World of Warcraft raids are meant to be tough, but recent growing sentiment among the playerbase has expressed that the MMORPG has become too harsh on individual mistakes leading to full-party wipes. Blizzard agrees. Following recent balance changes to The Venomous Abyss, introduced in August with World of Warcraft Midnight patch 12.1, the developer explains its intent to rethink raid encounter design. In particular, it admits that the team’s approach “has shifted over time at the expense of the average Mythic player’s experience,” so it’s taking steps to pull back.
World of Warcraft developer ‘Limestone’ shares the studio’s plan via the Blizzard forums. It notes that the latest round of changes to The Venomous Abyss were designed to “reduce the number of damage events that could kill you or your entire raid with a single individual mistake.” Among these were a hefty reduction to Malice damage (45% on Mythic and 63% on Normal and Heroic), and similar changes for Noxious Splash (33% less on the initial hit and 84% less damage over time), but those are just a couple of examples.
“We believe this type of severe mechanical penalty was used too often in The Venomous Abyss, causing the associated mechanics to become frustrating as the season wore on,” Limestone writes. “Going forward into Season 3, we’d like to intentionally pull back on some of these severe mechanical penalties, even at the start of the season.” You’ll be able to test out how this feels in the Season 3 PTR when it launches, if you’re eager, and Blizzard is keen to hear what you think of the new balance strategy.
Limestone says the team has “heard a lot of player feedback about this element of raid difficulty,” and adds, “Going forward, we want to be more lenient in places where we’ve previously killed players in a single damage event, or quickly wiped the raid as a result of a single point of failure.” They acknowledge that a gap between the proportion of a mechanic and the penalty for failure can quickly lead to frustration, and that “what feels ‘unfair’ can be very different from player to player.”
As an example, Limestone suggests, “A small missile landing on a character should generally not kill an appropriately geared character from 100% HP. However, if every player in the raid collectively ignores Malacrass’s cast of Eternal Nightfall, he will eventually complete his cast and destroy the raid.” That’s all relatively self-explanatory, although there’s a wide range of potential mechanics (and corresponding penalties) between those two situations.
While this discussion is retail-focused, any considerations within the WoW team could have knock-on effects, so I’ll be interested to watch how World of Warcraft Forever’s encounter design looks moving forward. Such changes should theoretically make raids easier in general, but Limestone caveats that Blizzard wants “to retain the challenge and sense of achievement you feel from completing encounters.” The primary goal is to have “fewer wipes that feel like ‘instant death,’ and more wipes that feel like a slow unraveling as the group makes mistakes and productively learns from them.”