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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.”
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.”