Combat for Everyone in Midnight
Since the release of World of Warcraft, our goal has been to make a game that everyone can enjoy. There are as many ways to play and enjoy WoW as there are people, and we love to talk with players about how they play and what they love about it, whether it's the story, running dungeons with friends, exploring and collecting, roleplaying, or tackling difficult team challenges.
Combat Complexity and How it Affects Players
One thing we often hear is that there is a high level of complexity in WoW's class and combat design. Classes have a lot of abilities to manage, and it can be tough to find comfortable keybinds for them. During combat, there are many buffs and debuffs to keep track of, which is critical to playing well and can require intense concentration. Players trying out new specializations ("spec") also report that the Talent Trees can be intimidating. Even after learning the purpose of each talent, there are still subtle interactions that aren't obvious, and players often feel like they do not understand what bonuses and combinations are critical to their success.
The complexity of the combat system impacts all types of players in different ways, and everyone faces barriers. There are challenges for new players, trying to learn the ropes for the first time, as well as for returning players who are trying to catch up. Going further, we understand these challenges make it harder to recommend WoW to friends—players sometimes feel that their more inexperienced friends need a robust guide on how to play, manage addons, and more, to even get started. Experienced players who are eager to improve their play so they can tackle more challenging raid difficulties often don’t know where to begin to get better. Without reading a guide, they might miss a subtle aspect of maximizing their performance. We have heard feedback from skilled players who tell us they have shelved some of their favorite characters because those characters’ gameplay is more mechanically demanding than they have interest in. Expert players can spend hours configuring and maintaining addons to display information they need to play at the top level.
Making WoW More Approachable
With Midnight, we aim to make gameplay clearer and easier to understand, so the path to improvement is more apparent for players at every skill level, while maintaining the depth of mastery that WoW offers.
We are updating every class specialization with an eye towards approachability by reducing complexity and making gameplay more intuitive. We are beginning by focusing on what makes each specialization unique and designing gameplay that matches their theme, so your character’s personality and style are reflected in how you play. Our goal is for the most appealing, visible elements of your spec to be what matter most in gameplay. That often means managing resources, tracking a few key buffs and debuffs, using ability charges strategically, and responding to important triggered effects (also known as “procs”).
We want to ensure that players have all the necessary information to play a spec with clearly visible prompts and indicators in the user interface. This can include changing the design of complex abilities or reducing the number of buffs or debuffs that can be active, so it's easier to pick out the most essential information on enemy nameplates or in the Cooldown Manager.
We are also reviewing the amount of concentration or "cognitive load" required to play each spec. Cognitive load encompasses tasks such as keeping track of active auras, parsing conditions to choose the most effective ability in a given moment, or remembering long sequences of abilities. Some specs will demand more cognitive load than others by design. Keeping track of damage over time effects requires concentration, but is also a big part of the appeal of specs like Affliction, Feral, and Assassination! However, we are reviewing all specs for areas where concentration demands are excessive, unclear, or don't serve enjoyable gameplay.
Ultimately, our goal is that once every spec has all its new class talent points, Hero Talents, and Apex Talents, it has what we feel is a manageable, fun, and appropriately challenging level of complexity.
Examples of Class Approachability Changes
What do these goals mean for specific class designs?
Here are a few aspects of classes we're reviewing, along with examples of abilities and talents we're enhancing as a result.
Using Abilities Without Needing Addons
We don't want gameplay to rely on addons to show the information that players need. Going forward, we plan to design the game so all information required to use abilities with intention is available in the interface. Two categories of abilities are particularly tough to play without the use of addons—abilities where players rely on addons to calculate when to use spells, and abilities that rely on information that's hidden in the UI.
For instance, Outlaw Rogues' Roll the Bones is an ability where players often use addons to calculate when to use it, as there are many factors involved. In Midnight, it's much easier to see when it might be worth recasting Roll the Bones. An example of an ability that relies on tracking information that's hidden in the user interface is the Feral Druid ability Bloodtalons, which has been removed in Midnight.
Abilities Without Meaningful Gameplay
Gameplay should have some element of interest or intention. If individual abilities are frequently macroed, or consistently used alongside another, they're not adding meaningful gameplay. Removing some of these abilities will simplify long sequences of abilities that are usually cast in the same order during openers or cooldown windows. Simple maintenance buffs, where you periodically use an ability with no other strategic considerations, fall into this category as well.
Assassination is an example of a Rogue spec that always uses several abilities in a rote order alongside its major cooldown. There is no choice or strategy involved—the challenge is mostly a dexterity and memory check. Several of those effects have been removed to make those windows less involved. Restoration Druid's Efflorescence is an example of a simple maintenance buff, and Restoration is gaining options to make maintaining Efflorescence easier.
Many Modifier Auras
Several abilities give you a temporary bonus or alter the value of your subsequent use of an ability, and these can be fun. However, when a spec has a lot of these, it can make spells feel not worth using unless you've done some amount of setup first. Plus, all the auras for those bonuses can make your active buffs list feel bloated and hard to interpret. We want spells you use frequently to feel consistently good, so we're removing or adjusting some bonuses like this and moving their power into more potent base spells.
Windwalker Monk has a lot of these types of abilities—effects like Dance of Chi Ji, Transfer the Power, and Martial Mixture have been changed or removed to address the need to track auras to determine when to use abilities like Spinning Crane Kick.
Important but Subtle, Hard-to-Discover Talent Interactions
There are many talents in WoW, and most do a good job of explaining how they work and what they do. Some have interactions with other talents or implications that aren't immediately clear, but are critical to basic performance. These kinds of subtleties can be interesting and welcome when trying to master the finer points of a spec, but it shouldn’t require a lot of specialized knowledge to play a spec at a basic level.
Balance Druids' Waning Twilight is an example of a talent we feel is too subtle—its damage bonus is very important, but it isn’t apparent how to meet its criteria to activate that bonus.
But Wait, There’s More!
In addition to the above, some other aspects of class design in review are:
Gameplay with high actions per minute—this can be physically demanding and uncomfortable.
Specs with a litany of ability buttons make it hard to set keybinds or keep track of them all in combat.
Situations where lots of ability-modifying procs can be active at once, causing an array of buttons on your action bar to be highlighted, giving a sense that all of them are urgent.
Specs that sometimes get flooded with so many resources that managing them becomes overwhelming or unimportant.
Abilities that are very complex, such as Adaptive Swarm, Surge of Power, or Blackout Combo.
Approachability and Mastering World of Warcraft
We have also spoken with players who enjoy mastering the many challenges that WoW presents. They carefully review logs, simulations, videos, and guides. They memorize complex action priorities and train their attention to perform rotations perfectly while handling encounter mechanics. They are often the knowledge gurus upon whom their communities are built, offering guidance and tips for other players and sharing their encounter strategies to help defeat bosses.
We understand that mastering World of Warcraft is a crucial part of its appeal; however, becoming an expert WoW player will look a little different after Midnight's approachability changes. Rotations will be learned more quickly, less time will be spent on customizing addons, and you'll experience new types of challenges during encounters. It's satisfying and fun at all skill levels to learn to utilize your abilities effectively to optimize your performance. It's important to us to maintain that depth. Specs will still be designed to give players opportunities to maximize their play, and players with determination to master the game will continue to distinguish themselves.
Looking Ahead
We hope these changes open the door to World of Warcraft for more players and are another step toward WoW being a game for everyone. If you've felt overwhelmed by what it takes to start playing, or intimidated by picking up a new spec, we hope you'll give it a try. Or, if you've wanted to build your skills to tackle harder content but don’t know where to start, we hope that Midnight brings the clarity you need. If you and a friend have wanted to play together but experienced barriers doing so, we hope that it will be easier in Midnight.
Alpha
Our plan for the first wave of Public Alpha is to rebuild all 40 specializations according to the above philosophies. As always, Alpha will be level-locked over its duration, so you will not have access to most of the new Hero Talents and Apex Talents gained over the course of leveling until later in the testing phase. Specs are designed with the assumption that you have obtained all those talents, so please take that into consideration during your playtesting and feedback.
Your feedback on these changes is crucial to us, and we are looking forward to reading it in this thread.
Here's what we are hoping to learn from players from the alpha test:
How well do the changes meet the goals described? Each spec changelist in the patch notes contains an overview of the changes and goals for the new version.
Gameplay clarity pain points you're still experiencing, such as information that's important to playing the spec well, but is difficult to track.
Building characters for different types of content—do you feel you can get the tools you need for dungeons, delves, raids, and PvP?
We hope you're excited for the new class changes in Midnight, and we'll see you in Azeroth!
Talent Changes in Midnight
With the release of Midnight, a new adventure path opens up, raising the level cap to ninety. Along with these additional levels, we’re expanding talent trees with exciting new abilities and introducing what we call Apex talents.
Expanding Talent Trees for Levels 81-90
In Midnight we’re expanding our talent trees with exciting new additions to Hero Talents and specialization trees with the introduction of Apex Talents. A total of ten new talent points will be disseminated amongst our trees during the level up experience with class talents gaining three new points, Hero Talents gaining three new points, and specialization talents gaining four new points. Let’s take a closer look at the details of these updates!
Specialization Trees and Apex Talents
For our specialization trees, we’re expanding them in a particularly unique way by introducing Apex Talents. These Apex Talents are intended to be the pinnacle of our specialization trees and provide a deeper fantasy and excitement than the average talent. Unlike Hero Talents which were focused on previously unexplored themes for classes, Apex Talents are focused on the core fantasy of each specialization and hone into core gameplay mechanics in new, powerful ways.
Apex Talents first unlock after reaching level 81 and are available beneath the (currently) final section of the specialization tree. They will cost a total of four specialization talent points. The first point is spent on an initial keystone that provides a large boost in power and introduces new gameplay. The next two-point node emphasizes the Apex Talent or a few core abilities for the specialization. The final point applies to a capstone that brings the Apex Talent into a complete and cohesive package.
More With Hero Talents
Hero Talents are also expanded in Midnight with three new talent points and nodes being allocated to each tree. These points will be added via an additional column, and once reaching maximum level the entire Hero Talent tree will be filled out. None of these new Hero Talent nodes will enhance utility or defensiveness.
Growing the Class Tree
We’re introducing an additional three talent points to the base class tree to be spent within the first two nodes. This means that the point requirement to unlock the final node will be increasing from twenty to twenty-three, but this will not come into effect until the Midnight expansion release and will not change during the pre-expansion content update.
Playtesting & Feedback
Many Apex Talents will be available for playtesting on the Midnight alpha immediately and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.
It’s also worth noting that players will be able to apply their four new Apex Talents as they wish and won’t be locked into where the points get applied. We will be carefully observing how this plays out throughout Midnight’s development to ensure our tuning goals for Apex Talents are being met on a specialization-by-specialization basis.
Here are some questions we are hoping to have answered by players when it comes to Apex Talents and the 81-90 level up experience during the alpha test:
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
We've shared a few examples of the new Apex Talents that will be first available in the initial alpha test below. Make sure to head over to the alpha test forums for the full list.
Death Knight: Blood
Apex Talents: Dance of Midnight
While Dancing Rune Weapon is active, when you parry you have a chance to make your next Heart Strike free and deal 150% increased damage.
For each Dancing Rune Weapon active your damage is increased by 4/8% and your damage taken is reduced by 2/4%.
When you consume a Rune you have a chance to call a Dancing Rune Weapon to your aid for 6 seconds.
Druid: Restoration
Apex Talents: Everbloom
Lifebloom stacks every 5 seconds, up to 3 times.
30% of Lifebloom's healing splashes to 2 allies within 30 yards.
Lifebloom bursts into a Blooming Frenzy when you consume Soul of the Forest, causing it to bloom 8 times in rapid succession.
Mage: Arcane
Apex Talents: Touch of the Archmage
Touch of the Magi accumulates an additional 5% damage and has 1 additional charge.
Arcane Charges further increase the damage of Arcane Blast, Arcane Pulse, and Arcane Barrage by 15/30%.
When Touch of the Magi explodes, it leaves behind a pulsing rune at its targets location, dealing 25% of its damage over 6 sec to nearby enemies. Damage is increased by 100% on your initial Touch of the Magi target.
We look forward to your feedback and look forward to you joining us in Midnight!
