World of Warcraft's Cataclysm Classic servers are live and players are once again picking up the pieces in the wake of Deathwing's devastating rampage across Azeroth. Cataclysm forever changed the landscape of World of Warcraft's main continents, brought a massive overhaul to stats and gear, and allowed players to take their flying mounts to the skies in their home cities for the first time.

In an interview with Game ZXC, Cataclysm Classic lead software engineer Nora Valletta and principal game designer Kris Zierhut spoke about their process of bringing back one of World of Warcraft's biggest expansions. They weighed in on how they approached historical bug fixing and balance changes, why they revamped the guild perks system, and offered their thoughts on the Looking for Raid feature in Cataclysm Classic, all ahead of its recent launch. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Changes to Dungeons, Raids, and LFR In Cataclysm Classic

Q: LFR is a pretty hot topic regarding Cataclysm. For a lot of WoW players, it marked a shift from "Classic WoW" to "Modern WoW." What was the team's approach to LFR in Cataclysm Classic? Was this something you had to think about?

Valletta: It's funny you say that's one of the things that separates classic WoW from more modern gameplay in players' minds. I can only speak for myself, but in my experience, there are a lot of different things that players can't necessarily agree on that would be the thing that makes or breaks a classic experience for them.

LFR is one of those things that was introduced in the original Cataclysm, during the Dragon Soul tier of content. It’s one of those things that we wouldn't necessarily launch with, and we actually don't have plans for introducing it at this time to Cataclysm Classic. That's not to say that we will never introduce it. That's not to say that we won't necessarily decide, if enough players are letting us know, “Hey, that is actually something we really want to see,” we may decide to introduce it later on, but at this moment in time, we don't have any plans for introducing Raid Finder to Cataclysm Classic.

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Zierhut: I think that LFD and LFR solve different problems. It's easy to conflate them together because they seem like similar features, but they're serving different kinds of players. The reason I think Looking for Dungeon had a lot of popularity is partly because when you were leveling up through low-level dungeons, it was so hard to find enough people at the same level as you who were on at the same time. The Looking for Dungeon feature actually solved a real problem for a lot of players, who literally could not do the dungeons unless they had some feature like that to get them to get people together, or in the case of max-level players, they just wanted to run a lot more dungeons than there were people to make it easy to organize and let them do more dungeons faster.

Whereas with Looking for Raid, I think it served a different audience of people who want to see the raids but aren’t part of an organized raid or guild, so it lets them go and see the raids without being part of a team. The audience that wants it is a very different audience, and in some ways, this is contrary to the spirit of Classic. I think people play Classic to this day because they want to keep playing with all the friends they made along the way. We went through the pandemic together, they built real friendships with these people that they want to keep on playing with.

That's part of the main motivation for giving them Cataclysm Classic because “Hey, we built this raid, we built this guild, I've built this character and I want to take it with my friends into the next thing” and the next thing is Cataclysm. Of course, we want to let them do that, but LFR isn’t really serving that same need. My gut says there's not as much demand for it from players, so we may never actually do it.

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Q: What was your approach to dungeon and raid difficulty for Cataclysm Classic?

Zierhut: I don't think we're really changing dungeon difficulty anywhere, especially at launch. The raid system is very similar to the raid system as it was at the end of Wrath of the Lich King Classic and how Icecrown Citadel worked, so that's going to be consistent. The plan with dungeons is just to have Normal and Heroic difficulty, very similar to Wrath of the Lich King, at launch. We may consider doing something like Titan Rune Dungeons later, but it depends on whether there's a need to fill. If we feel like dungeon content needs to be propped up so that there's a reason to keep doing it, then maybe we'll add it in.

One thing I can say that has changed from the original launch is the original launch dungeons were very hard. I was on the design team back in 2009 when we were building this, and we had an internal desire to try to make our heroic dungeons hard, like Burning Crusade heroics had been hard, and we probably went too far and players didn't like it. We had significant negative feedback back in 2010 on those, so we know players want the easier versions. Since we're using the last patch in Cataclysm, the raids and dungeons will launch with that “nerfed difficulty” that they had after the first patch.

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Q: Cataclysm introduced the new guild system with perks and unlocks, and it’s undergoing some changes in Classic. What drove your changes to the guild system?

Valletta: The original Cataclysm introduced a guild progression system, which we think may have incentivized leaving your smaller, more closely-knit guild in order to join much larger and more detached guilds to gain some of those interesting rewards. We did away with that system as it was known back then for several reasons, and we made many of the earnable guild perks baseline to just being part of the guild. We think these changes will better support the social fabric of the game.

There were some perks we decided to remove. For example, there was a perk called Cash Flow. In the original Cataclysm, whenever you loot money from an enemy, an extra 10% of that money is generated and then automatically deposited into your guild bank. That actually was really cool at the time, but what ended up happening was some players would create a guild and fill the guild with as many players as possible, and then use the guild as a means to funnel money to the guild master. At the end of the day, we want the focal point of the guild to be about interpersonal connection, having a guild be a means for moving together towards one or more shared goals as a team.

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Zierhut: When the guild system was first introduced, when we were designing it back in 2009, our purpose was that we understood that players had a better experience when they were part of a guild. We wanted to build a system that encouraged players to build guilds, play with their friends, and build these great social organizations. One of the things that was going to be really cool about that was to level up your guild. How cool is that? You'd all go out and do things together and try to earn experience to level up and make this group contribution to it.

The problem is that the guild leveling system incentivizes you to have a guild with a lot of members because it didn't change how much experience you need based on the size of the guild. There was initially no way to do that without creating perverse incentives, so small guilds would take forever to level and have a hard time with it and very large guilds were maxed out very quickly. After launch, this was a really difficult problem, and what ended up happening–and Nora has a great story about this one–is that people in smaller guilds started quitting those guilds to join the bigger guild so they could get more perks, and people who wanted to form a new guild couldn't find anybody to join their guild.

There were a lot of guilds that were built around Kharazan and Zul’Aman and doing ten-player raids during Wrath of the Lich King, and all of a sudden those guilds couldn't hold together. They were losing their members, even though they loved the way their guild felt. The system was saying, “No, you can't do that.” Even as early as 2010, we realized that that system was a big mistake. We made a bunch of changes in Pandaria to try to fix it, including making it much easier to level your guild. We tried to fix it so that any guild could get to level 20 very quickly, but ultimately, the leveling system was just harmful to the players.

It didn't meet our intentions, so why make that mistake again? So now, you unlock your perks from your reputation with the guild, which is about what you did with the guild, not how big the guild is or how much the guild has managed to accomplish. We think that's going to be a lot better for the players.

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Valletta: The story that Kris was alluding to is that when the original Cataclysm first came out, I was just a player, I wasn't part of the WoW team, and I was part of a wonderful close-knit community of folks. We were pretty casual, we'd maybe stumbled through some raids, but gosh, some of those rewards for being in a guild and achieving things together–in particular, I really wanted the Dark Phoenix hatchling pet and the Dark Phoenix mount–they were so tempting that I'm ashamed to admit I ended up saying “sorry” to my friends in that cute little guild. I left to join one of those mega guilds.

It was such a different vibe. We were all strangers in this huge guild of people, and it was almost like a free chat room. The unfortunate reality is there were a couple of other folks from that other smaller guild who ended up also doing the same thing I did. That kind of caused the community in that smaller guild to unravel such that folks started dropping off and deciding, “Oh, well, I played so I can play with my friends and my friends are off doing other things.” So that little guild ended up dying out. I think about that sometimes. The reason we made these changes isn’t just because “Nora was in a small guild that died,” but it definitely informed my part of the discussions where I experienced some of that back in the day.

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Q: Cataclysm will have a faster content cadence this time around. Can you talk about what that entails and why you wanted to speed things up this time around?

Zierhut: I think anybody who played through the Dragon Soul era of Cataclysm or Season 11 of Arena would say it went on for way too long. I think it's fair to say that the content patch length was too long in the original Cataclysm, so we definitely need to make it shorter. The question is how much shorter? Probably the cadence is going to be about 50% faster or somewhere in that ballpark. To compensate for that, we've made adjustments to the earning of valor and conquest points so that conquest caps are 60% higher, and you earn conquest 60% faster to make up for the fact that the arena season won't be as long. Some of the daily quests, like the daily quest for valor, have increased to make up for the same problem.

Valletta: We’ll continue listening to what players are saying as things move along because our ballpark estimate of how long or short these patches should be may be something that players disagree on. We're always paying attention to that and we’ll tweak things as necessary.

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Q: Speaking of what players are saying, were there any #somechanges that came along because of feedback from the community?

Zierhut: There are definitely changes. The first thing is that we made changes during Wrath of the Lich King Classic and a lot of those changes were carried forward into Cataclysm Classic. We don't want to undo them, but we did undo them in some cases. We made some new glyphs in Wrath of the Lich King Classic that we decided we're not going to continue in Cataclysm, so like many glyphs, they became unusable in that transition there. There were a whole bunch of glyphs retired back in 2009 as well.

Another example of something, a change that I made for Wrath of the Lich King Classic that we're carrying forward is that there was a long-standing bug with an ability called Ignite that Fire Mages had. When two critical strikes landed very, very close together, some of the damage from Ignite would get lost. It's a tiny bug that WoW has had since 2004. It was inherent to the original design of Ignite that there was this timing problem, and we eventually fixed it, I think, in Warlords of Draenor. I knew how we had done that fix and how to make it work, and I backported that fix to Wrath of the Lich King Classic so that Ignite would no longer lose damage and would do the correct amount.

The problem is that Ignite got a lot more complicated in Cataclysm because now you have this combustion mechanic where you can gather all your fire DoTs together and merge them into one big DoT, and then you could use Fire Blast to spread them to other people. So it got very, very complicated. I had more bugs fixing that Ignite interaction to work correctly with Cataclysm than any other single thing I worked on, strangely enough, but we kept it because it was a better experience for the players. That said, fire mages might be too strong, and we'll be watching them carefully to see if maybe we'll have to make some adjustments if they're too good. We'll leave it up to the data to tell us whether or not there's a problem.

But in general, there are other places where we fixed bugs that were bugs back in 2010. We went looking because we can run servers that run Cataclysm as it was back in 2010, and we asked “Should we fix it in the new version of Cataclysm or leave the bug?” The general feeling was if the bug was confusing so that the ability didn't do what the tech said, then we should fix it. In some cases, that results in nerfing the class if we fix it, so what do we do then? You don't really want to nerf them. In every case where fixing a bug caused a class to get weaker, we gave a little bit of compensation to make up for it, so there are a lot of little changes like that. We're like, “What did we do about this? What did we do with that? Do we keep this legacy bug? Do we fix it?”

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Zierhut: Probably some people are curious about “Hey, we made class balance changes in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Will we make class balance changes in Cataclysm?” I think our rule of thumb will remain the same. If it reaches the point where you say, “Oh, our entire raid group or most of our raid group should be this class or this spec, we should just stack lots of those players,” then we’ll probably need to bring them down a little bit. Likewise, if you say, “Never bring this class or spec in the raid,” then we’ll probably need to bring them up. We'll be watching those. Those are the guardrails: everybody gets to play.

But there will inevitably be class changes because players have 14 years of experience and expertise. They have gotten better at data analysis and better at figuring out timing, and have a better understanding of the game's mechanics. They will find ways to play that didn't exist back then, and we'll have to roll with the punches on it.

Valletta: I think those are the biggest ones Kris touched on, but also introduced in the original Cataclysm was transmog. Transmog is one of those systems that World of Warcraft has iterated on over the years. Initially, when transmog first launched, it wasn't account-wide, it didn't allow you to transmogrify legendary weapons, and that's what some of our #somechanges are: account-wide collections, including toys and pets, and transmog and including the ability to transform legendary weapons right from the introduction of the transmog system. That's something that I was going to say is one of the less competitive parts of the game, but I've seen a lot of transmog competitions. Sometimes you want to roll up to the raid and look fresh.

Zierhut: We were very conservative when transmog first came out with Cataclysm about what you can transmog. As Nora mentioned, legendaries couldn't be transformed. All the original PvP gear from the original High Warlord and Grand Marshal system couldn't be transformed. High Warlord and Grand Marshal gear will be transmoggable from the get-go.

In the original Cataclysm, that came out late in expansion, and you could get that stuff again, but we've had that available the entirety of Classic so anybody who has it can immediately transmog from day one to look like that. In general, a lot more things will be transmoggable than before.

Cataclysm Classic's Approach to Bug Fixes and Balance Changes

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Q: We’ve touched on this a bit, but do you have internal rules for how to approach balance changes and bug fixes in a Classic era? After all, there’s over a decade of hindsight and subsequent patches.

Zierhut: We were very aggressive during Cataclysm about fixing balance changes. Since we are using the final patch of Cataclysm for Cataclysm Classic, class balance is in a pretty good place. We were even more aggressive in Cataclysm than we were in Lich King about getting class balance to a good place. I was part of the team that did our class balance and I did probably half of the data changes myself, so class balance is going to be pretty good.

But like I said, people are going to figure out new things that they didn't figure out back then, so we will inevitably have to make adjustments. I don't know of any specific class changes coming. One encounter I can think of that may have an issue and we'll see what happens when we get there, but when we get to the Dragon Soul raid, Spine of Deathwing is a very specific fight that has some very tight timing restrictions where there are windows where you need to do a lot of damage very quickly and other times when you don't.

Back then, there was a class balance concern about how some classes had cooldowns lined up just right and some classes didn't, and that made a very big difference in that encounter. So that's one place we'll probably be watching for. “Does this create a problem? Do we need to make an adjustment?” We'll see.

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Q: This is WoW’s fourth classic era. Were there any challenges you faced bringing Cataclysm Classic online that were unique compared to the other expansions?

Valletta: I want to say yes, because Cataclysm is arguably one of the biggest content drops in WoW history, right? It changed all of Azeroth. Deathwing has destroyed everything, and in some cases, kind of, the originally desolate Barrens area is now teeming with life and activity. The world has changed.

From a technical perspective, the act of creating an expansion for the very first time, and the act of reviving a classic expansion from 14 or more years ago–we have the original data from Wrath of the Lich King, the original data from Cataclysm and data from Wrath Classic, which is the data in which we've made all these changes–and with all those changes and adjustments to Wrath Classic from the original, we try our best to smartly perform a three-way merge of completely different datasets.

We run into obstacles where the data is structured completely differently and so it takes time to examine and transform that data into something that works. It's really challenging, and it actually does grow in complexity over time, which makes it all the more important on the engineering side of things to make sure that we're making those smart decisions. We're thinking about our future too, like “Should we invest some time into optimizing this process and automating that one?”

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Zierhut: One of the challenges, of course, is every time we make a design change in Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King Classic, it now has–as Nora mentioned with this three-way merge–a conflict with what is in Cataclysm’s data and that conflict has to be resolved. In some cases, things just aren't working how they're supposed to, because of the collision.

One example of this is the spell Prayer of Mending. Due to the way the engine worked, Prayer of Mending had to be rebuilt to work entirely differently to be bug-free back in Burning Crusade Classic, so every expansion is like, “Oh, there’s all the Prayer of Mending bugs again. Prayer of Mending doesn't work at all.” I had to rebuild it from scratch in Wrath of the Lich King and rebuild it from scratch again in Cataclysm.

The complication is in Cataclysm, we had probably the most pervasive class changes we had up to that point. You might ask, “What do you mean? In Burning Crusade, we gave everybody five new abilities.” We didn't change drastically how the classes work. The talent tree still worked the same. In Wrath of the Lich King, sure, we introduced a new class, but it was kind of self-contained, and we had Shaman and Paladins for both sides. Those changes weren't terribly difficult.

But in Cataclysm, we completely replaced the talent trees and the talent tree system created all new talents and all new interactions and got rid of lots of old talents and old interactions, so there was a lot of change to resolve. “If we hadn't made changes in Wrath of the Lich King, this would have worked, but now it's busted.” So I have to figure out how to resolve all that.

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Valletta: The challenges I was talking about, that's just static data and things like spells, items, spawn records, map data, but there's also the code side of things. In order for us to accomplish so much with such a small team, we actually share a lot of our code with modern WoW for things that make sense and should function similarly under the hood. We're not duplicating that effort though. We try to optimize in that way. That has taken us super far.

However, there are some systems and behaviors that are kind of unique to Classic, in which case, we have to then fork those files and have a completely different set of functionality. Similarly, when we start doing the #somechanges thing and we start diverging from that, we now have code that is adding functionality that is specific to perhaps Cataclysm Classic that we didn't do in Wrath Classic. It can get pretty complex. We've come up with some pretty clever ways to address these challenges, but it is still challenging.

Zierhut: The hardest ones are the ones where it needs code support for something that didn't exist in 2004 WoW, got added for Cataclysm, and has since been removed and doesn't exist in Dragonflight. We have to find a way to recreate it. We're kind of in this middle space of WoW where there’s a lot of new stuff that doesn't exist before or after, and we have to make it work correctly.

Q: There have been changes to speed up content patch cadence. Were there any similar adjustments made to the leveling process?

Valletta: We have accelerated the levels 60 to 80 leveling experience. For that, our intention there was to make sure that we're allowing folks to progress at a good pace through the prior expansions’ content so that they can get to Cataclysm content. I don't think we released actual numbers on just exactly how much we shifted things in that direction, but it's something that we can tweak after the fact if need be.

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Q: Earlier you mentioned borrowing a bit from modern WoW as you worked on Cataclysm Classic. Do you recall anything noteworthy that was shared between modern WoW and Cataclysm Classic?

Valletta: We did update the backend of how guilds operate, so now we share some functionality there. That’s one of the steps we’ve taken in order to try and optimize such that we’re not duplicating effort on our team. The account-wide stuff was also borrowed from Dragonflight.

This is a work in progress, but it’s something we’ve mentioned in other interviews and maybe at Blizzcon or something, but we’re still in talks about making some updates and potential modernizations to the auction house as well. We’re still trying to decide as a team exactly what we want that to look like. We care very much about making sure we're not harming that classic experience, but at the same time, some of these quality-of-life features don't necessarily detract from the classic experience. In fact, a lot of players end up using a ton of add-ons in order to bring themselves up to the modern functionality anyway, so it might make sense for us to give that to them.

Q: Were there any changes directed toward PVP this time around?

Valletta: I guess technically any class balance changes that Kris touched on is going to naturally impact PVP.

Zierhut: I mentioned earlier the rate of earning valor points, so people are going to get geared up a little faster. I think Tol Barad has some changes like we did with Wintergrasp, where it’s more of an instanced battleground and less of an outdoor area.

Valletta: For Tol Barad, how it used to work is that the winning faction would get access to the raid, Baradin Hold. That will no longer be a thing, so you won’t have to actually win in order to gain access to Baradin Hold.

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Zierhut: Of course, Rated Battlegrounds are new to Cataclysm, so that’s a big new feature with a couple of new battlegrounds.

Valletta: With Rated Battlegrounds, if memory serves, originally in Cataclysm there was a rotation between 10-man, 15-man, and 20-man Rated Battlegrounds. Later there was some iterating on that. We decided to just keep it to 10-man for the sake of simplicity. There were challenges with that rotation back in the day when players would have to recruit a changing number of people.

Zierhut: It was a work in progress back then, and landing on 10-player Rated Battlegrounds was definitely a better place to be consistent on that.

Q: Anything else you’d like to mention about Cataclysm Classic that we didn’t get to?

Valletta: There’s a quest where you can punch Deathwing in the face.

Zierhut: Everyone loves that quest. There are a lot of fantastic quests. I really encourage people to try out and make a new character and quest through the zones. Don’t quest through it with your max-level character. Quest with a character who belongs in that level and there are all these new crazy experiences to have. A huge Cataclysm feature is that re-questing that we never really did again after this. There are new starter areas, but not a whole world–two whole continents–full of brand-new quests, and zones that used to be half empty are now full of quests. It’s really an awesome experience with lots of great moments like that.

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