Bornakk Discusses Logic Behind Raid DesignSep 17th, 2009 at 10:26 AM by Togikagi

In response to a thread on the official forums asking if we'll see raids like Blackwing Lair again, Bornakk has outlined Blizzard's logic behind designing future raids and dungeons. For example, attunements "cause more frustration than benefit so we have aimed to put the story parts into optional quests and allow players to have easier access to the dungeons." Also, crowd control could be around, but the team doesn't want to triple the amount of trash just to make CC more valuable.

Bornakk said players complained about the "boring linear part" of old dungeons, but the team still wants dungeons to feel epic. Bornakk also acknowledged that long kill times for end bosses in the old days were often due to bugs. "Yogg-0 is still no easy feat though and that took quite awhile for even the top guilds in the world to pull off," Bornakk said.

So using the original poster's points, Bornakk says we probably won't see a raid like BWL again. What are your thoughts on the subject? Are you happy with how raids have progressed over the years, or do you miss some aspects of the older raids?

Tags: WorldofWarcraft, News

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meh2
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# Sep 20 2009 at 5:51 PM Rating: Default
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i agree, tbc was the best for everyone i think (and there was more balance between classes - i note that issue still has not been addressed in wotlk)

small groups/gulds could do heroics and get badge gear at a casual rate
large groups could do raids and get raid gear
pvp players could join a casual battle ground and get honor gear
arena for teams of people that wanted to pvp

the outcome of that was that everyone could get gear that was suited to their idea of what they wanted out of the game as solo players or as team players,
all of this gear was suitable to quest in the open world and at least try other aspects of the game.

the main problem with wotlk is that it forced people to pve / raid for gear and weapons,
and to make up for that fact they made it easier to get the gear via pve.
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Meh
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# Sep 19 2009 at 10:01 AM Rating: Decent
bodhisattva
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1) I was never a fan of attunement. It limited content, gave new people a hard time when it came to catching up, forced guilds to go back and do stuff if they got new recruits. Karazhan wasn't that bad, but SSC/TK and Hyjal/BT were blah and I didn't ***** when they were removed.

2) The days of CC and trash are gone. After the backlash from Naxxramas trash Blizzard promised us that Ulduar trash would require it, and it did, at least until lower end guilds started wiping on it too much and the minimum level of CC/Co-ordination that your average progression guild takes for granted was just not there. So blizzard removed packs from Vezax, Mimiron, etc and also reduced the abilities of trash that were fairly simply to deal with like Ignis trash, Freya etc. Now we are back to aoeing trash again.

Blizzard at some point might find a way to bring some thought into trash, and with splitting raid ID's for regular and hardmode they have the opportunity to make trash "hard" too, which would be great to see. But the simple design philosophy that easy mode encounters should be accessible by EVERYONE pretty much limits the difficulty and need for co-ordination they can put on trash in regular runs. 25 man regular bosses at times seem easier than saying the finaly 3 pulls to Kael'thas in TK:Eye.

3) Ulduar, hardmodes were a little bit different than what we have seen so far. At times they were artificially made difficult on purpose by Blizzard to hold back progression steamrolls. Such as the buffs to Hodir that made him a mathematical impossibility for 2 weeks after people were steamrolling him for the algalon quest chain. Or the time limit per week put on Algalon.

One problem I have always stated is that guild now get to farm regular to get gear designed for hardmodes. You also get the basics of the fight on 25 man and then can beat the 10 man hardmode to learn the hardmode fight and apply that to 25 man which really really helps ease the learning curve of content as well. Which helps to steamrolling it. If I am pulling Ilvl 245 gear from 25 man ToC, 232 (one step up from Ulduar 25 man) from 10 man reg, and 245 Ilvl from 10 man HM, plus 4+ tier tokens then it stands to reason that my guild is going to be getting more face time with the content as well as farming a snot more gear than was possible in Vanilla or TBC wow.

/shrug
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Attunement
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# Sep 17 2009 at 6:02 PM Rating: Decent
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I thought that dungeon attunement served a valuable function. Blizzard seem to consider getting as many players as possible in to end-game content as a priority. As someone who's a casual raider I think that's great since I'm doing naxx and ulduar while in TBC I never managed to get any further than Kara since my guild is not a raiding guild and getting 10 players together for a raid was as much as we could manage. Now we can take our groups of 10 in to any raid if we're good enough.
I do, however, think that they've gone way too far. If you take Karazhan for instance, I thought that the attunement process was very important. Often you would get players (I was one myself) who would reach level 70 mostly through solo play. When players like that start doing high level instances and heroics they are often unfamiliar with how to work together in a group and play their class properly. The kara attunement requires players to go through several instances which gave them ample opportunity to learn group strategies before going in to a raid. By the time I became attuned for kara I'd learned to play my class better, I'd learned about managing threat etc. When I finished the attunement I felt a great sense of achievement and truly felt I was ready to do it, rather than feeling I was going to be a dead weight dragging down more experienced players.
Now that attunement is gone, it's increasingly common for players who are new entering raids like naxx or even ulduar with almost no experience in playing in a group and often with very little knowledge about playing their class properly. It's not as if you needed to be a hardcore raider to pug the instances required for kara attunement so I don't think the attunement quest lines were excluding casual players from endgame content.
Basically I think that adding heroic and non heroic raids was a great move that makes raiding more accessable for casual players but I think removing attunement is a huge mistake. Every time you go in to a raid now you spend half the time teaching people who really should have learned to play well before getting to that point. I think that diminishes the enjoyment of raids. They are not the place for teaching new players how to play.
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Attunement
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# Sep 18 2009 at 7:14 AM Rating: Good
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Lengthy attunement processes tend to discourage casual players from participating, thus drastically diminishing the number of available raiders that the other measures made more accessible. Those very pugs you mention would have a hard time filling if there was a long attunement involved. Make the attunements fairly quick and easy, and you have the same problem as with no attunement. It's a no-win situation. I believe Blizzard's attitude is that the lack of attunements is the lesser of two evils and makes more players happy than not. As with any company, that's the bottom line; making decisions that will satisfy the majority of their customers.
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Attunement
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# Sep 22 2009 at 5:16 AM Rating: Decent
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As a casual player I honestly found that getting the attunement was a lot easier than actually getting in to the raids once I was attuned. When most of them just involved doing 5 man instances pretty much anyone could pug them and you tended to learn to work in groups in the process. At level 70 noone was going to run you through shadow labrynth or steamvault. You had to hold your own. Getting in to raids once you were attuned was a different matter though. It's one thing to pug 10 people for kara but another entirely to get 25 for ssc or hyjal. That's where I think that having the 10/25 model like they do now is great since the more hardcore players can do the 25 player raids while the more casual ones like me find it much easier to get together 10. Without attunement though, you spend a lot of time teaching and carrying people who really aren't ready for raids since they simply haven't learned to play their class and work effectively in groups.
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meh
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# Sep 17 2009 at 10:11 AM Rating: Decent
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TBC was the height of WoW for me. You had to earn your raid spot. If you didn't show up, you'd likely not get attuned when a dungeon is cleared. Progress was awarded with new content, both on an individual and guild level. If you didn't want to spend the time to get attunements, there were heroic dungeons to run which had their own, lesser rewards.

These days there's less of a line drawn between the hardcore and casual.

Edited, Sep 17th 2009 1:12pm by Sorlac
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