Meeting Time

Jeff, Scott and I met up in the common area outside of the offices.

At Blizzard, everyone shared an office with one person, except the design leads, animators and producers who had offices which was shared between four people each.  In the center, a set of blue chairs with folding arms like something out of a college classroom were arranged in a circle. This was where the meetings were held amongst designers.

Scott:  Sure. *he turned to me*  Have you talked these ideas through with anyone else yet?

Me: No, I just scratched this stuff down half an hour ago.

Scott: Alright, well, go talk to Geoff to see if these things are even possible. Maybe check in with Kevin Jordan too – I promised you’d go around and ask people for ideas, so please do.

Me:  Oh, of course.

Scott: Great… and also… how did you think of Mages and not think of Jaina and her Water Elementals?

Me: Hmmm… I dunno, didn’t seem as connected to the player fantasy of being a mage.

Scott: Well, as a Mage main, I assure you, they are.

Me: Okay, I’ll keep it in mind!

Relief and Communication

Relieved that everything had gone OK with my first meeting with the lead designer, I trundled around the office, talking to each designer.

Me: Hey, I am working on a raid boss that’s supposed to be the “Ultimate Mage”. Do you have any ideas you’d like to see?

Joe Shely: I dunno, I think your abilities are pretty good too – but what will you do during the Blizzard phase from keeping everyone from standing in the middle. You should put a counterspell or something to force healers and casters to stand back.

Me:  (same question)

Eric Dodds: Hmm… you know, now that you mention it, I don’t but I bet Kevin Jordan does. If you ever make an engineer though, let me know, cuz I’ve got a ton of ideas I’d love to see there.

Kevin Jordan:  You want old mage spells? We deleted most of them… oh, but I think there’s still the Chains of Ice spell lying around. Maybe you can use that.

Stephen Pierce: It would be pretty rad if he polymorphed people.

Geoff Goodman: It would be even better if he polymorphed everyone and drank, hahahaha. (This was a common mage tactic in classic wow.)

Eric Maloof: What if he summoned a dragon? Then it could breathe on you.

Alex Afrasiabi: It would be awesome if he noticed that you’re carrying around his son’s staff if you picked it up in Naxxramas.

Your coworkers, be they designers, artists, engineers or the secretary at the front desk are an excellent source of raw ideas.

Processing Ideas

Ideas and feedback coming from a lot of places give you the seeds of many ideas. Filtering down those ideas is then your task as a designer. Decide which ones are best, figure out when to use them, why NOT to use them and generally look for the biggest possible moments in the game.

• Fire/Frost/Arcane Supers
• Counterspell
• Chains of Ice
• Polymorph
• Dragon’s Breath
• Water Elementals
• Drinking Water

The First/Frost/Arcane theme was strong… and three of the abilities suggested were CC:

• Chains of Ice
• Dragon’s Breath
• Polymorph

How convenient. So I lined up all of the abilities in a chart:

Arcane:

• DD: Arcane Missiles:
• Super: Explosion
• CC: Polymorph

Fire:

• DD: Fireball
• Super: Flame Wreathe
• CC: Dragon’s Breath

Frost:

• DD: Frost Bolt
• Super: Circular Blizzard
• CC: Chains of Ice

This looked pretty good on paper! Also, the rest of the ideas: water elementals, drinking water… they were fun and amusing to me, but they seemed like overkill.

Or so I thought until playtesting began…

(To be continued….)

There are few fights I am personally prouder of than Shade of Aran.  He was the perfect mix of qualities: Clear, Motivating, Responsive, Satisfying and Cohesive. However, he did not get that way through my ingenuity alone. It was the effort and contribution of many others.

Here is the story of how Shade came to pass.

The Shade of Aran

Scott: Alright, I have two bosses left in the middle section of Karazhan. A mage and a demon. Who wants which.

Moment of silence as Joe and I looked at each other.

Me: I’d actually like to do the mage.

Scott:  Really? I would have expected you to want to do the sacrificial demon boss, Mr. Ebonlocke.

Me: Nah, I need to start with something a bit simpler.

Scott: Alright, well, the tl;dr is that this is the ghost of Medivh’s father. Basically, he’s a super mage, so take a bunch of player abilities and crank them up to 11. It would also be good if you talked with the other designers about your ideas before implementing them.

Me: I think I can handle that.

Pre-Kickoff Meeting

I was sitting in my office, thinking about raid bosses. This was the first one I got to design myself, so I wanted it to be impressive. But I also knew that impressive means different things to different people. For me, impressive meant not graphically amazing, nor intellectually baffling, but instead, something that any player could experience, respond to and enjoy.

This has always been the driving force behind my natural game design philosophy. Make sure the pieces are individually clear, with clear outcomes of success and failure. So I wanted this boss to reflect that! I also believed that so long as it benefitted the player, no amount of pain inflicted upon myself was too great. I would gladly work harder to sheer off the rough edges that would make a fight feel difficult or wrong.

Now, up to this point, all bosses I’d played had been about very strictly defined roles. The tank holds the mob. The healer spams Greater Heal on the tank. The DPS push their rotations. That’s fine. But it’s not a common ground… in fact what on earth did all classes have in common in WoW? The ability to move.

So I based the heart of the fight around just that: Movement.

I then asked myself, which abilities made the player move on a mage? Blizzard? Yes. Arcane explosion? Yes.  Blast nova or Frost nova? No, that took away or diminshed your movement heavily. I could use just those two, but I really wanted a strong ability from each school of magic. I threw up my hands… so far, I couldn’t see a great fire idea.

 Switching to my sketch book, I started off by thinking about the reaction to an Arcane Explosion – easy! Run  away! I could suck the players into the middle of the room, then they run out before the explosion goes off.  Then a Blizzard… normally, you just walk out of a Blizzard, but that’s the exact same response as players would have to Arcane Explosion.  How could I make it better?

Well, the Blizzard could chase you… but how would you know who is being chased? Blizzards don’t exactly have a well-defined outline. That would be unclear, frustrating and annoying. What could I do to reduce that uncertainty? Make it a predictable pattern.  I elected for a circle that moved around the room clockwise.

Finally, Shade needed something else to do.  Super abilities alone weren’t enough – furthermore, they could ALL be avoided, keeping the healers very bored. So I decided he should Blink around the room and shoot volleys of Fire/Frost/Arcane attacks to deal even damage across the group.

I drew a sketch for each attack…. circle growing outward, a pie slice rotating around a clock, cone shots…what was missing.  Then it dawned upon me… if I couldn’t think of another way to make players run away, maybe instead I could encourage them to stand still. AHA!!

Illustrations go far to help organize your own thoughts.

Idea Iteration

My first thought was to put a fire debuff on you that detonated when you moved.  That seemed cool… but how on earth would you know when to stop moving? That didn’t seem like the right kind of warning. Debuffs icons are subtle and noticing a fire state on you is really, really hard to do. I needed something more granular.

The DotA Invoker had an ability that punished you increasing amounts the more you moved. This idea seemed like it had potential… but it was very poorly sold in the game, underminded the experience of moving and generally didn’t seem like the right fit. How to merge the two ideas?

I went rummaging through all of the art in the game. I happened to find an effect called “ZulGurub\LightFire.m2”. When I scaled it up, I realized it was a perfect ring of flame. Snatching the effect, I had my solution! Eureka! Scavenging for the win!

Instead of instantly blowing up when they moved, the target would detonate when they crossed the line of fire, thus giving PLENTY of time for them to realize they needed to stop moving. Knowing that this would mean creating an ability that had never existed in the game before, I figured it would be wise to check-in with someone more mechanically wise than me.

Opened up an email to Rob Pardo. I didn’t have many chances to get in touch with Rob since I’d started on WoW, so I figured this would give a good chance to check in. Writing a tightly bulleted list of points, I scribbled:

Making a new ability. Wanted to run it past you.

• Wraps 3 players in circles of fire.
• Crossing the circle of fire causes them to explode.
• Explosions deal damage to nearby allies.
• To ensure allies know who crossed the line and hurt them, the victim is knocked up into the air.
  • No one else is knocked up

Any concerns?

Nervous, I was relieved a few minutes later when I got a reply:

Seems tight, cohesive and well-sold. Good job on this.

A few minutes later, a nervous Jeff Kaplan walked into my office.

Jeff Kaplan: Hey, so I just heard you’re working on a raid boss already?

It had only been my third day at Blizzard when Scott had asked me to do Attumen the Huntsman. That was over a week ago!

Me: My 2nd actually, I did a horse boss for Scott.
Jeff: But this is the first one you’re planning on your own? Right? *was wringing his hands anxiously*

Me:  Yes.

Jeff: Okay, well, we always do kick off meetings before starting work on a boss. You should hold off on building anything until we’ve had that meeting.

I was panic’d – my ideas were good and I knew it… and now they might just all go away. Oh no. 

Me: Oh, well… I’ve only got a few ideas so far… When can we have this meeting, I would like to get started.

Jeff: Tell you what, let me grab Scott and we’ll talk it out right now.

Jeff walked out and I started to sweat… 

(To be continued…) 

If you’ve followed my previous posts, you’ll note how I spent quite a bit of time getting the basic components of Nightbane’s flight mode to work. Once that was settled, it was time to actually decide what he was doing to do while in the air.

One part was clear – Ranged DPS could have a blast nuking away at him while he was flying around, but Rogues and Warriors don’t care much for doing a /dance while the rest of the raid is having fun. So I added waves of skeletons that ran in from both sides to attack the melee.

… Unfortunately that didn’t quite work.

Geoff (Holy Priest): Augh! What the hell!

Me: What’s wrong?

Geoff: I keep dying to the bloody skeletons.

Me: Can’t the melee pull them off?

Geoff: They get one or two… but then the next wave spawns in and aggros me.

Me: I could make them immune to healing aggro.

Geoff: Nah, that’s not the problem – also its a bad idea to randomly disable core game rules. The problem is you need two tanks – one for each side – AND a tank for Nightbane. That’s just crazy.

Me: Ooops…

Geoff: Well, I guess a shaman or something could tank the dragon while he’s in the air.

Me: Maybe I should just spawn the skeletons in the crowd instead.

Geoff: That’s a good idea if you can sell it right.

Me: What if he hocks up the bone blasts like a cat with a bad hairball?

Geoff: … that’s a really gross image, but yeah, it works.

Me: Sweet!

So I went and did that… but Geoff’s idea about a Shaman tank stuck with me. Wouldn’t it be cool if a Hunter or Shaman was the perfect target for a flying dragon? I remembered doing much of the same thing on High King Maulgar – another raid in development – and thought it was pretty cool.

Nightbane at the time had a giant fireball breath. Plus… well… bones are like stones… right… and stones are physical, right?  So I switched the attack to be of Physical school – expecting that Shaman or Hunters would be the perfect match. Distracting shot, that’s a thing, right?

Next Playtest:

Geoff: You know, it makes more sense now that the skeletons are spawning in the middle of the pack, but its not really clear why they randomly appear.

Me: I could improve things by making all of the skeletons appear at once.

Geoff: They would just turn and gank one person to death if you did that.

Me: Ooh, what if instead of one little bone blast, he did like a channelled c0ne of bone vomit.

Geoff: Remind me to never spend Halloween with you.

Me: The spawning would all happen at once, you’d know who the target was and it would be cool.

And so the next iteration went into work. Now, the bone breath did physical damage, surged out in a burst and dealt AoE damage – this was so that the guy who was the target of the bone breath would want to run away from the pack.

That would be the final version of the ability… except for one issue.

Scott: Hey, I just noticed a couple problems with Nightbane?

Me: Yeah?

Scott: Well, for one thing… Nightbane is tauntable.

Me: Yeah, I want the tank to be easily able to regain aggro when he lands.

Scott: Uhm, yeah, we aren’t allowing that in Karazhan. That kind of mechanic belongs only in dungeons or on adds.

Me:  Are you sure?

Scott: Completely.

Me: Ok.

Scott: I noticed his melee damage multiplier is uh… really high.

Me: Too high?

Scott: Higher than Archimonde.

Me:  … I may have overtuned it.

Scott: Yeah.

Me: I did want him to hit really hard.

Scott: Well, we need 10-man healers to be able to handle him. If you want big numbers, turn down his attack damage multiplier and turn down his attack speed. He’ll attack more slowly, but hit hard when he does.

Me: Sure!

Scott: Oh, and one more thing. Nightbane is a dragon. At the very least, he should fear the enemies.

Me: … okay.

Now I was in a bit of a situation. I had a quest boss that became a raid boss that went from very predictable to very dangerous and chaotic. I wanted target switching to happen while in the air and for the tanks to be able to pull aggro when he landed. I couldn’t rely on taunt and I had to mitigate both high damage numbers and a group-wide fear.

To handle this I made several tweaks:

• Fear
  • I added a 3.0 second cast time to Nightbane’s fear. That ensured the raid had an exact timing for when the fear would go off. It also synchronized nicely with his howl animation.
  • I reduced the duration of the fear from 8 seconds down to 3 seconds.
  • I made fear reset his melee swing timer
  • This should ensure no more than one melee swing got off during the fear.
• Aggro Wipes
  • I made Nightbane reset his threat (target) table every time he lifted off or landed. This way, high dps, high threat targets should pull aggro, making it important that *someone* is damaging him while in the air and keeping aggro off the healers
  • I also removed the standard hate-wipe that was attached to fear abilities, ensuring that if someone with Shadow resistance gear fought him, they wouldn’t pull aggro by not getting hit by fears.
• Dragon-likeness
  • Finally, I added a tail swipe and a melee cleave to complete the “Dragon” package.

Then during testing… several observant QA people noticed that if you never ran onto the balcony, you would be locked into the instance, with the dragon in combat… but never able to kill you.

• Exploit Prevention
  • So to combat this, I added a 30k fireball attack that was only supposed to trigger if someone was in an “unpathable” location.

What actually happened when it went live?

• Air Tanking
  • For a little while, tanky DPS actually tried to hold aggro on Nightbane
  • However, the “RSTS” (Random secondary target system) Fireball attack confused matters. People often couldn’t tell when nightbane was targetting a particular person.
    • Issue: Clarity
    • The idea of a specialized targetting system to prefer mail targets wasn’t noticed.
  • Furthermore, a bug in the Earth Shield code caused all hate to be redirected to the tank, rather than a shaman. This trivialized both the skeletons and the tanking
• Skeleton summoning
  • Because the best option was for the tank to pick up all of the adds while wearing Earth Shield
  • Everyone would just clump in the middle during the breath attack.
  • To avoid clumping, I placed a standard Rain of Fire attack with an alternate “burnt ground” visual into the encounter
  • Players elected to stay swarmed up and move as a group from side to side
• Fear, Aggro and Slow Swings
  • While the slow swings worked, there was a little-known bug where melee attacks would be queued up, rather than delayed, during some spells. As a result, Nightbane would sometimes get an “extra” melee swing in if an attack was parried just before the fear spell.
  • As a result, people put an immense amount of effort into ensuring a Shaman or Fear Ward spells was present while facing Nightbane.
• Anti-exploit fireballs
  • While these fireballs correctly killed players who didn’t zone in, they also nailed the entire raid when someone happened to pull aggro while standing on the roof.
  • This would cause the raid to almost instantly wipe.

Sometimes, everything you try to do to prevent a problem just doesn’t work. When it became clear we couldn’t fix it consistently, we simply reduced the damage Nightbane did via a hotfix and made sure he was an experience players could beat.  The next patch included a blocking wall to keep players from accidentally walking onto the roof.

In the end, you have to make your game the kind of experience players want to play. No amount of clever planning or tricky tactics can overcome a bad impression.