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