Behind the Blue Curtain: Discussing Wrath of the Lich King with Jeffrey “Tigole” Kaplan

The MMO Gamer: Are 40 man raids gone for good? 25 seems a little low for say, Arthas.

Jeffrey Kaplan: I don’t want to say 40 man raids are gone for good, because if we ever felt like the quality of the gaming experience would be better if we did a 40 person raid, we would do it.

Conceptually, I don’t know what the right number is that would defeat Arthas. I could make the same argument for Illidan or Zul’jin, “Why are these powerful guys dying to so few?”

What I hope—and I’m sure the community will correct me if I’m wrong, because they’re excellent at doing that—is that in the essence of those encounters we’ve captured something that’s epic.

For those who are actually present, sure you might hear about “Yeah, Illidan died to 25 people, and that sounds weird, or wrong,” but, for anyone who’s actually been there and killed Illidan, man, was that an epic moment.

That’s what we’re hoping we can deliver on. I want anyone who fights Arthas, whether it’s with 10, or 25—or, the one guy who figures out how to solo him, God forbid—to say “Man, that was the most epic fight that I was ever a part of.”

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you guys handling Death Knight PvP? It seems like a pretty—I wouldn’t say overpowered class—but, you’re introducing a whole new system in there with the runes and that sort of thing. How are you guys blending Death Knight into the current classes, as far as PvP goes?

Jeffrey Kaplan: I was thinking of that when we were watching Tom and Lee do the demo, “Man, this is going to freak everybody out when he shows them the pull towards ability, or the Chains of Ice, or Death and Decay with the fear going off…” If you can’t see the arena implications behind some of that…

But, even if we hadn’t introduced the Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King—we have the talent panes disabled on the machines in there, but, if we were to show you the talent panes right now for the remaining classes, and the new abilities that they’re getting, the class balance, as you know it today, is going to change pretty drastically without the introduction of the new class.

We’re adding ten new talent points, new tiers across all three of the trees across every class, adding new core abilities, and retuning old abilities. Take a look at Warrior rend, or Thunder Clap, there are ones in there that are old abilities for classes where they didn’t use them, or they felt ineffective…

We’re going to have to rebalance PvP in this expansion, anyway. So it’s kind of, if anything, the perfect time to introduce the Death Knight, and make sure it works within that balance.

Curse: Another PvP question: Resilience was introduced in Burning Crusade. Can PvP players expect anything new with this expansion?

Jeffrey Kaplan: We haven’t finished completely itemizing PvP. Resilience is here to stay, we like the statistic. I don’t think we’ll be adding anything else to Resilience at this point, it’s a pretty powerful statistic. And, I don’t know if we’ll be adding any new PvP specific things.

Itemization is still up in the air, in terms of what exact stats will be PvP desired, and PvE. But, Resilience is a very clear PvP stat at this point, and we’re going to continue on that trend.

The MMO Gamer: Staying on the topic of PvP: You’re adding your first open-world zone in Northrend—well, some would say that Hillsbrad was the first open-world zone, but—are these zones going to be exclusive to expansion content, say, the next one might be in Southrend? Or, are you thinking about going back and adding them to some of the unused areas of the old world?

Jeffrey Kaplan: I think before we commit to adding open-world PvP to the old world we really want to see how Wintergrasp plays. We have a really good idea for how we want it to play out, and what mechanics we want to work there, and what we don’t want it to degenerate into.

We have some pretty good ideas behind that, but before seeing it play out in action, we don’t want to immediately go back to the old world and affect some of those areas.

I hope that we’ve proven, like in the patch where we addressed Dustwallow Marsh, that it’s on our agenda to hit lots of old world areas, whether it’s with PvP or PvE revamps, taking a hard look at the old world, keeping it viable, keeping it cool.

It’s one of our favorite areas, we put so much time into building it, it’s sad when people move on from it. I’m really excited about Stratholme for that reason, actually, the Caverns of Time event.

I think it’s great, not just for the Warcraft 3 players, because it’s based on that The Culling mission, but just for all the hardcore WoW guys who spent a lot of time at 60 doing a lot of Stratholme runs, it’s going to be cool to see the city pristine, as it was.

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