Icy Veins BlizzCon Interview with Ion Hazzikostas BlizzCon WoW Deep Dive Panel Summary
In another interview with Warcraft Wiki during BlizzCon 2023, WoW’s development team confirmed that Dragonflight will not get a Patch 10.3. In terms of a fourth season, however, extra seasonal assets have already been found by Wowhead back in September, hinting at a potential Season 4, which has now been confirmed by Hazzikostas – including the return of Fated Raids.
WoW’s Game Director has also commented on Fyrakk’s axe legendary, Classic Timewalking, and new systems coming with The War Within, such as Hero Talents and Delves.
Here is a quick summary of the Icy Veins interview:
- Dragonflight will have a Season 4 with Fated Raids.
- The team wants to continue exploring catch-up mechanisms for loot acquisition to counteract RNG, but the Dinar system in Shadowlands Season 4 may have been “too generous”.
- With the Mythic+ rotation changing every season, the need for seasonal affixes has diminished, but the team is open to community feedback.
- They want to see the community’s reaction to how the Fyrakk axe has been implemented. Based on feedback, they may reconsider the approach of implementing legendaries. The legendary comes from Fyrakk and should have a similar acquisition process to the Evoker legendary, not exactly the same, but similar.
- Bad luck protection for the legendary axe from Fyrakk will be active from the very beginning.
- The team plans to review class distribution of tier tokens to make it more fair.
- No plans for Classic Timewalking, as Classic dungeons are “considered too simple” for modern players, which is why Timewalking starts with the Burning Crusade.
- The WoW team is happy with how the new talent system has panned out, it offers more customization and granularity compared to the MoP-style trees.
- More updates to class and specs are planned, including talent pruning and adding more interesting options.
- Most Hero Talents will be passives to avoid button bloat. There will be some active abilities where they make sense.
- Delves will have a seasonal currency to avoid player burnout with a mix of reward types. The more lucrative rewards will have some limitations on how often you can get them.
- Future UI improvements will focus on the Guild Ui and the Friends system.
- The devs are mindful of the balance between gear from PvE and PvP. They want to avoid forcing players into playstyles they don’t prefer.
- Ion explains feature development is a collaborative process with ideas coming from the team rather than top-down directives.
