Blizzard Entertainment has shared a first look at the thinking behind the new raid bosses coming to World of Warcraft: Forever, along with a few early teases of what players will be fighting. The details come from the latest episode of the official WoW: Forever Podcast, an end-of-beta special that the World of Warcraft YouTube channel released today.
Lead Encounter Designer Michael Nuthals joined host Josh Corbett, Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield, Clay Stone, Ana Resendez, and guest Meeix to talk through how the team approaches difficulty, communication, and brand new encounters that nobody has a guide for yet.
Blizzard Teases A Spider Pair And A Possessed Wild God
Blizzard hasn't officially announced the raid bosses for Barrow Deeps or Hyjal Summit, but Nuthals was willing to tease a few of his favorites. The panel even pointed out that some boss names can already be found in the game's legacy system.
In Barrow Deeps, Nuthals highlighted an encounter built around a buff that lets players deal more damage, with a catch. "You have to manage a buff to be able to do more damage, but there's a cost to that," he said. That leaves players weighing a spot at the top of the damage meters against ending up dead and doing zero damage.
He also mentioned "a pair of spiders" in Barrow Deeps that he thinks is super cool. Over in Hyjal Summit, there is an undead creature he described as being like a crocolisk-style wild god. The spirit possessing it pops out during the fight, so players alternate between killing the husk of the creature and attacking the ghost inside it, with the encounter swapping back and forth between those two phases.
Every Boss Starts With Its Fantasy
When Corbett asked what goes through his mind when designing a new boss, Nuthals said the first step is the monster itself. "What is this boss? What is its fantasy?" he said. A boss might live in a deep dark cave full of spiders, and the team asks what would naturally live there.
Player expectations matter a lot. Nuthals joked that a giant fire elemental with a hammer that cast Frost Novas would get people asking what he was doing. Once the fantasy is locked in, the team looks for hooks and loops, like a debuff that has to be juggled around or a switch that turns off a bomb, which he compared to Gnomeregan.
The last layer is giving classes a reason to use their toolkits, whether that is a curse, a crowd control spell, or something else. "That's kind of the role of the encounter designer, is to give all those buttons a reason to be hit," Nuthals said, later adding, "We're storytellers. We just use mechanics. We just tell stories by hitting players in the face."
Beer And Pretzels Raiding
Nuthals also explained a phrase the encounter team uses a lot: beer and pretzels. The idea is that friends should feel comfortable bringing each other along and have a good time, even if there is a kill order or strategy to figure out.
"If we've prepared, we've done our pre-raid dungeon grinding, we've made a bunch of potions, maybe a flask or two, we should feel like we can come in prepared, execute a challenge and have success and find some new epics," he said.
Greenfield tied that into consumables. In WoW Forever, players can stack up a huge number of buffs before a fight. "Do you need them to kill the boss? No. But it's pretty cool to smash it when you do," he said, calling that approach "our lane."
To keep fights from feeling like a loot pinata, Nuthals said the team leans heavily on its QA testers. Bosses get pitched, built, played, and then reworked based on feedback such as a tester saying a mechanic is boring. He noted there is a line to walk, since the team does not want to add too much complexity and lose the "approachable and familiar kind of classic WoW raid boss" experience.
Voice Chat Is Not Required
The panel also tackled whether players will need to be in Discord to clear content. The answer is that communication helps, but WoW Forever brings over the ping system from the modern game so players can call out adds without talking. The team also pointed to text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools as accessibility features for players who cannot or would rather not join voice.
Since every boss in the new raids is brand new, Nuthals expects early clears to be all about discovery. "No one's ever done these raid bosses before," he said, adding that one guild might land on a very different strategy than another.
Smaller Raid Groups Are A Long-Term Promise
One of the bigger commitments from the episode is that Blizzard plans to keep releasing 10-player and 20-player content consistently, patch over patch. "We don't want to shuffle the raid sizes around," Nuthals said, explaining that a 10-person group should be able to count on content for that size and team up with another 10-person group for the 20-player raids. The team also confirmed that the two new raids include more than 20 new bosses between them.
Nuthals ended the segment with a tease for the far-flung future. He mentioned that players may have found "some homes, some manors" out in the world, along with "other instance portals kind of hiding in inconspicuous spots," and said Blizzard will share more when the time is right.
World of Warcraft: Forever launches on November 4th, and its first three raids open up a few weeks later.
Which teased boss are you most excited to see, the Barrow Deeps spider pair or the possessed wild god in Hyjal Summit?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.