World of Warcraft's developers are making some subtle shifts in dungeons and raids to help players with its more-difficult content, in the hopes that a variety of knock-on effects result, including increased participation in the game overall and a better balance of tanks, healers and damage dealers.
In the case of WoW's timed-dungeon Mythic Plus mode, it was a matter of making it just a bit easier to get to the mythic-level rewards of the weekly vault, says Paul Kubit, associate game director in charge of the Midnight expansion. The team tested it out in the first season of Mythic Plus, which just wrapped up.
Reducing Mythic Plus difficulty to entice support players
Players are often less-willing to queue for dungeons as tanks or healers because the level of responsibility is much higher—taking the big hits, keeping the group alive, directing where the party should go—and other players can be swift to judge when things go wrong.
Hopefully the reduced difficulty for the weekly "vault filler" keys, where players are typically looking to complete the minimum level of Mythic Plus dungeons that will get them the maximum level of gear available, helps with those stressors, Kubit says.
"We saw a lot of success in season one making it just a little bit easier for you to get into higher difficulties of Mythic Plus, and get the loot which comes from it," he says. "People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.' Some of the inherent stresses are cut by the approachability of the mode itself."
Giving players easier, and more flexible, Mythic raids
In the case of raiding, Blizzard is giving players another one-boss instance where they can get their feet wet in Mythic difficulty in a variably-sized group that can even be done with strangers. Midnight's first season was the first in a long time to offer not one, but two different one-boss raids that many players successfully did in pick-up groups even on the highest Mythic difficulty. One of them offered variable raid sizes, allowing groups of 15-25 characters to enter the fight.
As part of this month's 12.1 patch, developers introduced a new raid instance type, called a Lair. Lairs take the place of world bosses, which were simple to kill and could absolutely annihilate the frame rate in the zone where they were being fought as full 40-man raids of players jumped randomly from layer to layer depending on where their members were located.
Lairs are in instances, to solve that problem.
"A giant dragon, or bird, or Ettin just wrecking the side of your zone has always been really cool," Kubit says. "But as gameplay has evolved, world bosses haven't as much. World bosses can fight a lot of players, an uncapped number of players in a lot of cases, and that can cause lag."
Lairs may branch into more difficult territory in the future
Lairs are also available on world difficulty—the same difficulty level as world bosses—plus the typical raid Normal, Heroic, and Mythic Difficulties. Like the Sporefall raid in the first Midnight season, this season's Tidebound Grotto Lair offers flexible sizes that make it easier for guilds that can't field a full 20-man Mythic team (or pick-up groups looking to tackle the content).
"You'll often see us, in .7 patches looking at where we have some ideas, but we'd like to get a little more data, test players' appetites before we commit fully," Kubit said. "Sporefall was a great example, where we were able to test flex Mythic and say, 'How is this going to work out?'
"It's been a good response from players. This has allowed more flexibility for folks to be able to get into that Mythic level of difficulty, without that strict restriction. That's something that we're happy to carry forward into Lairs."
The Tidebound Grotto is about as hard as the early bosses in the Venomous Abyss, which is this patch's traditional eight-boss raid, requiring a full group of 20 to tackle on Mythic difficulty. (Normal and Heroic difficulties remain flexible for any group size from 10-30.)
"It's on the more-approachable side. But who knows? If more Lairs show up in the future, we may find the Encounters team wants to explore a bit more, with more difficult Lairs as well," he says. "I'm really curious to see where we go on this journey with players."
