WoW devs Ana Resendez & Clayton Stone on PvP, talents & class changes in Season of Discovery

World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery is set to launch on November 30, and its overall direction has led to many questions among the Classic community.

For those who don’t know, Blizzard announced Season of Discovery at Blizzcon, and it was widely seen as at least partial confirmation of the oft-requested Classic+. Players have new abilities and buffs, unlockable via the Rune Engraving system, which will allow them to assign specific Runes to one of three armor slots in the initial phase of the game.

Alongside these power spikes, new experiences will be uncovered and a 10-man raid adaptation of the beloved Blackfathom Depths dungeon will be added to the endgame. On launch, the level cap will be set at 25 before advancing to 40, 50 and then the usual endpoint of level 60.

With all these new additions to an already solid formula, Dexerto sat down with Associate Production Director Clayton Stone & Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez to get the lowdown on what to expect.

Where did the inspiration for Season of Discovery come from, within the broader context of previous seasonal experiences/realms?

Ana Resendez: Season of Discovery is our second season, as you mentioned, and it is something that the team is really excited to bring to the public and for the players to come and play. The inspiration came from taking a look at what Classic means and what’s in the Classic universe.

One of the main things that we want to capture in Season of Discovery is making sure that Azeroth is the main character of the game. How we can explore those familiar places that you know already but maybe add a little bit of a twist to it. Definitely, the inspiration came from “What does Classic mean for us, where do we want to explore, and where do we want to go next?” Those are some of our main inspirations.

Also, when we launched the Classic Beta, we started with level bands and saw huge success in having the level 30 band. We’d created a new meta, and players went in and played and created new characters and a meta of “What’s the best item at level 30, and how can you maximize X, Y and Z.” We thought that it would be a really cool opportunity to bring the essence of that into the new season and add a lot to it too.

It’s not just getting a new perspective on the leveling journey that we have ahead in Season of Discovery, but it also brings a little bit of a twist so we can start having some extra steps on the way and creating new experiences in that time frame.

Clayton Stone: Ana nailed it. I think listening to the community has been such a core component of the Classic journey so far. As we wrapped up our last season and we were looking at what’s next, we saw the baby steps that we took in the last season where we did some twists on the existing content and the level-up speeds. Something that we hear consistently from the community is we want to see class changes or class additions. We want to see new content, and we want to do it all in that classic Azeroth.

So, when we look at Season of Discovery, we really think that we’re fulfilling a lot of that desire and we’re doing it in a seasonal space, which allows us to take some pretty wild swings. Particularly with like the class design that we’re doing, we can see what players respond to and what they’re really into. We’re really excited for it and we think it’s going to be really fun when it launches in just a couple of days.

Have talents been altered heading into Season of Discovery? Particularly in reference to allowing players to build towards the new class roles like Mage Healer.

AR: Short answer, no. There’s not going to be huge changes. I wouldn’t say they’re completely off the table in case there’s a certain interaction that we didn’t foresee, there might be very, very small adjustments, but right now, there are no changes.

Most of the fun in “Hey let’s go out and explore these new classes and roles,” is going to come from the Runes themselves. As we mentioned earlier, one of the things that we really want to get from this season is that we balance for fun. We want to make sure that every single class has an ability or something that they’re really excited to go and play. So it’s definitely something that we are using as our philosophy to where we want these roles and classes to go.

I know that we have mentioned Rogues can now tank, and Warlocks can also tank. But a lot of this is not necessarily the game telling you, “Now you can tank. Choose a spec,” how we do it more in the modern game. It’s more of a “Maybe with this combination of Runes, you can get into this role,” and it’s up to the player to decide how they want to combine those Runes to make it happen. We want to keep it really open for the players to explore these new combinations of abilities.

One of the major elements of Season of Discovery is the phased leveling process. There are likely to be class imbalances, but I wanted to ask how significantly you plan to address those in a game that will be shifting so quickly. Is it a case of regular balancing, or will much of that come when Season of Discovery hits the level 60 cap?

CS: Yeah, so this is something that we certainly want to be careful about. I think particularly eagle-eyed players have seen that even pre-launch, we’ve been making some slight changes and adjustments to some of the classes. The balancing for fun objective is certainly there, but we also recognize that sometimes some classes can be a little too OP and we do want to try not to allow people to be able just to walk blindfolded through the whole game and leveling journey.

I would expect some class changes, particularly if we notice anything that’s super egregious or highly imbalanced. We’re going to have to see what things look like after launch. Our team is adept at balancing classes as they are, even with the new abilities from the Runes that we’re giving them, and we can make changes quickly when we need to. But I would not expect a consistent, every week there’s a new balance patch that goes out or something like that. More targeted changes are what I would say.

Equally, I think it’s important to ask about the balancing relationship between players and the wider world. With all classes getting significant power boosts via the Rune Engraving system, have the NPCs and monsters of Azeroth been similarly changed to make them more of a match for players?

AR: Yeah, that’s definitely something that the team has been taking a deep look into is how to balance that. How do you balance having these great new abilities, plus the other abilities that you usually get in Classic and the World? It’s been really fun to see how the people who have been doing those updates are getting a lot of very in-depth insight. Taking a mathematical approach and a feedback-based approach within the team on how it feels. There are definitely going to be adjustments in the open world to balance the level of difficulty versus having these new abilities that will change the power of the players.

CS: It’s tricky because our classes hit so much harder now with these Runes, once players have collected them and they are out in the world exploring. So, on the one hand, we don’t just simply want to increase the health of all of the enemies and make them, you know, sponges. But on the flip side, we also don’t want them to just die in two seconds. There are some opportunities for us to make them hit a little bit harder, maybe increase that health a little bit so they’re not dying super quickly. But there’s certainly a careful balance there that our design team has been looking at with a very close eye.

The community will never forgive me if I don’t ask about 2H Shamans. In the presentations at Blizzcon it seemed like there would be a move towards Burning Crusade dual-wield Shaman but is 2H still going to be a competitive choice in SoD?

CS: So specifically for that question, that is something that the team has been talking about a lot and we’ve heard a lot of feedback on. I’m not sure we can give a direct answer on that today, but I do want folks who end up reading this article to know that it is something that we talked about a lot. I would expect us to talk a little bit more about Shamans very soon.

You have already stated in previous interviews that players will still be able to experience the iconic raids and dungeons they expect from Classic. Is the priority moving forward to offer entirely new experiences to the community or are we more likely to see reimagined versions of the existing content?

AR: That’s something that the team is talking about right now. We have definitely been taking a look at how Season of Mastery worked and some of those cool new mechanics that were added into Season of Mastery. The level 60 content is definitely on the table right now, as well as what kind of changes, if any, we want to see in it. 

I think the main thing is that we want to get informed about what the players want and how they like these new raids, too, right? We are really excited for people to go in and start at level 1, then get to level 25 as the starting level band and go and try out these new raids and see how they like them with these new mechanics and so on. We’re going to take a lot of the learnings that we get from the early phases into the later phases.

We’re definitely talking about it, taking a look at what we brought in Season of Mastery and see if that fits into the Season of Discovery.

How will different zones work in relation to the level cap in the first phase? Will they remain the same and simply be too deadly for solo players to enter initially?

CS: Yeah, I would expect most of the zones to stay within the same scale that players are used to. As Ana already talked about, we’ve taken a look at the difficulty of mob encounters, not just in our existing zones, but in the future zones that will be incorporated as part of future level brackets. Without getting too into the specifics about the challenge of enemies in those zones, I would say that it would not be advisable to venture into those zones.

I say that, but I know in the back of my mind, our passionate players are going to try. And I’m excited to see what they can pull off. It’s tuned in such a way that players are expected to stay mostly in the zones that they would expect to be in within that level bracket.

AR: At the end of the day, this is the Season of Discovery, so we definitely want to keep it open for the players to go and explore if they want to. We can definitely see some challenges coming up in the community on how far they can go as level 25s. I’m just going to say though, that it’s not required to go to these zones for the discoveries. I wouldn’t expect that you need to go to very high-level zones to find a discovery for the lower levels.

World PvP is one of the most significant parts of Vanilla/Classic for a lot of players. The big new feature is the Ashenvale open-world experience. Could you go into more detail about how that will work, what players can expect and why it’s an important part of Season of Discovery?

AR: It is a PvP battle and the way it gets started is that the game is basically looking for PvP activity in the zone. Then, based on a certain level of activity of PvP, the battle will commence. To be clear, the intent is that there should be activity from both factions. The activity won’t start if it’s a big majority of one of the factions. It’s going to start whenever there’s both factions present.

Afterwards, basically, there are going to be two leaders for each of the different factions that are going to be around in the area and the whole goal is for the enemy faction to defeat these bosses. It’s similar to Alterac Valley in that once you defeat the leader of the opposite faction, that’s how you win the battle. Again, similar to Alterac Valley, there’s going to be a way to decrease the power of the leader of the opposite faction, and also the guards that are around them. Their strength will decrease the more you go around and complete the other objectives on the map. The more objectives you complete, the more it’s going to be easier to defeat the other raid leader.

We’re super excited to see how this pans out, because it’s going to be out in the world; it’s not an instance. Something that really excites me about Classic is that PvP is very different from even The Burning Crusade, where we started adding arenas, and it starts to have a different meaning. In Classic, it’s a lot about the world and having those epic world events. We definitely want to capture that and keep it growing in the PvP area.

CS: I’ll make one addition to what Ana said, and I double-checked this just to make sure. It is a PvP activity, but there is also PvE activity happening in the region that could start the PvP event. So, there are multiple ways to trigger it to start, but we hope that both PvP players and adventurous PvE players will want to participate.

Sticking with PvP, we have now had confirmation that the development team will be actively working towards maintaining faction balances on PvP servers. Can you explain how that will work in practical terms?

CS: Yeah, so something that happened early on in the Classic 2019 journey, I say journey at a high level for all of us players and developers, was seeing PvP realms not too long into the lifespan of Classic really just switch to single faction realms. Once players found out that a realm was generally trending in that one direction, let’s say Horde, they were all in on Horde at that point and they didn’t want to play the other faction because they felt like they were outnumbered.

Something like that, unfortunately, removes the essence of being on a PvP realm. There’s not much PvP activity happening when one faction is dominating the other side, or at least not open-world PvP activity. That can make playing as the other faction prohibitively challenging. So, something that we’ve really listened to the community about a lot is the importance of balanced faction PvP realms and just the play experiences that something like that generates.

In looking at the game and in the spirit of a lot of the experimentation that we’re bringing to Season of Discovery and all the things that players have to discover, we are for the first time ever going to be enforcing faction balance. We’re not going to get too into the details on exactly how it’s going to work, but the general idea is we’ve developed some new tools and technology that allow us to monitor the faction balance and be able to put in blockers when we need to.

Those blockers will happen around new character creation of specific factions. It will be based on the faction balance in the realm. These are meant to be temporary so that when faction balance is restored based on the activity that we see on the realm, that faction can then be unlocked again for new character creation for that specific faction.

We think that this is going to create some really fun open world experiences for players as they’re journeying through. Although I will note, for players who have only played on PvP realms that have been dominated by single factions, they may not be used to what a balanced faction PvP realm is like. There may be certain challenges or hindrances that pop up that may make it a lot more challenging for them to do certain things that they might be very used to.

I think in our announcement post, we said something along the lines of your favorite farming or gathering spot might be a little bit more spicy than you’re used to. Likewise, making it to a particular raid entrance might be a bit more challenging based on where that raid entrance is with faction balance and the other faction hanging around there. It’s something that we’re really excited for.

I will note two things. The first thing is that this will not apply to PvE realms. On PvE realms, you are able to roll a character of any faction at any time, regardless of what the faction balance is like. The second thing is that we may change course. We’ve been listening to players, and this is something that they’ve wanted strongly for so long now. So we’re excited to try it and give it to them.

If we find out, however long it is in Season of Discovery, that it turns out we were all wrong. Players were wrong, we were wrong, and it turns out this is not something we actually want, we will be able to easily change course if we need to. We want it to be a smooth, fun experience for all. We want to make sure that there’s somewhere for everyone who wants to play Season of Discovery to come in and play. We’re excited to try this out.

I wanted to briefly talk about the differences in the realms system that Season of Discovery is using when compared to the launch of Classic in 2019. There is a notable switch towards larger servers and more layers. What is the thinking behind this and are you hoping it will prevent dead servers further down the road?

AR: One of the things that we’re really excited about is that we have been working on the technology behind the scenes of the server capacity. That’s something that with Hardcore coming out, it was the first time that we were able to use this new technology. Basically it allows way more players to be connected at the same time in the realm.

So even though there were fewer realms, those realms had the capacity to be able to host way more players at the same time. We’re really excited to see how that will continue into Season of Discovery. After seeing Classic for many years now, we have seen certain patterns in how players like to go to different realms. There are always some realms that become really popular, where a lot of the players want to go and play.

With that in mind, we want to enable these realms to have a big capacity so that players can play with their friends and so on. We’re definitely going to take the Hardcore approach in the sense that we want to start with as few realms as possible. I’m not saying that we’re going to go with exactly the same amount of realms that we went with in Hardcore, but we’re definitely going to look into keeping it on the smaller side.

I do want to note that we’re prepared to host as many players as want to come and join us. There’s going to be space for everyone as long as you’re not on one of those faction-restricted servers. There might be space, but we might be controlling that. Other than that, there’s going to be a place for you to play if that’s what you want to do on the launch date.

If you could name one thing that you would like players to get out of Season of Discovery, over all of the other versions of Classic WoW we have seen so far, what would it be?

CS: It all comes back to that element of discovery. You know, WoW Classic is almost a 20-year-old game at this point and it’s been solved for a long time. What we’ve been able to do, in partnership with the community and listening to what they want, is be able to take this solved game and unsolve it.

Players can go in there with fresh eyes, explore Azeroth again, explore the new abilities that their classes are able to attain and utilize as part of their toolkits and just create new social experiences and new memories in Classic Azeroth. Again, all comes back to that word discovery. We’re just so excited for everything players will uncover in Season of Discovery.

AR: For me, it’s everything that Clay said for sure. I’m also super excited to see new people or people who are trying Classic for the first time to come in and try it out. Potentially, I’m hopeful that having these level bands creates a less intimidating leveling journey than “Oh I have to go to level 60, and my friend is already level 30, and I’m trying to get there.” I’m really excited to welcome new players, and older players, to see what they think of the game and see what they can achieve. I’m really hopeful that they’ll have a lot of fun too.

With the release of the full game imminent, excitement among the community is at a fever pitch. To find out exactly when you can play the game based on region, check out our full guide here:

When does WoW Season of Discovery come out? Release times for all regions