[BLOG]: BlizzCon 2011: Dungeons & Raids Q&A

[Lonesamurai]

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Dungeons & Raids Q&A

You said the challenge mode would scale--does it scale up as well as down?

"A little give and take, they may have monsters scale up."


Can we enter a random queue for Burning Crusade or WotLK raids?

"Currently no--worried about queue sizes, afraid people won't return so the queue will be way too long."


Dungeons used to be visible all over the world, such as Black Temple. So why did Cataclysm have that disappear? What is Pandaria doing?

"We don't always focus on that. The Brewery dungeon will be a quest hub on the inside, where you solo them and talk to them before the dungeon actually happens. It will be a huge scale."


Will we be able to quest in a raid group?

"Yeah, this might be happening."


You try to kick people and it doesn't always work in a 5-man. How does this work?

"Internal algorithm; it tracks how many times you kick people, how many times that person gets kicked, and so on. So that's why some people are unable to remove people for three hours."


Will there be more level 90 normals, or the same heroics you jump to and then run repeatedly (i.e. ZG/ZA)?

"We are not planning to have any level 90 normal mode dungeons, people will just go straight to heroics and challenge modes."


Hardmode toggling: Can we go back to Ulduar model? We liked Freya+3 or Mimiron's hardmode compared to just more health and damage hardmodes.

"It was very difficult to do that for EVERY boss. It worked well for Freya or the Iron Council, but it was harder to come up with modes such as Thorim or Hodir. We want to find consistency, make it more obvious, and no triggered hardmodes. It's much clearer to just submit it to heroic or normal to trigger a difficulty versus wait to a health percentage or another requirement."


Why can't you make a universal legendary chain versus class specific legendaries?

"We like our current system. The questline is all about rogues for this one, it's more fun, and rewarding to the community and players."


Can you join as a group in raid finder? 10 and 25-man sharing a lockout has made many players bored and their alt specs useless.

"You can only get loot once a week, but no lockout from the raid finder. We're trying to make it super fun regardless of the difficulty. 10 and 25 mans are discussed a lot, them sharing a lockout could change--it's not completely out of the picture."


There was no consistency from tier 11 to tier 12. How will you resolve that? (13 bosses vs. 7 bosses.)

"We want to make it less of a jump."


Why did you nerf Firelands? I didn't find Firelands epic, either. It seemed rushed.

"We did the hotfixes ASAP to make more people raid. We overtuned Firelands and that's our bad; it was not about trying to rush into 4.3."


Have you thought about dealing with the 10 and 25-man differences? What about server firsts for 10 and 25-man, they aren't tuned correctly?

We are looking into it, usually one or two end up vastly different, so we agree; it's not fair at the moment.


Challenge modes--will they have unlocks and more modes?

Gold medal might nerf your gear by 5%, then if you beat that, it could be by 10%--then 15%, etc. So that way it's not just Bronze, Silver, and Gold.


Have you considered maybe having a single raid where you progress through two sides that both reach the end boss so it can be split up?

"The way LFR looks you don't choose all 8 bosses, you instead choose 4 and 4. So this is happening with LFR to break up the content into smaller chunks."


What happened to Abyssal Maw?

"It was a raid we wanted to do. It was going to fit into Vash'jir. It ended up that it didn't fit; nothing was wrong, it just ended up not really fitting and getting replaced. All of it is gone--it was just concept art. We will probably not revisit it."


What are you doing about hit/expertise in challenge modes?

"We have top men working on this. We also worry about trinket procs and other scaling. So yeah, don't worry."


Mimiron's Head and Invincible were hardmode mounts; why did you make Firelands' Firehawk able to be on normal mode, rather than rewarding the hardcore players with an exclusive mount?

"You were rewarded more--they dropped 100% time. Anyway, this is why we're making LFR not drop rare mounts and prestige." (Kind of not answering the question here, sadly.)