WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clayton Stone and Lead Software Engineer Nora Valletta on Runes, Hybrid Classes, Faction Balancing and More For the Upcoming Season of Discovery

Almost 20 years since the cult classic World of Warcraft (WoW) was introduced and with its classic version set for a big new update with the Season of Discovery, we got to talk with the development team in an interview.

Joining us in this interview is associate production director Clayton Stone and Lead Software Engineer, Nora Valletta.

[Interview is edited for clarity]

Finding Balance

One of the more difficult things about doing something like this is finding balance. With that in mind, we asked the both Clayton and Nora are the new specs such as Mage Healer or Shaman Tank designed to be viable for the dungeons and raids of Season of Discovery.

With the new roles that the team added to just Mage Healer and the new tank roles for classes that previously could not tank, Nora mentions that the team intend to have them be capable enough to take on those main roles.

“That being said, balance is a difficult thing in general, and we’ve kind of taken the approach in Season of Discovery to make sure we’re balancing for fun above all else. We want to make sure that we’re not spending too much time trying to just kind of fine-tune everything at the cost of focusing on delivering phenomenal content to our players.”

Meanwhile, Clayton mentions that it’s going to be interesting to see the way players would build their classes out and use all the different tools in their toolkits to approach different situations.

He expects some classes to be more viable than others but they’re excited to see how players approach each of those and how they designate different classes to approach each instance.

Nora continues that the team will be keeping a very close eye on things and making sure that if there’s any outliers, the team will be making adjustments as they see fit.

Plans For More Content

Two to three months can be considered a long time for the 25 level cap. We asked Nora and Clayton if there were any plans for more content during this period.

“My first inclination is to say it may seem like a long time, but I think once players get out there and start really exploring Azeroth, experimenting with their various runic abilities, and also just exploring and experiencing that sense of discovery in the new season, I’m hoping they will find plenty to do.” said Nora.

Clayton chimed in saying that with the level cap of 25, the team hopes that’s an invitation for players to try new classes that they may not have tried before, or try out the classes they’ve tried before with these new runes that players can earn through discoveries.

“It provides a fresh experience for this classic era of World of Warcraft that even the most experienced players are going to find something new in, depending on the length of the phase, and we haven’t announced how long it’s going to last. We really do take that as an invitation for players to experiment and try new things, and we hope that because of that, there’s a lot more content for them to experience than they might imagine.”

Hybrid Classes

Roles were previously dedicated to specific classes. With the introduction of hybrid classes such as Mage Healer, Rogue Tank, and Shaman Tank, it seems that Blizzard is shifting its focus to said hybrid classes to promote them. We asked Nora if that seemed to be the case.

“I think I’m inclined to say, I mean our seasons, right? Our seasons are a great opportunity for us to experiment with interesting situations like Mage Healer, Warlock Tanks, and Rogue Tanks. And so I wouldn’t quite say that we’re necessarily leaning into permanently deciding; okay, we’re really leaning into the hybrid classes thing.”

Nora continued by saying that it’s more of a situation in which they see an opportunity to allow players to enjoy some of these iconic class archetypes in a way that they’ve never experienced before, especially in a classic WoW setting.

Runes

When it comes to the Runes system, players enjoy the notion of discovering secrets all over Azeroth, however there’s not much talk about how that’s going to work. We asked Clayton and Nora if they could shed some light on how this new system would work.

“That’s a tough one, because, as you’re right, we definitely want to preserve that sense of mystery and wonder. I would say that the runes and the discoveries may take a lot more effort than players initially think.” said Clayton.

He continued by saying that if players assume that everything is going to be found in a box that’s hidden in the cave somewhere, it may take a lot more collaboration with other players. But the team also expects that a social component is a massive part of World of Warcraft Classic, and they hope players would work together.

Nora agreed and said that the team is being purposefully cryptic about their actual rune discoveries just because they want to preserve that sense of wonder and awe as players stumble upon them for the first time in the game.

“That being said, it’s not going to be as straightforward or simple as, say, a new quest line, for instance, right? There’s definitely going to be stuff there that players are going to have to employ. They’re going to have to pay attention to the world of Azeroth around them.” said Nora.

Difficulty

With Season of Discovery, players are worried if the difficulty level would be lowered, considering WoW Classic is known to be of a higher difficulty level.

Nora mentions that they did anticipate that by adding new runes and new abilities which might change up the meta in that way and cause the game to get easier.

“That being said, because we anticipated that, we have made adjustments to make sure that the world still feels very dangerous, to make sure that a player can’t just enter a zone, pull all of the enemies in the zone, and just survive that encounter.”

Nora continued that they have made adjustments to the damage done by enemies and out in the wild to make sure that the world still feels dangerous and that the content remains challenging in a way that stays true to WoW Classic.

Hunter Class

Considering that other classes can support more than one role, there’s one oddity with the Hunter class where it’s the only class that doesn’t have other class roles. We asked Clayton and Nora what was the reason behind that decision.

“This is also going to be kind of speculation on my part a little bit, but when we approached designing these runes in Season of Discovery, we were really trying to lean into archetypes that were already rather closely associated with these existing classes, right?” said Nora.

She continued by saying that they consider Hunters to be masters of ranged combat but also incredible survivalists who use their weapons in order to survive. The team thought about these archetypes and planning runes around them, which made a lot of sense to lean into concepts like that and how that coincides with the team’s archetype-first class fantasy concept.

Clayton added in his thoughts saying that as phases go on and new level caps get unlocked and new runes being released, players are likely to change the way that they’re playing their classes as it might change substantially as more runes are unlocked, found and applied.

Faction Balancing

One of the big things that’s coming to Season of Discovery is faction balancing on PvP servers. However, it wasn’t implemented on the retail servers years ago. We asked Nora and Clayton about their thoughts on this.

Nora mentions there are a few reasons to faction balance and how there are pros and cons to enforcing that on a server. One of the potential cons would be that if a faction-balanced enforcement is triggered, then players who are joining late to the game might not be able to play with their friends who are playing on Horde.

“For instance, if the Horde is locked on that server, there may be difficult situations like that, but at the same time, to answer the question of why faction balance is really good, it’s one of those things, especially with Season of Discovery having that open world.”

Nora continued saying that the team will be monitoring the situation closely and adjust the faction balance enforcement safeguards accordingly.

Clayton joined in on the conversation mentioning that an additional element that’s brought to the game when in the case where players have to be aware of their surrounding as they may be walking into an opposite faction territory where there’s a lot more of their presence on top of having the PvP con flag constantly turned on.

“Now that being said, we do want to put a caution out there that for players who have never experienced a faction-balanced PvP realm, let’s say they’re playing on a PvP realm that is dominated by one side or the other and it already exists.” he continued.

Future Plans For WoW Classic

Players are speculating about the future of WoW Classic, and whethe will Season of Discovery lead other expansions.

“There are no plans for taking Season of Discovery forward into future expansions, unfortunately. The season will end at some point in the distant future, and we’re imagining that at that point players will have the option to migrate their Season of Discovery characters onto another Classic Era realm that perhaps looks very similar to Classic Era.” said Nora.

Rune Engraving

There’s a lot of concerns with the Rune Engraving Systems where players are saying that it makes their WoW character very overpowered. We asked Nora and Clayton how would the team balance the mechanic to create a suitable gameplay experience.

To which Clayton replied by saying that the team followed the discussion online and there are some concerns that introducing a system like this would require just regular balance updates. The team wants every class to have something fun associated with and something new that they get to do.

“We also don’t want classes to feel overpowered, and if it turns out that they can progress through their level-up journey blindfolded or run instance content without looking up from their keyboard or watching a TV show on the side or something like that, that may be a little too overpowered.”

That being said, the team wants the classes to feel powerful but they don’t want one class to feel particularly more powerful than others, but there’s an element of this little bit of fantasy with Season of Discovery as players gain these new abilities and spells that their class should feel a bit more powerful than it did in the Classic era.

Nora chimed in to say that they’ve seen a lot of speculation and theory crafting online around what’s the best and strongest class, and the team encourages players to have fun with it and continue theory crafting.

“All of those interesting metas that players are coming up with without having played the game might shift significantly once they start learning how things go. And that being said, this is just the 1–25 leveling bracket. There’s going to be additional runes, additional abilities, and more discoveries for players to encounter in the future leveling brackets once the 25 to 40 bracket comes out and future brackets as well.”

Cut Content

There’s been a lot of cut content from World of Warcraft over the years like the Crypts of Karazkan, We asked Nora and Clayton if players could see content like those be brought into Season of Discovery.

“I think that there is a very high chance players will encounter—perhaps, you know, players will benefit from revisiting potentially unfinished quest lines. There is going to be additional PvE and PvP endgame content in the future brackets as well.” said Nora.

She continue by saying that players can look forward to interesting, more flushed-out areas that maybe they haven’t had the chance to explore yet as part of WoW Classic.

“I think there’s certainly an ambition on the classic team to really push ourselves and push what we’ve been able to deliver to players so far. And again, following the community discussion and listening to our players, we’ve identified a very strong desire for that new content, particularly in the unfinished or what’s been only limited or presented limitedly in the past. So it’s something that, from an ambition standpoint, is certainly something that we would like to pursue, but there are no announcements to make on that front today.” shared Clayton.

New Players

Considering WoW launched back in 2004, and it’s been years of storytelling, we asked what plans do they have for future new players who are interested in jumping into the game but find it difficult to do so because of the massive lore around Warcraft.

Clayton replied by saying that’s something that the team feels fortunate with a lot of these classic experiences that they get to provide when they look at something like Season of Discovery as they’re bringing in these new abilities and starting fresh in this world.

“It doesn’t require a lot of knowledge about the existing lore or story around World of Warcraft for new players to be able to jump in and enjoy it. And certainly our non-season of Discovery Classic era realms are also present.”

“If they don’t want some of the new bells and whistles that players are enjoying, those exist. And then, of course, Hardcore as well. And we’ve really been surprised by the number of people who have never played World of Warcraft before who have found their way to the game because of Hardcore.”

Setting Boundaries

The next question that we asked Clayton and Nora was whether there were any boundaries that should not have been crossed when choosing what new content to add to Season of Discovery.

“We don’t have concrete, well-defined boundaries, but with our very iterative approach to development, we understand Classic, and we understand how Classic should feel and how it should play.” Nora replied.

During the development of Season of Discovery, Nora mentioned there were a couple of times where the team had a cool idea or new rune ability and implemented in the game, but had to be adjusted wherever it made sense or removing it completely.

“Trying to think of some of the examples, movement is a big one of them. I know we allow warriors now to be able to charge, but otherwise, I don’t think you’ll find a lot of really radical movement abilities or things like that making their way to Classic.” Clayton shared.

Endgame

Since there’s going to be a slow endgame shift, should players expect the sort of endgame flavour of these worlds and games of each of these sort of new raids to fit an overall story.

Nora mentions that they’re definitely committed to making sure they’re true to the lore and the background of all the locations, characters, and everything they utilise to bring forth these classic experiences to players.

“If you look at, for example, our Blackfathom Deeps raid, we’re very much leaning into kind of what’s going on in Blackfathom Deeps set at that time, like, oh no, there’s cultists in there. They’re messing with some really dangerous dark energies that may have corrected some of the creatures in there. These things aren’t happening necessarily in a vacuum, which is what it sounded like you were kind of asking about.”

“So we do want to make sure that as we’re adding these new experiences and the end game content, it makes sense and is kind of tied into the world around it such that it just feels like it just clicks in place like it was meant to be there all along.”

World PvP

We asked Nora if there were any plans for balancing the faction or server popular relations for World PvP considering the players in each faction aren’t equal.

To which, she replied by saying they have protections in place, but in the player versus player realms, they will be having faction balance enforced so that players should hopefully be a little bit on an even footing with the opposite faction in their realm. That being said, even with those faction balance protections in place on PvP realms specifically, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a fair fight.

“Surely, in World of Warcraft’s history, there really isn’t ever a guarantee of a fair fight because sometimes part of the fun is getting together with a group of your 5 friends and roaming the world, kind of just encountering people who are questing and then attacking them and the person who’s getting attacked.”

“Part of the excitement, thrill, and danger of Azeroth is encountering people who are going to ambush you, and you know suddenly you have to run away or hide or something like that, and so those situations will still occur, including on our PvP realms, which will have faction balance enforcement, as well as our PvE realms, which will not have that enforcement in place.”

Wrath of the Lich King

We asked Clayton whether it was intended to release Season of Discovery following he conclusion of Wrath of the Lich King, given that the core of World of Warcraft Classic is already transitioning to Cataclysm.

“We’ve been in development on Season of Discovery for a while now, but a lot of it was taken from a lot of the thoughts around Season of Discovery, and the team’s ideas for it came out of the successes that we found with Season of Mastery. Looking at what players really responded to in that, I think that there has certainly been a lot of discussion in the community about the three things that we hear consistently.”

Clayton explained that players love the classic era, the original pre-burning crusade where players love those classes, and they would love to see subtle or not-so-subtle changes made to each of those classes or additions to them.

“We had Blizzcon, and we thought that we would be able to release Season of Discovery not long after Blizzcon. So the team got really excited about being able to announce it at Blizzcon and then move right into it. It’s been a while since we’ve had a Season of Mastery, sort of wrapped up more than a few months ago. And the timing just felt right.”

“It’s been so exciting to see how well players have responded to it, and certainly about the news and everything that Nora and the rest of the team got to announce at Blizzcon, and we’re just excited to see now that players will have the chance to actually jump into what they respond to when they play and then how that will impact our future seasons, our future development, and of course the progression of Season of Discovery.”

Future updates

We asked Nora and Clayton if they’ve figured out what’s going to be converted in future updates, or would that still be up for debate.

“I think there’s a lot of forward thinking happening on our team. So we do have a plan in place. Folks will find out what will be coming for them in the Level 40 bracket fairly soon, and we’re very excited for that to be announced, as well as to hear your player’s thoughts on Blackfathom Deeps once it is released, and to similarly hear player’s thoughts once we announce what the sort of next PvE, PvP, and game will be like in the next bracket.” shared Nora.

Clayton chimed in saying that there are some constraints that are in place. When thinking about some of the dungeons and their viability, where they may be long, but also have the physical space so it doesn’t feel like putting templates in there.

“When I say we have plans, I want to be clear too that our team is very good at listening to player feedback and pivoting wherever need be I always say plans but it’s also one of those things where we’re constantly listening and trying to figure out what makes the most sense “What’s going to be the most fun?” “What’s going to be the most impactful thing that we can deliver to our players?” We’re going to go for that, you know?” Nora continued.

Slots

With the limited number of slots on player’s gear from the outset, we asked Clayton and Nora if it’s going to funnel players down to one specific play style.

“So there is, without reviewing too much, a hypothetical scenario where additional rune slots could be added to more gear. In that hypothetical scenario, the team is certainly up for the challenge of trying to balance everything together, as that does add additional complexity.” said Clayton.

It allows players to change how they play their classes, maybe not as substantially as completely changing their role, but there is an intention there to allow for greater customisation of one’s toolkit as things go on.

Nora continued saying that there’s a lot of potential for the customisation where in Season of Discovery, they started out with a lot more runes than we originally had, but that had to be cut back just because of the sheer complexity.

“We’re just like, “Okay, this is ridiculous. Like, players might not even like that there’s so much going on, you know?” And so we think we’ve hit a very happy place where there’s plenty of potential for really fun experimentation. And like Clay alluded to, there’s definitely the potential for more interesting class-changing combinations of runes later down the line.”

Threat Reduction

One thing that players noticed was that there were a lot of threat reduction in some of the taunt-like abilities. We asked Clayton and Nora whether if they can confirm if that was a real change.

“I feel like with data mining stuff in particular, it tends to be because it’s kind of a malleable thing. I don’t really want to start kind of speculating on what each individual change may have been or why based on the fact that a lot of things are still kind of adjustable up in the air, kind of in the process of being fine tuned as we lead up to launch.” Nora replied.

Clayton mentioned that the team are still making subtle tweaks to things as they’re going along, and that they expect that after launch, there will likely be more as well.

“As for the reason why, it’s going to differ from case to case, but we’re just trying to produce something that everybody has a great time with, gets to engage with, and has fun with, and I mean, that’s really our goal. It’s just creating an exciting experience for players.” Clayton continued.

10-person Raids

The next question we asked Nora was whether the team had a strategy for how different the team is planning on making the new 10-person raids as compared to the original release.

To which, Nora mentions that the fights are definitely going to be a challenge. There will be mechanics that would greatly benefit players to notice, pay attention to, and learn the dance of the fight in order to conquer each boss. There are unique, fun, and interesting new mechanics for players to discover in Blackfathom Deeps, as well as future PvE content that we have laid down the road.

“There was a time when, kind of leading up to Blizzcon and trying to decide how we were going to facilitate the Blizzcon demo, we were discussing as a team, like how much about the boss fights that players were going to encounter in this demo.”

“Should we reveal, or should we describe, that, you know, doing certain things may make the fight a lot easier for you if you can coordinate and do this thing? And we’ve decided to kind of just air on the side of players; they’ll figure it out fast, I’m sure, but we want to give them that experience, that feeling of self-accomplishment, when you kind of solve a puzzle and realize, “Oh, okay,” have that aha moment right, and truly conquer those boss fights on your own.”

Hitting the Level Cap

After hitting the level 25 cap, we asked Nora whether if players should stop questing to not break the leveling start when the level cap increases.

To which, Nora replied saying that players can continue questing to their heart’s content, and players won’t have to worry about preventing themselves from earning XP as the game will be capping that for players.

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We would like to thank Clayton Stone and  Nora Valletta for taking the time to answer our questions, as well as Blizzard Entertainment for setting up the interview for us.

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