To prepare World of Warcraft players for the new content in Mists of Pandaria, patch 5.0.4 will be deployed before the expansion’s September 25 launch date and change around many major systems. This includes a dramatic overhaul of each class’ talent tree, condensing the current branching system into what Blizzard hopes is a better alternative, where every 15 levels you pick one of three talents to customize your class.
“Say I’m a fire Mage online today,” said Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer. “I probably spent thirty-three points in the fire tree and twenty-eight or twenty-nine of those points are being spent on things like ‘oh, your fireball hits harder,’ ‘oh, you have pyroblast now.’ Those weren’t very interesting choices. Those weren’t really choices at all. They were just the things you were expected to spend. If you somehow managed to not take those, you were just hurting yourself. So we got rid of those, but we actually just gave them to you for free. So the player who logs in as a fire Mage is still going to be a fire Mage, is still going to have pyroblast. It’s not going to be a foreign, unsettling experience.”
The new talents are meant to let players make decisions without really hurting their combat efficiency. “I think they’re going to find some interesting choices that really let them set themselves apart and differentiate themselves from other players of the same class and spec in the game. If they want to be more mobile, if they want to be more defensive, if they want to have more offensive crowd control. They can customize themselves in a way that layers on top of what’s already in place.”
Changes to many of the classes, some of which are significant, will be rolled in with the patch as well to let players get familiar with the altered mechanics before Pandaria is released. “Some have really just had balance adjustments, got a couple new abilities, had some streamlining,” said Hazzikostas. “Others, such as the Warlock, have been more heavily overhauled. In all cases we take efforts to preserve a lot of the core that players expect and are used to with the classes.”
“I wonder about the Hunters and the removal of the ranged slot,” said John Lagrave, lead producer. “The bow is now the main hand. Whether the Hunters go, ‘what the hell, I need my polearm too.’ We’ll see.”
With so much changing, Blizzard also looked back at existing systems and in some cases made cuts in order to keep everything from spiraling into chaos. “We removed resistances from the game. There’s no elemental resists any more,” said Hazzikostas. “Years ago, you crafted resistance gear and that was part of the progression. You needed to get a full set of shadow resist gear before you could fight Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, but we haven’t made that type of gear in a while and it was just a buff that players cast. So we just assumed that you have Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild that gives you resist all. So you’re taking less damage from all these attacks, but you also have these five numbers on your character sheet that are adding to noise and really potentially confusing. So we took that out. That also means, though, if nothing else changes, you’re going to take about fifteen percent more damage from every elemental attack in the game, which means we go through and adjust those elemental attacks so we’re not making the game harder for players.”
“Suddenly you’re not just dead,” said Lagrave.
“That’s one of the great challenges of a game as expansive as World of Warcraft,” continued Hazzikostas. “It’s very difficult to just touch one thing without their being ripple effects that you have to take into account across the entire game.”
Also in the patch will be a Scenario, a new type of story-focused dungeon that doesn’t require the standard healer / tank / DPS group composition to complete. Lagrave explained the Scenario will link the events in the existing world to the events of the soon to be added continent of Pandaria. “There’s a version for both the Horde and the Alliance, that starts the story of what has happened since the Destroyer’s end. After Deathwing’s fall, what does the world turn back to? Of course, the world turns back to hating each other. The Horde and the Alliance start fighting again.”
Then moving into Pandaria and beyond launch, Blizzard sees Scenarios as a better way to deliver focused stories. “As a vehicle it allows us to further along whatever plotline we want to go with,” said Lagrave. “We know that everyone will have a chance to see it because any three of us can queue up for a scenario and boom, we’re in. Three tanks can do it, three healers can do it, it doesn’t matter what your group composition is.”
“In many cases they occupy and expand upon a niche that previously might have been filled by some of our more involved outdoor quest experiences, events that were kind of multi-stage things,” said Hazzikostas. “Those can be very tricky to do in the open world where you have player interactions. In an instanced version of that, we can really set up a multi-stage quest event where this village is going to be attacked and you’re setting up defenses. We’ve done things like that in the open world before, we can give players a better experience when it’s an instanced version. Once we move away from the DPS, healer trinity as it’s called, players suddenly use all kinds of abilities they would never find an occasion to use in instances. You’re suddenly using CC [crowd control] all the time, because as a Rogue there isn’t someone to tank for you and something’s actually hitting you. So you stun it, you gouge it or you fear it. That gives the combat a very unique feel. We’re looking forward to expanding on the system in the future.”
Lagrave provided more detail. “The big challenge we had in outdoor events like that was, when those things go live you have fifty, a hundred people trying to do that event. So everybody’s trying to click on the NPC to get up the dialogue to get it started. It really is a cluster***. You don’t really have a sense of what’s going on because it’s more important for you to step through the process rather than enjoy the experience. Because if I don’t get going on this, all these people are going to stop me from progressing. [Scenarios] allow you, the player, to spend the time to go through the content at a reasonable pace and get what we’re trying to tell you.”
Blizzard has been making changes large and small over the course of the Mists of Pandaria closed beta testing period, which started up this past March. Blizzard found that the starting experience on the new continent of Pandaria, home to the Pandaren race and all the level 85 through 90 questing content, wasn’t quite up to the proper quality level. So during testing the beginning sections on Pandaria were closed off and Blizzard took one month to alter the experience to better reflect the growing animosity between Alliance and Horde. “Previously you just landed on the shore. Now you come in, depending on your faction, as part of a massive assault. Whether you’re in a gunship bombarding an Alliance encampment or you’re doing a strafing run in an Alliance gyrocopter on a Horde fleet, and you really get that feel of conflict between factions. You see one of the main themes of Pandaria is war, the consequences of war.”
Outside of the main questing content, Blizzard is adding plenty of extras into the game, such as a Pokemon-like pet battle system, which lets players create teams of pets and battle others. It’s a system build just for fun – battling with pets will not serve as a method of progression for your character – but even so, Blizzard has been balancing the gameplay to try and ensure it remains interesting for those excited to try it. “Our players are great about sitting there and hammering on a system and letting us know ‘this is broken’ or ‘this is way OP [overpowerd]. They love to tell us what’s OP,” said Lagrave.
“There was a cockroach that had an ability, I think it was called Apocalypse,” said Hazzikostas, “that basically killed everything after X turns. Everything that’s not a cockroach dies. And it’s like, ‘yeah ok, multi-target death touch is maybe not the most balanced ability,’ even if there’s a delay of a few turns. Sometimes, some our more creative ideas, that’s what play testing iteration is for.”
The cockroach Apocalypse ability has since been removed. “We have a ton of new pets in the game as well,” said Lagrave. “We want people to go out there and explore and trap new pets and not just run after one thing.”
In case you’d rather take on something a little more grand in scale than a pet battle, Blizzard is also adding two outdoor world bosses to Pandaria. “They fill slightly different niches,” said Hazzikostas. “The Sha of Anger in Kun-Lai Summit is this massive, towering Sha. Whenever it’s up, you can see it from pretty much anywhere in the zone. It’s the size of a mountain. That one actually respawns every two hours. It drops from a large random pool of raid loot and PvP loot, so it’s going to be attractive to all players regardless of play style, but it’s designed to be accessible because it respawns so frequently. You can only actually loot it once per week.”
“The other boss is Salyis’s Warband. It’s a band of saurok lizardmen that are riding on the back of a gigantic mushan. A mushan is a beast that’s unique to Pandaria, it’s kind of like a green lizard kodo. That is also pretty much the size of a small town. It has about a dozen lizardmen on its back and huge cannons that it uses to bombard villages in the Valley of the Four Winds. That respawns every three to five days. It has unique loot. We expect it to be very hotly contested. We look forward to seeing, particularly on PvP servers, how that’s going to play out.”
So what kind of group will you need to successfully take out the Warband? “It’s designed for a group somewhere around in the teens,” said Hazzikostas. But you’re going to want to bring more people because you want to kill it faster before someone else comes to gank you. You can have ten people fighting off the gankers while the rest of the people actually kill the boss. For the world bosses we’re also using our new loot system. That is personalized loot. Your chances of getting a reward for the target are independent of the number of people in the raid and class compositions. So if I’m a Paladin, it doesn’t matter if there are six other Paladins in this raid group with me. When I kill the boss, I get my own personal roll. If it’s a success, then I will get an item that’s usable by my spec. That means there isn’t an incentive to keep the boss to yourselves with the fewest number of people possible.”
Are you looking forward to pet battles and world bosses, or have you moved on from World of Warcraft?
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
