Wrath of the Lich King Beta - Zitate der Entwickler

• Mi, 06. August 2008,
• 1637 Wörter,
• 1 Kommentar,
• Tags:
• Class Design,
• World of Warcraft,
• Wrath of the Lich King

Wie erwar­tet, kann ich den Schwung an neuen Ein­trä­gen der letz­ten Wochen lei­der nicht hal­ten. Diese Woche sieht es sehr schlecht aus mit Neuem. Eine kleine Geschichte ist vor­be­rei­tet, möchte aber noch abge­run­det wer­den.

Für Zwi­schen­durch mal etwas für all jene, die an WoW noch inter­es­siert sind. Die aktu­elle Kom­mu­ni­ka­tion mit der Com­mu­nity ist im US-Forum vor­bild­lich. Solch eine Offen­heit habe ich seit der Ur-Beta nicht gese­hen. Hier eine kleine Liste ver­schie­dens­ter Zitate, die alle mög­lichst all­ge­meine For­meln und Mecha­nis­men sei­ten Bliz­zards illus­trie­ren sol­len. Einige Ein­ge­ständ­nisse zu Feh­lern, einige Wün­sche für die Zukunft. Hof­fent­lich alles irgend­wie mal Lesens­wert. Hier fest­ge­hal­ten um die guten Vor­sätze der Ent­wick­ler dann in 6 Mona­ten mal über­prü­fen zu kön­nen. MMO-Design 101:

Seriously though, it’s easier for to focus on only a couple of clas­ses at a time. We find that way we are more in sync on the direc­tion of the class and its pro­blems. We don’t work in an environ­ment where each per­son goes to their desk, throws in the talents for one class, and then we pour them all into the game. A lot of the time it’s 10% actual talent imple­men­ta­tion and 90% brain­stor­ming and dis­cus­sion.

(Quelle)

Bloat: Bloat is ano­ther word for “I can’t have ever­y­thing I want!”. We want every class to feel their tree is “bloa­ted” to a degree. We want clas­ses to have to make choices and sacri­fices over good talents, because that is ulti­mately what makes talents inte­res­ting. If it weren’t that way, we would just make it a linear pro­gres­sion wit­hout any choices. That said, if you feel the flow of the talents makes you spend points in some­thing that doesn’t neces­sa­rily bene­fit you what that build is for (i.e. spen­ding too many “PvE” talents for a PvP build), then that can be addres­sed.

(Quelle)

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as impro­ving the raid via­bi­lity of specs such as Arcane mage, Sur­vi­val hun­ter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 avail­able specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this pro­blem. One is that there are 25 man­datory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be rai­ding. Boo. A more fun, inte­res­ting and ulti­mately fair direc­tion is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Ima­gine run­ning a raid with no war­rior tanks at all.

(Quelle)

Druids are not all done and ready for live. We need to “really look” at druids before ship. As I have pos­ted in other forums though, we don’t gene­rally look at all clas­ses all at once. We work very col­la­bo­ra­tively, which unfor­t­u­na­tely means clas­ses get app­rai­sed one at a time.

As far as gim­mick fights, in order to have four via­ble tank clas­ses, we’re just going to have to avoid that kind of encoun­ter. We hope we can do so wit­hout making every boss fight feel too simi­lar. We have no pro­blem if pala­dins are bet­ter at some bos­ses than others, so long as a guild that runs with a druid MT isn’t months behind the pala­din MT guild because the encoun­ter is so hard wit­hout the pala­din.

(Quelle)

We’re not ent­i­rely happy with the way the Feral ended up in BC. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were some­thing you wan­ted to bring if you weren’t the kind of guild that swap­ped dif­fe­rent people out for every boss. But I don’t think “con­ve­ni­ence fac­tor” is ulti­mately a great value to bring to a raid. The pro­blem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and ama­zing melee, then the rogues were scre­wed, because they couldn’t go respec to tank or heal.

(Quelle)

I do think the Feral fle­xi­bi­lity will still count for some­thing, as will uni­que abi­li­ties like Inner­vate. But we’d like the Raid of the Future (tm) to be one where you need various roles fil­led, but have opti­ons for how to fill them. Ferals can fill tank roles or melee roles (or both!) and can also supply the X raid buff. It would be nice if every spec of every class could bring a ver­sion of some raid buff.

(Quelle)

I would word it this way:

A DK of any spec should be able to tank a 5-player non-heroic instance. The same is true for a war­rior, and per­haps even a pala­din or druid, though those are a little tri­cky since the gear over­laps dif­fe­rent roles even less.

A war­rior pretty much can­not tank a raid (unless he mas­si­vely over­ge­ars it) wit­hout a heavy invest­ment in the Pro­tec­tion tree. The dif­fe­rence is the DK can go into the Blood, Frost or Unh­oly tree and still tank. But she pro­bably needs as many tan­king talents as she can get (which does not have to mean the same num­ber of talents that other clas­ses spend), and defi­ni­tely needs the tan­king gear and player skill that go along with rai­ding.

(Quelle)

It’s great to see people fine tuning DK specs, but our view on tan­king specs for DKs is that there should be many of them, none being par­ti­cu­larly more power­ful than any other if the goal is sim­ply to tank an instance. We’re wan­ting any death knight to tank, as long as they’ve actually spent their talent points some­where and they have at least aver­age gear. So you can be frost, you can be unh­oly, or blood and still be able to tank: the class is a tan­king class and no spe­ci­fic tree is inten­ded to be par­ti­cu­larly more sui­ta­ble for tan­king than the others. So unlike other tanking-able clas­ses, you won’t have to hea­vily invest in any par­ti­cu­lar tree.

A Brief History of Dege­ne­ra­tion I believe the initial ver­sion of Dege­ne­ra­tion descri­bed at the World Wide Invi­ta­tio­nal was that it remo­ved all hots on the tar­get and did extra damage per hot, and the dot effect of Degen also preven­ted any addi­tio­nal hots. Wow. While this might sound fun (for the death knight) it was pro­bably ridi­cu­lously over­powered, and very puni­tive towards one type of hea­ler in par­ti­cu­lar. If you think druids are OP in Are­nas, this was pro­bably not the best way to fix that.

 

Yes, we have done some ton­ing down of Life­b­loom. Life­b­loom was unin­ten­tio­nally buf­fed too much during Burning Cru­sade when we made the coef­fi­ci­ent sca­ling work on the stack app­li­ca­ti­ons. This has cau­sed a lot of pro­blems with balance in the game. Druids are inten­ded -- as hea­lers -- to be able to dish out good through­put heals with very low effi­ci­ency, like­wise Life­b­loom is inten­ded to be rather cheap and effi­ci­ent, but not to the degree that it is today.

Com­pare how you hea­led in dun­ge­ons and raids pre-Burning Cru­sade to today. Before you used nearly every hea­ling spell you had, today you just use Life­b­loom and maybe your other HoTs just because they stack with Life­b­loom. Not only is this boring to the player, but it pigeon holes the Druid to spamming Life­b­loom on the tanks. […]

Just as a note -- we did intend to change Life­b­loom in the Burning Cru­sade (lower the coef­fi­cent), but we ended up delay­ing that so that we wouldn’t hurt the Druids via­bi­lity in rai­ding. With Wrath, we’re intro­du­cing a new heal, a revam­ped Tree Form, and other mecha­nics to cor­rectly balance things out

(Quelle)

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tan­king rela­tive to war­ri­ors or pala­dins who spend a great chunk of talents on tan­king, it’s not fair. Ghost­craw­ler: This is a valid con­cern. First, I’m not sure the num­bers are all that dif­fe­rent. Second, gear and skill pro­bably have a much big­ger impact on tan­king effec­tiv­en­ess than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior’s best tan­king abi­li­ties are core to the class, though talents defi­ni­tely help (and a few talents help enor­mously). Fourth, and most import­ant, it doesn’t seem like smart design to keep desi­gning trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That’s a pretty con­tro­ver­sial state­ment, so I should ela­bo­rate. We don’t know for sure that the Prot tree sca­res off tanks. A lot of you adore tan­king just as it is, thank you, and I’m not try­ing to tell you you’re wrong. (I’ve tan­ked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren’t fun about tan­king that have not­hing to do with the prot trees: ina­bi­lity to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your fri­ends have to can­cel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some impro­ve­ment, and you’ve seen a lot of those chan­ges alre­ady. Star­ting over with a class’ talents would be a lot of work and pro­bably really anger play­ers, so that isn’t ter­ri­bly attrac­tive. But here is a new class wit­hout a lot of bag­gage, and a chance to try some­thing dif­fe­rent with the talent trees. Cle­arly a lot of people are exci­ted about it, so maybe we’re onto some­thing. If it isn’t your thing, that’s cool. But make that deci­sion for aes­the­tic or other rea­sons, not because you’re con­vin­ced DKs will be bad tanks. Uncon­ven­tio­nal doesn’t need to mean infe­rior.

(Quelle)

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