Events
Developer Interview: Morgan Day and Katrina Yepiz
With Patch 11.1 Undermine(d) hitting on Tuesday February 25th, we met with Blizzard developers Morgan Day (Associate Game Director) and Katrina Yepiz (Associate Game Designer) to address our most pressing questions for Season 2 of The War Within.
Watch the video of our interview or read summaries below!
Table of Contents
02:22 Q-1: When updating legacy dungeons, what key factors influence the decision to rework an encounter, such as the upcoming changes to Tussle Tonks in Mechagon Workshop or removing the Mind Control tech on the squirrels?
Morgan: Thematics play a huge role, and it’s not a coincidence that we're going to Undermine where there's tons of Goblins and are bringing back The MOTHERLODE!!
We always like to make sure we have a dungeon pool that can highlight different strengths and weaknesses of our classes. A dungeon like Theater of Pain is focused on big lieutenant creatures and there aren’t as many massive pulls in that dungeon, which is what the Season 2 dungeon pool was lacking.
When deciding whether to change a mechanic, it's about presenting new challenges and injecting novelty so that it still feels fresh. Often, we'll just make changes to add some novelty and maybe smooth over some rough edges. For instance, Kul’tharok in Theater of Pain previously hinged a lot on magic dispels, which put a lot of pressure on the healer. We wanted to spread that challenge out across the full group instead of leaning on the healer while still retaining the core fantasy of the boss.
As for Tussle Tonks in Operation: Mechagon Workshop, that encounter really focused on positioning the bosses at specific points in time. We wanted to keep those challenges and the spirit of the encounter, but the changes were for quality-of-life so that executing that mechanic would be more consistent, fair, and tactical.
The squirrels are an interesting case. The Mind Control tech is super fun. We love when players have opportunities to use their tools and create advantages using those tools, but for some cases, the tool can be so strong that it almost feels like cheating if a mechanic isn’t “doable” otherwise. That damage was scaling with keystone level no matter what your item level was. So an approach there would have maybe just been to make it scale with the player's power level instead of the dungeon's power level, and that could have resolved that problem.
An example of where we did do that is in Priory of the Sacred Flame; if you have a
Paladin or a 
Priest, you get a cool buff, and that buff was procc’ing damage. That damage was scaling with keystone level. We actually made that change to only scale with the Priest or Paladin so that it doesn't have as much infinite scalability. It feels like a cool bonus but isn't going to be the difference between potentially a keystone level or more of player power. 07:19 Q-2: In recent blue posts, the team acknowledged the community's concerns over the state of Mythic+ in Season 1. Other than participation numbers, what other data points do you use to determine whether a Season is successful?
Morgan: With the introduction of new Seasonal activity in TWW, the definition of what is successful for a Season has really changed. The addition of Delves have made it so that players who may not have participated in Seasonal content in the past are participating now. This has made some impact on the Mythic+ pool because there were people who were doing Mythic+ to participate in the Season who may now be doing Delves instead. We feel that this is still healthy for the game, as more people are doing things that they enjoy. A major focus for Season 2 was to ensure that the people who want to do Mythic+ are happy with Mythic+, so we focused on how that Seasonal progression within Mythic+ feels and making sure that it’s satisfying.
09:00 Q-3: There have been a number of changes coming to Mythic+ in Season 2 to combat some of the pain points of this past Season. Which changes do you think will have the biggest impact, and why?
Morgan: The goal is to get people into the right difficulty sooner.
Mythic+ is something where we feel like we had a lot of work to do and could do better. Going into TWW Season 1, we had that keystone level squish. But the way that played out because of how the seasonal rewards were set up, it almost acted like a double squish. There were players who had 10+ levels of progression in Dragonflight that felt like they were only being appropriately rewarded from like +7 to +10. There was a big new challenge being added from Challenger’s Peril, to new affixes, to Fortified / Tyrannical. There were big steps up at each level and we really wanted to focus on making that progression feel better for the player who might not have a static group to play with and PUGs a lot more.
So, we rescaled the dungeons. Mythic 0’s are back to a weekly lockout and drop Champion gear, so hopefully M0s can become an on-ramp for some of those players again. We also wanted to make sure that those early keys were rewarding. One of the other goals for Season 2 was to make deaths more punishing in keystones at the higher ratings where that’s more interesting to play around, vs. how overly punishing Challenger’s Peril can feel to a PUG group at lower ratings. We wanted to add a new achievement with Keystone Legend to incentivize those people who are looking for that extra bit of challenge to push higher than the rewards gained at 2500 rating and provide a cosmetic reward to chase.
We've already recognized that there's almost two audiences within Mythic+ and you could argue that there's three. There's the people who are in those lower keys, there's the people who are just looking to get their +10s done, and then there's the people who want to push really hard. We made some major changes going into TWW for those people who want to push high keys by essentially removing the weekly Affix differences for a more consistent experience and adding Resilient Keystone achievements for that audience. So, when you defeat all the 12s, your keystone level won't deplete below that, etc. That's something that we added for that audience as well, because there was kind of a big gap between Keystone Hero and titles.
14:38 Q-4: Some feedback from the high-key community suggests that using pre-key buffs such as those gained from Follower Dungeons have been granting unintended advantages. Do you have any plans to change how non-group eligible buffs are handled in Mythic+?
Morgan: Yes, that's a bug that we're looking to resolve with Season 2. It is actively being looked into right now, and will be fixed before Season 2 goes out.
15:12 Q-5: What is the general discussion and approach to managing a strict meta like we saw this Season, and how do you reconcile class or spec tuning impacting other aspects of end-game, such as Raid or PVP?
Morgan: The meta feels more narrow to each of the different audiences discussed previously. We have a lot of data that shows the success rates that we look at. There's interesting data points in different ranges that aren't really present or able to be seen by the community that we keep a close eye on. In terms of making changes to the specs and not affecting other elements of the game, class balance is an art and it is ever-changing and ongoing. When you look at how content impacts community perception about balance regarding both Mythic+ and Raids, we could make zero changes to classes going into one season to the next and, just because of the landscape of the content, the meta could shift drastically. Different classes have different strengths and weaknesses. Even just in Season 1, it was so interesting to me to see how
Restoration Shamans were really powerful due to all the Poison dispels in the dungeons, and then we buffed 
Protection Paladins and suddenly Restoration Shamans fell off and then 
Discipline Priest were most present in those very high keys despite us not even touching the healers. It's a very complex web of interactions between our classes, which we think is really fun to play around and look at how we play off these other members in your group and build those strengths. We are constantly looking at class balance week over week. We actually have a pretty fixed schedule where we both look at our classes, but we also look at our dungeons and raids in terms of the combat team and smooth out some potential rough edges like how Tankbusters were too powerful/prevalent in TWW Season 1 and we used community feedback. Maybe we missed the mark on our content changes when we made those tank changes, because we said we wanted tank health to feel like it isn't as spiky. And then we had to look at what the incoming damage looks like vs. the tank's tools in their toolbox. Those sides of the coin are really important that we're constantly looking at each of them and how they interact with one another. We have a cadence that we regularly look at those things together as a group and try to make sure that that experience is reflected in the community and they're having a good time with the dungeons and the raid as it were.
20:16 Q-6: What dungeon are you most excited to see make its way into the dungeon pool for Season 2?
Katrina: The MOTHERLODE!!
Morgan: Operation: Floodgate
21:46 Q-7: We’d love to hear more about the internal process when it comes to designing a raid inside a new patch. Does one team decide the story direction (next patch is Goblins), and then the Encounter team gets to run with that and make a Goblin-themed raid, or is the process different?
Katrina: It’s very fun to come to the point in the process where the story has been established and we then have to fill in all the pieces with the encounters. The pitch for Undermine is that Gallywix is retreating into his headquarters and just sent out all his top employees into the streets to take over, and the encounter team ran with that and had an amazing time coming up with the whacky Goblin mechanics and leaning into that tinker aesthetic and coming up with promoter Rick Reverb, whose whole focus is working with sonic machines and dropped amps from the sky.
Morgan: Looking at the War Within and the World Soul Saga holistically, we knew from the onset that we had to go to Undermine since it’s an expansion that was primarily set underground. If we were ever going to go to Undermine, it has to be now. There were lots of fun Easter eggs that were planted all throughout the expansion. It's not a coincidence that there's these interspersed Goblin encampments all throughout the Ringing Deeps, and then, it turns out the Ringing Deeps is where they busted the hole in the wall to get to the Undermine. It’s very fun to get to visit this location. It's a place we've wanted to do for so long, and this felt like the perfect opportunity to go there.
24:10 Q-8: What is your top theme to design encounters for?
Katrina: Any opportunity to work with a brand new culture. It's daunting to come up with something new for something you've never seen before, but with WoW in particular, you have 20 years of player expectations of what a creature does and extrapolating on that has been really fun, especially with Goblins in 11.1. Being able to design towards that with some fresh perspectives has been a joy.
Morgan: I’ve always loved incorporating Mind Control into encounters and both Goblins and Old Gods check that box.
26:00 Q-9: What is the approach to designing mechanics that are challenging enough to not be boring, but not overly difficult or frustrating, and how do you determine where that line is?
Katrina: It’s a constant balancing act. When it comes to designing mechanics, I start with whether the mechanic meshes well with the story or the concept of the boss. Is the mechanic fun? Is it repeatable? Can I come back in four weeks and still have some type of challenge with this? Or am I fully mastering it? And there's a variety – we want all those things across all the bosses of the raid. On the flip side (tuning), when it comes to designing something challenging enough, does this particular mechanic have enough time to tell what's happening? Does the player have enough time to react? Even with, you know, Raid encounters, they have such a gravitas, like you see a giant dragon swoop across your screen, that needs to take a certain amount of time to really have its epic-ness. It's really just finding that balancing act of what's enough time for players to react? What's enough time to tell a story? What feels good? What feels fun and exhilarating for the player? That's top of mind for encounters across the board.
Morgan: I have two trains of thoughts. One, what difficulty is it? When we think about how difficult the challenge should be, it has to be viewed through the context of what raid difficulty we’re doing. When I think about Normal raids, you're allowed mistakes, so how many mistakes are you allowed to make before you wipe? There's no one mechanic that should just instantly wipe you on Normal unless that's maybe the end boss and even then I would argue maybe don't do that. On Heroic, maybe it kills you if you make a mistake, but it doesn't kill the whole raid. The rules get a little muddied for arguments about boss 1 difficulty vs. endboss difficulty, and then for Mythic, every mistake kills you instantly no matter what, right? It all comes down to where we are and what the context is. If by far the most challenging part of the fight has a huge jump up in difficulty where it's punishing to make a mistake and it's 15 minutes into the fight, that's exhausting. That's not going to feel very great as a player. We've kind of stepped away from long end bosses because of this exact problem. It feels so bad to wipe 15 minutes into a fight because the fight gets progressively harder.
29:39 Q-10: Secret Mythic Phases…always a huge topic of conversation during the Race to World First. It seems like the element of surprise is generally well received. What’s the consensus on when, if, and how to implement them?
Katrina: We love Mythic phases. Part of Mythic is the spectacle. We have the Race to World First going on and when we want to do a Mythic phase, we think about when it might make sense to inject something like that. Does it fit the boss? Does it feel extra special as a result of when we do them? When we put a secret or a twist in and it's obvious, it doesn't feel quite as surprising or exciting. We have to be very careful when we plan to add those types of things.
Morgan: We never want to set the expectation that we're always going to do this because then it's not really a secret. We talk a lot about novelty within the team to try to keep things fresh. We know Seasonal content is exciting, but also it's easy to fall into the developer “trap” of what we did last time. As a player, you want to see new and interesting things and constantly try new ideas. One of the beauties of working on World of Warcraft is that there's always something new we can try and if it works, awesome. We can put it in our utility belt of options we can use in the future and if it doesn't work, don't do it again. The community will be more than happy to let us know that they didn't like it. We're always listening for that and excited to hear that. It's a tool in the tool belt, but we only want to use it when it makes sense and when we have a really cool idea. We also need to be careful not to make that aspect feel like the true version of the fight so that no one misses out on a cool story moment. Making sure everyone can experience the epic story is something that we have to be considerate of when we're building these epic Mythic encounters.
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