Dracthyr
The current design of the empower spell Fire Breath is that it does instant damage in a cone in front of you, and then additional damage over time. Empowering Fire Breath for longer increases the duration of the damage over time effect, while the instant damage is unchanged. Depending on the health of the enemy you’re fighting, spending less time charging Fire Breath could be better than fully charging it! Being able to release a spell early when you’re in danger, or using that casting time more efficiently if the later stages of the spell aren’t necessary, are new avenues for players to express mastery in varying combat situations.
The ‘bombing run’ type ability shown in the deep dive is Deep Breath, which is not an empower spell. The Evoker chooses a destination (like with movement abilities such as Heroic Leap or Door of Shadows), and then instantly lifts off and flies to that location while spewing flame beneath them, dealing massive damage to enemies in their path.
[When asked about a Legion Order Hall/Artifact Weapons] Evokers should be able to go back and complete the majority of questlines and content from previous expansions, such as the zone storylines, but we don’t currently have plans to create bespoke class content for them in those areas.
Talents
Exile’s Reach is remaining unchanged for the most part, you will still obtain many fundamental class abilities from completing the quests and this content. Your interaction with the new talent system will begin after you reach level 10
We are currently trying to focus as many combat-altering abilities as possible into the new talent trees. This can include things such as movement abilities, interrupts, dispels, hybrid healing options, defensive abilities, etc. Our goal is to set up the trees and paths so that there opportunities to choose between different types of utility, but not to, for example, abandon all utility choices entirely in order to maximize your DPS. If you choose not to have an interrupt, it is likely because you traded it out for some other type of utility or CC that you believed would be more useful in the situation. The inverse is also true—specializations that do not have a certain capability in Shadowlands (such as an interrupt) may be able to obtain it by giving up something they currently do have.
We recognize that abilities such as Eyes of the Beast, or Astral Recall, or Teleport: Moonglade, aren’t combat altering choices you’re making, and you would be hard pressed to spend a talent point to obtain this ability again. Those abilities are not going away, they are not going to go in the talent tree, they will just be a bonus spell you get while leveling up. Other than that, we’re trying to put as many combat related abilities in the tree as we can
PvP talents will continue to work the way they do now, there will be PvP talent choice nodes on the new talent UI frame where you choose extra effects while in PvP situations.
Professions
You do not directly get better at a recipe via crafting it multiple times, as you do with legendary recipes in Shadowlands. That is an interesting system, but ultimately requires a huge amount of gold investment and can get repetitive. This means only players with lots of gold can easily engage with it, and has also resulted in the cost of legendaries being extremely high in many cases.
For the profession revamp, there are many different ways to improve at your profession (I’ll talk more about those soon), and thus craft/gather items at higher quality. The goal is that the pursuit of profession progression is through compelling and fun activities over spending lots of gold though. Gold will of course still have its place. You may still want to buy reagents or make orders for high end crafting gear for instance, but it should not be a gate to your ability to dive into and have lots of success with your chosen professions.
I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on the planned system for Dragonflight yet, but the intent is that this is not generally grindy when aiming to earn gear appropriate to your activity.
That is, if you are a normal raider for instance, your normal raid provides enough reagents to allow you to to craft a limited amount of normal raid item level gear without needing to go do a bunch of other stuff. But if say, you wanted to craft heroic raid tier gear as a normal raider, you could choose to go do other activities such as m+, pvp, or challenging outdoor activities to supplement the reagents required and get better gear sooner.
In general we’d like crafted gear to feel like something you are earning at a satisfying rate along side your other gear sources. Say you had bad luck and got no drops while raiding, you’ll still be making progress towards some high end crafted gear…and say you just can’t get legs to drop for you, you may choose to have legs crafted to fill in that particular slot with a larger upgrade.
For some crafted gear, you might also need to seek out a special rare drop off a certain mob in the world, a dungeon, or a raid as well. Earning crafted gear should feel like a bonus, an adventure, and a social experience.
[considerations for letting learned recipes be account-wide, or otherwise shareable with alts of the same profession]This isn’t in our current plans for professions as we are concentrating on other aspects of the profession system for the moment, sorry.
Recrafting
The recrafting system shouldn’t be thought of as an upgrade system. It is just a way to take something that has been crafted in the past and recraft it with changed optional reagents and possibly a different quality. So to give a more concrete example using your numbers:
A crafted recipe might make a helm at between item level 325 and 335 depending on quality. It could require 100 dragonscales as it’s main reagent.
A skilled crafted might be able to make it straight up at quality 5, item level 335, while a new crafter might only make it at quality 1, or item level 325. In both cases, the reagent cost is the same.
Now, say you got your piece crafted by that unskilled crafter at quality 1 / item level 325. Maybe he’s a friend and says, hey Letholas, I’ve been working on my blacksmithing and I can now make that piece at quality 5! Send it to me via a recrafting order to me and I’ll hook you up. You do so.
Your friend then recrafts your helm using the old helm, 20 dragon scales, and one of a special reagent he earned, to recraft it. The result is it is now quality 5 and item level 335.
Leveling up professions
Improving your overall profession skill. If you’ve maxed out your blacksmithing skill for instance, you will craft everything better than if you are only halfway leveled through your profession. (Leveling / skilling up in your profession will mechanically work the same as it always has).
Getting better gear for your profession - through higher skill and/or other profession stats on the gear.
Specialization in your profession - This is the largest source of improvement. The more you specialize in ways that help a given recipe, the larger bonus skill you will get towards that recipe, and thus the higher quality you will be able to make it at. (There is a lot to this system that we’ll discuss later!) There are lots of ways to earn specialization points, and doing so will be necessary to excel in your profession. Some of these sources can only be done once, while others will be repeatable.
Some one-time sources for specialization points are likely to be: making recipes for the first time, certain discoveries in the world (an old book on a bookshelf about alchemy, an old buried tablet, a hermit scribe in a cave, etc.), special quests, completing certain profession achievements such as crafting your first max quality item
Some repeatable sources for specialization points are likely to be: helping various factions and NPC’s in the world (through quests), finding treasures out in the world, fulfilling crafting orders for others.
Ways to become more adept and have a better outcome each time you craft
Using higher quality reagents in your recipe.
Using a new type of consumable reagent that we are calling Finishing Reagents. These reagents give you bonuses while crafting the recipe, and some of them can directly improve your skill, and thus quality, when used. An example might be a blacksmith using a special quenching oil, or a jewelcrafter using a special polishing cloth while cutting gems.
Some crafting stats can improve the resulting quality crafted. One of these is Inspiration. The more inspiration you have, the better chance to be Inspired while crafting, gaining some bonus skill to be applied to the outcome. Basically a crafting “crit”. While we want the system to be largely about long term progression and opt in bonuses, inspiration provides a form of opt-in randomness. If you choose to specialize or gear towards Inspiration, you may be able to craft something at a higher quality than your current level of progression would otherwise allow (when you become inspired). The idea is this adds some additional excitement to the crafting process through variable outcomes, but that it is never required to be able to craft things at the highest level of quality.
Optional reagents - Using most optional reagents will actually increase the difficulty of the recipe, and thus require a higher skill to craft it at a high quality. Conversely, if you choose to use an optional reagent that, for instance, lowers the item level of the item you are crafting, it will actually lower the difficulty of the recipe and make it easier to craft at a high quality.
We recognize that lots of people see value in increasing the number of professions learned by a single player, and it’s something we have definitely discussed. Currently we have no plans to expand this number though. For Dragonflight we are adding significant amounts of new depth and gameplay to professions, so also increasing the number of professions that you can learn on a character at the same time could be a recipe for potentially being overwhelming.
(Runescape style (non-combat)) "Skiller" Character
For some players ideally, their professions should be able to be the most important part of their identity, and where they can choose to spend the majority of their energy!
Given that, we are discussing how to achieve both the goals of having group content being rewarding to a player with professions, and avoiding it being required to be successful in your profession.
You will absolutely be able to max your professions’ skills, and very successfully specialize without setting foot in an instance in Dragonflight. The vast majority of recipes will continue to be acquirable through outside play as well. It is possible though, that some recipes will come from dungeons or raid. These are great places thematically to acquire some recipes, and become a cool reward for doing that content. That said, we are currently thinking that perhaps many, if not all of these recipes will not be soulbound, so you could ask someone to go into an instance to get them for you, or buy them off the AH.
Will guilds have dedicated crafters that don’t even raid with them, but are there fulfilling the fantasy and role of crafting awesome gear for their guild? We don’t know, but that would certainly be neat!
We are definitely aware that inventory space is an issue and are currently looking into what we can do here!
The color Pink for transmog etc:
Yep. More pink would be great.
I’m not on the art team and I can’t stress enough how much I’m not promising anything here, but I think this is a really good point and good reminder. We could certainly stand to have more pink gear appearances in the game for the folks who want it.
