World of Warcraft’s most recent raid has been adjusted over two dozen times. Blizzard just can’t balance? Or is that on purpose?
Raids are still the supreme discipline of content in World of Warcraft. Even across other MMORPGs, the raids in Blizzard’s MMORPG are considered pretty good and are often used as a comparison for really strong group content. But as cool as the raids are, a familiar pattern emerges with every new raid. Developers are forced to nerf a new raid numerous times.
The current raid, Mausoleum of the First, is a particularly impressive example. The developers have announced and implemented nerfs a whopping 25 times.
But why is it like that? Are the players “too bad” for the raids? Isn’t Blizzard able to balance raids right away? We dare a little analysis.
What happened in the latest raid? The current newest raid in World of Warcraft is the “Mausoleum of the First”, which brings the story of Shadowlands to an end. A total of 11 bosses are waiting to be beaten by the players – in difficulty levels from LFR to Mythic, which all place completely different demands on the players.
However, today’s raid is very different than it was at launch. This is mainly due to the fact that Blizzard has very often readjusted and made adjustments. Blizzard announced and then implemented adjustments a whopping 25 times between March 1st and June 17th (via wowhead).
Why does Blizzard nerf a single raid so often?
There are a variety of reasons for this, all of which are interconnected. Probably the most obvious and well-known reason is the “World First” race. Here the best guilds in the world compete against each other in an unofficial competition and try to be the first in the world to defeat the final boss on the highest difficulty (mythic).
Everyone benefits from the fact that this race is exciting. The community can root for their favorite guilds, who also earn advertising revenue through the streams. Blizzard itself benefits from the fact that World of Warcraft is on everyone’s lips again for a few days and generates attention.
But balancing bosses is quite difficult, especially when you have to create them in such a way that the elite players could “barely” defeat them. There’s only a fairly small window where bosses have that perfect difficulty. Even minor deviations could mean that the bosses are simply invincible or are defeated by the professionals after 10 attempts instead of after 100.
However, because a boss once defeated would immediately mean the end of the race and the subsequent strengthening of the bosses would have a negative effect on all other players, Blizzard made them a little too strong at the beginning rather than a little too weak.
Buffing something after the fact is easy – buffing something afterwards, on the other hand, could lead to an outcry. Because “how unfair” would it be if one guild defeated the jailer fairly easily and everyone else had a harder boss fight?
Another reason is Blizzard’s limited ability to pre-test content. The final bosses in the Mausoleum of the First were not even accessible to players on the test realm. After all, they didn’t want to reveal all the secrets in advance.
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This means, however, that Blizzard is dependent on its own internal testers when testing these bosses. And even if they are competent players with a lot of experience – probably they will not play at world level and therefore cannot experience all eventualities exactly as the professional guilds would.
The number of internal testers is also limited. You just get completely different datasets when maybe 20 to 100 internal players try something out than when tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of players stream into the bosses in a live environment.
Last but not least, one must not forget that World of Warcraft is a fairly complex game – at least as far as nested systems are concerned. It’s not just a character’s raw stats that matter, but different systems like legendary items, tier set bonuses, soul ties and their media, covenants, and talent selection are also crucial. There are also different interactions between the player classes. Thus, a demon hunter in the raid increases the magic damage that all other players deal to the enemy by 5%.
Bosses must remain reachable: Blizzard certainly intended that not all players defeat all bosses – otherwise the level of difficulty would not increase significantly in the course of a raid. However, if it turns out that certain bosses, especially in the front part of the raid, are such a big hurdle that many guilds despair, Blizzard is almost forced to act. Because only a fraction of the players really enjoy dying from the same boss for weeks or even months.
A particularly prominent example here is Anduin Wrynn, the 9th boss, which was really difficult even on normal difficulty and caused huge problems for many guilds in the first few weeks. Even players who are usually on the road in heroic raids have bitten their teeth on Anduin Wrynn for quite a while – even though there were still 3 bosses after him. Accordingly, hardly any boss has been adjusted as often as Anduin until he has lost some of his toughness. He’s still one of the more challenging enemies in the mausoleum today, but he’s lost much of his terror.
Critics see “a waste of resources”: While many players are of course happy that raids get easier as time goes on and that groups can defeat bosses who couldn’t do it before, there is also a lot of criticism of this system. Not only do some feel “devalued” in their successes, but a second argument is also repeatedly put forward: it ties up a lot of the developers’ resources.
If bosses are initially developed in such a way that only the best 0.1% of players even have a chance of killing them in the first few weeks, this is an exciting race, but then requires a lot of fine-tuning afterwards. This in turn means that developers still have to deal with the bosses and their balancing long after a patch has been released. So these bosses also eat up development time that could actually flow into new content.
How much time does balancing really take? It will be difficult to determine whether the effort required to subsequently adapt bosses is actually that great. Blizzard isn’t giving out any numbers. If it’s just small adjustments to the numbers, such as an ability now doing less damage, the effort should be in the range of a few minutes. However, if mechanics change or boss ability timeframes shift, this will result in a greater testing effort that ties up more resources.
It is clear that Blizzard can always almost guarantee a relatively exciting “World First” race with this approach, in which they first make bosses almost invincibly difficult and later adapt them to the level of a larger number of players. Whether you view this as “casualization” or a planned process where bosses are intentionally “too hard” to begin with is up to your own interpretation.
What do you think of this kind of balancing? Is it good that so much is adjusted afterwards? Or should Blizzard make bosses a little easier in general, even if the world-first race is less exciting then?