Lead Encounter Designer, Michael Nuthals, joins the developers on this episode's podcast to break down the process of designing a raid encounter in WoW: Forever.
"We think a lot about difficulty in raids; we want folks to feel comfortable bringing their friends, we talk about beer and pretzels a lot. If we've prepared, we can execute a challenge and have some success and find some new epics."
Raid difficulty has been a topic of discussion amongst players in WoW: Forever. Players have wondered what types of mechanics and challenges they should expect when diving into new and familiar raids. Michael Nuthals goes on to explain how they balance difficulty with accessibility.
"It's important to balance the mechanical complexity of an encounter. We have a very good QA team that we rely on to playtest our encounters... Once it's built, we sit that boss in front of people and get that feedback... they might say 'this mechanic is boring' and you're like 'oh okay, why?'... And then iterating from there and playtesting again and seeing if we solved the problem. It's an interesting line to tow because you don't want to go too far the other direction and add a bunch of overcomplexity and too much challenge."
The interview would continue to explain that mechanics will still require coordination from raid teams, and whether or not it's through voice or using WoW's ping and alert system, players will want to prepare for these fights. When asked what his favorite boss fights were for this first raid tier, Nuthals broke down some fun mechanics players will see from the new 10- and 20-player raids.
"There is an encounter in the Barrow Deeps I really like; you have to manage a buff to do more damage, but there's a cost to that... there's another with a pair of spiders that I'm super excited for, and there's an undead crocalisk boss in Hyjal Summit, where the creature possessing it pops out, and you have to go back and forth between those two phases"
He would close out his discussion teasing new instanced content coming in the future, referencing a "home or manor" that players may have found, more than likely referring to the new and improved Manor Mistmantle players found in Duskwood.
