A: But we'll still be seeing the same bosses? Mr Smite will still daze us?
CS: Oh sure, you'll still fight Van Cleef, Mr Smite.
TC: Oh yeah, you'll see Cookie up there, they'll all be updated.
CS: There might be new mechanics for Van Cleef, for example
TC: Van Cleef might not just have two stealthed buddies, you might get waves running in or whatever.
CS: We went to a lot of trouble to pick which ones to update - we knew we wanted to do two of them, but there are a lot of dungeons to choose from. Scarlet Monastery was one...
A: Are there plans for more?
CS: It's left open, and it's something that we've talked about doing in patches before this but it always got bumped to the end of the list. Whereas here I think we felt like it was the time because we are going back and it fit really well here.
TC: But we don't want to do it too much; to the point where we're just updating old content. In Cataclysm, with the exception of Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, everything else is a new instance, completely new bosses. There are more new bosses than there ever have been in an expansion before. We don't want people to get the impression that we're just taking everything and bumping it up to level 85 and calling it a day.
CS: And those two, if you compare it to our Northrend lineup, are in addition. We always consider whether it feels like there are enough dungeons, or do we want to add more. But those two things, in the grand scheme it doesn't take a ton of time. Re-working Onyxia wasn't a lot of time for us, but we wanted to do something special for the players.
A: Game mechanics are changing too; how long have you been thinking about changes and the addition of Mastery?
TC: We've been seeing this coming in some extent since Burning Crusade when we were expanding the talent trees for the first time, and trying to balance them for the different parts of the game. In order to do that we had to insert a character power in some strange places. So a talent originally did ‘this', but now we need to add ‘this' and it will also do ‘this' and we need it to ‘that'. And so we got to the point where the talents are really bloated.
We were analyzing this at the end of Lich King and really wondered what we could do about it. So Mastery is an attempt to simplify the whole system. We have to wait until there's a good opportunity to make big changes like that. A: Do you think it will inhibit different builds or encourage non-cookie cutter builds?
TC: Our hope is that it actually does the opposite: that we have more crazy combinations because you won't have to worry about missing out on that five percent damage. So instead you can take ‘this' crazy talent instead of ‘that' crazy talent.
CS: And those talents will define your character more. Plus 10 percent damage is a flat out thing that everyone has, versus when I cast a heal there's a chance it will proc a shield or that my character will run faster. Those kinds of things are more defining even though they're not required. Right now a lot of people skip those talents even though they're cool because they want the 10 percent damage talent instead.
And I like that you get ‘mastery' but going deep in the tree to earn more points in that one specific stat. That will have diminishing returns, so by putting all your points in one tree it doesn't mean you're going to get that stat up to fifty or sixty percent, it will stop eventually. So it might encourage people to spread out their points.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010