Approachable, not easy: how Blizzard’s 22 October podcast described Forever’s raid design

On Blizzard’s official End of Beta Special episode of The WoW: Forever Podcast, published on 22 October, a long stretch of the conversation covered how Forever’s raid encounters are designed. These are the design goals described on that date, not measured difficulty.

Friends and preparation

The answer said the aim is for people to feel comfortable bringing their friends along. There might be something to work out, such as which adds to kill first. But a group that has prepared, by running dungeons beforehand and making potions and perhaps a flask or two, should feel it can come in, execute a challenge, succeed and find new epics. That is the goal described, not a promise that every group clears.

The boss’s fantasy comes first

Asked what goes through their mind when designing a new boss, the respondent said the first question is what the boss is and what its fantasy is. Mechanics come after, chosen to evoke that fantasy, so that the boss meets players’ expectations: a fire creature should do fire things. Only then are opportunities for player abilities layered in, such as crowd-controlling a mob during an encounter, to give the class team’s buttons a reason to be pressed.

Another answer stressed that raiding is something you do with others, and that encounters should give each class a moment to feel important and to make a play the group remembers.

Over-preparing as part of the style

The discussion described Classic and Forever as games you can over-prepare for, stacking up far more consumables than modern WoW’s handful, and called that the lane Forever wants to stay in. That is a description of the style, not a rule about what any particular fight requires.

Playtesting and complexity

Asked how encounters stay engaging, the answer described a cycle. The boss is built from its core fantasy, the QA team playtests it, feedback, for example that a mechanic feels boring, is dug into, and the encounter is iterated and tested again. The aim is to avoid going too far toward over-complexity. A boss is judged as a whole experience, so an encounter built on one complicated thing can be fine, depending on what internal feedback says.

One player, or the whole raid

As an illustration from original-era encounters, the discussion described simple mechanics that would kill the player who failed them without wiping the raid; that player was simply the one everyone laughed at for a few minutes. It illustrates a design preference, not a rule for Forever’s launch bosses.

This discussion does not say how many mechanics any boss has, or how hard the launch raids will be.

This account paraphrases the 22 October recording. It is not a transcript, and it does not describe the live game.