Eurogamer have a really good article, part one published so far, which talks about how WoW was designed.

They’ve interviewed Tom Chilton, Jeff Kaglan and other senior staff to storyline how the game went from a concept to sketch to model to release, and the turns along the way. Gnolls were an original art inspiration, for example, and no PvP at launch was a decision in order to get the game on the shelves.

No mention of death knights in the article (yet)! I guess we weren’t a twinkle in their eyes five+ years ago.

It’s a great read, here.

Tom Chilton is making his rounds on the interview circuit selling 3.2, this time he answers questions for VideoGamer.com. I’m only going to copy/paste the DK information, be sure to follow the link to see the full interview where Chilton discusses:

• New Content
• Level 80 battleground Isle of Conquest
• The Arena system
• Turning off EXP

Of course he also gets asked directly about the “nerfs” incoming for the Death Knight class in which he responds:

VideoGamer.com: Why are you “nerfing” the Death Knight class?

TC: More than anything else we’re just trying to make sure that we balance Death Knights relatively to everybody else. Of course we want Death Knights to feel like an awesome powerful class, just like any other class. People mention the fact that they’re a hero class, but to us what that means is well, they have their own special starting experience – they start at level 55, which is very heroic compared to other characters – but that doesn’t mean that at the end game they’re supposed to be more powerful. We’ve found that there were areas of the game that we felt like they were just too strong, so we’re trying to balance them just like we would any other character class.

GameStar.de snagged an interview with Game Director Tom Chilton at the Warcraft Regional Finals in Cologne. Unless you can speak German it would be a good idea to skip to the 3 minute mark to see the interview (in English). In it, Chilton talks about player housing, content coming at a rapid pace, game balance, and the Warcraft Movie.

(Thanks Goodwin)

This time Eurogamer talked them up about Ebon Hold, ganking level 55 DK’s and the definition of a hero class. Below are the highlights about Death Knights. You can hit up Eurogamer for the full interview.

Eurogamer: The Death Knight starting area is very different to anything you’ve done in World of Warcraft before.

Tom Chilton: Absolutely. We felt like that was part of delivering on making the Death Knight feel like a hero class. Really what that means, more than anything else, is that your start is heroic. You end in the same place as any other character class, for balance, but we wanted to make sure that the start felt very different, not only with level 55 – but because of the level, we can assume more about the player, we know they know something about the game, so we can do more with them than we’d be comfortable doing to a level 1 player that’s never seen WOW before.

There’s also the lore aspect – we wanted all Death Knights to start as servants of the Lich King. So how does the player become a Death Knight that’s a free agent with their own agenda? We had to answer that as well.

You’re also using instancing quite a lot more… the world changes dynamically as you move through the story.

J. Allen Brack: It’s actually not instances. What we do is we have different world states, and depending on what quests you’ve completed, it changes what world state you’re seeing. It’s also broken up between Horde and Alliance… because until you finish that quest, we don’t really want the Horde and Alliance conflict muddying what’s going on. The Lich King doesn’t care for PVP.

Eurogamer: Is that less static world something we’re going to see more of in the game proper?

J. Allen Brack: Yes, we actually have used it in several places in Northrend, what we call the phasing technology. There’s quests that you do when you arrive at a town that’s overrun by Scourge, it’s like a “Choplifter” quest, you have to fly in and rescue villagers. As you bring them back to your quest hub, those villagers are there permanently for you, whereas if somebody who hasn’t done the quest shows up, they don’t see them.

When I talk to players who aren’t in beta about the Death Knight, and explain its abilities, they simply can’t understand how it could ever be balanced. [Laughter.] How do you do that? Is the Death Knight’s overpowered feel all smoke and mirrors?

Tom Chilton: At the end of the day, if the DPS [damage per second] output of the class and the tanking mitigation stats add up to about the same, then we’re going to be okay. They have a couple of signature abilities, like the Death Grip, that help them feel very different as a class. But I honestly think that balance-wise, they’re coming along pretty well.

Eurogamer: So what makes a hero class different, in terms of design?

J. Allen Brack: To be honest, as far as the overall class design goes, we really treat it like just another class. Where the hero part of it really comes out is in that starting experience. But when we’re approaching it mechanically as class designers, we create it like any other class. Optimally, we want every class to feel overpowered… The phrase that we use for the Death Knight is epic but equal.

Eurogamer: What player feedback or behaviour from the beta has surprised you most?

J. Allen Brack: The thing that surprised me – I’m constantly surprised by this type of thing – the number of people that got their beta key, had their level 70 copied over, logged in and immediately ran over to Eastern Plaguelands on a PVP server, waited for those 55 Death Knights to pop out and… BAM. [laughter]. It’s like, you’ve got a beta key and this is how you’re spending your time? Just ganking level-55 Death Knights? It was amazing. Deviant behaviour.

Eurogamer: But that’s MMOs: people will always enjoy them however they want to.

J. Allen Brack: Oh, absolutely. I was surprised that it happened as quickly as it did, but I wasn’t surprised that it happened.

Blizzard dropped another episode of Blizzcast today, and while burning questions aren’t answered; there are some interesting topics brought up.

Bornakk: Hello everybody – this is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team. For our next segment we have our Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan returning to talk us about designing raids and dungeons. We will cover how they have evolved from the beginning of World of Warcraft up to some of the latest developments for what people will experience in our upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Welcome back to the show Jeff!
Jeff Kaplan: Well it’s great to be back.

Bornakk: To start us off, how did raid dungeon design evolve from the original World of Warcraft to The Burning Cruade?
Jeff Kaplan: I think we learned a lot of really good lessons from the original game. I think we were a little bit too hardcore early on. We didn’t introduce people into the raid content in a smooth enough curve. We tried to fix some of those issues in The Burning Crusade. We also looked at things like the raid size and switched over from a 40 person raid cap to a 25 person raid cap. We introduced the concept of Heroic Dungeons which were extremely successful and we also introduced full blown 10 person raiding in the form of Karazhan and Zul’Aman. So hopefully with Wrath of the Lich King we can take some of those ideas that we sort of evolved with Burning Crusade from the original game and continue them into the next expansion.

Bornakk: What are the most important lessons after seeing how The Burning Crusade has played out along with the feedback from the community
Jeff Kaplan: There were a lot of really good lessons we learned in The Burning Crusade. To start with, I’ll start talking a little bit about the Heroic dungeons. We definitely learned that the loot needed to be better in Heroic instances. We have to work a bit on our attunement process not only for Heroics but for raiding in general. We need to make sure that our introductory raids are a little bit more friendly; I don’t want to say to casual players, but a little bit more accessible to people in general. While I think High King Maulgar was a great encounter and Magtheridon was a great encounter, they weren’t necessarily tuned to the point of welcoming 25 person groups with open arms. It often took longer to explain to people how to do the High King Maulgar fight than it did to actually do the fight itself so I consider that a slight problem. But all in all I think we learned a lot of really great lessons not only in how to tune the encounters, how to make the attunements a little bit more accessible and understandable, and then also just some lessons in how to itemize the raid content versus the other content in the game.

Bornakk: We recently announced that all raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King will have both a 10 person and 25 person version available for players. Some players are seeing this as just an easy mode and a hard mode for each dungeon. Could you explain the philosophy on how the dungeons are being designed around these two versions?
Jeff Kaplan: Sure thing. The idea behind 10 and 25 person raiding isn’t to make one easy mode and one hard mode. We want to have progression in both the 10 and 25 person raid format. So for example Naxxramas is supposed to be an accessible early tier raid which will actually be pretty easy for both 10 and 25 person groups. Those groups will however graduate in the next tier in a zone like Ulduar to a more difficult set of raid encounters and then the raid zones that will exist past Ulduar will ramp up in difficulty.

Bornakk: Do we know how the trash mobs and bosses differ between the two versions? Would it mainly be health and damage or would we see a different set of abilities as well?
Jeff Kaplan: I think we’re going to have to take that on a case by case basis. We use trash to sort of tune the pacing behind a dungeon and we don’t ever want it to ever feel like it takes too long to get to a boss. So sometimes we’ll just affect that with the number of creatures other times we’ll look at things like clear times or health modifiers on those creatures.

In terms of the bosses, we want each boss fight to have a specific spirit to it and to really make sense in terms of what we want the strategy to be and the core sort of neat gimmick of the boss fight and that might have to change from 10 to 25.

Bornakk: What can players who have cleared only the 10 person version expect when they try to do the 25 person version?
Jeff Kaplan: They should be able to expect having at least 15 more people there with them. In all seriousness, the fights will change anytime that you raise the number of people or just introduce different people to a raiding environment or change up class composition it changes the general vibe of that raid so I think it will always feel different, not just from 10 to 25 but whenever you switch up raid composition.

Bornakk: Players had some complaints in The Burning Crusade over the length of time between dungeons being released in the content patches. Do you expect this change to allow the release of new dungeons to be more consistent throughout the cycle of Wrath of the Lich
Jeff Kaplan: We try to get new content out to players as quickly as we can but we’re also committed to a very high level of quality. So we always have to balance those two things, we never want to rush a dungeon out or put something out unfinished or unpolished. We’ll do our best to get things out and we feel like we’re working faster than we have in the past to produce better content.

Bornakk: Will gear sets differ in look or bonuses between the two dungeon versions?
Jeff Kaplan: The art will probably look a little bit different between the two dungeon sets, meaning the 10 and the 25 person version. It might be things like a different color version of the same armor or the higher level, the 25 person content, might have more particle effects, so something along those lines. Something that I am excited to talk about is that the PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.
Bornakk: Is it possible that we would we do something like include a timed event in one version and not the other?
Jeff Kaplan: Not sure if we would include a timed event in one version but not the other but we are certainly thinking about including things like timed events so that skilled players can really show off that little extra emphasis that they put on raiding.

Bornakk: Gear is always an important topic for our players. Do we have any specifics of the gear gap between the two dungeon versions?
Jeff Kaplan: Right now we’re going with the concept that 25 person raiding would be a full tier in item progression above the 10 person raiding so it’s quite a jump once you get the extra 15 people together.

Bornakk: Will the dungeon reset timers always match for both versions: 3 day or 7 day?
Jeff Kaplan: We’re hoping right now to keep as many of the raid reset timers on a 7 day reset and they will always match between 10 and 25.

Bornakk: You’ve talked in the past about how the raid dungeon Naxxramas will be returning in Wrath of the Lich King as a level 80 raid dungeon. Will we see the same stories of the Atiesh and the Corrupted Ashbringer return?
Jeff Kaplan: We definitely want to continue the story of Ashbringer, it’s one of our favorite things and we actually have a lot of fun with Ashbringer internally so we want to continue that storyline. Whether or not Atiesh exists in its current form or a new form that’s a great question, it’s still undecided. We really want to keep doing Legendary items though, we love the Legendary items we’ve done so far they’re really important to the story of Warcraft as a whole. So I think we’d like to bring back Atiesh at some point but Naxxramas is going to be really exiting. It’s moved over Nothrend now, it’s over a zone called Dragonblight, it’s currently laying siege to one of the Alliance towns there so I think fans are going to be really excited by sort of the return of Naxxramas, one of our best dungeons ever.
Bornakk: Sounds really exciting.

Bornakk: For Naxxramas, what bosses would you say are going through the most changes from the previous 40 person version that people know?
Jeff Kaplan: There’s a lot of bosses that will need serious consideration for when we make the change to the new style of raiding. In particular I think is the Four Horsemen, we’ve joked that the Four Horsemen are going to go from the Four Horsemen to the One Gnome on a Mule or something like that but no we’re not actually going to do that. We’re going to come up with ways to keep the spirits of those encounters the same. For example with the Four Horsemen what I think was really cool about it was the stacking auras and the need to rotate different groups in and out of those auras and sort of be aware of all four of the enemies at one time so as long as we can keep the spirit of that in the encounter I think we’re in good shape. Gothik the Harvester is going to be a challenging fight to rebalance for a different raid composition. The Kel’thuzad encounter is going to be a little bit challenging and I think the Gluth encounter will also pose some challenges because in smaller raid sizes we can only except so many of each different role whether it be crowd control, tanking, or healing. We’re really looking forward to it though, that’s the kind of design challenge that we look forward to as designers more than anything else.

Bornakk: What has been the most difficult part in updating a particularly well-liked dungeon like Naxxramas?
Jeff Kaplan: Probably the most difficult part is going to be overcoming peoples’ nostalgia for what was cool and what wasn’t cool in the dungeon. I think keeping the spirit of the dungeon while not forcing ourselves to do everything exactly the way it was done originally. We want to change as little as possible, we want to keep the dungeon, you know, it’s Naxxramas, we want the bosses to be who they were doing the abilities that they were doing. While we get a lot of credit for Naxxramas being a great dungeon I do think there are things we could have done better, I do think there were some flawed encounters in there that we could actually improve upon. I’ll say the Four Horsemen is one of those encounters because I think part of the reason it’s such a highly regarded encounter is that so few people actually did it and experienced it, it got placed in its own legendary status without a lot of people having ever tried it knowing what the fight entailed. Obviously we can do a better job with the Loatheb encounter, we can get the tuning on Grobbulus correct this time, but Naxxramas is going to be an introductory dungeon so we need to make it a lot more accessible to new raiders, so that’s going to be a challenge. Where it sat before was the end of regular WoW, the raiding tiers there, so we need to move to the front of the line and be an introductory raid.

Bornakk: Patchwerk won’t be quite so mean anymore?
Jeff Kaplan: Patchwerk needs to be really mean and he needs to be sort of a check and a bragging right, but it’s important to note that Naxxramas is non-linear there is lots of other bosses people can choose to do first so as long as we make some of those other bosses a little bit more accesslble. But I wouldn’t freak out if Patchwerk dies very early in the expansion, that’s his job, he’s supposed to.

Bornakk: For our five person dungeons, how many dungeons will players have available in Wrath of the Lich King, how many are we looking at?
Jeff Kaplan: We’re thinking right now roughly about a dozen and all those would have heroic difficulty and normal difficulty. So roughly about a dozen give or take a few we’ll see when we’re sort of at the end of the development cycle where we’re at.

Bornakk: Can we expect to see the return of a system similar to the Badges of Justice for the heroic 5 person and raid dungeons and if so, are there any changes or improvements really planned for this system?
Jeff Kaplan: Definitely. Heroic Badges of Justice were a new concept that we introduced with Burning Crusade and it was a concept I’m really happy with and I think it played out pretty well for the most part in Burning Crusade but we can definitely make some improvements. And we’d like to apply that same idea not just to the heroic dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King but apply it to raiding as well. I think we can do some things a little bit different or better, for example we want to come up with some way to indicate what tier you are doing content on so there is not just badge loot that serves a massive pool of content. Maybe it would require a token from different levels of content in addition to the badges or maybe there is separate currencies per tier but we’d like to come up with a way to sort of stratify the items so that way players doing higher level content have access to a different pool than players doing lower level content. And then I think we’re also going to find ways to move some of those badge type items on to reputation vendors, sort of spread them around much more, right now they are just kind of lumped on one dude in Shattrath and one dude out on the Isle of Quel’Danas but we’d like to sort of spread those guys out and have it be a more robust system where you actually go to vendors in town and you’ll see them there and reputation guys all over the world and sort of blow out the system much more than we’ve done.

Bornakk: We also added in some Daily Quests to improve the value of running like the five person dungeons, are there plans to expand upon this from the very start of the expansion?
Jeff Kaplan: Yes, we want to have definitely a dungeon daily quest similar to the one that’s in the game right now available from the start of Wrath of the Lich King, same would go for heroic mode. Daily quests in general are a concept that we want to explore more. We want more daily quests with more randomization in them to keep them from getting old and repetitive and we want to try to have them in place when Wrath of the Lich King ships. Daily quests were actually introduced after The Burning Crusade shipped in our first patch, it wasn’t even something we had the technology to do when we shipped Burning Crusade, but we’ve been learning a lot of lessons in our patches in 2.1 and 2.3 and 2.4 on what’s good and what’s bad about daily quests and we hope to refine the system and have those in place when Wrath of the Lich King ships.

Bornakk: More bombing quests right?
Jeff Kaplan: More bombing quests! See if we do too many bombing quests they become the new collection quest and then everybody’s like, “I hate bombing quests, I just want to do a collection quest.” That’ll be the day.
Bornakk: Yeah, it will be.

Bornakk: Some players have expressed some concerns that several of the current 5 person dungeons require crowd-control spells to even be attempted either due to the number of mobs in the pulls or the special abilities the mobs have. Does feedback like this pose a significant challenge when designing the new dungeons?
Jeff Kaplan: Definitely, I think class composition is one of the trickiest things to get right. The larger the raid size the easier it is to tune the content because you can expect a little bit of everything. The smaller a group size gets, down to five people, we’re at a really challenging spot in a lot of cases. Basically what we can guarantee is that you have a tank, you have a healer, and we can’t even really guarantee that you have crowd control at that point. We are assuming you have dps, if you don’t have dps that means you brought more tanks and healers or crowd control, and therefore you know you don’t need to do as much dps. The goal is to really tune the five person content so that it doesn’t require a specific class composition but rather you could tackle the content with a mix of class compositions. So really the trick there is just not overtuning the content, I think we run that risk much more with something like a heroic mode than we do in normal mode, but players would be surprised. I’m often baffled, I’ll be in Shattrath on one of my characters and I’ll be looking at the Trade channel where everybody LFGs in the Trade channel and I’ll see, “We need a Shadow Priest for Shadow Lab and then our group is ready, we have everything we need but we absolutely have to have a Shadow Priest” or a Frost Mage or like these crazy specs and compositions that I really question if players actually need that specific spec or if they’re just sort of putting an extra burden on themselves when it comes to putting a group together. Most players are usually pretty surprised that even in Shadow Lab if you go into Blackheart’s room and pull the biggest pull and you don’t have any crowd control that usually means that you’ve got more dps or more people who can drop fears down and just pull the pull back a little bit further and use all the little tricks your class has and you can usually pull something off. So I think the power is kind of in the player’s hands at a certain point too.
Bornakk: Don’t know it until you try it.
Jeff Kaplan: Yeah, exactly.

Bornakk: The first dungeon many players will explore in Northrend is Utgarde Keep. Can you tell us what players can expect to encounter throughout the various wings of this dungeon and how it will compare to Hellfire Citadel, which is the first dungeon people explored in The Burning Crusade?
Jeff Kaplan: Sure thing, Utgarde is a really cool dungeon that is in a zone called Howling Fjord. It is filled with these guys called the Vrykul, who are these huge sort of half giant barbarian-like creatures who have turned very nasty and evil. They’re actually trying to get into the good graces of the Lich King by doing evil deeds and when they die they are risen up and sort of taken into the Scourge. So they are really evil guys, unlike the Horde and Alliance who want nothing to do with the Lich King, only want to defeat them, these Vrykul guys think the Lich King is so cool that they want to do even worse deeds to get in his good graces. The dungeon is filled with them, the first room in Utgarde Keep is this massive forge room where they are forging weapons to go against the Horde and Alliance. They are also these famed dragon riders, if you look at their architecture they have stretched dragonskins over their village huts and that sort of thing. So the second room you come to is this really cool Proto-Dragon stable and the Proto-Dragons were sort of the early version before dragons really evolved into the sentient, beautiful majestic creatures that they are in Warcraft right now; they were these sort of primitive things that the Vrykul really lorded over. So you get to fight a variety of bosses, you also get your first interaction with the Scourge in this dungeon. You’ll find out that there is a Scourge ambassador and that the Vrykul are trying to get in with the Scourge then you’ll fight one of the Warlords and get a bit of lore about who is leading the Vrykul. And when you’re a max level player you can go up to Utgarde Pinnacle which is the max level dungeon that’s at the top of Utgarde Keep. So again, it’s kind of like a two wing dungeon with an entry-level level 70 wing on par with let’s say The Ramparts and then a max level wing that would be like the equivalent of Shattered Halls. So I think it’s a pretty cool place, we try to vary up the architecture from room to room so it feels a little bit different, it looks different, we use different creatures in the different rooms, we try to give various crowd control types, so the dragons can be hibernated, there is humanoids, undead for the different crowd control types all have options in the dungeon and then do some really cool scripted boss fights too.
Bornakk: Proto-Dragon mount right?
Jeff Kaplan: Proto-Dragon mount perhaps, maybe.

Bornakk: One of the most talked about dungeons is the new Caverns of Time instance set during the events of Warcraft III, where players will be fighting alongside Prince Arthas in Stratholme against the Dreadlord Mal’ganis, who was destroying the city with the plague. Has designing this dungeon brought any new unique challenges for you?
Jeff Kaplan: It’s very challenging. Part of it anytime we work on one of the Caverns of Time dungeons, we get obsessed with what we did before so we had this moment when we were working on Hyjal where all we wanted to do is stay as true to the Warcraft III Battle of Mount Hyjal episode as possible but at a certain point you have to say to yourself, “What game play works better for a Real Time Strategy game versus what game play works better for World of Warcraft?” So I think that’s one of the things that we have to focus on, not just recreating The Culling mission from Warcraft III which is where Stratholme took place but finding out what was cool in The Culling and what can translate into MMO game play for World of Warcraft. So sort of managing the expectations that the map is going to play out exactly like it did in Warcraft III, that’s one thing for sure. Making sure we pay homage to Stratholme from the original shipping game is also really important because there is a lot of WoW players who haven’t played Warcraft III and are only going to know Stratholme as that burning city in Eastern Plaguelands so making sure that it’s cool for those people. And then I think it’s also really important that we continue to tell the story of the Infinite Dragonflight and sort of explain what’s going on with the Caverns of Time in general. But I have got to say on the development team it’s one of the dungeons we’re most excited about working on.
Bornakk:Very exciting.

Bornakk: Another thing is in any dungeon regarding the trash mobs, Zul’aman presented relatively few mobs to encounter although they were quite challenging. Karazhan on the other hand had quite a large number but relatively easy ones. Will we continue to see both of these approaches in future dungeons?
Jeff Kaplan: I think so. I think one thing that is really important is to vary up what sorts of creatures people encounter, not just boss creatures, but general creatures in a dungeon making sure we’re not doing the same thing over and over again. I think a certain amount of scripting is very important like you brought up, the Scouts in Zul’Aman, I think that can be really fun it keeps players on their toes but we want to make sure not to go overboard with that otherwise there is a certain pacing to the dungeon and a lot of players sort of enjoy the more laid back social moments where they’re sort of chatting with their group getting through then we they get to the boss they put on their game face at that point. We have to make sure that there is a good pacing to the dungeon where players feel moments where they can sort of relax and be more social versus you know everything requiring an advanced strategy. We ran into a similar thing with Auchenai Crypts in The Burning Crusade where I think there were really cool ideas going on with creatures that spawn in after you aggro the other creatures in the dungeon, it was a really great concept but it would have worked better as a raid mechanic or a 10 person or 25 person raid mechanic whereas in a level up dungeon players just weren’t expecting that degree of coordination and tactics required to pull something like that off. So I think we need a good variation. So kind of a long answer just to say, yeah, we’re going to keep mixing it up.

Bornakk: In Zul’Aman and Shattered Halls players were introduced to some timed events. Are there any plans to see this return in WotLK?
Jeff Kaplan: Yes, I think we’d really like to continue to do timed events. We’ve learned a lot, actually the first time we introduced people to it was the 45 minute Baron run, so it’s a concept that we’ve been working on for awhile. We need to be careful with it, we can’t make the timed run be too consuming or else it actually takes away from some of the fun of the dungeon. Where I like a timed run is where the time is a reasonable length, it doesn’t feel like a necessity to progress, it more feels like an additional challenge to the dungeon. So Zul’Aman is a great example, the first few times you do the dungeon, you’re really just learning the boss mechanics and the mechanics to clear through the dungeon as a whole. And then later when you’re more comfortable with it you really start challenging your group to see if you can tackle it. So I hope our future timed runs sort of go along those lines and also don’t become totally consuming. An example is early on in Zul’Aman, people were talking about a timed run actually being all the way through Zul’Jin, but I felt like on a personal level that was just too long of a time to sort of be playing at 110% which you really need to do.

Yet another interview was posted, this time by G4TV. In it hot ass Morgan Webb interviews Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan and Lead Producer J. Allen Brack. I’ll embed the video for easy viewing or you can follow the link. Pay special attention near 3:07 when Brack lowers his Horde bias on the interview. (let the QQing begin).

Of course you do, but with the plethora of new information released those questions will only intensify. All this information should renew our nearly year long debate on release dates, talent trees, skill sets and renew deeper conversation on DK starting zones, races and levels. Hit up our forums, feel free to start new conversations and discussions, we have a lot more information to go on now instead of 100% specualtion like in August of 2007.

With that said, the following clip from IGN’s interview of Jeff Kaplan may answer some lingering questions about weapons, runes and presences:

IGN: Can you talk a bit about the Death Knight’s abilities.

Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah so he has three presences which are similar to Paladin auras in that it’s an activated ability that is always up on him. The difference between a Death Knight presence and a Paladin aura is a presence only affects the Death Knight. Some of them are tailored more towards DPS, like the blood presence and the unholy presence, whereas the frost presence is really tailored around the Death Knight tanking. The Death Knight gets some super-cool abilities; I think army of the dead is my favorite, where it’s an area of effect, moderate cooldown, rain down ghouls on everything around you. They really overwhelm the scene. I love the raise dead ability. And that one he can cast on a number of different targets, so if I’m out there fighting in Northrend and kill something, I can cast raise dead and bring a summoned ghoul out of the corpse to fight alongside with me. But if I’m out there adventuring with you I can cast raise dead on your corpse and then you don’t get to come back as you but you do get to come back as this very fun ghoul who has a whole action bar of abilities.

IGN: What about the rune resource system the Death Knight uses?

Jeffrey Kaplan: So you have six runes total and you’ll always have six runes. You’ll get to pick, and there’s actually a forging process where you put those in your blade, you’ll get to pick how many of those you have within six. So if you wanted four blood runes, one unholy, and one frost and that’s the six you’re going to run with, you can totally do that. We want there to be some customization in how a Death Knight manages his resources and let him choose. The runes have their own separate, independent cooldown as you consume them. Right now it’s feeling good at about 10 seconds per [rune]. And then there are also abilities and talents that can trigger an instant refresh or conversion that consumes your blood but puts it into frost. You get a lot of run resource gameplay that way.

IGN: You actually forge them into your sword?

Jeffrey Kaplan: It’s a process we haven’t completely defined yet but we’re thinking it won’t be as prohibitive as talent speccing or anything like that.

IGN: In terms of switching them around?

Jeffrey Kaplan: In terms of switching. But at the same time, it won’t be so fluid so that you’re doing it between fights. We’re going to hit some sweet spot between those two.

IGN: Can Death Knights only use swords then?

Jeffrey Kaplan: No they can dual-wield, they can use axes, maces, just not a shield. That’s the big thing. We really wanted this guy to feel like a different kind of tank, so no shield.

IGN: If you dual-wield do you get more rune slots?

Jeffrey Kaplan: No, it’s six across the blades. Early on we were thinking the rune slots according to specific weapons, but in terms of balance it created some weird scenarios where dual-wielding was always better or always worse.

IGN: And that’s set? It never expands through any special ability or armor piece?

Jeffrey Kaplan: No. What does expand is his runic power which is that blue bar by the portrait.

IGN: Which fills up as you use rune abilities, right?

Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah as you use rune abilities you’re runic power is building up and then you can just unleash that.

IGN: Where does the Death Knight actually start off at 55?

Jeffrey Kaplan: He starts off in a brand new area that people haven’t seen yet. And what’s really cool about it is that it ties right into the old world and helps further the story of the old world as well, but we’re constructing a brand new starting area for the Death Knight.

IGN: And that builds to what, 60? And then you go to Outland and do the rest of the leveling content until you get to the expansion?

Jeffrey Kaplan: Exactly.

More interviews from IncGamers and IGN bring more tid bits of information. Here is a recap courtesy of MMO-Champion:

World

Professions

PVP

Raids and Dungeons

The Insider recently sat down with World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack and art director Chris Robinson to discuss some of the ideas that influenced the development of Fury of the Sunwell, the most recent content update for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. While we were at it, we also picked their brains about the lessons learned from The Burning Crusade and how they’re influencing the design approach for Wrath of the Lich King….

Insider: In terms of lore, the Sunwell is one of the most important sites in Azerothian history. Revisiting this place in the Sunwell Plateau raid and the Magisters’ Terrace dungeon doesn’t just mark the high point of The Burning Crusade’s PvE progression; it also doubles as the final act of the first expansion’s story arc. How did this sense of a “grand finale” inspire the artistic direction of these settings? 

Chris Robinson: The central theme we wanted to realize with the Sunwell’s design was a clear revelation of blood elf culture in its highest form. With Sunwell Plateau and Magisters’ Terrace, we also had an opportunity to take the gear that players first experienced in the blood elf starting areas and develop those items to their most evolved form. One way this concept was implemented was in the fully realized blood elf visual style of the Sunwell gear players can obtain from these new dungeons. Since the Sunwell represents the culmination of the blood elf storyline that started with The Burning Crusade, it made sense to take design cues from the blood elf starting gear and translate those into some really epic-looking, clearly blood elven armor and weapons. 

J. Allen Brack: This is the first time that Alliance players have had access to the full range of blood elven items and equipment, and for blood elf players, they have the added treat of finally having the epic versions of their newbie gear. Another thing we felt was important in the development of this patch was that this is also the first opportunity for many Alliance players to experience the true blood elven culture, so we really wanted to show off their art and architecture as it would have been at the peak of the elves’ power.

Insider: Let’s talk about some high-level design concepts for the Sunwell. We already mentioned that the Sunwell dungeon and raid will conclude the blood elf and draenei storylines, at least for the time being. Can you elaborate on that a little more?

J. Allen Brack: Without spoiling too much, it’s true that some of the major story arcs of The Burning Crusade reach their conclusion in Fury of the Sunwell. There are big revelations for both the blood elves and the draenei, and players will also learn the fate of the remaining member of the bad guy triumvirate of Illidan, Vashj, and Kael’thas. In addition to Kael’thas, there’s a new “ultimate villain” to defeat. Essentially, we’re providing players with epic resolutions to The Burning Crusade’s most visible story arcs.

Naxxramas comes to mind as an example of what we’re aiming for with the Sunwell. Despite being the pinnacle of PvE raiding before The Burning Crusade, Naxxramas didn’t actually complete that many of the story arcs presented in the original game. While Naxxramas remains one of the best designed high-end dungeons in World of Warcraft, it still felt like there was untapped potential for what high-end PvE storytelling could be. That’s what we set out to do with Sunwell Plateau and Magisters’ Terrace: create a dungeon experience that features spectacular gameplay and an awesome conclusion to the expansion’s story arc.

Insider: Do you see a lot of parallels between Naxxramas and Sunwell Plateau?

J. Allen Brack: I see Sunwell Plateau more as an evolution of what we did with Naxxramas. Like I said, Sunwell Plateau serves a dual purpose of concluding The Burning Crusade’s story as well as representing the ultimate challenge for PvE content. In that regard, you could say it’s the Naxxramas of The Burning Crusade. But there are also some noticeable differences reflecting what the team learned from developing Naxxramas: Sunwell Plateau definitely has a more focused layout than the massive expanse of Naxxramas. Naxx’s immense size was one of its defining characteristics, and that was not a bad thing in itself. It allowed us to populate the necropolis with some of the game’s most memorable raid bosses, but at the same time I think its size made it difficult for some players to fully experience the dungeon. Sunwell Plateau’s smaller scale will let more players access the raid and give them a reasonable chance of clearing it before the launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

In addition, we consider Magisters’ Terrace to be an integral part of the complete Sunwell package — a small group experience that, along with the slew of new daily quests, new badge rewards, and new crafted items, shows our continued commitment to providing meaningful, rewarding solo and small group content. 

Insider: Speaking of Wrath of the Lich King — How is Northrend progressing? What are your feelings about going from the world style of Outland to the very different Northrend setting?

Chris Robinson: Coming up with the high concept look of The Burning Crusade was a great experience, and as a team we really enjoyed working in this style. For a designer, it’s always a breath of fresh air to have some new elements to play with. So naturally it’s great to now have this opportunity to go back to the more traditional elements of fantasy that comprise the look and feel of Wrath of the Lich King, even though this poses new challenges in and of itself. Northrend has a very Nordic, gothic fantasy feel that’s a departure from the wild scenescapes of Outland.

One way we’re attempting to reflect these new visual themes is by making sure all the item rewards of Northrend faithfully embody the new style. From the get-go, players will earn trophies of war that are very “Northrendy” — for example, say, a two-handed axe that’s made of a dragon jaw, covered with spikes, leather, and other traditional materials. We want players to see the new gear and think, “Yeah, that guy’s been to Northrend.”

 Insider: What sort of challenges are there in this artistic transition from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King?

Chris Robinson: There have been several areas where we’ve run into issues that are new and unique to Wrath of the Lich King. Take Lake Wintergrasp for example, which is an outdoor PvP zone with all-new gameplay features. This is the first time we’ve had to deal with destructible buildings, which is uncharted territory from a graphical and gameplay perspective. We usually try to give environments an aesthetic look that’s almost like a painting or an illustration; but how do we create that with an environment that can change radically? Along those lines, how do we keep making things look increasingly better within the technical boundaries of our intended system requirements? It’s a constant challenge that we need to always be aware of.

J. Allen Brack: Another challenge was how to balance Northrend’s cold northern climate with the need for diverse environments. We can’t just cover everything in snow and ice, because players would get bored of that quickly. But if we approach the snow and the ice as environmental clues for the player, we can actually use it as a powerful storytelling tool. There’s a story arc that ties all the zones of the expansion together, and the snow becomes a visual component of this common theme. The relatively green and “temperate” starting areas will be fairly densely populated, but as the story progresses we expect players to get more spread out. By slowly adding more and more snow, we can enhance that growing sense of isolation and dread. It’s very much what Arthas must have experienced when he wandered the wastes of Northrend after destroying Mal’Ganis. 

Chris Robinson: Then there’s the fact that the Warcraft universe is not just gritty and dark. One of Warcraft’s trademarks has always been the addition of little funny, whimsical details that round out the universe’s atmosphere. So while there are death knights, zombies, demons, wars, and all sorts of terribly dark elements in this universe, there are also light moments that balance things out. The tuskarr are a good example of this. Although players will see that the tuskarr are much more than just comic relief, we did try to give them some characteristics that would definitely fall into the “whimsical” category. For example, their “dragonstomp” animation is actually a “cannonball.”

 J. Allen Brack: That reminds me of another example: the turtle boat. If you look at Northrend, the continent is shaped a little bit like a crescent, with the two starting zones, Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, at the ends. There’s a port located in the middle of the coast between these zones, and we wanted to have an easy method for traveling between the zones. The method of transportation we settled on is a giant turtle with a deck mounted on top of its shell, very much like the turtles from Warcraft II. It’s simple, effective, grounded in Warcraft lore, but it’s also one of those light moments that are so important to create the iconic Warcraft feel.

Insider: Let’s go back to Fury of the Sunwell for a moment. Looking back at The Burning Crusade from day one to the conclusion of the main story arcs in Fury of the Sunwell, what are the lessons you’ve learned, and how are they affecting Wrath of the Lich King?

 J. Allen Brack: We now feel that the main villains of The Burning Crusade could have been a little more visible from the moment you entered Outland. For example, players could go all the way to level 70 without catching a glimpse of their nemeses. In Wrath of the Lich King, we’re going to engage players in the conflict with the primary antagonist from the beginning. By giving them Arthas as a clearly visible arch-enemy to focus on, we also create a stronger sense of purpose and a narrative pull that will continue to increase as the player progresses. Starting from your first step off the boat in Northrend, you will be constantly reminded about why you’re there, who you’re up against, and who’s running the show.

Aside from storytelling, another practical difference is that this time players will have the choice of two completely different starting areas, as I mentioned earlier: Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. This straightforward but important choice will set the tone for their gameplay and affect how they progress through the story. As an added benefit, this also increases the replayability of the whole experience of setting foot in Northrend: if you feel like it, after leveling up with one character, you can go back with an alt and see what the other starting area is like.

 

Chris Robinson: An important lesson for the artists was that it’s okay to take chances. The art style of The Burning Crusade was very colorful and high concept – a significant departure from the familiar geography of Azeroth – but the response we got was overwhelmingly positive. We took a chance, but ultimately it paid off. If we go far out there, people will respond. Hopefully, we’ll see another positive reaction to the quite dramatic departure in visual style that Northrend represents. While we’re making sure that Northrend looks and feels like a part of Azeroth, there are still going to be some surprises for players who played Warcraft III. For example, we are doing some seriously cool stuff with the nerubian zones right now… but I don’t want to spoil too much here. Make sure to check it out when you get to Northrend!

Insider: Thank you very much for your time!

Source: Official Site