Story Leadup, Spoilers, and Skyriding
The lead up to Undermine was very open and deliberate, while Ghosts of K'aresh was much more secretive. Looking back, there have been hints since Dragonflight, but much of that is meant to prime the players and familiarize them with the lore, rather than to explicitly tell them where they're going next. There's a belief that players enjoy getting different way to approach content, so they won't always do a prologue chapter for each content update.
Spoilers are a hot topic both internally and within the community, as Story Mode doesn't release until well after the raid has already been cleared and its cinematics already shared, giving non-raiding players little opportunity to experience it naturally. Despite this, the team has no plans to change the regular Story Mode cadence at this time.
The story involving Eco-Dome Al'dani takes place after the raid, which is somewhat new for Blizzard. While the dungeon and raid release at the same time, the dungeon's "epilogue content" is only viewable if you have completed the raid, so doing the dungeon first shouldn't spoil everything. The developers are keen to see how players react and taking notes for next time.
Skyriding has fundamentally changed how players traverse the world, and how the developers create content. They're less afraid of asking players to traverse long distances, and there's so much in K'aresh that's designed around skyriding. It's also forced them to think more about what players see though, as one of the first things the developers had to do when importing Tazavesh into K'aresh was cover up all the ceilings and roofs, since they weren't previously visible when it was just a dungeon.
Dungeons and Raid
Defensive creep exists, and has increased with the advent of expanded Dragonflight talent trees and Hero talents in The War Within. Some of it was intentional in order to give players more agency, but it also came at a cost in encounter design and how healers feel. They don't have any plans to disarm defensives with the new Season, but it is something that's on their minds and may come up in future expansion development.
Tanking and healing are high responsibility roles, and the team is keen to reduce the amount of stress put on those players. Though they don't have a singular way to increase tank and healer representation in group content, there have already been a few changes helping make tanks feel more impactful in PvP and increasing threat generation to give players more control in Mythic+.
There hasn't been any intentional design shift to ensure Manaforge Omega bosses have less WeakAura requirements, but the use of such tools is a common discussion point within Blizzard. As far as their future plans to restrict addons, they've nothing to share right now, but there are no changes planned for Ghosts of K'aresh.
The tuning focus for Patch 11.2 is to ensure that each subsequent boss feels approachable, avoiding brick walls stopping progression. While they don't a specific tuning point, they're hoping for a smoother difficulty curve than either Nerub-Ar Palace or Liberation of Undermine.
No plans to change Mythic+ grouping or Resilient keys at this time, though the developers have been discussing ideas to help like-minded players connect. It's expected that high end Mythic+ is going to demand increased coordination the deeper you go, and their goal is provide tools to help players find others to enjoy playing with.
Set Bonuses, Raid Buffs, & Class Design
While the developers generally want later set bonuses to be more impactful in order to offset how players have gotten used to all the other systems over the course of an expansion, the philosophy regarding seasonal set bonuses is heavily driven by feedback and how they're trying to shape the upcoming season. That said, they also heard a lot of feedback regarding how passive Season 1 and 2 bonuses were, pushing them to make more impactful ones for Season 3.
Active set bonuses that add new abilities are not something the team has done before, but isn't out of the realm of possibility.
In terms of raid buffs and class balance as a whole, the team's ultimate goal is to achieve broad representation of all specs across all types of content across all roles, though they also want unique utility to be a valued reason to bring someone to a group or raid. Warlocks are a good example, in that they don't provide a traditional raid buff, but healthstones and gateways are still considered very impactful, and they'd like to make Death Knights feel the same way. Death Grip is a consideration, but they're already buffing Anti-Magic Zone by quite a bit, and they're looking for more reasons to bring specific classes or specs to raids - unique utility or interactions like using Death's Advance to trivialize certain mechanics as an example.
As far as future tiers not necessarily having adds to grip, the encounter and combat design teams constant discuss these things to try to find areas for different classes to shine, but they they don't just want to default to 60-minute raid buffs.
The team will take a look at AMZ performance in dungeons. No promises, but they try to make appropriate changes as needed over the course of the season.
Gear Progression, Turbo Boost, & Dinar
Between tier, embellishments, a new artifact, and cantrips that enhance it, the teams has no immediate plans to change overall item progression, but they are always interested in experimenting and trying new things. Some players may like having more slots locked and others may not, though they did take steps to try to smooth out sore spots, such as not adding any other cloak drops in Season 3 (though there are still some cosmetics).
The developers are overall very happy with how Turbo Boost and Puzzling Cartel Chips (aka Dinar) worked out in Season 2, though they can't yet comment or tease on whether similar systems will return in Patch 11.2.
The Developers got a lot of feedback from Mythic+ players in particular about Puzzling Cartel Chips, which was acted on quickly to improve the system for them, and they saw how receptive players were to the system, so it's not off the table.
Unrelated to Season 3, there is some desire to protect the sanctity of rewards for the content in which they were originally awarded, but neither George or Stephanie are involved in Legion Remix, so they can't comment specifically on Legion Mage Tower skins not being made available again.
One-Button Rotation
The developers have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the rotation assist features, from all sorts of players, so it's definitely hit their goals to help players with leveling, learn new classes, and as an accessibility option to help more players get into more content. In terms of tuning goals, it's pretty much aligned with their intentions and they're happy with the current penalty in place - they might change it in the future, but they're interested to see how it's used in the upcoming tier.
