wow Patch 7.3: Ion Hazzikostas Interview

[Stan 5,022]

Jesse Cox talked to Game Director Ion Hazzikostas about Patch 7.3. We learn, why Argus isn't a separate expansion, why World Boss loot won't be updated and more.

Patch 7.3

• Argus as a separate expansion would feel rather monotonous - it's an awesome place, but it is a husk of a world that has been completely destroyed by the Legion over the course of millennia. It's not a place for flourishing civilizations or creatures to interact with. It's a good place to cap off the Legion experience
• Invasion Points are a Legion portal network on Argus, where the Legion is assaulting other worlds. Players can enter them using a riftstone they recover from the wreckage of Kil'jaeden's ship, which crashed on Argus. You're actually getting little glimpses of all new planets around the cosmos. The point is to defeat Legion forces, complete an objective & fight a boss.
• It's unlikely Argus will be revisited in the future, because it's used to end the story of Legion

Dungeons

• Dungeons are the biggest success story of Legion compared to past expansions. In Warlords and Mists, there was a huge spike early on, but there was nothing there that kept them relevant. In Legion through a mix of adding new dungeons, updating the difficulty baseline, rewards and the Mythic Keystone system, dungeons are still relevant and many players keep doing them as a complement to raiding

Legion

• Legion is the most ambitious expansion and it's easy to catch up and jump right into the action
• There are no plans to make existing micro-holidays with a one-day duration longer, because they occur multiple times a year
• With Broken Shore advancement, Blizzard wanted to experiment with a more player-driven organic system, no similar thing is planned for Argus
• World Boss loot won't be updated, they are extensions of raid tiers (Old WB 860 > Broken Shore WB > 900 > Argus WB 930)
• The team was in doubt whether they should have put a power reward into the Deaths of Chromie Scenario, but it turned out to be a success even without it, because many players were doing it just for fun
• Players miss being "humble adventurers". Defeating great forces of evil like the Lich King makes them peers to super heroes like Thrall or Jaina or Varian. As players grow in power, the threats they face also become stronger, but the team bears in mind relative power scales (when we fought Deathwing, we had the aid of the Dragon Aspects to make that remotely a fair fight)

Lore

• There are terrible Void creatures out there and an unexplored set of worlds and that's something they're looking forward to tapping into in the future

[Eukray 5]

8 hours ago, Stan said:

The team was in doubt whether they should have put a power reward into the Deaths of Chromie Scenario, but it turned out to be a success even without it, because many players were doing it just for fun

I agree, the routine is already enough to keep me busy for 2 hours. If it was really rewarding it would have been mandatory to do it. A bit like the tower mage, cool rewards, not mandatory.

[xBlueBlaze 5]

1 hour ago, Eukray said:

I agree, the routine is already enough to keep me busy for 2 hours. If it was really rewarding it would have been mandatory to do it. A bit like the tower mage, cool rewards, not mandatory.

I did it for the Timelord title

[smtips 5]

13 hours ago, Stan said:

Dungeons are the biggest success story of Legion compared to past expansions.

Only because you forced people into doing them to complete professions and artificially boost your numbers for the vast majority of people who prefer to play the world and don't care for dungeons and raids, because there's still too many elitist punks who make the experience pretty bad. Once you've seen one or two of these little jerks in LFR calling everyone vulgar names, you get a bad taste in your mouth for them. And that's the reality of why 90% of the people playing wow don't like dungeons and raids. So you had to come up with alternatives to force and push people into them. Then you come here and lie and say what a huge success they are. Some people aren't as stupid as you would like to think.

You should monitor the chat in raids and kick these little assholes that spoil the experience for everyone else. Most people won't abide that kind of behavior and just won't play dungeons again because of it. And Blizzard does nothing about it.

Edited July 4, 2017 by smtips

[Vayra 12]

1 hour ago, smtips said:

Only because you forced people into doing them to complete professions and artificially boost your numbers for the vast majority of people who prefer to play the world and don't care for dungeons and raids, because there's still too many elitist punks who make the experience pretty bad. Once you've seen one or two of these little jerks in LFR calling everyone vulgar names, you get a bad taste in your mouth for them. And that's the reality of why 90% of the people playing wow don't like dungeons and raids. So you had to come up with alternatives to force and push people into them. Then you come here and lie and say what a huge success they are. Some people aren't as stupid as you would like to think.

You should monitor the chat in raids and kick these little assholes that spoil the experience for everyone else. Most people won't abide that kind of behavior and just won't play dungeons again because of it. And Blizzard does nothing about it.

Come on.

If people act silly in LFR-level Raids, you can just laugh at them, shrug and move on, even with half a brain and just by meeting the ilevel requirements you can complete it. Blizzard has already heard your complaint years ago and acted upon it, which is why we have difficulty levels in all content and a Heroic raid is actually on the difficulty level of vanilla's standard content back in the day. Our current Mythic level content is very similar in difficulty to old-style vanilla Heroic Dungeons.

WoW has been increasingly dumbed down over the past 4-6 years and still you complain of little jerks that spoil your group experience because of 'elitism'... perhaps you need to realize that there will ALWAYS be players different from yourself, welcome to the internet, grow a pair and learn a few things about the world, not everyone is nice. Expecting Blizzard to act on every fart that is directed at yourself is an illusion I would suggest you let go of ASAP, its never going to happen.

FWIW, WoW has one of the healthiest and most diverse MMO communities in the world, and if you are amidst assholes, there are only two possible reasons for it: you're hanging around in the wrong part of the playerbase and/or need to find a guild of likeminded individuals. If you prefer playing WoW as a solo-player who just meets randoms, you can expect random responses which means you'll be served with the gutter trash and not the people who make an effort towards each other. This is common sense, and if this concept hasn't landed with you, take these words to heart and act on them.

 

As for a response on the dungeon content, no, my friend, its not because you're forced to run a couple of dungeons to complete your Profession content at all. It is because there is now actually a challenge to the higher difficulty content, plus a suitable reward for completing those challenges. Mythic+ treads that fine line between replayability that is not forced upon you because 'you need to keep up'. The rewards are tangible even for high level players, but the content is scaled such that it takes considerable effort to achieve and does not lock anyone out besides the amount of skill and time you choose to invest in them.

And, seriously, if LFG/Normal content is hard for you, you really need to have a long look at your playstyle and knowledge of the game. This level of content is catered to the absolute bottom of the ladder, go any lower and you're entering the realm of 'click here to win'.

Edited July 4, 2017 by Vayra

[Yridaa 490]

1 hour ago, smtips said:

And that's the reality of why 90% of the people playing wow don't like dungeons and raids. So you had to come up with alternatives to force and push people into them.

Do you have any factual data somewhere to back up your "fact"?

[InfernoRFU 117]

80% of all statistics are made up on the spot

[Sharknad0 67]

50% of the time, I am right all of the time!

[Rror 3]

On 7/4/2017 at 9:29 PM, smtips said:

Only because you forced people into doing them to complete professions and artificially boost your numbers for the vast majority of people who prefer to play the world and don't care for dungeons and raids, because there's still too many elitist punks who make the experience pretty bad. Once you've seen one or two of these little jerks in LFR calling everyone vulgar names, you get a bad taste in your mouth for them. And that's the reality of why 90% of the people playing wow don't like dungeons and raids. So you had to come up with alternatives to force and push people into them. Then you come here and lie and say what a huge success they are. Some people aren't as stupid as you would like to think.

You should monitor the chat in raids and kick these little assholes that spoil the experience for everyone else. Most people won't abide that kind of behavior and just won't play dungeons again because of it. And Blizzard does nothing about it.

I'm not as far as this in my opinion but some good points are made here.  The nastiness in wow, IMHO, began in earnest in Wrath of the Lich King.  Obviously big egos tromp around in the game and spoil it for many and have since the beginning but it seems to be the normal now.  Going in to a dungeon as tank or heals is a dangerous proposition if it doesn't go perfectly or doesn't go fast enough or some idiot that runs ahead of the tank and pulls extra groups because they are impatient gets killed.  Courtesy is still there but there is a core of loud mouths that spoil it for everyone else.  I almost quit tanking in Wrath because of it.  Not everyone can play constantly and not everyone primarily does instances so not as practiced as these guys that do no content and spend every waking hour of their lives running dungeons ad nauseum.   Trying to learn on a new alt toon is a crushing humility unless you can get guildies to teach as you come along otherwise non perfect action results in invective and getting kicked at the first sign of imperfection.

Another point I read in the main topic here is that there is no intention of improving gear in world quests or instances.  This is very short sighted.  Approaching TOS one almost needs to be geared to the level of the drops in TOS in order to run it.  I personally don't like the mythic key system and especially since the content becomes more difficult to run to get a lower level gear than the raid in TOS AND the raid in Nighthold even on Heroic, doesn't drop gear that can prepare for TOS unless it's an (rare or unusual) upgrade on the regular gear.  I was I level 907 entering Regular TOS and the drops, few and far between of course, are no better than what I have for the most part.  It always seems that the level needed to run the instance content is at or above what the drops received are.  Very irritating and discouraging for running instances.  I say beef up the drops in world quests to reflect the needs of the content and beef up drops to reflect an IMPROVEMENT over what is needed to run the thing.

[Valks 2,373]

On 30/07/2017 at 5:18 PM, Rror said:

 I was I level 907 entering Regular TOS and the drops, few and far between of course, are no better than what I have for the most part.  It always seems that the level needed to run the instance content is at or above what the drops received are.  Very irritating and discouraging for running instances.  I say beef up the drops in world quests to reflect the needs of the content and beef up drops to reflect an IMPROVEMENT over what is needed to run the thing.

This isn't really true, though. You can do ToS normal with a much lower item level than 907 - the required item level of a pug does not equal the required item level for the raid. You can create a group and set it at 895, get a full raid of 895 people and still complete the raid. There will be plenty of gear drops then. Same goes for starting a heroic group with 907.