Mythic+ Dungeon Pool
There's a variety of factors that go into selecting the seasonal Mythic+ Dungeon pool. Sometimes it's about adding texture or variety in the types of encounter or layouts. Other times it's about theme or providing context to the current evolving story.
When updating legacy dungeons for the current season, it's often done by developers who play Mythic+ obsessively. They'll taste the encounter 'soup' and if it feels old or outdated they'll make changes while still trying to maintain the essence or soul of the encounter as well as making it visually impactful to the standards of modern WoW.
If you look at dungeon design over the last 20 years, you'll definitely see an evolving philosophy. Specifically, back in BFA there wasn't a set idea of what Mythic+ trash should look like and it felt a bit more wild west. With a better understanding of player skill, inclinations, and aversions, we've been able to iterate and design things that feel legible and not overwhelming.
Encounter Visual Clarity & Addons
With the impending addon disarmament, it puts the burden on encounter designers to be able to tell the encounters story and mechanics through legible telegraphing. Players not addons need to be able to read the game state and make decisions based on that information.
For melee-designated healers (Mistweavers, Holy Paladins), there's not a hard and fast rule for how they're handled in regards to mechanics and often need to work with the class team to identify particular situations and designations. But often mechanics that are particularly more deadly to a given role we try to spawn fewer more intentional enemies.
We don't have anything to announce as a new feature for Mythic+ in MIdnight. We want to provide some space for players to digest the addon disarmament and have a better feel for what content looks like in this new ecosystem.
For our Trash philosophy, we want to make mechanics apparent. It's not so much about doing less, but more about concentrating the more vexing enemies into strategic places. Things that don't need a castbar no longer do, so that when you do see a castbar you know it probably does need to be interrupted.
There's a continual need to update LFG tools as well as provide the information necessary for LFG players to make the decisions needed to overcome encounters. For encounter design, it's about ensuring that information is accessible for everyone.
Healing in PvE
In regards to Healer DPS, it's not something we're tuning around for Raid or Mythic+. It's something that players can do to optimize for sure and often can be fun in that regard. As for how it should be tuned, that's probably a question better left to the class team.
We understand why healers feel it's necessary to have raid frame indicators for spells that are incoming on allies that are semi-lethal at higher key levels. Our solution to this is two-fold: First, reduce the visual clutter and noise that exists with current spells and UI elements. Second, also making classes a bit more readable and playable to free up some cognitive space that allows players to internalize those mechanics without the need for a WeakAura.
From an encounter design point of view, we love that the community comes up with a certain meta or valuation of raid buffs and utility that they consider strong for a particular encounter or dungeon or overall throughout the season. We just want to offer a robust enough set of challenges that everyone has a moment to shine and can find success up to a certain level.
Beyond that we do know that eventually it comes down to stripping everything away and going as fast as you can and that trickles down and can be problematic. But we want try to mix up the challenges we can such as with the Mythic+ rotation each season.
Prey
As an opt-in overlay outdoor world system, we're really not looking to push Prey on anyone. If you want to stick to your preferred PvE content, then feel free. We want this to feel complementary to the Delve loop in terms of the Great Vault but beyond that there's no player power associated with it.
We do think this is an incredibly fun system that offers a new challenge for players of all skills, but also ones incredibly skilled where the outdoor world might not feel as difficult. So much of our challenge is limited to instances, so we're looking forward to bringing more of that to the open world.
As for the difficulty, we don't want the difficulty to reach Ky'veza week one levels, but we want it to be more than just higher health and damage numbers. The exact tuning for Prey is still up for debate as we want to take player feedback into consideration. If you're well-geared and have learned the Prey encounters, they will begin to feel easier for sure but hopefully not trivial.
Essentially, Prey isn't a new thing for players to do, but rather a new way to explore and interact with the open world. The gameplay and war mode opportunities as well as difficulty options have all been a labor of love.
