World of Warcraft Q&A Livestream Summary

There was a developer live Q&A today, held on Twitch.tv and I have a summary after the break of all key points discussed.


Flying

• Flying being delayed until Patch 6.2.x is mostly for development reasons. There are some quests and bugs that need to be fixed before you can fly. It is too close to Patch 6.2's release to get it done in time, the alternative was delaying Patch 6.2.
• The reputation grinds required for flying will take around three weeks if you are doing the daily quest every day.
• The way flying is unlocked in Draenor is a blueprint for how flying will be unlocked in the future. Experience the game from the ground and explore it thoroughly, then you will be able to fly.
• Flying was a hard decision for the team. People believe that they were lying to players, but the reality is that it is a large design team and it was a decision made by the team as a whole. People were on both sides of the issue and with Patch 6.2 being on the PTR it was a time to make a decision. The majority of the team decided to never allow flying, but the player feedback made the team consider flying again and come up with a compromise that they were happy with.
• The delay on communication about flying after the decision in the interview was because the discussion was ongoing.

Reputations

• The Patch 6.0 reputations were added late in the process and aren't really fun. They had mostly cosmetic rewards.
• The Patch 6.2 reputations are better, there are daily quests you can do rather than endlessly killing mobs. Killing rare mobs may give reputation.

Quests

• The Apexis daily was a move too far away from daily quests after Mists of Pandaria. The idea behind Apexis daily quests was good, but the execution wasn't good. The Mists of Pandaria daily quests felt very structured and narrow, so the team went towards more flexibility and more freedom in Warlords. By removing quests entirely, story and context were removed, so there was no purpose behind the quests. It ended up feeling more grindy. The rewards were also bad. The Tanaan daily quests in 6.2 are better, both with having nicer quests and better rewards.

Garrisons

• Garrison rewards, such as ore and herbs, removed some of the reasons to go to the outdoor world. There was content in the world, but it was less effort to get them from your garrison. Outdoor content is the core of an MMO, so the world content was a failing that needs to be fixed.
• Alts have become more popular over the history of the game. The team recognizes that many people play multiple characters. They prefer to see alts exist to serve themselves. You should have a healer alt because you want to heal, or a PvP alt for PvP. Multiple alts shouldn't exist to serve your main character.
• Having many alts to use the Garrison to farm gold may be nerfed in the future.
• Garrisons are the path of least resistance to many rewards, which is a problem. They should be something for you to do when you can only log on for a short time, not somewhere to spend hours at a time. Rewards are shifted back to the outdoor world in Patch 6.2.
• Garrisons giving you loot from the next highest raid tier didn't work out well. When some guilds finished Normal and went to clear Heroic, they already had a good number of Heroic items and didn't need much loot.
• Naval missions require less micromanagement. You have fewer followers, less missions, more meaningful rewards. Having to log in every 30-45 minutes to send followers out on a mission detracts from gameplay.
• The garrison, as we know it in Draenor, is tied to Draenor. You won't bring your buildings and such to Azeroth. The core gameplay of building a base, having followers, and other ideas would be nice to bring forward, but it won't take the same form as the garrison we have now.

Guilds and Raiding

• Guilds have disbanded in every raid tier. The glue that keeps guilds together is the officers and leader, and as they move on in their lives guild break up.
• Changing the raid sizes and structure worked well. Raid participation is up in Normal and Heroic. Mythic raiders have gotten a better experience out of the fixed size thanks to tuning being for just one size and new mechanics. It also settles the 10 vs 25 debate.
• Mythic is something for people to aspire to. It allows the best players to prove who is the best. Mythic only takes around 5% of the development time of the raid's development. Most of the time is spent creating the art, gear, bosses, and tuning. Adding a few extra mechanics, testing, and tuning Mythic doesn't take very long.

Timewalking and Dungeons

• The Bonus Events aren't trying to force players to do certain content. Having a Timewalking event makes it a more focused activity, allowing you to gear up alts or catch up. If Timewalking gives better gear than the Draenor dungeons, there wouldn't be any reason to do them. If it gave you the same or worse gear, no one would do Timewalking. This way it is a bonus activity. The old dungeons are great to go back and visit, but they wouldn't hold up to repeated visits as well as the new content.
• Warlords of Draenor dungeons were great, but they didn't have any rewards to keep bringing players back. Mythic dungeons will give players a reason to go back and do the dungeons with better rewards. This is something the team needs to solve better with future dungeon releases.
• Valor kept you running the same dungeon for better rewards over the expansion, as the dungeons became easier as you geared up. It wasn't a great system.
• In the future, the difficulty of the dungeon might scale so that they aren't very easy by the end of the expansion.
• Timewalking wasn't added instead of new dungeons. It is a feature that the team has wanted to do for a long time and most of the work rested on the programmers to make things scale properly.
• The Adventure Journal was added to give newer players an idea of what to do. This was especially clear at the end of Mists of Pandaria, when you would hit 90 and see all of the daily quests, but nothing big telling you they were a waste of time and it was better to go and get epics from Timeless Isle.
• Patch 6.2 didn't have art resources to make new dungeons in time, Hellfire Citadel was the priority.
• You can chain run Timewalking dungeons to gear up alts. The quest also gives you an extra bonus roll for that week during the event.

Classes

• There are some concerns with how Demonology plays right now. You need addons to play it well because of how complex it was. It also was the best all around spec, so warlocks that wanted to play other specs had to go Demonology. Demonology will be significantly overhauled in a future patch. It is still viable, but won't be the best anymore. It is Demonology's turn to be the worst warlock spec.
• Ability pruning may not have gone far enough. Shamans may not need the Unleash spells. Some places had abilities pruned that shouldn't have been and the class fantasy suffered.
• Rotations aren't designed to be engaging when you are fighting a target dummy. You are getting out of fire, LoSing things, doing PvP, worrying about adds, and other things while doing your rotation, so keeping your rotation from becoming very complex is necessary. There are very few players who are at the skill cap today.
• Rotation changes in the future will improve the fantasy of playing your class. Visuals and animations are important. Rogues suffer as much as anyone else with the lack of unique and distinct animations.
• The game is less dominated by absorbs than it was in Mists, which is nice. Disc priests and absorb-centric healing may need to be scaled back in the future. If you have almost any raid comp, you need a disc priest and some other healers. Holy priests are in a great place in terms of versatility right now, but if you only have one Priest in your raid right now, they should be discipline. The absorbs stop bars from becoming empty, which makes the other healers that enjoy refilling bars sad.

• The garrison and daily cooldowns constrained professions, moving away from feeling like a crafter and more like a collector of daily cooldown materials. Patch 6.2 gives you more materials from your daily cooldown. Felblight will give you a reason to go out in the world.
• Fight length is determined by the nature of the fight and mechanics. If the mechanics are the same over the entire fight, it shouldn't be longer than 5-6 minutes unless it is an endurance fight. If there are multiple phases, it can go on a little longer. End bosses with many phases and abilities go on around 10 minutes or so. The team is happy with fight lengths in Tier 17. Brackenspore's endurance aspect was okay and didn't get boring. Mythic Mar'gok got to be too long. Fights that go over 15 minutes are too long. The length of Maidens was about right, but the first half of the fight felt too slow. If you rushed and pushed them to 20% it wasn't a super long fight, but if you waited for a 3rd boat phase it felt longer.
• The team doesn't want inconvenience to stop you from doing content, but they also have to be mindful of the downsides of making everything too convenient. Portals in Cataclysm made the world feel smaller. The Group Finder added in Warlords is an improvement over random matchmaking, adding some social aspect back while avoiding spending an hour looking for a group in town.
• Artistic integrity is important to the team.
• Twitter integration didn't take away from outdoor content, just something a few programmers worked on. It wasn't high priority. It was only a convenience added for players that already use Twitter. There wasn't any harm from adding it.
• The S.E.L.F.I.E cam was a side project for one designer and programmer who worked on it for a few weekends. There have been several side projects by designers that have been added.
• Patch 6.1 was extremely light on content and might have better been named Patch 6.0.5. The team had just launched the expansion and was going on holiday vacations, but wanted to get some fixes in before the next major patch. It was a small set of updates, but using a major patch number may have been misleading.
• The only thing that differentiated armor in Mists of Pandaria was color. One set of armor for PvP and one for PvE and then color variation in each. Instead, there is one set of armor for average accomplishments and modified and cooler set for bigger accomplishments, then color variation in those sets. The same system was in place during Burning Crusade. There are still two sets of gear, just tiers of skill rather than PvE and PvP.
• Raid loot itemization didn't make sense when boss difficulty increased but item levels were the same. A guild that kills Heroic Blast Furnace may DE almost everything from the boss, as they already have 685 gear in other slots. Other guilds would go 6/7 and then move to heroic rather than killing the final boss. Making items stronger as you get deeper into the zone helps to solve this problem.
• Itemization would not be as interesting if every boss had complete coverage for every spec. Most guilds that kill Normal Archimonde will move on to Heroic and have access to items missing from Archimonde. The people harmed by this itemization are mostly the highest end Mythic raider with all of the content on farm.

Source: MMO-Champion for content, Google Images for header image.