Legion Developer Q&A - Paul Kubit

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Legion Developer Q&A - Paul Kubit
Paul Kubit talked about Brawlers’ Guild, Micro-Holidays, Timewalking, and Professions today! The next Q&A isn't scheduled yet, but may be in February.



Profession Gear

• The crafted gear has a limited duration. As more content is added to the game, higher item level loot is added elsewhere.
• Obliterum upgrades help to keep crafted gear relevant.
• Crafted gear is still on the radar, so in future patches the team will try to keep adding things.
• Patch 7.1.5 added some things for Engineering and other professions, new armor may be coming in a future patch.
• Patch 7.2 and beyond will add new recipes to primary and secondary professions.

Brawler's Guild

• Bosses are set to a fairly static difficulty, increasing as you progress through.
• Early bosses should be approachable for most players, with fights becoming more challenging later on.
• Boss health adjustments based on spec is not something the team did this time. It might diminish the accomplishment of beating the boss.
• The team thought about ways they could bring healers into the Brawler's Guild, so maybe they could do something in the future, but the Brawler's Guild is about fighting!
• There aren't any plans to add additional bosses in this expansion, but it isn't out of the question.
• Almost every idea makes it into Brawler's Guild.
• A Mario themed fight was started and never finished, as was a Mega Man fight.

Timewalking

• The team is talking about increasing the item level on Timewalking gear.
• Scholomance probably won't make it to Mists of Pandaria timewalking. MoP timewalking is about the dungeons found in Pandaria.
• In the future the team might be able to do Vanilla timewalking, but there are no plans to do it right now.
• The Vanilla dungeons don't hold up to current dungeon design standards, which is why they didn't start with Vanilla timewalking. They don't feel challenging and aren't tuned for max-level players.
• Timewalking is designed to cover content from two expansions ago and earlier.
• Timewalking raids are probably coming at some point. It is a safe bet.

Engineering Goggles

• The new engineering goggles are the highest tier crafted items right now.
• The goggles are more powerful, so they take more to craft and have random stats.
• You can farm or buy Hardened Felglass.
• The googles are BoE, so you can sell them to someone else if you don't get the stats you want.

Professions

• The cost of gathered materials comes from the time it takes to collect them.
• Materials are more expensive in this expansion because you actually have to go and gather, rather than using your garrison.
• Professions can change a lot between expansions, it is a place to experiment.

Talent Tomes

• Talent tomes cost a little bit too much right now. This is largely due to the cost of the materials that goes into them.
• In the near future the team will look at ways to adjust costs of things that are too expensive, including talent tomes.

Obliterum

• The cost of unlocking the forge worked out pretty well.
• Players had to interact with each other to make the armor pieces to unlock the forge.
• It is very likely that the cost of unlocking the forge will be reduced in a future patch.

Skinning

• Making skinnable mobs multi-tap is still something the team wants to do.

Crafting Material Costs

• The team has been cracking down on bots, which also contributes to the cost increase of gathered materials.
• Taking raw materials and using them to make something doesn't have much of a time commitment for the most part, so the profit margins are slim.

Micro-Holidays

• The rewards from these holidays aren't really collectable items because of their short duration.
• Extra experience from a leveling micro-holiday is a cool idea.
• Call of the Scarab is a region wide faction competition, not realm-wide. It also rewards a good amount of experience.

Cooking

• As the team was building out Legion professions, they wanted to have content for all of them.
• For all of the primary professions, it ended up being quest lines.
• For the secondary professions, the team didn't want to overwhelm you with quest lines.
• Archaeology got a time gated quest line, Fishing got an Artifact fishing pole, First Aid got items that drop out in the world.
• Cooking had a progression in Warlords with work orders. Cooking felt like a way that the team could flavorfuly incorporate work orders.
• The randomness with Nomi is probably a little bit too random. You can give him a certain material and he will give you recipes that use that material.
• Nomi is learning, with every patch he becomes more efficient. In Patch 7.1.5 the chance to get recipes has gone up significantly.

Rank 3 Recipes

• When the team was designing the profession recipes system, it was a blank slate.
• The rarity of recipes could be anything from a guaranteed drop to super rare. The team started by making them rare, as it is easier to make them more common in the future if needed.
• The Rank 3 shoulder recipes were added to a fairly challenging part of the game, making them more rare.
• It isn't breaking the game to have some RNG on the Rank 3 recipes, you can still make the items.
• In the case where it does feel bad, such as gathering, adjustments can be made.
• There isn't a lot of profit margin in crafting, but having the Rank 3 recipes help to give players a little more profit.
• The team can increase the chance to get the Rank 3 recipes at the end of the expansion.

Archaeology

• There isn't as much of a reason to go on an endless grind now with how archaeology works. This was intentional.
• There are less projects you can solve so that you don't get down to the last one and feel like it takes forever to get.
• There are plans to make archaeology better in Patch 7.2!

Patch 7.2

• Patch 7.2 should be coming to the PTR pretty soon.

Profession Dungeon Requirements

• While the team was building the profession quest lines they leaned on dungeons because they could scale. At this point in development the world scaling tech didn't exist.
• Removing dungeon requirements for professions isn't going to happen, but it could probably be less dungeon heavy in the future.

Gathering Professions

• The team talks about making gathering professions separate each expansion, but it hasn't happened yet.
• They could add a third profession slot that is gathering only.
• Some of the people asking for another profession slot just want something new, but don't want to get rid of their existing professions.

Random Secondary Stats

• There won't be an item to allow players to reroll secondary stats on crafted items.
• If you want different stats, make another item.
• This was taken into account when setting costs for crafting items, so they are a little bit cheaper.

Artifacts and Weapon Crafting

• With Artifacts, professions that could craft weapons in the past no longer had this choice.
• The team tried to replace these weapon choices with crafted relics. It didn't completely fill the fantasy of a weaponsmith.
• The team will look at the quality of the crafted relics and maybe add some more crafted things.

Weekly Events

• Separating Timewalking from the other events is something not planned right now.
• The team might remove less relevant events in the future.
• Keeping Timewalking rare helps to make it special.

Micro-Holiday

• Maybe there will be a New Year's Eve micro-holiday in the future, but it doesn't feel like the other micro-holidays.
• Right now the micro-holidays that are being added are Azerothian holidays rather than analogues to real world holidays.

Engineering

• Reaves having a bank access is something the team looked at. It was considered for Patch 7.1.5 but didn't get put in.
• The team wants to save some things for later. If Reaves is the best thing right away there would be nothing left to add.

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