Plka and Kesslive had the chance to interview Encounter Designer Dylan Barker and Game Designer Noah Smith about Midnight. Specifically, the devs answered questions tied to encounter design and the Prey system.
Interview Highlights
Here are the main highlights of the interview:
Raid Encounter Design
- Top guilds will always optimize their raid comps to the max, no matter what. Blizzard is not deliberately designing the encounters that require specific comps, but some fights will naturally make certain classes shine. They want every raid to have situations like that. After the RWF, it’s reasonable to nerf the fights a bit for other raiders who aren’t at the same level.
- Removing addons such as WeakAuras frees encounter design, allowing them to create mechanics that rely on player awareness. Before, they had to balance boss mechanics around “WeakAura solvers,”, which nullified puzzle-style fights. Now, they can design mechanics that are challenging to solve again, but don’t require fast reaction times.
- Blizzard tests boss fights without addons internally to ensure the fights can be done without them.
- They want to avoid “inhuman precision” mechanics completely in Midnight.
- Blizzard is focusing on increasing the readability of boss mechanics with stronger visual, sound, and color indicators. No more avoid purple swirlies in a purple room filled with purple ads!
- Encounter designers don’t design bosses around specific ranges, but design raids as a slate of bosses that accommodate the various playstyles (melee, mid-range, and ranged).
Dungeon & Mythic+ Design
- The team isn’t happy with how overloaded trash packs in M+ dungeons panned out. They were too dense, too lethal, and visually confusing.
- Midnight dungeons will make threats visually obvious.
- Enemy design should tell you what the mob does. For instance, when you see a dragon, you should expect frontals.
- Mob groups regularly skipped by players are being re-evaluated.
- Blizzard monitors key progression in M+ to ensure multiple viable strategies exist across all levels.
- For early-to-mid keys, diversity is the goal, and no single spec should be mandatory.
- In very high keys, spec and meta comps are naturally expected.
- If an encounter would be impossible without a specific class, that would be a red flag.
- Players love high numbers so damage-boost windows are here to stay in Midnight. To balance them out, they create fights which emphasize burst, others will prioritize sustained damage, or add control.
- Eco-Dome is simple and clean compared to past dungeons. It was a successful test for future design. You’re going to see less “guesswork” in reading fights in Midnight dungeons.
- With the addon nerfs, Blizzard expects team communications to play a more important role.
Prey System
- Ambushes will only happen while you’re in combat.
- The system’s goal is to preserve the feel of the outdoor world.
- War Mode’s not mandatory, but players with War Mode enabled can interact with Prey targets for achievements.
- Prey is infinitely repeatable and optional. Players who don’t like it can simply skip it.
- Prey rewards include cosmetics, achievements, and gear.
- Prey follows the same rules as any outdoor content, meaning you can complete it in a group of 5. There are no plans to impose any group restrictions on the system.
Watch the Full Interview
You can watch the VoD below.
