Mountain Thane Warrior Interview with Bajheera and Plkatv – Fury & Protection Hero Talent Tree

Early Look at Hero Talents in The War Within
Blizzard revealed hero talents for San’layn Death Knights, Chronowarden Evokers, Lightsmith Paladins, and Mountain Thane Warriors earlier today, so check out their blog post for additional developer insights regarding the newly revealed trees.

Interview with Bajheera and Plkatv

Also check out Bajheera’s video of the same interview.

Embodying Class Fantasy

How do you feel about the fantasy of the tree and how well do the talents embody it. What are your favorite parts of the tree?

• Mountain Thane felt like a slam dunk. When I think about an iconic Warrior archetype, I think back to the Warcraft 3 Mountain King and being able to bring that into WoW with is a really cool opportunity. Adding in lightning strikes is cool and adds a new spin, which can create some cool gameplay moments. Avatar is one of my favorite abilities in the game, and the Avatar of the Storm capstone talent even includes an improved storm-infused visual during the effect!

• Things that proc cooldowns when they’re on cooldown are very cool. Mountain Thane was actually the first tree we discussed for Hero talents, and it hits on all the familiar points of Avatar, Storm Bolt, Thunder Clap, along with the new Lightning Strikes.

Describe Thunder Blast, how does it differ from Thunder Clap?

• Its an enhanced Thunder Clap, injecting a little extra thematic Stormstrike damage (not to be confused with the Shaman ability), which the tree synergies with. It is also visually distinct from a normal Thunder Clap, and so it really helps sell the Mountain Thane theme.

• We’re actively looking into Mountain Thane visuals right now, but we did show a bit of it at BlizzCon, which is sort of the starting point for that ability.

Why did you wave away from themes like Blademaster and Gladiator that are already built into the lore of WoW that players have been asking for all these years?

• Great question. One of the cool things about working on the Warcraft franchise is that there are so many cool things to pull from, and many iconic things that people expect, but it’s impossible to hit all of them. Early on, we discussed Blademaster and Gladiator at length, but we decided to go in a different direction for different reasons.

• Blademaster has two iconic abilities: Windwalk invisibility and Mirror Images, which felt like a very large departure of what World of Warcraft Warriors are, and we didn’t feel comfortable making that kind of change. They’re both very cool abilities, but they already exist within Mages (and don’t pass the “Warrior test” for Bajheera). Samuro is very fun and he’s even featured inside Ashenvale in Classic Season of Discovery, but the team didn’t feel like those two abilities would fit, and without them is it really Blademaster?

• Gladiator has a lot of history in WoW, but it goes against the core philosophy of hero talents, which is not introducing new roles. There would be an expectation that it would enable Protection as a DPS spec, but that’s not something they’re really looking to do with hero talents. Likewise, any kind of departure from the history of Gladiator wouldn’t feel right either.

Creating Hero Talents

How was the experience of combining different spec identities? Now that we’re talking about things that people have an idea of – people have an idea of what an Arms, Fury, or Prot Warrior is, but what was it like combining those things and making sense of new talents that affect multiple specializations?

• It was really fun, and a huge challenge. With 39 specs, that’s a lot of things to talk about, from what is/not appropriate, and narrowing it down to things they thought they could hit. The BlizzCon slide showcasing all of the names came directly from those conversations. Sometimes it’s easy, things like Mountain Thane and Lightsmith just make sense – Mountain Thane already has an established familiarity evoking ideas of Thunder Clap and Avatar, and just based off the name Lightsmith gives you an idea of creating things (in this case, Armaments) out of the Light. For things like Chronowarden, both Augmentation and Preservation share time magic in their talent trees, so focusing that into a hero tree is a great starting point.

• On the flipside, there are things like San’layn, which screams Blood Death Knight, but we need to find hooks for Unholy – things like Diseases or ability replacements, so that it feels good for both.

Balancing Trees in Different Content

When creating these hero classes, do you have a specific content type or build in mind while designing them? For example, are the trees built with the thought of PvP, Single Target, or AoE, and how would you prevent every Prot Warrior from going Mountain Thane, because it’s just all around better for tanking?

• It’s something front of mind while designing. Our goal is not for any of the trees to be best for a specific piece of content or spec. If you’re a Prot Warrior, you shouldn’t feel like you have to go Mountain Thane, Colossus should feel like a real option. We try to make sure they have a similar amount of single target vs AoE nodes, defensive vs utility options, so ideally we try to keep them as close together as possible… but we know that players love to min/max. They’re going to find the one with the best PvP utility and maybe that is triple Storm Bolt, but maybe Colossus will have something cool too, giving you options to weigh and decision points to be made.

• Players may find a 1% optimization within one of the trees, but there isn’t going to be a lot of friction to changing. That’s a lesson learned from covenant abilities – they’ve eased the restrictions of changing and from the start players will be able to change talents and between hero talent trees at any time.

• To reiterate: the goal is to keep the trees as close together as possible for single target, AoE, defensives, and utility. Unlike class and spec trees, you’ll also have the entire hero tree unlocked, which actually makes tuning a little easier.

Designing for PvE vs PvP

Does these ideas generally appear as PvE and then you figure out how if its good for PvP too, or do you brainstorm something sick for PvP and then figure out how to make it work for PvE? Do you have people who are PvE and PvP minded, similar to how many players tend to be?

• The answer probably changes depending on the designer you ask, which is one of the great things about working on the game – they have a very diverse combat team, and that breadth of experience makes for a better game. The combat team includes people who are casual in PvE and PvP, as well as those pushing for Hall of Fame and Gladiator every season.

• The talent trees are meant to be an evergreen system, and should feel good for every type of player. Anecdotally, Spear of Bastion was initially conceptualized as a very PvP focused ability, but it needed more throughput to stand up in PvE. Similar discussions have taken place within the hero talents, to help ensure they work for both.

Tier Sets vs Hero Talents

How do you see tier sets interacting with Hero talents? Are you that far into development to figure out how they’ll work together yet?

• It’s certainly top of mind for us. Nothing new to share about tier sets in The War Within, but the implications of having tier sets on top of hero talent choices is certainly something we’re considering. In Season 3, we actively made class sets more involved and impactful on talent tree selections, and we’re curious about your thoughts on that design:
• Bajheera: I think it’s really freaking cool to look at your tier set affecting specific talents like Odyn’s Fury and Bloodthirst, building you toward some kind of Annihilator bloodthirst spamming build. Arms’ gigantic Thunder Clap bleed spread was also sick. I love the fact that you can take a look at your build and it has bonuses that may synergize well with certain talents on the tree. It allows you to guide players into trying different builds, its interesting, really cool, and I’m all for it.
• PIkaTV: I like that it shakes things up. I’ll spend a whole raid tier with one best build, Raging Blow the entire season – getting the new tier set is really cool, because now I’m thinking about Annihilator and Bloodthirst. For Prot, last season was all about using Last Stand on cooldown, whereas now it’s an actual oh-crap button again. So I like that each season feels fresh; without the tier set or extreme tuning every tier, we’d just be playing the same build all expansion. Something I worry about is if the hero talents are very strong or impactful, how much will change? Am I always going to be speccing into Thunder Clap as a Fury Warrior vs it changing up every tier?

That’s great feedback, and we’re happy you both liked how Season 3 tier sets turned out. We can’t talk too much about tier sets at this time, but questions like that are questions we ask ourselves all the time too.

With many talents synergizing with specific abilities, such as Thunder Clap or Bloodthirst, do you feel like hero talents might push people into certain builds?

• Ultimately the goal for hero talents is just to enhance your base build and however you want to play a class, whether it’s Annihilator or Raging Blow, both of those should feel like they work with Mountain Thane. In reality, what you see on live right now and what’s planned for 11.0 might not always mesh, so there’s some work to be done on the backend to account for that – maybe it means Bloodthirst needs to be better incorporated into the main build, so it doesn’t feel completely pushed out. This isn’t a Warrior specific issue either, several classes need to be looked at to ensure they align with the hero talent philosophies.

• If you feel like you have to take three off the path talent nodes just to make a Hero tree work, that’s something we need to focus on and fix. That’s great feedback to give us as things go live – we don’t want to reduce the amount of choice in the base talent tree. For example, if Mountain Thane heavily modifies a talent Thunder Clap, should that talent be free or baseline within the regular tree?

Providing Feedback

What is the best way for players to provide feedback?

• Player feedback is super important and one of the reasons we’re doing things like this as early as possible. Best source is the official forums, managed by our community team. They’re nice because they’re organized and concise. Still, things like videos, Reddit posts, and Discord threads all get read too. Even tier lists, as long as they’re well explained and eloquent. In general, we prefer written feedback, and we love hearing about how things affect you personally – stories about impactful choices or frustrations are just as important as tuning to us.

• Please don’t sandbag tier lists!

When Can We Try Hero Talents?

• Our goal is to have as many hero talent trees testable on day one of public War Within testing as possible. It’s a big part of class design, so we want them online as soon as possible. Blog posts can only go so far, but we got a ton of great feedback for the initial Dragonflight talent trees that way, so the goal following the New Year is to do more of these articles and showcase more trees, creating a good source of community feedback to iterate on before public testing begins.

Mountain Thane Warrior Talent Tree

That’s all for the interview, in the meantime, check out our mockup talent calculator with tooltips and placeholder icons based on what was revealed today!