Your Tier 1 set is spread over all three raids

In a long interview, principal game designer Kris Zierhut and lead Classic designer Tim Jones talked about the raids of World of Warcraft: Forever, attunements and PvP. What they said about Shamans is in our earlier post, the pets in the post about Tuesday’s hotfixes. This is the rest.

Tier 1 over three raids

The Tier 1 set is spread over the three raids of 9 December. To complete it, you have to go to all three. If you only raid with 10, you still get a lot, just not everything. The pieces themselves also need a quest chain.

The item level is the same on every difficulty. Blizzard learned that the size of a raid does not make a fight harder, only the work for organizers and raid leaders. So more or fewer players should not mean better loot.

No class stacking

To make groups of 10 work, Blizzard changed a lot: Shaman totems work for the whole raid, every raid buff lasts an hour, and you need fewer Blessings. You should never have to stack one class. See also our post about party buffs.

How hard the raids are

Season of Discovery went a step too far towards modern boss design. Forever aims for the complexity of Naxxramas in Classic Era or Season of Mastery, with room for class utility such as Mind Control, decursing and Curse of Tongues. A group of friends with pre-BiS gear and a rough idea of the boss should see moderate success without much stress. There will still be secrets, aspirational bosses and legendaries.

After the first boss of the upcoming raid, three paths open. You have to clear all three wings before the last part opens. The Barrow Deeps has three entrances, each leading to a different part of the raid.

Old raids and attunements

Old raids such as Molten Core have their place, but Blizzard wants to bring them back in a way that surprises. Molten Core alone is only elementals and fire, with enemies that resist fire. Plans follow later.

Attunements come back now and then, but not too heavy. Onyxia and Karazhan have good attunement stories. What it took to enter Tempest Keep or Mount Hyjal in The Burning Crusade went too far. Karazhan is about the upper limit.

Two updates, four months apart

The roadmap has two big content updates, about four months apart. Each brings a raid for 10, a raid for 20 and new quests.

PvP

Frost Mages have always been good in PvP. Their 31 point talent gives more Frost damage, but it can be dispelled, so there is a counter. Balance only became really tight once rated arenas arrived. As long as Battlegrounds stay at the center of PvP, classes do not have to become alike.

Honor gear is fairly easy to get. The advantage lies in the seasonal grind for higher rank gear, and you trade in your Honor gear to get it.

Beyond the launch

Zierhut hopes Forever keeps drawing new players, with a steady rhythm of raids and PvP events that does not overwhelm. Jones wants every patch to shake up the meta with new unsolved problems, and to pick up story threads that were never finished. A weather system that affected gameplay was cut before the launch for lack of time, but Blizzard wants to explore it later.