Once those bosses are dead — or players skip them — it’s time to head up to the big guns.
“Your goal in the lower city is to make your way to a teleporter that gives you access to the emperor’s citadel at the top of the hill,” Hazzikostas said. Once there, you’ll find:
Above: The Twin Ogron.
The Twin Ogron
The brothers Pol and Phemos are Ogron: half-ogre; half huge, ugly, cyclops-like Gronn. They are “fearsome warriors,” Hazzikostas said. “Their gimmick is that their abilities become more potent the farther apart you keep them.”
But stacking them on top of each other isn’t good for player health either, because some things they do (like dealing damage to multiple players standing close to them) hurt when doubled up. So players will have to drag them apart, then back together, during the fight, he said.
Above: Kor’agh.
Ko’ragh
This powerful ogre has been modified by a mysterious relic to become virtually immune to magic — bad news for the spellcasters in your group. But as players throw magic into his shield, it gradually weakens and breaks.
“One player can [then] step into the beam to become nearly magic immune themselves,” Hazzikostas said. A good thing, because Ko’ragh summons spheres of light that slowly drop from the sky and require that immunity.
If these touch the ground, they explode, hurting the entire raid group of players. If a single player touches them, they take all the damage — a death sentence, unless they have the beam’s power. As the fight goes on, more and more players have the immunity, but more and more spheres are summoned.
Picture them as “giant beach balls,” Hazzikostas said.
Above: Imperator Mar’gok.
Imperator Mar’gok
The final boss of the raid dungeon is Imperator Mar’gok, the sorcerer-king of the ogre empire. This fight is most similar to the Lei Shen encounter in the Throne of Thunder raid dungeon in Mists of Pandaria, Hazzikostas said.
In the beginning, Mar’gok uses basic abilities: spells, a debuff that turns players into a living bomb, additional smaller enemies that he summons, and the like.
But periodically during the fight, Mar’gok pauses for an intermission, using one of three relics that add to his power.
The rune of replication multiplies the things he does, creating new images of himself and duplicating his spells. The rune of fortification adds to the health of the smaller foes he summons, and roots the players who have become the bomb to the ground, forcing the rest of your group to scatter.
The rune of displacement adds elements of movement to the fight, he said. So a player who becomes the bomb is randomly teleported to a different spot in the area, for example.
“Your players are introduced to three to four straightforward abilities they can get their heads around, not 20 things they have to memorize,” Hazzikostas said. Then, Blizzard adds in the variations.
Random raids in Warlords of Draenor
Next week, Highmaul opens to randomly formed groups of players using Warcraft’s Raid Finder tool, also known as “Looking for Raid” or “LFR” by players. It’s designed as the least difficult version of the dungeon, because it throws groups of random players together to figure out how to defeat it. It’s also not opening all at once.
Next week (Dec. 9 in North America), players can fight Kargath, The Butcher, and Brackenspore on LFR difficulty. The week after (Dec. 16), they can battle Tectus, the Twin Ogron, and Ko’ragh. LFR players won’t see Imperator Mar’gok until after the holidays on Jan. 6.
Hazzikostas said Blizzard chose to keep Mar’gok in his own wing after seeing players take on Garrosh Hellscream as the final boss in the Mists of Pandaria expansion.
“Three bosses is a good length for a wing,” he said. “We know our end bosses tend to be more complex, lengthier encounters. Garrosh was kind of rough coming at the end of a full wing. If he were just a standalone boss, it adds to the weight and the importance of that boss, but also makes the encounter more manageable.”
Above: Highmaul features a wide variety of spells, abilities, and landscapes designed to kill players.
Raids that are all about the mechanics
In all but Mythic difficulty, Blizzard worked hard to make bosses challenging but vulnerable, Hazzikostas said.
“It’s one thing if you fail because three people die because they fail to get out of something,” he said. “If the whole raid is alive and you hit the berserk timer and the boss is at 11 percent [health]… Do you just push the buttons harder and hope that it works?
“Now you start to look at the damage meters, and get on the two to three lowest people. That’s not what we want the experience to be about. For normal and heroic difficulty, if you do the mechanics correctly, you’ll win.”
The same thinking goes into how things scale as the dungeon group size increases, he said. In Mists, when Blizzard was first experimenting with flexible group sizes, it added in more traps and additional enemies and other mechanics as the player group grew.
That led to groups tailoring their size to avoid “breakpoints” where one more thing would enter an encounter, he said, which threatened to defeat the whole point of flexible raids.
“It led to people being turned away,” Hazzikostas said. “We’ve really backed off that type of scaling almost entirely. If there’s an ability that makes two people the bomb, it doesn’t matter if you bring 10 extra players, there are still just going to be two.
“You can bring whoever you want to raid. You should always feel like the correct answer is yes, you can come.”
Above: All are welcome in the Highmaul Colliseum. Welcome to DIE, that is. [Cue creepy announcer voice.]
Raids by the numbers
All bosses in Highmaul’s Normal and Heroic difficulties are available today to groups of 10 to 30 players.
Mythic difficulty unlocks next week, and it requires a group of 20. This hardest setting will not require players to complete Heroic difficulty first, Hazzikostas said.
LFR has only three bosses available next week, and it requires that each player must have armor equipped that averages 615 in item level as a measure of power. Raids generally consist of 25 players.
Highmaul drops armor and weapons ranging from item level 640 (on LFR difficulty) to 685 (on Mythic difficulty).
Player vs. player in a new expansion
Player-vs.-player competitors have been waiting anxiously as well: The new rated season begins today.
The Warlords of Draenor expansion dramatically changed some classes, removed and revamped a large number of spells, and tinkered with how things play out in PvP versus PvE content — basically, a nightmare for Blizzard folks tasked with balancing battles.
“Ultimately we’re just excited to see how the new season plays out. We’ve been keeping an eye on gameplay and balance as players make use of our new arena skirmish feature, but everything gets turned up a notch this week with the start of formal rated play,” he said.
Skirmishes, unrated contests between groups of two and three players, actually entered several expansions ago, but Blizzard removed these in the Cataclysm expansion because players weren’t taking advantage of them.
As more players have taken advantage of PvP opportunities, the demand for a lower-stress way to jump in has grown, a Blizzard blog post suggested early this year. So skirmishes are back, with some minor rewards attached.
Blizzard could have launched the new season at the same time as the new Warlords expansion, Hazzikostas said.
“Our logic behind delaying the start of the PvP season mirrors the logic keeping Highmaul closed: It gave everyone a chance to take their time and enjoy leveling and various max-level systems, without feeling like they were falling behind if they weren’t yet ready to jump into competitive play.”