I had the chance to take part in an interview with Brian Birmingham and Ana Resendez in advance of the official release of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic. They both work as lead software engineers on the classic WoW expansion for the Lich King. Here are some of the interview’s highlights from the wide range of subjects that were covered.

Features: Should They Be Added?

One of the features in Retail WoW that makes finding parties to complete dungeons exceedingly quick and simple is the dungeon finder. However, it is frequently highlighted as something that contributed to weakening the sense of community among players because we weren’t naturally joining groups on our own and kept running into the same faces, which strengthens community bonds and new friendships. Birmingham brought up the fact that they promised not to add Dungeon Finder back in if they ever returned to Wrath from the very beginning of Classic.

The team had to reconsider their position because the community has voiced a strong demand for it. He continued, saying  “the biggest argument we hear against it is ‘if you don’t like it, don’t use it,’ but it doesn’t really work that way. Once it’s available in an ecosystem, it tends to leach players away because it’s so convenient.” This is accurate; the first time around, we saw that play out with WoW. The number of gamers wanting to form groups in various ways crashed as soon as we were able to automatically queue for items. It’s simpler to add your group to the queue than it is to use other techniques to recruit people, even if you were just attempting to find one extra person. So either you have to implement an automatic dungeon finder and understand how it will affect the community, or you can’t include it in the game. With it, there is no genuine room for compromise.

The developers had also considered merging the raid lockouts for raids with between 10 and 25 participants. Many guilds felt under pressure in Wrath to undertake weekly 10 man and 25 man raids in order to increase their chances of obtaining gear. This was troublesome mostly because it lengthened the time required for raiding, and playing the same content twice as often can result in players becoming fatigued twice as quickly. A further stressor on raid groups in Wrath was the inability to easily divide a 25 man raid into two 10 man raids. This specifically became a problem with Trial of the Crusader because there were suddenly four versions of every raid instead of only two after Heroic difficulty was enabled.

Birmingham said they had gotten a lot of feedback from players who preferred to play one version of the raid with their buddies and the other with pick-up groups and didn’t want the lockouts shared. He gave this explanation of their solution: “So what we decided is actually, it wasn’t really a problem until Trial of the crusader, so we’d really like to try the Ulduar model where the lockout is split between 25 man and 10 man so you can do each of those in a week. But still, the Heroic versions are something you can do optionally inside the normal version, so we are going to try and see if we can do that for Trial of the Crusader.” Sincerely, this is a great answer. I’ve always been disappointed that they switched away from having the difficulty of the fight alter as a result of people acting differently during the fight. Each solution has trade-offs, but if they can successfully implement it in ToC, it would be nice to see that applied to ICC as well.

The new user interface (UI) that will be included with the Dragonflight expansion was also brought up, along with the chance that some of it might make its way into the Classic branch as well. Birmingham stated that it is something they may be able to incorporate in portions, highlighting in particular the capacity to rearrange additional elements on the UI. He added, “One of the things that we were really happy about with the initial Classic release, I know I’m one of them I really enjoyed the way it looked, was bringing the original UI for folks who were nostalgic for it. We put a lot of effort into making sure that when you first start the game, you think, “Oh, yeah, I remember this; this is how it looked.” In light of this, it’s probably doubtful that Classic will receive the same comprehensive UI revamp that DF is receiving, but players could see some aspect appear if the community wants it.

Tougher heroic dungeons

According to a recent interview, phase two of Wrath Classic will also include harsher Heroic Dungeons. Although there has been a significant departure from how Wrath operated in the past, ultimately, this should be a good thing. It will definitely serve as a bit of a catch-up mechanic for players, which will make it simpler for raids to backfill their teams when the first tier is complete. This raises several issues, one of which is whether the Heroic+ dungeons will stop rewarding rare gear and start solely dropping epics.

Birmingham quickly clarified that he was unaware of the precise strategy being used to deal with treasure in Heroic+ because it was still being developed. He did, however, state that he thinks it is currently intended for the additional stuff that drops to be genuine additional loot. You will receive both the new epic loot and the rare gear that typically drops in Heroic. The player will still be able to go back and complete the ordinary Heroic version of the dungeons to obtain those rare items and be able to obtain the enchanting mats that way, he added, if that isn’t how they decide to go about it.

This entire interview was a fantastic opportunity to go over some of the information we already knew and to get a glimpse of what is coming up for Wrath Classic. When phase two is released, some people could be disappointed by the concept of changing some aspects of raiding and the addition of Heroic+, but these modifications could make Wrath Classic even greater than it was. Although Wrath had many positive reviews, there were also several significant drawbacks. It is amazing to watch the development team address these problems by coming up with fresh approaches.

At 3 p.m. PDT on September 26, Wrath of the Lich King Classic will be live worldwide. To find out what time zone you are in, go to the Wrath Classic launch page.