With the launch of WoW Forever underway, Blizzard developers have been hard at work maintaining server stability, deploying Hotfixes, and solving travel issues. After a (mostly) smooth launch, developers Kris Zierhut & Josh Greenfield sat down with content creator MrGM to discuss WoW Forever and what players can expect from the upcoming raids.
Raid Addon Philosophy
During their conversation, MrGM brought up the recent addon restrictions that were introduced during the Midnight expansion. The devs confirmed that WoW Forever will have similar restrictions. However, the overall philosophy of raid encounters in WoW Forever suggests that players should be able to complete the content without the use of addons.
Previously, players commonly used addons to solve certain boss encounters. This led to Blizzard creating more difficult mechanics to counter the use of addons. This cycle continued to the point where encounters became nearly impossible to complete without the use of addons. In WoW Forever, Blizzard is looking to reverse this arms race and create boss encounters that are not too complicated, allowing players to complete them without requiring addons.
Raid Difficulty in WoW Forever
Continuing the conversation on raiding in WoW Forever, the team suggests that raid encounter length will fall somewhere between Classic raids and Mythic raiding from Retail. While some boss encounters in Classic 2019 only lasted around 45 seconds, the developers intend for players to be able to use their 2-minute Racial Cooldowns more than once per boss encounter in WoW Forever.
The developers expect the new Barrow Deeps raid to be completable by pick-up groups a few weeks after launch. Kris Zierhut states that this first 10-player raid will be comparable to Karazhan from The Burning Crusade.
The Future of Raiding in WoW Forever
The team will continue to encrypt items and boss spells with each future content release. Additionally, Josh Greenfield states that while there may be future PTRs to test stability, the team is not planning on allowing raids to be testable.
Finally, a question that is often discussed by the WoW Forever community: what will gear progression look like? While there will be Vertical gear progression throughout the game, the item level between Tiers will not be nearly as steep as in previous iterations of WoW. Instead, the goal is to allow players to earn best-in-slot items from any raid Tier. Zierhut also hints that there will be low-drop-chance “chase” items that will be available from previous Tier raids. These low-chance, but high-value rewards will give players a reason to revisit older raid content.