Wowhead Exclusive Interview with Ion Hazzikostas and Morgan Day - Private Auras, Raid Difficulty, Defensive Creep

Wowhead sat down with WoW's Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Associate Game Director Morgan Day and discussed some of the overall philosophies and goals regarding Private Auras, Mythic+ Affixes, raid difficulty, gearing, class balance, defensive creep and much more!

Raid

What is the goal of Private Auras in TWW? Do you think the ‘Macro’ solution is a good solution for players to work around them?

Ion Hazzikostas

We developed this new tool in Dragonflight as part of our efforts towards our philosophical goal of wanting to limit the computation power of addons and reestablish more room in encounters for players to coordinate and communicate, and to allow us to give them more time to react and process mechanics as opposed to unavoidably having to tune around a world where when addons can solve a problem for players, we know at Heroic and Mythic difficulty, players will rely on addons to do that. So Private Auras were this new tool that we developed to put certain buffs and debuffs out of the reach of addons. Through using that tool, and we've been guided by feedback from the community, what it's good at and what it's not so good at. And I think there are plenty of applications of Private Auras over the last couple of tiers that were pretty innocuous. They're just debuffs that require an immediate reaction from players that you're handling on your own, or a couple of people are running out of the raid with something that people just watch for and handle it accordingly.

What we've seen though, is that when we try to use Private Auras to apply to raid wide coordination mechanics, where the entire raid needs to solve a problem together, and the rewards effectively for doing so are more significant, players will find cumbersome workarounds involving creating manual macros that they could then communicate that information to the addons that would solve the problem for them. When the advantage of doing it is great enough, people will do that anyways. In that case, Read more on wowhead.com