Dev Interviews - Damage Meter, Apex Talents, Neighborhood Managers, and More

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Dev Interviews - Damage Meter, Apex Talents, Neighborhood Managers, and More
A few more interviews with the developers came out today. We've summarized each and some of the bigger points from all of them below.

Damage Meter and Nameplates

• An official damage meter is coming to WoW, for both damage and healing. Multiple panels will be possible.
• Enemy nameplates are getting updated with a new design, it'll make it easier to see if an enemy is behind you, visual threat indicators, and more.
• In a raid, there will be a timeline of abilities/casts that are coming.
• Players feeling like they need WeakAuras to play a spec is a problem.

Housing

• Exterior housing customization is a separate space divided up in 3 things; the plot, the house that sits on the plot and the yard around the house.
• The UI for the exterior customization of the house itself is going to be similar to the full-screen barbershop UI/character customization UI in terms of layout.
• Players might change the roof or add towers or other elements to the exterior to distinguish their house from their neighbors.
• Endeavours are somewhat a combination of world quests/travel logs from the Trading Post specific to your neighborhood.
• Neighborhood managers can select a specific endeavour from a short list which commits the neighborhood for roughly a month long event.
• Neighborhood managers are free to run a neighborhood how they want, if they want to create a democracy where people can vote on which endeavour to pick in town meetings, they can do that.
• Players can live in a neighborhood with whatever people they want. This means a Horde player can live with Alliance players. This is necessary in a world with cross-faction guilds and Warband owned houses.

Talents

• There will be 10 more talent points, split across the three existing trees. Four points into the spec tree and three into the other two.
• Hero talents will get an additional lane, so every tree will now have four lanes.
• The spec tree will have four points into the Apex talent.
• The Apex Talent is a unique, multi-talent, multi-rank node, with four points that you can put in. Each point should feel really impactful, especially the first and the last.

Misc

• A cost is only attached to creating a transmog outfit for the first time as well as unlocking an outfit slot, swapping between outfits is free.
• The sword is going to play a very important role in the Worldsoul Saga.
• At the start of the season, you'll have access to Voidspire and The Dreamfrift. Around 2-3 weeks later you'll get access to March on Quel'Danas.
• The cinematic team put an emphasis in conveying human emotions. Emotions that would be more difficult to convey when a character's eyes are completely glowing gold or if their design is too close to the in-game model, which can’t always convey subtle facial expressions.

Kexman Interview
Kexman talked to Laura Sardinha (lead UX designer) and Toby Ragaini (design lead on Player Housing).


UI

• Blizzard started redoing how the UI is made as well as the assets for it back in Legion.
• With the biggest background UI reworks being done as of Dragonflight, they can now focus on adding more complex UI features such as the tools needed for housing.

Player Housing - General

• They wanted to exceed expectations for the first iteration of housing instead of just checking the box on having the feature.
• A lot of new tech had to be developed, such as how the server balances neighborhoods.
• The housing UI is largely separate from the main UI to keep everything as simple and accessible as possible.
• Due to having 1000+ decor items and more in the future, a lot of time was spent on making filters, categories and searching.
• The team does not want housing to exist as a separate system in isolation, the goal is to have it deeply integrated in core game loops.
• A lot of time is being spent on figuring out what places are the best for acquiring certain pieces of decor (e.g. dungeons, mob drops, crafting, quests, etc).
• Enormous amounts of feedback has been gathered from user testing, internal groups and now the public.
• They know it won't be perfect the first time, it is an evergreen feature they are committed to adding stuff to in the future.
• The team is already planning on what to add to housing in the next major patch as well the next expansion.

Player Housing - Exterior Customization

• Housing will be launching with 4 options for exterior culture kits: Orc, Human, Blood Elf and Night Elf. They hope to add more in the future.
• Exterior housing customization is a separate space divided up in 3 things; the plot, the house that sits on the plot and the yard around the house.
• They do not want to force a spacial relationship between the interior and exterior as it would be too constricting.
• The interior being "bigger on the inside" compared to the exterior (the "TARDIS effect") is intended and something they think is actually kind of cool.
• The UI for the exterior customization of the house itself is going to be similar to the full-screen barbershop UI/character customization UI in terms of layout.
• Laura mentions for example changing the roof or adding towers or other elements to the exterior to distinguish your house from your neighbors.

Player Housing - Neighborhoods / Endeavours

• Endeavours are a reason to send you from your neighborhood out into the world.
• Roughly, Endeavours are a combination of world quests/travel logs from the Trading Post specific to your neighborhood.
• Neighborhood managers can select a specific endeavour from a short list which commits the neighborhood for roughly a month long event.
• Themes are based on different cultures visiting your neighborhood, for example the gnomes from Mechagon.
• As you make progress, props and artifacts of said culture will appear in your neighborhood as a visual indicator of the endeavour's progress.
• Adding a voting system or something similar might be too complex, but there can for example be multiple neighborhood managers (similar to guild rank structures).
• Neighborhood managers are free to run a neighborhood how they want, if they want to create a democracy where people can vote on which endeavour to pick in town meetings, they can do that.
• The endeavour UI can be accessed from anywhere in the world and lists current progress, a log of who has done what and which activities you could do next.

Transmog UI revamp

• Much bigger window, more modern.
• They are introducing "outfit slots" which are slots of outfits you want to wear.
• Some outfit slots will be given to players, not known how many initially but additional slots can be bought for relatively low costs.
• If you want to have pajamas on in your house, you can call it your "housing outfit" and in the "Situations" tab set it to equip each time you go into your house.
• A cost is only attached to creating an outfit for the first time as well as unlocking an outfit slot, swapping between outfits is free.
• More outfit situations are for example when you raid, when you PvP, when you are crafting.
• You no longer transmog the item, you transmog the slot. For example, when you equip a new helmet while wearing a certain outfit the slot will stay transmogged.

Damage meter

• An official damage meter is coming to WoW.
• You can have multiple meters such as damage and healing.
• The addons out there are very powerful, how in-depth the options go for the official one is still TBD.

Enemy nameplate revamp

• Many presets: Classic-inspired, bulky/big, modernized and more.
• Threat improvements, more of a fiery effect.
• Indicators whether or not a mob is behind you.

Boss timers

• In a raid, there will be a timeline of abilities/casts that are coming.
• Beginning of the team working on a new raid/combat UI.
• This is the first phase of the project, they are looking for feedback as they go.

Closing notes

• Toby noted that the feedback they have been getting, even the criticisms, have been incredibly helpful/motivational and makes them want to put in that little extra bit of effort.
• Laura noted how fulfilling it was to see a boy who doesn't play WoW make a perfect Alliance dining room in the player housing demo at Gamescom.

Gamestar Interview
Gamestar talked to Ion and Paul.


Story

• The team didn't know if the community would be okay with an expansion that ends setting up a new villain, rather than defeating the big boss. The same went for the story, we had questions that went unanswered by this expansion because it was setting up things for the next one.
• The sword is going to play a very important role in the Worldsoul Saga.
• Undermine gives us some variety, different vibe from the previous content in the expansion.
• We'll learn about the aftermath from Dimensius and how it sets up Midnight.
• The team build a shortened version of The War Within quest line to help returning players keep up with the story so that they can go into Midnight knowing the story so far.
• The threat to Azeroth is the void storm that is right above the Sunwell. You won't be at the Sunwell the entire time though, eventually you'll even go into the void storm itself.
• Midnight will have the same update cadence as the last couple expansions. Long content droughts were not great.

Player Housing

• Working on Endeavors with your neighborhood will unlock things for your house and more opportunities in the neighborhood.
• You'll be able to move freely between guild Neighborhood instances.
• Cooperative player housing building is something the team would like to deliver after Midnight launch.
• Players can live with whatever people they want to. This means a Horde player can live with Alliance players. This is necessary in a world with cross-faction guilds and Warband owned houses.
• Cross-faction guilds will have to pick a neighborhood style.
• Housing will be here around the end of the year in Patch 11.2.7

Demon Hunters

• The team is interested in hearing feedback about the new Demon Hunter spec. If there's interest in new specs for other classes in the future, that would be interesting to explore.
• A new class needs to be really compelling and make sense, but this time around focusing on Demon Hunters makes a lot of sense in the story.
• New Hero Talent tree is Annihilator, focused on dropping meteors on your enemies. Shared with Vengeance, who will drop Fel Meteors. Devourers will be dropping Void meteors.

Raids

• Players shared that eight boss raids were getting repetitive, so the team is splitting bosses up into three raids this time.
• Based on story progression, there was a good way to tell some of the story in the Voidspire, then some in quests outside of raids, then back into the raids.
• At the start of the season, you'll have access to Voidspire and The Dreamfrift. Around 2-3 weeks later you'll get access to March on Quel'Danas.
• Once all the raids are unlocked, it's likely that guilds will do all three of them every week.

MarcelianOnline Interview
MarcelianOnline talked to Paul Kubit (Associate Game Director for WoW & Game Director for Midnight) and Jade Martin (Lead Combat Systems Designer.



Leveling, Talents, Specs

• The level cap will be 90.
• There will be 10 more talent points, split across the three existing trees. Four points into the spec tree and three into the other two.
• In your class tree you'll get a little more breadth with these extra points.
• Hero talents will get an additional lane, so every tree will now have four lanes.
• The spec tree will have four points into the Apex talent.
• The Apex Talent is a unique, multi-talent, multi-rank node, with four points that you can put in. Each point should feel really impactful, especially the first and the last.
• You don't have to put your spec points into your Apex Talent, you are just strongly encouraged to.
• The team really wants to make sure the moment is right for introducing a new class.
• The team is looking at all of the classes and specs to see what they can do to make them feel more approachable and modern.

Demon Hunters

• Demon Hunter's first Apex Talent point enables Collapsing Star to always critically hit. The second and third points increase your Void and Cosmic damage. The fourth point gives you scaling on your crit damage so that you don't lose any value because your Collapsing Star always crits, the team wants crit to still be valuable.
• Fel-Scarred will be shared with Devourer and Havoc.
• Devourer has two playstyles that talents will cater towards, a mid-range caster or a hybrid (dashing in and out of melee combat from time to time).
• Void Elf Demon Hunters will be unlocked in the pre-patch after a very short quest line.
• The team is aware that Void Elf Demon Hunters give an Alliance imbalance. There will be other cool story fits for other cool race/class combinations that may bring things back into balance in the future.
• Void Ray - 25 yard beam that is like Eye Beam. Turn your enemies into ash!
• Art team did a great job with Devourer, you won't see any green in your abilities, it'll be all Void.

Raids

• All three raids are part of the same tier, but March on Quel'Danas unlocks after a couple of weeks and will have a difficulty increased compared to the other two raids.
• The Dreamfrift should be about middle of Voidspire level difficulty.

Prey

• Normal mode Prey is about the same as regular outdoor world bosses. They might ambush you.
• Nightmare Prey difficulty should be around a difficult Delve. Lots of cool cosmetic rewards and some power rewards.

Finding Groups

• Finding groups is a challenge for everyone. The team is focusing on making it easier to find the group that you are looking for in Midnight.
• People making groups may be able to express their intent. Are you looking for the most efficient players, or here for fun and a more relaxed time. Players looking for a group will be able to filter by that.

Tanks, Healers, WeakAuras

• Playing a tank or healer is a large ask. You're the leader of the party in a way. There are some plans for Midnight to make tanks and healers a little more approachable, some through encounter/dungeon design.
• There may be some things that tanks and healers are asked to do in an encounter that are a little too much.
• Players feeling like they need WeakAuras to play a spec is a problem. Outlaw or Unholy Death Knight are two examples of specs that the developers are looking at to see if they can offer you a better experience by redesigning it.

Buffed.de Interview
Buffed.de spoke to Ion about player feedback to the Midnight cinematic and Orcs / Thrall

• The cinematic team put an emphasis in conveying human emotions. Emotions that would be more difficult to convey when a character's eyes are completely glowing gold or if their design is too close to the in-game model, which can’t always convey subtle facial expressions.
• It's simply about human eyes, a human mouth and that's how we [as humans] interpret emotions. It's very difficult to convey emotions when these features are distorted.
• Over the course of the Worldsoul saga, all the major races, all the factions, and many of our most important heroes will have their moments where they truly take center stage
• We won't see every faction in every expansion.
• Midnight will see the Blood Elves, Haranir, and maybe even Thrall.

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