Addons & Encounter Design with PC GamerMidnight Season 1 OverviewMidnight Raids Hub
Addons & the Trickle Down Effect
- World First raid teams would enlist programmers to create WeakAuras to counter or solve certain mechanics. Mechanics would then have to be designed with these programmers in mind leading to an escalating back-and-forth cycle.
- Creates a nightmare scenario for both design and gameplay with the bottom line being: You probably shouldn’t need coders to raid.
- The issue trickles down into slower progressed raid teams and even the faster paced Mythic+ where interrupt tracking and enemy management was key.
Let’s say, in a Mythic+ scenario, what mixes of trash we’re suggesting is reasonable for players to pull … up until the number of creatures we expect makes it unmanageable.
- Midnight Pre-Patch has pared back a lot of addon capabilities by restricting the data required for solving combat encounters.
- To compensate, WoW’s classes were redesigned and simplified since player’s would no longer have addons to deal with complex mechanics. Additionally, Blizzard created alternatives to the most crucial addons.
- Computational addons forced the challenge to rely on dexterity or reflex mechanics since addons could solve strategy but couldn’t pilot your character out of fire.
Opening Up Encounter Design
- Part of the difficulty of a similar MMO, Final Fantasy 14, are mechanics called ‘limit cuts’ that force players to strategize. Addons like WeakAuras often nullified those opportunities in WoW.
- Expect to see more limit cut-style mechanics in WoW with significant complexity; designed for people, not computers and coders.
I think there are a couple of mechanics in the raids for this opening tier that are possible in Midnight that might not have been possible in the recent past, and we’re able to challenge players puzzle and communication and coordination and strategy more.
- Difficulty progression will test your skills beyond just shooting more bullets at the player.
- The addon disarmament offers a lot of opportunities for encounter designers to develop something that hasn’t been possible for years. It’s super exciting to see what the dev team can pull off in this environment.
It’s cool, because the way that gets harder from Normal to Heroic to Mythic is not ‘we shoot more bullets at you’. It is harder on a communication axis, on a coordination axis.
About The Author
