Sportskeeda Interview with Ion Hazzikosta and Josh Augustine

Ion Hazzikostas and Josh Augustine on Sportskeeda

Character Freedom

• More freedom of approach is something that the team has been steadily moving towards over the last couple of years, realizing mid-Shadowlands that they need to listen to what players were telling them about how they approach the game and viewing their experiences as one character versus a collection of characters.

• Dragonflight systems were built with alt friendliness and catch up in mind, to be very respectful of players’ time, think about which activities are going to lend themselves more naturally to being repeated on other characters, and give a satisfying progression and a fresh experience. So that’s something that they will try to carry forward.

The Onyx Annulet

• The Onyx Annulet is not going to be instantly obsolete, but there are no plans to add new gemstones or upgrades.

• Ultimately, borrowed power is a term used for parallel progression, tier, or expansion spanning systems after you hit max level – alternate advancement paths of artifact experience for the Heart of Azeroth or whatever, which was meant to be part of the expansion and then left behind.

• In the most literal sense though, all items are borrowed power – a Season One trinket from the raid is used for awhile, but intended to be replaced. That’s the nature of items. The intent with the Annulet was to make an interesting item that had its own chase and progression within Forbidden Reach and the Zskera Vaults. It was tuned to be something people would carry into Season Two, to use and then replace. Some players will replace it sooner than others, but eventually there will be a lot better rings down the line for everyone.

Dragonflight Mini Games

• Centaur hunts, Tuskar feasts, and Explorer rock climbing all helped tell the story for each culture and it’s something they’re doubling down on in Patch 10.1, which includes two new large groups of friendly inhabitants.

• The Dragonscale Expedition is delving further inside the Cavern and will have a large-scale public scenario called Researchers Under Fire, in which players will help them acquire research and survive against the Djaradin.

• The Niffen mole people love to dig, sniff things out, and trade, so players can participate in a special activity called Sniffen Seeking, which operates kind of like cave diving for treasure. It’s kind of like an escape room, digging into an underground cave which could have treasure chests and puzzles to solve, with our happy little Niffen buddy Merritt helping sniff out clues.

• The idea Sniffen Seeking formed after looking at concept art for the Niffen themselves. “Oh, they’d go burrowing like, can we go burrow with them? What would we want to find? Right? And so it started with just that nugget.”

• They didn’t want a special new feature to be “go Kill 20 bears in a cave with a Niffen,” because that’s not exciting. They want to ry new things all the time and find new ways to surprise players. So what does it look like to go exploring a cave? They’re trying to explore and find something, but they didn’t want to overlap too much with the Dragonscale Expedition which is also all about exploring. The Niffen are also traders who love bartering, so the theme evolved into looking for things to scavenge. This is also where longer, earlier PTR cycles come in handy, since they have more time to get feedback and iterate on what’s a fun puzzle.

• Players will use maps to do three different Sniffen Seek activities a week – the first will freely available, while the other two will be accessed from a weekly wrapper, trading with merchants in town. One of the rewards will be barter tokens, which can be traded with the merchant Ponzo for cosmetics, reputation, and more. One of the best rewards you can earn is also the Smelly title, which is one of Josh’s favorite titles they’ve ever put in the game.

Third Evoker Spec

• There is no hidden third spec in Patch 10.1.

• The team deliberately didn’t go in the direction of melee when thinking about Evokers from the start. They already had a lot of melee in the game, and melee range is already getting crowded, but they also wanted to embrace the visual fantasy of a highly mobile winged being using deep breaths and that combat style doesn’t mesh as well with melee as it does ranged.

• Expanding class-spec options is something they discuss internally a lot and may be something that they pursue down the road at some point though, because it’s a fun idea. Community brainstorming for internal discussions over what a Mage heal spec look like are fun fantasies to chase, but regardless of what the future may hold when it comes to thinking about extra specs for any classes (and they still get questions asked about things like Demon Hunter or tank Shaman), they want to stay true to the core of the class fantasy.

Single Target vs AoE Balancing

• To some extent certain classes/specializations working harder in single target or AoE relative to others is just general balance, but also the health of the talent system as a whole. The system was just massively overhauled, and so talent diversity and the health of individual specializations is something they’re going to continue to iterate and build upon.

• Situationally, having multiple build options feels better than having one dominant build and a bunch of dead talents, but that may be a less critical issue in the short term as compared to specs which have fundamental problems and negative feedback about their core gameplay. Those are things the team are going to prioritize fixing first, but in the long run, they very much want the talent trees to be all sets of interesting choices. If there aren’t any choices and one build is commonly used for everything, then they’ll try to vary it up over time.

• Balance wise, they want to make sure that all aspects are at least viable across the wide range of activities in the game; from Mythic+ to different kinds of raid encounter mechanics, to PvP, and even the open world.