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We've summarized the key points from the interview below.
Raid Philosophy
Tim Jones is really excited about having different raids.
When we go back to Blackwing Lair and Molten Core, they want it to feel familiar but new.
Narratively, they plan to use those raids to mark various points in time.
For Season of Discovery, Scarlet Enclave was super fun and creative, but maybe too challenging.
They maybe pushed things too far at the end of SoD with the complexity of boss fights and tuning.
Will be really exciting when they can reincorporate Scarlet Enclave back into Forever down the road.
They want the encounters to be approachable. Somewhere in the realms of the difficulty and complexity of the Season of Mastery raids and baseline Naxx.
They'll be keeping the same visual language of Vanilla raids: no gigantic visual outlines on mechanics and that you don't need addons.
They still want there to be difficult encounters that are aspirational, whether they're at the end of the raid or secrets, that will drop gear that you can "flex" with in a capital city.
Prog Time
Somewhere between two to three weeks of progression for the average guild.
Raids
They can have creative raid encounters, hidden bosses, and secret phases.
Fundamentally, they only want one difficulty for their instanced content.
Ulduar Hard Modes are cool, but they are the start of splitting a piece of content into Normal and Heroic.
In TBC and Classic, everyone is competing on the same bosses.
There's value in a casual guild taking on the exact same encounter as the Hardcore guild.
40 Man
Onyxia will drop a lot of loot.
Onyxia turns into how few people can we kill it with to maximize loot or to showboat?
Farm
One of the issues with truly flat horizontal progression is that it assumes that all loot is equal. Then if you're in Tier 4, there are four tiers and people still want something from the first raid.
Aggrend thinks that this is why they won't have purely flat item level progression.
Maybe on a free raid day, you might go back and clear Hyjal to "get your healers their Legendary Staff" a couple patches in.
Hyjal has multiple wings and you want to target a specific boss for loot, you can.
In future patches, there could be shortcuts for the raid, such as the Translocation Orb in Naxx.
It's important that people go through the intended progression path when it's the active tier, but allowing people to target farm things later to respect people's time later on farm
Chase Items
They've made an effort to make sure there are items of great power that are on various bosses.
Raid Progression
If everyone is kitted out, then you can probably have some carries.
Ideally, they've tuned stuff in a way where it requires players to do the previous tier.
