Personal and Professional Practice 3: 'Research' Studio Brief - Blizzcon 2014

World of Warcraft - Items, Class Changes and More!
This was a very interesting talk that was mainly covering the new items that were going to be added and then also the changes that have been changed throughout the expansion of Warlord of Draenor. The talk was mainly broken down into these little sections which where very interesting to listen to and I learned a lot about the changes in the new expansion, and it's making me really want to go out and play it even more now.

Class Design Goal in Warlords of Draenor
- Re-evaluate what makes classes fun

- Strike a better balance between class and encounter mechanisms

- Stop the PvP arms race as it was getting out of control

- Reduce frantic pace of healing

- Make numbers easier to understand

Class Changes That Happened
- Item squish and numerical returning

- Class ability pruning, they looked at abilities and asked whether they needed that certain one

- Crowd control reduction 

- Healing game play improvement 

What Makes Abilities Fun?

- Strong fantasy 

- Awesome visuals and sounds 

- Cool game play effect

- Powerful

- Interactive

- Clear purpose

What Makes Abilities Not Fun?
- Reduced abilities

- Inconsistent fantasy

- Too situational

- Balanced to mediocrity 

- Lack of feedback

- Unreliable 

- Complicated

They then went onto speak about a particular class abilities, in this case the restoration Druid. They looked at the abilities that they came with in the beginning and then looked at how they had changed over the years as each expansion came out and saw that by Cataclysm there were just too many.

Core game abilities: 21

2004 game abilities: 39

Patch 1.12 abilities: 46

Burning Crusades abilities: 51

Wrath of the Lich King abilities: 57 

They had a lot of feedback on this and knew that they layout and sheer number of abilities was just confusing and people didn't know what half of them did or when to use them so they started to look at optimising this, but there was little success, as they got rid of some, new ones where added. 

Cataclysm abilities: 57

Mists of Pandaria abilities: 57 

So, now the usless buttons are gone, and they have made a real effort in this new expansion to get rid of these abilities that weren't being used or were thought to not be as good. 

Warlords of Draenor abilities: 41

Why is Healing Not Fun?

- Health bar whiplash, goes from full health to near death very quickly but can be restored only for the effect to happen again

- Smart heals are too smart

- Healing rotation doesn't effect the person you want

- Mana scales too much in a problematic way

Solutions

- Double the effect player health, you have more time to heal this way

- Smart heal picks injured instead of most injured

- Increased base re-gen on healers

- Reduced availability of spirit so its not as common but still powerful

What Does This All Mean?

- More tactical and less reactive

- Slower pace

- More decision making

- Mana is sufficient and powerful

Itemisations Philosophies and Lessons
There is a lot of work that goes into getting higher quality look and it takes about 3 hours to gain the necessary materials and crafting to upgrade otherwise, so they want everything to be more streamline in this sense with three simple steps; kill, loot, equip.

Kill. Loot. Equip

- Raid set tokens directly convert into items

- Hit/expertise removed

- Reforging removed

- No upgrades

- Focus enchants and gems on fewer slots

Stat Customisation

- Less work to swap sets

- Removed caps and breakpoints

- Use existing systems like cooking, jewel crafting and enchanting

More Useful Loot

- Duel stats on main amour slots

- Seperate role items from amour slots

- Dodge and parry are now bonus amour

- Set bonuses swap based on spec

Variety

- More sources of loot

- Quests items can now upgrade to be rare or epic

- Chance at bonus effects in dungeons and raids

- New stats: Versatility and multistrike