Take a look behind the scenes as the World of Warcraft Classic team give us an update on how they are recreating WoW history. In this Dev Watercooler, the team share core decisions, current thinking, and some of the technical challenges and solutions they’re working on.

With the upcoming changes to PvP in Legion, we’re also making some big changes to how you gear up for battle. In this Dev Watercooler, Senior Game Designer Brian Holinka shares more of what’s in store.

We’re making some changes to our Raid itemization with the goal of improving the Personal Loot experience, creating more interesting distinctions among items, and providing rewards that more closely reflect the challenge players face to earn them.

In the final installment of this Dev Watercooler series, Lead Game Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas walks you through the team’s raid design philosophy for Warlords of Draenor.

One of our earliest design goals with World of Warcraft was to ensure a healthy rivalry between the Alliance and the Horde. Cross-faction communication was banned outright, even where it made little or no sense in the lore. Entire realms are dedicated to PvP. Battlegrounds and quest hubs feature prominent Alliance and Horde iconography. We want to foster a sense of factional pride, a real identity with your brothers and sisters in arms.

A lot of game design is striking a balance, and I use that term not only to mean making sure that all the various classes are reasonably fair, but also to mean that it’s easy to go to one extreme or the other. You even have to strike a balance in how many changes you make. I wanted to discuss today some of our philosophy on change, how much is too much, and when we think a change is necessary.

We recently buffed tank threat significantly and suggested that we would fill in any potential lost gameplay with new gameplay. What I meant by that was that if tanks don’t need to hit their buttons to generate threat, they may realize they don’t need to hit most of their buttons at all, and just stand there waiting until the right time to Shield Wall. Going a GCD or two without using a combat ability is fine with us. Standing around much longer than that gets boring quickly. What we proposed is that tanks should ideally want to hit their buttons because it keeps them alive. I didn’t elaborate on that too much except to say it would feel more like the Blood DK method of tanking, which prompted some players to state that they didn’t like the DK model, or to point out that the DK model is not just active but reactive. Fair enough.

One of the fun things about working on an MMO is that the game design will evolve over time, and you have the opportunity to make changes to reflect those design shifts. (And yes, we know that it can sometimes evolve too quickly). Back in December, I wrote a blog post about our vision for how threat should work. Since then, the game and the community have continued to progress and the designers have found ourselves changing our minds about the role of threat. Enough that we’re planning to apply a hotfix this week to change how threat works.

World of Warcraft has a pretty big footprint: we try to create a world that appeals to casual and hardcore players alike. There's a whole body of players -- be they casual or solo gamers or serious gamers with time constraints -- who gravitate toward questing. It's the most accessible part of the game. Quests move you through cool locations, allow you to play through epic stories, and continually reward you without requiring a lot of practice or commitment. Not everyone has the time to raid, and not everyone wants to; for many players, quests are the whole game.

You may have noticed we changed class talent trees for Cataclysm. We changed not just the trees themselves, as you might expect for an expansion, but the entire structure of the trees and the way you choose talents. Now that the Cataclysm model has been in play for several months, the team has been discussing what we like and don’t like about it, and I thought that might be of interest to some of you. As always with this series, this is design rumination, not a list of upcoming changes.

‘Dev Watercooler’ is a blog series that provides an inside look into the thoughts and discussions happening within the World of Warcraft development team. In our first entry, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostctrawler" Street laid down a few ground rules: No promises. Don’t read too much between the lines. No whining about the choice of topics we cover.

"Dev Watercooler" is a blog series that provides an inside look into the thoughts and discussions happening within the World of Warcraft development team. In our first entry, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostctrawler" Street laid down a few ground rules: 1.       No promises are being made in these Dev Watercooler blogs. 2.       Don't read too much between the lines. 3.       No complaints about the topic not being what you want to see covered.

A  re spellcast interrupt abilities, such as Kick, too good? It’s easy to make that argument. We think their ease of use and low cooldown has led to a whole cascade of events in PvP. Because interrupts are so good, casters without a lot of instant spells or mobility are weak. For that reason, we tend to give casters a lot of instant spells or movement abilities, and casters who excel at those (say, Frost mages) are very powerful, while those without (say, Elemental shaman) have more difficulty.

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually -- we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.