April 11 Balance Update, Developer Interviews, Comic
Overwatch Retribution Skins and Cosmetics
SpartySmallwood Interview with Lead Encounter Designer Morgan Day
Spartysmallwood sat down with lead encounter designer Morgan Day. Here are the highlights:
- The exact duration of controlling a Warfront location is up to how fast the opposing faction takes to contribute resources.
- There are multiple ways to contribute to Warfronts. Morgan mentioned professions being a possible way.
- The opposing faction team's tactics in Island Expeditions will often require your team to create different strategies that best allow you to deal with them.
- The amount of raid tiers in this expansion is dependent on where the story in Battle for Azeroth goes.
- Mists of Pandaria scenarios were heavily story driven, but static every time. Islands Expeditions are about exploration and dynamic experiences.
- Island Expeditions are mean to last about 15-30 minutes. This time will fluctuate based on your experiences with the different events that can happen during expeditions and the best ways to deal with them.
- The team is planning on 6 different island aesthetics. There is currently only one type that has been seen in Alpha.
- NPC teams in Island Expeditions don't necessarily follow specific class designs. An example would be Gazlowe using a flamethrower.
- There is a fog that covers the map in Island Expeditions. This fog limits how much of the map you can see and depends heavily on where your teammates are on the map. Over time, the fog will begin to display different azerite options on the map.
- There are no plans for Mythic + Island Expeditions at launch, but it is possible in the future.
- The team realized the advanced AI wasn't as believable because they didn't jump. They can now jump and certain NPCs will jump more than others.
- The war campaign will take you into the enemy faction's zone.
- The team likes class abilities interacting with trinkets, but know it causes friction with personal loot when trinkets are better for certain classes. They plan to address this.
- Class stacking in raids is an issue of communication between the team. The team likes allowing classes to show their strengths in different encounters, but in retrospect know they could do things better to avoid situations like Coven of Shivara's Aman'thul phase favoring AoE.
FinalBossTV Interview with Morgan Day and Daniel Stahl
FinalBossTV sat down with Battle for Azeroth Devs Morgan Day and Daniel Stahl at PAX East 2018. Here are the highlights:
- Abilities like interrupts are off the global cooldown because they are abilities that you are asked to use as a reaction to a mechanic in game. Reaction time could be key to not wiping.
- Encounter designers give you time to prepare for moments that require damage or healing cooldowns and so these cooldowns don't necessarily have to be off the global cooldown.
- The team is constantly looking at encounters and whether or not they need nerfs over time. They try to establish a system in which a raid will nerf itself over time through titanforging or artifact power.
- The encounter designers will make changes to Mythic fights when they see specific problems that require a certain strategy that is not ideal, such as sitting as many healers as possible. These changes sometimes buff or nerf a fight, but they try to tweak things so that it is relatively the same difficulty as prior to the change.
- Every single variable of Island Expeditions is random, meaning that events, opposing teams, inhabitants, etc. are not linked to each other when you zone into an island.
- When creating encounters the team doesn't necessarily focus on balancing around having every unique buff, but when a group is created, the assumption is that the group will build around what each person applying can bring instead of just pure dps/heals/tanking and will work itself out. Having all these buffs isn't needed for encounters, but if a specific group is wiping at 2% they have the option to find a missing buff or just fine tune their performance.
- The decision to bring class buffs back was made because these buffs were iconic to the game and made players feel special to bring something unique to groups.
- The team is looking into possibly making changes to how trinkets interact with character abilities so that situations where personal loot and trinket acquisition isn't such a big deal (such as in Legion with the Draught of Souls not being good for some DPS but amazing for warriors)
- On the same hand, finding solutions to situations where lower item level trinkets/gear are better than item level upgrades will also help address the pitfalls of personal loot.
- Feedback about weapon restrictions and artifact appearance transmog has been heard loud and clear but it is still uncertain what the rules will be when BfA launches. Issues like this are why the Alpha/Beta is so valuable for feedback.
Swifty Interviews Morgan Day and Daniel Stahl
Swifty also interviews Morgan Day and Daniel Stahl!
- The team is creating many different Azerite armor pieces from many different sources to give players a variety of options to choose from.
- As the technology of the game advances, the team likes to revisit different aspects of the game and see if there is a way to improve it. War mode (world pvp toggle) came about because of the new server technology that has come over the past couple expansions.
- The team is discussing different rewards for having War Mode active at max level.
- The goal for Warfronts is to have as many units as possible to give the players the feeling of being on the front line of a war.
- Beta is actually soon, not TBD soon.
- Raids will require some CC again like in the past to allow unique class abilities to shine.
- The encounter design team used Antorus to start introducing the idea of unique class abilities and CC being able to shine. An example of this is the Aggramar encounter.
- One off style legendaries are still a possibility in BfA, but no more of the Legion style.
Shacknews Interviews Daniel Stahl
Shacknews sat down with Daniel Stahl for an interview. Here are some highlights:
- Advanced AI will get out of AoE.
- During a conversation about Azerite's affects on the different races of Azeroth, the Mogu were mentioned in the same breath as the dark iron dwarves. This does not in any way mean they are a planned Allied Race, but the conversation was stirred from a question about Allied Races.
- You are going to see the impacts of the war on the world.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
FinalBossTV 1st Impressions of Priests in Battle for Azeroth
FinalBossTV made a few videos recently on his first impressions for Priests in Battle for Azeroth!
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/75 ... TV-Priests