Dragonflight Prelaunch Interview Recaps

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Dragonflight Prelaunch Interview Recaps
Several outlets conducted Dragonflight interviews with the World of Warcraft developers. Here are quick recaps of new information from each one.

SoulSoBreezy Interview with Professions Developer Eric Holmberg-Weidler

• You can look forward to something cool with Archeology in the future.
• The main reason archeology isn't there at launch is because they wanted to focus on the primary professions with the refresh.
• A separate team added a bunch of awesome world content for both Cooking and Fishing.
• The team doesn't have any specific plans for more Glyph spell customizations because the goal is to make spell animations well recognized, especially in PvP.
• There will definitely be more rare cosmetic crafting recipes in the future.
• The idea with Dragonflight is to have professions be a major gear source without forcing players to pick a certain profession. Crafting orders allow for this without making items BoE and causing gold to be a major influence on gearing up.
• The Engine of Innovation will be used to create Sparks of Ingenuity that are used for crafting gear. You will get more quests to unlock more Sparks as the Season progresses.
• Acquiring the items to fuel the Engine will function in a similar manner to obtaining Legion legendaries, with bad luck protection in place the longer you go without obtaining one.
• To be able to craft a piece of higher item level gear, you need to get drops from content that is equivalent.
• You are guaranteed to get a crafting reagent from a raid or mythic + run.
• Crafted gear will not be eligible for the Catalyst of Inspiration because it can upgraded and changed a lot. They don't want players to feel like they need to convert the gear early and lose out on upgrading it further.
• Players get one rare Primal Infusion crafting reagent for reaching max renown with each reputation in Dragonflight. You get another one for killing Raszageth for the first time. This is 5 pieces of heroic item level gear for players who only focus on casual content over the course of Season 1.
• The general idea is to keep upgrading profession gear into a new season while also offering new recipes.
• The team is still trying to figure out if they should add new gathering reagents every season.
• You will eventually get everything from a specialization over the course of an expansion, but it takes a lot of time.
• Players that enter the expansion late can still pick a specialization and be able to craft a good portion of useful things if you focus on a niche.
• The team wants to add crafting orders for old expansion recipes as well.
• You can fill a public crafting order without digging into your daily limit if the crafting order is within two hours (time not certain) of expiring.
• Public orders are not region wide because the team wants to see how they work out on live servers.

Raider.io Interview with Ion Hazzikostas

• The goal for Vault of the Incarnates difficulty is to make it just difficult enough that it still feels like a huge and exciting moment for Race to World First, but also not have to nerf it 20 times over the course of the season for slower raid groups.
• Releasing all raid difficulties at once will offer layer of strategy if gearing vs. progression. Some guilds will elect to tackle mythic right away while others will gear up first.
• Changing the European daily reset time has nothing to do with the Race to World First. It was changed to place servers coming up around the time of the reset.
• There are no plans for a global raid release in Dragonflight.
• Fated raids will most likely become a thing at the end of each expansion as a way to revisit the content in a new way while waiting for the next expansion.
• WHEN cross-faction guilds release, the Hall of Fame will become faction-agnostic.
• On the lower end it will be a harder for a lot of players to get the same quality of gear that was accessible through Mythic + in previous expansions as they want the challenge between raiding and Mythic + to be similar.
• The team is going to listen to feedback about the change in Mythic + Vault reward scaling, but the hope is that it will give players new goals to strive for.
• The goal is to keep offering more unique rewards for Mythic +.
• For now, the team unofficially draws a line at Mists of Pandaria for dungeons to be added to Mythic +. They will make changes as needed, but older expansion dungeons would need a lot more work.
• The goal is to implement small changes that make life better for players with the idea that they will be expanded and iterated on down the line.
• Ion wants to stress that the entire team is extremely passionate about the game, and the most hurtful community feedback is seeing some claim that they don't care.

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Maximum Interview with Morgan Day

• The team decided to shift their approach in delivering the Alpha/Beta in order to better focus their testing.
• There has been a philosophy shift in design that better focuses on being friendly to player time.
• Morgan says adding too much incentive to the vault, such as ways to add tertiary stats with the tokens, would make players feel like they have to maximize the vault every week to stay relevant.
• Building on this, he offers the suggestion that maybe adding catch-up mechanics to the vault, such as being able to loot multiple items from your vault if you are behind.
• The team designs Mythic+ vault progression to be in-line with raid vault progression, not as much PvP.
• The team still wants raiding to be the main method for earning tier sets early in a season. Raiding competition is generally at the front of a season where Mythic+ and Pvp push is further into the season.
• The team will definitely iterate a lot on Talent trees throughout the expansion.
• Choosing between important utility or damage (such as Solar Beam on Balance Druid) is something the team will look into and address.
• 10 slots is where the team landed on for talent loadouts, but they could add the ability to have more overtime.
• The team has been exploring the identity for seasonal affixes in Dragonflight, and have settled around adding more group coordination.
• The team recognizes that patch cadence of Shadowlands left a lot to be desired, but their plans for future patch content have evolved quite a bit based on this feedback.
• The team has been experimenting with making cooldown buffs worth triggering a global cooldown, specifically with giving Arcane mages Arcane Surge over Arcane Power. They are curious if this design could be a solution to the problem created with the GCD and macro issues from BFA.
• The team doesn't balance specific class spells against each other (uses Ice Block and Divine Protection as an example, same function, different outcomes)

Preheat Evoker Interview with Sr. Game Designer Graham Berger

• Hover is a defining feature of the Evoker.
• Devastation Mastery comes from the idea that they need to be good at fighting large dragons.
• Evokers may need to wait a second before attacking to let the tank establish threat because their mastery allows a lot of initial threat.
• Exploring a new mid-range niche is part of the Evoker's unique role. If it is too much of an issue they might increase it, but having a shorter range is part of the fantasy of being a dragon in the thick of the fight.
• The intended strengths of Preservation is burst healing, especially on clumped allies. They also have higher mobility. Preparation is also key to mastering the healing class.
• Devastation also excels at clumped AOE damage and mobility.
• The team is happy with where empowered spells are, but will fix any bugs of course.
• Echo is designed to be used for a few targets while Emerald Blossom is best used for many targets.
• Looking forward, the raid designers will take the mid-range class into consideration with raid encounters. Evokers are considered ranged for mechanics.
• The team wants Evokers to do competitive damage as a DPS, but they are a hybrid class and gain the necessary utility because of it.
• No plans at the moment to add a ton more customization for the Dracthyr, but they love adding new customization to the races in general.

Wowhead Interview with Morgan Day

• The talent trees are always a work in progress.
• The team feels that major talent adjustments would best be saved for new seasons.
• The 40% health and creature damage increase was added to stop the feeling of health bars being very rubber-bandy. The team is still addressing any side effects found from the changes.
• Ultimately, the developers prefer that healers spend a majority of their time healing. They keep an eye on healer damage, but focus on how much they are bringing to their groups total contribution.
• Threat still plays an important part in the game, but the team recognizes that tanks have a lot to manage and don't want it to become too much of an issue. They will assess it patch over patch.
• The team added many class buffs in Dragonflight and walked it back a bit. They are happy where they landed, but are open to feedback.
• The team wanted class buffs to be class specific and not unique to a certain spec, which is why they might have stepped back on a few.
• Bloodlust was added to Evokers because the ratio of classes that brought it has diminished over time with new classes being added.
• No immediate plans to change certain abilities still having half a GCD. They want to iterate on abilities, however, to make them feel worthwhile to trigger the GCD.
• No plans currently to add more armor pieces showing on Evoker's dragon form.
• No plans currently to add unique tier tints for Mythic+, but it's a good idea.

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