The panel was started by covering what goes into designing dungeons and raids for World of Warcraft. Many factors are part of the development process, and deungeons or raids would be created for various reasons.
- Lore & Storylines: Many dungeons are created for this purpose, such as Deadmines and Karazhan. These are locations that are steeped in rish story and lore from around the warcraft universe.
- Level Progression Gaps: These are locations added to fill gaps in the progression of levels, such as Mauradon or Ragefire Chasm.
- Raid Progression Gaps: These include areas that might be added to fill gaps in the progression from one raid to another. Zul'Aman would be an example of a raid being added to fill the gap from 10 man Karazhan to 25 man Gruuls and beyond.
- Geographical Purposes: These might be areas added to draw attention to locations that would otherwise be devoid of any areas of interest. This allows the developers to get players to visit areas that they might not normally bother visiting. Examples of this might be Zul'Gurub.
When designing raids and dungeons they always plan more than they can build. This is a philosophy they use almost everywhere with the understanding that there will be changes and reductions in what they can put in before the content goes live. It is better to have more planned than what they can actually get into the game, that way they never run out of content to put in a particular location. They also plan dungeons and raids around the idea that it needs to be balanced for both the level of the players going in, the gear that those players would have when going, and the difficulty of the encounters in that location.
At this point the floor was opened up for questions:
- When asked about the current trend in which certain classes are stacked for certain bosses and if there were plans to better balance that, they replied that strategy is always a part of encounters and how they are designed, and whenever possible they try to make sure that the classes that need to be there are the same classes that will benefit from being there. They do try to make encounters doable with most classes but some will always have requirements to be successful or easier.
- When asked if there were any plans to make content more accessible to semi-casual gamers, they replied they have already begun looking at this and trying to fix any issues by removing attunement requirements for many raid areas, adding more 10 man encounters, and making some of the older raid encounters playable again.
- When asked what plans if any will there be for adding more raid instances before the next expansion, they replied that there will be another 25 man added before the expansion but after Black Temple in terms of progression. There will also be Zul'Aman for 10 mans just after Karazhan, and possibly another 5 man.
- When asked if there were plans to add more outdoor raid bosses, they replied saying that there were no current plans to do so, but you may see some with the expansion pack. It is too early to tell at this time.
- When asked about itemizations for dps classes such as dps warriors and ret paladins, they replied that it has been evaluated and we should see new gear being placed on justice badge vendors for those classes. It is hard to add more raid loot for them because any more they add dillutes the drop rates of existing gear.
- When asked if we will see more world based PvP, they replied that the expansion will add the ability to siege and destroy buildings as part of greater world based pvp objectives. We may see this element added as part of PvE as well.
- When asked if older dungeons might be revamped or given heroic version, they replied that there are no definite plans to do so, but we could see a few revamped to scale with the playerbase as we approach level 80 in the expansion.
During the questions they got onto the topic of features that we might see included in the game to help us during raids and dungeons. Some of the things hinted at were itemrack functionality in the default UI, as well as threat meters, cooldown timers across raids, and consolidated bag space. These could be subject to change, but it sounds interesting to say the least.
Link to the YouTube video can be found here.