 So, we're here, hello. Hi. Yeah, we're here with Tim Jones and with Linnie Cook Saver, is it Saverline or Saverline? Saverline. Saverline, okay. I got half of each one, okay, cool. You got it. These are developers that are joining us today for classic season of discovery. Very, very excited about this. Yeah, I hope you guys are excited as I am to answer some of these questions. I'm stoked. Absolutely. I'll start off, I have a lot of time and I know we don't have a lot of time today, but I'll start off with some of the community questions because I ask people on Twitter and just through streaming stuff, like what are some things people want and a lot of the feedback that I've gotten. One of the big ones is, and I'm sure you guys have heard it nonstop, it's two-handed and a hand shaman. And I'm sure, I'm sure you guys have heard it maybe once or twice. I haven't seen anything about that. So, are there any plans to add support? Maybe not in this phase of Saad, but maybe whenever you guys, whenever they get one fury in the next phase. I just said that we were only gonna support dual wield because I really just wanted people to make memes. That's what fuels us on our team. So, the community's voice has been very loud on this and we definitely see that. I think the original comment that I made about sort of the design philosophy being oriented around dual wield, there's definitely dual wield oriented runes. A lot of that comes from the fact that two-handed enhancement shaman really isn't that great until you get, you know, self buffed wind fury. Dual wield sort of helps shaman out in the first phase when you wouldn't have wind fury normally. Yeah, there will definitely be support for two-handed shaman in future phases. People don't have to worry about that. We know it's a beloved play style. We love the memes. There you go, okay. We're very enthusiastically listening to feedback, so. Yeah, well no, that's good to hear. Especially that class fantasy, that's the big thing that people want. A lot of the classic shaman players, they like their big two-hander, so. Cool, awesome, good to hear. The next question, the next question that I have, and let's kind of stay with some of the class questions. On the other side of the fence with paladins, Wrath Rep Paladin, gameplay of Divine Storm has been implemented, and so we've seen that in Season of Discovery, and it's almost there with Seal of the Martyr, with the move to make Crusader Strike six seconds instead of four seconds, like it was in Burning Crusade, is there any hope for Seal Twisting to be a thing with Seal of the Martyr and Seal of Command? Because we didn't see that in the BlizzCon demo. Currently, I believe Seal of the Righteousness and Seal of Justice can be twisted into Command or Martyr. We're just really waiting for people to make more memes asking us for being able to twist Martyr into Command or vice versa. No, it's definitely something that we're being influenced by you and the feedback of the people who really love that play style. It might not be currently implemented, but we might be able to get to it in Phase One. We know people are excited about it. We know it's a beloved play style, so. Cool, awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's a big one. That's something like having the option of the wrath gameplay of Divine Storm and then also having the Burning Crusade option would be huge. Being able to, for players to be able to express their skill within the nuances of playing in class is really important and we wanna embrace that where we can in Classic. Awesome, next question. Are you guys looking at changing any of the current items or proc rates of these items in Season of Discovery? Could that be how the procs work? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, for content like Black Feathering Deeps, we're definitely taking inspiration from previous items that existed in that content set, breathing new life into them, making sure that they're balanced based off of their item quality and budget. Some items will actually just become more desirable based off of the content phase that we're in. Maybe an item that had a proc that wasn't that great if you were just leveling past it. Maybe it's more interesting now. As far as adjusting the balance of existing items or proc rates, it's definitely a possibility, especially as we get into later phases and get into the max level rating content. There's definitely room for more player choices important and I think where some items were maybe memes or just like never desirable or only useful in a very specific case, I think there's definitely room to try to breathe new life into that item for Season of Discovery. Maybe vendor strike is desirable in some way to some class. I think it makes the encounters more interesting too if there's more options for desirable items from those bosses. So speaking of encounters, how much new content do you guys expect to add at Endgame? So you guys have talked about the BFD is going to be a mid level raid. We saw a slide that wasn't supposed to be in the presentation that might have teased some things but is there a plans to add a lot of content at the Endgame as well with like a horizontal progression as opposed to like a vertical progression in terms of power creep? There's a lot of lessons that we're going to learn along the way. We are planning as far in advance as we can but we're keeping things a bit open ended at the same time in order to be able to react to player feedback. What do people like about level up raids? Are there aspects of that content that can be interpreted at max level? Should we have additional instanced content at max level or should we focus more on rewards or some mix of those things? There's definitely a desire to create new content in that the desire to make new level up raid content doesn't just end at level 60, right? So we're passionate about making that new stuff as well. So I won't make any promises. There's definitely a desire to have interesting content that is just beyond improving rewards and letting people go through the traditional raid tiers. And like we did with this phase, we want to make sure that we have something fun and cool as far as like raids, PvP events, all of that at each of the caps so that you have something that you're exploring when you hit that level cap. Okay, okay, cool. That's awesome. I mean, I think you guys mentioned in the presentation the idea of approaching it with like the, drawing some inspiration from like the classic beta and what was fun about the classic beta is a really, really, really good approach. I think a lot of people are really excited about that. Continue on with itemization and it sounds like you guys are, you know, there's some potential to rework some of the current itemization and making more things more useful. Is that gear going to be more optimized like it was at the end of vanilla or can you expect more mid vanilla type of itemization early to mid vanilla itemization like BWL patch gear versus like Naxx patch gear because Naxx patch gear was basically burning crusade. Like it was all perfect stats and everything. You know, and this sort of plays into the, the horizontal progression that sort of exists even within raid tiers. When you don't have a perfect item, it sometimes makes like choosing how to gear your character out or figuring out what combinations of items and stats are best on your character. It makes that a more interesting process and more nuanced process. I'm sure all of us have heard Kevin Jordan talk about like item balancing, how it's interesting to have well items that have well rounded stats, items that are specialized in offense, utility or defense and how the stat budgets change based upon like the design of that item. I think we want that more nuanced approach to item design. Yeah, I think it just creates more interesting choices for players, right? Yeah, that sounds great. Sounds really cool. We also want to make sure that our items have a handcrafted feel to them. That's what I wanted to add. I like that. That's a good way of putting it. Here's another thing that I've seen. This is a lot of feedback I've gotten from rogue players. People being worried about having to apply instant poisons mid encounter like if they're in assassination build and their poisons are being spammed. And then all of a sudden they run out of charge as mid fight. So is there any plans to, I guess, counter that? Yeah, we've actually made some adjustments that I think rogue players will be excited about, especially people who want to pursue the poison gameplay. There's actually a couple adjustments that I'll go through. So, people may have seen in the BlizzCon demo that wild strikes from Druid could stack on top of temporary enchants. So, people could benefit from poisons and wind fury at the same time. We want to make sure that there's parity in between Shaman, wind fury totem, and wild strikes from Druid. So, wind fury will not stack anymore with temporary enchants. However, rogues, rogues who were gonna buff the deadly brew rune for rogues such that originally it was, if you had a poison on your weapons already, then it would simultaneously be able to apply deadly poison if you had an active poison. Now, if you don't have a poison applied, or if you have a temporary enchantment like a sharpening stone or wild strikes or wind fury, then your weapon can proc instant poison without it being applied. Oh. So, rogues who want to have instant poison on their weapons for the sake of playing assassination don't actually have to have a poison at all as long as they're using the deadly brew rune and they can additionally benefit from wind fury or sharpening stones if that's what they want to do. So, wanna give players that flexibility and also that excitement of maybe having a poison and something else on your weapons simultaneously. Wow, okay, so you got like a default poison put in there, sick. Speaking of some of the talents and stuff, will there be any fundamental changes to classes or talent trees outside of the new runes? So, possibly stuff that we'd see applied to classic era as well. So there's not a plan to really ever explicitly change the structure or placement of talents in the talent tree. With that said, people have probably already seen that some runes benefit from talent points spent on other abilities. So like for example, a wild strike on warriors' benefits from any talent that benefits heroic strike. There will definitely be a continuation of that policy. If there's ever something that benefits fire damage, then runes that deal fire damage will benefit from those talents as well. And we want to make sure that we're catching all those where we can. But as far as like changing or adding like healing specific talents to the arcane tree that probably won't happen. That'll manifest itself in the runes themselves. Yeah, we really want to make sure that the season is self-contained and any of the new kind of wacky functionality is specifically in the season. Yeah, there's also technical limitations that we have to deal with. Like a good reminder is that season of discovery lives on top of era and hardcore. Maybe one day we can have conditional talent trees based off of what content set or what season is active. We've put our effort into making the content as exciting as possible. We might have that in the future, but that's not on the table for the current season. I guess to clarify, I guess what more so instead of changing the shape of the talent trees, what I was talking about was changing specific values or under the hood things with the talents, like how they're applied and whatnot. I guess is more so what I was talking about. Sure. So I guess if it lives on top of classic era and it lives on top of hardcore and everything else, then it would have to... If you made a change in era, it would then apply to season of discovery, right? It depends. Like there are ways of us conditioning spells to do a different thing in era versus season of discovery. So we can make a talent that exists behave differently in two different environments. However, like the actual structure and placement of those talents is not going to change. Oh, okay, cool. But the talents themselves could potentially behave or read differently and we can condition that in season of discovery how we like. That's super interesting, actually. Awesome. I like how you're answering like multiple questions that I have at a time, which is nice. Or like you can context clue it and it's like, okay, well, this means that. Great. You guys have added warlock tanks, mage healers, basically new roles for existing classes. Are you guys hard committed to having these things in the game throughout the different phases as you level up? It's like, we are going to make this work. And also are you guys open to adding anything else that is not currently there? Some people have been talking about maybe like a melee mage, like a battle mage or like a melee priest or something. Is there a chance that there's even more roles of more classes? For your first question, we are definitely committed to keeping these roles in season of discovery. People are really excited about them and we want to keep growing them. So we want to make sure that people can keep exploring those class fantasies. I'll jump on the second part of your question. Nothing's off the table. The existing batch of runes that we have planned from one to 60 is actually a fraction of the total runes that we planned and built for the season. And we've, you know, some we've had to remove based off of just design philosophy reasons. Like we actually had a lot of, when we were doing our blue sky ideation of just throwing everything at the wall, maybe some versions of movement enhancing runes were originally going to be included. I think warrior had like a chain death grip, which sounds tight. Like that sounds really cool. Or like, you know, wouldn't it be neat if Druids had stampeding roar? Like that's a useful spell. However, making sure that we still stay true in some respects to what classic vanilla is, I think is incredibly important. And raid encounters, dungeon encounters weren't built with the assumption that everyone could move to any space on the battlefield at any given time. We have added Warbringer. So, you know, warriors have a bit extra mobility, but like the classes where that's part of their identity, I think it's okay to accentuate that and build that up, but giving those tools to everyone, you know, it sort of muddies the water and makes those classes less special. And it trivializes some of the existing mechanics and encounters that we still want to feel like classic. And we still want people to have to strategize around some of these mechanics. Awesome. I mean, so I actually sort of follow up on that. A lot of what we've seen and a lot of what people talk about and just all things considered, all the suggestions, hey, can you add X ability from Y expansion for Z class? And I guess, so when you guys are in your design meetings, how are you guys kind of managing it and keeping it from going too far and to differentiate from, to basically differentiate season of discovery from being more classic plus and less retail minus? Honestly, our biggest focus right now is does it feel like classic? We want this to feel like you're continuing your adventure through the classic world of Warcraft and with just, you know, plus a little bit more to do. So we really want it to feel like that world and everything is focused around the class fantasy feeling like it's just a continuation. We've talked a lot about with runes, with the different rune discoveries and new things in the world. We want them to feel like, maybe they've been there the whole time, you just haven't found them yet. Maybe they were back there in 2019, who knows? And we want to do the same kind of thing with the classes to still make them feel like they're classic classes. There's also elements from the original design of, of, you know, vanilla back in 2004, that some of these things aren't actually that outlandish or pulling from someplace that has never been. Like Rogues had bucklers, you know, back in the original alpha of WoW. So there was maybe some design intention for Rogues to be able to, to tank in a certain way. And I'm sort of embracing that, the avoidance aspect of, of their tanking, I think stays true to aspects of classic. And we, you know, as far as like the design of tanks, for example, I think it's also important that we, that it's okay for certain classes to have strengths and weaknesses. We don't, I think like every tank should be able to function at a base level and do basic content, but there should also be some, some places of the game where they're not the best at or that they really excel at, whether that's, you know, throwing a chain lightning out to, to start a pull. So you have, have group aggro. That's an incredible pulling tool that a shaman has. Or like if you need huge defensive cooldowns, maybe a warrior is the best tank. Maybe mobs have resistances that, that makes the warlock and shaman not the ideal. Tank in that situation. I think it's okay to have elements of, of friction in the world. That's something that, that makes classic, classic. And we, we are definitely keeping those, those rough edges to keep the spirit of classical life on that way. Yeah. We love that. That's, that's good stuff. That's a, I literally had that question. I was like, you know, the, it feels like the classes or maybe the tanks specifically is what I actually wrote. The tanks are getting homogenized. But yeah, there you go. Boom. Good to hear. Good to hear. That's good stuff. Without getting too specific, cause I know you guys can't for obvious reasons. Do you guys have any, any plans in place to do anything to nip potential botting and gold buying in the bud, just stopping its tracks as much as possible on the new server launch? Cause it's a fresh, it's not there yet. Do you guys have a plan in place that maybe trying something new or anything like that? Yes. We're there. There was always new tech and new, new detection methods that, that we are, are, are implementing and working with our engineers. It's not just engineers on the classic team looking at that stuff. We have our risk department. We have engineers on mainline who are creating new tech to help us identify people who are exploiting the game either like through the various hacks that, that people use to gain unfair advantages. And we're definitely sensitive to that, especially on new servers. Like having as pristine of an, of an economy as possible is something that I like, as the assistant lead designer on, on classic, it's something that's incredibly important to me coming up with design and, and engineering oriented solutions to help fight against that is, is something that's incredibly important to us. And I know a lot of people don't see like what goes on behind the scenes and, and it's, it's easy to focus on like what is visible, but it's, it's a constant battle. It's hard to see what isn't visible, right? Like to, the unknowns of, of what we're doing. I'm just repeating myself at this point. It is important. We are doing stuff. It is a constant battle. I hope, I hope people can, can see that. Cool. It's a very active discussion and always on our minds. Awesome. That is, that is good to hear. That is very good to hear. Can we expect any big changes or any additions to professions in the mid to end game? Cause you know, some people have been talking about, oh, like this, this, I mean, you never really know a stuff that's leak, data, mine, whatever, right? And can we expect to see some changes to, to professions in the mid to end game? Yes. I, I, you know, it just as we want players to feel like there's, there's a lot of options to play within the, what ruins you choose, what class you play. We want there to be choices in professions as well. Just, just as we try to bring things up to perhaps where the warrior is, we want to do the same thing for all the other professions that aren't engineering, right? Like engineering is great. We love engineering, but we want the ability for other professions to shine, whether that's like profession oriented quest lines, really embracing profession specializations, maybe looking at some recipes for profession items that were way too expensive to build in the future that, that sort of made them unavailable because they were such an investment before you actually, you maybe got a drop that was better than the profession item because it would take too long to build that profession item at certain levels. We're looking at those as well, or anything from the thorium brotherhood, right? Yeah. So, you know, looking at those things and figuring out like what would be cool with professions, I know I have great memories of becoming like an armor Smith and aligning myself with the thorium brotherhood as a blacksmith in, in original vanilla. So those are great memories. I want people to, to have an excuse to be a tribal leather worker. You know, those are definitely things that we want to explore and, and be a part of, of season of discovery for sure. Fantastic. That's good. That's real good. Next up, I have, this is, this is a little bit more, I guess this is a little bit more outside the scope of like talents and that kind of stuff outside of the character. Are there any plans for changes to the level design of the world? Like building out any of the new terrain, maybe a new zone or even possibly finishing like what people consider to be unfinished zones, like Hygel or something like vanilla Hygel or anything like that. I don't think we can say anything specific on this. What I will say, however, is that there is a desire to make new things on, on our team. We are doing our best to not let anything really be a limitation to that. Whether or not that there is, there is something completely new that, that has never been in season of discovery or any version of classic WoW before. I mean, we're making new things, right? We're making things that haven't been there before. We're, we're reusing some stuff initially. There is definitely a desire to explore the types of possibilities that you're talking about. So our team is passionate and excited to try all sorts of new things. Cool. Speaking from a player's perspective, I think that a lot of people would agree that we can see it. If you guys, if you build it, they'll come. You know, that's what they always say. So we'll be there, you know? But if the opportunity comes, then we will absolutely be there to play and enjoy it. So earlier this week, I think it was this week, there was a, there's a post that went out that was talking about faction locking servers for balance. Do you guys have an idea at what percentage the character creation for dominant factions will be locked at on the PVP servers? Like what, like population split? Can you guys even say that? I don't know. We definitely have an idea. We know. We said the values. I don't, I don't know. Whether we're ready to talk about it today, not so much. No worries, no worries, no worries. There's a level of obscurity that's probably important for players to have. We don't want it to feel too unnatural or, yeah. Super mapy. We're going to do our best to make sure that those servers feel good and balanced. We'll be constantly monitoring those numbers and be making adjustments as needed. Okay, cool. Okay, I have another itemization question. Sure. How are you guys trying to balance runes against talents and gear? For example, some of the newest tank runes give a lot of the biggest and most important tanking stats for free while original tank builds are still built through talents and gear. And that's a lot of what Vanilla is. A lot of what Classic is is people like building their character and they like getting that loot. They like being like, oh, I put on this piece of gear for this encounter and all that. How do you guys really, I guess, balance that, differentiate that and try and apply that to some of the new tank classes? It's tricky, right? Because I'm sure that, you know, all those tanks, those warrior tanks who've had such a hard time playing Classic are really jealous of classes getting some stuff for free. Just joking aside, I mean, Protection Paladin, some of the tools have been there to be a functional tank, but they also suffer from the fact that you need a lot of different stats to do what you need to do at even a baseline, whether it's like the hit or the spell hit, the needing attack power and intellect for a mana pool. Sort of like you sort of having items that fulfill all those roles, the amount of total stats that you have is just sort of not enough to measure up to the performance of other tanks. So with that in mind, I don't see it as really a negative that we're giving stats away for free, we're giving crit immunity away for free or armor bonuses away for free. I think that there will still be really interesting gear choices for those characters. And at the same time, it's interesting to have items that are hyper-specialized, like only one class wants this, only one specialization wants this, but I think it's even more interesting if an item maintains desirability for multiple specializations, multiple archetypes after one person gets that item, like cloth with armor on it, like cloth with bonus armor as part of the item budget, that's gonna be really special to Warlocks, Warlocks who want a tank scout, right? Yeah, it'd be something useful now. But maybe someone wanted to use that piece for PVP or dueling against melee classes beforehand too. So even though it is semi-specialized, it is still desirable by multiple classes and because we're giving some defense-oriented stats to classes baseline, then we don't have to build cloth with defense rating on it, right? So we sort of give ourselves more room to make cool items for more classes this way. There's itemization ramifications, obviously for building the runes in the way that we did. I think that's what really matters at the end of the day. We wanna make cool items. We want lots of people to be interested in the same item. They're having healthy competition over rewards is important at all stages of the game. So that's sort of the philosophy there. First on, completely agree. I mean, I love that you mentioned, specifically for Prop Paladins, like you just need so many stats for them to be like really effective is one of their biggest problems. Outside of the taunt, everybody talks about the taunt, right? Everybody talks about that as like the thing, but there's a number of other like small issues. Now, to everything you said, from a class fantasy perspective, this is kind of me and talking with the fellow Paladin brothers, right? Spell power, people really like having spell power as like one of the primary like threat generation stats for Prop Paladins. Is that still going to be a thing with how Prop Paladins wanna build their class? Like are they still gonna wanna have like a spell power sword or some other ways of getting spell power on their gear to be able to increase their threat gen? Sorry, just jumping in. This will be the last question. Okay, perfect. I might not have the best answer for you. I'm not like as much of an expert at Paladin as you are as other people on our team are that are helping make these types of decisions. I will say like, if that's something that you're passionate about and that you like how the class functions and those are the types of rewards that you want to see then we will do our best to make sure that those are the types of rewards that exist in places that they don't currently. So I don't wanna give you a non-answer, but like. No, but it's a good answer because people get to see that like the feedback is heard. Like when people have a chance to share their feedback with you guys that you guys are listening and I think there's a lot of value in that and I think there's a lot of value in this interview and the fact that you guys are willing to come and come on and get to talk to us as content creators and like I said you guys make our job easy. We just show up and hit record a lot of times. So I really appreciate you guys coming on, spend the time. I know you guys are incredibly busy. Hopefully season discovery is not late because of this interview. So thanks a ton for joining me guys. Again, for those of you guys who are watching Tim Jones, Lenny Cook, Savorline is here as well. So thank you guys so much for joining me and is there anything you guys wanna say before we send it? No, we're just, we're as excited to see everyone play as we are like, I'm just excited to play season of discovery myself. Like it's gonna be fun to jump in there with everyone on Thursday. And I'm really, really excited to get everybody's feedback. Like we wanna know what you wanna see in this game. Classic came about as a love letter to the fans because of the community and we really wanna be able to take community feedback and do really cool things with the season. Awesome, awesome. Well, again, 100%. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. And we'll see you guys in Azeroth. Thank you, that's fun. See you in Azeroth. Thank you. Absolutely incredible. I hope you guys learned something. I hope you guys got some information out of that that was useful. I know I certainly did. I'm very, very excited about that interview. I'm very excited about season of discovery coming out today. Make sure to like the video. If you guys haven't liked it already, leave a comment. If you guys have any feedback about season of discovery or anything, they read it. They will probably read the comments of this video. Leave a comment below, leave some feedback. I'll try and forward some stuff personally as well. Let's get to it. It's a great day for Azeroth. Like the video, subscribe, turn on your notifications, all that stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed and see you guys next time.