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[Interview] Blizzard's Greg Street on new systems in Cataclysm
What precipitated the removal of spell power, defense and similar item statistics?
The problem was that we had these competing stats, like intellect and spell power. Intellect didn’t really do much except affect the mana pool for spell casters, so it wasn’t super-exciting for them. Spell power is what they really cared about on their gear and we felt that instead of having one lame stat and one exciting stat, let’s just make them the same thing.
We removed armor penetration because it was just not balanceable. It was a thing where the more you got the better it was going to be and it was just never going to work out.
A stat like defense: Instead of being something exciting that tanks could try to gear for it felt like a barrier to entry so that they couldn’t even do their job until they hit some magic number.
So we just tried to get rid of anything that was problematic like that. Our philosophy is to try and make gear as widely attractive to lots of different types of characters. We want dropping a piece of gear to be exciting, we want players to make a choice about it, rather than having players say, ‘Well, this boss has one item I want and this boss has one item I want’ and feeling like the choices are limited.
Can you talk us through the removal of the Path system, where exactly did it fail?
Yeah, so World of Warcraft is a very complicated game. We have a lot of new players trying the game out every day and we think that Cataclysm will be an opportunity for a lot of players who haven’t played in a while to return to the game.
I described it recently this way: We have a designer on another team who plays WoW a lot but he took a break for a month or two to play Modern Warfare 2. When he came back he discovered in the meantime that we had reset all his talents and we had changed the functionality of some of his spells. And he said ‘you know, I know the game really well, but it was really hard to get back into it. I had to do a lot of research before I felt ready to play again.’ Feedback like that made us think hard about where the game was going and the kind of complexity that we were adding with every expansion.
When WoW was designed, the designers thought that it might last two or three years. Now it’s clearly going to be continuing on for a long time and we need to be thinking about the future, not just [Cataclysm patch] 4.0, but also 5.0 and maybe there’s going to be a ninth or tenth expansion some day, and those designers will still have to manage all this stuff. So we’re really focusing now on polishing what we already have in the game, making it exciting, having things that didn’t quite work out – rather just adding more and more new features. Blizzard really believes the maxim of “concentrated coolness.”
We’d rather have a few things with a lot of depth than just a lot of different things. With that in mind, we sat down and really tried to simplify the Path system and we realized we were taking out almost everything except for this idea of making glyphs cooler because glyphs really didn’t live up to what they could’ve been.
So we wanted to revamp the glyph system and realised, ‘why are we spending all this time on the Path system when what we really want to do is fix glyphs up. So once we made that decision, we thought, ‘we still really like the idea of paths, we still like the idea of having some kind of endgame progression, more character customisation, we really like the way it ties into the lore and the history of the world’ – so we might do it someday.
We have “Dance Studios” and other things on the wish list and never quite get to it, but still like the idea.
Going on to that idea of “ease of information,” one of the takeaways from this morning appears to be removing the necessity of third party websites.?
Yeah.
Is this something you’ve been focusing on?
Oh absolutely. There’s nothing wrong with third-party sites, we love those guys and they’ve been very loyal to us! But we also feel like the game needs to stand on its own.
The original philosophy was more ‘we’ll just throw all this stuff at players and they’ll figure out through trial and error how things work.’ They’ll figure out, for example, that some rogue abilities work better with daggers and others are really designed to work with other melee weapons, but the game never tells you that, you’re kind of supposed to look at the numbers and analyse it and know.
That just doesn’t feel like a game from 2010, you know? It feels like a game from the ’80s or ‘90s. So we’re really taking the step to have the game speak to players and say, “this is the intent, this is what you’re supposed to be doing here.”
So now when you level, for example, it says [in so many words], “You want to visit your class trainer and here’s what you’ll get if you do.” Before, there was really no way to know that and players would haphazardly visit their trainers and discover they’d travelled half way across the world and there was nothing to train.
How exactly has the glyph system been upgraded?
First of all, we’re going to change it to have three types of glyphs. Before, we had the minor glyphs, which were not really player power, and then the major glyphs, which were player power. Since they only got three choices for major glyphs, most players chose their three most powerful abilities. It’s really hard to make a situational ability compete with a main ability when you only have three choices.
So we thought that by adding more glyphs we’d give players more opportunities to make decisions. The new medium glyphs are some of the most interesting because they’ll affect abilities that you don’t use constantly but you do use, and they can be DPS or healing increases, but not necessarily straight-forward ones.
That was the first step, to break them up a little more. The second step was that glyphs are in a weird place where they’re not consumables like potions but they’re not as permanent as say, talents, either. And we know that some players walk around with stacks of glyphs that they’ll swap in and out depending on the situation. Then there was the added problem that there wasn’t really anywhere that would tell players what glyphs actually exist. So if you’ve just got your Druid to level 80 and you’re looking for some Druid glyphs, really your only options are to go to the auction house, the guild bank or a third party site and read them all.
So the new glyph UI is designed more about collecting all the glyphs for your character and storing them there. Any time you want to switch glyphs you can just use that. Glyphs are now permanent.
What does that mean for the inscription profession?
We’re going to focus inscription on more of the non-glyph aspect of the trade skill. So, Darkmoon Faire cards, trinkets, offhand items, things like that. We also want to tie the ability to change glyphs into inscription. We’re not sure of the name yet but the idea is that scribes would basically sell a kind of eraser and the eraser is what allows you to blank out your glyphs and write in new ones.
What changes are planned for the other professions?
Quite a few! We’re getting rid of some of the specialisations, like those in blacksmithing and leatherworking. We’re keeping them for alchemy and engineering.
We’re introducing the multi-skill concept, so particularly at low levels, if you make a hard to craft blue item, it might give you say three, four or five points rather than one.
A lot of the new trade skill recipes are going to have random stats on them – not completely random, but there’ll be a slight variable range, so that you can surprise yourself by discovering you’ve made a really good item on this particular occasion instead of cranking out fifty identical items.
Those professions will now provide the starter level PvP gear, so that players can get in on PvP by crafting sets for themselves or finding a crafter to purchase it from, and that will kind of feed into the system. We’ll then support that in future [PvP] Seasons, that [craftable] gear will keep getting better and better for the professions.
With 10 player raids now dropping the same loot as 25 player raids, where’s the impetus for players to make that extra organisational effort?
Our philosophy is to reward the 25 player raiders with more items, just not better ones. So for example, a 25 will get more badges per player than a 10, and at the heroic level, they’ll get more token pieces that can be turned in for tier items.
So players who are really focused on efficiency and that race to the being the “server first” should still gravitate towards the 25s, but now you don’t have to feel like you’re being stupid for playing a 10.
Can you talk us through Rated Battlegrounds and the implementation of conquest points?
Conquest points are really arena points, except that now you can earn them in both arenas and rated battlegrounds, so we just needed a new name for them.
Rated battlegrounds are designed to give you the exact same type of gear that you can earn through doing arenas but through a battleground environment. The idea is that you don’t need a permanent team as you do in arenas, but you do need a premade team.
We really want to put the onus on players to organise it so that they know the resilience level of the people involved, or the history of the players, or ensuring they have enough healers on their team. We don’t want them to feel like they lost the match because Blizzard match-made them with a bad group, for example.
We also wanted to have some type of authority figure, the organiser or leader, to be able to say, ‘Hey you’re AFK, we’re going to kick you and get someone else,’ that kind of thing. So we really wanted players to have to organise it.
After that it’s pretty much just a battleground, if you win, you increase your conquest points, if you lose, you don’t. There’s a cap on the number of conquest points you can earn in a week, so that if you really like battlegrounds you can do a lot of battlegrounds, if you really like arenas, you can do that instead, if you want to mix and match you can do that too. But there’s no impetus to do rated battlegrounds every waking moment of every day to maximize your efficiency.
And your battleground rating can’t go down?
It wont go down except at the very highest levels where we feel that we have a pretty good estimation of the player’s own contribution and whether or not you just had a bad game or not. But for most players it will go up when they win, and stay where it is when they lose.
You’ve talked about the reforging system in the past, where’s that at?
Yeah, it’s really cool! It’s actually completely functional now. The way it works is, instead of being tied to trade skills, now there are NPCs in the major cities. You go to this NPC and tell them you want to reforge an item. The interface opens and you place the item in it. It then asks you to pick a stat to reduce, and then pick a stat to add. You can’t use primary stats like agility, strength and intellect, but you can use all of the secondary stats like hit, crit, haste, parry, dodge, things like that. Then you reduce one of the stats by – at the moment it’s 40% but to make the example easier, say it’s 50%. If you have 100 crit, you reduce that by 50, that then gives you 50 points to put on, say, hit. And the cost of that transaction is the vendor cost of the item, so if you later decide to sell that item, you’re not really out of pocket.
Oh, that is cool
Yeah, it’s pretty elegant: You can do it on any kind of item, a green levelling item or on a purple item if you didn’t need all that hit on it, for example. We don’t want it to be a way to get the “Best Possible” items, we still want those to be rare drops, but we want it to make the difference between an item being no good for you and making it useful.
The Mastery system: Do the bonuses change based on what talents you’re selecting within a tree, or is more “40 points gets you this much”?
Yeah, the point is to give players more flexibility in how they spend their talent points. As soon as you spend a point in a tree, the Mastery system says, ‘OK, you’re this kind of player.’ So if you’re a Paladin and you spend your first point in the Retribution tree, you’re now a Retribution paladin and you’ll get those bonuses. You can get up to a maximum of 51 points worth of bonuses because we actually want players to get to the bottom of a talent tree, if you spend more than that there’s no additional [Mastery] bonus but no penalty either. So we’re assuming that most players will get the full 51 points worth of passive Mastery bonuses from their talent tree.
How does the Mastery system feed into other systems?
There is a Mastery rating bonus as an item stat that will start showing up on gear, levels 80-85. If you have that, it’ll improve the passive bonuses unique to your mastered talent tree. There’s 30 of them, and that’s a way of ensuring mastery is important to everyone because it affects something that’s important to them.
There’s also a slight Mastery bonus you’ll get for wearing the correct type of armour, so for example, it’s a way of making sure warriors wear plate instead of taking mail or leather.
What are some of the benefits of guild levels and guild achievements, and how do you expect smaller guilds to compete against larger guilds?
It was really important for us to avoid making Blizzard out to say, “Guilds should now be built this way,” because guilds have existed as long as the game has existed and there are all kinds of different guilds. Some guilds are gigantic 500+ member guilds, there are very small guilds, there are people who have social guilds and then do their PvP and raiding with other guilds completely, so we didn’t want to come in and tell everyone they have to change the way their guild is organised.
So for example, the guild experience system is based on a certain number of contributors. In a small guild, everyone’s contributing and in a larger guild, everyone can compete for who’s being a contributor at that time. So a large guild might still have an advantage, but a 500-member guild won’t level ten times faster than a 50-member guild.
How do you weigh that against the fact that guild mergers and transfers are common? Will a player’s guild reputation status reset to zero when they transfer guilds?
When you leave a guild your “faction” rating – your guild reputation – will reset to zero, but it’s not going to be an insurmountable thing. We’re horrified by the thought of a player sticking with a guild that’s not a good fit for them, just because they don’t want to give up the benefits they’ve gained there. They’ll be able to get back up into the upper echelons of reputation fair quickly by doing things with their new guild.
How quickly? Could you provide some kind of estimate on how long that would take?
Yeah, I would say in the order of weeks or months. It’s something that we’re still tuning and it depends on exactly what kind of bonuses will unlock to guild members at honored versus revered or exalted.
We’ve also put in some hooks because we know that some people like to kick members out of a guild as a joke and we don’t want people to go to zero as soon as that happens. You really don’t lose any reputation until you join another guild.
Cool, and how about guild disbands, I take it that’ll wipe it entirely?
That’ll wipe it. It’s possible we could retrieve it, the information will exist somewhere, but probably for practical purposes it’s gone.
What precipitated the removal of spell power, defense and similar item statistics?
The problem was that we had these competing stats, like intellect and spell power. Intellect didn’t really do much except affect the mana pool for spell casters, so it wasn’t super-exciting for them. Spell power is what they really cared about on their gear and we felt that instead of having one lame stat and one exciting stat, let’s just make them the same thing.
We removed armor penetration because it was just not balanceable. It was a thing where the more you got the better it was going to be and it was just never going to work out.
A stat like defense: Instead of being something exciting that tanks could try to gear for it felt like a barrier to entry so that they couldn’t even do their job until they hit some magic number.
So we just tried to get rid of anything that was problematic like that. Our philosophy is to try and make gear as widely attractive to lots of different types of characters. We want dropping a piece of gear to be exciting, we want players to make a choice about it, rather than having players say, ‘Well, this boss has one item I want and this boss has one item I want’ and feeling like the choices are limited.
Can you talk us through the removal of the Path system, where exactly did it fail?
Yeah, so World of Warcraft is a very complicated game. We have a lot of new players trying the game out every day and we think that Cataclysm will be an opportunity for a lot of players who haven’t played in a while to return to the game.
I described it recently this way: We have a designer on another team who plays WoW a lot but he took a break for a month or two to play Modern Warfare 2. When he came back he discovered in the meantime that we had reset all his talents and we had changed the functionality of some of his spells. And he said ‘you know, I know the game really well, but it was really hard to get back into it. I had to do a lot of research before I felt ready to play again.’ Feedback like that made us think hard about where the game was going and the kind of complexity that we were adding with every expansion.
When WoW was designed, the designers thought that it might last two or three years. Now it’s clearly going to be continuing on for a long time and we need to be thinking about the future, not just [Cataclysm patch] 4.0, but also 5.0 and maybe there’s going to be a ninth or tenth expansion some day, and those designers will still have to manage all this stuff. So we’re really focusing now on polishing what we already have in the game, making it exciting, having things that didn’t quite work out – rather just adding more and more new features. Blizzard really believes the maxim of “concentrated coolness.”
We’d rather have a few things with a lot of depth than just a lot of different things. With that in mind, we sat down and really tried to simplify the Path system and we realized we were taking out almost everything except for this idea of making glyphs cooler because glyphs really didn’t live up to what they could’ve been.
So we wanted to revamp the glyph system and realised, ‘why are we spending all this time on the Path system when what we really want to do is fix glyphs up. So once we made that decision, we thought, ‘we still really like the idea of paths, we still like the idea of having some kind of endgame progression, more character customisation, we really like the way it ties into the lore and the history of the world’ – so we might do it someday.
We have “Dance Studios” and other things on the wish list and never quite get to it, but still like the idea.
Going on to that idea of “ease of information,” one of the takeaways from this morning appears to be removing the necessity of third party websites.?
Yeah.
Is this something you’ve been focusing on?
Oh absolutely. There’s nothing wrong with third-party sites, we love those guys and they’ve been very loyal to us! But we also feel like the game needs to stand on its own.
The original philosophy was more ‘we’ll just throw all this stuff at players and they’ll figure out through trial and error how things work.’ They’ll figure out, for example, that some rogue abilities work better with daggers and others are really designed to work with other melee weapons, but the game never tells you that, you’re kind of supposed to look at the numbers and analyse it and know.
That just doesn’t feel like a game from 2010, you know? It feels like a game from the ’80s or ‘90s. So we’re really taking the step to have the game speak to players and say, “this is the intent, this is what you’re supposed to be doing here.”
So now when you level, for example, it says [in so many words], “You want to visit your class trainer and here’s what you’ll get if you do.” Before, there was really no way to know that and players would haphazardly visit their trainers and discover they’d travelled half way across the world and there was nothing to train.
How exactly has the glyph system been upgraded?
First of all, we’re going to change it to have three types of glyphs. Before, we had the minor glyphs, which were not really player power, and then the major glyphs, which were player power. Since they only got three choices for major glyphs, most players chose their three most powerful abilities. It’s really hard to make a situational ability compete with a main ability when you only have three choices.
So we thought that by adding more glyphs we’d give players more opportunities to make decisions. The new medium glyphs are some of the most interesting because they’ll affect abilities that you don’t use constantly but you do use, and they can be DPS or healing increases, but not necessarily straight-forward ones.
That was the first step, to break them up a little more. The second step was that glyphs are in a weird place where they’re not consumables like potions but they’re not as permanent as say, talents, either. And we know that some players walk around with stacks of glyphs that they’ll swap in and out depending on the situation. Then there was the added problem that there wasn’t really anywhere that would tell players what glyphs actually exist. So if you’ve just got your Druid to level 80 and you’re looking for some Druid glyphs, really your only options are to go to the auction house, the guild bank or a third party site and read them all.
So the new glyph UI is designed more about collecting all the glyphs for your character and storing them there. Any time you want to switch glyphs you can just use that. Glyphs are now permanent.
What does that mean for the inscription profession?
We’re going to focus inscription on more of the non-glyph aspect of the trade skill. So, Darkmoon Faire cards, trinkets, offhand items, things like that. We also want to tie the ability to change glyphs into inscription. We’re not sure of the name yet but the idea is that scribes would basically sell a kind of eraser and the eraser is what allows you to blank out your glyphs and write in new ones.
What changes are planned for the other professions?
Quite a few! We’re getting rid of some of the specialisations, like those in blacksmithing and leatherworking. We’re keeping them for alchemy and engineering.
We’re introducing the multi-skill concept, so particularly at low levels, if you make a hard to craft blue item, it might give you say three, four or five points rather than one.
A lot of the new trade skill recipes are going to have random stats on them – not completely random, but there’ll be a slight variable range, so that you can surprise yourself by discovering you’ve made a really good item on this particular occasion instead of cranking out fifty identical items.
Those professions will now provide the starter level PvP gear, so that players can get in on PvP by crafting sets for themselves or finding a crafter to purchase it from, and that will kind of feed into the system. We’ll then support that in future [PvP] Seasons, that [craftable] gear will keep getting better and better for the professions.
With 10 player raids now dropping the same loot as 25 player raids, where’s the impetus for players to make that extra organisational effort?
Our philosophy is to reward the 25 player raiders with more items, just not better ones. So for example, a 25 will get more badges per player than a 10, and at the heroic level, they’ll get more token pieces that can be turned in for tier items.
So players who are really focused on efficiency and that race to the being the “server first” should still gravitate towards the 25s, but now you don’t have to feel like you’re being stupid for playing a 10.
Can you talk us through Rated Battlegrounds and the implementation of conquest points?
Conquest points are really arena points, except that now you can earn them in both arenas and rated battlegrounds, so we just needed a new name for them.
Rated battlegrounds are designed to give you the exact same type of gear that you can earn through doing arenas but through a battleground environment. The idea is that you don’t need a permanent team as you do in arenas, but you do need a premade team.
We really want to put the onus on players to organise it so that they know the resilience level of the people involved, or the history of the players, or ensuring they have enough healers on their team. We don’t want them to feel like they lost the match because Blizzard match-made them with a bad group, for example.
We also wanted to have some type of authority figure, the organiser or leader, to be able to say, ‘Hey you’re AFK, we’re going to kick you and get someone else,’ that kind of thing. So we really wanted players to have to organise it.
After that it’s pretty much just a battleground, if you win, you increase your conquest points, if you lose, you don’t. There’s a cap on the number of conquest points you can earn in a week, so that if you really like battlegrounds you can do a lot of battlegrounds, if you really like arenas, you can do that instead, if you want to mix and match you can do that too. But there’s no impetus to do rated battlegrounds every waking moment of every day to maximize your efficiency.
And your battleground rating can’t go down?
It wont go down except at the very highest levels where we feel that we have a pretty good estimation of the player’s own contribution and whether or not you just had a bad game or not. But for most players it will go up when they win, and stay where it is when they lose.
You’ve talked about the reforging system in the past, where’s that at?
Yeah, it’s really cool! It’s actually completely functional now. The way it works is, instead of being tied to trade skills, now there are NPCs in the major cities. You go to this NPC and tell them you want to reforge an item. The interface opens and you place the item in it. It then asks you to pick a stat to reduce, and then pick a stat to add. You can’t use primary stats like agility, strength and intellect, but you can use all of the secondary stats like hit, crit, haste, parry, dodge, things like that. Then you reduce one of the stats by – at the moment it’s 40% but to make the example easier, say it’s 50%. If you have 100 crit, you reduce that by 50, that then gives you 50 points to put on, say, hit. And the cost of that transaction is the vendor cost of the item, so if you later decide to sell that item, you’re not really out of pocket.
Oh, that is cool
Yeah, it’s pretty elegant: You can do it on any kind of item, a green levelling item or on a purple item if you didn’t need all that hit on it, for example. We don’t want it to be a way to get the “Best Possible” items, we still want those to be rare drops, but we want it to make the difference between an item being no good for you and making it useful.
The Mastery system: Do the bonuses change based on what talents you’re selecting within a tree, or is more “40 points gets you this much”?
Yeah, the point is to give players more flexibility in how they spend their talent points. As soon as you spend a point in a tree, the Mastery system says, ‘OK, you’re this kind of player.’ So if you’re a Paladin and you spend your first point in the Retribution tree, you’re now a Retribution paladin and you’ll get those bonuses. You can get up to a maximum of 51 points worth of bonuses because we actually want players to get to the bottom of a talent tree, if you spend more than that there’s no additional [Mastery] bonus but no penalty either. So we’re assuming that most players will get the full 51 points worth of passive Mastery bonuses from their talent tree.
How does the Mastery system feed into other systems?
There is a Mastery rating bonus as an item stat that will start showing up on gear, levels 80-85. If you have that, it’ll improve the passive bonuses unique to your mastered talent tree. There’s 30 of them, and that’s a way of ensuring mastery is important to everyone because it affects something that’s important to them.
There’s also a slight Mastery bonus you’ll get for wearing the correct type of armour, so for example, it’s a way of making sure warriors wear plate instead of taking mail or leather.
What are some of the benefits of guild levels and guild achievements, and how do you expect smaller guilds to compete against larger guilds?
It was really important for us to avoid making Blizzard out to say, “Guilds should now be built this way,” because guilds have existed as long as the game has existed and there are all kinds of different guilds. Some guilds are gigantic 500+ member guilds, there are very small guilds, there are people who have social guilds and then do their PvP and raiding with other guilds completely, so we didn’t want to come in and tell everyone they have to change the way their guild is organised.
So for example, the guild experience system is based on a certain number of contributors. In a small guild, everyone’s contributing and in a larger guild, everyone can compete for who’s being a contributor at that time. So a large guild might still have an advantage, but a 500-member guild won’t level ten times faster than a 50-member guild.
How do you weigh that against the fact that guild mergers and transfers are common? Will a player’s guild reputation status reset to zero when they transfer guilds?
When you leave a guild your “faction” rating – your guild reputation – will reset to zero, but it’s not going to be an insurmountable thing. We’re horrified by the thought of a player sticking with a guild that’s not a good fit for them, just because they don’t want to give up the benefits they’ve gained there. They’ll be able to get back up into the upper echelons of reputation fair quickly by doing things with their new guild.
How quickly? Could you provide some kind of estimate on how long that would take?
Yeah, I would say in the order of weeks or months. It’s something that we’re still tuning and it depends on exactly what kind of bonuses will unlock to guild members at honored versus revered or exalted.
We’ve also put in some hooks because we know that some people like to kick members out of a guild as a joke and we don’t want people to go to zero as soon as that happens. You really don’t lose any reputation until you join another guild.
Cool, and how about guild disbands, I take it that’ll wipe it entirely?
That’ll wipe it. It’s possible we could retrieve it, the information will exist somewhere, but probably for practical purposes it’s gone.
