Hear about the new patch from Blizzard’s lead encounter designer.
Blizzard released the fourth expansion – Mists of Pandaria – to its major MMO this fall. With the last expansion, Cataclysm, the player base complained that it took far too long for new raid content to be added to the game in patches. Blizzard didn’t want to wait this time around and Patch 5.2 – The Thunder King released today, a mere 6 months after the expansion. The Thunder King focuses on the resurrection of Lei Shin, the first emperor of the stone-like Mogu who subjugated the Pandaren people thousands of years ago. The Zandalari, always trolling the players of WoW with many raids featuring them as adversaries, have resurrected the Thunder King to wreak havoc and retake the isle of Pandaria.
Patch 5.2 is a big one. In addition to the hundreds of class and spell tweaks to help rebalance the game, Blizzard is also adding a new daily quest hub and collectible minipets to its surprisingly addictive battle pet system, among other additions and changes. The major addition which hardcore players will be excited about, however, is the Throne of Thunder raid instance in which 25 elite players can try to defeat the reinvigorated Lei Shin himself. I got a chance to speak to Ion Hazzikostas, the Lead Encounter Designer at Blizzard, and pick his brain on what it takes to design a highly anticipated raid dungeon, keep it challenging for dedicated players without alienating the more casual raiders. Oh, and, Ion also talks a little bit about PVP and how hardcore Arena players really love to collect ’em all.
Raiding the Throne of Thunder
Greg Tito: Patch 5.2 adds a very large raid with twelve bosses, is that correct?
Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Encounter Designer at Blizzard for World of Warcraft: That is correct, twelve bosses plus one additional boss that is only available on heroic or hard mode difficulty.
Greg Tito: Who is the additional boss? Are you going to tell me what it is or is it a secret?
Ion Hazzikostas: Sure, his name is Ra-den. He is a mysterious Titan keeper, evocative of some of the figures that players encountered back in the Ulduar raid in Wrath of the Lich King. He’s been locked away underneath the Thunder King’s palace for a millennium at this point. Players who defeat the Thunder King on Heroic Mode will unseal this mystery that’s lurking beneath the palace.
Greg Tito: Is he working with the Thunder King or is he more of a rogue entity?
Ion Hazzikostas: He’s a prisoner essentially.
Greg Tito: The players will then get to free him and use his power for good and not for evil?
Ion Hazzikostas: Something along those lines. We’ve been keeping the exact workings a little mysterious since this is kind of a special bonus treat for the first players to get there. We didn’t test it on our public testers and there’s very limited information available about the boss so it should be a cool surprise for the first people to get there and see him.
Greg Tito: This is kind of similar to, also in Ulduar, where you had an extra special encounter.
Ion Hazzikostas: Algalon, in Ulduar, is very similar to that in terms of the design and the structure.
Greg Tito: How long have you been working on this specific raid instance?
Ion Hazzikostas: Pretty much since the second that we released Mists of Pandaria. In terms of the first concepts, from early October through now. It’s a very involved and lengthy design pipeline where we had to figure out exactly what the dungeon is going to be, what the raid is going to be, who the bosses are going to be, what the overall flow is then the overall setting. Then it just needs to get made physically by our awesome artists who actually are making the dungeon itself as well as the creatures that are going to inhabit it and then we start putting all the pieces together and implementing the encounters and then of course testing them so from start to finish it’s a number of months but we’re really excited about the final product and looking forward to getting it in players hands
Greg Tito: That’s actually a pretty compact design schedule. I would have thought that you would have actually started, at least in concept for what this raid would look like, while Mists of Pandaria was being built before release.
Ion Hazzikostas: We knew it was going to be the Thunder King and the Isle of Thunder King and his palace but in terms of exactly how many bosses it was going to be, what those bosses were, what the flow was, that didn’t really take shape until the early fall.
Greg Tito: Was there anything that came with the testing or the iteration from the artists that made you change the design as it was going forward?
Ion Hazzikostas: No single big thing that jumps out. I think we constantly … it’s a creative process and everyone has input and we have ideas our artists have awesome ideas of their own and concept sketches and we just kind of bounce around and often they’ll have a suggestion for an interpretation of something that we all just agree is, immediately, that’s way cooler than what we had in mind, let’s go with it. But it’s more just about sort of the look and feel of a boss or of a room. The fundamental design and the actual mechanics that are implemented those are constantly iterated on both through internal testing and public testing we’ll often realize that something isn’t playing out quite the way we intended and maybe it’s too easy, maybe it’s too hard, maybe players are bypassing it entirely and so we just make adjustments and fine tuning to the way encounters work to make sure that they’re fun.
Greg Tito: I saw that this is going to split into four parts for when you’re searching for a pick up group using Blizzard’s Looking For Raid feature.
Ion Hazzikostas: Exactly. There’s four sections with three bosses each. It kind of corresponds to the four separate thematic sections of the zone, the zone was in some regards designed and structured to be broken up that way. The first section are outdoor ruins then at the end of that you plunge into this underground cavern, kind of a forgotten grotto underneath the foundations of the palace that’s where the next three bosses are. Then you come up underneath into sort of experimental, dark sinister wing, sort of the dungeons beneath the palace. Then the final section is the seat of power of the Thunder King himself, much brighter more ornate and that’s the final three bosses.
Just Who Is This Thunder King Anyway?
Greg Tito: The Thunder King is Lei Shen. What can you tell me about him?
Ion Hazzikostas: He was this figure that had completely conquered Pandaria thousands of years ago and subjugated the Pandaran race and really was the Mogu tyrant when the Mogu were the ascendant power in Pandaria.
Greg Tito: Now why didn’t that power expand beyond into Kalilmdor?
Ion Hazzikostas: Because until the Cataclysm and the events following the Cataclysm, the contents of Pandaria was shrouded in impenetrable mists and so there really wasn’t much traveling in or out. The wandering turtle on which new Pandaren players begin as the lone exception to that.
Greg Tito: You’d think that with Lei Shin so hungry for power that he would try and get out of the island, too.
Ion Hazzikostas: I guess he didn’t get around to it. Ultimately he died of old age his first time around but then was resurrected by the Zandalari trolls in their bid for power in the recent events of the 5.0 patch.
Greg Tito: I remember playing through that quest line. Was that intentional to seed the event of this big raid through a memorable quest line that players did as they were leveling through Pandaria?
Ion Hazzikostas: Yes, it’s something we try to do wherever possible, you know when we can plan ahead and know what the next raid zone is going to be or what the next raid boss is going to be. I think it’s always cool to introduce and foreshadow as much as possible so that when players go into a place and they fight an enemy, they kind of know who it is. We’re not completely having to introduce them from scratch and there’s no connection, we try to avoid that.
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Killing World Bosses Softly
Greg Tito: Did you also work on the world bosses that Blizzard is adding for Patch 5.2?
Ion Hazzikostas: Yes. We have Nalak and Oondasta, two outdoor raid bosses that are in the 5.2 patch.
Greg Tito: I saw the big changes that it’s going to be faction tapping, in which everyone who helps to kill a boss from the same faction (Horde or Alliance) will be able to loot from the corpse once it’s killed. How do you think that will change the psychology of how taking down these bosses goes?
Ion Hazzikostas: I think mainly, it’s just going to hopefully remove some of the more obnoxious elements currently where, particularly early on in the patch when they’re very competitive sought after kill targets you have people actively trying really hard to get the tap. I think the idea of tapping is something that makes a lot of sense when you have individual mobs in a quest area and there’s a couple of people trying to kill mobs for their quest, “Oh okay I hit this one first, this is mine. You hit that one first, it’s yours.” That’s how claiming it works. But when you have some of the situations we saw early in Mists of Pandaria this past October where you have sixty players standing on a spot on the ground spamming AOE spells hoping that if the boss bombs they’ll be the one to tap it first. That’s just clunky and cumbersome so we’d like to focus on combat against the boss itself and have it feel more co-operative. On PvP servers certainly you’re not going to be co-operating with the opposite faction. If they have the tap and you wipe out the AllIonce group that has the tap, well now your Horde group has the tap because that’s just how it works. We don’t want you to feel like players of the same faction are your enemies.
Greg Tito: That makes sense. Do you think that that will lead to more calls to arms in the major cities to try and take down a boss once it’s spawned?
Ion Hazzikostas: It’s potentially. Nalak respawns fairly frequently so in that sense I think players who want to fight him and want to defeat him will be able to. I think you’ll just generally see people want to fight him going to the area where he spawns and you won’t necessarily have the case where you have people that aren’t in the group but are kind of begging for an invite because they can’t quite fit into the group, they’ll just join in and participate in the encounter. The other world boss Oondasta is a bit more off the beaten path, he’s on a new island off the North coast of Kun-Lai Summit and he’s much more challenging. His surrounding are actually full of elite mobs in something that’s more of a throwback to some of the vanilla days, like Lord Kazak and green dragons. So we don’t expect quite as much player traffic in those areas. That’s really intended to be more for the organized group, the first guild on the server that notices the boss is up and gets the raid group there and less for casuals.
Greg Tito: How will the cross-server mechanics work with the world bosses?
Ion Hazzikostas: In order to fight Nalak you have to have fully unlocked the outdoor progression on the Isle of Thunder. That’s sort of a server wide progression. You can’t loot Nalak if you’re travelling to a different server. Specifically out of the concern that as soon as one server opens up this boss we don’t want to see players from all the other servers congregating, flocking this one server and overwhelming it just to get the loot from the boss that isn’t accessible on their home server. Once your home server’s unlocked him fight him there, we don’t expect him to be super competed over just because he respawns fairly frequently like Sha of Anger, if you missed him wait fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, it’ll respawn you can fight him again.
Greg Tito: Oondasta is going to be something similar?
Ion Hazzikostas: Potentially, currently there isn’t any cross server restriction there. You can only loot the boss once a week and we don’t necessary foreclose the possibility of, you have a real ID or a Battletag friend on your friend’s list and you’re looking to fill out the last few spots in your raid you invite him in to come help you. That’s good, that’s fun gameplay. If we see it being abused at all in the sense of guilds intentionally going to other servers to snipe their Oondasta kills we may take some action there but hopefully we think that won’t necessarily play out so we’re going to keep an eye on it.
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The Prisoner of Thunder King Trailer
Greg Tito: The trailer Blizzard released for this patch was a little different from your other patch trailers. With the single voice reading a poem over action foreshadowing the showdown against Lei Shin, I got a very Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban feel from it. Was that intentional?
Ion Hazzikostas: I think we’re just really trying to set the mood for what this patch is going to be about. The Isle of Thunder itself is this very, constantly overcast, dark stormy place with lightning strikes hitting the terrain, hitting the spires of the Thunder King’s palace all the time and there’s just a certain vibe about it. That is what I think we were trying to convey and our movie production team and our artists that created all of the assets that you see there just did an amazing job and kind of knocked it out of the park. And obviously we have Jim Cummings the awesome voice actor [reading the lines] and I believe it was Dave Kozak our lead quest designer who actually wrote the stanzas of the poem and it all came together really well. It was very cool.
Greg Tito: Is the poem going to be referenced at all in the raid itself or is that just a stand-alone thing.
Ion Hazzikostas: It’s just a stand-alone thing to just set the stage and the tone for the patch.
Keeping Non-Hardcore Players Interested
Greg Tito: I’m definitely a WoW player but I have to spread my time among so many other things and then as I was doing research for this interview I feel like the game has already passed where I was in my progression already. Do you ever think about those players when you are designing additional content like Patch 5.2?
Ion Hazzikostas: We do, yeah. There’s content for all types of players. There’s a huge amount of outdoor quest content for just any player who wants to go check it out solo on the Isle of Thunder and in general we’re also mindful of providing some mechanisms for people who are not necessarily fully caught up to speed to maybe catch up a little bit faster so we’ve done things in this patch like take the Looking for Raid modes of the existing raids and vastly increase the drop rates from them so that players, either alts or fresh level 90s or people who weren’t quite fully caught up can sort of get there much faster. If you go into Looking for Raid you’ll probably get a lot more gear than you did in 5.0 and 5.1 which will get you ready in turn to experience the new Throne of Thunder raid.
On PvP
Greg Tito: That’s a great concession. PVP is also getting additional content with a new Arena season, and a big change to create a more constant progression for PVP players. Can you talk a little about that?
Ion Hazzikostas: In general with every new raid tier comes a new PvP season, that’s just sort of how the game has been structured for a while and we have these parallel PvE and PvP gear progression and the two kind of keep pace with each other. If we released a new raid zone without a new season then suddenly the raid gear would become the best stuff in the game to take into PvP which isn’t really our intent. The new structure for the conquest gear that you earn from doing arenas and rated battlegrounds I think is designed to create a more long-term and satisfying constant progression throughout the course of the season. I think something that we’ve seen a lot of in the past is that players who are fairly successful will quickly reach a point where they are just done and they’ve gotten everything they want with their conquest points, they have a full set of gear and there really isn’t any place else to go from there. Playing is still fun, many people certainly just hop into an arena just to test their skills and just to have fun competing but I think one of the core parts of MMOs is progression and feeling like you’re getting stronger for your time investment, for your accomplishments. When you beat that particularly difficult team that was slightly higher rated than you that you really care about the points that you earned from doing that and having a more continuous spectrum of gear progression, I think, will help keep that satisfying and help keep people involved and invested in the season from start to finish.
Minipets
Greg Tito: I will switch to my personal favorite feature from Pandaria which was the minipet battles. You guys seem to have released a large update and kind of added a whole bunch of content in the collecting of pets for 5.2. Does that speak to how popular that feature is with players, do you have any metrics on that?
Ion Hazzikostas: It’s definitely been a popular feature, it’s very accessible. I think a lot of people who were initially skeptical and didn’t see themselves getting into it have actually really embraced it. There’s actually a large overlap between some of the most hardcore PvP arena players and people that were also into pet battles, which is kind of funny. It has surprising depth. It’s great for the casual collector who wants to complete their pet journal and fill in all those grayed out slots and also for the person who actually really wants to build a high end competitive team and match it up against other players. It’s a system that we have also enjoyed a lot ourselves and we definitely enjoy updating it and adding a few new pets to get via different means whether it’s going back to some old raid zones that you can now solo or checking out our new quest content.
Greg Tito: I did see that the art for the minipet frogs is being updated. Are there plans to do that for more pets going forward?
Ion Hazzikostas: Certainly where possible you always like to update it. The frog was more something that we were using in other contexts. There are a few frogs that you’ll see in the grotto underneath the Thunder King raid and once you realize “Oh hey we have a really cool, better looking frog, let’s also make sure that our pets are cool and better looking.” It’s just an ongoing process of updating and polishing existing assets to make sure that they stay up to date with where the game is at and what the look of the game is.
Greg Tito: That’s a good way to keep reusing content to make it as seamless as possible. Thanks for talking with me and I’ll see you in Pandaria.
