Athalus Race to World First Interview with Morgan Day

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Athalus Race to World First Interview with Morgan Day
Warcraft Radio's Athalus spoke with Morgan Day on the Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First.

• The team has been working hard to make raid tuning a science rather than an art.
• They have used a lot of the level squish technology to add health mods to raid bosses, allowing easier adjustments for tuning.
• The Kel'thuzad encounter was tuned correctly, but Echo found a "clever use of game mechanics" late at night and the team wasn't able to address it fast enough.
• The team is happy with how the tier turned out, but they are taking the RWF length feedback to heart.
• Not having the final three bosses available on the first week caused guilds to have to spend additional time running splits for tier from these bosses.
• The team did not expect Halondrus to be as big of a road block. They realized having an encounter like this so early in the tier and the difficulty of the bombs was too much.
• Locking the last three bosses was done for story purposes, but the team had to decide whether or not they could QA them internally without a PTR test, and they are happy with how it turned out. It is not the template moving forward, but could be used when it makes sense.
• Phase 4 of the Jailer is not meant to be the most difficult part of the encounter.
• There has been a lot more emphasis on utilizing utility when designing raid encounters, and the Mortal Strike effect on the Jailer's heal for Phase 4 is an example.
• The Jailer not healing at all bug was extremely hard to reproduce.
• The excitement around tier sets has been heard loud and clear and they will continue in future tiers.
• The rules around trading gear between players will be talked about more soon. The special rules for trading tier were meant to stop "unfun" moments, but players still found ways around it.
• The team doesn't want loot trade rules to cause unfun moments for the general player just to deal with RWF issues.
• The team wants to create a more deterministic path to gear that heavily effects player power. This is the goal of the Creation Catalyst.
• The team is discussing the timing of adding things like the Creation Catalyst for the future based on feedback.
• The goal of the Great Vault is to always have something exciting for when you log in on reset. The team has been discussing how to make sure that you always get something useful when looting it.
• The team missed the mark on the amount of gold required for getting legendaries to higher item level.
• Being able to extend the fight past the Lords of Dread enrage was a surprise. Utilizing utility in a clever way is fun to watch.
• The plan for Shadowlands was always to have 3 raids.
• The team is excited to experiment with older content in Season 4 of Shadowlands.
• The ability to work from home has allowed the team to address raid issues faster than in the past.
• Blizzard as a whole has been trying to better their communication with players.
• Getting rid of the barriers to play with friends is a priority for Blizzard.
• The feedback against Shards of Domination has been heard loud and clear. They will likely not be important in Season 4 Sanctum.
• The team still wants tier sets to be part of the itemization in Season 4.
• 6-8 months is the general idea of how long a season should last.
• Morgan Day plays Final Fantasy XIV.

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