Developer Q&A - Lead Encounter Designer Morgan Day

[Ateo]

Your post is full of bad comparisons and bad assumptions. First of all the game drew in the most amount of players back then because it was new... no one was doing what WoW was doing quite so well. "10% or less of the player base raided..." That's because the other 90% who had never even heard of an MMO before WoW either had no idea how to get into it, no way to get into it, no idea what it was, or just pvp'd.

Stories were not told through raids the same way they are now. Now entire expansions are funneled into the raids in coherent ways vanilla/tbc neeeeever accomplished.

So anyways... remove the stick from thine posterior and take off the rose colored glasses.

This "rose tinted glasses" phrases gets thrown around left and right on this forum so much that it's lost all meaning entirely...


First of all nothing I'm saying is based off assumptions, yes the game was newer and that most definitely added to its subscriber base but it doesn't account for all of it. The game had a very direct route of progression in vanilla, tbc, and even wrath. Attunements set the course for vanilla/tbc due to the game being in early development and the developers not really knowing how to set the pace for the game.

As far as story telling in raiding goes wrath had an extremely coherent storyline told through its raids and dungeons. Almost the entire story of wrath was told as we reach northrend we quested in our respective zones, cleared out native threats(maly and sarth) then fought our first line of the scourge (naxx), we then worked our way into the northern hills of storm peaks where we freed the keepers of yoggs corruption and quelled the old god threat while learning that this very same old gods blood was used to construct ICC itself! We then went into icecrown and trained an army at the TOC raid, where arthas appears to intervene with anub and we again defeat him. We breach ICCs gates immediately after TOC and fight arthas the main featured villain who quotes everything we did in all other raids and how he pushed us to make us stronger so we could be his new army.

Now tell me how the hell that isn't the ENTIRE expansion told via raids? If you just quested you had absolutely no idea wtf was going on in that expansion. Wrath set the pace for all future expansions and this was WITHOUT raidfinder and easy mode bullshit. If you weren't a hardcore raider back then you most definitely were not killing the current bosses at their time, exactly like now if you aren't a hardcore raider you aren't seeing the special mythic boss fights without YouTube. This isn't new, it isn't surprising, and it most definitely isn't unfair.

Also to hit a few other marks you made:

- I believe in wrath only 3% of the player base did pvp as it was unbalanced and shitty.
- Players had plenty of ways to ease into current raids especially after they introduced 10/25 normal and heroic. If you wanted to raid, you did with ease.
- tbc/wrath were and always will be the highlights of wows history as both games introduced much easier ways to get into raiding yet still offered a challenge unlike current lolfaceroll content(unless you're doing mythic which is pretty much perfectly tuned for the most part.)

[KrotosTheTank]

20-man strict requirement for top-level raiding isn't working for everyone. Not all guilds can maintain this roster. And I don't care about those special snowflake guilds that have had the same 20 members since Vanilla, congratu-fuck-you-lations, this is the real world, and not every guild works like yours. Sometimes we raid with couples and that couple has a baby, or maybe someone gets a new job and their schedule changes... point is, shit happens, even with veteran raiders. What happens to a guild that's had the same Mythic tank for two years and he just suddenly goes? Do you think that's easy to replace? The role might, but the player isn't.

I stand firm that 20-man Mythic blows, and will continue to keep players who WANT to see the content unable to because it's just not always possible to have a consistent 20-man roster. It's not news that maintaining this sort of roster is burning guilds out. As a co-GM and raid leader of my guild, I offer our recruits the world. We make good progression, we down bosses, and we have fun doing it... people will leave even under perfectly fine conditions. Whatever twat mentioned "oh your leadership must be bad then" has zero clue, and I'd contend he'd never led a guild in his life.

Fix the 20-man restriction, it's holding people back that want to see this content.

I like that you complain about raid size, then use a tank of all roles as an example. You know, the one role where there will be 2 of regardless of raid size from 10 man all the way up to 30 man...

The number is just a number, if they swapped to 10 man then you'll have all sorts of people complaining about how they only have 8 ppl, why can't we do raids with 5 like we do M+? When you have much below 20, they found that it really limits what they can do to make a fight difficult and engaging. I personally wish we had 25 man back, or hell even 40, but I understand that with a smaller playerbase that becomes difficult. There needs to be a happy medium between raid size and raid difficulty (ie: tuning) and 20 seems to be it.

Honestly If i had to gripe about one thing it's that how, as much as group finder has helped the game, it's also destroyed community. Once you destroy community you create much larger pockets of anonymity. When you have that there's no repercussions for players to be shits. Nowadays you have people who join 3/10M guilds to get the achieves then move to 6/10M for those then push to join the 9/10M guilds, etc... There's less loyalty and pride in who you are as a player or guild. RL will always cause setbacks, but with the right sense of value to a guild, players will come and players will stay, players will be more likely to be ok with sitting when another is better suited for a given fight because the guild getting the kill is what matters. I just want community back, I think it would bring a sorely missed element of the game back.

[arcaneshot]

This "rose tinted glasses" phrases gets thrown around left and right on this forum so much that it's lost all meaning entirely...

It's an alternative phrase to "blinded by nostalgia." Which, incidentally, your posts reeks of.

That wasn't so hard, was it?

[MrExcelion]

"The first raid of an expansion is an exception to normal raid design, as it could be a player's first raid ever."

This dev team seems to underestimate the community's intelligence/memory. This looks like an excuse to explain why Emerald Nightmare was undertuned. If you remember Cataclysm's first tier, it was really hard, maybe harder, maybe easier than Firelands, but definetly comparable. The difficulty difference between Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor or Nighthold is just too great.

While I agree with you, I think there's been a philosophy shift since then towards retention of new players that hop in each xpac. There's also a true easy normal difficulty that lets players acquire the gear needed to power through heroic. Most importantly, they underestimated the power of M+ by quite a bit. At the time I was pretty much getting more upgrades from M+ than mythic EN (though 5 items should consistently drop in 20m imo). Titanforge gear from heroic that's stronger than base mythic too.

To go more out on a limb here, imo the real/non-PR reason is they have a harder time tuning that first raid because it's a much wider gamut of player power and lacking live data to back it up. They have a much easier time going into later raids because they have real hard data from live/WCL. I know they have internal simming tools and an internal raid team, but it pales in comparison to the raw quantity of data they get from live, taking all factors into account (like the playstyle/talent build they think is optimal might not actually be the best)

[MiiiMiii]

They are happy with the current raiding structure huh? OK, I won't be back for raiding next expansion either then...

I honestly don't understand how people can suck up this reusing of the same content over and over and over again.

Beat Gul'Dan on LFR then go do Normal! Cuz he has slightly more HP and DMG. Then go kill him on heroic! Cuz he has slightly more HP and DMG. Want to do him another time? Go Mythic!!! It will feel really cool and epic to kill the same guy again we promise...

Now Dungeons have the same concept. Actually, the dungeon system is even worse. Whatever. PvE is appearently not for me anymore.

"There is somethig cool about a boss not having been defeated by anyone in the whole world. It makes the game feel mysterious and gives you a cool goal to meet" - Blizzard on raid design in Vanilla. Clearly that philosophy has been dead for a while now.

[Hulkovius]

Imo the system should be like this for Mythic +.

One chest per affix. And you can add more affixes. Maybe up to 5. The timer on makes the AP-token better.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

"The team tries to keep the number of tanks and healers in a certain range for all of the fights. Usually the fights are balanced around two tanks, but once in a while it might be a fight where a third tank role would be fitting."

And then we got Legion Bears, so only one tank was needed. In the game. Like really, why did they even keep those other tank specs if they didn't want anyone to play them?

[Murderdoll]

We had to just end our guild because of the recruitment boss and me and two others have gone guild to guild trialing and scratching our head that some of the guilds weve trialed at/spoken to have managed to put pants on let alone kill bosses.

The hardest boss in this game, is the recruitment one. There simply is not enough players to go around to replace the ones who are leaving.

A lot of guilds simply died on Mythic Spellblade/Krosus because they didnt have the numbers to get proper attempts in. Then when you are 3/10 and everyone else is 5/10 your appeal is gone and you in many cases simply never get it back.

Now, theres an issue of skill - some guilds just arent cut out for mythic. Thats fine.

Another huge issue is Mythic guilds churnining out Heroic players. They snap them up for warm bodies, they spit them out 2 bosses later and the heroic player says fuck this im done and the pool gets smaller.

Something needs to be done server wise, if Blizzard wants to keep this 20 man raiding model up, it needs to merge many more servers or make server transfers much cheaper.

When server transfers etc are so expensive, your recruitment pool is just non existent in some instances. Take for example OCE servers. There are IIRC 6 servers. Only 2 of which are worth playing on. Frostmourne and Barth. Guilds on the other servers are dropping like flies because the top 5 can just poach anyone with 910+ ilvl and use them for a warm body and kick them to the curb.

[Deleted]

Nothing about the dead world pvp?

[Easo]

Instead you want to punish the guilds that actually have a roster and either actively recruit new blood or merge with others. One of the major problems with 10/25 "mythic" raiding (yes, it was called something else at the time, but effectively it was the same) was that of tuning. You simply cannot tune a boss very tightly if you have to account for only 10 players being there. Most mechanics are either much simpler with fewer people (spread-the-raid ones) or much harder (require x people to do something).

The amount of development time to balance both the current 20-person and a new smaller one is just detrimental to the absolute amount of raid content there is.

As many pointed out before: This alleged "difficulty to recruit" is mostly based on raid guilds being too proud to actually merge with others. We have too many guilds and therefore too few people per guild...

Yeahh... except when you have small national guilds. And still, why would the merge be the answer?

[cobrahn]

I love people crying in the comments about some portion of lore being gated behind a PHASE of Mythic difficulty. Remember Algalon? Sinestra? Ra-den? We used to have whole bosses gated behind difficulty. And they had major lore implications. You are better than others, you get rewards,simple.

[FelPlague]

Uh...did they just say Blackhand was a short fight???

archimonde took 50% longer
guldan took 100% longer