On Game Design, Blizzard and MC

[teddog]

Being the media geek I am, I tend to look at things in an odd way. Yesterday evening, I had the chance to run most of Molten Core on World of Warcraft, to the point that we could run it. This was mostly done as a curiousity - Molten Core was the first attempt at designing a massive raid. It was originally tuned for 40 people. To compare, the new raids coming out soon are going to have two versions, one for 10 players and another for 25 players. The scale is much different.

Plotwise, there's not much of a storyline to discuss. It boils down to "Some dwarfs accidently-on-purpose summoned an elemental and now you get to raid his clubhouse!" The less said about this, the better.

The design is much more interesting to look at.

For one, it's pretty cheap. My first time raiding was in Karazhan, which is a highly detailed tower that you fight your way up, interacting with monsters and NPCs along the way. There's a strong attempt both include new characters and ones from earlier canon. There's even an non-combat event where you can play a game of chess. Dozens of rooms aren't even used for gameplay and you can explore and discover oddities.

Molten Core, on the other hand, is a big hole in the ground. It's a cave system that, while unique in layout, doesn't really offer anything. There's rocks, some more rocks.... a lava pit, but the rocks were kinda red anyway.

Likewise, the monsters are seriously ALL the same models used over and over again. You're either fighting a core hound, a fire elemental, a lava elemental, a giant or a flamewaker. Even the bosses pull from the same models. It's a bit dangerous, because sometimes you'll pull a boss and not realize thats' what it is! We did that with Lucifron and Baron.

The placement of the bosses is dumb too. There's no build up or "rooms". They're tucked away in corners. The only thing that's notable is the names, some of which have obscure references.

With how unbalanced the game is at the moment, the bosses are cake. Their quirks aren't very noticable for the most part.

Lucifron - Lucifron's Curse is annoying, but we pulled him with a pack of core hounds. Even without mana, it wasn't THAT hard.

Magmadar - The fear is annoying, but doesn't do damage. Otherwise, he's now a tank-and-spank.

Gehennas - I don't remember. I think we AoEed (Area of Effect spells) him down.

Garr - The debuffs aren't really an issue. AoEed down.

Baron Geddon - Living Bomb is still a problem. It CAN be healed through - we only lost 5 players and bombs weren't running away.

Shazzrah - Nothing notable. All I remember is "He's a mage!" "He's going down anyway!"

Sulfuron Harbinger - He and the guards can be AoEed easily. Not an issue.

Golemagg - We attempted to kill the core hounds first, but then discovered that they healed themselves. They're not trouble to deal with.

Majordomo Executus and Ragnaros - We didn't have the water, so no-go on them.

Molten Core doesn't hold up well, even in the context of the pre-TBC raids. I haven't seen the Ahn'Qiraj raids (as a friend put it, it's "STARSHIP TROOPERS! WITH SWORDS!"), but Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub and Naxxramas overshadow it. In the context of the TBC raids, Molten Core reminds me too much of Gruul's Lair, which I hated. But, yeah, the "Hallowed Core" is now nothing more than a chance to burn down monsters as fast as possible.

Comments

[spirit-dog.livejournal.com]

When I was first raiding, and this was back in 2005, healers used to have to stand facing a wall to be able to heal at all in MC, and people had to take away noncombat pets and I know of guilds that used deviate fish because having everyone looking the same helped rendering time. Times change, not to mention hardware changed. The reason MC looks like it does is rendering issues, still the first time you faced Ragneros as 40 people (nothing now feels as epic as 40 people did) it was awe-inspiring to see him for the first time to hear that speech with the sound all the way up. By the time AQ40 came out, most of us hated the place but at the same time we still did it once a week for pants and to gear alts. It also required a lot more thought and setup then it does now because when t2 was the top of what you could get the place was a lot rougher and you really did need most of 40 people to do it. Remember, the game has changed *a lot*. Before lucky charms, and back in the day you had to have a set of warlock and tanks take care of all of the Garr adds, and people had to get their own seperate of 8 identical targets without the marks, which came fairly late into wow1.

The first time most people walked into BWL they promply DCed because the entier suppression room is loaded when you first zone in. Vael and Neff used to be on three hours times, as in if you wiped you had to wait three hours to start again. Things hace changed, a lot.

KZ has always felt like a large 5man to me, and probably always will. Then again I can't help but thinking of ZA as ZG2.0.

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I understand the gear difference, but what stood out to me is that fights in BWL, Naxx (before it was pulled) and some in ZG are still so tightly tuned that you can't simply walk in and AoE everything down. Molten Core is very much "Blizz's first raid!" In terms of the complexity of the fights. This might be the passing of time talking, because some new bosses now are upgraded versions of the early raid bosses

Maybe my opinion might change once we get Ragneros up.

I'm so sick of Kara right now that I could puke. I actually prefer ZG to ZA, but I felt that ZA was a slight misstep due to how the difficultly level scales. Same token, I felt that the randomness of Gruul and Prince were the dumbest things ever.

[spirit-dog.livejournal.com]

You couldn't aoe anything in there asside from core hound packs at 60. I mean nothing. You had to carefully plan add tanks, and for Lucifron you had to have 2 tanks per add. The people that first did MC did it in greens. I don't mean t0 blues, it predates Dire Maul. They walked into that place in greens of the monkey and casters in of the owl, and well there was a time before decursive. The game has changed *a lot* since then. Its not about what MC is now compaired to what Naxx is now, its what MC was back compaired to what else was out there back in the day. It used to be that rogues would range a lot of the bosses (more then just the two they typically still do) because the aoe spash dmg was so bad, and good heavens you could forget having hunter pets out (let alone with the rendering issues). Things like having good tranq rotations on Magmadar made the difference between a dead tank and a live one.

If you didn't have proper dispelling and decursing in MC, even in t2+ people *died* to the curses and the debuffs.

Really wait for Majordomo and Rag. Better yet do Majordomo without knowing anything about how the fight works first. :D


It might seem like its easy now, but at first it really was hard. I'll spare the "we spent 12 hours wiping on Lucifron" stories.
To give you some idea I was the *first* BM raiding hunter on my server. One of the big things I do to do was prove that I could keep a pet alive in MC and most of BWL while not loosing dps.

BWL wasn't actually beta tested before it was released and well let's just say that the current version is a massive nerf from the original. Originally Vael and Neff were on 3 hour respawn timers and much much harder, also originally none of the three flappies (Flamegore, Firemaw, Ebonroc) were tauntable, so you had to do tank switching without proper threat meters without taunt. This was okay for alliance, BoP and all, but it kinda sucked for horde. Even up to a few weeks before TBC was released my old raid group had problems with people zoning into BWL and then DCing.

Ragnaros is still pretty tricky at 70 unless you have two well preped tanks and people really know how to spread.

Naxx in its original form was about the most tightly tuned raid instance they made before Sunwell. KZ in its original form was quite difficult too, then again the current heroic 5mans are easier then the original versions at 70.

They used to say that in MC you learned to heal, in BWL you learned to tank, in AQ40 you learned to move and in Naxx you learned to dps.

ZG I like better then ZA, but then again I just find ZA annoying. Or well I find the ZA trash annoying and unnecessarily difficult. The trash gauntlet before the dragon hawk boss really doesn't add anything to the experience.
One of the best things about ZG though to me was always the amount of infernals that some of our locks used to drop.

Onyxia back in the day was more annyingly random the Gruul since a lot of her randomness can't be beaten by tossing dps at things[1].

Some of it I think is point of view. The old raid instances look rather different looking back on them then they did when you first saw them at 60.

[1]My solution to most problems in WoW is to toss more dps at them until they go away.