Blizzard says World of Warcraft’s raids have been killing players too harshly for small mistakes, and Season 3 will ease off. In a developer post on the official forums today, the raid team said it has “heard a lot of player feedback” about one-mistake wipes and wants to be “more lenient” from here on.
Watch the short YouTubeThe post is unusually direct about where things went wrong. “We feel that our design has shifted over time at the expense of the average Mythic player’s experience,” the developer known as Limestone wrote. “Going forward into Season 3, we’d like to intentionally pull back on some of these severe mechanical penalties, even at the start of the season.”
Blizzard says The Venomous Abyss used one-mistake wipes “too often”
The Venomous Abyss is the current Season 2 raid, and it is the example Blizzard holds up. The team said damage events that could kill you or your whole raid after a single player’s error were “used too often” there, which made those mechanics “frustrating as the season wore on.”
Last week’s tuning pass was the first response. Blizzard listed two of the changes as examples:
- Malice damage was reduced by 45% on Mythic and 63% on Normal and Heroic, so a failed interrupt is “a punishing but recoverable group mistake.”
- Noxious Splash had its initial damage cut by 33% and its damage over time cut by 84%, so one player’s mistake “no longer feels like a death sentence.”
“The punishment must fit the crime” is the rule for Season 3
The post spends most of its length on what Blizzard calls a mechanical penalty: the consequence a designer attaches to a mechanic to make players do it properly. A tank who is slow to pick up an add gets teammates hit. That one is simple. Heroic Ula’tek is the complicated kind, where not enough players soaking Stone Venom leaves someone with Calcified Corpse and “very likely” wipes the raid.
Blizzard’s position is that the penalty has to be in proportion. “A small missile landing on a character should generally not kill an appropriately geared character from 100% HP,” the post says. A whole raid ignoring Malacrass while he casts Eternal Nightfall is a different matter, and that one should still end the pull.
The stated goal is to keep the challenge and change how failure feels:
Fewer wipes that feel like “instant death” and more wipes that feel like a slow unraveling as the group makes mistakes and productively learns from them.
Blizzard also says the line for what feels unfair differs from player to player, and that the team discusses it separately for each raid difficulty.
Players can test every difficulty of the new raid on the Season 3 PTR
Blizzard twice invites players to judge the change for themselves once Season 3 reaches the Public Test Realm, on each difficulty of the new raid. It did not give a PTR date.
Season 3 arrives with Eclipse, the 12.2 update that sits in winter on Midnight’s roadmap. Its raid is the Worldcore, an eight-boss raid that ends with Xal’atath.
Raiders on Reddit say they have heard this promise before
The first reaction from players is cautious. The top replies in the r/wow thread about the post say Blizzard has talked about cutting back on mechanics where one player wipes the raid in earlier expansions, and that such mechanics returned anyway. Some single out “seed” mechanics as the thing they most want gone from the next raid.
The PTR will settle it. Blizzard has put its reasoning in writing before a single Worldcore boss is testable, and raiders now have a standard to hold the new raid to.
