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We've summarized the key points from the interview below.
Interesting Storylines to Pay Attention To
The Riverglades has a fun dynamic and interplays with Warcraft 2
The Undead Paladin stuff is near and dear to Aggrend's Heart
Hyjal can be seen from anywhere and it's really cool to finally see it
A cool storyline to pay attention to is what's going on with the Skyborne. They aren't just an island in Skywall. There's a much deeper history, especially in the history of Desolace and Dire Maul. Pay attention to who you're talking to when you go to Shen'dralas.
Maps and Flying
They want to fill in the map as if you could fly.
They are not going to put in Flying mounts in this game, ever.
They wanted it to be built out in a way that you could fly over it, where there are no empty voids.
Gilneas
The World team can copy and paste World Chunks.
They have to blend in the chunks. The Greymane Wall looked very different in Classic
As of right now, Gilneas is just the Cataclysm version, but they plan on doing a lot of things with it once we go there.
The Economy
Players essentially are walking printing presses of money in an MMO
You need places for the gold to go, or else you get inflation over time.
The idea behind the Black Market Auction House is to put some really cool items on there and people would be willing to spend gold on.
They are doing it conservatively at launch, so there are only a few mounts and a few pets.
It's mostly "I've killed Gandling a few times and he won't drop my hat, but it's on the BMAH"
You can buy your dungeon set pieces, which you'll need to finish Lord Valthalak's quest (Lord Valthalak Laid to Rest).
There's another vendor that sells rare resources such as Black Lotus that was put in to combat the repeated problem of some particular reagent going crazy.
This allows them to put in a price ceiling, rather than spawning in more.
The NPCs are a reference to Madam Goya, the future BMAH owner.
They've toned down some of the mounts and offerings: Rivendare's Deathcharger is no longer on the BMAH.
Global Launch
Raids will have a global launch on December 9th.
Raids Encounters and Addons
The problem is that when the addons can do more, the encounters have to do more to stay challenging.
They don't want their encounters to "get that complicated".
The encounter team talks about "beer and pretzels," and you can get the team together and go smash content. Classic has always been a game you can overprepare for.
"It's a relatively easy game you can overprepare for."
It's sometimes a punishing game where you can just get gibbed by a Fire Blossom.
There are new encounters and you're going to have to learn them. That's something Classic players aren't used to.
There are other ways to challenge players, such as Threat
The difficulty they are aiming for is the typical Naxxramas encounter. Not Four Horsemen, but harder than Molten Core.
Encounters are not going to be 45 seconds in Raids. Not to the level of Retail WoW's Mythic raids, but longer than people are used to in Classic. "Fight is going to be longer enough that you can hit that cooldown multiple times.
Barrow Deeps
Is more like Karazhan, than UBRS. After a couple of weeks/months, you should be able to pug it no problem.
Encryption
The items aren't that complicated and they have created a flag that just says this item's data is not sent to the client until someone finds it.
Every time they make a new dungeon or raid, they're going to keep hiding the drops.
Tier Lists
"They're often Sus"
They like the idea of the unsolved game. You don't know what the best classes are because you don't know what the loot is and you're figuring it out on the fly.
It lets everyone be part of that game, rather than a small subset of people telling everyone how to play.
PTR
They will likely have a PTR for general stability.
They doubt they'll be putting raids on the PTR and they'll likely hide select questlines, etc.
Modern Features
They discussed early on how much quest support they should give you.
A very high percentage of players install Questie or an addon like it.
The goal was to give players enough quest information that it's comfortable and people don't have to install Questie.
Questie tends to go a little overboard and tell you what to do too much.
It's better if Blizzard can make people feel like they don't need it and give them a more lightweight version, and they can have a better time.
There's a feature in Retail where you can have markers for where to go and they left those out because it feels out of place in Classic. Classic has less verticality, so they didn't feel like it was need.
They instead wanted to draw clear lines in the sand for things they shouldn't include: Flying Mounts, Rated Arenas, Shared Mob Tagging.
Anything they add gets compared to their main 4 pillars.
Chase Items
Every boss has a lower chance to drop "Chase Items."
Some are highly optimized. Some are literally a higher item level
It's not just Dragonspine Trophy, there might be 10 items across the raid.
There's also a new Legendary staff revealed.
