Developer Insight: Combat for Everyone in Midnight

Since the release of World of Warcraft, our goal has been to make a game that everyone can enjoy. There are as many ways to play and enjoy WoW as there are people, and we love to talk with players about how they play and what they love about it, whether it's the story, running dungeons with friends, exploring and collecting, roleplaying, or tackling difficult team challenges.

Combat Complexity and How it Affects Players

One thing we often hear is that there is a high level of complexity in WoW's class and combat design. Classes have a lot of abilities to manage, and it can be tough to find comfortable keybinds for them. During combat, there are many buffs and debuffs to keep track of, which is critical to playing well and can require intense concentration. Players trying out new specializations ("spec") also report that the Talent Trees can be intimidating. Even after learning the purpose of each talent, there are still subtle interactions that aren't obvious, and players often feel like they do not understand what bonuses and combinations are critical to their success.

The complexity of the combat system impacts all types of players in different ways, and everyone faces barriers. There are challenges for new players, trying to learn the ropes for the first time, as well as for returning players who are trying to catch up. Going further, we understand these challenges make it harder to recommend WoW to friends-players sometimes feel that their more inexperienced friends need a robust guide on how to play, manage addons, and more, to even get started. Experienced players who are eager to improve their play so they can tackle more challenging raid difficulties often don't know where to begin to get better. Without reading a guide, they might miss a subtle aspect of maximizing their performance. We have heard feedback from skilled players who tell us they have shelved some of their favorite characters because those characters' gameplay is more mechanically demanding than they have interest in. Expert players can spend hours configuring and maintaining addons to display information they need to play at the top level.

Making WoW More Approachable

With Midnight, we aim to make gameplay clearer and easier to understand, so the path to improvement is more apparent for players at every skill level, while maintaining the depth of mastery that WoW offers.

We are updating every class specialization with an eye towards approachability by reducing complexity and making gameplay more intuitive. We are beginning by focusing on what makes each specialization unique and designing gameplay that matches their theme, so your character's personality and style are reflected in how you play. Our goal is for the most appealing, visible elements of your spec to be what matter most in gameplay. That often means managing resources, tracking a few key buffs and debuffs, using ability charges strategically, and responding to important triggered effects (also known as "procs").

We want to ensure that players have all the necessary information to play a spec with clearly visible prompts and indicators in the user interface. This can include changing the design of complex abilities or reducing the number of buffs or debuffs that can be active, so it's easier to pick out the most essential information on enemy nameplates or in the Cooldown Manager.

We are also reviewing the amount of concentration or "cognitive load" required to play each spec. Cognitive load encompasses tasks such as keeping track of active auras, parsing conditions to choose the most effective ability in a given moment, or remembering long sequences of abilities. Some specs will demand more cognitive load than others by design. Keeping track of damage over time effects requires concentration, but is also a big part of the appeal of specs like Affliction, Feral, and Assassination! However, we are reviewing all specs for areas where concentration demands are excessive, unclear, or don't serve enjoyable gameplay.

Ultimately, our goal is that once every spec has all its new class talent points, Hero Talents, and Apex Talents, it has what we feel is a manageable, fun, and appropriately challenging level of complexity.

Examples of Class Approachability Changes

What do these goals mean for specific class designs?

Here are a few aspects of classes we're reviewing, along with examples of abilities and talents we're enhancing as a result.

Using Abilities Without Needing Addons

We don't want gameplay to rely on addons to show the information that players need. Going forward, we plan to design the game so all information required to use abilities with intention is available in the interface. Two categories of abilities are particularly tough to play without the use of addons-abilities where players rely on addons to calculate when to use spells, and abilities that rely on information that's hidden in the UI.

For instance, Outlaw Rogues' Roll the Bones is an ability where players often use addons to calculate when to use it, as there are many factors involved. In Midnight, it's much easier to see when it might be worth recasting Roll the Bones. An example of an ability that relies on tracking information that's hidden in the user interface is the Feral Druid ability Bloodtalons, which has been removed in Midnight.

Abilities Without Meaningful Gameplay

Gameplay should have some element of interest or intention. If individual abilities are frequently macroed, or consistently used alongside another, they're not adding meaningful gameplay. Removing some of these abilities will simplify long sequences of abilities that are usually cast in the same order during openers or cooldown windows. Simple maintenance buffs, where you periodically use an ability with no other strategic considerations, fall into this category as well.

Assassination is an example of a Rogue spec that always uses several abilities in a rote order alongside its major cooldown. There is no choice or strategy involved-the challenge is mostly a dexterity and memory check. Several of those effects have been removed to make those windows less involved. Restoration Druid's Efflorescence is an example of a simple maintenance buff, and Restoration is gaining options to make maintaining Efflorescence easier.

Many Modifier Auras

Several abilities give you a temporary bonus or alter the value of your subsequent use of an ability, and these can be fun. However, when a spec has a lot of these, it can make spells feel not worth using unless you've done some amount of setup first. Plus, all the auras for those bonuses can make your active buffs list feel bloated and hard to interpret. We want spells you use frequently to feel consistently good, so we're removing or adjusting some bonuses like this and moving their power into more potent base spells.

Windwalker Monk has a lot of these types of abilities-effects like Dance of Chi Ji, Transfer the Power, and Martial Mixture have been changed or removed to address the need to track auras to determine when to use abilities like Spinning Crane Kick.

Important but Subtle, Hard-to-Discover Talent Interactions

There are many talents in WoW, and most do a good job of explaining how they work and what they do. Some have interactions with other talents or implications that aren't immediately clear, but are critical to basic performance. These kinds of subtleties can be interesting and welcome when trying to master the finer points of a spec, but it shouldn't require a lot of specialized knowledge to play a spec at a basic level.

Balance Druids' Waning Twilight is an example of a talent we feel is too subtle-its damage bonus is very important, but it isn't apparent how to meet its criteria to activate that bonus.

But Wait, There's More!

In addition to the above, some other aspects of class design in review are:

• Gameplay with high actions per minute-this can be physically demanding and uncomfortable.
• Specs with a litany of ability buttons make it hard to set keybinds or keep track of them all in combat.
• Situations where lots of ability-modifying procs can be active at once, causing an array of buttons on your action bar to be highlighted, giving a sense that all of them are urgent.
• Specs that sometimes get flooded with so many resources that managing them becomes overwhelming or unimportant.
• Abilities that are very complex, such as Adaptive Swarm, Surge of Power, or Blackout Combo.

Approachability and Mastering World of Warcraft

We have also spoken with players who enjoy mastering the many challenges that WoW presents. They carefully review logs, simulations, videos, and guides. They memorize complex action priorities and train their attention to perform rotations perfectly while handling encounter mechanics. They are often the knowledge gurus upon whom their communities are built, offering guidance and tips for other players and sharing their encounter strategies to help defeat bosses.

We understand that mastering World of Warcraft is a crucial part of its appeal; however, becoming an expert WoW player will look a little different after Midnight's approachability changes. Rotations will be learned more quickly, less time will be spent on customizing addons, and you'll experience new types of challenges during encounters. It's satisfying and fun at all skill levels to learn to utilize your abilities effectively to optimize your performance. It's important to us to maintain that depth. Specs will still be designed to give players opportunities to maximize their play, and players with determination to master the game will continue to distinguish themselves.

Looking Ahead

We hope these changes open the door to World of Warcraft for more players and are another step toward WoW being a game for everyone. If you've felt overwhelmed by what it takes to start playing, or intimidated by picking up a new spec, we hope you'll give it a try. Or, if you've wanted to build your skills to tackle harder content but don't know where to start, we hope that Midnight brings the clarity you need. If you and a friend have wanted to play together but experienced barriers doing so, we hope that it will be easier in Midnight.

Alpha

Our plan for the first wave of Public Alpha is to rebuild all 40 specializations according to the above philosophies. As always, Alpha will be level-locked over its duration, so you will not have access to most of the new Hero Talents and Apex Talents gained over the course of leveling until later in the testing phase. Specs are designed with the assumption that you have obtained all those talents, so please take that into consideration during your playtesting and feedback.

Your feedback on these changes is crucial to us, and we are looking forward to reading it in this thread.

Here's what we are hoping to learn from players from the alpha test:

• How well do the changes meet the goals described? Each spec changelist in the patch notes contains an overview of the changes and goals for the new version.
• Gameplay clarity pain points you're still experiencing, such as information that's important to playing the spec well, but is difficult to track.
• Building characters for different types of content-do you feel you can get the tools you need for dungeons, delves, raids, and PvP?

We hope you're excited for the new class changes in Midnight, and we'll see you in Azeroth!