Gear and Upgrades
WoW has pivoted away from the borrowed power of previous expansions, and Midnight is no different. Apex talents are a new introduction to the talent tree, but are intended to stick around for awhile. Although borrowed power has kind of a negative connotation now, temporary bonuses that your character can play around like legiondaries were kind of cool, so nothing is off the table for the future.
Changing crests for each upgrade track was a simplification from the upgrade systems of Dragonflight and The War Within. The previous overlap between crests with varied names created a lot more confusion, when now players can much more clearly associate Heroic crests for Hero-track gear.
As far as the number of crests are concerned, that's simplification of a different type. They initially tried scaling costs, with each subsequent upgrade becoming more expensive, but ultimately decided the flat cost would be a lot less mathy for players just trying to figure out what to do with their resources each week. Players should be able to make some sort of "rule" in their head like "weapons first, then trinkets, then chest" or whatnot, but trying to do that while also dealing with incremental costs required too much calculation.
As far as changing tier tokens, it's a mix of wanting to try something different and aligning armor types to make each token more obvious. They just want to see how it plays out.
Raid Progression
There is no raid renown track in Season 1 of Midnight, which they hope will make it a little easier for players to approach raids however and whenever they want. With the absence of a raid-specific buff unlocked over time, they'll be keeping tabs on completion rates and nerf as appropriate, but are also hoping that gear will help players grow in power organically over time.
With three different raid locations each with a different number of bosses, skips and teleports shouldn't feel as necessary, and they can simply prioritize which raid to tackle based on how much time they have on a given day.
Designing boss mechanics without computational addons and Weakauras has been a big focus for the team. The very first boss of Voidspire asks players to play tic-tac-toe, which is something they want to play out in the world. It's a simple game, but they want players to keep their eyes on the battlefield, at what the enemy is doing, and to think about how to counter it.
The biggest difference, and the thing they've struggled with in the past, is getting players to communicate more, rather than deducing what is going to happen based on an automated aura or macro.
With Mythic difficulty in particular, they want everyone to participate in mechanics. Sometimes they'll let players choose who is going to do what and when, while other times its randomly assigned in order to add an extra degree of difficulty... which often got flattened out by computational addons. Many of the newer encounters now have more static assignments, which should help lead players to developing more of a rhythm in learning the cadence of the fight without as much need for addons to keep track of what's going on.
Dungeons, Affixes, and Rewards
Dungeons have been getting a little shorter, but more important is trying to create parity between the different dungeons of a given season. Players always tend to want to skip the long one and binge the short one until they're sick of it, so the team is trying to do better at keeping them all at a similar playtime. The 30-minute dungeon has felt pretty right and it feels like a good length of time to ask players to remain engaged.
Great Vault rewards shifted around on the beta as the developers experimented with new ideas, but ultimately, gameplay in Mythic Plus has not changed enough between the War Within and Midnight to to warrant changing the rewards structure. Even if the difficulty remained the same, players have an expected value for the "rewards cap" and so to change it so drastically from 10 all the way up to 18 would have been a pretty big change in expectation, so they brought it back down.
The new Routing Affix as targeted to provide a racing line for newer tanks, intended to reduce the anxiety burden placed on them by streamlining part of the process and hopefully encourage more players to pick up a new role. Just like a racing game, that line which the computer provides is good, but ultimately not meant to be optimal - as they come to understand more about the game, players should start to learn where they can should play safer or be more aggressive.
Non-Seasonal Mythic+0 dungeons should become available on March 3rd, after early access ends.
Addon Changes in Review
The goal of the addon changes has been largely about fairness, making sure that players feel like they are on equal ground whether they have add-ons or not. The developers think it's gone about as anticipated, but there's still work to be done for sure.
Add-ons are still welcomed in plenty of forms, from adjusting the way that information is presented, to managing non-combat related things like collections, and accessibility reasons. In a lot of ways, the team is happy to see folks continue to modify their gameplay experience, but whether or not class and encounter design feels fair will often fall back on those designers, rather than the add-on side.
The Future of Season 1
Because the Sporefall raid is arriving later in the season during Patch 12.0.7, most players who have already been running content should find it to have an appropriate difficulty and rewards. It won't be the hardest raid they've ever released, but it's going to be a lot of fun, they can promise us that!
These mini-raids would be an interesting place to play with new rule sets, like smaller raids sizes, which is something to think about going forward.
We'll meet a dominaar in the Voidstorm named Decimus, who is a complicated individual, sort of an employee of Xal'atath but also not. Hell help us run the Voidforge, which will help make our gear stronger. We'll start this process at launch, collecting fragments to empower the forge for something upcoming later in the season, with more details coming around the 12.0.5 timeframe.
No comment on whether there will be another Turbo Boost in Midnight, but the developers believe it has succeeded in its goal of providing players with new mid-season gearing opportunities, some new amount of power to chase after they've exhausted other activities earlier in the season.
The team is constantly iterating and experimenting with interesting systems for players to find cool stuff to make their character stronger. Cyrce's Circlet is one example, being closely tied with the Siren Island, while Turbo Boost being more thematically associated with the Goblins of Undermine is another.
The team is going to continue playing around with different systems, but philosophically, they want to retain novelty. They don't want it to end up feeling like players will expect the same thing in every x.5 or x.7 patch, they want players to look forward to the unknown. That's why the Turbo Boost was different than the Circlet and why some things we might see in the future will be different than what we've in the past.
Exciting Upcoming Features
Dylan is most excited for the Murder Row minigames, but that's not in the Season 1 dungeon pool. From Season 1, it would be Maisara Caverns, as it features an incredible vista while approaching the final boss and from its encounter mechanic. The whole dungeon is begging for high keys.
Internal playtests for the final boss of March on Quel'Danas have also been a blast. Without spoiling, its mechanic is not something they could have done in a world where computational add-ons could take dynamic assignments and automatically correlate them to static responses. The team is going to be able to play a lot more with making the fight easier or harder based on coordination, instead of just flooding the arena with one shot danger orbs.
Paul is partial to the Den of Nalorakk, which isn't in Season 1, but is part of the Zul'Aman campaign. Players will be entering the dreams of the bear loa for the majority of the dungeon, in a sort of dreamlike space, which is about what you'd expect the the dreams of a bear to be about about - gathering food and surviving the winter. Seasonally, he's more excited to go back to Pit of Saron, which is the earliest dungeon they've reached back to for Mythic+.
Raid wise, Paul is most excited for the final encounter of the Voidspire, Crown of the Cosmos. They've been intentionally shy about exactly who we'll be fighting there, but if you go in game and you dig into the dungeon journal, you'll probably figure it out. The fight itself is spectacular and leads into some really good story that fits in-between the March on Quel'Danas raid.
