Liquid Maximum Post-Aberrus Interview with Morgan Day and Michael Nuthals
Liquid Guildmaster Maximum interviewed Dragonflight Associate Game Director Morgan Day and Lead Encounter Designer Michael Nuthals on Twitch, discussing role of gear upgrades, very rare loot, private auras, and shorter boss encounters in Aberrus, as well as how those lessons will translate into Season 3.
Gear and its Impact on the Raid Gearing was insanely fast this Season compared to the past, with week 1 average item levels approximately equal to week 4 of previous tiers for high-end guilds like Liquid. The goal was to create a system to unify separate systems from Mythic+, open world, PvP, while addressing the fact that there was no upgrade path for raiding, and while they achieved that goal, the rate that high-end players «finished» gearing was measured in the first 2-3 weeks, which felt too fast.Gear plays a very critical part in their raid tuning plans, assuming that there's a long tail of gear progression, so that the roadblocks reached a week in are smoothed out after a months worth of gear. These organic nerfs are important to progression, rather than just hitting a roadblock and having to wait for the fight to be nerfed.
Ultimately it is a system they're happy with and will move forward with into Season 3, but they can expect some tuning and tweaks to happen. In a lot of ways, gear helps achieve the promise of an RPG — gearing up and getting better helps progress through an encounter; a natural sense of progression over time that makes encounters easier, rather than reaching a hurdle and feeling like they have to wait for the designers to nerf it.
They want players to have that chase and progress their characters over time. Speaking of tuning holistically, one thing Morgan would have liked to do is perhaps.
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