August 28 Hotfixes, Blue Posts, John Staats Reddit AMA Recap

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Topic/Postby Haggle » 29 Aug 2018, 06:00

August 28 Hotfixes, Blue Posts, John Staats Reddit AMA Recap

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Patch 8.0.1 Hotfixes - August 28, 2018






Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Azerite Powers

  • Fixed an issue causing Combined Might and Stronger Together to grant less Haste, Versatility, Mastery, and Critical Strike than intended when those respective buffs are triggered.


Classes



Dungeons

  • King’s Rest

    • Spectral Berserker now recasts Severing Blade after 8 seconds (was 4 seconds).
    • Shadow of Zul’s Shadow Barrage direct damage reduced by 30%.
    • All enemy casters now have mana bars.

  • Siege of Boralus

    • Viq’Goth’s health has been increased.

  • Tal Dagor

    • Overseer Korgus

      • It is no longer possible to outrange Hearstopper Venom.



Items

  • [With server restarts in each region] Azerite armor from Dungeons is now tradeable.
  • Fixed a bug in which several trinkets were unintentionally breaking nearby crowd control effects.


Player versus Player

  • Many low-level items with effects that provide crowd-control such as Silence or Stun will now stop working at a level appropriate to the item’s expansion.


Professions

  • Cooking

    • Crafted foods now provide significantly more health and mana.

  • Engineering

    • Holographic Horror Projector will now properly break after an appropriate amount of damage has been dealt to the target.
    • Holographic Horror Projector's fear effect is now classified as Magic and can be dispelled.



Quests

  • Fixed a bug preventing Zolani from being available to complete “Evidence of Evil”.
  • The Signal Falstad ability should be more reliably available to players who logout or leave The Great Sea while completing Chapter 4 of the Alliance War Campaign.


World Quests

  • Being hit by the Frightened Stomps of the Frightened Brutosaur during "Underfoot" will no longer flag players for PvP.
  • Jammer no longer disappears when defeated in a pet battle, and no longer has other pets helping him in the pet battle.


World

  • Several missing Zandalar mailboxes have been found and delivered to their proper locations.





Blue Posts






Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment


Seabreeze Trinket Functionality

I just got myself a decent Seabreeze from the Shrine of the Storm, but it does not seem to be procing off healing spells. Off damaging spells, it works just fine. Is this intentional? Or am i just super unlucky on healing procs?

Seabreeze (like many trinkets) can proc from healing, but only while in combat. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)



Jammer

To defeat Jammer, we all have to take turns engaging him. And the respawn time is 15 minutes.



This assumes of course, that all players are going to play nicey-nice and wait their turns and no one is going to try to engage Jammer ahead of his turn, shafting someone who has waited a half an hour or more. To say nothing of griefers with their AoEs whose sole purpose is to annoy other players.


We're working on this bug. We'll try to get it fixed as soon as possible. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)





John Staats Reddit AMA Recap





Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

Unused Areas

Before TBC the two Caverns of Time instances (Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass) were in the game files and remained largely unchanged from Vanilla to their release in TBC.



However, there's a section in the beginning of Opening of the Dark Portal instance, before you reach the actual Black Morass, that didn't make it to the final product. Here's a video of it



Did you happen to work on this and do you remember any details about it? Like it's purpose, what it held and why eventually it was decided to not be included. Thank you!


Damn. We'll start with very specific questions. My officemate Aaron Keller worked on CoT and he discovered the concept wasn't as good as it sounds. Going back in time makes sense in the 21st century, we can recognize changes between decades...in fantasy worlds not so much. CoT sometimes looked like a junkyard to we scaled back it's size. It was stopped and started a bunch of times, the resulting dungeon was what we ended up with. Best laid plans and all.



After we built it, we realized there wasn't enough room for gameplay on that thing ledge. Just not good for gameplay. (Source)



Are secrets in maps something that’s planned? Are there any secrets that have yet to be found?

At the bottom of Ahn'Qiraj temple, I cut into the wall the word, "Lisa." She was the receptionist at the time and is still dating my officemate, Dana Jan. You can't see it unless you've loaded it into 3D S Max (or any wireframe viewer).



Dana at one point put in "poo-dads" into the Ogre mounds in Loch Modan but I think someone might have removed them. I talked about them in my book.



Are you responsible for the on the ground underneath the Karazhan tower mesh? I found a tiny hole in the Kara wall on the backside of the tower that certain races could squeeze into and get "under" the tower. There was a big smiley face carved into the alpha of the ground. Always made me happy!

Nah, that's Matt Sanders, the exterior level designer for the area. Matt used the circle as a placeholder (while I built the tower exterior). He added the smile as a goof. (Source)



John, this is my favorite area in all of Vanilla wow. I made a video over a decade ago of me and a buddy 1. slipping through a tiny crack you left in the Karazhan tower mesh to go under it and see the you left, and 2. Fearing eachother through the gate and exploring the dungeon beneath kara. Here it is, if you're interested in seeing the joy you've brought me and so many others.

Thanks, nater. It's amazing how many headache's you fear-explorers caused the engine programmers (whose job it is to prevent you from doing that, LOL). (Source)



Was Karazhan Crypts meant to be part of the raid environment or a boss encounter? What's the story of that?

They weren't part of the raid if you're talking about the sealed off non-instance areas around the tower. Karazhan also was going to have flooded areas in it's basement...but by then, Jeff Kaplan was telling Aaron and I, "Stop building, it's big enough!" (Source)



Is there anything that you've made that you were really proud about creating that ended up not making it to live servers? If so, what was it and what's the story behind it?

I was happy with the catacombs under Karazhan but we discovered at the tail end of the project that we didn't need any more dungeons. There just weren't enough item upgrades to give away to players. People don't realize, the number of UPGRADES is what limits the design scope of an RPG. If there isn't a meaningful reward, people won't generally play it. (Source)



What were the original intentions for the Emerald Dream and Azshara's Crater?

Emerald Dream was a high-concept zone. It was suppose to be dream-like and high-level...but it looks just silly in-game. That's a common trip-up in game development, some things sound cool until you see it in game. Azshara Crater was a PvP zone, if I remember correctly. I think we went with Arathi Basin instead as our next battleground and never went back to AC. (Source)



What content that didn't make it into the final product were you saddest about?

Dragon Isles probably, but I can see what it wasn't used, not enough floor space at the top of the old-god squid temple. It was on the cover of Vanilla WoW's concept art book, the one that came in the Special Edition. (Source)



What is something that never made it to live that you wish did?

Probably Dragon Isles. I kept hinting to the endgame designers that it was ready to be greenlit but the thing wasn't good for raid combat. The mesh is too simple to be usable anyway. It was one of the first areas I built. (Source)



With the zone flow the way it is, Karazhan, and Deadwing Pass, really stands out. In Vanilla, i remember it being a pretty dead (not a lot of quests, or impact to vanilla gameplay). Was there a bigger idea behind this, maybe something that was realized in BC that wasn't in Vanilla?

We didn't need new questing areas. Simply that. Until we had more levels we didn't need the areas. The area pretty much stayed the same, aside for minor changes around the tower's base. (Source)



There were a lot of areas in Vanilla WoW that were often seen from flight paths (Ironforge Airfield, for instance), but were inaccessible to players without some weird mountain climbing/pathfinding. Did the old team ever intentionally design any of these "hidden paths" to be discovered by players, or were they just oversights in terrain design?

Neither. They were areas design to beautify the flight paths. Little gems to discover from the area. Intended to be inaccessible. (Source)



On the preview above, a neighbourhoods arrow is on the original version of Stormwind. Was that a planned idea for player housing originally? I wasn't around until WoD, so a glimpse into the past is super neat to see.

Yeah, Stormwind even had a green portal, I think that was supposed to be a placeholder for player housing. I don't know when it was ever removed. I rebuilt Stormwind for Cataclysm, so maybe I was the guy to remove it, I can't remember. But yeah, it was absolutely for player housing. (Source)



Were any other NPCs planned to be hiding in the Deeprun Tram besides Nessy (the Loch Ness monster)? Were other hidden, "decorative" NPCs like this planned in other places, such as in lava pits in Blackrock Mountain?

Nah. I think a lot of those NPCs were just ninja'ed in by devs goofing around. As long as it wasn't way off the rails, Metzen was usually fine with it. (Source)



What was the original idea behind Mount Hyjal in vanilla and why was it never implemented? The entire zone appeared pretty much finished however inaccessible blocked by a gate and raid portal. A lot of effort seems to have been put into Hyjal so it's odd that it was never used in it's entirety until Cataclysm (excluding the BC raid).



​There was also an onyxia style cave placed inside vanilla Hyjal complete with a raid portal, any idea what raid this could have been?


We didn't realize until the end of development that we had more content than we needed. Hyjal was cool, but BC already had Karazhan, so returning to another zone for a raid probably didn't make sense. That's just a guess, but there were lots of high level areas that weren't used. I think when Rob Pardo made leveling faster (still a good decision, IMO), it affected some things surprisingly, and that was one of them. (Source)



Was there anything cool you tried to make, but ultimately ended up abandoning because it couldn't be fully realized in the game?

I made things that looked cool like the Dragon Isles temple but wasn't good for gameplay. I made a pitch for guild castles, component pieces would attach to them as they'd level up. They were real world castles that guilds would compete over by completing raid content, PvP battles, events. It just annoyed me that WOW didn't have many castles (and I wanted an excuse to build one since Aaron Keller (another level designer) got to do Shadowfang. #Jealousjealousjealous (Source)



Dungeons and Raids

That damnable jump in the wailing caverns, was that working as intended?

Yeah, I tried some thing in WC that sucked. That jump was one, the mushroom maze was another. It was built LONG before we had gameplay so we didn't know that jumps and mazes sucks so bad. Scott Mercer told me years after I'd left the team that he'd removed the maze (thank god!). I was happy but he was afraid that I'd be upset. So not upset, Scott rocks. (Source)



Also on an unrelated note thanks for Wailing Caverns, pre-shrinkage that was always my favorite low level instance simply because the atmosphere and asset design was so cool.

Thanks. I still proud of how it looks. IMO it was the first really convincing cave environment in a game. (Source)



BRD is my all-time favorite dungeon! Was it intended to be one massive 5 man dungeon or was it originally supposed to be something else?

Mine too. It was built LONG before we knew how many people were part of a party. It was my attempt at non-linear dungeons. (Source)



The older Vanilla dungeons were far more sprawling and non-linear than most of the modern WoW dungeons today. Why do you think dungeon design has changed in the modern era and which type of dungeon experience do you prefer more?

Definitely the old style since I'm a dinosaur. I'm a level designer, it's what I was hired to be. Most of the people in the department were environmental artists. Their art skills were better than mine, but I came from AD&D where credibility and immersion were important. I was anal about things such as eliminating hallways and that was something that didn't bother the rest of the team. LOL (Source)



Which is the best designed dungeon in the game that you either worked or didn't work on?

BRD was my best dungeon. I'm not crazy about the last 3 rooms (they were tacked on at the end and look it). I wish I'd had a chance to do Shadowfang. I'm a HUGE Ravenloft fan, but generally, i was always jealous whenever someone worked on a dungeon...I wanted to be the person to build it...the only exception to that was the Undercity. I had no clue what to do with and was AMAZED but what Dana and Jose had accomplished. (Source)



In Stratholme near the final boss (Baron Rivendare) there is a closed off gate which leads to an area of Stratholme which contains a very small version of Naxxramas floating in the air, what was the original idea behind this?

That was a hint at Nax. We were planning Nax for the longest time. I finished building Nax after Dana Jan went to ReadyAtDawn. I guess a lot changed, but the look was all Dana Jan and I believe he started it before WoW shipped. Big dungeon, Nax. Probably my second favorite raid, such good fights. (Source)



What is your favorite raid encounter, and raid itself, that you worked on in development? Molten Core was my introduction to raiding and wow end game as a whole, and here I am 13 years later simply amazed at how far we’ve come.

I played all raids though Cataclysm. I think Baron Reddon (SP?) was my favorite. Launching myself into the air at an angle was fun (and unplanned for, the script guys didn't realized you could angle knockback effects), and of course, running after the guild leader to blow them up was great fun. (Source)



Roughly how long would it take you to build a proper dungeon?

It depends. Usually a couple months minimum for mesh, texturing another month or two. Some took a few months. Karazhan took forever. Molten core took me only a week or two (and it looks it, LOL).



When you say Karazhan, are you referring to the largely unused version of it from Vanilla, or the BC raid?

I spent 5-6 months (90 hour weeks) using a BSP editor. Another designer built it from scratch and got it textured top to bottom...and it was too small so it was scrapped. I rebuilt it from scratch again, starting right before Vanilla WoW launched (Aaron Keller helped by building the interior while I did the exterior, and that's the version you know...THAT one took forever. (Source)



In the history of WoW, what was your favorite dungeon and/or raid to play in? (irrespective of your own level of involvement in developing it)

Molten Core probably. Just because it was the first. I love all the fights. Wiped so many times on Rag. I guess I enjoyed UBRS because there were more people in it...there was more chatting, more social. LBRS was fun, once it was despawned (LOL). I think Stratholme raid was great too, great battles and it was fun being possessed and teaching your party members some respect! (Source)



Story

Seeing as WoW and Warcraft III were in development at the same time was there a lot of story and design concept cross-pollination between the two or had the Warcraft III plot been storyboarded so extensively by the time of WoW that there really wasn't much room for change?

Dude, you would totally be blown away by my book. Game are constantly changing, there's never a set storyline. There was MUCH cross-pollination, our assets inspired theirs, theirs ours. At least at the end of W3's development...at the beginning, when both games were starting out...it was all pain and headaches. (Source)



Game Design

What was the biggest limitation to the team when designing WoW versus the original scope? Was it technology; time; cost or knowledge?

Tech tech tech. WoW was a technological wonder. In terms of engine, server stability, it blew everything away. I'd never worked in such a flexible engine before. I got into the details about this answer more in my book; about why the programming team was just insanely good. (Source)



What was the biggest challenge between your team and coding team?

There were a few little ones. Developing an engine means early dungeons designers don't know exactly how to build. How many polygons is the big one (an big, big deal back then) but texture usage, size of areas, portals (occlusion), and pathing. Scott Hartin rewrote the monster pathing system over a dozen times. That's how finicky the programmers were. Once the engine was done, it was all smooth sailing, but that really wasn't the case until maybe the last year and a half of the dev cycle. (Source)



Can you speak to some of the ways the zone design facilitates players moving through questing patterns in smooth ways? Has the process and interplay between the teams responsible for those things changed and adapted as time went on?

Drastically changed at the beginning. Quests were originally just navigation breadcrumbs to familiarize players with areas to grind. They were NOT intended to be the way to level! We learned from Vanilla WoW that linear zones like Darkshore or Felwood suck, because the travel time to quest turn-ins was that much longer. Now that designers know how players will behave in zones, it's easier to coordinate with exterior level designers. Before, the landscapers were just making zone to beautify areas more. These days, I imagine its more rinse and repeat--but that said, devs are very inventive whenever they're in rinse-and-repeat situations. (Source)



What's your opinion on the Vanilla PvP ranking system?

My opinion was wrong. Let's start there. I wanted NO rewards for PvP believe it or not. I wanted to recreate FPS games where people played just for the joy of victory. PvP was utterly unbalanced between classes because abilities were 100% focused on PvE. Ergo, a ranking system didn't really mean much to me unless it considered only rogues against rogues, shaman against shaman and so forth. Maybe that's the way it worked, I was more of a raider than a PvPer. (Source)



Which zone did you enjoy making most and which was the most frustrating for you?

LBRS built the fastest. I just couldn't believe how quickly I'd built it. It was the first dungeon when the game designers gave their blessing to build "ledges." Before, we were worried that disconnected players would accidentally run to the desks (we didn't know how the tech would work). After this mental block evaporated, it was SO much easier to build cool rooms. (Source)








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https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/79 ... -AMA-Recap
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