Similarly to previous topics I wanted to take a look at what exactly makes an encounter hard, and I thought I'd start much broader than WoW encounters.
So at it's most basic level the concept of difficulty comes via the choices you make. The ability to make the right or wrong choice is often what defines most games. Look at something like chess or checkers, or even go as an extreme example. There are a finite number of moves to make. These choices make the games complex and difficult, especially if you're playing against other people. Slightly different story playing against a computer but the concept is the same.
To take an extremely simple example to allow us to really consider what I'm talking about I'm going to use Tic-Tac-Toe. If you have examined the game closely you can begin to see that it's impossible to lose if you follow the "right" pattern. Consider all ways the game can play out using the 3 different starting zones. Once the first few moves are placed the rest of the game falls into place. You can pick the corner, the middle, or the edge. Because it's a square and identical in all transformations all games can be considered to have these 3 starting moves. You don't have a lot of choices and the game breaks down pretty quick, and it's easy to see that there are clearly "wrong" moves which will cause you to lose. Connect four is another game that's got a slightly higher complexity level but has the same basic concept, you can make wrong moves that make you lose.
Tetris is another example of moves that make you lose, or at least set you back drastically. A friend of mine once said, regarding a game called "Lumines," 'There are no wrong moves, only series of moves that end in you losing." The simple idea here being that a single move wont be your finishing blow, but any given move can be the descent into one.
A step up is checkers, it's an 8x8 grid with a much larger moveset from which to choose. The game is still relatively simple compared to games like chess, go, or any modern computer games. These get more complicated and the idea isn't always restricted to which moves you can make. In some of the previously mentioned cases, once a move is made everyone locked out of that space, which isn't necessarily true for other games.
Moving on to other games, and sticking to turn based briefly, picking the timing of some moves is also important. Warcraft has good examples in many situations such as interrupts in pvp or major cooldowns of all sorts in pve, and pvp of course. Timing is extremely important and choosing the timing of things is also a choice and adds to complexity. Looking at something like chess, you often have to be careful of when or how fast you set something up to avoid being either countered or caught in a bad position.
With warcraft we have an extremely large skillset for each and every player, in addition to a fair amount of RNG that must be dealt with on the fly. So while no single action will really be considered "right" or "wrong" you will still find "better" choices that allow you to more comfortably handle other aspects of the fight. In some, many even, cases this is a right or wrong choice. Many DPS rotations will tell you what is right or wrong in terms of maximizing your numbers, however often things will crop up that cause you to alter what's going on.
So what do we have so far in terms of things that create difficulty:
1) Choices - Right/Wrong choice and the number of them
2) Reaction - Not knowing exactly when something happens and reacting to it ties back into choice but is sufficiently distinct
3) RNG - Things you can't necessarily prepare for but can minimize and deal with.
4) Timing - Again related to choice you have to pick your timing to really shine.
The next step is to ask how this relates to warcraft and encounter design. Because you've already constructed a ruleset for the game, which is essentially the game client and functional parameters of the game, you can refine this list to add/remove some of the less relevant options.
Revised set:
1) Placement - Warcraft is a graphical game where your position is important, don't stand in the fire.
2) Reaction - Many abilities can require you to react to anything that may happen in the game, e.g. interrupts.
3) RNG - You can't always control where the deckfire spawns but you can deal with it afterwards.
4) Choice - Mostly in your ability usage but this also includes things like which direction you choose to run when you get tethered to people etc. Also margin for error is related to choice.
5) Numbers - Technically out of the power for the player to deal with but is an avenue for difficulty scaling.
6) Time Limits - Enrage timers, burst dps sections (see tendons), running between places often must be quick as well.
There's probably more but that is a fairly good list for the purposes of this discussion. When designing an encounter there are these and many more things to take into account to create a sense of how difficult the encounter is, here are some examples, many of which will include spine of deathwing and the lich king.
Defile took up a pretty large part of the not-so-large platform by the frozen throne, each person in the raid also had to be ready to react to it being case especially since it didn't always follow the same pattern with respect to the valkyrs, there was a lot of healing to be thrown around in addition to the boss having relatively tight timers especially when you consider healer mana as a sort of enrage timer. Deathwing's spine is pretty narrow, and if everyone ends up on the same time he scares the crap out of people by telling them he's about to roll, jumping on the tendon asap is extremely important. Getting the numbers out for spine are incredibly important, which lead to some class stacking for the world firsts.
Those are often considered some of the hardest encounters in the game, spine being the hardest I've had the fortune to have access to and complete while it was considered "current," heroic ragnaros is one I reached but didn't beat that fits the bill pretty nicely. However the question here is how can we bring this into being related to the topics discussed in previous weeks. How do we look at encounter design and try to find a solution to the normal vs heroic problem. Let's ignore the Dev time consideration for this simply because I'm not really familiar with how much dev time goes into these sorts of things and how much additional time would need to be considered.
Usually it's adding onto the encounter that really makes the difference between heroic and normal, but it's also often a modification of normal mode mechanics to varying degrees. So lets look at taking a sample normal mode from before the days of heroic modes and imagine the sorts of things that we can do to increase difficulty without the addition of mechanics.
1) Increase spread range of splashing attacks. It makes your placement extremely important. I'm including things like frost tombs picking 6 instead of 5 like hagara.
2) Jack up all the numbers. Make the core parts of the game (dealing damage and healing specifically) more difficult strictly with numbers. Tanks get the same numbers thing but in an entirely different manner. I'm including enrage timers here.
3) More frequent use of abilities. Imagine if Nef used crackle every 5% instead of every 10% not technically a new mechanic but it would ramp up the difficulty even if the numbers were tuned right. Also consider timing of abilities. Modifying when bosses throw out certain spells could really rough up a raid. Imagine a dragon boss breath attack followed closely by a cleave followed closely by a tank related special abilitiy. Far more dangerous that the cooldown mashing behaviour most bosses seem to have these days.
Most of these types of changes are really uninteresting and should really be applied as necessary to specific fights to make them feel right. After that though you really need to mess with mechanics, for a variety of reasons the foremost of which is really give players a new encounter instead of a ramped up normal mode (sidenote: if blizz or anyone else reads this doing the exact same fight on normal and heroic with just different numbers is *not* very fun).
So lets look at mechanic changes. You can add, modify or subtract mechanics from bosses to change them. Many abilities you should just let stand as they are and tweak some of the previously mentioned metrics. It also feels really strange to remove a mechanic from the heroic mode without a really good reason for doing so (such as redesigning the fight in it's entirety). Which leaves the majority of hard mode fights being rehashes of normal modes or normal modes that got new mechanics that drastically changes the fight.
I'll likely continue this later in the week instead of waiting until next weekend since I am technically late this week, though I'm going to claim asylum under Canada day holiday. It's a complicated topic and am always excited to hear feedback.
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