Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas

Tomb will release sometime in mid to late June.

Gear mattering is the default in WoW.

Timewalking is there to normalize people of all levels so that they can do content together.

The challenges not scaling means that they will become accessible over time to the entire audience.

Green fire started off being challenging and eventually became easier.

The challenges aren't made for a few percent of players. Over the long run more people will be able to enjoy them.

Early on there is a lot of prestige being able to complete the challenge so early.

There will be a large number of people that won't be able to do it with Tomb or Argus gear.

The team didn't have the capacity to make 36 challenges, so they are happy with the ones they created.

Overall the team is pretty satisfied with how things worked out.

The team would have wanted to add another couple light requirements to Part 2, such as donate to buildings or kill elites, something that you would have gotten over time.

Anyone who you see flying right now has done the outdoor content of Legion. Now you can enjoy the perks of flight.

The team doesn't have any plans to turn off the invasions right now, even way down the road.

It is content for people to do, there isn't really any reason to turn it off.

The team isn't thinking about changing the frequency of invasions.

Unlike the pre-expansion patch invasions, these are taking place in zones players are actively using, shutting down other activity in that zone.

The invasion achievement being required for flying would have been annoying, no one wants to get up at 3 AM for an invasion.

Timewalking being up all of the time would result in people always or never wanting to do it.

Contribution rates haven't declined so far. The team was expecting them to, but it hasn't happened yet.

If contribution rates decline, the team will adjust the amount of supplies needed for the buildings.

Part of the reason is storytelling. The team is trying to create a global narrative, the forces of the Alliance, Horde, Legionfall, all building towards an event.

Tomb will open when it opens for gameplay reasons. It was far too early to open it when Patch 7.2 released.

The world story builds up towards Tomb opening.

One option is everyone playing through the content leading up to Tomb opening in a few days, followed by a long wait with nothing.

The other option is some weekly steps, alternating between meaty quests and filler. The team is aware they are giving us filler as a pacing step.

Eventually the team realized (late in the PTR cycle) that the zone felt pretty empty with not a lot to do. They accelerated the release of the weekly steps, only leaving filler for the rest of progression.

They didn't plan out the release of content as well as they should have.

There are Artifact unlock challenge lines, class mount quests, artifact challenges, which took lots development resources. If you are only playing one character, you may only see 1/12th of the content.

The team learned from this and will improve in the future.

In terms of the number of quests, creatures, text, and other things added, Patch 7.2 was a very big patch.

More VO lines were recorded for Patch 7.2 than any previous expansion.

The team completed a massive amount of content, but that doesn't mean anything to players if they feel like they don't have anything to do.

What more would you like to see?

If there were more traditional things like Isle of Thunder story questing, that would only add a few more hours of content. Is that enough?

What do you expect in a big named patch?

The right thing for you to do in Patch 7.2 was to go to Broken Shore and do the Artifact things.

If you log in and see an invasion of a zone, you might want to go there first. The more things there are for you to do on Day 1, the less clear it is what you should do.

The team could have done a better job of communicating how the content rollout was going to work.

The class specific content probably won't continue going forward to Patch 7.3.

More raid testing will take place over the coming weeks: LFR, Heroic, and Mythic.

Originally the requirement to unlock your class mount was Exalted with Armies of Legionfall, but that requirement has been removed.

As soon as you complete the Legionfall campaign, you can unlock your class mount!

It is easier to remove requirements later than it is to add additional requirements.

Patch 7.2 is what was announced at BlizzCon. It is a patch with a dungeon, zone, raid, PvP brawls, assaults, and more.

Patch 7.2.5 is micro-holidays, a Timewalking raid, and new legendary items.

The plan is similar to what happened when Mythic Nighthold opened.

Week 2 the Mythic Keystone loot cap will go to 15, end of run loot Heroic, end of week Mythic.

The lag and latency issues are on the team's radar and they want to fix it.

In Legion, sharding tech was added. This is why the release was so smooth.

There are some addons that are causing behaviors that don't play well with sharding tech.

The team doesn't want to break up groups, having people that can't see each other in a group

The team wants to minimize the number of times you move from one shard to another. In previous expansions you would switch around when filling up a group, which felt bad.

Addons that are automatically creating groups are causing performance issues.

Heirloom upgrades are planned for Patch 7.2.5.

You will see upgrades in an upcoming build.

In Patch 7.2.5, if you have all of the legendary items for a spec and a legendary drops, it will randomly be for one of your off specs.

You can still change your loot spec if you want to target a specific spec.

If the team answers questions about one spec or class, they are answering a question that isn't relevant to 11/12 players watching.

Getting class information out there is something the team wants to do, maybe AMAs on the WoW subreddit would work.

Specs feeling like different classes with baseline abilities changing per spec.

There was a lot of focus on spec identity at the cost of some class identity.

Having a Fire mage never cast a frost spell might be too much, they are still a mage.

In some places the team went too far towards spec identity at the cost of class identity.

Tomb isn't the last raid in Legion. Patch 7.3 takes us to Argus with a new raid zone.

It doesn't feel great when you need an external buff to be effective or viable.

Making Disc priests less Innervate reliant is important.

Some of the classes are still hybrids, with a history and identity that is rooted in offering support to others. There is some value in recognizing this.

The team wants you to look at your raid composition and be happy that there is a certain class there. There are only a couple of examples of this right now, but the team could add some more.

If you want to work as a team to maximize effectiveness, this is a nice way to do it. If you goal is to top the meter that is probably less important to you.

If you are looking to fill a PuG, it would be awesome if you wanted to look for a specific class rather than just grabbing the highest item level player.

The team may have gone too far with bring the player, not the class. Sunwell was a long time ago and a different world. Not being viable without multiple group buffs is bad, but we are in a different place now.

The team would rather you take a slightly less geared Warlock rather than a third Hunter.

The team would like to make these challenges something you can go back and do again if you want.

The team has nerfed the new ones a lot. They are keeping an eye on statistics, completion rates, times, chest count.

Things are mostly in a good space right now when it comes to balance.

Any time a new dungeon is introduced, you are learning a new dungeon. You have already been running the old dungeons many times and know them well, so they are easier even if the new ones are balanced well.

The new affixes are comparable in difficulty to the old affixes and the team is happy with them.

Overall the team is happy with the difficulty of Mythic Nighthold.

There is pretty smooth progression through Nighthold.

Gul'dan and Elisande might be the targets of a few nerfs.

There are no plans to add Armies of Legionfall reputation to the invasions.

If you don't enjoy them, don't do them.

The team doesn't want to give every activity every reward.

Invasions give Nethershards, Artifact Power, emissary credit, and reputation. They are already rewarding.

There isn't anything planned for spending your excess Order Hall Resources on.

Bonus Rolls are a big sink for resources.

The team may offer something to spend them on in the future.

They don't want players to regret not earning more if they add a substantial thing to spend them on in the future.

Some players are always running low on Order Hall Resources

When Tomb unlocks, the item level ceiling on everything shifts up by 30.

New legendary items will drop at 970, and there will be a quest to upgrade again.

Legendary upgrade items will drop right away, you won't need to pick up the quest.

Once all of your legendary items are upgraded, hopefully the team will be able to hide the quest.

The upgrade item will take you from 910 to 970 if you haven't upgraded yet.

This will be tied to the Burning Crusade timewalking event.

In the future the team would love to have a timewalking raid for every event.

What raid would you like to see for each expansion's timewalking event.

These chests still mostly reward the same thing, which is underwhelming. The team will discuss this.

There is a ruleset for some creatures that uses a PvP style CC rule, with diminishing returns.

You shouldn't be able to CC some of these mobs endlessly, as this would make content trivial.

Diminishing returns and limited duration are both used to accomplish this.

Cripple being a four second duration is something the team looked at, but Affliction Warlocks found other ways to do the challenge, even without a specific legendary item.

Vol'jin is dead, what update do you want?

Stories are told in a way that makes sense for the narrative.

This felt like the right time to finish the Alliance story arc.

The team doesn't want to force symmetry and tell a story where it doesn't feel right.

Going back to the initial Broken Shore experience, the Horde did have an extra cinematic.

You won't be able to use weapon illusions on your Artifacts.

This was an artistic decision made early on.

Visual effects have to attach to certain places on weapons, which would constrain their design.

Most of the weapons aren't designed to have weapon enchant visuals attached.

US Realms - World Boss - Si'vash

US Realms - Nether Disruptor

Ion Hazzikostas answered questions today about Patch 7.2. Next month there will be a Patch 7.2.5 Q&A.is up now, so you can head to the Broken Shore for a chance at item level 900 loot, a Frost Relic, or Storm Relic.The Nether Disruptor is active on US realms!