Some WoW bosses are simply terrifying. Some mechanics even come directly from nightmares, as a developer recently revealed.
The designers of boss encounters in World of Warcraft often have to get really creative and come up with something to challenge players after 15 years. But who would have thought that some mechanics originated from a developer’s nightmare? At least that is what one developer from World of Warcraft reports.
Who is speaking? Candace Thomas. She is a Senior Game Designer at Blizzard and works on World of Warcraft and Diablo IV. She is responsible for combat and thus also some mechanics of the boss fights.
What was said? On Twitter, Candace explained in a tweet that a nightmare was the inspiration for a boss fight:
I created this boss in World of Warcraft that blankets the battlefield with damage from left to right and you had to cleverly evade it.
One night, I had a dream that the fight was broken and the attack was coming from all directions.
The next day, I created the heroic version of the fight and the boss did exactly that.
What was a bug and a failure in her nightmare that would have ruined the mechanic became an actual mechanic of the fight.
Which fight was it about? In further tweets, it became clear that Candace Thomas was talking about Ner’zhul, a boss from the Warlords of Draenor expansion. He was the leader of the Shadowmoon Clan and the final boss in the dungeon “Shadowmoon Burial Grounds”. In his fight, after a while, skeletons appear that carry a deadly area with them. Only when players kill one of the skeletons does a safe spot open up, allowing them to escape.
Whether such nightmare influences will also appear in the new expansion Shadowlands remains to be seen.
A very similar mechanic also occurred in the fight against Sylvanas Windrunner in the dungeon End Time, which was already introduced in Cataclysm – here, Candace found the use of this mechanic even cooler.
Do you also know boss mechanics that you think must have originated from a nightmare?
