With the Opt-In being announced recently for the Wrath of the Lich King beta, many lucky players will soon be checking out Northrend.
Now, as the title says, what would you like to experience in terms of encounter design in WotLK? There have been so many different encounters since World of Warcraft was released years ago, but some are more memorable than others. How about the “dance” during Heigan the Unclean in Naxxramas or Sapphiron where you must move behind the ice blocks or you die? There’s also Onyxia, where you have to move to the sides, depending on her position, or you’ll get deep breathed and most likely wipe.
Furthermore when Blackwing Lair came out, Razorgore was very hard and Blizzard had to change the design to make it possible to overcome by more guilds. Monsters kept spawning over and over in the Razorgore fight and you had to control Razorgore with a mind orb and while having Razorgore in control your mission was to destroy as many eggs as possible while the rest of the guild made sure to control the constant spawning dragonkin and orcs.
Several players enjoy the C’Thun fight in Ahn’Qiraj; it’s quite unique and takes a lot of coordination to overcome. A lot is going on at the same time, which is pretty much comparable to all the end bosses of the raiding instances in World of Warcraft. Ragnaros, Nefarion, Kel’Thuzad, Illidan and Kil’Jaeden. All very challenging and well designed encounters which forced your guild to overcome many challenges.
Thaddius in Naxxramas is another great example of interesting encounter design. You have to move to a different location depending on what debuff you have on you and if you don’t you will hurt the raid over and over and wiping is unavoidable. This requires from everyone to constantly be alert and to pay attention.
Moving on, one of the most well designed and challenging encounters in World of Warcraft so far has to be The Four Horsemen, again in Naxxramas. Taking on four bosses at the same time and balancing their positioning in such a way that the overall debuff in the room won’t stack high enough or it would wipe you out right away. A lot of coordination is required for that fight and it also had a gear check, Warriors needed several pieces of the Naxxramas set Dreadnaught or it was almost impossible to hold agro. What are your thoughts on gear checks like that? Some high-end guilds did cross-server recruiting of Warriors with enough Dreadnaught armor in order to progress faster. This hurt the guilds that lost their Warriors. All is fair in love and (racing) war right?
When reaching Sapphiron there were several challenges to overcome. The most obvious was how to counter the aoe frost aura which kept doing frost damage every tick. By now you’re thinking frost resistance and yet again this is a form of gear check – resistance-wise. In order to get the required frost resistance gear you needed frost runes which could be looted in all the boss rooms of Naxxramas. Yet again the higher-end guilds went out with an announcement, this time they offered to buy frost runes for high amounts of gold, even cross-server paying for the transfers and all. Other fights which require certain resistance gear is Princess Huhuran in Ahn’Qiraj. She’s hurting the tanks with her poison attacks, so you had to farm poison resistance gear for the tanks. Haven’t seen Maraudon for awhile? No problem! You will now.
In The Burning Crusade several fights requires a certain form of resistance, mainly for the tanks though. The exception is Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, pretty much everyone need to have high shadow resistance gear and the best gear for that require certain items which drop in Black Temple. It was pretty harsh to farm those items, but Blizzard increased the drop rate after a few guilds has successfully beaten her.
Looking back at all encounters in World of Warcraft, from Deadmines last boss to Kil’Jaeden, what type of encounter design did you enjoy the most and what encounters would you want to see more of and/or mix? A bit of C’Thun, Ouro and Sapphiron perhaps? That’d be crazy. Nefarion is a great and interesting fight which could be expanded upon further.
Another idea is to really expand on the final fight in Scholomance and turn it into a raid encounter; I like the idea of players being ported into separate rooms where their individual skill plays a large role. I.e. killing the monsters in the room you were teleported to will allow you to return to the fight. There are many ways to make that more interesting adding more challenges then just killing monsters, such as managing to jump over certain things (platform game!) or perhaps solve a riddle.
Platform boss idea
Everyone in the raid have to spread out on different platforms in the air. Each platform can only have a certain amount of players on it and if it exceeds the maximum amount, it will slowly start to break. New platforms will spawn during the course of the fight. Every three or so minute, the boss will destroy a platform, forcing the players on said platform to jump to a new one before they fall down and die. The hard part is to coordinate to have the right amount of players on each platform and to have one group move to a newly spawned platform if another group’s platform is destroyed and have to move to another group’s platform.
Eventually after a certain time has passed, no more new platforms will spawn but the current ones existing will be able to have more players on them. Uh oh.
There’s so many ways to create encounters, question is what you really want to experience and see more of in Wrath of the Lich King? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
