- Author: Luxrah
- Date: July 31, 2024
- Updated: July 31, 2024
- Expansion: WoW Classic
Classic WoW content creator Ebonhardt sat down recently with Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield (Aggrend) and Assistant Lead Classic Designer Tim Jones (OptimusJones) to talk about Phase 4 and the future of Season of Discovery. You can watch the entire video at the bottom of this article. Here are the highlights!
Design Decisions
The developers discussed the origins of the new Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. The Vampiric Touch rune for Priests drops inside this dungeon, and it seems the dungeon was born as an extension of this single rune discovery!
In discussing the new boss that was added to Molten Core, Jones explained that the dungeons that were converted to level-up raids were chosen because they were less frequently played in the Vanilla leveling process, which allowed the developers to explore them with a little more depth. For Molten Core, they were dealing with an iconic raid that was much more familiar to most players, so they wanted to take a subtler approach that enhanced what was already there. That also led them to Heat levels and fire resistance requirements.
Future Content
The approach the developers took to Molten Core with new difficulty levels and an emphasis on resistance gear are not necessarily indicative of what they’ll do with future raids. Greenfield emphasized that Blackwing Lair “won’t be the shadow raid;” they don’t want this phase to mark the beginning of players being forced to carry around full sets of every type of resistance gear. They’re more interested in emphasizing the particular vibe associated with each raid, and for Molten Core, part of that vibe was in the preparation, including fire resistance.
It was also mentioned that we may get AQ20 rather than AQ40, which would give Blizzard a chance to bring the less appreciated raid of that phase of Vanilla to the forefront.
The team is happy with the instanced versions of the two world bosses, Azuregos and Lord Kazzak, and they plan to do similar things in the future to allow more players to experience these previously very exclusive encounters. Jones made reference to “a certain encounter” that will become important next phase. He was most likely referring to Thunderaan, the elemental that players face as part of the quest to create Thunderfury.
Finally, Greenfield addressed the length of phases going forward: “It’s not gonna be 3, 4, 5 months, but it’s not gonna be 4 weeks either.” So we can expect Phase 5 to land sometime in September or October.
PvP Events
The developers said that PvP realms are still perfectly balanced, but they recognize that it may not always feel that way in reality. Blackrock Mountain was bound to be a major focal point for world PvP on PvP realms, so they decided to take advantage of that with the Blackrock Eruption event and see what would happen there, since this is the first time they’ve been able to experiment with world PvP on numerically balanced servers.
Ultimately they are looking to make some adjustments to the PvP portion of the event, although they are very happy with the PvE portion. They’ve been excited to see the spontaneous world PvP events that players have come up with themselves and are looking at how to give players the tools to facilitate those in the future.
Where Nightmare Incursions were an attempt to imitate the Cenarion quests in Silithus and make them into something more accessible, they think they made it too lucrative and repeatable. Those lessons led them to the Blackrock Eruption dailies, which they feel have been very successful.
What Happens to SoD Characters When the Season Ends?
Blizzard has acknowledged in the past that this is a tricky question. Greenfield said they can’t move our Season of Discovery characters to the current Classic Era realms with all of their powerful seasonal items. But they have no plans to quickly shut off the seasonal realms either, so they will have some time to figure it out.
He ended his explanation with, “I can’t see a world where we just delete characters, that’s just not gonna happen.” So most likely our seasonal characters will live on somewhere, it’s just a question of where.
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