Café com Batatinha Dev Interview - Warbands & Hero Talents in The War Within

wowhead.com:

Brazilian WoW content creator Café com Batatinha (Coffee with Potato Chips) interviewed Game Producer George Velev and Principal Software Engineer Peter Hodge, discussing Warbands, Hero Talents and more!

Café com Batatinha Interview

Check out the full video for the full context:

Warbands

• Inspired by player-base continued affinity for more alt-friendliness but something they couldn't do in a smaller patch.
• No specifics for new cosmetic Warband login screens. Definitely something they're talking about will probably be heavily inspired by existing collection systems
• Looking at converting most old expansion factions to Warbands. Will be done on a case-by-case basis since there are some that make sense as character specific.
• Warband equipment should drop from all types of content and will drop 1 upgrade tier lower.
• Large umbrella of what could fall under Warbands. Going through their list as well as listening to player feedback for what other features they'd like added.

Hero Talents & Class Balance

• Want Hero Talents to be visually distinct, but it's an ongoing process that they'll be continuing to iterate on. Hero Talents are an evergreen system that will continue to exist beyond the War Within so something that will be refined over time.
• Fun is the priority when it comes to class design and development but they try to be conscious of tuning and continue to iterate on that even with Hero Talents.
• Goal is to provide scenarios where each set of Hero Talents has a chance to shine while maintaining the core of a spec. Should be treated as an extension of your core instead of a sub-spec.
• Don't want each set of Hero Talents to be limited to a specific content type whether that's Raid or Mythic+. Want both Hero Talent options to support a variety of scenarios and target counts.
• Tier set bonuses were designed with the addition of Hero Talents in mind. Wanted to give Hero Talents and the major changes to classes an opportunity to breathe, so they settled on more