Highlights

This is not set in stone, but the current plans for flying include flying enabled in Nazjatar and Mechagon.

The requirements for Pathfinder Part 2 will be similar to the Legion achievement version.

Tides of Vengeance is made to be a play on Tides of Darkness.

There are no plans for improvements on PvP gearing, the dev team wants to see the 8.1 changes on the PvE side in action first before coming up with anything for PvP.

Heroic Warfronts will be flexible between 10 and 20 players and meant to be more strategic.

There are no plans of nerfing past raids for soloing, but the devs do look into making targetted changes if a specific boss is impossible to solo.

There are no plans to add Legendaries in BFA, but the devs are not done with the system.

There are no plans on adding a fourth slot of Azerite gear.

More rewards like Conquest will be added to War Mode as extra incentives.

Free for All PvP Quests are scheduled to make a return in Nazjatar.

There are plans for more random events in Island Expeditions. Also, mobs will be less scattered and more clumped together in the future.

You have a higher chance of obtaining Island Expedition loot by playing on higher difficulties.

Addons that blacklist realms automatically will have their functionality broken.

The devs really liked how the Mage Tower played out in Legion, and they might bring a similar challenge back in the future.

In Nazjatar, you will be sunk down to a zone below water and you can look through the water like a wall of glass!

There are no plans for more Allied Races until 8.2, but character customizations are added as players suggest them.

The devs are looking into removing hair restrictions from certain helms.

There are no current plans of increasing the friend limit on the Battle.net client, but it is something constantly discussed around.

It is hard to differentiate between classes enough to build class sets in situations like Antorus. The Azshara raid sets will be themed around Nagas.

The devs are currently happy with the Titanforging situation and believe Thaumaturge Vashreen will solve some the RNG loot problems.

There are no plans for solo queueing for Rated Arenas and RBGs, even as a separate bracket.

Full Interview

Do you plan on adding Flying to Nazjatar?



JF: So, I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot here by giving you information we may change our minds about. The current plan is that you can fly in Nazjatar and Mechagon. This may change, we shall see. But we're building the zones with flying in mind.

What will we need to do to be able to fly on Pathfinder Part 2?



JF: The requirements will be pretty similar to Legion Pathfinder Part 2. So that is a lot of gaining rep, do a certain amount of World Quests in the area, meet new friends and finish the questlines there.



Is the War Campaign included?



JF: You will see a minor continuation to the War Campaign. As long as you've kept up with everything in Tides of Vengeance, you should be in a good spot to unlock that part quickly.

I've played WoW and Warcraft since the very beginning, I've played like every single game. The thing I really want to know is that about the artwork - the Alliance and Horde soldier on the cover is very reminiscent of Warcraft, also "Tides of Vengeance" sounds really close to "Tides of Darkness", is that a play on nostalgia?



Jeremy Feasel: For sure, one of our major focuses behind Battle for Azeroth is getting to the core of the franchise feel, the attack between the Alliance and the Horde, and that's what Tides of Vengeance is all about. For the Alliance, this is the culmination of all your War Campaign efforts, sneaking your way into Zuldazar, setting all those bombs you previously planted and seeing all your plans coming to fruition with this final battle, the Battle of Dazar'alor. Moving forward into the future, we feel that the Alliance vs. Horde conflict is super core to the Warcraft franchise. I mean, if you guys watched the opening ceremony on Friday, you saw John Hight up there screaming "For the Alliance!" in a deeper tone, and I already lost my voice, it's the second day of BlizzCon! The number of people that just hold on to the idea of the conflict, it's just such an ingrained part of WoW. You have so many Alliance and Horde players going to the forums and discuss how Saurfang is a jerk or that no, he is your real Warchief, or that Sylvanas is your Warchief. It is an amazing thing to build stories around. Especially during Battle for Azeroth, it is such a good time to get back to the core of Warcraft and remember just who the civilians are. You may ask, what are we gonna do next? Are we gonna start recruiting farmers? There are so few soldiers left, and we're really getting back into those storylines about who are we fighting for. It's something we need to remember every once in a while.



It is a really good callback. I did feel that feeling of nostalgia since the very first time I heard about Tides of Vengeance. "Oh my god, this is Tides of Darkness all over again!"



JF: Yeah, that's exactly what we wanted you to feel, so that's great! I'm glad we got that feeling across.

I have a question about itemization. Regarding BFA, I have some doubts about PvP itemization. It's kinda hard to gear up when you're just doing Arenas, to get upgrades or even Azerite pieces. We keep getting the same item level pieces for weeks on end, and so we cannot progress. I'd like to know if there are any plans regarding PvP item levels or even clarifications on how PvP templates and item levels work.



Paul Watkins: We recognize that is something that players are definitely asking for. There are a couple of different systemic improvements that we are implementing in Tides of Vengeance to help you shoot for better pieces of Azerite on the PvE side, and that means you can make constant progress towards getting better pieces of gear, giving you the opportunity of shooting for very high item levels. We don't have any definite plans to announce on the subject on the PvP side. We want to see first how the improvements for gearing on PvE will ultimately play out before trying anything on the PvP side of things.

How will Heroic Warfronts work, itemization wise?



JF: We want this to be an alternative. When your guild is done raiding for the week, but you wanna do something that requires more than 10 players, our current idea is that Heroic Warfronts will be on a flexible format, accepting between 10 and 20 players, so that whoever you have online that night will be able to join in the battle for the Warfront. The first Warfront done for that week will give you an exra high item level piece of gear.



Any idea on what item level this first piece will be?



JF: It's something will have to figure out, still. Rise of Azshara is still quite a ways off.



Would it be comparable to a Heroic raiding piece of gear? Maybe Mythic?



JF: Still TBD. We are looking forward for your feedback, though!

About raid soloing: A couple specific raid encounters are impossible to solo. Are you looking into making those encounters maybe not soloable, but easier to do on smaller raid sizes in the future?



JF: Generally speaking, our philosophy is that, for soloing old raid encounters, players should not be able to solo encounters on the previous expansion, but on the expansion before that. This is why we make targetted changes to certain encounters, like the beginning of Siege of Orgrimmar. We changed Galakras so that it could be solo'd by players. You know, there are really cool mounts, awesome transmogs, even Hunter pets to find in there. We want that be available for as most players as possible. It's something that we are constantly evolving and looking for player feedback on, and in cases where we feel like, "Yeah we really need to make this a little easier" because otherwise everything else in that raid is trivial, we decide to nail changes down and make that hard encouter a bit easier. So while I don't have anything to announce right now, this is our general philosophy, and if you see anything that is way harder while everything around it is super easy, it is a great piece of feedback for us.



One encounter in particular that is incredibly hard to solo right on Mythic now is the first boss in Hellfire Citadel, Hellfire Assault.



JF: So what in particular are you looking to get from that encounter on Mythic, that cannot be done in other difficulties? Is there any transmog in specific that you're looking for?



Actually no transmog in specifics but there is a mount from Archimonde. We can't progress through the instance without defeating the first boss.



JF: Ah, gotcha. Yeah, this is really good feedback and something we will look into.

Do you have any plans of implementing any legendaries in Battle for Azeroth?



JF: We liked some of the powers that came with Legion Legendaries. Of course they had some ups and downs within the community and ultimately we allowed you to target legendaries at the end of the expansion. One of the things we liked most about legendaries was the fact that they could really change how your class would play out, like "I need this legendary, it adds a rad talent" and that is an awesome thing as a class designer to see from a particular piece of gear. So, with Tides of Vengeance, we want the new pieces in Battle of Dazar'alor to all have these amazing, game-changing powers. We want to loop that into the system. That does not answer your question, does it? Because your question was about legendaries. Legendaries have evolved through the course of WoW's lifetime, and there is a big difference between say, Thunderfury and Thori'dal, the Legion Legendaries and Shadowmourne. I don't think we're done with legendaries yet. We don't have anything to announce right away, but we did love the system the past, and we aren't really done with them.

And what about a possible fourth Azerite piece? Possibly legs?



JF: We don't have anything to announce about a fourth piece of Azerite gear, but you will be adding an additional ring into your Azerite pieces in Tides of Vengeance that gives you additional choices for your character class, and in regards to that, we're retiring a lot of those Azerite traits that the players thought were a bit uninteresting and cool. We want Azerite choices to feel really cool and interesting, especially from the new raid.

When we used to play Vanilla, there were those items that made players feel really unique because it took so much effort to get them. In the last expansion, it felt like everyone had the exact same pieces of gear and it diminishes the feeling of "I am the only person that has this piece of gear!". Why is this happening?



JF: Over the course of time, World of Warcraft has become easier to gear on. Back then, if you were doing a 40-man raid like Molten Core, you would remember the number of times the Felheart Gloves dropped, and every Warlock in the raid already had them, and everyone was like "well, this is a waste". So gearing has become much faster, and that results in what you're talking about, where a lot of players can complete their BiS set. Legion Legendaries helped break that a little bit, but instead of feeling good, they felt bad for not having that particular piece of gear. So, we need to be careful when moving forward in the future. The entire guild coming together in order to get one specific piece of gear like Sulfuras or Thunderfury, in order to get one particular member of that guild an awesome piece of gear and everyone else would be like "Look, my guild is so awesome that we got Thunderfury and now every raid will be a little easier from now on", that is something awesome to hold on to and something that we don't want to get rid of. We're definitely taking a look there.

War Mode is going through a very extensive faction imbalance right now. Is there any plans on changing this?



PW: One of the big things we're doing in Tides of Vengeance is that we want to create ways to incentivize the undernumbered faction into the fight, aside from just turning into a target-rich environment for the enemy. Which should be reason enough, but we want to give extra incentives. Our newest assaults, something exciting is that for both factions, it will take place at the same time in the same place, so if you have War Mode active and the enemy faction is also there, it now turns into a conflict while you're trying to defend yourself.



JF: We're looking into adding extra rewards to War Mode specific things, like in assaults. One of the things we're discussing is "Hey, especially if you're driving you into a location where both factions are specifically attacking, we're gonna build World Quests around that and the opponent that is trying to kill you, that is awesome!". That plays to the strengths of War Mode. So why don't we give you Conquest for that? It totally feels like a PvP activity. This is something we're looking on adding in Tides of Vengeance.

Why did you guys remove the PvP World Quests that were added in Legion?



JF: We really liked the PvP World Quests in Legion, but they would send you around a World that essentially doesn't exist anymore. In War Mode, there is no such concept as a "PvP Flag" anymore. But one of the things that we really liked about that system were the Free for All aspect, where it didn't really matter which side you were on, you could jump in and mess with people, and for those PvP players, that was a concept that felt awesome. This is not off the table, and something we plan on bringing back in Rise of Azshara. There will be a whole new continent, and a place we can build those quests from the start.

Air drops are really cool but they only really had any meaning at the beginning of the expansion. Now, they're there just as a place where Horde and Alliance gather for some PvP action. Are there any planned changes for Air Drops?



JF: One of the big things we want to do in Rise of Azshara is to take a big look at the different War Mode specific activities like the Air Drops. We plan on adding more of those and add more drops into the Air Drops. We want to test out everything that we can with War Mode and think that's cool. I've played on Tichondrius as an Alliance player as my entire time playing World of Warcraft and you know, this is a super Horde heavy server and one of the best sides of being on a PvP server is not knowing when a Rogue is going to jump on you and kill you. We want to play to that strength, there are some things we really want from that playstyle and we want to continue supporting it.

There isn't enough information in-game about possible rewards you can gain from things like the weekly Conquest Cap. Any plans on changing that?



JF: I think what you're talking about is a problem to where WoW exists at. There are a ton of rewards that you can get from raids, dungeons, island expeditions, warfronts, PvP and very few of those things are directly surfaced to the player when you log. When you are a brand new player playing WoW, you're levelled all the way to 120, there is a very high chance that you may not know where to go for your very first piece of loot. This is something we're looking to solve in the future.

One of my favorite activities in Battle for Azeroth is Island Expeditions. Do you plan on expanding them besides adding new zones and loot? Also, an issue that I see often is that whenever I DC while in an Expedition, I'm unable to log back in until the scenario is over.



JF: That's really interesting, I mean, the second part of that is definitely a bug.



PW: Engineer here, we will take a look at it! As far as the future of Island Expeditions, I think we see that the first incarnation of Island Expeditions is just a start, right? We wanna hear all the player feedback and respond, and keep iterating on them. We are getting two more islands in Tides of Vengeance and we're also looking at the procedural spawning in Islands. Right now, if you jump into an Expedition, all you see is a sea of monsters. They're kinda just everyone, and the perfect execution of "we wanna cover this small island with monsters". And maybe that's not exactly perfect for the Expedition gameplay. In the future, we wanna concentrate the monsters in more identifiable and iconic clumps, so you're better able to pay attention to what you're fighting against.



JF: So you're gonna have more dead space between monsters, you're gonna have to choose whenever you wanna mount up and go to this creature, rather than just pulling your way across the entire island, which is what some groups do right now. We want you to pay more attention to the events that occur. We're also planning on changing a lot of those events. I'm sure most who do Expeditions of you have seen the Azerite Growth event where this Azerite Elemental spawns and that usually wins you the island. What if that event didn't happen? What if more invasions happened? There are 18 different invasions and they change the sky around the Island, fire shows everyone, you get portals sending you to pockets of alternate dimensions, iron and lava, an extra boss, that's awesome. We want to play more into these strengths of Island Expeditions, because it's one of the things we believe is the most exciting about the system. Then in the middle of playing these invasions, you can be thrown into a completely different direction, and that's what an exploratory system like this should focus on, in changing your perception of where you should go and what you should be doing at any given point. This also gives us the opportunity of looking again at things like the quest givers that show up on Islands, and making sure that these little puzzles give you an awesome reward, and give you time to explore your way around the islands.

Like Paul said, we're just beginning to look into the procedural generation system. We're learning a ton about the system. You will see new events in Tides of Vengence that include capture points that show up instead of the Azerite Elementals, this is an Azerite seam that you can take over and it gives you a constant flow of Azerite, but the other team can come and take it back from you. So, you now have a push-pull mechanic instead of a 1-shot. Similarly, we're also adding wave events! Instead of elementals, you might see this beacon that you can click on and it causes waves of monsters to come at you, and although those are great to get Azerite with, they get progressively more difficult. The enemy AI might jump in at any point and kill you, taking all of your Azerite. It's all about experimenting with expectations and seeing what can be the most fun part about the system and doubling down on that. In some cases, you might not see any of those events and instead see an early Fire elemental invasion. We feel like that really plays to the strengths of the system.

The thing about a procedural generation system is that it's incredible power and so easy for create a ton of different system and change things on the fly. So you will see us changing a lot of things and experimenting on Islands in both Tides of Vengeance and Rise of Azshara, including even more top-level changes to rulesets, to how the Island plays out, even what is your goal on the Island. We're looking forward for more feedback as the system evolves, this is not something we're quite through yet, and we wanna keep working on.



PW: One of the major challenges we undertook when we started talking advanced AI is that they should feel like you're fighting against players, and that meant a lot of things. Obviously, we need them to fight and navigate into objectives, but there were a lot of subtle stuff. One of the funny stories we have: We spent a lot of time developing these advanced AIs so they can fight against players and contest objectives intelligently, we put them in front of a bunch of people, and there was this unanimous feedback that the AIs don't jump. They fight, they take objectives, they can open boxes, they can mine, but players jump. Fine, we gotta make them jump! This was our top priority. So we went back and we made them jump, that was critical. We had one point where all we could do is turn the jump option on and off, so everything was boucing around, it was incredibly silly and chaotic. Now we have a "jumpiness" slider.

Is it possible that we might see this advanced AI in raids anytime soon?



JF: I feel like the future for both systems, procedural generation and advanced AI, is huge. We have a ton of different directions we can take those, and we built the systems intending for them to be expandable. So, we're really in excited in 8.1.5, that you will be able to experience the system in the Arathi Basin brawl by going against AI enemies. You're gonna get to see them strategize on a high level, building in various different strategies, sometimes you will see them deathball their way towards a certain objective, sometimes you will see them intelligently spread out with a variety of different tanks and healers, and they might even try to figure out the best way to beat you, and sometimes they will jump off the cliff after you while shooting Frostbolts and stuff. You know, like a player does. We feel like we had to solve another whole sleuth of feedback issues that came back from that, about how players might play the Basin. Playwrs are not perfect. They might think that they are, but in fact, sometimes, I even find myself fighting on the roads when I'm not supposed to, because this Warrior jerk comes up and Hamstrings me and I'm like "well, now you have to die". And the AI needs to do that too. It needs to make imperfect decisions, it needs to make you feel like you're sometimes outsmarting it. It's a really fine line to walk on. That is our next step that we're going towards, and where are we going from there? Well, we got a lot of ideas.



PW: A warning though, if you think you're walking into a curbstomp, they will take you down.

Could that kind of AI ever be added to a raid, though?



JF: It is possible technically, although we have a lot of learn from the Faction Champions encounter in Trial of the Crusader, and how that encounter was received by players, and how we're gonna build another thing like that.

One problem I see in Island Expeditions is the lack of perception on rewards. How do you plan to fix that, so that people might want to do harder difficulties?



PW: So one of the little known things that I can spell for you here, is that on higher level difficulties, you do have a higher channce of obtaining loot from different creatures. Although, I don't show up to your house with the game and explain that to you, and it is a deficit of the system, the obsfucation of how difficult it is to tell what drops loot and how difficult it is to get the loot, especially with all those mounts and pets and transmogs, and all this awesome. It ended up being an experiment for us that did not really work out like we wanted it to. We're looking at ways to better target loot in the future and get what you want from the system.

Are you aware of addons that can block players from specific realms? Any plans on changing or even breaking the functionality of said addons?



PW: It automatically blocks them?



Yeah, they block players from those realms so you can't even see them wanting to join your groups or raids.



PW: I'm not aware of any addons with such functionalities but it's really important for us to embrace this sense of community, and I think that whenever it's possible, we want to make sure that our addon authors are sort of following that spirit. I don't know exactly about that addon. Do you know what is the addon called?



NoobBlocker*. It automatically blacklists players from servers and blocks their whispers and invite requests.



JF: That is definitely the opposite of the inclusiveness we want to foster in WoW. We will take a look into it, thanks for bringing it up!



* Editor's Note: As of the time of this post, the addon NoobBlocker is no longer available on any addon websites.



Do you have any plans to bring solo challenges like the Mage Tower back?



JF: We really liked the Mage Tower, and there were a couple of key parts that we need to have in order to make a challenge like that an awesome experience. One of them is that you need to have a great reward at the end of it. The Artifact system gave us an awesome opportunity for something that you can show off to other people. It is something that requires the right place and the right time, but we really do like the idea.

You showed up the new Worgen and Goblin models and they're awesome. Do you have any other improvements on how the game looks and feels in the future?



JF: Our engineering team is always looking at making processing improvements. Do you wanna talk about some of the stuff coming up?



PW: A lot of our work is building features with design, but a large portion of our team is devoted to constantly keep WoW on the cutting edge of technology as well. Some of the major things coming to Tides of Vengeance is multithreading support to our render, which will let us take advantage of the more modern hardware that our users have. Another big effort is we're constantly working with our environment teams to amp up the visual fidelity of our world while still remaining performant on not super modern machines. We want WoW to be accessible to everyone. As far as major visual updates and combat animations, I think that's an ongoing process. Our class team is actually sort of getting almost all of the way done with the class updates, we've seen a combat revamp happening all the way through Legion and in Battle for Azeroth. I think that is also a constant process, we're looking at things that are starting to show their age and attempting to bring them to a more modern era. Also, we're looking for ways to make sure our visuals are telling a gameplay story as well. We want the players to know that they need to get out of that Frozen Orb, that thing looks pretty nasty, and make sure they can see and react to that.



JF: Specifically to the Goblin and Worgens, anytime we create an HD version of player models, we want to take another look into their animations, and you will see some animation updates with those guys. I think we will improve the running and walking animations in particular, and we got some awesome new updates for them. And as we approach Rise of Azshara, we're looking at some major scale of engine and art improvements we can make to make those epic zones. For the first time ever, you will be sunk down into a zone that is below water level and entirely surrounded by waterfalls. The power of Queen Azshara has split the water and you can look through the water into the depths like a wall of glass. It looks awesome.



PW: Also, the visual remastering of Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch look awesome.

I have a friend who has arachnophobia and I have some spider traumas as well. When I was questing in Kul Tiras, spider quests made me feel all some traumas surfacing back up. Is there any way for those people to run away from those quests? To complete these quests without requiring interactions with giant spiders?



JF: We will tell our quest designers that they did a great job, unfortunately. We totally hear what you're saying, and we totally pride ourselves into being as inclusive as possible, as well as being on the forefront of accessibility. We want to have as many player types as possible. Hearing things like this from the fans, please keep bringing these things up, we want to hear this feedback because it is very important to us.

Do you have any plans for Allied Races after the Kul Tirans and Zandalari Trolls?



JF: I feel like Allied Races are an awesome addition to the game. You have seen us taking this system in a bunch of directions now, we kinda pieced it apart, we've added Allied races and then we said "hey, wait a minute, I like being a Dwarf!", so we added a Dwarf heritage armor set. We added that, then we thought about Blood Elves wanting golden eyes or Night Elves, what do they get? So they got different customization options. So we really like the different levels of player customizations that came out of this and we're definitely not done yet, but we don't have anything to announce today.

About character customizations, can we expect more of them?



JF: We're definitely looking for more ideas from the community. I know that there are particular groups of Dwarves that really wanna be a Wildhammer member and have all those awesome tattoos, and these ideas ultimately result in us having very nerdy conversations on the whiteboard talking about "oh this is a great idea!", so please, keep shoving those ideas at us, we love hearing them!

The Heritage Helm on Female Kul Tirans, as displayed on the website, does not clip their hair like a lot of other helms to for different races. Is this going to be a Kul Tiran feature or are you working on removing this restriction in the future?



JF: Something that we've been talking for a bit now. We've had a good amount of feedback about certain helmets having hair restrictions where they make your hair disappear, where my hairstyle may have actually worked pretty well with this, you know, I wasn't going to use the ponytail because it would weirdly stick out to the sides. This is something that is actively discussed and, like you can see with Kul Tirans, we're looking into making things that play to that strength.

Are there any plans on increasing the number of friends you can have on the Battle.net client?



PW: I'm not aware of any plans right now, but this is definitely good feedback to hear. You're stuck at 200 friends?



Yeah, it is a problem if you play multiple Blizzard games.



JF: And especially as we add new players to the launcher. You will see Destiny players flooding in, per instance. It is something we've heard a couple of times now, and I feel like it's definitely something we need to look into.

Can we expect class-specific sets in BFA? It kinda feels bad as a Warrior to look at a Paladin or a DK and we all look the same.



JF: So one of the reasons why we decided to go in the direction of more universal sets was that it was starting to become very difficult when you got, say, to the fel-ridden parts of Legion, to differentiate between what an Antorus geared mage would look like, against an Antorus geared Warlock. Everything is green, so how do you differentiate between those things? We're planning on continuing with universal sets through Battle for Azeroth, but we're always looking for feedback from our players. One thing that this allows us to do is create themed armor sets that are heavily themed around the areas that you're going to. So you will see these awesome new naga-themed armor coming from Nazjatar, per example. And we hope you really like it, but please, tell us what you think.

Do you guys have any plans of adding improvements to the community system, like an in-game browser to help us find things more easily?



PW: I think that our community system, like many of our features, is sort of on their first incarnation of the system, and one of the great things about WoW is that it's an ever-changing game. We're always looking for feedback and making it better. You will see a lot of features coming into the future, but we don't have anything to announce right now. But, we love hearing that kind of feedback, like "this is what I want to use this system for", because that allows us to craft the next version of the feature.



JF: The Community Finder concept in general has been a major piece of discussion amongst us at Blizzard, and something we're definitely looking at improving.

We have seen the growth of characters like Sylvanas and Anduin in BFA. Will we see the same growth for older characters not prominently featured in the expansion?



JF: I think it is a lot of fun for us to revisit older charaters and go "What will they look like in 10 years?", on their journey. We will do that whenever it makes sense for those particular characters.

Any plans on smoothing RNG a bit, to allow us some more choice on the Mythic Weekly Cache? Like instead of giving us a random piece, giving us the choice of three random pieces?



JF: We're making the first iteration of a choice system in Tides of Vengeance, which is the ability to, over time, gain currency to turn into Azerite Armor pieces. Thaumathurge Vashreen is being added back in and he has many different pieces of Azerite gear for sale, with 3 different item levels. If you want to get really expensive, you can gather a huge amount of stuff, scrap it, and have a constant progress towards an end goal. If you wanna go towards a very specific armor piece, like a 385, and this item level will go up with each season, you are able to shoot towards it.

But this does not fully answer your question. What you're asking is, "I don't want a cache of disappointment. I don't wanna open my Mythic cache and have something that makes me sad". This is absolutely something that we think is crucial to advancing the Mythic system and we had a lot of discussion towards it, consider this the one thing we need to improve the system, but we have other plans.



Are you guys happy with the Titanforging system literally scaled through the roof? Do you have any plans of backing titanforging scale down a bit?



JF: That's a tough one. I think that there are a number of underlying systems that all influence each other here, and we wanna make iterative changes within them without changing too many things. So, we're probably gonna leave Titanforging as is right now, but I wouldn't say that's how things will be forever into the future. Let's just do one iteration at a time and make sure that we're not changing too many things at once.



But that is part of the RNG problem, the Titanforging problem.



JF: Right, that is another layer of RNG on top of everything, and that is one of the players where Vashreen will really help us out, because if you're shooting for that 385 piece of gear that is particularly your helmet, at least you are constantly building towards that one piece of gear. And know that, for a certain amount of time it doesn't matter that your helm can't titanforge, you will absolutely get it at one point.

Is solo queueing a possibility for Rated Arenas or Battlegrounds?



JF: We feel like that is a little counterproductive because most other teams will be queueing as groups, and you will be putting yourself in a very big disadvantage.



What about this option as a separate bracket?



JF: It is a really good question to ask, and something that we will keep asking ourselves. But we don't have any plans for that right now.