Warlords of Draenor - General Discussion

Thelos wrote:I guess I, too, have my nostalgiagoggles, like everybody else...Oh, would but [feature X that was around at the time I enjoyed the game most] return, then everything would be as good as I remember!

Warlords of Draenor Developer Interviews
There were a few developer interviews at the recent press events, so today we are taking a look at interviews with Alex Afrasiabi from Ausgamers. Most of the information has already been covered in other interviews, but there are a few new things:

Warlords of Draenor has roughly 10 new mounts.
Warlords of Draenor has roughly 10 new scenarios.
Garrisons could come to Azeroth in the future if the devs feel like it is the right decision based on what they learn from Warlords of Draenor.

New Character Models - Face Variations
There has been some concern about the variety of faces offered with the new models. It looks like we will get some answers in a future Artcraft post!

Misc
You won't be allowed to fly in Draenor at release, and the devs want to see how players react to this.
Afrasiabi also mentions that he thinks it is possible that players could love a world with no flying.
Garrisons will change the way the game plays, making it feel new.

Draenor
Iron Horde will be coming through the Dark Portal in the weeks coming up to the expansion release.
Upon arrival to Draenor, players will go through a 45 minute experience to try and turn off the Dark Portal to save Azeroth.
You will see why the enemy is so bad right right away, as well as why you must stop them.
When Garrosh goes back to Draenor, he still thinks he is a great savior. He wants to show the world the might of a united Orc front.

Blizzard wrote:There's a ton of awesome PvP-related stuff happening in Warlords. Just off the top of my head:

CC Disarmament: there's a lot fewer CC spells, especially instant and auto cast CCs, and more shared DRs among the ones that remain.
Health and scaling rebalance: means little to no Base Resilience or Battle Fatigue are needed, and classes that aren't as reliant on gear to perform. Also does wonders for PvP class balance.
Ashran: our new open world PvP zone, which we're not quite ready to share details on yet (but what I've seen so far looks awesome!)
Skirmishes: unrated Arenas that can be queued for either solo or in a group.
Spectator invites & Tournament gear: additional tools to allow tournament organizers to run high-quality tournaments without needing direct intervention from Blizzard.
Our new built-in Group Finder: much easier way to find party members for rated BGs or Arenas.

And that's just from the stuff we've already talked about. There's more to come as we continue development.

I know healer scaling was mentioned, but what about damage scaling? It has just gotten absurd how quickly damage scaled in MOP - we went from doing 60k dps to 400k+, which is why Battle Fatigue and PVP Resilience had to be set so high in the first place.

You need to hit the root of the problem NOW while you are doing the item squish - if you wait until after WOD then it will be too late and you'll have to do an item squish again for the next expansion.
So, there's actually a lot going on there:

Currently, in Mists, level 90 characters have a relatively high amount of base health, and a relatively low amount of base damage or healing on their abilities. As a result, your health from Stamina doesn't increase as quickly as your damage or healing from Attack or Spell Power. To use some made up numbers for perspective, your gear might account for 80-90% of your damage, but only 40-50% of your health. That's why, as the quality of your gear increases by hundreds of item levels over the course of an expansion, we see such a high swing in damage output compared to health pools.

For Warlords, we're simplifying that by making health and spell effectiveness scale a lot more linearly. Base health is being lowered dramatically (and the effectiveness of Stamina increased) to the point that as damage or healing goes up, health pools go up alongside them. That lets us ensure that PvP gameplay at low gear vs high gear feels relatively similar.

On top of that, we're increasing health pools in general -- they'll be much larger in comparison to the damage players are able to deal to each other than they are today. Resilience and Battle Fatigue were added because without them, an attack or heal would account for massive chunks of a player's health bar. With higher health, that same spell doesn't have as big of an impact.

(It's worth noting that all of this is after the item squish, so it's all relative. The actual numbers, including health pools, will end up much smaller compared to how things are today.)