World of Warcraft: The War Within, the tenth expansion in Blizzard’s long-running MMO, is about to launch its second major patch. Titled Ghosts of K’aresh, patch 11.2 is taking Azeroth’s champions to the destroyed ethereal homeworld of K’aresh.
With the promise of lots of content, major lore reveals, and a final raid boss that’s pitched to be larger than Stormwind City, there’s a lot in store for us players. We got to sit down with Assistant Lead Quest Designer Stephanie Yoon and Senior Game Producer George Velev to talk about all aspects of K’aresh, from raid trash to reward structures.
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Our conversation about Ghosts of K’aresh kicked off with a fun topic: raid trash. For quite some time, the amount of raid trash, or non-boss NPCs, in a raid has gotten overwhelming. Even though they’re easy to kill, the amount has reached levels that feel like time is being ultimately wasted on top of being too much of a cooldown after a thrilling fight. That trend doesn’t seem to be changing with the new raid, Manaforge Omega.
But what is changing is the raid renown track rewards. This raid’s renown will reward you at certain milestones with reduced trash. And to put it bluntly, this change feels like it’s an admission that raid trash may be getting overwhelming if it needs to be made a reward to reduce/weaken the amount of trash in a raid over time.
The War Within’s Manaforge Omega raid renown rewards you with reduced raid trash at certain milestones.
Velev, to address the topic of raid trash, first talked about the philosophy behind it. “We do think a lot about the player experience and how it feels to traverse through the content. But also, it’s a lot about what this is supposed to feel like in the game. If you’re going into someone’s lair for the first time, of course, they’re gonna have a metric ton of bodyguards.”
He continued, “We’re also breaking up the amount of time that you have in between bosses. I’m sure some players might enjoy it, but we want to make sure there’s a bit of a break in between so you can hang out on Discord or talk to your friends instead of just focusing on the boss constantly.”
So what about the change from the raid renown track? Blizzard is not just reducing its length from 20 to 15 ranks, but adding a reward that is explicitly designed to reduce and weaken the amount of trash in a raid. Velev said, “One of the purposes of the renown track is to show mastery of the content and accelerate content from time to time. So when it comes to figuring out ways that we can make someone’s raid night faster, the amount of raid trash certainly feels like something that we can tweak and play with.”
That’s fair. Besides the raid skip, reducing the amount of raid trash in Ghosts of K’aresh is a nice change to make raid clearing more efficient, regardless of difficulty. Speaking of the raid, there has been lots of confusion about one of the new bosses in Manaforge Omega, The Soul Hunters, which has oddly been flagged as optional. For most raids, you need to kill bosses in a particular order to reach the final two to three bosses. The only time raids have had optional fights has been Ulduar, and Heroic/Mythic-only encounters, like Sinestra or Ra-den.
The Soul Hunters bosses will drop shoulder tier tokens in the Manaforge Omega raid.
Velev, in a way, cleared this up. “In my opinion, if it drops loot, it’s definitely required.” This boss does drop shoulder tier tokens, so I’m sure most raids will go after The Soul Hunters to ensure players get their best-in-slot tier piece.
What’s most mysterious about this boss is the use of a third Demon Hunter specialization. Demon Hunter is the only class in WoW that has two specs instead of the usual three (or four in Druid’s case). But in this fight, they have representation of Havoc, Vengeance, and a void-based spec.
Does this mean DHs are next to get a new spec? Not necessarily, according to Velev. “We ended up making some narrative beats in Ghosts of K’aresh around Demon Hunters. So we want to sort of explore that little bit more in the raid.”
Velev continued, “Personally, I always really enjoy raid encounters that are based off of classes or specs. It’s a really good opportunity for encounter designers to flex different muscles. So it’s certainly just a fun exploration on our end to see what’s cool and what’s not. In terms of a new class or spec, we have nothing to announce, but it does sound really cool.”
After our interview, we got the following statement from Velev about the encounter’s ‘optional’ status. “We’ve heard feedback that clarity is needed about the full nature of this demon hunter encounter being optional. To avoid confusion as we inch closer to the season’s start, we’d like to make it clear that while you can bypass this encounter once your raid group decides the rewards from it are not compelling to progress to the end of the raid.”
He continued, “Completion of the encounter will still be required for the purpose of gaining credit toward Hall of Fame status. We appreciate the feedback from players who have jumped onto the PTR and look forward to an exciting start to the season.”
Dimensius may be WoW’s biggest boss to date, but Blizzard assures you won’t need the latest hardware to run it.
Our final raid topic was Manaforge Omega’s last boss, Dimensius. Not much is known about this fight besides what can be inferred from the encounter journal. All we know is this boss is going to be the largest boss we’ve ever fought to date, possibly larger than Stormwind City. My biggest concern is: How will this fight work on non-top-of-the-line PCs?
Velev shared that Blizzard tested lots of computer specs to make sure fights will run well in Ghosts of K’aresh, regardless of hardware. “We have a lot of brilliant and smart engineers on our team. For any single encounter, not just Dimensius, we go through rigorous performance testing to make sure that all PCs of all types can play the encounter.”
Velev continued, giving a little insight into the fight without revealing much. With a fight this massive, we’re not just going to be fighting its void-y whisps or fingernails. “We made sure to listen to the lessons of the past in two major aspects. One was, we’ll be punching a very big thing. The last thing we want to do is have people fighting his toenails for 15 minutes. And we also don’t want it to be a 15-minute fight.”
Ghosts of K’aresh has a new feature designed to help with spell density visualization on-screen.
Velen added that there’s a new feature coming in Ghosts of K’aresh specifically to help with spell density visualization on-screen. This could be a big help with the sheer size of attacks we’ll be dealing with while fighting Dimensius.
According to Velen, “We’re taking a previous option in the graphic option settings that toggled your framerate depending on performance, and we’re adding a new feature on top of that where you can essentially change how many allied player visuals you can see in raid content.”
“So, for example,” he continued, “you could set it to everything, and you could see all of your friends and buddies’ visual effects. There is a ‘reduced’ setting where you see a little bit less, and there’s an ‘essential’ setting where you see only the critical things from other players. It won’t affect things like Dimensius’ visuals. It won’t affect PvP. It also won’t affect your spells.”
Umbra Essentia is intended to be a first step in tackling the racial ability problem in WoW.
Next, we moved on to Mythic+ balancing, specifically regarding the new Umbra Essentia potion, which gives all races the Night Elf racial ability Shadowmeld. For Umbra Essentia, Velev explained that creating it was about giving others more opportunities.
“Over the course of the past couple of seasons, we saw a lot of top-performing groups rely on Shadowmeld for certain strategies. We want to see if we can give others more opportunities to do that same strategy without having to race change and reduce the pressure on group compositions in Night Elves.”
He added that the addition of Umbra Essentia is a first step to tackling the racial ability problem in WoW. “We do want to ultimately do something about this. The last thing we want to do is start updating racials across the board because of just one game mode. Specifically, we’re looking to see if we could take a lighter touch first.”
We then talked about raid buff balancing in Ghosts of K’aresh and how it affects Mythic+. Recently, Monk’s raid buff, Mystic Touch, was increased from 5% to 8% physical damage taken by enemies. It was also quickly reverted because of its effect on Mythic+.
Velev explained why this change happened. “One of the reasons we wanted to actually buff Mystic Touch was in terms of overall performance in raids, not Mythic+. Physical damage versus magic damage wasn’t 50/50. In fact, depending on the environment, it’s usually more like 70/30 for magic to physical. So we wanted to buff Mystic [Touch] more so we could have some parity with Chaos Brand (the Demon Hunter raid buff that increases magic damage taken by enemies).”
He added, “We also wanted to use it to buff and maybe push forward some different metas, this time around, for Mythic+. Maybe something like a physical comp. That being said, we reverted that [change] almost immediately. We want to take different avenues to potentially push up comps like the physical Mythic+ comps, instead of relying on Mystic Touch. So it comes down to a lot of data, a lot of analysis, and players’ feedback to iterate on it.”
The new legendary cloak lets you phase dive into an alternate version of K’aresh.
With Ghosts of K’aresh, the new legendary cloak will also allow us to phase dive into an alternate version of K’aresh. Over time, our cloak will get more powerful, and we will be allowed to do more in phase diving, like mounting up. Is this a case of taking away mechanics we already have to limit us? Or is it a way to reward players over time, giving us more things to do each week?
According to Assistant Lead Quest Designer Stephanie Yoon, it’s the latter. “What is the difference between giving the players what they want to get, but also preserving the experience as we had intended. Like, we are trying to preserve the fantasy of your body turning into an energy form. You’re exploring the world and fighting all these cosmic enemies in this specific way. You’re able to unlock bonuses that change the gameplay week upon week.”
She added that phase diving has evolved greatly since being added to the Public Test Realm. “We started getting in feedback that players felt that phase diving itself didn’t have enough rewarding things for players to explore. And once we heard that, we made a lot of changes. The phase diving feature, when it comes live, is a lot different than what it was when PTR first opened up, and that’s directly due to player feedback.”
Yoon continued by detailing the changes since PTR launch. “We’ve added in a lot of explaining features to encourage players to discover this (phase diving) without having to go to a website to look it up. Another thing we did was we added a whole bunch of achievements that encourage players to explore phase diving, which you can do from week one. So it’s not a time-gated feature.”
Finally, Yoon explained that “There’s what are called phase lost items, phase lost weapons that you’ll be able to discover in phase diving now that allow you to uncover all these transmogs. Once you collect all of them, you get a grand reward. We’ve also shuffled how a lot of those unlocks that you get from the Reshii Wraps make your phase diving experience better. We’ve juiced them up and made them feel impactful every time you earn one.”
The War Within patch 11.2, Ghosts of K’aresh, is poised to be a big one, especially as it closes the first chapter in The Worldsoul Saga. From an exciting new raid to the return of the fan-favorite Ethereals, exploring K’aresh and its impact on us will be exciting. Now, next stop… Midnight!
World of Warcraft: The War Within is available now on PC and Mac. Patch 11.2, Ghosts of K’aresh, is available August 5th.
