Some good points made, but there are some I think are also a little off.Not testing last 3 bosses isn't going to return any novelty because the fights are still THOROUGHLY documented in journal. Even if they took that away, the abilities are thoroughly datamined. They'd have to encrypt the client beyond dataminability AND kill journal to reach what he's talking about. Even then, That novelty would last all of 5 minutes after the first twitch stream sees fight. Truth of matter is, there is no way to get the novelty of being ignorant 2006 gamers back anymore. All this sentiment is gonna do is result in fights that will no doubt be more buggy or mistuned because internal testing is a poor reproduction of player testing.Also, another point not touched on at all is something I think they've been guilty of too much lately is still over emphasizing the single player hero experience. today alone, I tried to play with a wow friend doing opening quests. Literally every other quest was "sorry this is personal credit or even personal phase". I'd be standing next to my friend and yet we'd be in different phases on same quest. This is NOT MMO design. I get that they like epic story telling, but it should never ever be at expense of an MMO feeling like an MMO. He literally talks about social bonds in this article when it comes to guilds...Blizzard, I'm asking you, pleaing with you. This should apply to questing too. Stop making quests that put you in some scenario for 30 minutes separate from the friend you logged in to play with, stop doing outdoor phasing that magically turns your mmo experience into a solo one. This is a design philosophy that's gotten worse in recent years and it needs to be undone. Tell your epic story, but find a way to make it work with your friends, period.
What feedback are they waiting for before going through with cross-faction guilds? Like why are we stifling the ability to play with people to hold onto some antiquated faction restrictions? If you don't want to play with the opposite faction, then don't that's a choice, but this rigid locking of who can play with who is a relic of old and needs to go.
I don't mind with not testing final bosses. But I do mind that the we still cannot have worldwide raid release.
When it comes down to the min max mentality the problem is how the balance turns out when compounding choices will sway you in one direction or another.It doesn't matter if all 3 talent choices are within .3% of one another in a bubble. The fact is there are multiple talent choices, multiple conduit choices, multiple legendary choices, and multiple covenant choices. Adding and expanding choices means you will see farther imbalance as power discrepancies begin to grow due to synergies immerging. Frankly the team bit of more then they could chew with the list of legendries that were not designed with talents and covenant spell design in mind. What farther accentuated this problem was conduit choices which feed off talents while other rely on spell that remain unmodified in any scenario. For example Frost DK has a conduit that makes Remorseless winter apply a stacking debuff. This feed off Gathering Storm which makes Remorseless winder do more damage and last longer for each rune spent. Meanwhile you have another choice that gives you a stacking strength buff after frost strike that doesn't feed of any talent choice.This is why having a singular expansive system is far preferable to having multiple layered system which often seem to create snowball effects causing one choice to lead you down a path. This is what people refer to when they say a system offers the "Illusion of choice". There are event times when the effect is small but dose not require a gameplay pivot. Why choose the choice that offers less power with no change. This is also why passives that act autonomously are the worst as they change nothing about you other then your damage output.I whole heartedly believe we need sharp systems that keep to the point rather then over bloated choices which create balance issues.
Pretty much confirming that WoW will never improve because they choose to pander to raidloggers and their minmax obsessions, meaning casuals and solo players will never get to enjoy good rewards and power progression because raidloggers cry.Well they can always buy boost that is, farming gold is factually far more efficient than wasting time with that worthless zeroth Morris gearSomething tells me that isn’t sustainable because they are losing more casuals by the month to better casual friendly mmos
what this game needs is fresh wind. ion has been torturing us with his bad systems-on-top-of-systems for 6 years now.
Better to add cross faction random BG. Also I remember at siege of Orgrimmar event in BFA there was a possibility for Sylvanas loyal Horde players to kill Horde players that are on Alliance side.Imagine such possibility in Open World!For example, in some options Alliance player clicks a check box that he is for the peace with the Horde. And turns on Warmode.In this case all the Horde players, and Alliance players that also have selected such options, becomes a friends.But all the Horde players, and Alliance players that select a WAR checkbox, are enemies.We will have finally 3 teams!1. Alliance loyal.2. Horde loyal.3. Union of the Azeroth (or something), Alliance + Horde.From development, I think its pretty easy to implement!
More Account-wide Progression - Just more of this please. Think about the systems before you make them. Torghast for example I've done it a few times I'm good. It's not really THAT fun. I leveled up a resto shaman to 60 and then realized I had to do torghast and then just quit. I don't feel like grinding torghast, conduits, legendary drops and all of this over and over just so I can jump into a M+ and be halfway decent. Don't design legendaries behind quests. Make them drop again, make them rare.I would also like to just see some of these currencies just account bound in a shared pool after a certain amount of time say the next .5 patch. All my alts that are leveled I could just login and its all pooled and i could see i have 10000 soul ash and 2000 soul cinder and boom just spend it right then in there instead of logging on one alt, sending 1 cache over, logging over to another and sending 2 over etc.Most of these were fixed in 9.1.5 with all conduits to 200 and I definitely appreciate all this but the only thing you need to fix now is in the next expansion don't put these systems into place. Honestly something like Conduits at the beginning and then just allowing you to get them later is fine. No way of getting legendary resources except for running torghast for the 300th time is not fine (Note: Why is tower knowledge still not account bound? Do you actually expect someone to grind out tower knowledge again? Why can't alts just have it done and making running torghast just a little easier.). Running a wing on LFR of castle nathria just so I can get this Legendary ability to drop for my gear...not fun. I get I don't speak for all people but once I've done most of the systems the first time on one character. I just want to level an alt jump in and start grinding gear. Put some systems in dungeons. For example make a crazy dungeon with M+ based on torghast just for fun.
More BS talk from Ion as he claims to learn this time, even though some of the things mentioned are things he "learned from" last expansion too but kept on doing it.
Korthia was almost non-factor for power level but so many players were stuck in there, chasing rares, digging chests for useless conduit farming.I was really shocked to find out that so many non-raiding casual guildies were doing it like it was mandatory.
If you think reading the dungeon journal is anything remotely close to testing a boss, I feel safe in my assumption that you do not have any idea what you are talking about. Datamining og dungeon journal will give you a vage idea of how the fight will be. But you won’t necessarily know where things happen, how transitions happen, what overlaps might occur or the tuning of anything. And the list goes on forever. Go read the dungeon journal of Sylvanas and then go kill her on mythic. If you really feel like you understand everything that is happening on your first pull of a complicated fight, and are able to make working strategies without playing it out, I honestly think you should apply for a position at Echo, GG, Method or Limit. They are in need of a talent like your. Truly one of a kind!
Very promising interview! It actually seems like they’ve learned a lot. Let’s hope it doesn’t all go in the trashcan and next expansions starts from scratch like the previous two. Without bringing any of the knowledge from SL into the development.Also, do devs know how broken RMP is? Or are the huge buffs to holy priest and no changes to rogue/mage happening without them knowing how broken these specs are in arena?