This was a great interview full of insights and explanations on Raid, Mythic+ and other design choices for Dragonflight, so we’d recommend watching the full interview on Bellular’s YouTube channel, but we’ve provided some highlights below!
General
- It’s unimaginable that Dragonriding is something that is forever confined to the Dragon Isles. It would make people very sad. There’s stuff to navigate there, such as making sure that player’s mount collections are still relevant.
- Archeology returning is possible in some form. Part of why they haven’t cared about Archeology is because they want to do something different with it. They could paint diamonds on the map for players but it may not be compelling.
- They can’t imagine other races being Evokers, but down the line, there’s no reason that Dracthyr couldn’t learn how to Bladestorm or cast some other schools of magic.
- You can expect that UI improvements would be coming in every major patch coming forwards.
- They’re due for another Timewalking Raid and looking at Mists Raids, Throne of Thunder is high on Ion’s personal list, but nothing to announce for Embers of Neltharion as Timewalking would more likely be x.7 or x.5 patch content. Outdoor Timewalking gameplay could be something they do in the future.
- The Hall of Fame will be unified with Cross-Faction guilds.
Mythic+
Affixes
If you are interested in the Mythic+ affix discussion, I would highly recommend listening to the entire discussion which beings at 12:45
- Currently looking at not having a Seasonal Affix. Seasonal affixes were crafted to solve the problem of keeping players engaged with content that they were going to be running for 24 months straight. This is no longer a problem in Dragonflight. In addition, seasonal affixes are always on, and could be more harmful than good.
- Focusing on freshening up the rotating affix pool. They’re currently looking at adding new affixes to the level 7 tier, rotating some out and iterating on other ones. If this works well, every season could mean a general refresh of the affix pool, not completely replacing all them, but rotating a couple out and bringing some back in, and introducing some new concepts to try out.
- Extremely unlikely that they’re going to do a fully positive affix, as affixes are supposed to add challenge, but Ion could see them doing more kiss/curse affixes where you if you play well you can offset the challenge. Each affix should be something to think about, if you can ignore it, then it’s viewed as not successful. Affixes which dominate the dungeon and are the primary thing you think about in a dungeon also aren’t a success.
- Not just affixes, as we head into Season 2, they’re looking into the mechanics of the dungeons as well, creature spawning, abilities combined together, etc. and all that adds up to create a holistic player experience. They think there is very valid feedback from players that when you fighting groups of enemies, combining a couple together (as you do in Mythic+), there’s just too much going on. There’s too many different things going on, what are you supposed to be doing here and then Quaking goes off and whatever else. They’re talking a pass on the 4 Dragonflight dungeons that weren’t in Season 1, disarming and pruning here and there and making them friendlier to the Mythic+ experience.
Key Depletion
- They have the same thoughts. It’s moving people around and requires you to succeed to climb the tiers. If deplete didn’t exist, it would lend itself to the brute force approach. They want to keep some stakes and think it’s much better than the original deplete system where your key was literally dead and needed to be recharged.
Great Vault & Revival Catalyst
- Nothing really planned to change with the Great Vault. It’s not perfect but they’re focusing on other things.
- Revival Catalyst exact timing is TBD, but probably in the same window. They know many players felt it was a bit too late and it may be something that they will continue to look at. However, the Revival Catalyst is meant to be a fall-back method to help with bad RNG, but they know once the Revival Catalyst unlocks, it becomes the Primary method of acquisition of set pieces. It’s nice to have deterministic loot, but there still is that excitement in that first month of getting that Tier piece.
- They’re looking at simplifying the mechanics on the Revival Catalyst. There are aspects of the account-wide charges that they like in terms of the alt friendliness, it’s lacking in clarity and catch-up mechanics. They’re thinking they might be going back to something more naturally currency based. They went with the mechanics that they did in Season 1 was that there was no currency, making up a brand new currency for the catalyst felt like design bloat.
Raid
- They are happy with Vault. There were obviously tuning issues on Week 1 / Week 2 on the highest difficulty, they need to do better, but explained that they changed everything about their class system and added talents, and a lot of their playbook and expectations went out the window. Now going into Season 2, they feel like they have a better understanding of what every class is capable of. “Tuning in general should be much more on point. “
