Introducing the Chronowarden: Interview with George Velev and Jade Martin

Accompanied by fellow Wowhead writer Preheat, this past Thursday I had a chance to sit down with two incredible members of the World of Warcraft development team, Game Producer George Velev, and Lead Combat Designer Jade Martin for a 30-minute chat all about the newly-unveiled Chronowarden Hero Talent Tree.

First shown just over a month ago at BlizzCon 2023, the Hero Talent system is an ambitious and exciting new feature of the upcoming The War Within expansion that promises to explore new elements of class fantasy through new “sub-spec” talent trees, which are shared by just two of each class’s various specialisations.

Be sure to check out the official blog post where you can read all about the new Hero Talents feature, as well as share your own feedback in the comments section.

So without any further ado, here is a transcript of our full interview with George and Jade!

Introductions

Preheat: Okay, so today I’m joined by George Velev, Game Producer, and Jade Martin Lead Combat Designer for World of Warcraft. So for a little background on me, my name is Preheat, I’ve raided at a World First level for years in Limit now Liquid and now I raid with Myst. I’m also the Wowhead Guide Writer for Devastation Evoker and today I’m joined by Jereico!

Jereico: Thanks Preheat! My name is Jereico, I’m the Augmentation Guide Writer over at Wowhead. These days I main and make content for DPS Evoker, so Augmentation and Devastation. I raid in a little guild called Euphoric over on the NA servers. Honestly, it’s my first time doing one of these so I’m a little nervous guys, but I’m super excited to be here, so thanks for having me!

Preheat: And let’s talk about our two guests here who are joining us, so George, why don’t you go ahead and give us a quick introduction.

George: My name is George Velev, like you mentioned, I’m a Game Producer on the World of Warcraft team working with the Combat Design team.

Preheat: Excellent! Jade?

Jade: Hey everyone, happy to be here to talk about Hero Talents. As mentioned I’m Jade Martin, one of the Lead Combat Designers on WoW, been over here on WoW for almost five years now.

Preheat: Fantastic. Big fan of both of y’all’s work, so let’s just jump into this! So first off, thank you for the opportunity and privilege to have this sneak peek and to see these new Hero Talents coming in The War Within. Loving the different themes and rotations that are going to come from these choices. We have a lot of questions for you. So if you don’t mind, we’re just going to jump right into it. 

Jade: Yeah, let’s do it. 

Balance Tuning and Lessons Learned

Preheat: So once again, loving the columns, the flavour, and the fantasy that you can see with each of these different subcategories that we have in the Hero Talents. These are awesome ideas; very excited for this system. Maintaining the freedom to choose new Hero Talents, each with their own visual gameplay differences is a great goal. In the blog post you mentioned wanting options that feel similarly effective–regardless of the content–while avoiding required talents. You acknowledged that throughput is a very important thing for a lot of players. And keeping Hero Talents in balance is going to be one of your close priorities. I think I speak for a lot of players when I say that ultimately the success of this system will depend on the effort put into tuning. Obviously, they’re not all going to be completely tuned or in line, but to see this play out as advertised: it’s ambitious. So let’s start with some general questions about Chronowarden.

Jereico: My first question really is the big “elephant in the room” general question. I’m thrilled about the idea of this feature and all the flavour that it brings, and the new blog post that’s accompanying this, it does a great job explaining all the thought process and design, so that’s awesome. For me, the obvious first comparison to this system is the Shadowlands Covenants, of course, which saw a lot of iteration over the course of that expansion. I was someone who struggled a little bit with being able to choose between my favourite fantasy, and the one that does the biggest numbers. So really, for you guys, how big of a priority is the balance tuning at the end of the day, what sort of lessons did you guys learn from some of those past expansions, and what does that mean going forward?

Jade: Yeah, great question. Let’s start with “lessons learned”. Looking at past systems, Covenants is a good example. One of the largest problems with Covenants is there was a disparity between class or spec fantasy and the power that was available. That made it really hard to choose, because, as you mentioned, you’re kind of deciding, “do I really want to align with what fantasy speaks to me the most or do I want to do what is apparently the best throughput: damage throughput, healing throughput, whatever it might be. Those were kind of butting heads a little bit. Over the course of Shadowlands we reduced the restrictions on that quite a bit, but it was very hard early on.

Jade: Going into The War Within and Hero Talent Trees, the biggest thing we’re doing is removing all of that friction. Really, this is a system that you’re going to learn as you level up, you’re going to be able to put points into all of your Hero Talent spec trees, with only one active at a time. Starting at level 71 you’ll unlock one point, and all the way to 80 you’ll have all 11 nodes filled out (you get your first one for free, which is why it’s 11). You’ll be able to change the choice nodes within the tree at any time. And if for whatever reason you don’t feel like playing Chronowarden and you want to play Scalecommander, you can just switch. So, removing a lot of the friction is probably the biggest thing we learned. Let’s make sure that people can play what they want, when they want, and I think that’s going to show through with this system.

Jade: Going back to the harder problem, which is the balance, we’re setting up a roll of guidelines for ourselves to really try and hone this in to the best of our capabilities that we can. Assuming a DPS tree, you’ll see a similar number of DPS nodes, whether it’s single target or AOE, as well as utility and defensives. You’re not going to see Scalecommander with five utility nodes and Chronowarden with only one utility, because that’s obviously creating an imbalance. It might be too good, say, in PvP versus PvE, and so why would I ever play Chronowarden if Scalecommander is giving me all this extra utility? We’re trying to limit that. Really you’re picking based off of the fantasy–and also how that fantasy is delivered. That’s the big differentiation there. Maybe one is just, they get all their throughput from execute type damage, whereas the other one maybe gets all their damage from a really sustained damage profile, but at the end, the total package should roughly be the same, and that’s really what we’re trying to aim for and hit.

George: Also wanted to add real quick that these aren’t traditional class talents, you’re getting everything in this hero talent tree, which gives us a lot of tools and understanding of like, alright, cool, we know that the Mountain Thane package is “XYZ”. Let’s compare that against you know, Slayer or Colossus, and make sure that they’re on the same page. The understanding that the player will have everything, give or take a few choice nodes, really goes a long way. 

Jereico: Awesome!

Preheat: Thank you for the clarification, that’s great.

Inspiration for Chronowarden Hero Talents

Preheat: So each column, since we’re on the topic, they all have their own theme. There are obviously “sub specs” you can have, so we’ve got like Warp, we’ve got Temporal Bursts, and Reverberation, for Chronowarden. So we will get into each one of these a little bit, but which is your favourite and were there any talents that drew inspiration from maybe some early concepts or ideas for Evoker that didn’t quite make it into the game?

George: Yeah, I like Warp, I think Warp is sick. It’s certainly one of the more gameplay-impacting talents in the Chronowarden tree simply because it is, fundamentally, movement in a “blink”. It also is one of those where like, alright, cool, you’re playing with Chronowarden and you see them Warp and you immediately know that it’s a Chronowarden and I think that’s sort of a great selling point for the Hero Talent Tree. It’s also one of the most important ones that we get right because it is such a big part of the feel of Chronowarden. In terms of what we’re pulling from, yeah, like Reverberations pulled from, I think a previous Preservation set bonus. Temporal Burst is something we always really wanted to do. Something that makes you feel like you’re controlling time and manipulating your cooldowns. We did something similar with Flow State and Time Skip. And this felt like a really sort of good and fun angle for Chronowarden to pursue, so those are a few things that inspired us.

Preheat: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to Warp. You actually just answered one of my future questions too!

Hero Talents and Complexity

Preheat: Uses for these talents will obviously be quite different for Augmentation versus Preservation. They both have access to these trees for Hero Talents. Is the idea that these talents should fundamentally alter your rotation, or what are your thoughts on how the talents will play and how they will impact the actual gameplay?

Jade: Sure, awesome, excellent question. Broadly speaking, the goal of the talents, really, they should feel impactful, but we don’t want to add too much complexity. We don’t want to inject a lot of complexity that’s going to complicate your rotation, make things more difficult, maybe even inject a playstyle that you’re not really looking forward to. They should be impactful. You should be excited when you’re playing Chronowarden and you’re doing the things that the Chronowarden can do. So it’s a really fine line for us to walk, and how much complexity is there. And you know, that’s kind of one of the reasons why we’re actually opening up this feedback loop pretty early on Hero Talents is because from the community, we actually want to know like, are the notes in which we’re hitting right now with the complexity that we have too much? Too little? We want to know. We want to be relatively cautious because at a base level we want your core spec and class to play as you would expect. You are still an Augmentation Evoker, but Chronowarden is just injecting a little bit of gameplay into your spec. And so hopefully, that’s coming through and that’s really kind of our goal there. 

Preheat: Awesome. Yeah, I think that there’s definitely a lot of variety–well, we have another question later that kind of ties into this, but depending on what you play, obviously because Preservation and Augmentation have very different playstyles but we can definitely tell that there are some intricacies there that are interesting.

Jade: Just to add on to that too, I mean, there are 39 of these and all of them are going to have a little bit of different complexity. So some might be a little bit simpler and some a little bit more complex than others. But I mean, it’s definitely going to be a range and a scope of complexity as we go through these 39 different Hero Talent Trees.

Talent Tuning Between Specs

Preheat: So in the blog post, it mentioned that some talents are going to be adjusted depending on which spec you’re playing. I think the example was Tank versus DPS for Warrior. So are there also going to be differences when it comes to the difference in the talents between DPS specs? For instance, Augmentation Evokers are obviously very tanky, right? They have the cheat death and all of their cooldowns last longer for defensives, and now they have access to a really short cooldown 30% damage reduction, that Devastation can’t [access]. Are there considerations for this kind of thing to try and, I guess, equal out some of the power?

Jade: Yeah, definitely, good question. I mean, obviously Chronowarden is Augmentation or Preservation but even there–I think you’re calling out Interdimensional Phase, if I’m not mistaken, the “Warp grants DR (damage reduction)” and so, that value even might be different between Preservation and Augmentation. And I think that in terms of like, overall power, you’ll see similar type nodes for Devastation that also may grant some sort of DR. But like, it’s totally possible that 30% DR on Warp is just too high for Augmentation considering how survivable they already are, and maybe, you know, 15% makes more sense, right? So these are definitely things that we’re cognizant of. I think one important note here is that these are very early trees. We tried to get the numbers somewhat sane for our internal playtesting, but these are all bound to change, especially over the iteration cycle.

Jereico: This is kind of something that we saw on Live right now actually with the Stamina and Leech nodes for Devastation, right? So you’re saying this is still on the table?

Jade: Absolutely. 100%.

Preheat: By the way, that is awesome. I love that there’s like, the variability on those individual talents, it helps so much, and super appreciate those.

Jereico: More of that!

Jade: Yeah, absolutely.

Hero Talents and Support Gameplay

Preheat: So with the addition of Augmentation, we’ve seen just how hard it can be to balance things between specs when one of them is a support: just look at Devastation [in Patch] 10.2. So are Hero Talents meant to help bridge the gap between Augmentation and its peers by adding more support, maybe, to Preservation and Devastation in the other trees that we haven’t seen yet? Is that kind of the intent, or are these kind of like a different idea?

George: It’s really quite a different idea. I mean, they’re really here to primarily add new gameplay opportunities to specs. I think with Augmentation, it’s really fun and interesting that we can let Devastation and Preservation dip into support playstyles, but the goal of these talents is, and basically, the gameplay is to give them flavour and some gameplay around support but not sort of the main focus of it. Regarding Chronowarden, the support oriented talents are throughput oriented. They’re not things that focus on large utility or defensive buffs. And considering that they are throughput oriented, that’s part of the budget and the tuning package of Chronowarden, so we’re not really aiming for these to be mandatory. If anything, those support bonuses will be part of the bucket that Chronowarden tuning contains.

Jereico: To jump on that, is that maybe a hint that Scalecommander might see a little more on the group utility side and sort of Tank/Healer support, or are we still trying to keep things kind of one-to-one in terms of throughput-to-throughput kind of thing?

George: We’re keeping things one-to-one for now. We are experimenting with Chronowarden and Scalecommander having you know, both of them share Augmentation so both of them will have some support-themed talents. That being said, we want to make sure that they’re not required picks because as you mentioned, it can cause problems. That might mean that some of these support oriented talents are things like fixed damage like Inferno’s Blessing, but we’re sort of feeling that and seeing what feels right and appropriate.

Preheat: Excellent. Well, that was my next question, so I’ll still ask it. You just gave the answer but–so Chronowarden obviously has a lot of crossover with Augmentation’s support theme. We can feel that throughout the Hero Talents, that they’re, you know, adjacent to Augmentation. Obviously Ruby Adept has no connection to Augmentation, that’s the one just for Preservation and Devastation. How do you intend to design these Hero Talents so that they don’t become just the default pick?

George: Well, I mean, it’s really making sure that the tuning package is appropriate. Like mentioned Chronowarden and Scalecommander will have a tuning package of “X, Y and Z” . If they do have support oriented abilities, in specs like Chronowarden, that’ll be considered part of their “throughput”. Ruby Adept will be focused largely not on support because, like you mentioned, it doesn’t share with Augmentation. And going back to, I think it was mentioned previously, the fact that these are chunks of talents, and they’re guaranteed gives us a lot of opportunities to make sure that across the board, they’re as close as they can be in terms of performance.

Preheat: Awesome, great. Thank you. Yeah, just [as an] aside, I do think having them all be part of the package where you can pick more than one row here is great for that. Cool, so let’s move on. 

All About Warp

Preheat: So, Warp! Warp talents, they’re awesome. I’m a Mage veteran, so the idea of having a blink as an Evoker really excites me a lot. Does Warp mean that I can teleport over hazards like Blink? And what happens if I do it in a neutral position? Because right now you can Hover neutral and you just like, stay put. So is that still gonna fling me forward? Or am I just going to blink in place? 

Jade: Yeah, kind of topical. We were actually discussing this last week after playtesting with Warp and yeah, the easy answer is, it’s similar to Blink. It does allow you to avoid dangerous hazards like fire on the ground. So as a veteran Mage as you said, it should feel pretty familiar. The difference here actually is, we were actually discussing letting you Warp in place with it. We don’t know what that looks like yet, because, you know, it’s kind of a little bit of a new concept. But it is something I think we want to add because it keeps that Hover theme of being able to hover in place, and that feels pretty integral to how we would expect Warp to work.

Preheat: I think one of the best features about Blink is if you’re in the air, usually it will teleport you onto the ground. So like a neutral–and this is something that annoys me with Hover, just like as a side thing. Whenever you Hover in the air, you get flung forward regardless of your input. Whereas with this talent, I could see it, you know, bringing you down to earth which would actually be fantastic. That’s exactly what I would want. So do that what you will!

Interdimensional Phase and Overloading Existing Abilities

Jereico: Alright, I think I’ve got the next one. So hopefully not to tread too much of the same ground over again. In the outline, of course, we talked about complexity, and now in most Hero Talent Trees we’re not necessarily adding new buttons. I’m a big fan. And I mean, I picked up Devastation Evoker. I’m a big fan of keeping buttons to a minimum in sort of “current” WoW. Some specs keep maintaining that fantasy of having a million things going on, some keep it simple. I love that there’s a distinction. To me, one thing I’m mindful of is when an ability has been kind of “overloaded” with too much functionality at the end of the day, especially when those things have different purposes. 

Jereico: On one hand, I’m looking at Temporal Burst in this tree and to me, that’s, you know, “wow, awesome”. I’m taking Tip the Scales, this pretty mundane, quick thing that I push and kind of forget about it after and I’m giving it this really cool fresh coat of paint and I think that’s a great fantasy there. 

Jereico: On the other hand, I look at Interdimensional Phase here, this Warp damage taken reduction, and I think, “wow, that’s strong”. And I like active mitigation buttons that require timing, I think that stuff’s great. But wait a second, am I going to have to now save Hover charges just for that big hit that the boss does, and am I going to only be able to use hover in that way? How is that actually going to translate into gameplay? 

Jereico: So is this dilemma of mine sort of an intended aspect of the design, and how do you guys evaluate whether an ability is doing too much at the end of the day?

George: It’s a great question, and honestly one we talk about all the time. The impression I’m getting based off what you just mentioned, is that maybe we swung a little bit too hard with how much DR Interdimensional Phase gives you. Really, these should be nice bonuses for your abilities. They really shouldn’t be changing how you sort of treat them mentally. We don’t want you to sort of have to have those mental calculations constantly. Unless it’s something like a starting node or a capper node on these Hero Talent trees. They really shouldn’t be changing the expectation of what a button does fundamentally. So really appreciate you letting us know that–

Jereico: I think so, because to me, Hover is a very integral part of how the game plays for Evoker and I think other specs, how they sort of handle similar buttons, they’re usually a little lower in potency, and they’re usually on buttons like Fade or Feign Death that just don’t actually do anything otherwise, right. So that’s kind of a comparison that I’m drawing I think on that one. 

George: Gotcha. 

Jereico: So yeah, great answer.

George: Yeah. Good feedback, and asterisk to everything that you’re gonna see with these Hero Talent articles is that tuning is not final. You’ll notice that a lot of numbers are omitted on purpose. Numbers are really important for us but we are also very much looking for like, alright, Hover gives me a DR. I’m not sure how I feel about that. That’s really important feedback too.

In terms of how we evaluate if something feels like it’s too much, maybe, there’s a lot of things that we do. I narrow it down to two big things. Biggest one is feedback both internally amongst ourselves, and feedback from the community, which is what we’re really sort of trying to get out of this push for Hero Talent articles. It’s also playtesting. You know, feedback is awesome, but playtesting really also goes a long way when it comes to figuring out what feels good and what feels bad.

Jereico: Great!

Back to Warp and Mythic Tindral

Preheat: To talk about this Warp a little bit more I was just thinking, so is it also a way maybe to break out of roots? Like could you use Warp to teleport if you’re rooted or would that theoretically come along with you?

George: That’s a great question.

Jade: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know the answer offhand right now how it functions, but that’s something we could probably figure it out.

Jereico: Write it down! Write it down!

George: That would be sick on Mythic Tindral, I’ll tell you that.

Preheat: Yes! I’m doing it right now that’s why it came to mind! I was like, “oh my gosh.”

George: Me too, me too, like that sounds really cool actually, I want to write that down!

Jade: At the moment I don’t think it does, but again, those are things like again, getting this out there early, something we can talk about as a team and see if that’s something we could apply to the talent itself. 

Preheat: I know for like the PVPers out there, apparently roots are like the big thing that they’re all really upset about when it comes to playing Evoker. Just a thought!

Time Convergence and Impact to Rotation

Preheat: Okay, so next question, does Time Convergence stack duration if multiple 45+ second abilities are used in quick succession?

Jade: Currently, no, I don’t believe it does. Ultimately, how this functions, it should feel smooth. Like, if it’s natural for it to feel like it stacks then that’s probably something we could explore. I’d be kind of interested to hear how you initially read it and kind of what your take on that was when you saw it?

Preheat: Well, from the perspective of playing Evoker, you’re almost always, at least as Augmentation, sending your Empowers back to back. Like there’s actually no world where you would hold them because you want to, you know, maximise your damage multiplications you want to, especially with Breath of Eons, try to buff people as much as possible with the force multiplication. I think you would always use your Empowers back to back so that’s–I guess the question is, is there value in changing the rotation in some way with this to make it so that you would want to space them out? I don’t know if you would if it didn’t refresh the duration? I’m not sure if you would even do that though, to be honest. 

Jereico: Off the top of my head we’re just talking about like Breath of Eons, Tip the Scales, maybe Time Skip, right? Is there anything else that technically would qualify for Augmentation? Probably not, right?

Preheat: It depends on what a “cooldown” is, right? Because would Obsidian Scales count for instance?

Jereico: So that would count for the second part for the defensive abilities.

Preheat: Right.

Jereico: So anyway, all of that to say, I think right now we kind of would use those abilities together and that’s sort of why this question comes up. 

Jade: That’s something where I can talk to the team. I don’t have a sure answer for this right now. I think ultimately, this is probably what’s going to feel best and ultimately fit into that tuning package that we see for the talent. So if the tuning makes sense where the duration would stack then we can totally explore that. We’re not like, vehemently against it or anything like that.

George: You shouldn’t have to stagger your cooldowns in a way that feels unnatural.

Preheat: Yeah, great. Thank you. That’s great to know. So we’ll definitely play that and give feedback once we get our hands on it. Excited for that.

Threads of Fate and Master of Destiny

Preheat: Okay, so let’s talk about Temporal Burst [and subsequent talents]. So Tip the Scales felt pretty underwhelming before, it’s really cool to see it get some love here. Definitely excited for that. So will Threads of Fate use targeting priority currently like we have like with Augmentation spells, and if so, what lessons from Augmentation over the over the course of Dragonflight that we learned are going to carry over to these sorts of mechanics? Are there improvements in mind for how it does this priority?

George: At this point, no, it’s not going to use Augmentation targeting, it’s going to be auto-targeted to allies, preferring DPS roles. For Preservation in particular we really didn’t want the targeting to feel like you had to focus your healing spells just to buff your damage dealers, so right now we want it to be more automatic. But if it feels like it needs to be more targeted, that’s good feedback that we can sort of take back and discuss.

Preheat: Excellent, and Master of Destiny says it increases the power by 100% per stack. So does that mean the proc rate, or like the damage echo percentage, or both? And with the 15 seconds of Threads of Fate and the eight seconds of Master of Destiny, is the intention to get out like four buffs and then use two powers to buff them up? Or another question is, will that buff amp them after the fact, like if I use my Empowers first and then I get out a couple of [Threads of Fate], am I going to buff those up?

Jade: I believe the idea behind Master of Destiny is that the damage would be increased and it will work with any new Threads of Fate. It was designed with a previous iteration of Threads of Fate in mind. I think previously, you could have Threads of Fate active much more often. And we would probably see those changes in a new iteration of Chronowarden going forward. 

Jereico: Okay that’s interesting, because I have a question here that kind of goes through a specific example, and I’ll do it pretty quickly, just in the interest of time. I’m really interested in getting down to work to start writing up my feedback on sort of the detailed interactions and everything, and for me, these two were very interesting because what I look at on Live, for example, is in my Augmentation rotation, I’m generally casting my Empowers first before my Essence spenders. That gets my Shifting Sands out, and then I can start sort of extending my Ebon Might. But the way this is laid out, it sort of encourages me to do the opposite, where I might want to dump all my Essence abilities first, to get these Threads out and then use my Empowers. But at that point, I don’t have my Shifting Sands on my allies anymore. 

Jereico: So to me, perhaps to help guide some of the feedback that myself and others provide, is this example of competing priorities meant to feel like a feature to encourage experimentation, or is the sort of exact example more of a pain point that you’re hoping might come out in feedback that you might want to address?

Jade: Yeah, definitely the latter. That sounds incorrect to me, I don’t think the intention when designing Master of Destiny was to really reverse your spell priorities in a way that clash, especially one that’s super uncomfortable. If it was maybe a little natural, that probably is right, but this sounds like maybe a miss on our part.

Jereico: It jumped out at me, for sure. 

Jade: So yeah, we can definitely take a look at that. 

Jereico: That’s great! 

Golden Opportunity and Augmentation Buff Targeting

Jereico: And then, one more that builds in my “wish list” as well, you know, half Hero Talent, half Augmentation question. So Prescience on Live is both a damage buff for your allies, and is also this main mechanism by which Augmentation selects buffed targets. So we have this node here called Golden Opportunity where Prescience has a chance to not incur a cooldown, and this has very interesting implications for different players. For more casual players, or–I describe it in my write-ups as “autopilot” gamers–who just kind of use the default targeting to send their abilities, they might just see that as you know, “hey, look, I get more Presciences, that’s great, awesome.” 

Jereico: But for the more competitive minded players, there’s a lot of what I describe as spreadsheet gaming, where they might want to be, you know, plotting out their Prescience casts by the second then adding this random element suddenly to Prescience actually seems like it might have a very disruptive aspect to it, especially to the buff targeting mini-game where, you know, I generally only want four Prescience out because that’s the only people I want to hit with my Ebon Might. If I have more than that, who knows what happens?

Jereico: So the question I really wanted to kind of draw out is, maybe if we can expect to see any changes to the way that buff targeting is addressed to sort of open the door for maybe more possibilities here, but I’ll leave the [framing of the] answer up to you guys, I think.

George: Currently, there are no planned changes for buff targeting for things like Ebon Might. If there are, they’re not things we’re gonna make on a Hero Talent level, they’re things that we’re gonna make fundamentally on the class or spec. I mean, personally, I think Prescience reset is kind of cool. I think it opens up a lot of opportunities for things like Anachronism procs. That being said, I also really like “casino-like” styles of gameplay, where you just get resets, resets, resets. That’s pretty fun to me, so I’m a little bit biased…

Jereico: So, I could go for that, personally, like I’m with you. That style needs to be competitive, I think with the spreadsheet style is kind of the thing. 

George: Sure.

Jereico: So maybe it’s just the tuning angle. 

George: It’s always worth mentioning that it’s on a choice node. So if you don’t really like that kind of gameplay you can also pick Master of Destiny instead, which is more cut and dry.

Preheat: That’s good because it means that the gameplay where you want to have four Prescience out all the time isn’t locked behind one specific Hero Talent flavour, right? You don’t have to be a Chronowarden to have your Prescience, I’m assuming, you know, all four of them mapped out the whole time. If it were up to the class talents instead of the Hero Talents. 

George: Mhm.

Where to Share Feedback and Closing Thoughts

Preheat: Cool. Well, we’re at time so yeah, appreciate your answers. These were great. And looking forward to getting our hands on it and giving you some more feedback. Yeah, any questions for us before we go?

Jade: I have no questions; I did just want to add: I think we’ve said it a couple of times throughout the interview. One of the reasons why we’re doing this so early is, we’re really interested in player feedback. So our hope here is that once these go live we’ll get a lot of feedback, and we consume this on a lot of different mediums. Like our forums, Discord, Reddit, YouTube videos. George loves Tiktok, I’ve said that now a couple times. So even if you give us a Tiktok video, we’ll look at it. 

Jereico: Get on it, Preheat!

Jade: Haha, yeah. Generally written feedback is best for us, it’s just easier to parse through. But again, anywhere we can get this feedback is great. So please, please, please send us that feedback. We want to hear what you think about Hero Talents. Things we’re specifically looking for are, how do you feel about the fantasies of the trees? Do the talents embody that fantasy? What are your thoughts on how the talents play or how they impact your rotation? I know that can be hard when you’re just looking at a paper design but even early thoughts on that are great, and we’re really pushing to get the majority of these in to be play-testable for our very first public testing in the future. And lastly, once we get to that stage, like, what the visual looks like, how the names are, is that coming across in the fantasy of these Hero Talents? So please, please, I said please a lot already, but I can’t wait to hear feedback on this.

George: Yeah, Jade basically said everything I was gonna say, so thanks Jade. Two things I wanted to add: This is just the beginning. This is our first wave. We’re going to be doing more of these on the road to public testing, so look forward to them. They’re gonna be a lot of fun. And honestly, if you were around for Dragonflight Alpha, we did our sort of talent reviews, similar sort of vibe to that. And yeah, if you make a Tiktok for Chronowarden, I’m going to send it to, like, everyone I know. ‘Cause that’s apparently my preferred method of feedback, Jade? But forums are great too. So yeah, really appreciate the time.

Preheat: All right, noted, send all Tiktoks to George, got it. All right, appreciate y’all. Yeah, this was great, I had a lot of fun and really excited for all these Hero Talents. I know like, just really whenever we saw The War Within and we saw all that they were coming out with, already hitting us with the three expansions, that was big. And then now we see these awesome talents are going to add, like, really cool, thematic fantasy themes to the classes we already know and love. It’s great. Yeah. So great job. 

George: Happy to hear that!

Jade: Glad to hear, thank you guys!