Millenium Interview with Ion Hazzikostas - No Patch 8.3.5

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Millenium Interview with Ion Hazzikostas - No Patch 8.3.5
Millenium sat down with Ion Hazzikostas recently to discuss Visions of N'Zoth and the future of World of Warcraft.

Shadowlands
  • Ardenweald will continue the stories started in the Emerald Dream and Emerald Nightmare.
  • There are currently NO PLANS FOR A PATCH 8.3.5..
  • There may be some small systems tweaks or updates for stability between now and Shadowlands, however.
  • Horrific Visions aren't designed to be the same sort of roguelike dynamic experience as Torghast.
  • Horrific Visions are pretty static in terms of what to expect when you go in. Torghast is a different experience each time.

N'Zoth and the Ny'alotha Raid
  • The manifestation of N'Zoth's power is a little different than what we dealt with in the past. He is going to subvert our minds and wills to transform Azeroth into a nightmarish future.
  • When creating raids, the team sees what cool ideas that they have and what characters have been set up in the past for this moment to revisit.
  • Creating the end raid is usually a bit longer because they try to place more bosses in it than previous raids in the expansion.
  • They also try to consider what inventive mechanics they could implement that players haven't seen before.
  • Ny'alotha is very real, but exists in an alternative reality that is starting to merge with ours.
  • If we are victorious against N'Zoth it should be the last we hear from him, but we'll see!
  • Dying in Ny'alotha is as permanent as in our reality.
  • Getting rid of an Old God for good should remove the corrupting power from our reality.
  • There are many forces at play in the world of Warcraft. Removing one may tip the balance in favor of others and there may be consequences to that we explore in the future.

Essences
  • There are currently still no plans for account wide essences. The system at its core is about player power and that is usually something that they don't allow to be account bound.
  • The team is still looking at overall essence acquisition rates and tuning how easy they are to obtain based on what they discover.

Corruption System
  • The team has wanted to move away from titanforging for awhile now.
  • The team agreed that there was too much randomness and undermining of item level from titanforging.
  • Corruption was a replacement that they team came up with that also manages to tie into the story.
  • Corruption will not carry forward directly into Shadowlands.
  • The team wants to explore more variety in gear sources in Shadowlands, such as making sure players who PvP obtain gear good for PvP, Mythic + rewards being geared towards Mythic + and so on.
  • Ion believes the Corruption system is less random than titanforging because there is effectively a limit on how many you can wear because of your corruption level, meaning only a small handful of Corrupted items can be worn at a time.
  • Your weekly Mythic+ cache is a regular source of Corrupted gear.
  • The team wants to get back to a place where you can feel confident that if you get a piece of Mythic raid gear, it is as good as that piece can be in terms of raw power.

Awakened Affix
  • Ion isn't 100% sure, but he believes the obelisks have a couple of different places that they can spawn each week, and the bosses associated with them go through a small rotation as well.

PTR and Grinding
  • The holiday break kept the PTR up longer and the team was able to get more feedback on Ny'alotha encounters, and the relative balance of Corruption, Affixes, and drawbacks.
  • Grinding is a loaded term. Generally, the more skill something requires, the less time it may require to earn. Example - Some players have more time to grind reputations but aren't necessarily a hard core competitive player.
  • Sometimes, rewards may feel mandatory for someone who doesn't enjoy the type of content required to obtain it. This is something the team is always trying to listen to feedback on and adjust.
  • Balancing all these systems for a variety of different play-styles in one of their greatest challenges.

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