The Game Informer YouTube channel has released an interview with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas on Patch 12.1 and beyond.
We've summarized some of the major points below, but please watch the full video for more details. While it looks like the video is close to 24 minutes long, it appears that the video is less than 18, and the last 6 minutes are a black screen.
Overarching Vision for Ul'atek
It's continuing the epic story of Midnight. At first glance it may seem like a detour, but players will see that there's more than meets the eye and it'll tie back into the central narrative.
Last we saw, Xal'atath had transformed the Sunwell and we were able to retake it at great cost, but there's more to her plan than we originally thought. She has slipped away potentially towards the heart of our world, the center of Azeroth, and we need to figure out what she's up to and be hot on her heels. In the meantime, there are troubles on the Coiled Isle and unfinished business with the troll brethren.
Troll patches are a long standing tradition all the way back to Zul'Aman.
Venomous Abyss Raid
In terms of skill and tuning, they're happy with how the set of raids played out in Midnight Season 1
They're looking at a similar difficulty of progression, and they're not looking to step up mechanical difficulty.
Adding new small raids over the course of a season is something they find pretty exciting at a moment.
Training Grounds
PvP is an integral part of WoW's history. It can feel at times underserved by Blizzard.
There's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation going on. The PvP community has shrunk over time, compared to raids and dungeons. They're trying to focus their team and resources proportionally to the number of people that participate in each activity.
PvP is often not approachable and their focus for this "cycle" is to grow the PvP scene. They're trying to create more of an on-ramp.
They want to grow the PvP scene.
Housing
If they would rank themselves on the way they've handled things, Addons would be a B and Housing would be an A.
A lot of people are backing off until Blueprints arrive in 12.1 because they don't want to tear down what they have.
They have a wonderful foundation with Housing and want to keep adding onto it.
With Vendor decor prices, they aimed high knowing they could lower it later, rather than vice versa. They're excited to lower the costs across the board and will be watching to see if they need to lower it more.
Addons
Overall solid -- B or B-. More good than bad.
They've got feedback on things that players used to be able to do, or problem points from the community. One of these was Trinkets and Potions that weren't trackable on the Cooldown Manager previously.
There were some loopholes that players found out that allowed computational functionality that this whole project was set out to prevent.
There's a pretty big refactor for the buffs and debuffs API in Patch 12.1 which should make it easier for addon authors but close a lot of the loopholes.
Another area is the built-in damage meters don't correctly attribute Augmentation Evoker damage, but they are working on it and it should be addressed in an upcoming update.
Adding Coordinates was more involved than just flipping a switch. They did decide to embrace the community solution here. They explored other ways of having players organically communicate such as Pins, since coordinates felt "gamey", but at the end of the day, there's 20 years of precedence here and if you're looking for help you're going to see coordinates on community sites.
Auto Loot
They tracked down the Auto Loot bug. It was tricky as it only happened on live servers, and was due to latency, and things getting out of sync due to client-server delays.
Looting should now be reliable.
Instead of working on a big new future for UI such as the size of Discord integration, a lot of the quality of life changes were made as short (1-day) tasks and those would help players now.
