Shacknews Dragonflight Combat Team Interview with Brian Holinka and Graham Berger

Posted 2022/11/24 at 5:34 PM by Archimtiros

Highlights

Making a new class is a big undertaking. Years ago while talking about Dragonflight, they decided they wanted playable dragons, but figuring out how to accomplish that was the hard part! They need to do more than breath fire, they need to fly. A dragon class that can fly is cool too, but what about races that don't have horns and wings and dragon things? That line of thought led to the Dracthyr Evoker combined class.

Now it's an even more complicated process, with a new race, a new class, tons of new abilities, and looking for a way to make it innovative - that's where the Evoker's Empowered Abilities came from.

Demon Hunter was a big step forward for WoW, the double jump alone was an eye opening moment which opened up a lot of the game world for them. Evoker was an opportunity to bring that dynamic action to a caster class.

The release of Classic and the team playing the game again, re-experiencing the feeling of earning talent points every level inspired them to revisit more traditional talent trees. While they'd added a few rows to the "modern" talent tree since its implementation in Mists, that had grown stagnant, and wasn't really doing anything anymore.

It took several internal iterations before realizing they weren't getting what they wanted, leading Holinka to take the team offline, dedicating a three days to nothing but talking talents in order to determine what they wanted the system to accomplish, looking at talent systems in other games, and brainstorming prototypes.

Players had already embraced spec identity over class identity, the idea of being a Protection Paladin rather than just a Paladin - an idea that didn't really exist up through Cataclysm. That became a key factor in the new talent trees being unique to each spec in contrast to their vanilla counterparts.

There's still going to be some issue of groups demanding players allocate a certain talent for their groups, and it's something the team wants to be mindful of. Players are generally much more fixated on PvP rating, Mythic+ rating, or item level than inspecting specific gear/talents now though. If you're picking off-meta talents, but you're also a 2400 rated arena player... well who are we to question you?! Similar things happen in Mythic+ or raids - proven performance over perceived choices. That said, they've heard player concerns and want to keep an eye on it.

The talent system has a few features to help address those issues though. Changing talents was a much more involved process in Classic - hearthing back to a city, paying gold, reallocating the entire tree, etc. In most cases within Dragonflight, you can simply change talents on the fly.

It was also a point of feedback for players during Dragonflight - finding out which talents players felt were absolutely necessary and expected to be had. Many of those things that were in the first version of the talent trees, such as battle rezzes and heroism effects, are now simply baseline. Other spells are in positions where they either can't be skipped or can be very easily be taken to path down the tree.

The idea of a tank specialization for Evokers definitely came up, but they'd already added several tank specializations to the game, while only one healer and no ranged damage dealers. From the start, the team started brainstorming which of the five flights magic fit each role and specialization. They knew they wanted a ranged damage dealer (the first ever added post-launch by the way!) and landed on Red/Blue for that, while Green is obviously related to healing, so that felt like a good fit and natural theme to explore as a second specialization.

There was an early idea of associating customization with gameplay - Dracthyr scale color affecting the color of your breath attack, but upon seeing all the customization ideas that were ultimately created, they decided they didn't want to be locked to red or green - they didn't want to arbitrarily lock players out of the cool new purple color. There's something attractive to tying together visuals, but self expression is also very important, so they decided to completely separate the two.

When the team talked about shaping and animating the Dracthyr, they wanted to make everything as dragon as possible and really lean into their unique customization aspects. There were technical challenges to fitting a lot of traditional armor appearances onto the Dracthyr body, especially the wings and tail, but ultimately they felt like it would take away from that dragon fantasy and so they scrapped the idea altogether in favor of specific Dracthyr armor.

WoW's code base is constantly evolving, and it's funny when looking at various implementation which is reflective of its time. Some spells were build 5 or even 10 years ago when they had different tools, and they have new features now, but updating every single one to take advantage of a new API call might actually do more harm than good! It's almost a house of cards, where if something is working, it's better not to mess with it until they really need to change it.

That said, things are constantly being updated. The entire talent system and UI revamp demanded it, the renderer is constantly getting upgraded with new and better lighting, and so on. WoW has a very mature codebase and like any engine it has its idiosyncrasies and pet peeves, but its also very powerful and one of the easiest games to implement new ideas that Brian has ever worked on. In this case, the fact that it is old is actually a benefit and allows them to make content even faster than they might otherwise due to the huge pool of existing features they have to pull from.

A good example of this came up during early Evoker development. They wanted to test Fire Breath, but they didn't have Dracthyr models yet, so they asked "well, what else has wings and combat animations to use them?" So they found the Stoneborne Gargoyles from Revendreth, hooked it up as a faux-Dracthyr, and had Gargoyles breath fire for awhile to get a feel for how Fire Breath would look in action.

Because the Dracthyr Evoker are combined, there isn't much functional distinction between what is a racial ability and what is a class spell, but the team felt it was important to specify which is which. Other designers actually had to stop Graham from adding more racials because the Dracthyr abilities were already becoming too good! Initially they tried only Wing Buffet, but early internal playstests felt it was weird that they didn't also use their tail - like virtually every other dragon - so they had to add Tail Swipe. Soar was the really challenging one though, especially figuring out how it would work compared to regular Dragonriding.

The team first wants Empowered Abilities to be unique to Evokers, but they may eventually decide to roll it out to other abilities. There have always been suggestions of "charging up" various abilities to different levels, but the mechanical challenge is "why would I release at one, why would I release at two? If it's just holding for more damage, the answer is always hold to max." Figuring out how to make it feel good and interesting at every level was a major design point and it's a question that needs to be asked for every ability - what does Aimed Shot do at level 2 that's different from 3? These are the interesting nuances they want to explore with empowered spells.

Comment by PeacemoonOne thing I would like to ask is, why don’t Dracthyr have a ‘running wild’ racial that lets them just fly normally? So many people upset that Dracthyr can only fly on cool-down with Soar.

Running wild acts like a mount, so you have to turn it off to interact with something. Something like that would be great for Dracthyr who don’t want to have to ride a mount to fly.Comment by LautnerOne thing I would like to ask is, why don’t Dracthyr have a ‘running wild’ racial that lets them just fly normally? So many people upset that Dracthyr can only fly on cool-down with Soar.

Running wild acts like a mount, so you have to turn it off to interact with something. Something like that would be great for Dracthyr who don’t want to have to ride a mount to fly.Comment by AuriOne thing I would like to ask is, why don’t Dracthyr have a ‘running wild’ racial that lets them just fly normally? So many people upset that Dracthyr can only fly on cool-down with Soar.

Running wild acts like a mount, so you have to turn it off to interact with something. Something like that would be great for Dracthyr who don’t want to have to ride a mount to fly.Comment by katkalyOne thing I would like to ask is, why don’t Dracthyr have a ‘running wild’ racial that lets them just fly normally? So many people upset that Dracthyr can only fly on cool-down with Soar.

Running wild acts like a mount, so you have to turn it off to interact with something. Something like that would be great for Dracthyr who don’t want to have to ride a mount to fly.Comment by NarhwalsBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesComment by HranthaerBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesComment by bluebird91Barely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesArcane ChargesComment by apedosmilBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesComment by ScaryfoxI really appreciate learning about their thoughts surrounding the Dracthyr Evokers because they definitely put a lot of effort into them. Same thing with the talent trees because I still see potential. Sure, I had over on several classes. It's been worth it so far, however. I wonder how much you can do when people have to switch to please strangers or how a lot of people give the impression they would dump their main in a heartbeat after a guide called it trash.Comment by SchattensangBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesArcane ChargesComment by KerathrasWoW's code base is constantly evolving, and it's funny when looking at various implementation which is reflective of its time. Some spells were build 5 or even 10 years ago when they had different tools, and they have new features now, but updating every single one to take advantage of a new API call might actually do more harm than good! It's almost a house of cards, where if something is working, it's better not to mess with it until they really need to change it.Comment by bluebird91Barely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesArcane ChargesComment by LobscotchMaybe 10 expansions is enough and it’s time for WoW 2.0? Just sayin.Comment by TorewinA suggestion to answer the aimed shot question:

1.) Never make it do 'more' damage. That's silly.
2.) You you the variables you have right now - number of targets, more up front / dot, lead with those - Aim Shot hits 1, 2, 3 targets (isn't there a talent already for this?). Obviously can come up with more variables, but those can fit with a lot of abilities - Halo for priests, Avenger shield for prot paladin, Greater Pyro can be more dot / upfront damage, etc. Would change the meta up completely!Comment by justintalon22One thing I would like to ask is, why don’t Dracthyr have a ‘running wild’ racial that lets them just fly normally? So many people upset that Dracthyr can only fly on cool-down with Soar.

Running wild acts like a mount, so you have to turn it off to interact with something. Something like that would be great for Dracthyr who don’t want to have to ride a mount to fly.Comment by justintalon22Barely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesArcane ChargesComment by warlocktankBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choicesArcane ChargesComment by SaadiaEven if they keep denying a tank spec for dracthyrs I can't help but think there's a good chance it will come, when the story justifies it, meaning when the Aspects get empowered again and Wrathion becomes the new Aspect of the black dragonflight and shares with the dracthyrs the secrets to become a tank.Comment by PeacemoonI mean it probably doesn’t help that a lot of the flashbacks for Dracthyr depict them fighting in melee with halberds.Comment by VSozonovBarely an excuse to exclude a tank spec. Black dragon abilities are the obvious tank choices