The encounter designer of World of Warcraft reveals how to develop new raids and what the developers pay particular attention to.
The streamer Slootbag recently conducted an interview with Morgan Day, a developer from World of Warcraft. Day is the “Lead Encounter Designer” – the main person responsible for the boss fights in dungeons and raids. We have outlined and translated the most exciting points from the interview. If you want to see the full interview, you can watch the Twitch recording here. The interview starts at 1:02:25.
The first raid of an expansion is easy
When designing new raids, there is one exception for each expansion: the first raid is always easier than all the following ones. The reason for this is the high chance that the first raid instance will be the first raid for many players.
Here, newcomers can still have a bit of fun and achieve successes more quickly. In the patches that follow, less consideration is taken, which is why the Trial of Valor, the Night Hold, and the Tomb of Sargeras are each harder than the Emerald Nightmare.
The development of boss fights often takes strange turns. It frequently happens that developers create a fight designed for the “normal” difficulty. During the first testing, they then notice that the fight has so many mechanics that it is actually already a “mythic” encounter. Then, numbers are often adjusted (damage, cooldowns, etc.) and abilities for the easier difficulty levels are removed or otherwise adjusted.
Not every raid needs a mythic bonus phase
With end bosses, there is often a “hidden” boss on mythic or a special phase that only exists in the mythic difficulty. However, contrary to what fans expect, this is not set in stone.
The developers simply look to see if something presents itself – like the additional “The Demon Within” phase in the Gul’dan fight. However, there is no fixed concept that every raid must have an “extra phase” on mythic.
By the way, in the Tomb of Sargeras, we can expect that the environment of a fight will be much more incorporated into the fight. This is likely to include destructible platforms and “Line of Sight” pillars.
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