Today, millions of World of Warcraft players will start pouring into player-versus-player combat arenas and one gigantic city-dungeon as both the new PvP and raiding seasons begin.
I quizzed lead game designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas on what you’ll find in the new Highmaul large-group raid dungeon — it’s less about gear and more about knowing how to handle tricky boss abilities — and his thoughts on the new PvP season.
Blizzard put raids on hold to give players time to explore
The new dungeon and PvP season are part of the Warlords of Draenor expansion, which launched Nov. 13. The decision to hold up the season openers for this end-of-game content for both PvP and player-versus-environment (PvE) was deliberate, Hazzikostas said, to give players time to quest, explore other content, and raise their characters to the new maximum level of 100.
“It’s an extension of an experiment we tried with [the] Mists of Pandaria [expansion],” he said. “It’s nice to give players a little bit of breathing room, a little time to enjoy the experience. For a lot of people, it can be stressful if you have the social expectation — ‘Our first raid is next Wednesday, you’d better be level 90 or level 100 by then.'”
When Blizzard first started delaying raids in the Pandaria expansion, the company expected criticism from players, he said. But “it was better received than expected. If anything, we felt that we released raids a little too quickly.
“This is about more than just giving players time to level. Many people got to 100 within a week, or a couple of weeks. It lets some of our systems in the game shine and stand on their own for a while.”
The Highmaul dungeon opens today to players in two difficulty settings: Normal and Heroic. The hardest Mythic difficulty, plus the first three bosses in the game’s easiest Raid Finder setting, both become available to players next week.
Blackrock Foundry, the next large raid-group dungeon, will not be available until next year.
Above: The raid dungeon and city of Highmaul.
Players take many routes to gear up for Highmaul
Because raids didn’t start right away, gear from other sources feels more valuable, Hazzikostas said. Players earn armor and weapons from Heroic-difficulty five-man dungeons, crafting, completing super-difficult dungeon challenge modes, and purchasing items from vendors using new currencies.
“Once raiding comes out, it has to offer the best PvE gear in the game,” he said. “It tends to overwhelm those other systems for a good number of players.”
Plus, there was that whole pesky issue of Thanksgiving. Blizzard didn’t want players to feel pressured to get into group dungeons and developers to have to work to fix problems during the U.S. holiday week.
“We’re all very excited and ready to jump into a raid this week,” he said. Here’s his boss-by-boss rundown of Highmaul, the new large-group raid dungeon open now.
Highmaul: It’s big
“Highmaul is a very sizable, pretty epic raid experience,” Hazzikostas said. He compared it to Firelands in the Cataclysm expansion, a zone that took players quite some time to fully conquer. “Highmaul is the capital of the Draenor ogre empire, at the west end of [the] Nagrand [zone].”
Players who have completed the quests in Nagrand will recognize the ogre challenge rings, gladiator-style combat quests that have now — in the storyline of the new raid — given their group the opportunity to compete against the ogre capital’s champions.
Players will rise up into the center of the Highmaul Coliseum arena and defeat the current ogre champion in a pre-boss-fight event, he said. Then the fun starts.
Above: Kargath Bladefist.
Kargath Bladefist
Kargath is actually an orc, not an ogre. He fought as a slave in the gladiators’ arena and is back to teach you a few things.
Players encounter him in the first hour of questing in the new Warlords expansion as he locks you and your party in an arena and challenges you to kill 100 orcs to survive. You only kill 99 before your ally Archmage Khadgar freezes everyone in the ring, allowing you to escape. Kargath isn’t pleased, but Khadgar flippantly tells him that you all will just have to owe him one.
Now it’s time to pay up.
In one part of this tricky fight, Kargath will get rid of the five players standing closest to him.
“You’re flung up into the stands and have to deal with unruly spectators,” Hazzikostas said. “We’re trying to move away from fights where there’s a boss standing in a square on the ground.”
Defeating Kargath gives players access to the nearly wide-open landscape of Highmaul.
“After his defeat — spoilers, you win — [ogre chief] Cho’gall springs his trap, and the whole city is plunged into chaos as his shadowy pale orcs climb over the walls,” he said. “Then the raid opens up into a much less linear structure. You leave the coliseum walls and you enter this sprawling city, with a beach, a dock, a marketplace.”
Cho’gall is a boss that players have tackled before: He was the final non-bonus enemy in the Bastion of Twilight raid dungeon in the Cataclysm expansion. He doesn’t appear as a boss in Highmaul.
Above: The Butcher.
The Butcher
The first of three optional bosses in Highmaul, The Butcher is literally … a butcher. He’s a giant, homicidal, animal-chopping, player-killing butcher in the heart of the city.
“He’s a brutal, in your face, intense fight,” Hazzikostas said. He said players will find him most like the famous Patchwerk fight from The Wrath of the Lich King expansion (and original WoW). The giant abomination was made from parts of other creatures and challenged players in the raid dungeon Naxxramas.
That fight consisted of players throwing everything they had at the monstrosity while he dealt out enormous damage — it’s a speed race to see who died first. Players still use “a Patchwerk-style fight” to refer to battles that are not fancy, have a hard timer after which the boss becomes unkillable (usually by enraging and destroying everyone), and require a particular level of gear and skill to advance
The Butcher is this raid dungeon’s optional gear check, Hazzikostas said.
Above: Tectus.
Tectus
In this second optional encounter, players find a group of pale Orcs summoning a corrupted elemental made of earth.
Tectus shows off a mechanic that’s been in WoW for a decade, as damage causes him to divide into smaller versions of himself that do the same damage and have the same abilities. Players carve him down from one boss, to two, to four… well, Hazzikostas said, perhaps you don’t really want to get to four.
Above: Brackenspore.
Brackenspore
In the final optional fight down on Highmaul’s beach, the Iron Horde Orcs (the bad guys of the Warlords expansion) are leaving, as this whole ogres vs. Cho’gall thing isn’t their fight.
A fungal giant, Brackenspore, rises from the waters and players take him on.
“There is a creeping, spreading fungal growth engulfing the beach,” Hazzikostas said. “Players can pick up flamethrowers to clear areas for the raid to fight.”