It was a warm day in May when I walked in the doors of the unlabeled entrance to Blizzard HQ, hidden deep in the heart of a school campus. After the usual couple hours of HR paperwork and contract signing, I was brought upstairs to the WoW team floor and deposited in the middle of the hallway/meeting room where the other game designers were sitting.
They were excitedly discussing the plans they had in store for the final boss of Karazhan, a 10-man raid instance – the first of its kind for the team.
Afterwards, I was introduced to the future lead encounter designer, Scott Mercer. Scott had worked on Starcraft as a level designer and was responsible for a ton of the itemization work that had been done in classic WoW. (See Shard of the Flame ala Ragnaros)
Recently replaced as item designer by the notoriously handsome Travis Day, Scott was now responsible for the newly formed encounter design team, which would focus on raid and dungeon bosses, as well as providing support to the quest team for outdoor spawning.
Scott didn’t expect to see me. To be honest, almost no one did – I’d been hired after a long lunch interview with the Gang of Three design leads (Pardo, Chilton and Kaplan) about a week before.
The second day, someone in IT brought up a computer for me from the QA dept and set me up inside a small office next to one of the production QA members, a friendly guy named Stuart Massie, who was responsible for collecting testing requests and writing the patch notes. Stuart helped me setup my machine, taught me how to use the internal wiki tools and introduced me to Alex Tsang who helped me setup WoW Editor.
Then, I was off!
… but what on earth was I supposed to do? I stumbled over this question for a bit when a voice interrupted me.
“Well, hello Mr. Brazie. Let’s get you started.”
I spun around to see Scott wander in. A warm and friendly, if occasionally sardonic, guy, Scott shared my love of the Japanese language and was an expert on all things k-pop.
“So, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really expecting you already, but I’m glad to have the extra manpower. We’ve a got a lot ahead of us.”
Scott sketched a rough layout of Karazhan on the whiteboard behind me. It read as follows:
[Demon Island]
– CUT
[Tower Top]
Demon Boss – Geoff
Nether Wyrm – ??Chess Game – Pat
[Library]
Archmage – ??
Golem – ??
Satyr Summoner – ??
Bone Dragon – ??
[Opera House]
Little Red Riding Hood – ??
Romeo and Juliet – ??
Wizard of Oz – ??
[Entry Hall]
Maiden – Joe
Butler – Joe
Horseman – Scott
Animal Bosses – ??
“We need to get all of these bosses done by the end of summer. The good news is we’ve got plenty of time to pull it off. Since you’re new, I want you to focus on learning the tool. It’s old, its weird and it takes a long time to master. So, I’m giving you a boss I’ve already designed and want you to focus on implementation.”
Me: “So what’s his name?”
Scott: “Attumen the Huntsman”
… and so began my life as a raid boss designer.
The Plan
I grabbed a yellow notepad and jotted down the notes Scott provided as requirements:
- Starts out attacking the horse
- Attumen runs in when his horse is hurt.
- Mounts the horse when either one of them is low.
- Horse should charge other people randomly.
- Attumen is a ghost so he should be hard to hit sometimes.
- Attumen should be faced away from the group, has a shadowy cleave attack.
- Attumen should get pissed off when you disarm him.
Starting Out
Looking back, it’s a great idea to start out by implementing someone else’s idea. It lets you focus on learning the execution, rather than fretting heavily of “what” to do. I gleefully ran around the tool, mostly confused, attempting to copy and paste various pieces of existing monsters to create Attumen.
Version 1:
Midnight was spawned as a static spawn inside of the livery.
Midnight had two abilities – charge and hoof
Hoof – a short stun on the target.
Attumen has three abilities – shadow cleave, enrage and ghost form.
Shadow cleave – 3 target shadow damage chain attack, jumps to 2 nearby targets.
Enrage – when disarmed, Attumen gains bonus attack speed, bonus damage and turns red!
Ghost form – reduces Attumen’s chance to be hit by 50%.
When one reaches 50%, both despawn and a new Attumen + Midnight creature spawns at 100% health.
Analysis:
So what’s the state of this design?
At first glance, this seems to satisfy the requirements of the design. However, it has a number of issues. Which ones can you spot?
Answers:
Midnight’s design doesn’t quite work. Charge rushes to a target, which means you want to pull Midnight off an enemy. However, the primary target stun means it is difficult for the tank to build an hold aggro on the boss.
Attumen’s design is incredibly frustrating. The chain attack means the tank + 2 melee characters will always be hit by the Shadow cleave. This means there’s nothing your melee characters can do to avoid it. When Ghost form is activated, you cannot do anything to stop it. Furthermore, Disarm, which should help the player instead penalizes them. Finally, there’s no reason to attack both Attumen and Midnight. When either one reaches half, a new creature spawns. This means all threat is lost and all damage done is lost.
Iteration
Iteration is the process of improving a design to achieve a goal. In the case of games, the goal is to make the experience more satisfying.
Version 2:
Midnight was spawned as a static spawn inside of the livery.
Midnight has one ability – charge and knockdown
Charge – rushes to one of the three most distant targets and fixates on them for a couple seconds.
Knockdown – knocks down the tank temporarily
Attumen has three abilities – shadow cleave, enrage and ghost form.
Shadow cleave – cone shadow damage attack
Uppercut – when disarmed, Attumen gains begins knocking up the target.
Intangible Presence – curses all nearby enemies, reducing their chance to hit for a few seconds.
When one reaches 50%, the highest health of the two transforms into the fused creature. Preserving damage dealt and gaining the abilities of both.
What changed?
At first glance, these abilities look identical, but each one has changed its mechanics in subtle ways that allow players to iteract with them.
Charge – the choice of only a distant target means you can choose which 3 of your allies will be struck by the attack. Charge – the addition of a fixate guarantees a certain amount of damage is dealt before the horse runs back.
Knockdown – the duration of the knockdown is much shorter than a stun, allowing for a more rapid response.
Shadow Cleave – now a cone attack, melee dps can avoid being hit by standing behind Attumen.
Uppercut – now an appropriate flavor attack, this has no actual bearing on most tanks, but retains the feeling of change when Attumen is disarmed. Intangible Presence – now a curse, it can be removed by Mage or Druid players.
Merge – the fact that it preserves the damage taken from the other incarnation means multi-target DPS’ers such as Warlocks or Rogues now have their bonus damage preserved.
Can we do better?
Yes, yes we can. There’s a lot of issues that remain with this design (which is the one that went live). At the time, I didn’t have a process to use to analyse and detect these issues. However, I really want you, the reader to understand this.
Take my process and apply it to these two mechanics: Charge and Intangible Presence.
Midnight’s Charge:
1. Is this ability clear?
2. Does the player care?
3. Does the player have a response?
4. Is this response satisfying?
5. Does this make sense in this situation and fit the theme?
Attumen’s Intangible Presence:
1. Is this ability clear?
2. Does the player care?
3. Does the player have a response?
4. Is this response satisfying?
5. Does this make sense in this situation and fit the theme?
Copy and paste your answers into the comments and I’ll evaluate them.