Even so, we thought we’d go the extra mile for this and transcribe everything and also translate it into Greek to provide more options to our readers, the game’s fans and the community both in Greece and beyond. Naturally, we’d like to thank all those that submitted questions, regardless of whether they made the cut or not (we had to hit a specific number and we even pushed that by one inn the end). Curating this selection wasn’t easy, which was a nice problem to have. Also, kudos for being patient as this was quite the thing to arrange for both us at enternity.gr and Blizzard.
So, without further ado, enjoy. However you like.
Hello. It’s pleasure to be able to speak directly to a lot of our Greek fans, a lot of our players in Greece and answer some questions submitted directly from the Greek WoW community. So let me just go through these and I’ll read off a list of questions, where they came from and we’ll see how this goes.
So, first off we have a not game related, more of a personal question from Stavros Vergos.
Stavros Vergos: Ion, you have Greek ancestry. How has your Greek heritage affected you in your work at World of Warcraft? How often you visit your yiayia in Athens and when will we have the chance to get some of her recipes as a food buff at WoW?
So, yeah, I think, obviously, my father is Greek, he was born in Athens, and he’s, you know, growing up, listening to his bedtime stories of ancient Greek mythology, that definitely shaped a lot of my outlook, inspired my passion for, you know, fantasy worlds, for exploration, for, you know, the imagination that in some ways led me to play World Of Warcraft and then to work on World Of Warcraft. Growing up I had the great fortune of being able to go to Greece many summers to visit the family, my yiayia in Athens, and we had a small house on Syros, where we would often go and, you know, spend the summers, enjoy the beautiful Aegean. I haven’t had the chance to go unfortunately in many years, I miss it greatly, I hope to have the chance to return soon, but I have, you know, been very busy with working on the game and it’s hard to take too much time away from that. But as far as food goes, you never know. We’ve had a lot of different cultures that have been the focus and inspiration for pieces of content in WoW. We haven’t really focused on ancient Greek culture too specifically yet but maybe that will change. And maybe we’ll see some spanakopitas, a moussaka, you never know. But for now, nothing specific to announce. Anyway, thank you for the question, and, again, it’s a pleasure to be able to talk directly to the Greek community. And I apologise. My Greek used to be much better, it’s pretty rusty now since I haven’t been back for so long, so I’m not going to embarrass myself by trying to speak at length in Greek.
Alright, so moving on to actual questions. We have a question from Rogerbrown, in Method, of course.
George Georgiadis (Rogerbrown of METHOD): With the introduction and continuous development of the Mythic Plus system, it seems that there isn't a lot of interest in joining a guild and raid heroic/mythic anymore, which leads to the disbanding of guilds. Mythic Plus dungeons are great but are there any plans to give some new incentives for people to enter or create new guilds and raid as a group (e.g. Guild Halls with unique rewards and bonuses to be gained)?
So, [it’s] something that definitely concerns us. On the one hand we’re very excited about having opened up high end competitive co-operative play to this whole new group of players with a lower barrier to entry than, you know, a formal raid schedule and Mythic Plus is great. At the same time, we, you know, it’s important to us that there remain unique incentives and rewards for challenging yourself, for going in with a larger group of players and having that different, massively social experience that only raids can offer. You know, at the very high end of the competitive scene I think we’ve seen, you know, a lot of continued interest as Uldir has unfolded, there are really just as many guilds as in the past, doing Mythic and pushing high content. You know, we’ve kind of formalised leaderboards for that, through our Hall Of Fame system we’ve added. That said, especially with the removal of class set pieces that used to be uniquely available from raids, we‘re aware that that’s a problem that we need to solve and I think we’re looking forward over the course of the rest of Battle Of Azeroth and beyond to make sure that there are still some unique benefits and rewards for going into raiding. I think, ideally, each path of endgame progression should offer some unique benefits that make it distinctly compelling and, you know, the strongest player, the most well-rounded players should be the one to excel in all of them. Though focusing on any one individually should still lead to great strength and success.
OK. Next question from Tasos Rafailidis.
Tasos Rafailidis (Elserat of PogChamp): Going into Battle For Azeroth there is a big change in Mythic Plus. Gear swap is not allowed anymore. What are the thoughts behind this change? Gear swap in Mythic Plus has been a huge factor in BFA and many times it would determine if you will end up timing the key or not. For example healer swapping gear for specific pulls to do more damage.
So, in this case, this is from a member of the PogChamp MDI team, just to be clear. So, this is something that we actually thought about changing about partway through Legion but didn’t want to do so in the middle of an expansion because of how reliant many people’s strategies had become on swapping gear, specifically Legendaries. I think, when we look at World Of Warcraft, we view in a lot of ways an entire Mythic Plus dungeon the way we view a single boss encounter. And that’s why you can’t change talents in the middle of a dungeon, why you can’t respec in the middle of a dungeon, even if you‘re dropping in and out of combat in the course of the run. Some of the choices in terms of the best talents, the best gear are most interesting when you’re weighing the entire range of situations a dungeon’s going to offer. Right. Maybe, whether it’s AoE versus target choices or whether you want one type of defensive or utility trait or talent versus another, I think, if you’re just speccing or just gearing for a specific boss or a specific pull of trash in the dungeon, I think, though oftentimes those can become really easy choices to make actually, it just becomes about collecting the right gear, having all of your macros set up so that you can, you know, swap between pulls as you go. I think there is more high level decision making depth in a world where you make that choice once up front. And it also makes success in the dungeon more about your moment to moment combat gameplay, your positioning, your decisions that you make on the fly and not about having all the right macros set up to swap in and out ahead of time.
Next question from Manos Aloupis.
The three PvP characteristics are burst/mobility/cc. How should they be balanced in a spec and which class is tougher to balance while preserving its unique characteristics?
It’s hard for me to speak…I’m not an expert these days on the nuances of PvP balance when it comes to individual specs, so I can’t really say which is harder or easier to balance. Thinking though at a high level about this question, I would also say there’s another, at least one more characteristic that maybe isn’t included there, which is survivability, you know, defensive potential, how tanky are you, and it’s not just burst. I think we’d also like to have space in the game for sustained pressure, which is something that DoT classes for example have more traditionally brought. They’re not necessarily going to just take you from 100 to 0 while your healer has [been] cc’ed once but the sustained pressure they can provide while actually wearing down the healer’s mana and create opportunities maybe for a burst class that complements you and yours 3s team to jump in and get the kill. I think we’re always looking to have as many differences as possible in the scene. You know, a weakness in one area should be made up for by strength at another. If you are less mobile, you should be tankier and harder to kill because you’re going to have a lot of people on you a lot of the time. If you have very high mobility, you can easily evade threats, you should probably go down more easily if people are able to lock you down and focus on you. And so I think we’re always looking, and it’s tricky in a game with 36 specs, for each spec to have a unique combination of these strengths and weaknesses, but as much as possible we like there to be clear strength and weaknesses. And when it comes down to it, as long as, you know, you can’t be so weak in any one of these areas that you’re just completely unable to function but when it comes down to it, for the most part, we’d rather focus on increasing strengths rather than mitigating weaknesses. Because that makes, you know, people better at what they do best at. The alternative of always trying to bolster weaknesses leads to a state where everyone is kind of average at everything and that’s a less interesting game to play in our opinion.
Next question, apologies if I get the pronunciation on this one wrong, Germanos Chatziathanasiou.
Germanos Chatziathanasiou: What are your plans on future stat squishes? Have you considered working on a new system since stat squish is more like a temporary solution?
So, we don’t think we’re gonna need to do another squish for at least another expansion. I mean certainly not within this one but probably more than one to come. Really, with the work that we’ve done to make it work for Battle For Azeroth it should be a much simpler process with far fewer bugs and other unexpected issues. We did an one-time major rework of basically every creature and ability in the entire game from 2004 through 2018, in Battle For Azeroth, to convert them into a system where we can now just say “OK, we want to nerf these by 30% under the hood”, change one number and the rest of the game will just work. We want to make it simple going forward. Now, why do we do it? Again, this is just to keep numbers from spiralling out of control where we’re not getting much value out of it. You know, I think, within a given expansion we have this range of power where, well, highly-geared raid players maybe quite as strong as those that just hit max level. That level of differentiation is important but when we have number that are in the millions or tens of millions and most of that power progression is happening in older content at lower levels, we’re just dealing with very very large numbers that are hard to grasp and compare, without getting any gameplay benefit out of it. Now, is there a system going forward where we wouldn’t have to do this at all? It’s something we continue to talk about and think about. We don’t have a great solution there yet. We know this isn’t super elegant but on the one hand it’s important for the game for power to continue to increase for the next raid tier to be harder and give better rewards than the last and for the gear that you get to be meaningful and, at the same time, we try to balance that against making years and years and years of content to come while still keeping the numbers somewhat manageable. That’s why we landed on this solution. Maybe one day we’ll wake up with, you know, some stroke of inspiration that leads us to a better place but for now I think we feel pretty good about how the squishes have played out.
Next question is from Chris Diamantis.
Chris Diamantis: Why did some of the classic raid buffs (Mark of the Wild, Blessing of Kings) not make a comeback like Arcane Intellect and Fortitude did?
So, we definitely looked into bringing back some these classic buffs for a couple of reasons. One is that there’s something, having some buffs in the picture, there’s something nice and ceremonial about “alright, let’s get buffed up before we pull this boss”, you hear those spelling pacts, it feels like you’re getting ready, like you’re powering up to go into a fight. But also it’s added, there’s a social element to it making sure that people are stronger in a group, in a raid group than they are on their own but it also gave a couple of classes that could use some extra utility, some value to their presence, an extra reason to be brought. Now, paladins and druids, yes, traditionally they’ve had raid buffs but, frankly, in the Legion and Battle For Azeroth environment they already have plenty of utility. When you bring a paladin to your group, you have all of their blessings as well as, you know, other hybrid utility that they bring. Druids of course have excellent mobility, they have Battle Res, they have Innervate if you’re a caster, Stampeding Roar if you’re a tank or DPS. Druids where not seen having any problem with representation, whether it’s in dungeons or in raid groups and so there isn’t really a problem to solve there. I think we get some of the benefit of having buffs just from having a couple and we’re only looking, we’re only going to add a new ability if a class actually needs it for differentiation. And just the standard Stamina and Int buff, I think, cover it for mages and priests, it was cool to be able to bring back those old-school iconic abilities and then, you know, the advantages that some others get kind of came from, let’s say, the warrior’s Battle Shout, which covered the physical damage dealers to complement the magic damage dealers. In the future, if you we get to a place where, for whatever reason paladins or druids are seen as not really offering much to a group, it’s something we could consider but I think we’d rather focus on the unique and strong utility that they already bring and find ways to make that even more valuable if it’s feeling like there’s isn’t a reason to bring those classes. But we’re just not seeing it right now.
OK, so, next question from Ignatios Deuterevos.
Ignatios Deuterevos: Loot has always been a major factor in WoW. It could be a reward or a breaking point for a player/guild. Over the years there have been many changes to how loot works and drops. In recent expansions we have the warforge/titanforge systems that can be extremely rewarding in some cases and disappointing in others. You decided to keep the system in Battle For Azeroth, in addition to the personal loot that you are going to apply to all modes, which means that someone who wants to min/max a character will have to grind all modes every week with the hope of looting a titanforge upgrade. Have you considered a cap applied to the loot that drops in lower difficulties?
So, OK well, a few pieces to this to break down. So I think, why does warforging and titanforging exist? The origins of the systems actually go back in some ways to Mists Of Pandaria, when it was first called thunderforging in Throne Of Thunder but it became a game-wide system that has been uncapped in more recent expansions. So years and years ago loot was much harder to come by. Period. I remember my guild in Burning Crusade, we killed Gruul The Dragonkiller every week for a year and a half. Even long after we had Black Temple on farm, we were going back and killing Gruul in the hope that he would drop a Dragonspine Trophy trinket that all of our rogues needed and we’d only ever seen two in, like, ten months of killing him. And yes, when that finally dropped, it was amazing. But that kind of loot was much much harder to come by. There were fewer sources of it. And if you didn’t raid, good luck. Over the years, we’ve been more generous. We decided to move away from a space where you just can kill a boss or run some content, week after week after week, and never see the item you want. Drop rates are higher across the board, there is, you know, with personal loot there is tradeability which gives another chance at the item, we added bonus rolls in Mists Of Pandaria, which give you a third chance at the item and so, in practice, we expect players to get things that they want out of a raid zone within, you know, a couple of months at least of doing the tier. It’s very very rare even if, you know, early on people may grumble about not seeing the trinket they want, it’s very rare to actually go a meaningful amount of time into a raid tier without actually getting the items you want. And so, warforging and titanforging keep some level of interest at potential for growth in those repeated clears. Right, when you’re working on Mythrax in Uldir, if you’re not a guild like Method, if you’re not someone that cleared the raid in the first couple of weeks, you’ve probably been doing Uldir for at least a couple of months at this point. You might have eight or nine kills on, you know, MOTHER, on Taloc, on Zek'voz and most of your raid has the items they want from those bosses and so you just mindlessly go through the motions, otherwise not really hoping for an upgrade, not having any chance of something good happening to you, just take it back to Mythrax that you were stuck on. Also it means your raid is not getting much stronger week after week. So warforging and titanforging create the opportunity for anything to happen. They do create moments of excitement as you know. I remember watching the Method stream, I think it was Sco who got a warforged, socketed polearm that dropped halfway through progress. It was a giant, giant upgrade for him on his monk tank, that made an immediate difference. In a world where loot is more common, the rare opportunities to have these amazing items retain some of those moments of excitement. Now, we definitely don’t want players to feel obligated to go back and clear Normal every week, clear Heroic every week for the very very slim chance that something might upgrade, while at the same time for people who are doing Normal and Heroic as their core content, having that opportunity is exciting. I think, in practice, as we’ve seen, most players don’t feel forced to do that anymore. I think one of the things that really led to it in Legion was set pieces, where people would, you know, want titanforge versions of set pieces, especially set pieces from older tiers, also Legendaries, I think, you know, many guilds, many groups would go back and clear Emerald Nightmare even in patch 7.2 or beyond, every week, just for more chances at Legendaries or the Bad Luck Protection around Legendaries. Those are the things that we moved away from. The vast majority of groups that do, let’s say, Mythic raiding today definitely don’t do Normal Uldir and most of them have moved on from doing Heroic Uldir at all at this point. And so overall that feels like a healthy place. I think it’s up to players to choose where to spend their time, where it’s most rewarding and we’re trying to craft the systems of the game such that what is most rewarding should generally be content that’s relevant and challenging for you. You’re probably much better off doing some high Mythic keys with your spare time versus going back and doing lower difficulties hoping for a 1% chance of something amazing to happen that probably won’t happen.
Next question is, we have another loot question. This is from Nick Kanelis.
Nick Kanelis: I am studying for my MSc in Applied Economics, and I am currently working on my final project which is about Loot Distribution Systems in MMORPG.
That sounds like a pretty cool project and I’d be curious to hear more about.
In another Q&A session you had on March 15 this year, you mentioned that we can reasonably expect Personal Loot to be the only option for raids in BfA, and you argued that intentionally stacking gear on specific characters within a guild makes it harder to design challenging content for everyone. Many players, especially in high-end guilds, would argue that master loot systems allow the leadership to reward players who demonstrate maximum consistency and effort, and they are also a valuable tool for raid optimisation, like gearing their main tanks for maximum threat or maximum mitigation, for example. Are there any plans for catering to these player needs, like changes in the way Personal Loot works, or is less player input in the loot distribution process really the way to go, and why do you feel so?
So. TL;DR, personal loot, why are you doing it, do you have any plans to change it? This question was asked before Battle For Azeroth came out. Again, apologies for getting to this now, but it still remains a hot topic for discussion throughout the raid community. Overall, I know this is disappointing to some raid groups, we’re happy with how personal loot is working out so far. I think, what we’ve seen, in practice, as Uldir has gone on, is that across entire groups the best-geared guilds, the best-geared raid groups are still the ones doing the hardest content, doing most efficiently. I think the benefits to removing Master Loot are three things. First off, on the lower end of the organisation spectrum, there’s a lot of guilds that train through a steady stream of trials. And if you’re looking to find a guild in WoW, you’re often applying, you’re going through your trialing in a place for a few weeks and historically in the Master Looter world guilds had very strict control, often had strict control over what they were doing with their loot and trials were not allowed to get any loot. And your experience as a player trying to get into raiding in World of Warcraft could very typically be, go into a guild, deciding that you don’t work out there or they wanted to fit someone else in instead of you and you got literally nothing for your efforts, for helping them defeat bosses, maybe even helping them defeat bosses for the very first time in your time in that guild. You move on to another guild, the same cycle would continue. Now, yes, there is a social dynamic here, this is a social system and something for players to solve or deal with in their own way. In practice it was just a different form of control than what we’ve come to see in pick-up groups, that led to us taking Personal Loot out of pick-up groups in past expansions, where, yes, of course, if you are an officer of a guild, if you’re running a Loot Council, Master Loot is an amazing system. You get to decide exactly who gets everything. And of course the Master Looter, of course the person who is on the Loot Council likes Master Loot. There’s no system we could create that is as fulfilling as giving you or you and your friends the ability to control who get every single item that drops. However, for the majority of players out there, they’re often a more silent majority, that came at the expense of a lot of the reward that comes from just playing the game and progression. That’s one thing. On the other end of the spectrum, the very, very, very high end, there’s no surprise that, you know, we’ve seen in the past top guilds running multiple raid groups in parallel with four or five alts, maybe even more in some extreme cases, and funnelling gear in the first weeks to a handful of specific mains using Master Loot. This effectively quadrupled or quintupled the rate at which they could gear up their raid, compared to a regular group that did none of this. This over time led guilds outside of just the top few, top 10, top 20, top 50, top 100 and beyond to start running at least some split raids. It made it very difficult for us to balance encounters for, to provide a challenge for Method during the first week, or other comparable guilds, while still being a fun and satisfying progression experience for the majority of Mythic guilds in weeks to follow. It was very difficult when, going into a raid in Legion like Tomb Of Sargeras or Antorus, Method’s item level during the first week of Mythic would actually be higher than what typical guilds would have to work with a month later, a month into Mythic. Normally it’s the best guilds in the world are the ones who are doing it undergeared. When they’re doing it overgeared, that’s really tough. And I think, not having that option available, we’ve seen how that played out in Uldir. I think, for those first few guilds, bosses like Mythrax, G'huun and even earlier ones like Vectis were very stern challenges for top guilds. And yet, without needing massive nerfs, without other progression changes, we’ve seen hundreds of guilds follow in their footsteps with the advantage of more gear who were able to down those bosses without advantage. And so it helps the high end competitive scene as well but that effect trickles down where, now, if you want to be competitive, if you want to try to push for top 100, let’s say you want to try and get on the Hall Of Fame, you don’t feel compelled to full force or tell all your members to gear up multiple mages, multiple rogues or whatever for future gear funnelling. You can just focus on gearing up your main roster, maybe having some off-spec folks or back-up classes when you want to bring in more of one class or another but that’s very different. And when you’re playing, you’re just playing to get loot, you’re playing all your mains to get loot for your mains, that feels better all around. And then, finally, the third benefit is that it lets us itemise in a somewhat different way. When Master Loot was an option we still had to design loot tables and design what items we put in the game around the possibility of Master Loot. So, very niche items, only useful to a few people, whether it’s ranged weapons, whether it’s shields, whether it’s unusual things like two-handed caster weapons, two-handed mace or a two-handed caster axe that a shaman could theoretically use, we never made those items. And the way we constructed loot tables, we had to assume that this thing could drop no matter who’s in your raid. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a hunter, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a holy paladin. That caster shield is going to drop. And so, moving it to a world of Personal Loot we can actually better cater to a wider range of itemisation. You’ll see more fist weapons, you’ll see more shields, you’ll see more ranged weapons and more, because it doesn’t matter if an item is only useful for one specialisation out of 36. When we know that item will only ever drop for that one specialisation when they’re present, we can do a lot more and take more chances there. Now, finally, I recognise that for tight-knit social groups that weren’t abusing any of these, you were giving everybody a fair shake, you were letting trials get loot, you just enjoyed being able to share and allocate loot to your tanks or help someone complete a set bonus or give someone a big upgrade that they needed, there’s something that we lost here. And I’m not denying that, there is something that we lost here for those groups. But we feel like the change for the majority of players, for the game as a whole, is a step in the right direction. And once you get past the first few weeks of a new raid tier, I think loot tradeability is something that helps with a lot of those problems. So if you try to gear up somebody who came back to the game or has switched mains, the rest of your raid can still pretty quickly funnel loot to them. Or, if you don’t need an upgrade but someone else in your raid does, you can pass that to them. Now this breaks down a little bit when item level upgrades end up not being true upgrades for you and you get something that you don’t want to wear but you also can’t trade, that’s a symptom of a larger problem where we’re trying to, where possible, make item level a better guide for what’s actually better. So, overall, that’s where things stand. It’s an ongoing conversation but I think, frankly, Personal Loot is here to stay and we should be discussing what we want to do with it rather than let’s just roll back to Master Loot. Because that’s not how we’re building loot tables anymore and we feel like the benefits have outweighed the downsides thus far.
Next question from Orestes Kontos.
Any chance for solo queue in arenas or ranking systems for Battlegrounds? Battlegrounds seems boring right now with no reward. Also always matching with players of low skill or with players that lack the necessary drive to win makes things worse. It would be awesome if we could see a comeback of Tiers or Ranks that would make players work up a sweat and, also, Transmogs like Grand Marshals that would give people reason to actually focus on winning.
So, I think, we feel pretty good about how the Battle For Azeroth ranked system, with clear tiers as you work your way up towards Gladiator, has worked out. There are clearly increasing rewards, you can get some great items out of this, some of the best availability of powerful PvP gear that rivals the very best stuff out of raids that we’ve seen in a long time and so within rated system there’s a very clear progression. Random, Battlegrounds and Skirmishes, I think, we’re not looking to make a hardcore competitive environment. Those have always been for more casual players who just want to hop on, relax, run about a Battleground, fight some players. Of course we want you to win and the rewards are aligned with whether it’s your conquest, your honor, bonuses that you get otherwise. The rewards are aligned with wanting you to win but that’s always going to be a more relaxed environment, just like any sort of quick play or quick match in other games that have PvP components. Now, for rated Arena, rated Battlegrounds, the reason why solo queuing is not something we think is a great fit for World Of Warcraft when it has worked well in other games is the extent to which our game is very composition dependent. What classes you have, what specs you have, what roles you have matter tremendously and that’s not something that’s flexible. Alright, when we create an Overwatch team or a Heroes team, people can switch as needed and people can play a variety of characters and we can make sure that you have this exact composition. In order to have good matchmaking in terms of reasonable queue times, matching you with people around your skill level and rating and making reasonable compositions that work well synergistically and then are matched up against other reasonable compositions, we don’t think that that’s possible to achieve. Without, again, one of those things would have to give. And it would either be very, very, very, very long queue times that would be, I think, extremely frustrating, or wild mismatches in skill or, yes, sometimes you’re frustrated you don’t have a healer on your 3s team or other times you have, you know, too many of the same class and this isn’t gonna work synergistically. And no one has the ability to switch classes on the fly the way you might in, say, Overwatch, if your team needs a tank or a team needs a support. So we’re instead focused on improving the social tools in the game, the pre-made group finder, adding communities to make it easier for people to join groups of like-minded folks who are looking to find matches or partners at a given rating and, you know, that’s also a more social experience which is something that we try whenever possible to emphasise as part of an MMO.
OK, so, next question from Vasileios Kondylis.
Vasileios Kondylis: The Flex Mode was added to WoW with the aim to facilitate easier raid groups. Other than in Mythic, every other raid difficulty support flex groups, which means that it’s easier than ever to make truly competitive groups for every circumstance. I believe that the raid difficulty system could be tweaked, merging LFR and Normal with the other difficulty levels remaining as they are. This way we can avoid unneeded content repetition and narrow down the level gap so that stat squishes aren’t needed as often as they are today. What are the chances of something like this happening? Apologies in advance for the length of my question.
So we think that the number of difficulties that we’ve settled on, the difficulty structure we’ve had in place since Warlords Of Draenor is actually the right fit for World Of Warcraft. Raid Finder and Normal, for someone who does Mythic, both of those seem like all these are casual difficulties. But they’re actually serving very different audiences. Normal is for a mix of friends and family groups and pick-up groups. And again it’s maybe hard for you to imagine as a Mythic raider but there are plenty of groups, there are literally hundreds of thousands of WoW players around the world who spend an entire tier progressing through Normal difficulty. Where it’s like, OK, in a few weeks they finally got Fetid Devourer Down and now they’re moving on to work on Zul and they’re gonna spent a week or two working on Normal Zul before they move on to Mythrax. And that’s a satisfying and rewarding experience for them. Because that’s a type of group that they’re literally just playing with their friends. They’re not going to recruit people for being better players, they’re not going to kick people out because they stand in the pools and spawn adds in Zek'voz more often than you might like. They’re just gonna say, hey, try to do better next time and keep working at it and that’s progression that they enjoy. LFR, this is what we’ve heard really throughout Mists Of Pandaria that inspired us to make this change. LFR does not provide that satisfying experience. LFR is not a social experience, LFR is not a progression experience. And so, in Mists, where we had a Normal difficulty that was similar to our Heroic today, groups like the one I described would find LFR unsatisfying and asocial and Normal, as it was then, to be too difficult. They would kill two bosses and maybe get stuck on Horridon and then not really have a satisfying place to progress. That’s why Normal exists in the form that it does. Raid Finder is for people who don’t want to commit to a schedule or find a large group. You have some free time in the evening, you have an hour in the morning before you head to work, you can jump in, you can check out the end of the story, you can get some gear for your alt, you can finish a quest. It’s right there, it’s a more bite-sized chunk, it’s not meant to be this lasting, enduring, social experience, it’s a chance to see the content, to experience some of the most epic encounters we make and to have an alternate path for progression. And so those are two different purposes, two different audiences and we don’t think it’s possible to merge those two into one single experience without heavily disappointing one or the other as we’ve seen in the past. And then, moving up from there, I think Heroic is for more organised groups that do value performance at some level, do value class composition, you might actively look to recruit, you know, a priest, if you don’t have any priest in your raid, you look to recruit a rogue if you don’t have any rogue, unlike a friends and family group where they’re just gonna take what they have and then as we know Mythic is for people who are looking to do all of that at the very highest level and to be the best. Now, I think, also, just another aspect to this question, so content repetition, I think, we’ve tried to set up the incentives so that guilds feel like and groups feel like that they can focus on, at most, two difficulties. If you’re a Mythic raider, I’m not sure of any Mythic raiders these days who are still going back and doing Normal Uldir. They probably, when a new tier comes out, when Battle Of Dazar'alor comes out in Tides Of Vengeance Mythic guilds are probably gonna jump into Heroic, then move on to Mythic. Normal won’t really offer much for them. You might do it once or twice if you’re trying to get specific trinkets or Azerite pieces, but you’ll quickly leave it behind. And in terms of the gear gap, I think, we’ve settled on 30 item levels per tier and that is the right number. Even if we had fewer tiers. Not that we’re going to but even if we did, we assume that you’re doing two tiers basically. If you have Mythic gear right now, you’re gonna go into Heroic next difficulty. If that Heroic gear isn’t an upgrade over the Mythic gear that you have today then that’s an odd place to be. Why are you even doing it? You’re doing new content, you ’re learning new boss encounters that for many guilds, again, not for Method, but for a guild that, let’s say, is six of eight Mythic at the end of Uldir. That’s a guild that’s actually gonna spent some time going through Heroic and then slowly progressing through Mythic. If Heroic isn’t a source of upgrades then the whole raid feels disappointing. You’re spending weeks learning new fights, getting no rewards for it and you’re not getting meaningfully more powerful in a way that’s gonna help you feel like you can push farther into Mythic. So, in order for Heroic of next year to be Mythic of this year we need a gap at item level of at least 25 or 30, that’s what we’ve settled on and we feel like that’s worked pretty well. Balance has felt good and progression and rewards have felt meaningful as you go into a new raid tier with each new patch.
And the last question from Christos Angelidis
Christos Angelidis: During Legion we saw long quest lines for the first time, quests that unlocked new recipes for our professions and those quest lines were engaging and fun experiences. On the other hand, some recipes like alchemy flasks had a different system that required the player to craft a ton of them, hoping that they'll get a proc for a rank 3 recipe. A player with a rank 2 recipe and someone with an early super lucky proc rank 3 means hundreds of thousands of gold difference in earnings. A system as this one, based on luck alone, is certainly flawed as it has negative impact to the economy of the server and the overall gameplay experience. What will your approach be on the issue? Will we see a different solution than the random proc system? Maybe a system similar to the legendary items' progressive drop rates?
So, with professions, really, with every expansion of, I’d say, throughout WoW’s history, we’ve taken a slightly different approach to professions. You know, they’re themed and rooted in their own individual expansions, whether that’s heavily integrated with the Garrison as we saw in Warlords Of Draenor, or very quest-driven and tied into world quests as we saw in Legion. And part of that is delivering mechanisms for recipes and ways for crafters to differentiate themselves from each other. Again, in a game where we have, you know, tons and tons of blacksmiths, what makes me as a blacksmith different from you as a blacksmith? And for a long time in WoW one of the things, I think they key thing there is if I can make something that you can’t and you can make something that I can’t. That makes us feel a bit different. And, going way back, a lot of that was accomplished through rarity. I mean, way way back, in classic WoW days, you know, 12 years ago, there were a handful of smiths on your server who might have the Arcanite Reaper plans they got as a very low percentage drop, kind of luck-based, and that gave them a reward. I think a world where everyone can steadily progress towards making everything makes, actually, harms crafters’ ability to get an economic advantage, it turns all crafters into basically the same thing. It’s, you know, as we did in the past, jewel crafters using currency to purchase some recipes before others so they could focus on an undervalued piece of the market, while others got different ones. We’d like to find ways for people to have different recipes from each other. Now, obviously, if you never ever ever get the thing that you want, that can be frustrating so I think some sort of bad luck protection probably makes sense there but, this is something, I’m thinking through a bit of this one the fly as I’m answering this question, but the route we’re more likely to take is actually having enough variety in the meaningful recipes such that, you know what, you may not get that rank 3 recipe that you really want. But what if that’s OK because you have a different rank 3 recipe that is also on high demand and you can make your money by selling and crafting that one at a market advantage, while a different alchemist has their flask or their thing they can make? And as long as there is competitive advantage that you get for dedicated crafters that probably works out overall. I think, the general topic of crafting I, actually, I think it’s an area where we can do a lot better. I think that, part of, you know, it serves a purpose in the economy but I think we’d like to do more inn terms of giving players opportunity to really feel like their identity can be one of a crafter. Where I am a blacksmith, I am an alchemist, I spend tons of time and effort being better at this and that has economic advantages, maybe it even has some power advantages. Now, that’s not, we’re not quite there yet, we know, but it’s something we want to work towards. But one of the things that guides in that is finding ways for players to differentiate themselves from each other. So that not everyone is the same.
OK. Again, thank you for all the great questions and, like I said at the start, it’s a pleasure to be able to speak directly to the Greek WoW community and I hope I get a chance to actually visit in person in the near future. Thank you.
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