Raids in World of Warcraft

aids have been a staple of high-end gameplay in massively multiplayer online RPGs for years. It will be no different for World of Warcraft, where the designers have plans for some incredibly challenging and rewarding raid content for players that approach or hit the maximum level cap of 60. Designer Jeffrey Kaplan, who designed hundreds of quests and is now heading up the world and raid design, shared his thoughts on designing and implementing raids, how non-instanced raids will benefit the entire Realm, and how raid looting will differ from normal looting.

The Seeds of Raid Content

e knew from the beginning that players had an expectation going into World of Warcraft for a good raid game. Early on in development, we planned out everything that we felt would make for good raid content. We really tried to go top-heavy with it, to make these raid encounters truly spectacular, because we knew we weren't going to put in a steep leveling curve. We aren't going to bog people down in the normal leveling process, so we expect that there will be a lot of people at maximum level and they'll be anticipating some truly epic challenges. So we did an inventory of the world and lore for potential raid encounters. For any designer at Blizzard, the greatest resource in that regard is Chris Metzen, who is our vice president of creative development. Chris is the keeper of Warcraft lore, and the guy who designed the world. My job as the world designer was to take Chris' world, sift through the lore, and identify as many creatures as possible that I felt were epic enough to be raid creatures within Chris' story line. And then I sat down with Chris, lead designer Rob Pardo, and Allen Adham [co-founder of Blizzard] and we discussed all sorts of things, including who was worthy of becoming a raid encounter, how to rank the various raid bosses, since they obviously shouldn't all be of equal difficulty, and how we would progress players through the raid game.

Determining Raid Progression: Not All Raids Are Created Equal

big task before us was thus determining all the creatures that we wanted to turn into raid bosses, deciding where we were going to place those raid encounters, determining whether those encounters would be instanced or not, and then forming a progression. And then we assembled a raid strike team, to go through our raid progression and rank raid bosses by tiers of difficulty.

We decided early on that for some tiers, we would want you to defeat lower-tiered raids to get to higher-tiers. But we didn't want to force you into a linear progression through the raid game. What I mean by that is that we didn't want to force you to kill raid boss X to get to raid boss Y for every single raid encounter. We wanted some raids to be accessible on the very first day the Realms are up. Two of our early raids will be Onyxia, a full-fledged dragon, and the god of fire Ragnaros. Ragnaros will be a higher-tiered raid boss than Onyxia, but players can access both early on. Ragnaros will just be more difficult to beat.

Of course, for quite a few raids, we did want players to ramp up to more difficult raid bosses, but we wanted to make this progression more natural. In some cases, you might be able to encounter a higher-tiered raid boss, but you couldn't actually defeat it until your AC or resists or basic stats were pumped up by acquiring items from lower-level tiered raid bosses. We would consider that a natural stop gap for raid progression.

In some rare cases, we decided we wanted a hard stop gap where we do directly link two raid bosses. For example, defeating Onyxia will give you an item that will make a previously invincible raid boss beatable. If you want to defeat this raid boss, who is even more difficult than Ragnaros, you will need to kill Onyxia first to claim the item she drops. That is a case where we force the progression.

Raids: A Single Encounter or a Dungeon Crawl

e put a lot of thought into deciding whether a raid would just be one great encounter with a single raid boss or a full dungeon experience. A lot of us on the design team have previous raiding experience. We realized there's not a set formula for a raid. You really have to give high-end and casual guilds a variety of different ways to raid. For a casual guild that wants to experiment with raiding, we wanted some raids that were relatively easy to get to and not too involved. A good example is Onyxia. Onyxia will be accessible to everybody early on, and hers is not a massive raid dungeon. When you go into Onyxia's lair, there are only a few creatures you need to defeat to get to her. So players can go into her instance and can very easily try their hand at beating a dragon. We realize that making Onyxia a short encounter is going to expose a lot of new players to raiding, and it's going to be a lot of fun. At the same time, some of the best raids in other games were massive dungeon crawls that would take an entire night, if not multiple days, to clear. And we plan to have those as well. These will be like raiding dungeon crawls, where you'll hit multiple special raid-strength monsters along the way that will require an entire raid to clear. These raid-strength monsters aren't the actual raid bosses, but are the monsters in the raid encounter. They will probably be flagged as elite monsters, but since they will be in a raid zone, they will be even tougher. These normal raid monsters will be tuned for anywhere from 20 to 40 people to defeat.

Most Raids Will Be In Instances

he raid I've talked about the most, Onyxia, will be in an instance, which is a personalized version of the raid or dungeon that spawns for each raid or group that enters it. In fact, a good majority of our raids will be in instances, which is good for a number of reasons. It means that every guild or raiding group on the Realm will have access to the same creatures. It means you don't have to camp Onyxia and wake up everyone in your guild at two o'clock in the morning when she appears so you can hit her before another group kills her first.

Placing a raid in an instance gives everybody a chance to have a shot at the encounter. The fun of the encounter is going to be defeating the raid encounter. It's not going to be having access to the encounter in the first place. In some other games, the true difficulty in raids ended up being in the right place at the right time. We're aware that when we don't use instancing, very negative player collision could occur.

So once you form a raid and go into a raid instance, it will be the only version of the instance you are going to be able to enter until it resets. Onyxia's lair might be flagged to stay up for five days, for example. The minute you enter and do anything in her lair, such as kill a creature, you will be locked into that version. If you log out and revisit Onyxia's lair within those five days, you'll come back to the same version you played in before.

If you leave and come back though, you won't see the instance empty. We are planning on doing respawns in raid instances. We do that to make the encounter more enjoyable. People might not realize it at the time, but if we never made anything respawn, and you could just chip away at the dungeon or raid, it really wouldn't be the same. It wouldn’t be as exciting without that pressure. There is much more of a game there with respawning.

But with that said, we'll probably have the raid bosses not respawn. In bigger raid instances, we might even have lieutenants that don't respawn. But for Onyxia's lair, she'll probably be the only thing that doesn't respawn for those five days.

Non-Instanced Raiding

owever, all that said, we do have a few raids that take place in the exterior world. These aren't instances, but we tried to design our exterior raids so that there would be some benefit to everybody when the raid boss dies. We will, for example, have a raid boss that guards access to a special area. Once this raid boss dies, not only does the guild that killed it now have access to that special zone, but the whole Realm now can get past the dead guardian and enter there. These new areas would be actual full-sized zones that people won't be able to get into until a powerful raiding party comes and kills the raid boss guarding the entrance. Another exterior raid we have involves fighting multiple raid bosses in a zone-wide battle. When the battle finishes, a new raid zone will open up for the entire Realm. Everybody who is in the zone is going to want to take place in the battle to make the gates open. Even though only one person is going to be able to start the battle and complete the quest, everyone is going to want to help because their help will lead directly to the opening of this new raid zone. Inside, the monsters will be raid-strength, providing raid-scale challenges to groups that enter. So rather than closing content, we are trying to open content with our exterior raids.

Raid Loot

e know that loot will always be the end goal of a raid. For many people, loot is the end goal of the game. There is no denying the loot factor.

Our raid loot will have unique look too. When they see Onyxia loot, they'll know that you killed the dragon. Obviously the loot has to scale with the difficulty of the encounter, so raid bosses that are lower-tiered will still give good loot, but not nearly as good as that from higher-tiered bosses. Despite this, even the lowest-tier raid bosses will give better loot than a typical dungeon boss, even a level 60 one.

Most dungeon bosses drop at the most two items. We haven't nailed down exactly how much loot a raid boss will drop, but we want the loot table to be very deep; not only in the number of items that drop, but also in terms of what those items will be. She is also going to drop loot that is necessary to beat a higher-tiered raid boss, but that loot can also be fashioned into some of the best equipment in the game. So players will have to make a decision: do they want to equip themselves to take down the next raid boss or do they want this really cool item? And because we are instancing her, many raid groups will be able to face this choice, and keep raiding her. In addition to that, we'll put very deep loot tables on the rest of the monsters in her raid instance, as well.

We are actually adding new loot options to the game, and these will be especially useful for raids. You will now be able to set a threshold for loot. Let's say I set it to blue items. Everything else is going to go round robin or free for all like normal, depending on how you have it set. When a blue item appears, everybody gets a roll or pass option. You have to click it right away, and if you roll and win, you get the item. There is also a master looter version, where the raid leader gets to assign blue items or higher. We think most groups will set a threshold of green or blue and use normal loot options for the rest of the loot. We think this will make looting more fair in raids, since the loot there will be so much better.

Having Fun In Raids

am really happy with the way the raid game is progressing. Onyxia is looking incredibly cool. We are iterating on her right now. She is going to have several attacks. She is going to do some things you haven't seen before. And we are working on Ragnaros and others too.

These raid bosses are going to be great. We outdid ourselves in our dungeons with each boss. We had Archaedas bringing 40 stone dwarves to life and calling 2 stone golems in Uldaman. You can't have something cool like that at level 45 and then have Onyxia come up and just beat on you.

We just want players to have a lot of fun with our raids. And we want to have fun too. Sometimes we come up with crazy ideas, but rather than just saying "This is too hard," we say, "How can we make that work?" That's been the goal all along.