World of Warcraft Classic: Season of Discovery was announced at Blizzcon 2023. The new season of WoW Classic brings back vanilla with a huge twist: Runes. These runes sometimes dramatically change gameplay and class roles, including warlock, rogue, and shaman tanks, and mage healers!

Among the announcers at Blizzcon were both Nora Valetta (Lead Software Engineer) and Josh Greenfield (Senior Game Producer) (also known in the community as Aggrend). Today, I sat down with both of these inspirational members of the Blizzard team to talk about SOD. Find the following transcript of our discussion on all things Season of Discovery. The following transcript has been edited to provide clarity of questions.

Q: Josh, where did the name Aggrend come from?

Josh: That's actually a that's kind of a fun one. I used to post on forums quite a bit under a different username when I was on Diablo 3. And I was mostly posting in the bug report forums, because I was the QA lead for live operations on D3. And whenever I started on classic, there was a desire to just sort of communicate more and talk more. And I was the QA lead for classic at the time, too. And so I was like, maybe I should get a different forum name because I think we changed forums or something. I didn't have my old account. And I sat down with Randy (Kaivax), our community manager, and we just kind of brainstormed names. And I'm like, Well, I really like dwarves, And I really like something that sounds Dwarvish. And I actually did a long time ago have a d&d character named Agron or radiant beard, but the whole team called him Aggrend Radbeard.

Q: Were either of you involved in the development of a specific feature, or class design change that you were super involved in? And now you're really excited to see go live and see how people take it?

Josh: The funny thing about classic is, we all kind of wear a lot of hats. A lot of times we'll have engineers who might do some design work and some designers who are kind of half engineers and, I did a little bit of design work for season and discovery for some professions, things that I'm particularly proud of, and I think are gonna be really cool when people find them. I'm not gonna say anything else, because I want it to be a surprise. But I think it'll be cool. People will like it.

Q: As follow-up before Nora responds, we know that for primary professions, there's some new stuff. What about for secondary, like fishing? I know one of my guildies basically all he does is fish. So he wanted to make sure I asked that question.

Josh: Oh I don't know if I should say...Well, sure, we'll give it to you since you're such a WoW man, we'll give you a little bit of fishing. You know, I don't know if you enjoy the Stranglethorn fishing tournament. But at some point in season a discovery, you're going to be able to do that a little bit more often. Because the season's a little bit accelerated and the phases are a little bit accelerated. We want to make sure that you have ample opportunities to do that. Those kinds of fun things. And so we're going to have the fishing tournament twice a week instead of once a week. So if you want to get in on that and do some things, there might be some other little things related to that too.

Q: Nora, If you want to address my previous question now regarding anything you worked on in particular that you are excited for?

Nora: So I haven't been as hands-on with season of discovery classes enough to want to take ownership of anything in particular. That being said, in general, I'm actually just thrilled to see players come up with interesting rune combinations across the board that essentially shift their classes in ways that allow them to do wild things, maybe in the world pvp events or maybe find out some interesting new ways to play the game that take them through our raid and dungeon content a little more creatively than they normally would.

Josh: Nora's little shy so I'll toot her horn for her. The new PVP system revamp that actually went in when hardcore was released, a lot of that was Nora. She kind of kicked that off for us and got the initial implementation designed for that down, and that's been very well received - don't sell yourself short Nora that's really cool! The secret is we kind of did that for season of discovery, but also an era so you can kind of say that was the season of discovery thing.

Q: While we are on the PVP topic, I saw the announcement about the honor decay going away from the PVP system. Any other changes in store for PvP that you could talk about or honor ranking?

Nora: Nothing planned at the moment. But we are thinking about and talking about what ranking will look like going forward. And one of the things in particular we've been kind of discussing as a team is, how do we feel about honor gains in battlegrounds at the moment. How are we feeling about Alterac Valley versus Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. So we're still discussing things, still trying to figure out if we want to make some adjustments there, but nothing to announce just yet.

Q: You are referring to potential changes to AV being really the only "optimal way" of ranking?

Nora: Yeah, we want to make sure we are enabling people to rank and the obstacles keeping them from ranking isn't necessarily, "the only viable way for me to rank is to queue for just one battleground." There's all sorts of obstacles to ranking that we were keeping an eye on because it may or may not be healthy for the PvP scene.

Josh: One thing that we haven't really talked about a ton, but we will be talking about soon, is we're taking a very close look at what rank you can get to in each phase, and also how quickly you can get to rank 14, because one of the issues that we had with season of mastery is that we accelerated the PvP system there. But it kind of created a weird situation where you could get to rank 14, right around the time Blackwing Lair came out. And you ended up with people walking into Blackwing Lair for the first time with the rank 14 weapons, which is a little odd. And so I think we're probably going to do something about that this time. And we're going to try and spread it out a little bit more. We're not super ready, like Nora said, to share the exact details. But that is something that we're very aware of that is kind of a pain point for season of mastery that we want to ameliorate going forward.

Q: With that said, I guess it's safe to assume that traditional PvP rewards are still in the game like your normal gear that you get for those ranks. Anything different planned?

Nora: You might be able to get some additional goodies... we're not sure... like maybe players will find some, you know, interesting goodies?

Q: We have the new class combinations; Rogues, Warlocks, Shamans, being able to tank, Mages being able to heal. Were there any other combinations that were thought of or discussed that were scrapped? Either due to class philosophy or technical challenges?

Josh: Many!

Q: And maybe, if there were "many", what were your favorite ideas originally, that just couldn't come to fruition?

Josh: It's always tough to talk about things we cut because we don't want people to be like, "Oh, this thing I wanted that I can't have now" , but the thing that's cool about runes and the season this time, is that it gives us a lot of room a lot of opportunity to experiment and also a lot of opportunity to add on to later because runes exist outside of the talent system. There's a lot of things we can do like whenever we were designing individual kind of class archetypes, like duelist rogue was the tank rogue thing that we had, and metamorphosis Warlock for tanking and stuff like that. And there's a lot of abilities that you haven't seen yet that kind of play into those sort of informal archetypes. And who knows, if this thing is successful and people like it, later on we might be able to add whole new archetypes. And so that's one of the things, it's a very flexible system for us to be able to scale up or scale down as we want to. So I think there's a lot we could do there.

Q: Speaking of scaling, have you considered flex raids 40 man raids? Something like flexing difficulty if you have between 30 to 40 players?

Nora: We understand there's pros and cons to implementing something like flex raiding, and obviously it's much easier to get just a bunch of friends together and just roll right into a raid and start, you know, start crushing things. But on the flip side, it does kind of shift the way the game feels. So one part of classic inherently is even just as you're out in the open world leveling and fighting enemies, those enemies aren't scaling with you or anything like that. So things are consistently the power that they are. And we still plan on just continuing with our typical classic style. Okay, this raid encounter, this is how powerful it is. This is the intended raid size, go ahead and challenge yourself there, versus kind of having enemies get stronger or weaker with you.

Josh:I think original World of Warcraft, from the earlier versions, is a lot more RPG like. It's still a heavily abstracted game, but it's a lot less abstracted than later versions where systems feel kind of "gamey", which there's nothing wrong with them. And they undoubtedly add flexibility. There's also a technical... I don't want to say limitation, but there is a hurdle, because a lot of that scaling tech and stuff that's not really something that exists in classic and it's not to say it's insurmountable, but mostly what's the best way to use our time? And is it retrofitting all of the old content to be scalable? Or is it making new stuff? That's always a question we have to ask ourselves.

Q: A lot of people in the community, especially lately on Reddit and whatnot, are worried about botting running rampant lately. Are there any new technologies or strategies in place for SOD, that you're looking to be able to combat the botting issues?

Nora: With botting, it's kind of always been a cat and mouse game, and don't share any of our like strategies or anything like that about what we do to combat the botting situation. It is something that we do care about. It's always on our minds. And, you know, again, it is that cat and mouse game of trying to put measures in place, having them overcome those measures, it's, you know, just kind of like bit by bit trying to fight that.

Josh: It's this is one of the most frustrating kind of things to talk about. Because we know what's what's going on in the background. And we know, like, we do actually have a couple of extremely exciting things that came out recently with patch 1.15 when it went to Classic era, And we've seen that they work, and they're very effective, and we're very excited about them, until someone figures out the way around them and we do it all over again. And so it's really tricky to talk about it because, every time we get excited about something, they figured out something else.

Nora: Yeah, I've got a vendetta against bots. Personally, you know, don't like people kind of messing with the game and breaking Terms of Service.

Josh: We have regular Charlie Day moments with Tim Jones, one of our designers where we are coming to his office and he's just like, "okay, so this is what we're gonna do, this thing in this instance, and it's gonna do this, and then they're gonna trigger this thing, and it's gonna send this report. It's just like yeah, we have fun with it as much as we can.

Q: With GDKPs kind of getting it out of control lately with insane gold amounts. A lot of people are calling for permanenant bans on anybody caught buying gold. Can this ever happen in the future?

Josh: This is honestly is a little bit outside of our responsibilities. But I could give you a personal answer and say, I'm always for actioning people who are breaking the rules, I think we all are. I think there's a narrative that people never get actioned for that but they definitely do pretty regularly. It's just the scope of the actions that's kind of a little bit outside of our purview.

Q: What made you guys decide to go to the route that SOD has taken where it's more drastic changes, these crazy new combinations that are fun, rather than doing something very similar to vanilla with some minor tweaks like bringing Crusader strike to Paladins and maybe something that somebody else is missing just to balance it more. Why was that decision kind of the direction you guys chose to go with?

Nora: Seasons really are an incredible opportunity for us since they're not a long lived thing. They're a great opportunity for us to experiment and kind of get super creative and get fun with it. But as I'm sure Josh will tell you, the inspiration for capping levels at different points in leveling actually came from the original wow classic beta in 2019. Basically, the level cap was set to 30 for a couple of weeks, and during that time, players came up with an entirely new meta, which led to some you know, really fun wild world PvP, battlegrounds and dungeon gameplay for players as they tried to figure out fun, new and exciting ways to play the game. And the team loved that. And so that kind of planted the seeds I think for for what we have today and season of discovery. That being said, Yeah like I mean, the season is a great platform for us to kind of deliver on things that we're like, "okay, let's try this out. players have been asking for this, let's see how it goes. Do they like this? Do they want to see more of it? They want to see less of it? Actually, maybe that didn't work out so well. Right?"

Josh: I think one of the challenges just in general with game design is, you know, I think it's really easy to kind of look at something like original World of Warcraft and be like, Oh, just, you know, give Paladins Crusader strike, give boomkins a way not go out of mana in a minute, give Shadow Priests a way to use their dots or mind blast, flare, whatever. And it's like, Oh, that's easy, that's fine. It's all you got to do is done. But what if you're a warrior or a mage or a rogue? These are very complete very successful classes, and they feel good. But at the same point, if you've been playing warrior or rogue for years, as it was, it's like, maybe I want something new too. Is it fair for us to just give Crusader strike to paladins and call it a day? No, of course not. And that's kind of why we're just like, let's actually just go nuts. And as Nora said, you know, the season's a great opportunity for that, because we don't have to be tied down to what these decisions are forever. And it's kind of tryouts, you know, it's like, what if we do want to do something else that's a little bit more nominal, in terms of class changes, but we want to lean into something else, we can take maybe the greatest hits of what worked in season of discovery, maybe move those forward.

Q: Scaling the open world if the runes kind of get out of control with empowering us, has that already happened in the current build? Or is it the same as vanilla and you're looking to just keep an eye on needing to scale that?

Nora: Scaling is a word we kind of almost want to stay away from. Because i'ts not quite scaling. That being said, players should find that the world continues to be dangerous continues to be lethal. Maybe mobs do more damage, you know, stuff like that, so that people can't just pull an entire zone and then be able to take that and survive.

Josh: We spend a lot of time internally thinking "what impact would this have on your player power? Did it double it?" Spoiler: in most cases, yeah it did double it. And so there needs to be something there and we want the world to feel like, Oh, if I pull three mobs, I'm gonna have a bad time. Because that's how that's how WoW should feel.

Q: Regarding weapons skill changes so that you're not tied to a specific race. Any notes on what this would entail, or timing or anything like that?

Josh: I think it's safe to say that long term, you should feel good about playing any race that your class can. Like I wouldn't make a choice because of weapon skill racials. We have a lot of tools and a lot of opportunities in the season to allow you to be able to branch out either through items or through runes, or through other different cool things that can convey some of those bonuses.

Q: In regards to the joyous journeys type leveling buff, anything you can say about what specific percentage it might be, or have you landed on that?

Josh: I don't think we know yet. We need to do play testing and see what feels good.

Q: Will we see tiers passed tier 3 and Naxxramis? Will we potentially see a tier 4, that's more powerful than what we have with Naxx?

Nora: Maybe, I mean, that's a pretty far into the future thing. We are adding a lot of new itemization even in just the one to 25 bracket. So who knows what players might discover later on, right?

Josh: There are a lot of things on the table there.

Q: How would power creep be addressed? Is it going to try to be very minimal upgradesT3 to whatever's next? Or much more powerful?

Josh: One of the things I like about original World of Warcraft the most is how seemingly sort of innocuous items maybe lower level items and things like that have a niche or power that may be hidden, if you think of the demon forge breastplate plus a Skull Flame Shield plus, a bunch of items that have a thorns effect and suddenly, you know, a paladin with retribution, or suddenly a really cool AOE thorns tank. And that's kind of something that goes away in later versions or WoW. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for things like that, making things for niches like that, and making the niches through unique and interesting optimization. But there's also you know, you want to have some sort of attractive power gain in any anything you do. And so it's one of those things that I think it's too soon to say what we'll do for level 60, tier 3 and beyond, but I think that one of the things that we talk about a lot is with itemization is making interesting niche, cool things that really play up some of those playstyles.

Nora: There's, there's almost different deltas between each tier of itemization that you can obtain, right? And so part of our job is kind of figuring out a delta that actually feels good and doesn't just kind of allow you to roll through everything and just destroy everything. But we also want you to feel accomplished, like Oh, geez, I achieved some great gear. I feel powerful now, right?

Q: The decision to keep Paladins on Alliance and Shamans on Horde. Is this a permanent decision? Something that could change in the future?

Nora: I think it would be unlikely for us to do something like that. There's some level of niche with its classic's classes and race combinations that we don't know if we want to rock that boat. Additionally,we want to focus on where is our time best spent? What do we focus on? How do we optimize for fun?

Josh: I think there's a lot of folks who have seen the direction that wow has gone from Burning Crusade and Wrath. And there's some people who really like that. And they're like, I would like to see the classic world move forward a little bit more and, and trying to find that balance of like, what's a good sort of modern-ish type kind of change versus what's not, is a highly contentious and highly subjective to your opinion. And that's a really scary kind of Rubicon to think about crossing. At what point do we sort of lose what is classic? And that's probably been one of the moral questions and quandaries that we've had to kind of ask ourselves multiple times, what season of discovery is like, what is classic? I think we're trying to stay on the right side of that line.

Q: Tom Ellis announced on the forums and Josh you also touched upon the subject of the PvP realm balancing. As I understand it, character creation may be turned off for a specific faction if the balance is too in favor them? I also realize that you specifically said, you don't want to show exactly how it all gets calculated. Maybe if you can just share at all, are alts included in that calculation? Is it looking at active players from each side?

Nora: That's actually the kind of stuff we were avoiding from revealing to folks, I do want to stress that it's on PvP servers only, and it is something that we are able to configure on our end, such that we can kind of mess with the numbers a little bit, make sure we're maybe not too overly aggressive with it, while still sticking to the enforcement of faction balance, which is something that players have been asking for, for a really long time. So we're really excited to kind of experiment with that and season of discovery.

Josh: There will be some pain with this. Somebody might get cut off from being able to play with their friends, their might be situations where the server you want to roll on just isn't available to you. And that's part of the reason we didn't want to do this, but in the spirit of trying things for the season, we're going to rip the band-aid off here a little bit, we're going to try and be a little bit more heavy-handed than we normally would be just to try and protect that experience as much as possible.

Nora: And that's part of why we've built it in such a way that it is configurable. It's something we could kind of maybe back away from and say, okay, maybe that's not such a great idea. But we're really excited to see how it goes. And we think that healthy servers are important. And we want to make sure that the Discovery servers are very healthy, lively and fun.

Josh: I think the the main takeaway there is if the cure is worse than the disease, then we could decide not to pursue that ultimately, we're going to be watching it really carefully. I anticipate many, many hours spent staring at graphs for myself over the next few weeks.