Q u o t e:
What happened to the kinder/gentler damage vs. health model that we were promised in Cata? And presumably these are normal instances which shouldn't require the best possible lower level gear before entering an 85 instance. Are we expected to farm 83-84 instances before setting foot in 85 instances even on normal?

The normal dungeons require a little more crowd control than many LK players are typically used to, but they aren't intended to be brutal. You shouldn't need to farm a lot of gear before stepping into one. Keep in mind that feedback is going to be all over the place in a beta. Some players are heading into dungeons they know nothing about and getting frustrated when someone can't immediately explain the boss mechanics to them. Some just have no sense in investment since this isn't their "real" character (such irony). Some of the bosses are overtuned and some of the class abilities are undertuned at this stage. Because Uldum and Twilight don't have quest rewards yet, there are also some folks who are just really undergeared. Half your glyphs probably don't work. The new enchants aren't readily available. And so it goes. That sort of thing will all get ironed out over the next several weeks.

You shouldn't have huge mana problems in a normal dungeon. Your middle heal should get you through most of it just fine. You'll have to use more of your emergency heals in the heroics and raids, and you'll also be expected to gear up a little more for the heroics and raids. In Burning Crusade, players went and finished the Shadowmoon quest lines or got their reps to Exalted or maxed out their trade skills in order to have the best gear available for the heroics and raids. That is our model for Cataclysm.

Q u o t e:
They totally missed the mark when it came to tuning in WotLK. GC admitted that they caved in to QQ when it came to mana costs, for example.

I read every blue post most every day, and never recall him saying this. Feel free to post a source if I'm wrong. The devs have always held the stance that, while they do listen to feedback, will generally make decisions that are best for the game, not based on qq.

This is fairly accurate. Spell costs were more expensive when LK was in beta but we later backed off of it. That isn't the entire reason that the heroic dungeons and raids ended up a little easier than we intended. It was a combination of a lot of things: we got better at designing talents (fewer wasted points), glyphs offered a lot of additional player power, little things like the gathering skill buffs, most raid buffs going raid wide, every spec had access to mana-efficient AE, more survivability tools, specs that historically didn't raid much suddenly out there contributing their unique abilities, etc. etc.

Q u o t e:
I also remember us being told that ICC tank damage would seem less spiky so that tanks wouldn't always in such risk of near insta-death. Anyone else remember that?

I also remember being before the release of WotLK that Pallies would be fine without AoE heals because there would not be as much AoE damage. Then we got smothered in AoE damage. Remember that one too?

It feels like you're mostly just trying to play gotcha here, but I would characterize the above two statements as follows.

We added an avoidance penalty to Icecrown so that we could lower boss spike damage. It was still quite spikey. Now imagine would it would have been without those avoidance penalties. Bosses would have had to hit that much harder in order to compensate for missing so often. I even said at the time that a better long-term solution would be to boost health pools across the board (even for PvP), but that was such a big change that we worried it would take too many patches to get right.

On the paladin issue, our LK model was that healers were still pretty specialized. You want a paladin for tank healing and you want a Holy priest or Resto druid for AE healing. We thought that paladins had enough tools to heal when they were the only healer (i.e. in 5 player dungeons), and that was generally true, though paladin players did have trouble with heroic Loken early on. Since paladins didn't need to solo heal raids and since we didn't want to encourage raids to bring 2 paladins for their 2 healers, we thought that was sufficient. In Cataclysm we are backing off of that even more and trying to make all the healers more well rounded.

We're adding more heirlooms in Cataclysm. Though I've not yet seen much evidence of tank specific items, development of the new expansion pack isn't completed yet and some of the new heirlooms we add might end up being of particular note for tanks.

However so far we haven't really focused on making heirlooms fill all the gear slots nor have we tried to completely replace all the items you receive from quests and dungeons as you level up. So it might well be that we decide to continue staying away from filling some slots and addressing some itemisation niches with heirlooms deliberately to maintain the value of quest or dungeon rewards, thus also maintaining the value of completing quests and participating in dungeons while leveling up.

Prime glyphs aren't going to be exciting in a "change up your rotation" style. We want primes to be unambiguous dps (etc.) increases so we figured they might as well be easy to understand rather than something so convoluted that everyone would just go to a fansite to see which 3 to pick.

The majors are more interesting, because they are either not dps increases at all, or dps increases in ways that are tricky to math out. We think players will debate and geek out more about which majors to use, and with the new glyph design, swapping them out once in awhile isn't very painful.

Minors are basically convenience or fun.

We don't want glyphs to change rotations. We feel that was a mistake in LK. Talents should affect your rotations, and glyphs should just provide a little bit of customization and power. We fixed some class problems with glyphs in LK, which was an easy solution to do at the time, but now is the time to undo all of that and let the classes stand on their own without the glyphs.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I can understand wanting to keep it simple, but like someone else said, if you're going to have 3 glyphs that we're always going to have with no variation, and none of them have any effect on the rotation… couldn't we just stick with minor/major glyphs, and just remove the prime glyphs entirely?

A few things:

First, it would be a weird world in which a warrior say could glyph Charge and Battle Shout but not Mortal Strike. It might make sense to savvy players who thought through it, but I'd wager you'd also see a lot of "Why don't they make glyphs that affect the buttons I care most about? Blizzard is dumb." (And to be clear, the point of that is not to defend ourselves against agitated forum posters, but that if something in the game is confusing like that in can get in the way of having fun.)

Second, gaining power when you level up is fun. Hitting a milestone where you get a noticeable damage bonus is fun. There is also some mildly interesting decisions about which prime glyph to use first. In other words, don't view everything through the lens of the maximum level player.

Third, not everything in the game needs to be a nail-biting decision. We don't for example really want Fury warriors to stress about whether to choose Raging Blow or not, nor we do we make it particularly challenging to choose your weapon enchant. Sometimes easy decisions make players feel more comfortable rather than every potential decision having a host of invisible pitfalls. This isn't an issue of catering to the dumb players — it's more about there being a few safe places in the game. [I feel nearly certain after re-reading that paragraph that it's going to be hard to understand and I will end up having to clarify it for months to come.]

Finally, I'd argue that the popular glyphs on live today already were the no brainers because in most cases they led to a consistent dps increase (for dps specs of course). When everyone uses those glyphs, then you aren't making some interesting decision about how to use your abilities — you're just doing what every other warrior out there is doing. The only way to deviate from that is to have two glyphs that affect your primary abilities in two totally different but equal ways. That's a very tall order, because more than likely we'll end up having to constantly adjust around that. "Encounter #4 in Grim Batol is unfair to warriors who use the Glyph of Furious Mortal Strikes instead of the Glyph of Meaty Mortal Strikes." What I mean is that we end up having to support multiple play styles within one tree. We're willing to do that to a limited extent (the TG vs. SMF Fury warrior for example, or the FFB mage), but it's hard enough to develop 1-2 viable rotations per spec. We don't want every important glyph bifurcating that rotation even more.

Game designers Luis Barriga and Craig Amai sat down with us to discuss upcoming changes to Darkshore's landscape, the fate of Auberdine, and the challenges of redesigning an old-world zone from the ground up in this World of Warcraft: Cataclysm content preview.

Q. What was the original concept for the zone?

A. Darkshore was one of the areas hit hardest by the Cataclysm, so the main idea was to present a zone that had literally been shattered by those events. That was the approach we took for the revamp in terms of lore and aesthetics. In terms of gameplay, our goal was to take advantage of the changes to the environment and use them to help address previous issues with quest flow. It was an opportunity to streamline progression within Darkshore so that the overall experience for players would be much smoother and require less running back and forth.

Q. Who will be using this zone (what levels/factions)?

A. Darkshore is designed for Alliance players, primarily night elves and worgen, from level 11 through 20.

Q. What is changing about the zone?

A. Auberdine has been destroyed; entire species of creatures have been wiped out, and the land has been torn wide open in multiple places. The Cataclysm has also given the upper hand to a number of nearby foes, including coastal naga, Twilight's Hammer cultists, and opportunistic trolls of the Shatterspear tribe who seek to exploit weakened night elven settlements.

Q. What's happened to Auberdine?

A. Auberdine has been nearly razed to the ground, and what wasn't destroyed by the Cataclysm is now under assault by air elementals led by Twilight's Hammer cultists. The city is pretty much in ruins, but some survivors did make it out alive.

Q. With Auberdine in ruins, where do night elves go now?

A. Lor'danel. It's a small night elven town just to the north of the ruins of Auberdine.

Q. Without giving up any spoilers, what's the general storyline for this zone?

A. Darkshore has suffered immensely from the massive seismic ripples of the Cataclysm. The night elves are in survival mode, helping refugees and, wherever they can, fending off the advances of the Twilight's Hammer cult, the naga, and the Shatterspear trolls. Meanwhile, Malfurion Stormrage, recently returned from the Emerald Dream, has traveled to the epicenter of the destruction and called upon the ancient powers of Cenarius to contain it.

Q. What do you think is the most exciting new addition to the zone?

A. Without a doubt, the most exciting addition to Darkshore is the gigantic vortex in the center of the zone, where the devastating forces of the Cataclysm are being pit against the primal power of Malfurion Stormrage. Our amazing artists and level designers made us an epic energy vortex to serve as a visual centerpiece for the destruction, and it looks phenomenal.

Q. What goes into redesigning a zone like this?

A. Redesigning Darkshore required much more work than we originally anticipated. This was one of the first zones we tackled that centered on the effects of the Cataclysm, so we started out with the modest goal of adding a few themed quests and improving the general flow of the zone. As we piled on the visual changes, though, we soon discovered that a lot more manpower was needed to generate content that correctly reflected Darkshore's new landscape and lore.

Q. What was the most challenging aspect about implementing these changes?

A. At first we thought that we would be able to work with the majority of the original quests in Darkshore, but most of them just didn't make sense when viewed in the context of the zone's new storyline and direction. For example, chasing after corrupted wildlife and investigating washed-up threshers would seem out of place when everything around you is being ravaged by natural disasters, elementals, naga… and worse. Reaching the realization that we would basically have to scrap all of the old content and start from scratch — and then actually bringing that plan to fruition — was probably the hardest part of the process.

Q. What should players do or go see first?

A. Players should start in the town of Lor'danel and then play through the quest series naturally, slowly heading south. Higher-level players (levels 15 and up) may want to skip ahead and meet up with Malfurion Stormrage at the center of the zone, but Darkshore feels best if you experience the entire storyline from the beginning, as intended.

Q. What's happening at the Master's Glaive? The last time we saw it, it was mostly buried underground.

A. Twilight's Hammer cultists have recently begun to unearth the remains of Soggoth, one of the more powerful servants of the Old Gods, from beneath the Master's Glaive with the intent of bringing him back to life. Players will have to foil the cultists' plans before the new incarnation of Soggoth reaches full strength.

Q. Is there anything new at the Grove of the Ancients?

A. The Grove of the Ancients was shielded from most of the devastation caused by the Cataclysm, due in large part to the power of the ancient guardians residing therein. Protecting the grove required an enormous amount of energy, though, and as a result, most of the guardians have gone into a sort of slumber. Players will have to figure out a way to wake them and bring them into the fight to ensure the survival of Darkshore.

Thank you, Luis and Craig, for taking the time to talk about your involvement in reshaping Darkshore for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm!