Designing a World of Warcraft raid boss fight sounds tricky enough, but designing one for 40 hardcore players determined to break every mechanic you throw at them? That’s another story.
Thankfully, former Principal Game Designer, Wyatt Cheng, is here to give us a little more insight into that story! Posting to TikTok under the name candlesan, Cheng looked back at one of the encounters he designed 20 years ago: The Prophet Skeram in Ahn’Qiraj.
@candlesan01 The Prophet Skeram is the first raid boss in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, a raid instance in the original vanilla WoW. I focused on Skeram's two signature abilities, Mind Control and the Mirror Image for this video. His Arcane Explosion was intended to be general raid-wide damage that would be overwhelming if he ever split into 5. His Earth Shock was a light nod towards the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj favoring guilds that had Nature Resist, but since this is the first boss of the instance we didn't want to have a hard Nature Resist fight right off the bat. #gamedesign #wow #blizzardstory ♬ original sound – candlesan
Outsmarting Skeram (and Cheng)
Skeram was designed to split into copies at 75%, 50%, and 25% health. Cheng originally wanted players to figure out which Skeram was real by watching their health bars. The copies had half the health, meaning they would lose health faster when attacked.
The idea was that players would spread their damage to figure out which two targets were dropping faster. If they accidentally pushed the real Skeram past another health threshold, more copies would spawn and things would quickly go south.
But of course, as WoW players do, they found a bunch of ways around it.
In Cheng’s first version, the copies literally had “Pet of Skeram” underneath their names, making the mystery not very mysterious. Testing also highlighted that addons could identify the real boss through creature IDs and mismatched localisation strings, giving players more giveaways. Even after these problems were addressed, players still found more ways to identify the real Skeram, including tagging with Hunter pets and using Mana Burn.
Cheng says that while bugs and genuine exploits need fixing, players finding creative ways to outsmart the designer is “just one for the history books.”
You can watch Wyatt Cheng explain the whole story over on TikTok!
