All the Developer Responses to the Warcraft Class Design Reddit AMA

Blizzard Posted 2017/06/23 at 2:53 PM by Serrinn

WoW Subreddit

Blizzard

Join us on Friday, June 23 starting at 1:00 pm PDT (4:00 pm EDT) on the World of Warcraft subreddit where members of the World of Warcraft development team will be answering your questions on class design, item design, Artifacts, and PvP balance.

To participate, just head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/. We'll be answering as many of your questions as we can, including the ongoing goals for class design and balance in the Legion expansion, the approach to classes and honor talents in PvP, and how it all ties in with Artifacts, Legendaries, and other items.

We'll be digging in to your questions until approximately 3:00 pm PDT, so don't miss out!

And CM Lore as well

Edit: after a break, the devs returned around 7pm PST for several more replies on Demon Hunters and Windwalkers.How hard is it to balance class/spec fantasy with creating meaningful and fun game play? We've seen definite strides in Class fantasy for a lot of specs but I would argue that some miss their mark for the sake of gameplay or vice versa. Can you comment on any potential changes coming down the pike to improve player experience or class fantasy for those not currently up to par?

Blizzard

Some are certainly harder to pull off than others, but our best successes come when a spec's kit is clear and we can focus both aesthetics and mechanics into the same end goal that flows pretty naturally. I think our recent work on subtlety was a great example of how a clear vision (planning, patient, focused ninja) can make everything flow from that core.

I think on the flip side, something like explosive trap is a great example of really awesome fantasy, but doesn't really deliver fulfilling gameplay in practice. Which makes it difficult when a spec has a main theme around damaging traps. The upside though, is that we get to see what parts of the spec do feel natural and work well in both flavor and gameplay, like Dragonsfire Grenade.
Legion brought lots of opportunity to deliver a more focused identity to each spec, and invariably some found their footing better than others. We're always iterating and looking to make changes we believe in.

As of Legion we had a lot of improvements with targeted spells like Warriors Heroic Leap, but often times as a Shaman, targeted totems still feel very limited and prone to having "No Path Available" a lot of times, is this an intentional design choice or just a limitation that could have improvements in the future?

Blizzard

We'll take another look at our totem placement rules, especially now that we have an increased number of totems that are spawned on your reticle. I share your frustration with trying to throw totems in situations such as from the top of Blade's Edge Arena bridge to the floor.

When Ghostcrawler was apart of the dev team he often did, "Watercoooler talks" to discuss class changes and the ideas of what was going on with each spec. It gave the community some insight on what you guys had planned and what your specific goals were.
Will we ever see the return of that?

Blizzard

Definitely something we're still open to. Lately we've been leaning more in favor of responding to specific concerns (such as what you'll see on the Class Development forums). That's definitely left something of a void in terms of sharing overall design philosophy, though. It's something we'd like to address.
Worth noting that that sort of thing isn't always branded as a "Dev Watercooler" - for example, early on in Legion development, we did a series of blog posts that explained our overall philosophy for each class (at least at the time - some have changed since). They weren't called Watercoolers, but did have the same general content.

What is the current status on the spell animations update? Will we see more in 7.3? There are a few classes that have seen little change for many years for much of their core spells, especially some healers shadow priests, and arcane mages, while some classes seem to get their spell looks redone every 6 months to a year or so (Balance) . How do you decide which classes get work done first on their spells? Can you share some plans for upcoming specs and classes?

Blizzard

Melee was our focus for the first round of updates in Legion because there was significant ground to gain, but that has set in motion an ongoing effort to update as much as we have time for, as often as we can. I'm happy to say that we are actively working on caster specific animations, as well as sound and spell FX updates for multiple classes. Keep a lookout for what's next for casters, you should see updates very soon :)

Is there any information you guys can drop here about any class tuning changes that might drop over the weekend or when Mythic Tomb Launches on the 27th?

Blizzard

There are likely to be some PvP-specific changes next week. Unsure if there will be any PvE-focused tuning just yet, as we're still compiling data from the first week of Normal/Heroic Tomb.
One thing that's worth noting is that our general strategy toward class tuning in Legion is much more ongoing than it has been in previous expansions. In other words, there's no longer a point where we consider tuning to be "finished" for a patch cycle (aside from maybe in the couple of weeks prior to another patch being released). We're constantly monitoring performance and make tuning changes where it makes sense.

/u/Sigma_WoW What is your favorite kind of cookie? If you fould only eat one baked good for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Blizzard

I'm going to say /u/Solanis_wow 's chocolate chip cookies that he recently brought, that I basically had to keep eating since they were on his desk right next to me.

Whip these together first:
2 ½ sticks (1 1/4 cups) salted butter
1 ¼ cups brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
Then start adding these:
1 ¼ teaspoons baking soda
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons coarse salt
3 3/4 cups flour
Once the dough is consistent, fold in a bunch of chocolate chips, then add some more.
This makes 4 batches of 12-16 cookies, depending on the size you like.
NOT OPTIONAL - crack some sea salt over each cookie ball before you put it in the oven.
Bake at 350 for 12 minutes, cookies should have golden tips, but still a little soft.
This recipe is not my own but it's far and away the best I've found. Now go eat some cookies :)

I demand a bake-off.
2 cups shortening
2 cups sugar
2 cups brown sugar
4 eggs
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
4 cups flour
4 cups quick cooking oatmeal (any oatmeal is OK)
12 oz chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup raisins
Heat oven to 350. Cream together shortening and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until smooth. Sift or mix together all dry ingredients. Add gradually to other mixture. Add choc chips, nuts, raisins. Add oatmeal (may have to mix this in by hand). Drop cookies. Bake 8 min. on greased cookie sheets.

Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) has spoken some on Blizzard's apparent philosophy of not needing devs to play their own classes they work on provided there is reliable data and things are done in a balanced manner among other things. But they aren't oftentimes, so if this continues to be the philosophy which seems to include the mistakes in does in design, why is it adhered to?

Blizzard

I wouldn't say that's our philosophy at all. I don't remember exactly what Greg said, but there is an expectation that a developer working on an aspect of the game is going to be very knowledgeable about that aspect of the game. We're just a very large (and growing) team, and the game itself is very expansive, so we generally don't expect e.g. a character animator to keep up with the ins and outs of top-level Arena gameplay.
There's probably a theoretical state in which someone makes up for a lack of direct game experience through a massive amount of research, but I'm not personally aware of any developers for whom that's the case. It's certainly not the case for our class and PvP designers.

Can you spill the beans on when 7.3 might hit the PTR?

Blizzard

™

"Class Fantasy" has been the major buzz word of this expansion so far. For many people I've spoken to, it feels like that nebulous term refers to the Dev Team's fantasy for the class rather than that of a class' players. I feel this disconnect between the players' fantasy and the devs' vision/fantasy for classes is responsible for a lot of the hostility and tension after class balance/tuning/rework passes.
Will you guys look at incorporating more player feedback moving forward to give players a greater sense of connection and ownership of their particular class/spec? If yes, what would that look like?

Blizzard

Class Fantasy is certainly a subjective topic, and we listen to as many players and developers as possible when carving out their unique identity, inevitably there will be differing opinions.
There is an inherent risk in moving further in a particular direction with class fantasy for any spec because of this, but if we believe confindently in a vision for that spec that is unique, cathartic, resonant, and fits their design kit, we go for it.
Is there any spec in particular where you believe we are not hitting the mark?

Describe a typical "Day in the life" of a class developer.

Blizzard

Thanks, shyguybman! This is a fun one :)
The typical day starts with, as with most tech jobs, email. Blizzard's an international company and people around the globe play World of Warcraft, so there are often fun surprises waiting in our inbox in the morning. Addressing those and making sure we're providing information to the rest of the team is a priority.
After that, what we do tends to be dictated by which phase of a project we're working on. If we're in ideation mode, there's a lot of brainstorming, looking at reference media, talking to our lore team about historical reference within the game, and thinking about both the fantasy we're trying to communicate and the gameplay we're trying to engender. Brainstorming also tends to be a collaborative effort - a lot of times we'll grab a meeting room and have an hour-long jam session that generates hundreds of ideas, which are then winnowed down to the unique/fun/cool/fantasy forward ones.
Implementation is where the rubber hits the road - you've come up with a fun idea, and now it's time to actually build it. Building an ability typically involves using our internal tools to author spells, scripts, and hook up the spell visuals our artists have created, as well as a healthy dose of Excel for working out correct numbers. This process typically involves a great deal of coordination - talking with other class designers, encounter designers, artists, and programmers to see if the particular way in which we've built this ability is right for the game.
After that comes iteration, polish, and playtesting - is the ability actually cool in game now that it's built? Does it fit into the class the way we expected it to (ideas are always better in our heads)? Do other people find it fun to play with? Does it deliver on the fantasy? Does it feel impactful? Is the timing of the swing correct? How does it look in the context of other people using their awesome abilities? Is it readable in PVP about what's going to happen? This phase is also where the inevitable bugs from initial implementation tend to be corrected - our QA teams are awesome and find all sorts of fun edge cases and interactions with our very large game. It's also where a lot of ideas either die (because they weren't good enough) or are completely re-imagined with only the original elements remaining.
I really have to emphasize: nobody does it by themselves. Design's an intensely collaborative endeavor, and while one person may ultimately be responsible for the implementation of a given thing, everything that ends up in the game is the product of the hard work of dozens of members of the team.

Blizzard

I think the most prominent feature of any day for me is working with other developers from all over the team to execute a new project. I talk with engineers about the best way to implement new awesome visual things without breaking the other 90% of the game (or whether we are ok with doing that in a targeted fashion), artists about how to push rosy-tinted spell effects of our memories of WoW into the modern era of gaming, and designers about what feels good to play, what is the right design given all of the information we have available.
I think the best thing I can say about the WoW dev team is that everyone is super passionate about the game, and each of us in our own way. We foster a culture of each developer pouring themselves into something they believe in, all while receiving feedback and iterating as far as possible.
Whether a day full of meetings, or a day full of getting the feel of a single ability just right, it's always a challenge, and always rewarding to see the vision of a project become reality.

Blizzard

As Forge noted, good question!
Starts with e-mail, mostly making sure nothing happened that needs some immediate response.
Some days I have a bunch of feedback on my mind after a night of raiding or running dungeons or playing a new alt and will likely go talk to the relevant people about things while it's still fresh on my mind.
I check my bug list many times per day to make sure nothing was assigned to me that needs immediate attention, or if something is sent my way that needs to be escalated to someone else or just needs to be resolved by a different person. I tend to fix simple bugs like typos or very obvious missing checkboxes bugs when I see them.
Throughout the day I tend to have a whole lot of open windows on my machine, whether it's an excel sheet planning out something new, or email drafts of half finished thoughts, or a half dozen wowedit windows open from whatever I was working on last, and figure out which needs attention next.
I'll spend a bunch of time building new things or trying to figure out why what I made isn't working as expected. It's about inevitable that at least one point during the day a discussion (or multiple discussions) spark up around me that I either should be listening to or involve myself in. Sometimes this goes on for 5 minutes, other times much longer.
I ask a lot of people around me for help when I get stuck on a problem, or if I need advice on the best way to approach a problem I ran into or how to fix a tricky bug. It's a lot of back and forth discussion with the people around me, and thankfully they're all within earshot.
Once a project is finished, I either end up revisiting it due to feedback or further iteration, or move onto another project.

My question for you is about the dev's mindset on the relationship between a spec's damage profile and its overall throughputWhat kinds of levers do you guys choose to pull to correct for these kinds of discrepancies and what kinds of warning signs do you use to identify that tuning is out of step with the reality of a spec's ability to deliver damage effectively over a tier? Should we expect as a class to be performing better than other specs in terms of overall throughput if we're living with a greater-than-average number of limitations (this appears to be the conventional wisdom, but does not appear to be backed up by tuning)?

Blizzard

This is a super complex issue to be sure. High level: our goals are that each spec should have their moment to shine, and that a given dungeon, raid tier, or outdoor situation should play to strengths and weaknesses. The delta between damage profiles is a very fine needle to thread to feel good, but not so swingy that changing composition feels mandatory. Our goal of pushing utility more to the forefront also helps carve out unique contributions to a group.
Whether dungeoning or raiding, chances are your group is different from most other guilds, even your own party likely varies from dungeon run to dungeon run. WoW is at its best when a unique group of players is presented with a problem and they have to solve it with the tools available to their composition. Improvisation, coordination, and limitations provide some of the best gameplay in WoW, and a victory is so much sweeter when your tools are concentrated, powerful, and unique rather than broad, generic, and overlapping. The exact same thing can be said for solo gameplay in the outdoor world.

Will there always be (a) spec(s) that have no RNG involved in their rotation? With all the RNG in Legion gameplay, I'm starting to get tired of it and want something stable and known.

Blizzard

Three of the simplest games I can think of are Tic-Tac-Toe, Black Jack, and War. Representing the spectrum from 0% to 100% RNG. Each game can be taught in just a few sentences. Black Jack clearly stands out as a game you can play and enjoy for many more rounds than the other two. Middling amounts of randomness provides something that the abundance of and lack of do not – a change of state that requires you to react in an unpredictable way. In war, randomness is so extreme that there is nothing to react to, you just win or lose. Tic-Tac-Toe games may vary slightly, but like War the outcome is practically predetermined. Black Jack does have basic strategy, but there's just enough randomness to react to and change your decision like doubling down, splitting, tracking a hot or cold deck.
The core take-away here is that either end of the RNG spectrum provides a fairly dull experience, where somewhere in the middle provides you with a multitude of things to react to and think about and is ultimately more engaging.
Certain specs in WoW do this, but not all. Fire is one of the specs that immediately comes to mind, and if we made a simple change like giving Fireball 100% crit, I would probably get bored and look for another spec to play. Subtlety, which we sometimes affectionately refer to as our Master Planner spec, has little to no RNG but requires you to think very very far in advance - which on the surface doesn't have randomness, but because of the length of the loop can be affected by the environment quite a bit: did a poison cloud just pop under you, did that mob you were about to use a finisher on get blown up by someone else, etc. Your randomness is expressed by things throwing a wrench into your long term plan as opposed to a short term one. We try to provide as many unique options to players as possible when it comes to our plethora of specs, and some specs have ways to curb a bit of it. Ultimately there is a threshold when a spec becomes both too simple and too smooth where the experience becomes flat and boring.
I have definitely felt the frustration at a chain of bad RNG in a row, but I would so much rather have peaks and valleys where I can be occasionally frustrated contrasted by Huge moments of awesome, than have a flat experience and tune out from being bored.

A Windwalker question but with an answer about general tuning:

Blizzard

Since this is high-ranking post asking something that essentially every spec megapost is asking somewhere--to wit: "why don't I do more damage"--I'm going to talk a little about tuning before this is done. I will see if I have time for the "scaling" followup, but that is a lot more abstract and probably technical. But since the real issue is that a raid tier is starting and (as always) every spec is lobbying hard for the case that they need to do more damage, we wouldn't be totally complete here unless we tried to talk about it a little. For reasons I'll get into below, it's almost impossible to answer this topic to only an individual spec: it is innately a discussion about all specs at once.
Class balance has always been a very difficult topic to have a detailed and open discussion on. For many reasons. Nearly all players are heavily invested in the fortunes of one particular spec. Everyday experience with DPS balance is through the lens of a particular play group's experience (and that can vary widely between groups). Like arguing about what the climate trend is based on the weather on a given day, it's virtually impossible to draw meaningful inferences about what's “really happening” from what you happened to see. Even when doing as well as possible to aggregate data about live performance, a host of different variables and assumptions can cause different people to draw different conclusions.
Tuning DPS output (which I'll use as the example for this discussion) is often described as a math problem, but more practically it is a science problem--given a limited set of observations, what do we think is actually causing them? A certain set of data may be in front of us showing a supposed “ranking” of DPS, say from community logs, but that chart reflects an amalgamation of a wide variety of factors: the “true” balance (that ethereal concept we are trying to tease out), the encounters/situations being examined (and the methodology for averaging/weighting them), current fluctuations in gear and other bonuses available to each spec, player skill, community perception of the spec (which absolutely impacts measurable DPS), selection bias in what data is being used/examined, and others. The question is not “who is doing the most DPS on this chart” (which is, of course, obvious), but “how would it look if any or all of the above factors were changed in certain ways?”
And that doesn't get into the element of the process that consists of design judgment: who should be strong in what situations and why? What is the right time/method for a tuning change? Is a given problem a big enough to be worth any disruption to the live game at this particular moment? What is the degree of certainty in our current conclusion, and the probability that we're making an overcorrection?
It's hardly an exaggeration to say there are probably as many opinions on balance as there are people who pay attention to our game. And because, in this sort of game in particular, a player's experience is often so bound up in one particular character, the feeling that it's the most important thing in the world to watch over a particular spec's lot in life is powerful. More than with any other aspect of the game, working on getting it right requires the gut check of letting go of the idea of making everyone happy. Buffing your spec potentially makes you feel like everything you do is that much easier for you—that all of your concerns in this entire game are that little bit lightened. Next to that, few people (understandably) are very interested in all of the things I listed above. But our only option is to take the opposite approach: it is a careful, measured process that largely avoids the emotional valence of knowing that people are being made happy or sad by the change (in this way it is unlike almost all of the other aspects of design being discussed here today). We don't completely avoid it—the long-term upwards creep that's caused by our bias towards buffing rather than nerfing is interesting evidence of that. But this is an area where we have to remain steadfastly focused on the view of all 36 specs taken together, not on any one person who's in front of us and asking us about it.
Nobody likes to be below average. Half of you currently believe you are at this moment, using whatever metric is most important to you. Actually more than half, because there are many datasets you might look at, and the one that says you need help is the one that sticks in your mind. So to the great majority of you that wish class balance were in some way different from how it is at any given point in time: we understand, and we hope we can help you do the same.

Are you guys happy with the removal of spirit and how it has effected legion for healers?
How happy are you guys with Innervate/Wisdom particularly with how potent they are?
Artifact Abilitys (sic) were a key feature in Legion, some are awesome (Sindragosa's Fury) but other's both in terms of feel, power and animation are lackluster (Tyr's Deliverance). Is this something that is too late to address, or could be done via new Artifact Traits/Legendarys? It would be awesome if all classes could feel powerful when they use their artifact ability.
How close attention do you pay to overall healer balance?

Blizzard

Making mana matter more consistently to healing required making mana dymanics more stable across an expansion. The progress of secondary stats across an expansion increases the pace of play for all specs, but for healers it simply did so far too much. From a gameplay perspective that is--healing became increasingly spiky and spammy, and the underlying reason for that was that content was tuned around healers that were increasing able to cast whatever they wanted nonstop. The goal for healers should be the same as other specs: stat increases across an expansion after how you play, but are within acceptable bounds of pacing at both the start and the end.
Innervate and Wisdom: abilities that characters can use to support other characters are a class part of RPGs. We like having them, and if anything we think they've too much been ironed out from WoW. Yes, they introduce potential tension and social debate about how to use them--but it's not clear why that's anything other than a good thing.

Monk/Priest/Paladin - This could be a really dated question, but what was the reasoning for shifting Mistweavers away from healing on damage done? I thought it was cause y'all didn't want a healer to rely on damage, but we see this now in Discipline Priests and, to a degree, Holy Paladins. Thanks!

Blizzard

Designing alternate playstyles of a spec that differ too much from the standard baseline spec can be highly contentious. I think it's certainly possible for us to design an alternate spec playstyle that works, and is fun/balanced with iteration time. However, we often get into trouble when we stray too far from the spec's standard playstyle if a large portion of the playerbase vehemently dislikes the alternate playstyle. That's a problem for us even if a similarly large portion of the playerbase enjoys the alternate playstyle. So usually what we end up with is a talent or two that supports the alternate playstyle, but we end up tuning them to be weak so that the contentious playstyle doesn't become the norm. That's how we've operated in the past, but we're not entirely happy with the situation. I think when we put playstyles/rotations into the game, we should be happy enough with them to stand behind them and say – if this playstyle ever becomes the norm, we are okay with it. That probably means we should rein in how off-the-wall some of these playstyles are, while maintaining as much difference as possible.
Discipline Priests were completely redesigned from the ground up to be this damage-dealing Healer spec. Everything from talents and artifacts supports it. That's probably the kind of comprehensive spec direction that's required to make a healer into a true damage-dealing healer spec that is enjoyable to hopefully a large portion of players who play the spec. Additionally, Priests have two healing specs, so it was the correct class to add this alternate damage-dealing healer spec.
There's also the question of – what's the benefit of this alternate playstyle? In the case of Fistweaving or Melee Holy Paladin, is it they get to do more HPS than normal ranged Holy Paladins? I think the answer is probably not, because then very quickly the only way to play the spec (according to the community) will probably be to be a Melee Holy Paladin, which we don't necessarily want. Probably they just get to deal more damage, which is something that won't often feel required.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this, but I do think that innervate/wisdom are perhaps too powerful, If one week I have a wisdom, and the next week I don't i feel like crap the week I don't have it. Or if i am in a competitive relationship with another healer (Can argue whether or not that is how healers should view each other if you want) and they get an innervate that makes me angry, because suddenly i may not be able to compete. Or people look at logs and see someone who is fed innervates and think "I need this to perform!". All of those are negatives, that with a "nerfed" innervate/wisdom would be less important.

Blizzard

This is a hard design problem, and I'm mostly going to point out that these two things are fundamentally in opposition: 1) Classes should have more interesting/unique abilities added back in (or newly added) that do things that other classes can't do. 2) Any situation where I'm not at the top of a particular meter make me feel bad.
Interesting abilities, almost by definition, make someone better in some situations than in other situations. Innervate is worth having because getting an Innervate is better than not getting an Innervate. These issues are inseparable, and on some level we have to trade one goal against the other.
When I said this seems like a good thing, a lot of that is looking back on the history of WoW--the very sorts of abilities and memories that people commonly cite to us as things they miss--and noting the texture caused by caring about (in this example) what other players were in your group due to their support abilities or buffs. Worrying about whether you lost 5% damage because you didn't have Arcane Intellect certainly mattered (meters existed then as well), but people understood it as part of the basic precepts of an RPG that not having it (and wishing you had it) was sometimes the situation you were in.

Are we likely to see the cap on the amount of legendaries we can equip raised during the expansion?

Blizzard

We've talked about granting the ability to wear 3 Legion Legendaries as part of the reward for the Argus questline in 7.3. It's not really something that the game needs one way or the other, but it would be cool. We've also talked about (mostly jokingly) about removing the Legion Legendary limit entirely in the week(s) before 8.0 launch, and letting people go wild west with them. That's probably not going to happen due to power level reasons, as it would be a very jarring when you level from 119 to 120 and suddenly all 12+ of your legendaries you have equipped turn off.

How do you feel trinket design has been so far in legion, specifically for casters? How do you balance trinket strength in each raid, is making raid trinkets the best available a priority?

Blizzard

There's two parts to this, and I think its important to separate them: trinket design, and trinket balance. Overall, we're pleased with the variety of trinket designs we've provided in Legion. There's a breadth of complexity available, interesting mechanics to play with and explore from encounter to encounter, and we like trinkets feeling closely associated with the bosses who drop them.
Trinket balance is never going to be perfect, and some of that is deliberate in our designs that have different gameplay impact. Switching between trinkets that are better for some fights and not others is a design goal, which is quickly made more complex by spec-specific quirks like cooldown alignment.
We do agree it's tough to make a comparison between two different trinkets, both because the trinkets often do complex things and because it's not easy to get two trinkets of the same item level. We'd like to improve that readability, and reduce the impact of class-specific mechanics like Recklessness as the dominant factor of which trinket is best in a given situation.
We are also very reluctant to change trinkets once players have them, which contributes to the perception of imbalance. If you spent 5 bonus rolls or wrangled a deal with a guildmate to get your Draught of Souls or Unstable Arcanocrystal, it's going to feel really bad if we nerf it. We've applied a light touch to trinket tuning this expansion to avoid undermining that investment.

/u/Seph_WoW What's your secret?

Blizzard

Sephuz's Secret is kind of a reference to a scene in Kung Fu Hustle, where The Beast (the bad ass bad guy) shoots a gun at his own head point-blank and catches the bullet with his fingers, then says something like "In the world of kung fu, speed determines the winner." I always thought that was really bad ass, and Sephuz's Secret is a speed-themed item (movement speed, haste) so there it is.
I've always loved flavor text (probably stemming from my MTG days) and love adding references to names/flavor text of things. I could probably do an entire writeup just on references in the names and flavor text of legendary items. Many of them players have figured out (e.g. Tak'theritrix's Shoulderpads) and it definitely makes me really happy to see when people get it.

How are items designed? Do you have a specific stat budget that has to be spread out on items? What decides which stat goes on which item?
How is tier sets designed? Since all 3 warrior specs seems to have crit as their worst stat. Should tier sets not be desireable?
Currently most pieces have this awful stat to us. So I'm thinking there has to be some amount of it, to offset powercreeping?
I also understand making trinkets such as DoS is problematic when Fury and Arms can benefit so much from it. Will trinkets be tailoreed with such outliers in mind in the future?

Blizzard

Itemizing the equipment in a dungeon or raid is all about creating exciting moments and interesting choices. The spread of secondary stats on items, whether its off-set pieces or Tier, creates valuable texture over time. We purposefully give Tier a fairly even spread of secondary stats to ensure that if stat priorities shift from patch to patch, it won't fall out of usability. Putting the best stats on Tier gear isn't viable for every class (because many specs have wildly different stat priorities), and we think the game of gear acquisition is more fun when the player has choices to make.
Part of creating that texture, and building a foundation for exciting moments to occur, is making sure each dungeon or raid tier feels different from the previous one. When the best-in-slot Critical Strike/Mastery belt drops and get equipped immediately, that's an awesome moment! However, those Haste/Versatility leggings that just dropped aren't the best stats, and there's no alternative until the last boss... maybe the Tier legs have better stats, or maybe there's a Legendary in that slot to experiment with? Having players ask those questions, and find the answers for themselves, is an important part of making items fun to chase after and acquire.
To speak to the process itself a little bit, itemizing a raid generally goes through a few stages: Determine the boss layout, decide where Tier, trinkets, and weapons drop (since these categories are the hardest to move around later in development due to how much they impact other item placement), fill in gaps with offset items, name everything, and finally choose secondary stats. By leaving stats for the end, we can be confident in the placement of each item, and set their stats accordingly. For example, if all of the items on the first three bosses have Critical Strike rating, that's not great texture. We'd much rather have those items spread throughout the raid, so that the specs who like Crit continuously have something to look forward to.
Thanks for the question, blackshirtguy! Item design, especially stat budgeting and layout, is one of those things that tends to feel "behind the scenes", so having an opportunity to talk about it is awesome.

PvP talents are neat and seem to be doing a good job balancing PvP however have you guys ever thought of making some of them regular talents to spice up the pve balancing for some classes.

Blizzard

We're very happy with the strategic tradeoffs that PVP talents afford, and in cases where one is particularly cool ( springs to mind) we have made them into regular talents.
If there are particular PVP talents you really love, let us know! :)

I know that WPvP is only a big deal to a small portion of the community but on my Home server of Emerald Dread(RP-PVP) it used to be the end game for the majority of the server. With that said the current state of the game has lead to a massive decline in WPvP due to sharding, lack of World Defense, legendary items, Player on Player damage. So my question is does blizzard have any plans in the works to help with WPvP? Particularly in regards to the damage players do to each other and does blizzard have any plans or interest in adding "PvP situation" nerfs to some legendary items that do millions of damage to single or groups of players? Thanks and I really hope you get to my question as it is an important aspect to our server and anything would be appreciated.

Blizzard

Designing WoW PvP is a sort of tug-of-war between two philosophical ideas. On one side, WoW is an MMORPG where you have freedom of your gear choices and where power progression is core to the game. On the other, competitive WoW PvP gameplay feels best when players are on an even playing field in terms of power gained from items. Historically we've always favored the former idea most – that power progression should matter everywhere. It definitely is a more elegant design – you gain an item, and it increases your power everywhere in the game. But in a world with legendaries, artifact weapons and powerful trinket abilities we felt in Legion we should make an effort to flatten the power curve by disabling legendaries and trinkets, and by applying the “stat templates” to players in competitive PvP environments like battlegrounds and arenas.
When it came to world PvP, we decided not to apply those rules to players for a few reasons. Say you're fighting a world boss on a PvP realm as a healer and another player attacks you. Do we disable your trinkets and legendaries, and set your stats to something you may not want in a PvE situation? We're not sure yet if that's in the best interest of the player, because those creatures and encounters could be balanced around assuming you may have a legendary or two.
We could disable your trinket effects or legendaries as a damage dealer from happening to just only players, but what about healers? If I'm in a World PvP encounter against creatures or bosses, and I get into PvP combat, do we reduce your healing done to other players in that situation just because you're in PvP combat?
Those are just some of the challenges we're facing with World PvP and why we haven't simply flipped on stat templates. While we don't have anything to announce yet, we definitely aren't completely satisfied with class balance in world PvP so I would expect changes in the future. We're very interested in your feedback here, so keep it coming!

Do you have any plans to redesign the current PvP Elite Gear gearing system and their respective seasonal ensembles?

Blizzard

The way in which we've distributed the Elite appearance in Legion is something we've been discussing a lot internally throughout the entire expansion. While we have nothing concrete to announce yet, an idea we've been entertaining is returning to a classic system where you would earn different slot appearances at different rating milestones. So imagine getting 1800 in Arena and you get the Elite chest appearance instantly, then the shoulders at 2100 etc.
Again, we have no immediate changes planned yet but do expect changes in the future. Happy to hear your feedback!

Are there any plans to give the tournament UI to normal arenas? Everything that it does is currently possible with an addon (all elements are exposed) but none exists at the moment. I feel like this would be a good way to help people learn different classes abilities instead of having to learn what every single class's spell effects look like. One barrier to entry is knowing what battle cry looks like, then what serenity looks like, what ascendance looks like, what icy veins looks like, and what chaos blades looks like, and so on and so on and so on. Having this UI as an arena UI would really help people learn.

Blizzard

We probably wouldn't copy the tournament UI into normal arenas directly. I could see a hypothetical future state in which we add some of the functionality it provides to the base Arena UI (similar to how we recently added a tracker for trinket cooldowns), but as of this exact moment we haven't made plans to do so.
(As an aside, for any tournament organizers out there, as of 7.2.5 the UI we use for official Blizzard tournaments will display automatically for anyone using the /invitespectatormatch command!)

My experience with legion healing in arena is quite negative, its not very fun, lots of insta gibs, damage is way to high in my opinion, which makes arena miserable as a healer. I no longer play healing classes in arena, and my friends that still play healing in arena say they don't enjoy it anymore.

Blizzard

The pace of damage has definitely increased in 7.2.5, which puts a larger stress on healers than other roles. We're very happy with the current pace of high-end Arena matches outside of a few specs, and we want to preserve this speed of Arenas.
We're planning on buffing most healers in the very near future with throughput increases (aimed at Arenas mostly), but we understand that healer frustration in PvP right now isn't just limited to the amount of raw healing they can output. Buffing healers too much can lead to long games (dampening), and the perception of 'unkillable healers' in random battleground situations.
I'd like to thank all the healers that have been providing constant feedback about their experiences healing in battlegrounds, Arenas, and RBGs. We've been taking this feedback into account when we make changes for healers, and we'll continue to iterate on their toolkits until we're more satisfied with playing a healer in PvP.
(PvPers, remember to thank your healers!)

I always make sure to thank the enemy healers when I mc them off a cliff

Blizzard

Same!

Hi guys, thanks for doing this. My primary concern is casual PvP. Are there plans to bring back gearing rather than templates? Or more specifically, to allow stat customization in instances?

Blizzard

The goal of templates is to level the power playing field between players. Instead of researching your ideal stats, instead we set their distribution through the template for you. I think our question for you is: why do you want to change your stats? We suspect it's because you feel you have a better stat distribution than us, and that you can increase your character power if only you had the freedom to set your own template values. That may be true, but if we balance your spec or class assuming you have our templated stats, and you min/max out a better distribution then that causes balance issues. Suddenly now we have to balance specs and classes assuming a variety of different stat distributions, which is challenging assuming you could argue we have balance issues already with the strict templates set by us.
What I think could be useful is give feedback on your specific stat template. Is the stat template good for battlegrounds, but feels weak in arena? Does it make your spec unfun, or doesn't fit the kit? Are you looking for a different type of playstyle for the spec through stat customization, such as sacrificing health for more damage for a glass-cannon feel?

Mostly is that a lot of specs have some form of aoe built into their rotation due to PvE (or single target abilities that end up cleaving). This ends up being problematic/frustrating in PvP when you have so many spells that are mainly used for single target damage even just as your rotation, yet end up having some cleave that breaks CC. It's kind of frustrating and makes the gameplay feel very unfluid due to this.

Blizzard

Legion has pushed us a bit too far into the world of passive cleave on abilities, and we'll keep this in mind as we change classes in the future. As a PvPer it can be frustrating when your abilities break crowd-control on a target, especially when you're not specifically targeting them.
However, I -do- like the choices you make with the volatility of some spells via talents. Your example of the level 90 tier for Mages is a great example - do you want your Frostbolt to hit harder but might have a chance to cleave (and break cc?). In this example, we also need to keep in mind that there should be a healthy alternative for PvP Mages in that talent row who don't want to opt into this gameplay style. Arcane has a great alternative with Erosion - Fire+Frost need to take talents in the row that aren't optimal in PvP if they want to get away from the auto-cleave.
Continue to leave us feedback about spells that are breaking crowd-control when they are completely out of your control, and we'll evaluate and address them on a case-by-case basis in PvP.

Where does the PvP team stand on solo queue arenas these days?

Blizzard

During our last PvP Q&A on March 9th, Brian Holinka addressed our thoughts on solo queue, and we haven't changed our thoughts on it since then.
Here's a link to the section of the vod where he talks about solo queue: March 9th PVP Q+A

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