5 lessons learned working on World of Warcraft
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- Опубликовано: 8 июл 2024
- While I was a game designer at Blizzard on World of Warcraft, not only was I able to make some pretty incredible content, got to work alongside some wonderfully talented developers, I also learned some critical design and development lessons.
Id like to share 5 of them with you here today.
- Chapters -
00:00 - Intro
00:29 - Fantasy First
05:14 - Foster Junior Talents
07:57 - Iteration Equals Quality
12:14 - No Talented Jerks
15:40 - Massive isn't Social
- Contact Information -
My email - andrew@andrewchambersdesign.com 
Игры
Whats your favorite WoW class?
Philosphically: Mage or Priest. Caster gameplay just is no fun though. Mechanically: PvE - Demon Hunter (missing stealth though). PvP - Rogue (missing tank specc for PvE though). Honorable mentions (not because you did it): Hunter (straight forward but very little flexibility in PvE roles), DK (too little movement).
You see the theme here? It is mainly about the missing parts. I love some classes but I get bored half way into the season because they are too one-dimensional or they prevent me from doing other roles or content. DH is fun in PvE (especially M+) but I hate Havoc in PvP. Rogue is great in PvP for me but I cannot tank in PvE.
I'm partial to WoD arms warrior, particularly with the HFC tier set. Warriors in older versions of the game were one of the more visceral classes. I'd like to go into more detail, but it's a youtube comment!
Fantasy: Probably the hunter. Being "an ordinary adventurer" feels really good to play and prevents me from feeling like, "I'm an all powerful [X], why can't I do [Y[?!" I like grounded, lower-fantasy RPGs settings for a similar reason.
Mechanically: I've enjoyed Mistweaver the most in past expansions, in part because it felt like I could do a little bit of everything while having the sustainability that healing can bring (especially to small group and solo content). It's felt fairly hit or miss in Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands though.
As a special mention, no class is funner than Rogue when doing Rogue-related stuff, or things that only a Rogue can do. Rogue class hall quests are a great example. Another is pick-pocketing a dockmaster near Freehold to get the key instead of having to kill him to get the key. Such small details take effort, but they make the fantasy feel so incredibly rewarding. It's just unfortunately that more of the game isn't built to cater to individual class fantasies. The "benefits" of pick pocketing are also repeatedly nerfed, which is never a fun feeling. Classic/Vanilla had a really sweet spot when it came to "benefits" of pick-pocketing. It felt unique and useful.
there only one true class that exists in wow: Warlock!
And this class has only one spec: affliction.
All the others are supports ^^
Rogue !
i always thought survival should have been made into dark ranger since it already had black arrow. if anything BM should have went melee like rexxar with dual axes instead of a spear..
Dark ranger is too niche for an entire spec.
Disagree.
You could say that one element is too niche for an entire spec but we have Fire, Ice and Arcane mages and they're all fine.
BM is ranged because ranged is easier and BM is the "easy" class that a lot of new players gravitate to, largely cos having cute pets is visually cool.
WoD Survival Hunter was my favorite spec, so when that was removed/changed, I lost a lot of interest in Hunter. Which was a bummer. I have played Warrior ever since.
I appreciate your openness in the video. It was helpful to learn of your intentions behind the survival hunter changes. Personally, once the spec was made melee the class fantasy was dead to me. I grew to really enjoy the spec especially in Cataclysm throughout WoD.
I realize adding a 4th spec may not have been possible back then, do you foresee that happening in the future?
Legion was my favorite iteration of elemental shaman from fantasy and gameplay perspectives (except for totems getting shanked) and has some of my favorite design flairs. For example, the chance to proc Ascendance off of another spell added to the fantasy of shaman, in that they don't COMMAND the elements, but they ASK for their help. Sometimes they just help a lot more than you expected, and if you're well prepared, you can channel that help into a massive performance boost.
If you had any direct hand in that, I thank you for making my time with the spec then and now a superb way to spend $15 a month.
Hey thanks, that was what I worked on for sure. And yea, sorry for shanking the Totems, that was a miss on my part.
@@AndrewChambersDesign it's cool, we eventually got them back AND kept the ascendance casino
@@AndrewChambersDesign The totems needed to go. You were good on that honestly. There's always haters.
@@jetillian Totems need to go? Totems need to go... from a Shaman? Literally their core identity.
@@PositiveRaincloud For things like utility, it's fine, but in Legion, not dropping Windfury anymore? Ick.
This ruined Hunter for me when it became the best spec for hunters to play. Really dislike it is making its way back into SoD. If you wanted to take risks, you should of made it a ranged ranking class.
played all 3 shaman specs during legion, it was a lot of fun, good job on that
i initially planned to play survival because of the rework, but i never did because it was undertuned
the spec is probably unpopular because there is no reason to limit yourself to melee range when the other hunter specs are very mobile already
playing surivival feels like playing with a handicap, there is no reward for it with how the game currently works
i played survival hunter in legion, and mained it. I loved the spinning plates style, Way of the moknathal was super satisfying to play with when i could keep uptime.
So you talk about Fantasy to inspire your rework choice, yet when talking about surivival you constatly show footage of Rexxar who was s very commonly known as the beastmaster so why didn't you make beast mastery melee and not survival.
I basically stopped playing hunter after mop and played feral druid and sub rogue up until BFA where I mained brewmaster and some bear. In the next expac I'm playing most of the tank specs and some mix of melee/range on the classes with tank specs. Monk will be my main in TWW and will remain my favorite
Bepples is still pissed about the survival hunter to melee change
Very interesting stuff. I appreciate you peeling the curtain back and actually giving a demo of the tools used at blizzard to make my favourite game. Great video, thanks!
I loved this spec in legion but what I really want is a spec where you mount your pet and do like mounted melee combat with your pet
What i would like to know.. and thanks for the insights btw , but do you still have any contacts from your time at Blizz? anyone you still are in contact with? also, what is your view on the current class / game design filosophy? they're really taking a different turn with The war Within, focussing much more on alt play and evergreen features. what's your take on that? good idea? bad?
Why was adding too many tank specs a problem? Anecdotally, there's always been a large shortage on tanks, at least during the leveling phase. I don't mean that to be confrontational, I'm just very surprised to hear something so opposite to my experience as a player.
You need much fewer tanks in raid content, unfortunately. 2 tanks for 20-man group means tanks can struggle to get groups and the more tank specs there are, the more tank specs there will be that are shafted and auto-rejected from groups.
@@Serphentin Really good point. After reading your reply, I also realized that too many tank specs can really break PvP (a LOT of fun in battlegrounds). So a large number of tanks really only supports instanced leveling and (maybe) mythic+. Thanks!
Warlock tank would be amazing! They have flirted with the concept for years... I wish they'd do it. Why are they concerned about having too many tank specs in the game?
When you talked about how smaller servers are more social, Eco Global survival came to my mind. I think that's a game you'd be interested to have a look at, if you haven't already. It's "survival" game based around the tension between selfishness, cooperation and a global threat, all without physical violence. You build a civilisation from scratch in a Minecraft like voxel world, but everything is very slow and there's a job system that forces you to specialise. Then there's a whole politics system with player founded towns and countries, with custom (semi programmable) laws that they can pass that are mechanically enforced. There's also an economy system with player created currencies and shop blocks that the owner can set prices at and that people can shop at without the owner needing to be present. The player number is between a dozen and one or two hundred per (player hosted) server.
Sorry you're getting so many negative comments over Survival Hunter ... it is currently one of my favorite specs in the game & I raid Mythic as one currently. It is a ton of fun! I am so grateful for the changes you made back in Legion for the spec.
I know many people are still not happy with the ranged Survival being gone but, Legion Survival brought a whole new, unique gameplay that breathed a lot of life into Hunter. Even today, Beast Mastery is extremely boring to me and I have no interest in Marksmanship.
There are not many of us playing the spec but, the people who do are completely dedicated to it and play it at very high levels. And it is our little best kept secret that no one touches. So thank you for being a part of that!
I appreciate that, but its fine honestly. Im happy for folks to share negative feedback, I ban the ones that are overly rude (I mean, my kids read these comments sometimes), but overall im glad they are passionate about it.
How did it "breathe a lot of life into Hunter" when it drove away a ton of people from a formerly very popular spec?
Loving seeing insights into design decisions and philosophy, for better or for worse 🙌 keep the content coming!
Wish you were still with wow, such a cool game, really needs leadership with the mindset you have. Thanks for all the joy you've given me and others over the years! :D
I've been a hunter main since Vanilla and raiding within the top 50 scene since Legion and the reworks to each hunter spec I personally felt were fantastic particularly Marksmanship. The whole concept of the Vulnerable mechanic I fell in love with it and felt it was truly a unique concept that seperated from every other spec in the game. I did every single mage tower for every spec in the game during Legion and I can confidently say Legion MM is my favorite version of a spec i've played in the entire history of WoW, thank you for your contributions to my favorite game
Great video! Love hearing stories and lessons learned from game development. It's tough stuff.
I've been an elemental shaman main since Wrath and oh boy did I appreciate the life that was injected into it in Legion. Leaning into the lightning and lava fantasy was really great and enjoyable. Unfortunately that fantasy nowadays is mostly gone, replaced by spamming one damage button as much as you can and that damage button might change each season. Too bad you couldn't have really dug into it more at your time; hindsight and all that.
And enhancement going back to weapon stacks was really silly. I'm really not sure why they threw the baby out with the bathwater on that one; stacking buffs are fundamentally more difficult to track than something standardized into your spec.
Hey Sir, i just read an articel, that said u are the guy i have to tank for the awesome meele Hunter 😁 Great Job, Sir! I never had more fun in wow. I played a meme meele Hunter in TBC but u gave the Real Power to me 😁 Thank u Sir!
Taking a ranged spec out of the game was a bad move my friend, hell they added a dragon and still couldn't do range right.
I cannot express with words how much I've enjoyed this video
I love everything about these tips, especially I love Iterations Equals Quality and No Talented Jerks. Other lessons are good too
Thanks man, really great stuff
The unlocks of Quel'Danas and also Isle of Thunder being somewhat of a regionwide effort but on the other hand also throttled/boosted to stay in line globally felt a bit off too.
I have a lot of hours in the game, and have so much feedback and ideas for certain classes and specs. But I feel like no matter how much feedback is given nothing is done nowadays. Like the entire hunter tree with the Dragonflight rework of talents.
Really cool to see your perspective on this. Do you plan on talking about your work experience as a whole? maybe talk about what you did at Netflix? Show us your journey as a designer
Yep, along with the design type breakdowns/reviews Ill do too.
@@AndrewChambersDesign looking forward to more quality content like this!
I started in Legion, and loathed how survival felt during it, manually aiming traps just feels terrible, because you can't predict how other people are going to move, and get penalized heavily by CDs if you miss. In contrast, BFA Survival, especially in season 1, was incredibly fun, the fast-paced combat paired with harpoon resetting with enemy death made me an absolute menace in m+ and bgs.
Every shaman i've talked to always brings up having so much fun in Legion. It's clear you care about the subject, and actually want to make the class feel good to play rather than just trying to even out the numbers. I hope other developers get inspired by your work, truly. I truly miss hunters having actual devs with passion for the class. They feel abandoned now, like the devs working on it only do it to generate overtime hours if they need some extra, despite being the most populated class.
QA UX team got my attention. How long did they exist - in the structure you were talking about them. Isn't there a certain risk, when you start growing yourself "hardcore raider" and convert them to game designers, that their focus becomes mostly intern driven? Or what exactly was their given role? How is community feedback evaluated? Very interesting video! :)
Ele sham and Marks hunter were two of my favorite specs when I played. Wild to think you likely had a hand in them! They're both casters that require fun decision-making and big booming projectile hits that feel so good when you combo them with other buffs through the rotation.
Yellow is king of thumbnails colors. Nice Thumbnail!
what was ian's role in the work and how was he to work with? and what about metzens?
I will not be discussing individuals or calling out anyone by name. That is inappropriate.
@@AndrewChambersDesigntrue I understand! Didnt mean it in a bad way more like how they fit in the picture, Love your videos!!
Well your SV "fantasy" is just BM + bombs so that's great, not to mention you somehow couldnt wrangle 3 ranged weapon identies even though there's like 9 melee identies in the game. And the massive population of surv hunters sort of proves you right? Oh wait they're disliked in the extreme.
спасибо вам, за мастера элементов в реворке шамана, это было потрясающе. мое любимое в шамане именно эта фантазия взаимодействия элементов и анимации класса
It's incredible how you have less than 20 videos published, but the you've managed to grow your quality so much.
Hey thanks! Takes alot of effort so I appreciate that.
Well is good and different content, actually adult and constructive! Super good this would and maybe will make devs and players have a much connect idea overall
Ive tried so many times to play a hunter , but i just cant gell with it😊
subbed !!
Loved the vid! I loved the survival hunter change and played it for most of Legion. And I can attest to the debilitating effect of having a talented jerk as a manager/leader. It's a 'Fear Tax' - as coined by Liz Wiseman - and that is so expensive for the company, that no matter how talented they are, they are a net-negative.
I’m not going to make this personal, but the decision to change survival from ranged into a melee spec was probably the single worst class design decision I can think of. Ranged survival was one of the most popular ranged dps specs in the game in WoD, and it became by far the least popular dps spec in the game after it went melee, and has remained so to this day.
As far as fantasy is concerned, melee survival has a very weak fantasy. Is it a trapper? Is it a primal spear user? Is it an explosive expert? Is it a beast master? It’s a mess.
BM to me was the clear choice to make a hunter melee spec for, and fits the fantasy of Rexxar MUCH MUCH MUCH better, which is the character always used as the poster child for melee hunters.
I love those ex blizz dev videos. Thank You for sharing Your stories and experiences!!
Survival has remained one of the most controversial, contentious, and unpopular specs in the game to this day. Before your changes it had a successful tenure as a widely-enjoyed ranged spec. Did you expect this outcome while you were making the changes? Did you have the interests of existing Hunters in mind when making them?
You pre-empt these negative comments and dismiss them as "you can't please everyone". What if you upset a lot more players than you pleased with your changes?
Nice video, I enjoy all of your videos, they are very will put together but anything on blizzard is always going to be more interesting to me. DM reacked to one of your videos a will back so thats how i found you. Id be disappointed if asmangold dos not reacked to your wow video. Thought i do think your deablo 3 video was my favorite. Interesting to see your take on why it ended up the way it did.
Looking forward to watching more
Playing Cata classic as survival and it was by far the most fun hunter spec. I want it back. You could've destroyed BM instead :(
I really feel you missed the mark on Survival hunter, like many have mentioned before rexarr is the first hunter many think of for lore. Being a dual wielding beastmastery hunter you had the answer infront of you.
Survival should of stayed a range poison, traps style play style. Could really use that spec to add some needed hunter utility. So many things you could do similar to rogue with poison dipped arrows, slows on bolas shots, small stun bomb that could be hunter baseline.
You're heart was in the right place and mele hunter was a smart move. Just wrong execution.
Nah it was just a dumb move as well. No approach would have worked well.
@Bepples i disagree. Watching rexars fight in the horrific visions gave a good idea what a mele beastmastery hunter was about. Hunter didn't need 3 similar range specs.
But thats the beauty of being human. We are all allowed to have our own thoughts.
@@Chrisco_Hamper Then let's have 3 different ranged specs. That's not an impossibility. We can argue all day over whether ranged SV was different enough, but even if it weren't they could have made it more distinct without making it melee (it had already grown more distinct each passing expansion) and being too similar to other specs is a far smaller problem than what Survival has been facing since Legion.
I think what you did with Survival Hunter was great, and even today it has some very diehard fans that have been completely and utterly sold on its fantasy.
My only issue what that it took away from the game one of the VERY few ranged-weapon specs that remained. I wish another one was created in its place, perhaps for a class like Rogue, or "Survival" was added as a new 4th spec entirely. As it stands, we still only have one class that can use Bows, and only two of its three specs do so.
Doing so may have also left more room for Marksmanship to be that solely "sniper" spec you were hoping it could be. I certainly wish that fantasy was properly represented in WoW, it isn't really right now. With only two ranged Hunter specs remaining, I'm sure that made it extremely difficult for you to follow that fantasy without robbing too much from the "ranged physical" playerbase.
Hi Andrew, loved this video. As an aspiring Blizzard designer myself, It’s fascinating to hear your firsthand perspective about changes that drastically flipped my Hunter experience upside down. Melee Survival Hunter was an acquired taste, but once it got there, boy did I love it! So thank you for sharing!
I did have one question about Legion Survival Hunter though that has always been itching at my brain for an answer:
During the Legion Alpha, I distinctly recall the Survival Hunter having the “Sentry Turret” level 100 talent. Did you make this ability? It functioned very similarly to Torbjorn's turret from Overwatch, or any other standard MMO Engineer-archetype turret. It was removed from Alpha to Beta if I recall. What I'm curious about is, Were you/the designers dipping your toes into the “Tinker/Engineer” MMO archetype? Does this mean that at some point, it was considered to make the Survival Hunter the surrogate "Tinker" class for WoW?
As someone who's always had a giant affinity for the guild wars 2 Engineer class, Warhammer Online's Dwarf Engineer, Torbjorn from OW, Gazlowe from HotS, etc type of gameplay, the Tinker has always been my dream class. Was it ever on the cards for WoW, and do you think Blizzard could ever revisit such a concept in the future? Even if any answer is pure speculation, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it!
Thanks again, and much love from Aus!! Definitely subbing.
Sentry Turret was changed into Spitting Cobra because they wanted to move the spec's theme away from the tinker stuff.
The talent kept the same backend implementation as Sentry Turret so it was pretty underwhelming. In BFA it got moved to BM and was useless because it had Sentry Turret's 25 yard limitation and couldn't move. Even when it did work its damage and focus generation were pathetic. They tried to fix it in SL but it was still useless so they removed it in DF.
I really dislike you for what you did to SV Hunter Great job on making one less ranged class to satisfy the very few melee hunters.
They have removed so many cohesive elements from wow starting from classic and now to Dragonflight.
have you ever talked about; the auto attack system with tab targeting, the overall fluidity of the classic combat and its unique intuitive stat system.
Compare that to the aggressive button mashing and spamming with no restrictions and only have TWO stats in the game (Haste and Mastery)
this version of the game feels like it’s trying to be action oriented like Dark Souls or New World while holding on to the remnants of the Original combat system.
Hello @AndrewChambersDesign. How are you?
Shaman Enhancement 2handed is more than viable with the current talents points. Can we please be allowed to use Storm strike and lava lash with 2handed melee weapons?
Thanks in advance.
what was the dynamic between the retail and classic dev teams?
Super supportive.
"you can't make everyone happy" doesn't justify such an extreme change being forced through like SV's rework, especially coming around a period when SV was being used. it's a very powerful "fuck you" to people who've been playing the spec for a long time. same with outlaw rogue. you really should have just added 4th specs.
Exactly. All of these ego driven designers that get hired, inherit someone else's design, and want to redo it to put "their mark" on the game. I'm sure it looks great on a resume, but did they stop to think about the relationship between the players and their RPG characters they'd been playing for a decade or longer at that point?
P.S. You can add Subtlety Rogue to that list too, because Legion completely butchered both the fantasy and mechanics of the spec, and it has never recovered since that point.
I'd love to play around with wow editor
Most of the WoWEdit footage is fake and stolen from a modder (Zarkeven) using open source community tools (Noggit). Notice how there's no WoWEdit on the task bar and the FPS counter never changes, it's just an overlay.
Great video! I was wondering if you would be willing to speak to the dynamics between different teams/roles and how that relationship may influence desgin. I'd be curious to hear how the team dynamics may have been similar, whether at Netflix or Blizzard, and what you took away from them.
Ugh. So you were their "bad ideas guy"?
Yikes, ruining ranges SV and involved with the D3 RMAH? Coulsnt get worse tbh
As someone who played Survival since inception and still absolutely loves it. Thank you! I appreciate your passion and desire for thematic game play. It may not have ended up where you wished it, but there are many of us enjoying it to this day. We may not be popular, but we're having fun. :)
"many of us" hahaha
Andrew, the key fact that is totally missing from your analysis here is that the group that loves the SV changes likely includes a lot of people who play six to ten different classes and aren't too heavily invested in any of them (and in fairness to their perspective, what a neat novelty the new SV spec must be!), while the group that hates the changes probably includes a lot of people who are only interested in playing Survival Hunter, which as far as they are concerned, completely ceased to exist with Legion.
At least, that's exactly how it is for the Subtlety Rogue spec that your colleagues horrendously butchered during the same development cycle by applying the same destructive philosophy of "let's completely reinvent the RPG character into which you've poured yourself for more than a decade, so that it becomes something you no longer recognize or relate to, LOL"
Your attitude about the whole thing seems quite smug and cavalier, and suggests to me that you could still benefit from some reflection on the whole incident.
You're absolutely right. The less someone's invested in the Hunter class the more likely they are to support melee Survival. So it gets a ton of online cheerleaders with very few actually playing it.
I've seriously had conversations with people who swear by melee Survival while also telling me they'll likely never play it. A very frustrating situation for a spec.
As for his attitude: the worst thing about this video is it's labelled as "lessons learned" yet it seems each anecdote here is "here's something I made that's great and perfect". What lesson was learned here? That Andrew Chambers is apparently a flawless developer who can do no wrong?
I very disagree that each spec of hunter played the same. That's like saying every spec of rogue played the same because they are melee.
Nah other classes are held to a different standard. In the same segment he says Warriors, the most generic class with very similar specs (apart from Prot being a tank), is a greatly varied class. Just a standard melee brained take. "All ranged are the same, all melee are precious and valuable."
So you're the one who killed my ranged survival hunter 😞
(on Survival Hunter's rework to melee)
I was one of the ones that initially hated this change. I LOVED the rotation of Black Arrow procing Explosive Shot and just loading up the boss with a ton of Explosive Shots, which were dots back then. Then I actually played it and realised how cool Harpooning to enemies was, getting in the fight with your pet was with Flanking Strike and how cool the bombs and such were. Ended up playing Survival for the next 4 or 5 years.
The community gives survival a ton of stick, but what you will find is that every single time Survival becomes meta, I consistently hear "what? survival is actually really fun?" - people never give it a chance, then when they do, they realise it is one of the most unique and fluid and fun DPS specs in the game. That's in PvE, in PvP its even more interesting. It plays like a hybrid between an Outlaw Rogue and a Frost Mage there - CCing people with your traps and stuns and roots before blowing someone up from mid range with bombs and explosive shot.
Survival's rework's biggest mistake was that it over writ an already beloved spec. If you ask people what their favourite specs are in WoW through the years, there is a strong chance someone will tell you 4.3 Dragon Soul Survival Hunter or 5.4 Siege of Orgrimmar Survival Hunter. Hell, in 6.2, Hellfire Citadel, the tier bonus for MM hunters made Aimed Shot instant cast which made it feel just like 5.4 Survival Hunter and lo and behold, a ton of people view 6.2 MM hunter as one of the spec's peaks.
People generally view specs based on its past potential, not its current place. I can't even tell you what 6.2 Survival played like, and I played WoD as a hunter and even got 2k+ rating as survival! I can however tell you the exact rotation and how it sounded and how it felt to play in 4.3 or 5.4, so when the rework came out I was excited for a potential return to the glory days, instead we got something totally new, which again I initially hated... but by the end of beta quickly realised I now love!
You say people find out it's fun when it becomes meta, but every time that's happened people abandon it as fast as they reroll to it.
In reality what's happening is people go through a honeymoon phase where it all seems perfect when its new but they don't stick around because it's a genuinely uncompelling spec.
Sorry mate melee hunter just didn’t work it made the class confusing with the rest of the talents we share with the other specs and spells
While I agree with the "Fantasy first" philosophy. You missed the mark with making Survival a melee. The melee Hunter should have been Beastmaster, not Survival.
A hunter who fights on melee right next their pet should have been Beastmaster for obvious reasons. Rexxar also looks like more of a Beastmaster rather than a Survival.
Melee BM would have also been a disaster. The fact is that any Hunter spec going melee would have been extremely popular and disliked because there are just very few people who both love Hunters and want to be melee.
@@Bepples Mechanically you are right only about people who have been playing hunter in the first place. If someone was already playing hunter, chances are they didn't do it to play melee since that wasn't even an option. But new players are sold more on class fantasy. And some veterans like me have it as priority as well.
Heck, I am thinking of not playing TWW because I play MM Dwarf Hunter styled as a Rifleman and I see no Hero Talent Tree that can support my class fantasy. Sentinel is for Night Elves, not Dwarves.
That's how important is class fantasy to me. So I repeat, Rexxar who is also a melee hunter looks like a Beastmaster not Survival. He should have been the template for Beastmaster IMO.
Survival hunter and Shadow priest both were ruined by legion, worse changes to happen to the game
Why do all the designers hate feral druid?
I don't think they hate it, I think they just don't care about it. It's chronically undertuned compared to other specs in almost all content and the abilities haven't really changed much in like 10 years lol. It's just a neglected spec.
I remember when the Survival Hunter melee change was first publicly announced, I thought, "That's a cool idea, but there's no way it's making it to launch." I was pleased to be wrong.
Me too
Is it super common for the same people to work on vastly different games? I would have expected different genre's with different engines and goals to require experience.
Nah, quite the opposite, in fact. There are some edge cases, where your knowledge might transfer less (say going from MMO to racing sim), but most of the work is the same. You still open the engine, you still create 3D models, wire them up, trigger some animations, have some actions and reactions, etc... it's just that the car will have more detailed physics, whereas MMO will focus on networking - both can be done by the same engineers, it's just their focus has shifted.
Hola ty for the work & nice experiences :)
I loved Legion elemental at the time because the rotation went into a much more complex route. If you specd into Icefury AND Elemental blast, you had to weave lava bursts in between frost shocks, ele blasts and earth shocks, while also not overcapping maelstrom and keeping flame shock up.
Really fun gameplay imo, now he have a much more mobile version of elemental where we spam lava bursts as much as we can. Can't say i don't like it, but i miss Legion elemental.
I've mained hunter for a decade and played through this massive change. I'll be honest, I think you missed some massive low hanging fruit that would have worked out better.
Survival is dying to be a tank spec and would have brought a highly unique toolset to the role. Having a stable of pets that would 1) allow you to solo taunt swap and 2) allow you to customize the passives you benefit from and the active utility you brought would be wholy unique. Traps are fantastic utility if you control the pulls, the aoe rotation has always struck me as perfect for tanking. This is the personal hill I'll die on, we didn't need more melee dps but we can always use more tanks.
As for the MM change...taking away the ranged Survival toolkit and not wholesale baking it into MM was a miss. There was even early builds on Legion Alpha where you were so close but missed it. Bake Explosive Shot onto Aimed Shot, let Black Arrow ticks proc resets, MM is *dying* for that reactivity. Blizzard seems to be trying to get there with the Dark Ranger hero talents, but for me radically changing both MM and SV simultaneously was why it was received roughly. I say that as someone that came to love Vulnerability.
No one wants a tank Hunter.
Melee hunter is so fun, even though it's being overlooked
Bruh we are like 8 years in. Most people know about it and have tried it. It isn't a case of people just not knowing about it. It's a genuinely unpopular spec and concept.
All that effort and you still couldn't add dual wielding for 1h axe fantasy?
Turning Survival into melee could have been fine if it wasn't done so SHITTILY and half-assed. One of the most unfun specs in the whole god damn game : /
So much hate for survival... I want to thank you. I leveled my hunter in wrath as melee before it even had useful skills... (go go wing clip). I LOVE that there's a melee spec for hunters. I always felt bad sending my pets in to do the work while I sat back and just shot away at stuff. Getting to be right there with my pet, fighting things side by side made the spec for me.
"I love being a Hunter but worse"
The problem with WoW is that there is so little consistency. Learning a class in wow takes work. Not a lot of work, but work. Spending a few weeks or even months mastering a spec, getting your logs up into the 90th+ percentile on mythic, and then having the dev team come in and nerf you into the floor, change a bunch of stuff, or otherwise ruin what you've been doing is unbelievably frustrating. It's a big reason why so many people just don't play the game anymore.
Take Havoc DH for example: The swap from the old BFA style of simple, durable, and mobile was replaced with this movement for damage gimmick which adds complexity just to reach a lower relative point of performance. Not only is it more complicated, but it's less fun. Even worse, you're sacrificing your mobility, so even though you're constantly moving you have less freedom to save your movement abilities to dodge mechanics. All my logs for the last 3 expansions are high 90s on mythic and I have famed slayer or CE every tier so I'm not just some bozo who can't play it, either.
The more devs meddle with classes and nerf class performance the less people want to play. Nerfing should be an absolute last resort. It's better to buff every other class 10%, buff all mobs by 10%, and keep the mechanics the same than it is to gut a core playstyle of a given class or nerf them by 5%. It's even worse to ADD IN things that previously weren't there unless they add significant amounts of utility or damage. For example, adding a baseline kick to every class that doesn't have one should be a no-brainer. The fact they haven't just makes me think the wow devs don't play the game at any reasonable level. On the other hand, adding in a momentum/inertia playstyle of havoc DH was idiotic. Havoc took a net DPS loss while also increasing complexity by adding busywork. Pressing fel rush every once in a while (or pressing it after immo aura, which you're pressing on CD regardless) is just needless complexity for its own sake. Hurray. Now we can have a maintenance buff and stack damage windows like half the other DPS classes. Oh, and they also took our 40% leech away which was just a pointless nerf. Seriously whoever has been doing class design for DH since BFA is incompetent.
Take the most overpowered version of every spec and KEEP THEM AROUND. When specs are overpowered they are fun to play. For example, Vengeance DH right now should not be nerfed, it should be kept exactly how it is. Delete tier sets entirely and keep the current tier set baked into the class. If other tanks can't keep up then buff them, but don't nerf vengeance.
Another example is Shadow Priest: They keep reworking the spec. STOP. Pick the version that had the most people playing it and keep that current. Keep the playstyle unchanged for the next 20 years. When people get sick of a spec they start an alt. When you change that spec they get sick of the game.
Blizzard's nerf first ask questions never approach is absolutely the worst possible thing they can do, and I'm sick of it.
Edit: Oh, and don't talk to me about talent trees either. They don't provide any choice. There is the best spec for a given fight on ANY given fight, and you either run it or you don't. At best you have two relatively equal alternatives due to milquetoast talents. Talent trees are an illusion of choice, nothing more, and they never will be anything more because the best strat always wins out. Always. Running anything else is just trolling.
Survival should've gone Tank spec. It seems like swapping in and out with pets for threat and damage soaks could make for some interesting and dynamic gameplay.
No one wants a Hunter tank.
If u know the guy that is buffing mm hunter please tell him to stop already. That class is cancer in BGs. I go into random BGs or Epic BGs and there are too many hunters man it’s played out already
Killed a loved fun ranged Hunter spec into something no one is interested to play unless it's overtuned for no reason.
Just wanna voice my love for survival becoming melee. I didn't miss the old version and hunter specs mostly felt "meh" before the change.
If anything, I'm just gutted it didn't get a 2 1handed scaling, because that's the true melee hunter/ranger when I imagine them
i mained hunter since day one vanilla, while i did like old survival hunter, I LOVE melee survival way way more, and its still pretty much the only thing i play, when i play retail.
mongoose bite ramping up in legion to big insane numbers was the best.
i problems with melee surv were that it was released broken... with mastery that didnt work for the whole first raid tier which was critical to its rotation.
and the legendries it had were worthless mathematically or crippled by silly design like the belt that made harpoon give you a 10% damage but only would give you it once per boss fight the first time you used it, which made it totally useless for pve. i would have loved to roll up to 6 stacks of mongoose disengage out to harpoon back and really start smacking the boss.
in my opinion the reason that melee survival "failed" partly because it replaced a loved spec and fantasy, but more importantly it was broken on launch, wasn't tuned well enough to draw people to it so the community as a whole just thought of it as dead on arrival and never gave it chance let alone a play. if it was in a better position in performing dps i think it would have been better received because it played so different to other classes, just no one gave it a chance....
The basic reason melee Hunter failed is that there aren't a lot of people who both love Hunters, a class thematically rooted in ranged combat, and want to be melee. No approach or configuration would have changed that. It would have always been an extremely controversial and unpopular spec.
What a wonderful and insightful video.. same with your DIII video. You speak thoughtfully and with confidence and bring us behind the curtain. Thank you for these.
Congrats you took a meme spec from vanilla and ruined survival. Did real money auction house, and got rid of shaman totems. Literally ALL bad decisions. No wonder you're not there anymore.
Love how his "lessons learned" video doesn't actually include any lessons learned other than "I'm perfect and every decision I make is great".
18:31 - This, people, is why modern WoW is no longer an MMO.
You ruined the wrong spec man
I wish the current devs working on shamans specifically showed the same interest and drive that you portray in this video. An aggressive rework would indeed be welcome, if you ever for some reason go back to working on wow ;)
Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart
Screw you, for not only ruining Surv but also making this horrible and boring mongoose playstyle that has nothing to do with the hunter fantasy 😊
The spec does what other specs does but worse and less fun, and it's probably my biggest issue with wow
Quick question.. why do seemingly very bright and smart game designers begin to fade away from being fans of the game and have to rely on hardcore players in the community? I understand that perhaps no one wants to work 24/7 on a game then play it on their offtime.. but.. maybe some folks do? I understand that once you see how the sausage gets made, it takes some of the allure away.. but it's so common and just well-understood that no matter who you are, if you begin development in any capacity on that game, you pretty much stop playing it as a hobby. I don't understand that bit.
The team (especially the designers) played the game a LOT. Most of us would have mains that we played on a regular basis on live. The reason we needed QAUX is for the fresh eyes that couldnt give us the perspective.
@DesigningPlay Ah okay that's reassuring, good to know!
Congratulations, you're responsible for all the shitty parts of wow
You should do a video on how you got the job at Blizzard as a game designer
I'm curious why WoW uses the boss and mob telegraphs it has? After branching out to other MMOs (Wildstar, FFXIV, Lost Ark) they do encounter mechanics so much better. WoW encounter design comes off like theyre made by an angry French chef that refuses to change the recipe. These high artistic, low technical fidelity telegraphs are needlessly frustrating as mob density has increased.
One lesson was putting effort into shit that NO NOE WANTS! Plunderstorm, Pandaria remix, etc.
So you are responsible for removing hunter from the game...
Most of your WoWEdit footage is fake and stolen from a modder (Zarkeven) using open source community tools (Noggit). Notice how there's no WoWEdit on the task bar and the FPS counter never changes, it's just an overlay.
I love melee survival hunter. :)
Loved your changes to Survival Hunter. Was extremely satisfying to play.
You made survival this way? Dude.. It's the least played spec in the game, you know right?
He's unironcally proud of it too lmao.
I love playing survival I think it's fun as hell. And I've played all specs since early TBC
@@aerodynamic456 Would you have less fun with it if it were ranged?
@@Bepples yes I would. Been playing and still playing a survival hunter in classic.
@@aerodynamic456 What exactly is your appeal with "Hunter but worse"? In MoP SV could also fight up close with full effectiveness, you know.
Yeah dude, thanks for deleting my favourite spec from the game. It made me actually stop playing and my life became much better.
Thanks for ruining Survival.