Please talk about your approach and design intent when it comes to racial abilities and balance.
A lot of the comms/marketing for Forever have focused on the social aspects of the game, the world as a character, encouraging people to play their way and so on; essentially pitching it as getting back to WoW’s roots as an RPG and encouraging people to play it as an RPG.
That’s included giving assurances when it comes to class design, and I found it very encouraging to hear at one of the Blizzcon panels that your goal with class balance is essentially ‘everything is viable, and nothing is so good you stack it, so play what you want to play’.
You also recently posted an article titled Create the Hero You Want to Be in World of Warcraft: Forever which includes the line “Each playable race has its own racial traits, offering additional flavor and utility alongside your chosen class as you adventure through Azeroth”.
It would be really nice if race was a choice we all made on the basis of flavour and utility; things like Goblins getting discounts at vendors, Mecha-Gnomes having built-in profession tools and Skyborne’s slowfall are fantastic on that front.
Unfortunately, though, racial abilities as currently implemented in Forever are a significant source of player power, and many players will feel obliged to choose their faction and race on the basis of PvE/PvP performance, not flavour and utility.
The team clearly recognise this on some level, and the recent change to the Gnome racial ability Eureka is encouraging in terms of indicating an awareness of it and an intention to make balance changes to racials generally.
Ideally though people would actually be free to “create the hero they want to be”, and to play a race they like without always having the nagging feeling of knowing they’d be better off as some other race with a better racial ability.
A simple example is Dwarfs, who have a 1% passive crit ability tied to a weapon type and a 5% damage bonus against beasts (which will presumably be inactive most of the time).
They can be directly compared to Orcs, who also have a 1% passive crit ability tied to a weapon type but then have a target-agnostic on-use damage bonus as their other racial.
Because Alliance Shamans can only be Dwarf, this means that they’ll underperform Horde Shamans any time they’re not attacking a beast.
This sort of thing feels really bad as a player who cares about optimising my performance in raids, and personally I don’t think racial abilities should have a performance impact on PvE/PvP at all.
Ideally the abilities that do would be removed entirely, (and maybe replaced with additional flavour/utility) but if that’s not on the table they could be disabled in instanced PvE or PvP content, or we could be given the ability to ‘respec’ them and be a hardy Gnome, a hasty Dwarf or an angry Human.
If none of these are options, please consider additional balancing like the change you made to Eureka, including buffing weaker racial abilities; Taurens, Dwarfs and Skyborne are far weaker than Orcs, Humans and Undead at the moment, for instance.
Please give this some thought, and please explain your reasoning whatever you decide.
(I’ve done a lot of work looking into this and have a bunch of maths/spreadsheets/etc on the topic. I could write a whole big essay, but I don’t think this is the right place for that - I’m happy for you to contact me directly if it would be of any use to you.)