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Warcraft Radio Interview with Ion Hazzikostas
Warcraft Radio sat down for an exclusive interview with Ion Hazzikostas about the recent Ny'alotha race to world first. Here is a recap of the interview. Be sure to watch the full video for all of the context and additional information!
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Warcraft Radio sat down for an exclusive interview with Ion Hazzikostas about the recent Ny'alotha race to world first. Here is a recap of the interview. Be sure to watch the full video for all of the context and additional information!
- Race to World First
- It was really exciting to see a North American guild come out on top for the first time in awhile.
- The team monitored the race in real time and fixed issues as fast as possible.
- The Ra-den pre-immunity issue was hotfixed immediately so that immunity class stacking wasn't encouraged on the fight to bypass mechanics. The difference between this and the respawn issue was that Limit hadn't killed Ra-den yet.
- The mythic race has shed light on bugs in mythic raids a lot faster than in the past.
- There is a bit of a trade off in that the team wants to keep final boss mythic encounters somewhat exciting and secret which results in them not being tested by a large variety of guilds or situations.
- Most mythic encounter strategies end up a little different than the team intended.
- The issue that caused the team to despawn N'Zoth wasn't necessarily a bug, but a workaround that needed tuning so that the damage wasn't healable, forcing players into the portal.
- The team wants to avoid excessive randomness in encounters that continually cause wipes.
- The intended mechanic for 25% was a safety mechanism to spawn the gateway at 25% if phase 2 was initially skipped by dpsing the boss down to 25% without going in the portal for phase 2 yet, but the bug was that it was doing it EVEN IF phase 2 was completed.
- Carapace was a little easier than intended, and in retrospect the damage requirements of phase 1 was too low.
- In the past, these bugs only affected a small group of people, but now that they are public the team is learning how to improve communication and fix issues.
- There are no plans to have mythic raids open simultaneously between NA and EU. They don't want the raid opening at bad times or having to delay opening, and most of the race comes down to learning and conquering the fight first.
- Corruption System
- Overall the team is happy with how corruption turned out, but there are still tuning issues. They like the choices and trade-offs that it brings to fights.
- There are multiple tiers of each corruption so that you can wear more pieces of gear with good corruption without having excessive corruption negatives attached.
- Corruption is an 8.3 system and is NOT the future of WoW.
- Ny'alotha Encounters
- The ball mechanic in the Xanesh encounter is the team trying to develop new ideas in raids that haven't been seen before.
- Ion likes the Wrathion encounter, especially as a first fight, because it creates spectacle while also having some interesting mechanics.
- Ion also likes the Carapace fight, particularly because he likes the idea of fighting your way into N'Zoth.
- Sometimes datamined abilities in the encounter don't make the final cut but remain in the files as they iterate on fights even prior to PTR testing.
- Queen Azshara originally had an extra phase with unique adds that didn't make the final cut.
- Ion believes N'Zoth lives up to the standards of previous final boss encounters.
- Future Mythic Encounters
- The team is working on making sure bugs are solved before the race starts while also improving communication so that they fix these bugs faster when they pop up.
- Final bosses of raids will likely still not be tested on the PTR for mythic to keep the surprise.
- The team is happy with the 6 months between raid tiers as it's a good balance to allow people to make it to the end of the raid that have slower progression.
- Battle for Azeroth Ending
- There are definitely already hints building up to the future of the story.
- Ion talks about the disappointment some felt for N'Zoth's end, but at the end of the day we are the heroes of the story and we will always defeat villains and make way for new villains to enter.
- The team wanted the final cinematic of the expansion to focus on you as the hero and your efforts to build up your Heart of Azeroth being important to victory.
- Shadowlands
- There is a lot more to talk about with Shadowlands in the NEAR FUTURE.
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