Midnight Overview
In a World Without Addons
Ion Hazzikostas has talked about the addon disarmament multiple times leading up to Midnight, and one of the point is how Blizzard has had to "design around " for the past several expansions. With raid testing starting, we finally get to see Blizzard's new encounter design!
Ion Hazzikostas Blog Post
A Memory Mechanic
The final boss of March of Quel'Danas shows off one of these mechanics that likely wouldn't be done in a world with computational addons: a memory game.
On Heroic, L'ura starts by showing 4 symbols, one at a time, in a specific order. L'ura will then assign those same 4 symbols to 4 players before charging up a laser beam. The laser beam will then rotate counter-clock-wise around the boss and must hit the symbols in the correct order for the mechanic to be resolved. Every symbol hit in the wrong order will deal high damage to the raid, leaving a DoT on the raid (but the DoT wasn't working).
The order shown in the clip is Triangle, X, Moon, Diamond, but in this clip it was resolved in the order Moon, X, Diamond, Triangle, leading to 3 instances of raid damage.
On Mythic
On Mythic difficulty, a similar mechanic is added in Phase 3, but it seems to be a call back to Star Augur.
Instead of a laser to trigger the notes, players with the same notes need to collide to trigger them, and you still need to trigger them in the same order as the memory pattern.
Assuming there's enough time, this seems to be a great elevation of the mechanic, emphasizing raid coordination.
Is it Fair?
Affordance
"Affordance" is a term that is used by Blizzard to describe if players have enough time to respond to a mechanic as described in this interview.
Taylor SandersWe call this concept “affordance’’. So when a mechanic goes out, we want to make sure that players have not only the right amount of time but the right amount of visual and audio feedback in order to respond to a mechanic.
Affordance has also been brought up in the past in Shadowlands in a response to a community council post.
This is a cool term and I like it, but I want to expand a bit and talk about even more factors that we think about when determining if a mechanic is appropriate to ask players to do at a given difficulty, such as:
• How complex is the mechanic?
• How much affordance does the mechanic have? (basically a function of how clear it is + how much time you’re given to react)
• How severe is the punishment for failure, and is it binary or granular?To use a few Shadowlands mechanics as examples:Smoldering Ire (Denathrius)
• Low complexity
• High affordance
• Outright ignoring it is an instant wipe, but failure is granular (if you only miss 20% the damage is likely survivable)Spiked Floor (Painsmith)
• Low complexity
• Medium affordance
• Failure is binary (die if you get hit), but it only affects one person so a few mistakes can be OKLoom of Fates (Fatescribe)
• High complexity
• High affordance
• Failure is binary and instantly wipes the raid.Note that this is simplifying a bit and doesn’t account for “what else is competing for your attention while this mechanic is happening?”, but it’s still a useful model to help evaluate the impact a mechanic has on a fight.When it comes to Loom of Fates, I wonder if you’d feel less like addons are a requirement if one or both of the following were true:
• Fewer things competing for your attention during the mechanic (avoidable elements, adds, etc)
• More granular penalty for failure (ex: a single mistake resulted in a “survivable with all your raid CDs” level of damage, as opposed to a wipe)Ultimately what I’m getting at here is that “high complexity” is a design space that allows us to do some pretty cool and thematic stuff, and I’d like to find ways for us to continue doing things in this space while keeping them accessible. To be clear: We make “high complexity” mechanics not because we feel pressure to keep up with addons, but because doing so allows us to create more unique bosses.
Is This Mechanic Fair?
Let's break down this mechanic:
Every ~1.5 seconds, a new shape is shown.
2 seconds later, the shapes are spawns on 4 players.
8 seconds later, L'ura starts rotating the laser beam.
The laser beam takes 3 additional seconds for a full rotation.
It's important to note that as of right now, the only other mechanic during this time is the Tank mechanic. The rest of the raid is able to focus their attention solely on this mechanic and nothing else. Given what is shown of this mechanic, here's my personal rating of this mechanic using the same system that Blizzard used.
Medium complexity
This mechanic is not as easy to explain as other mechanics, but not on the level of complexity of Fatescribe rings
High affordance
Players are given 6 seconds to identify the pattern, and type it out in chat (if needed), and 8 additional seconds to line up correctly.
Failure is granular based on number of incorrect shapes.
I think this mechanic feels fair. 4 symbols feels like the right amount to remember, and also have players shuffle into the correct order without being overbearing. The amount of time that is given to players to complete this mechanic feels fair for the Heroic difficulty as well. For less coordinated groups the symbols could be quickly typed into chat for easy memory as well, especially since there is no other mechanic going on,
Why Couldn't Blizzard Do This Previously?
A big question that people might have is why couldn't Blizzard do this previously? I think the answer lies in this statement from Ion:
Ion HazzikotasGuilds—or even pickup groups—commonly require the use of specific addons for mid-combat coordination. While we have never designed FOR addons, in the sense of making a specific encounter or class mechanic with the intent that players would write addons to solve a given puzzle, we have inevitably had to design AROUND them for the past several expansions. We have to accept that even in non-cutting-edge content, a majority of players will turn to any available tools to make things easier.
Let's take this exact mechanic in a world with addons. Here's my speculation on what would happen:
Someone would design a WeakAura with buttons that one player could click on to enter the order order of the shapes.
You would put down 4 markers around the boss in a specific order.
The Weakaura would then tell the marked players which marker specifically to stand on in text and Text-to-Speech.
If Weakauras existed, this mechanic would turn this mechanic from everyone needing to pay attention to one person needing to pay attention to the order, and then just being told by a computer where to stand, pretty thoroughly trivializing the mechanic. I think this is an example of a mechanic that Blizzard can do now that addons are being disarmed.
