Tettles Interview with Blizzard Encounter Designers - Resilient Keys, Splits and Updating Mythic+ Dungeons

Posted 2 hr 5 min ago by Squishei

full interview on his YouTube channel, and we've summarized some of the largest discussion points below:

Favorite Things They've Made

Andrew's favorite things that he has designed over the years are Mekkatorque and he also enjoyed the Encrypted affix
One of the first things that Taylor made when he joined the team was creatures in Nazjatar, so that has a special place in his heart. Both Taylor and Drew worked on Castle Nathria

Lairs

Tidebound Grotto is a one-boss raid instance.
If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience.
It's also launching with Flex Mythic difficulty and it's going to feel a lot more like Sporefall. One of the things that they've liked about Sporefall is that it can act like a stepping stone.

Flex Mythic

Right now, they don't see Flex Mythic as a replacement for traditional Mythic.
There's still a lot of value in a fixed raid size. They know exactly how much of certain things you have and can design challenges around that.
Flex Mythic has a place, and they're working on figuring out how much is the right balance for it.

12.1.5 Raid

No spoilers, but while the Tidebound Grotto is supposed to be a side raid, the 12.1.5 raid is not that.

Popularity of Season 1 Mythic+

They attribute Accessibility to be the #1 reason for the popularity, but there's also some other things.
Some of the design decisions have also changed, such as how casters work, and the interrupt updates.
They had a solid dungeon pool overall; Pit of Saron was pretty popular.
The class updates were also a good hit this season.

1% Title

The Top 1% rewards is something they've wanted to do for a while.
They're always looking for more ways to add more rewards and milestones into Mythic+.
It felt like the right time to inject these rewards into the system.

Updating Mythic+ Dungeons

The blog post that came after they announced the dungeons was something that Andrew would like to see more of when they announce the dungeons themselves.
This helps show the player base that they're already thinking of these things: the problem points, the themes, the motifs, the damage profiles, etc.
Then once it's adopted by the Mythic+ team, they look at old feedback threads, they're playing it themselves, reviewing every creature.
The new dungeon should still have the theme and soul of the original, but everything is fresh and more modern.
One of the things that has worked really well is batching their testing weeks on PTR
Separating the dungeons into this method really allows them collect feedback easier, allows them to iterate dungeons more, and provide changelogs the way you do now.
It also allows players to digest the changes better.

More Straight Line Routes

There are more straightforward dungeons this time around, but that's just a byproduct of where the patch took them.
There is a non-trivial audience that prefers non-linear dungeons and what they provide.
They are still making changes to non-linear dungeons such as choosing left vs right in Voidscar Arena and what buff you get.
For King's Rest, they added some options for trash routing and similarly for Ruby Life Pools.

Resilient Keystones

They're paying attention to the way Resilient Keys are functioning.
No plans to change anything today, but they're monitoring Resilient Keystones.

Mythic L'ura

Watching Mythic L'ura was a lot of fun for the encounter designers.
Being able to hide the Secret Phase was a not only a cool experience for them, but also having it televised for a lot of people to enjoy.

Raid Metrics

There are some metrics of various player things that they track such as "How many players get AOTC?", how many players are still engaged, or have completed various milestones.
They also track general velocity, if you track the number of guilds that kill a boss every week, you generally want that number of increase every week. That could be general strategies, increased gear, external factors, etc. As long as that is increasing, they don't want to rob players of an opportunity to improve on their own.

Designing Fights

Mythic hides many difficulties inside of it.
They always want the core hook, or the core challenge to remain whether you're Race to World First, or Race to World Last.
They never want to try to remove progress. It's why they very infrequently touch a raid boss' schedule due to muscle memory. It feels very bad to relearn.
They also try to design ahead of themselves. They know they're going to get nerfed after the RWF and after the Hall of Fame, and they don't expect that to change.

Splits

They've always viewed splits as somewhat problematic. That's not really how they want you playing the game.
But they've always been part of the high end community for a while now.
They're keeping an eye on how far that goes down in the competitive player base. The reality is they need to keep track of how much of it is a trickle down psychological effect from the highest teams, and also how many guilds are actually doing splits.
It's been more of a focus due to the split raids from Season 1.

Shaking Up Raids

They're always looking for new ways to engage players in raids.
It's a cool thing to go back to an old encounter and imagine what it would look like in the modern day.
For example, going back to the first encounter of BWL and Socrethar from WoD, they have a similar theme of driving the boss around, but you can see how they're done in different ways.
The narrative team takes them in interesting new directions, they've never made a raid before that's a giant snake infested ancient troll temple.
Listening to players will tell you when it's time to shake things up and playing themselves. Doing the same things over and over again is not what players want.
As players and playstyle changes, it's important they're reacting.

Excitement

Taylor is very excited about the raid reward changes in the Vault.
Drew is excited for people to get into Season 2. If you had a good time in Season 1, players are gonna have a great time in Season 2.

Comment by KodokuTenshi"If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience."

Uhm... says who? It's the best feeling ever if you just care about getting your weekly item. Don't know anyone that is rubbing his hands together and says like oh golly gee let's group and go fight this awesome world boss from 100% down to 0%!Comment by KarthusTeemoTheir anxiety with talking about the problems with Mythic Lura and trying to just dodge it at every turn does not bode well for future design decision in Mythic i fear.Comment by ZerothianNone of this matters when the GCD bug exists and ruins the entire game for people who have it.Comment by RellyneMythic L'ura will always happen if they keep designing the game for the RWF event. That boss was never made with their current game design choices in mind (no combat addons).

There is no problem with Resilient keys, aside from never delivering what was asked originally: to make it so that we would only worry about breaking keys at higher levels and let people have a better time finding groups for the weekly chests (10) and lower without too much gatekeeping/MDI/Meta influence. If you can try again that 10, you'll start giving a chance to "off meta" specs, "lower" IOs, etc.

But somehow, the current resilient key system is bad for (outside) business I guess? So those guys decided to start making "hot takes" about how bad resilient keys are hoping for it to be removed? Yeah... we can't have flex/10 men raiding because of external influence over Blizzard, now we can't have resilient keys either, lol.Comment by ClownWorldmythic lura was a &*!ing horrible boss.

Can't even imagine how bad the unnerfed version must have been to experience.

Also "The class updates were also a good hit this season." really now?

Literally noone likes your pruning and dumbing down of the classes and wants at least a bit of complexity added back(or in the case of vdh losing most of our -already pitiful- defensives)Comment by Pwnstar86“Thats not how they want YOU to play the game”…Comment by Zerothian
But somehow, the current resilient key system is bad for (outside) business I guess? So those guys decided to start making "hot takes" about how bad resilient keys are hoping for it to be removed? Yeah... we can't have flex/10 men raiding because of external influence over Blizzard, now we can't have resilient keys either, lol.Comment by furos72Another pointless job interview.

Like I said, always the same questions, just phrased differently or based on some irrelevant clichés that 90% of people don't care about.

The questions that people are actually interested in are never asked. What idiots! I'd tell them that if I had the chance.

Absolutely useless!Comment by Kerathras“Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience.”

The hell it isn’t, lol. That’s literally the best. These guys really kill me with how the seem to think that the content they put out is god’s gift to humanity and they can’t fathom anyone wouldn’t be thrilled to experience it in exactly the way they intended! I aspire to have that level of self absorbed arrogance. 😂Comment by Esoterick"If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience."

Uhm... says who? It's the best feeling ever if you just care about getting your weekly item. Don't know anyone that is rubbing his hands together and says like oh golly gee let's group and go fight this awesome world boss from 100% down to 0%!Comment by pr0udmooreSo when are you adding affixes back to M+ so we can all actually have fun again?Comment by vyndrian"If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience."

Uhm... says who? It's the best feeling ever if you just care about getting your weekly item. Don't know anyone that is rubbing his hands together and says like oh golly gee let's group and go fight this awesome world boss from 100% down to 0%!Comment by PeacemoonTop 1% of M+ should be for each class/spec rather than of all players. It rewards meta chasers too much and makes reaching it on an off meta spec extremely difficult, even if you’re in the top 50 of your class.Comment by APEIRL''The class updates were also a good hit this season.''

Are we serious? How out of touch are the devs? Hello? No one likes the pruning. It completely !@#ed over so many specs and turned the game into a snoozefest.Comment by ItsJustVegaMythic L'ura was an awful boss. AWFUL. Flex raids really help guilds who struggle to maintain that 20 roster, especially when you stop reclearing and people who are sitting get sick of just watching the rest prog, so please more of this.Comment by VhyeThe fix for resilient keys is easy enough: make them only work when everyone in the group qualifies. Then it’s the key pushing floor tool it’s intended to be.Comment by Wombat62"If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience."

Uhm... says who? It's the best feeling ever if you just care about getting your weekly item. Don't know anyone that is rubbing his hands together and says like oh golly gee let's group and go fight this awesome world boss from 100% down to 0%!Comment by Wombat62''The class updates were also a good hit this season.''

Are we serious? How out of touch are the devs? Hello? No one likes the pruning. It completely !@#ed over so many specs and turned the game into a snoozefest.Comment by Seniaa"If you tackle it on World difficulty, they want it to be a bit more of a higher quality experience than a world boss. Jumping into a group when the boss is at 2% HP isn't a great experience."

Uhm... says who? It's the best feeling ever if you just care about getting your weekly item. Don't know anyone that is rubbing his hands together and says like oh golly gee let's group and go fight this awesome world boss from 100% down to 0%!