Less than a week before the release of Warlords of Draenor! Blizzard is aware of this and has provided quite a bit of detail on the changes made and to come with this new expansion during a small one-hour conference on this first day of BlizzCon.
Classes
- When the team makes changes to classes, one goal stays in mind: to make this class fun to play. If the goal is achieved, it means that these changes are good. If not, they get back to working on it until they get a result that is interesting for both the team and the players.
- The changes to the classes are intended to make fights more readable, with numbers easier to understand. In PvP, Blizzard has mainly focused on controls in order to smooth things out a bit.
- Removing certain skills makes the game more fun and enjoyable to understand.
- Visual effects are extremely important! Indeed, even if we do not always pay attention to it, the fact of having a simple, beautiful and nice visual effect amuses the player more than an effect that is too "blurry".
- Some situational skills weren't very fun. Most of them were removed with 6.0.
- Skills that don't provide visual feedback are boring. Blizzard is working on it.
- Some skills are difficult to pinpoint (Symbiosis for example), it is detrimental to the fun according to the team.
- Former players returning to the game felt lost. Blizzard wanted to end this feeling at all costs. According to them, a player should not have to go to read guides to learn how to replay his class after a long break.
Happiness
- If players don't like healing, there's a simple reason. Spamming healing spells is anything but fun, and watching people die feeling helpless isn't motivating for a healer.
- A healer who plays smart can get bored since the game mechanics will do most of the work for them. Indeed, it will be enough for the healer to go from one target to another and start a rotation, and so on, without really paying attention to what is happening next to you.
- Mana is quite tricky to balance. A healer with low-level gear didn't have enough mana, while a well-equipped player never ran out because they had too much. With Warlords of Draenor, that shouldn't be the case anymore. We will no longer be able to blindly cast spells, even with good equipment. However, Blizzard has made sure that a player has enough mana not to run out, even with "average" equipment.
- Healing will be much more tactical with WoD! The healer will have to make choices, he will no longer follow a simple rotation.
- Spirit is a much rarer characteristic now. We will no longer be able to accumulate this statistic as was the case at MoP.
- The healing efficiency is increased with the expansion to allow the player to choose their targets more intelligently and reduce the feeling of being a spam machine.
Equipment
- "Kill, pick up, equip." This is Blizzard's new vision. The firm found certain stages off-putting and simply wished to remove them.
- Now the tokens can be directly transformed into pieces of equipment. It's simpler and less restrictive.
- Touch and expertise have been removed to avoid unnecessary gem / touch / enchant. Indeed, players tended to capture its characteristics and then redo the gemmage / enchantment steps. It was boring and not rewarding at all.
- Upgrade levels also disappear. Having equipment that progresses without "merit" is not something cool according to the team.
- There won't be any need to cap now. The player plays as he wants and optimizes in his own way, it's easier and more fun that way.
- It is no longer possible to see equipment that does not suit anyone on a raid. This was the case until MoP and it was extremely frustrating for a lot of players.
- Dodge and parry come together in one statistic: bonus armor.
- The spirit is no longer present on all parts of healing equipment.
- With WoD, loot is more frequent, more varied, and above all, you can receive interesting equipment without necessarily going to a dungeon or raid.
- There will be quests to improve your gear, it's a more fun and worthwhile way to see your gear level improve.
FAQ
- The legendary piece of equipment is a ring, in case you missed the information.
- Discipline priests could not be nerfed before WoD as most guilds relied on this specialization in order to overcome some complicated clashes.
- Legendary weapons could be added later for story purposes.
- Although the game seems at first glance simplified, this impression should not be relied upon. The difficulty will be there with Warlords of Draenor. Getting to grips with your character will indeed be easier, but mastering your class will be more complex. And more rewarding in the long run!
- Tanks can "solo" content more easily than other classes in the game. The game's balance doesn't really revolve around that.
- Everyone should be able to do old game content on their own. It's just going to be a bit trickier for some classes!
- Mana gems didn't add anything of interest to the game, so they were removed.
- The DPS of the Destruction spec is more than correct at level 100.
- Adding new filters to the group finder isn't a good idea, according to Blizzard. The queues would be longer, especially for DPS, and the primary purpose of this tool is precisely to speed up group research, not the other way around.
- Shadow Priests will get some visual updates in the future!
- The druid's travel forms will be entitled to different buttons for each of the available forms!
