NA Content Creator Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on Patch 10.1 – Mythic Raid Lockouts, Cross-Faction Guilds

Here’s a summary of the discussions.

Social, Guilds and Cross Realm

• Regarding the guild member cap, they would love to increase it from a 1,000 but there’s technical limitations. Raising the cap is not trivial but maybe would like to look at the experience of maybe alts as there are very few guilds that have 1,000 active humans in them. Nothing in the immediate future but definitely something they would like to do.
• For cross faction invites and the reason that you need to be in a community or friends before you can invite, it’s something that you can voluntarily opt into. The connections of needing to be friends or part of the same community are what makes it opt in. It’s a step in tearing down the faction barriers.
• Can’t set a date for cross-faction queued content, but it’s the next step. However, cross-faction queued content is violating the opt-in mentality that they currently have. They want to move carefully but they are moving in that direction of tearing down barriers.
• You can’t change the faction of the guild and the faction is defined by the leader. You can’t pass leadership to an opposite faction leader, but opposite faction officers do work.
• Regarding the Battle.net friends cap, Ion would love to increase it personally but it’s a technical limitation.

Upgrading System

• Current system is very Dragonflight themed and the hope is that it works in Patch 10.1 and is a unification of multiple upgrade tracks. If the system carries forward, then it can be a permanent evergreen feature going forward and then they can use universally named currencies going forwards.
• On the topic of open ended upgrades to gear no longer existing, on one hand you can’t spam low Mythic+ piece for a piece and upgrade it all the way like I used to which takes away options, on the other hand being able to spam +2s and upgrade that gear they’ve heard from players as kind of degenerate. They’re heard that there is a desire there, but now the system it’s not just about dungeon gear but also about raid gear. If a normal raid group can upgrade their normal Sarkareth raid gear to Heroic Sarkareth raid gear before they kill it and complete their progression, you wouldn’t need that loot at all and it doesn’t feel right. It would also be awkward if players felt like they needed to run Normal and LFR because any drop from any different any time could be an upgrade and approach Mythic level. Overall its an experience and they’ll be listening and they’re make adjustments as needed.

Raids

• For the first time, the first LFR wing at the same time as Normal, Heroic and Mythic. The rest of LFR is delayed as they don’t want to spoil the progression experience of friends and family guilds. LFR exists to make sure that everyone can see the end of the story and see the final boss. This way a lot more people see the end of the raid with their friends and guild mates and get to experience that together and that’s a cool shared moment. In a world that has LFR open from the start, it would guarantee that everyone has seen the end of the raid in an LFR experience long before they got there with their friends.
• No plans to change Mythic lockouts in the future. While people do pug, Mythic raiding is meant as a last bastion of activities meant for semi-fixed groups of players where it’s a more hardcore progression experience. They recognize that this leads to inflexible when trying to pug. The flip side to that is it adds a greater investment in the shared experience. On Normal and Heroic if you wipe a couple times, people leave but on Mythic, before you start, it’s a little bit like Mythic+ and you’re in it together. There’s more motivation there to stick around instead of trying to hop, overcome challenges and help others and everyone overcoming the boss together. That’s a hallmark of Mythic raiding as it currently stands. Anythign is possible in the future, all the other difficulties have complete flexibility and Mythic is the exception and its targeting a specific audience with that.

Class Tuning

• Hope is not to have to do another player health/damage increase in the future. This is something they should have done more before Dragonflight launch. The 40% for Dragonflight launch was a scary big number, but what they saw from data is they should have done closer to a 66% increase. The 25% change in 10.1 is less about scaling and more about continuing to come to terms with the amount of throughput and survivability increases from the entire talent system.
• Broadly, there are plans to balance defensiveness and survivability. It is something that they need to look at as much as throughput as maybe some classes feel like they’re getting benched even through their throughput is good because they’re more likely to die. They don’t want complete homogenization, but it’s not fair to say your weakness is you just fall over dead. As they get into Season 2, they want to keep their very active tuning, and so every couple weeks, they’ll want to be looking at damage throughput but also who has trouble surviving.

Customization

• On Class/Race Combinations, the Magic-8-Ball says Outlook good. This is likely. They are chipping away and moving in the general direction of allowing more combinations. However, doing this sometimes requires new animation and visual support and there are some combinations that they want to make sure are consistent and explained in the world such as if Goblin Druids became a thing. Evokers are a tricky one though, but anything is possible.
• On Pronouns and Voice options, it’s something they’re still working on, but having the game reflect that choice is a huge undertaken due to localization and a massive amount of text that refers to your characters gender. They want to make sure they do it right and thoughtfully and they’ll provide more information when they’re going to be able to move forward.
• The Story of the Dragon Isles is focused on the Dracthyr Evoker. After Dragonflight and watching the Dracthyr integrate with Azeroth, it would make sense for them to be able to learn how to learn Frost magic or how to Bladestorm. Post Dragonflight, very likely for them to have other classes.

Dragonriding

• They are building upon Dragonriding and the things that Dragonriding can do with new abilities in 10.1. They’re still planning to have traditional flying available on the Dragon Isles and how they’re going to bring Dragonriding to the rest of the world. The next step here is probably going to set precedent for the next step of WoW forever, so there’s a lot to talk about and figure out.

Bag Space

• No plans to address this in Patch 10.1. The bank is definitely something they have been looking at as it’s very dated, maybe in a future patch but more than likely in a future expansion.

Crafted Gear

• Yes, 418 crafted gear will automatically upgrade to 421 gear. As for why, as they planned out Crafted gear for Season 2 they are also rolling out the upgrade system, they wanted the systems to be aligned with each other. Doing that meant that crafted gear would start at 421 at a baseline, so there would be this weird 3 item level gap between the end of S1 crafted gear and the start of S2 crafted gear and players may have felt like you needed to recraft everything to get a 3 item level gap. Doing something retroactively is something they do sparingly but it just made sense players to spare players the awkwardness.

Tier Bonuses

• With 50% Tier set nerfs in PvP, it’s not to discourage using them, it’s just reducing the overall impact they have in PvP. The damage profiles of raid are different in PvP, but the bonuses are still net positive.

Timewalking

• No plans to do continue Turbulent Timewalking, but the overall event is something that they might do again. Timewalking and the event for the end of the Season was good for general catch-up, but if it were to be at the beginning of the expansion it would probably overshadow the new content. They don’t want old content to be the best thing in a new Season. They also want to make sure that Timewalking doesn’t become stale.
• The Weekly Event rotation was introduced in WoD and haven’t experimented and evolved it since then. There’s so much they can do to spotlight things from week to week.

Lore

• Book collections would be awesome. Personally would rather start with a library collection of your own character. They can do it for past expansions and past zones retroactively as this is your character’s personal journey. Recently, there are a lot of interesting books scattered around the world, and turning them into a collection could be a really interesting idea as well.