WoW: The War Within devs on Warbands and class fantasy in Hero Talent trees

❘ Published: 2024-07-23T17:00:00

Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft: The War Within will be released in August, and it’s a significant departure from any expansion players have seen to date. Two of the most significant changes are the Warband system and Hero Talent trees, so we sat down with the developers to discuss exactly what to expect.

For those who are yet to play the beta or read into it, Hero Talent trees are a new system designed to complement existing talent specializations. Players will be able to build into specific themes, furthering their class both practically and thematically.

Warbands are an exciting addition that is rolling out to make WoW more alt-friendly. It allows more progress to be shared between characters, including a multi-character bank, the ability to transfer items via the UI, and a new category of gear known as Warbound.

We sat down with Game Producer George Velev and Principal Software Engineer Peter Hodge to discuss what players can expect from both systems when The War Within hits its full launch.

Ideating Hero Talents and how they fit into WoW’s landscape

Hero Talents is an exciting new direction for WoW, allowing players to define their class further. As Dragonflight draws to a close, the class system is relatively solid. Still, the many additions with each expansion can potentially upset that significantly.

We asked Velev exactly how Hero Talents came about and what the developers’ goal is for the system once The War Within is released.

“Every expansion we basically need to find a way to give players some level of reward from leveling up. We did that with talents for Dragonflight, but as we were moving towards The War Within pre-production, we thought about what exactly the features were going to be and we wanted to explore something a little bit different.” he said.

“Overall, we were really happy with where the talent trees landed by the end of Dragonflight. So we didn’t want to upset the balance too much, because if we just gave one more point every single level, that’s 10 more points. That makes the tree quite large. We wanted to keep what we had with the talent trees, but give players another separate avenue for progression for 71 to 80.”

Additionally, Hero Talents should add some variation to the options available for players when they build their class. Velev confirmed exactly how class fantasy has informed the creation of Hero Talents and underlined how this won’t change the fundamentals of each class and spec.

“We also wanted to take some time to dive deeper into existing class fantasy. What would a Dark Ranger Hunter be all about? There are some that call to that in talent trees already, but we wanted to take a broader approach and see if we can make these fantasy packages for players,” Velev said.

“I like to say that it’s to give spice to existing rotations and play styles. We’re not looking to make sub-specs in any way. First and foremost, you’re a Ret Paladin in World of Warcraft. You can be a Herald or a Templar Ret Paladin, but you’re a Ret Paladin, first and foremost.

“We’re trying very hard to make sure that we’re not making new sub-specs on top of existing specs because there’s already 39 of them. We’re not trying to double that. So, for the most part, the goal of Hero Talents is to make sure that your gameplay feels different and distinct, but you’re still doing things that you know and love from your existing class respect.”

How WoW’s complicated balancing works with Hero Talents

Balancing in WoW is forever a contentious subject, and Hero Talents will inevitably become a topic of conversation when that debate is brought up. With the already complicated nature of balancing, we asked Velev for clarity on how the development team will be approaching changes in this regard.

“Right now, our thinking is that we’re going to ship the War Within. At that point, Hero Talents are going to become part of your class and spec fantasy going forward. If we need to update parts of a spec or a class, as evidenced by Dragonflight, we’ll do so and players really enjoy that constant iteration,” he said.

“Going forward, Hero Talent updates, Hero Talent tuning and Hero Talent polish are certainly on the table for major patches or even just content updates. I think time will tell, and we’re really curious to see where a lot of these land with players.”

The priorities for Warbands in The War Within

The clearest benefit of Warbands is that they make it much easier to build up and maintain a set of alts. We asked Peter Hodge about the priorities of the new system and how they had reached the launch iteration.

“We definitely want to try and make it so that players feel more comfortable spending some time on an alt. If they really want to check out one of the new Hero Talents for one of their other classes, we don’t want them to feel like they have to dedicate time to one character because they need to progress it first,” Hodge said.

“We definitely want to head in that direction of making it more flexible, more comfortable to play alts as much as possible. And underneath that, there’s also a desire to hopefully allow players, because they feel a bit more comfortable trying different alts, maybe they find a class or a spec that they haven’t tried before, that they suddenly fall in love with or had always wanted to try but didn’t really want to commit the time to it because it would take away from their remains.

“If we end up with players finding even something more to love about World of Warcraft by virtue of being able to try a new character, a new spec, a new Hero Talent tree, I think that that’s also an underlying goal for us and would be great to see.”

The present and future of Warbands

The future of Warbands is arguably even more exciting than the present, with many potential iterations on the table. We asked Hodge what the next steps for Warbands could look like and what features might be introduced further down the line.

“Whether it be a patch or an expansion, there is always finite time and finite people. We have to look at what we think players are going to enjoy most and get the most benefit from. What are pain points that they’ve been bringing up as feedback? All of those things go into the mixing pot to decide what we should work on first from that giant list,” Hodge said.

“It was very clear to us that certainly the transmog thing was a big one. We’ve heard feedback about that for years. Being able to manage your inventory more and more comfortably across multiple characters is also something that you can do without mailing things back and forward and jumping through various hoops.

“Let’s make that easier. Let’s take some of that pain away. Similarly, with transferring certain currencies between characters as well. Normally, we would go and create an item on a vendor you could buy on one character and mail it to another character, consume it over there. It’s like, let’s just make that a UI feature, make that something we can do directly from the UI to make that process smoother,” he explained.

“I think it’s very much a case of looking at all the things that we want to do under the umbrella of Warbands and alt-friendliness, and being sensible about what we can tackle in this time frame? What’s the next set of priorities?

“Once this first round of Warband features go out, we’ll wait to hear player feedback about what they would like to see as the next steps towards making things even more alt-friendly in the future. That is definitely a philosophy we’re adopting, and have been adopting, for a few years now.”

The biggest issues implementing Warbands and Hero Talents

As with any significant content additions in World of Warcraft, there were inevitably some road bumps along the way. We asked Velev and Hodge exactly what problems they had when implementing the new systems ahead of The War Within’s release.

“On the Warband side, because it’s an umbrella of a pretty broad range of features, some of those were more straightforward to implement. A good example of that is the Transmog collection loosening. Yeah, there’s not too many places in the code we had to go and touch that. The collection was already account-wide. It was really just finding the places in code where we determine what you’re allowed to collect and adjust those accordingly,” Hodge said.

“On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got much, much bigger pieces from the engineering side like the Warband Bank. That was a very significant technical lift from a lot of people. Up until now it has been 20 years of inventory code that only one character has ever had to deal with to suddenly now supporting multiple characters accessing that shared data,” he continued.

“If you have multiple things that can manipulate that data at the same time, you immediately open the door to a significant range of technical challenges around making sure that that data integrity is maintained. That’s certainly been a big challenge for us across a few features with Warbands.”

Velev was similarly candid about the Hero Talents system, with the extensive systems that have built up over the years also needing to be addressed.

“As a game producer, the biggest challenge —I’m not going to say challenge, I’m going to say puzzle—was that there were 39 of these. That’s a lot to track. There’s one for basically every spec, if you cut it that way. So, we had to make sure that we were spending the right amount of time on all 39. As we were going very early on with like, you know, what feels appropriate for a Hero Talent tree that all of them are aligned,” Velev explained.

“Sometimes we swung really hard with a few of these early on with our previews, and that was very helpful because that let us get aligned on ‘this tree is probably doing a little bit too much for a Hero Talent tree. Let’s bring that back in. And this tree is probably doing a little bit too little. Let’s boost it up a little bit.'”

“Finding the right sweet spot for what a Hero Talent tree did was an ongoing process for us. Right now, we’re really happy with where we’ve landed. That was one of the bigger design questions is, “well, there’s 39 of these. Let’s try to make sure that they all feel roughly as impactful as the rest of them do.”

With The War Within releasing on August 26 or August 22 in early access, players don’t have long to wait to get their hands on the expansion. Warbands are going live even earlier than that, added to the game with the weekly reset on July 23.