Check out the full interview on Tettles' YouTube, or our summary below.
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Interview Summary
Introductions
Ion still hears about him telling people to reroll Demonology Warlocks 12 years ago.
Paul Kubit has worked on questing in Cataclysm, Professions and World Scaling in Legion, Brawler's Guild, and Midnight.
Raid Buffs
Some of the origins of raid buffs were support and synergy, and feeling stronger when you're in a group with others. There's something cool about that.
In recent years, the team views them as a bit of a backstop to make sure the best raid composition is a varied raid composition.
They want every class and spec to be able to find groups and a home. If a pug leader is missing a class, they want that pug leader to go searching for that class.
Raid buffs take different forms; some are direct stat buffs, some have clear utility. Death Grip is not a traditional raid buff, but it is a reason to bring a Death Knight.
The reality is that these utility spells (e.g., Death Grip, Stampeding Roar, etc) only matter or are seen at the highest level of play.
Balance comes in two forms: first are raw numbers and community perception. The other is representation, and representation is what they think matters the most to them. Players should be able to find a home, and if that's not happening, then that's an issue.
Raid buffs are one of the easiest ways to get representation, but it's not the only way. If there's a spec that doesn't have a throughput buff, but it's well represented, then they consider that fine.
Varied fight profiles are another way that they can get that representation.
Utility raid buffs are more interesting, but there are a lot of groups that aren't doing content that requires that kind of coordination. If the only thing you bring is a utility raid buff, then many groups are not going to value that enough, and their representation goals wouldn't be satisfied. If they can get that, that would be awesome though.
Satisfying Different Types of Players
There's been a lot of pendulum swings over the years about things like Borrowed Power and player progression. They would focus on one part of the audience, and then after hearing a lot of negative feedback from the other portion of the community, would often swing it back in the opposite direction.
For someone who isn't an altoholic, something like Legion was perfect. You could always get more AP, but this comes at the expense of someone who has less time or wants to play multiple characters then feeling pressured or frustrated.
From an RPG power progression perspective, things are too frontloaded right now, with over 90% of the power of the Season in the first 4 to 6 weeks.
There's a part of them that would like to have a smoother progression curve. That would also allow gear to help overcome challenges, instead of relying on progressive raid buffs or targeted blanket nerfs. It used to be that you just kept getting stronger, gear- or stats-wise.
However, this is amazing for alts. If you want to play different characters, or take some time off and want to catch up, this system is great.
Gearing
It's never been easier to get the majority of gear that you want.
For some players, gear is a means to an end; for other players, gear is the end.
Mythic+ vs Raid Gear
The systems are designed so that there are pros and cons of each gearing track, and there's a bit of healthy envy that goes both ways.
For example, raiders look at Mythic+ players who have a weekly lockout and are decked out in gear.
When it comes to the high-end ecosystems, raiding competition is defeating bosses as early as possible at the start of the Season, while Mythic+ prestige is at the back end of the season.
While Mythic+ gearing does take longer to acquire the BiS setup, it's not out of step with the timing of when players are looking to accomplish their high-end goals.
They understand that players would want things earlier, but Mythic+ is not competing in a final sense until later in the Season.
Patch or Expansion Resets
When bringing on new friends or players, they want to make sure that players don't feel like they're miles behind.
There is something nice about carrying something forward from one season to the next.
The change from Warlords to Legion was massive, but there was also a 13-month content gap which allowed for all that to happen at once.
With more frequent patches and the ability to hotfix more, they might just hotfix a change into the game immediately, while other changes might wait for a minor patch, or a new Season or expansion.
The Dragonflight crest system was rolled out in the middle of Dragonflight. If it didn't work, they would've just killed it.
Borrowed Power
Borrowed Power, or alternate progression, does exist in things like the Reshii Warps, the Omnium Folio, or the Corrosive Codex.
Long grinds, such as Legion AP, lead to a conflict between someone who plays a single character and someone who has a stable of alts. Whenever you have a big part of your progression that feels mandatory and takes a lot of time, then you can see the pain and frustration.
The amount of work to get the Omnium Folio was perfect for Patch 12.0.7, and if you drop in now it's not a huge amount of catch-up and the system is also account-wide.
All gear is "borrowed power"; it's definitely an overloaded term. When you replace a trinket with a better one, hopefully that feels good. The bad parts of Borrowed Power are things such as logging in on BFA pre-patch day and finding out that the Artifact traits were disabled.
They already know a lot of systems are bloated, but if everything was permanent, they would have a very bloated game, or they would have to be super conservative about what they could give to players, which isn't as exciting.
Legendaries
Nothing to announce about Legendaries coming in the future, but it is something the rewards team talks about.
The benefits of legendaries include being a large goal for not only you, but also for your group.
There's an interesting reflection on the player psychology of the Dragonflight Legendaries, which informs how they would make future Legendaries.
Early on, when it was a few hundred people in the world (single-digit % of players) who had the Legendaries, overall sentiment was positive. The people who did have it got to feel awesome; many others were excited that it existed and to get it themselves. As the number of players who obtained the Legendary increased to around a third of players, it felt like everyone was mad. There are now players who are the only ones in their guild who don't have the Legendary, and groups always have applicants who have a Legendary. It then felt like a disadvantage versus an aspirational goal.
They'll need to work out acquisition in the future because they know that the middle ground where people want it but it feels really common feels bad.
Addons
The goal of addons is still no competitive advantage.
They want to continue leveling up the base UI and the API for addon authors. They want to continue giving players what they want as long as it doesn't encroach on players feeling that they need to have an addon to do content.
In 12.1, with the latest changes, they're much closer to where they want to be.
It is fine for players to want to display the information on their screen in a certain way that is favorable to them, but it should be the same information.
They want to offer a robust baseline experience, and addons should be there to customize how and where on your screen information is displayed.
Addons should not solve problems for you, and should not give you information that people who aren't using addons don't have access to.
If you feel like you're struggling to heal while also keeping up with things and someone recommends an addon for that, that's fine. What's messier is if you want to join this group, or do this boss, everyone needs to have downloaded this addon, which is configured correctly.
When allocating time, they know that making new systems, dungeons, and raids is pure upside; the community is going to enjoy it. Continuing to make a game for 20+ years involves pruning, or changing things based on community trends and mindsets. They don't relish making changes they know are going to be unpopular with the community.
Early on, when they announced the addon changes, if the entire community had a negative reaction, they probably would have reconsidered, but there was a divide, and there were tons of people who mentioned that if they could pull this off, it would be great. It was encouraging enough that they continued down that path. They definitely could have done a better job, especially with communication on what this was.
Talent Trees
When they've been expanding the talent tree, they haven't added overwhelming complexity. Hero Talents are their own tree for this reason, and Apex Talents were something that you probably want.
They know this doesn't scale indefinitely. When they overhauled the talent tree due to a bunch of feedback about limited options on the MoP Talent Tree, they also needed to build a system that lasted for a few expansions but not forever. They're getting there, but nothing to announce. There will be another squish, another reset in that space to preserve the best parts, but remove some of the complexity.
Raid Changes
Midnight saw a large number of changes to raids in Season 1 with Mythic Flex, multiple different raids, and they will continue to look at ways to iterate.
There are two problems that they see with the ecosystem currently and where they would likely focus their efforts.
First, groups that finish AOTC but have more in them and don't have 20 people. 1-boss Lairs, Flex Mythic are interesting solutions, but for a final Mythic boss of a tier, fixed size remains important.
Normal mode raiding is a little stranded right now and lacking a clear purpose. The correlation between needing to manually form a group and the rewards that you get doesn't make a ton of sense. It made sense back in Warlords of Draenor, but you can get the same loot from soloing Delves. They're looking to see if there's a way to get a smoother on-ramp into raiding.
PTR Testing
Blizzard gets a lot of value out of PTR testing. Class changes are a big one.
They would love to be able to avoid spoilers where available, such as Cinematics.
Some of it is due to the way their client and data files work, and how they've been dissected by the community for 20 years.
When they hotfix something, Wowhead knows it before they've posted their hotfix notes.
They would love to get away from that as much as possible. There are cases where they need community feedback, such as with class changes. They want players of that class to play it and see how it feels.
It would be wonderful if the first couple of weeks of the expansion or a patch felt like a shared community journey of discovery, instead of completing a known checklist.
12.1 Bugs
The Survival Hunter 2pc set unlocked the Catalyst Unbound achievement, which was just a flipped piece of data. A very small percentage of Survival Hunters were affected.
There was a misplaced Treasure table that caused players to be unable to receive a Spark or to have too many Sparks. That one is taking longer to clean up. It's not ideal that Sparks are built in a way that is so fragile, where one issue in the data causes so much cleanup.
Bugs are frustrating. It's not an excuse, but it's an explanation.
It's a vast game, with a lot of data. The Catalyst Unbound achievement is a designer who is manually inputting 40 numbers that correspond to each set bonus. One of those was flipped.
They do a root cause analysis after the fact to try to understand how they missed it, improve tools, or make it harder for a designer to make a mistake.
Human error is unavoidable. Ion is aware of all the AI Vibe Coded memes across the internet, but they're doing this manually, and the QA team has never been larger than it has, but they also have never been doing as much.
They always want to do better.
There was a report that players who had disconnected kept casting spells. They looked into this, and characters have always been capable of doing this and would operate as if you were Mind Controlled. Previously, your character would be stunned when you logged out, but the stun was no longer triggered with tech updates in the patch; it has since been fixed.
Responding to the Community
Tettles gave Ion and Paul a chance to speak to the community on anything:
Ion: They care and are listening. It would be a lot easier if there was a single playstyle that they could focus on, but part of the magic of WoW is that there are so many playstyles. Everyone wants the game to cater to their own preferences, but they're often trying to have a path forward that maximizes the happiness of the group as a whole. It doesn't mean that they're not listening to feedback, but they're trying to balance competing objectives and desires.
Paul: Everyone is on the WoW team because they love games, MMOs, or WoW. The people who are making the game are playing it alongside you, and they all do better when everyone is playing it.
