Even though it was unfortunately ruined, it seemed your intention was for Ra-den’s limited attempts be a surprise. You mentioned that you’re hoping that cutting-edge players will get to write guides…what reaction were you hoping players would have upon discovering this surprise during progression–think they’d keep their discovery secret?

I suspect some of them might have kept quiet. Guilds tend to be very tight-lipped during progression, especially guides that are racing against each other. Every possible advantage that you can seize is one that you can keep for yourself. Ultimately, it was one of those things that I think wasn’t going able to be datamined or otherwise discoverable, but due to a collision issue, players were able to get down there during one of the PTR tests. It wasn’t a huge deal, but as I mentioned on the forum post on the PTR, I think we use limited attempts quite a lot during Wrath of the Lich King and there were some pitfalls in how we went about that system then. We’re trying to take what we see as the best version of that and try it out one more time.

When I say the best version, that entails things like a reasonable number of attempts, not the 10 total that you had in Icecrown Citadel when it first opened up, or in Trial of the Crusader, where even a single wipe permanently meant you could not get the best rewards ever. This limited-attempts boss is tied to something that’s heroic-only content, as opposed to normal-mode limited attempts in Icecrown Citadel and also tied to content that isn’t accessible unless you have cleared everything on heroic. As for heroic Lich King, we actually never saw any guilds use alt raids, but there’s some revisionist history there. Ask Paragon–they never did a single alt-raid pull on heroic LK because you really couldn’t at that time, with the gear you had available, clear through Heroic Lich King with your alt groups.

Why did you decide to add a limited-attempt boss to Tier 15, after their absence since Wrath?

We did have Sinestra in a sense–that was a heroic-only bonus boss in 4.0. But I think limited-attempts is appropriate here as a way of testing high-end raiders, the very best guilds in the world, in different dimensions. The race itself for progression is very much about skill and very much about endurance. It’s about the hours that these people put in and the time they spent grinding away and learning encounters. It’s about who can do that the best in the initial couple of weeks. So, here I think we’re also stressing quality over quantity, emphasizing the quality of your attempts. How much do you learn each attempt? How quickly do you figure out the correct strategy for an encounter that nobody really knows anything about?

Whoever wins the tier finishes both Lei Shen on heroic, and Ra-den on heroic first. That will be the guild who has proven to be adept at both of those areas–both having the dedication to focus and spend time working through 12 heroic bosses, but then also having skill and consistency and efficiency to make those 30 attempts count.

That sense of discovery makes sense with purposely leaving out a Dungeon Journal entry.

As I mentioned in comments in the Throne of Thunder preview…the Dungeon Journal harmed the experience in some small way for the cutting-edge top .1% of guilds, the players that literally were the first ones to ever see a boss. For everybody else, which includes the guilds that got there a week later and certainly the players that got there months later, there were multiple guides all over the internet laying out all the bosses’ abilities—for example, you’d go to Wowhead and look up the abilities a boss had. The right thing to do back then was to alt-tab in the middle of the game and read up on a boss. We were just taking that information and putting it into the game client so you could see it right there in an organized way, instead of forcing you to exit the game for this information.

For the very first guilds in the world to get to a new boss, it used to be a sense of discovery and exploration to learn what the boss does and genuinely have no idea until you did the first pulls. So for this heroic-only boss, we don’t have to worry about having the data for all players–this is really is designed for that 1% of players. We probably will add a Dungeon Journal entry for Ra-den in later patches just so that it’s fair and complete. Once the information is out there, there’s no use trying to hide it.

A lot of raiding activities taken for granted in past expansions have undergone significant revamps, from obtaining food with the best stats to grinding out all reputations. What’s considered normal or average behavior for a raider in MoP?

Again, there’s a spectrum. For the average LFR raider, there’s no preparation. Someone may drop a feast before some pulls, or some raiders may choose to use their own flasks just to bolster their own numbers so they look better on damage meters, since that’s always fun. In normal modes, it’s pretty standard for people to drop a feast–it could be a specialized banquet that’s skewed towards one stat type for appropriate classes. Most people probably use flasks, since flasks are cheap at this point. We wanted to make those accessible, and we’ve successfully done so.

We’ve removed cauldrons as a guild consumable because those went one step too far, where really the whole raid’s consumables were the purview of one person. Whoever managed the bank would show up with cauldrons and feasts and nobody else would have to farm anything up at all. They didn’t need to interact with professions, there was no reason to worry about cooking, there was no reason to go to the auction house, or to farm up herbs to make your own flasks. We’d like to have more interaction and a better sense of preparation. I think we struck a good balance in Pandaria. It’s not nearly as onerous as the consumable requirements we moved away from in the Burning Crusade days, where you’d go through two elixirs and five potions on every single pull.

Right, all available consumables stacked back then.

For heroic raiders, there are things like the 300 stat food. When you have your 1% wipe to a heroic boss, you pull that out for a last little bit of advantage. It’s really a very very tiny change. If you’re looking at someone that has 12000 strength, you’re literally saying “you’re going from 12000 to 12025.” It’s not a huge deal, but when every little bit counts and players like to feel that they’re really min-maxing, it’s something you can do. You’re treating it as a special occasion to bring out the 300 stat food.

How successful do you think the staggered release of Tier 14 was? Are you happy with LFR participation and normal progression rates?

I think it was quite successful. I think specifically staggering Heart of Fear after Mogu’shan Vaults was effective, because they were a half tier apart in terms of item level and tuning of the bosses. I don’t think that we necessarily gained much from delaying normal Terrace of Endless Spring compared to normal Heart of Fear. The reality is that for many guilds, majority of guilds, they didn’t clear through normal Grand Empress Shek’zeer in the two weeks that Heart of Fear was open but Terrace of Endless Spring was not. Therefore, the gating served no function. People got to Terrace of Endless Spring when they killed Grand Empress Shek’zeer and that was the limiting factor.

All it ended up doing is affecting very high-end progression guilds. Delaying Terrace of Endless Spring may have even shortened the life of the content. I think a fight like Sha of Fear, was very challenging for guilds that got there, but it was beaten after several days of progression. If those guilds had gotten there that first week of November instead of the third week of November, without those those two weeks of heroic clears under their belt, I think it might have been a very different story on how long those bosses survived. So it was a little bit of a loss for high-end progression raids, and it really had no impact on anyone else.

Separating Mogu’shan Vaults out though worked well, in the sense of really focusing player attention on one tier. For players still leveling up, there was really just so much to do during the first weeks of an expansion so having 16 bosses accessible and able to be worked on at once would have felt overwhelming for quite a number of people. Having six bosses was a nice bite-sized chunk–it satisfies your appetite for raiding but gives you time to finish all the other things you were doing on the side.

Are you expecting that raiders unfinished with Tier 14 will try to finish up Tier 14 when Patch 5.2 hits, or if they’ll feel pressured to jump into the new instance for a gear boost?

Players will be excited to check out the new content–we’re releasing a whole new patch and zone with awesome art. Previews are getting players hyped up about it and they want to go check out the new raid, regardless of their normal progression.

The first couple of bosses of the new raid tier are intentionally tuned to be somewhat more accessible for players who haven’t necessarily completely finished Heart of Fear and/or Terrace of Endless Spring on normal mode. I think a guild that is say, on Garalon today, they should be able to beat Jin’rokh the Breaker, the first boss of Throne of Thunder. He has some 522 loot and they get to experience the new raid zone, but if they go much further, they’re going to find some challenges that they may be a bit undergeared for.

At the same time, we have reduced the difficulty of the 5.0 raids when 5.2 comes out–there’s a 10% reduction to health and damage across the board in all those zones. Guilds that found that they were roadblocked somewhere along the line on progression should be able to have a much easier time to go back and finish up all those bosses, while maybe continuing to work on the first few bosses in Throne of Thunder until they gear up so they can throw themselves at Throne of Thunder full time.

Yeah, and more advanced guilds would still be interested in returning to Tier 14 for meta-drakes, the guild Reins of the Thundering Jade Cloud Serpent mount, and Sha-Touched weapons for transmog.

Some people may just want to get their Sha-Touched weapon so they can put their legendary gem in it that is sitting in their bags. For many people, a Sha-Touched weapon is great until you get your upgrade from Throne of Thunder, which may be several bosses in depending on where your weapon comes from. Sha-Touched weapons will still be very desirable items for a while.

Patch 5.1 was the first patch to use item upgrades, which allowed raiders to feel more powerful and replaced the need for a progressive zone-wide buff. However, players then felt VP capping was mandatory and the item upgrade system led to gearing dilemmas for hybrids. What’s your current reaction to the system–how did you think it went overall?

I think that’s a fairly accurate summary of the pros and cons, and we’re still evaluating it. On the one hand, it keeps Valor meaningful, which is nice in a sense. Valor is something you acquire as a byproduct of playing the game, no matter what you do–dailies, dungeons, challenge modes, scenarios, raids, you’re getting valor. Without the upgrade outlet, many normal mode raiders, let alone heroic raiders, would have quickly reached a point where they didn’t need vendor items anymore and the currency would just sit there and not serve a purpose.

There’s this steady notion of power progression–knowing that even if you didn’t personally get a great drop from a zone this week, you were still going to be stronger the next week than you were today. Maybe upgrading your gear will help you get over whatever hurdle you’re stuck on in your progression in the zone. And we did see pretty steady progression rates during several months of the 5.0 and 5.1 tiers, without resorting to a zone-wide buff as you mentioned.

The feeling that you need to cap and you’re somehow falling behind permanently if you don’t isn’t ideal, though a potential response to that is that ultimately, a couple of months from now, if you look at someone who has raided 5.2 a lot, there’s going to be no difference between someone who didn’t cap their Valor religiously during the 5.1 patch because you’ll have 5.2 gear instead. You’ll be wearing 522 normal epics or 502 LFR gear depending on what your track and playstyle is. All that the Valor got you was a temporary advantage as you were progressing through the raids in 5.1, but it’s not like you’re permanently behind or permanently lost out on something.

And with regard to the other downside, again I agree–people felt like they never wanted to upgrade something that wasn’t their BiS item. It felt that sitting on your Valor and getting as close to the 3000 cap was the right thing to do. You wanted to avoid ever upgrading something that you might replace and you wanted to make sure that you know your heroic item isn’t going to drop this week before you did something.

If we bring back item upgrades in the future, I think we want to explore some way of getting a partial refund or being able to move your upgrade from one item to the other in the same slot, so you always feel good about the process of upgrading an item. What we’re going and hoping for is that the second you hit 750 VP, you’re excited and run off to the item upgrade vendor to go get stronger. Right now you have to plan out some complex meta game to be efficient–it should just feel good. If we bring this system back, we’ll work to improve it to avoid some of these pitfalls.

Yeah, I think those are some good modifications if they go through.

While the rationale for T15 LFR gear being ilvl 502 was covered in a recent blue post, some players also feel that Normal mode gear at ilvl 522-528 was higher than expected. How were the item levels for all Tier 15 gear determined, and did the presence of item upgrades force T15 items to have a higher ilvl than originally intended to make new loot more appealing than upgraded Tier 14?

I think a lot of the same points that were made in the blue post you referred to also apply to normal item levels. Item upgrades were certainly a factor. There’s a lot of people that have heroic 509 items that are now 517 with upgrades. If you were one of the handful of people that managed to kill Elite Protectors on heroic mode, and you got an ilvl 516 item raised twice to ilvl 524, you might have a couple of those.

We didn’t want heroic guilds, even the best guilds in the world, to be farming heroic mode for weeks to go into the 5.2 raid and disenchant items that dropped from new bosses for the very first time. That’s not fun or satisfying to kill a boss for the first time and have everything be a shard. It also makes it really hard to balance the content. When a guild like Blood Legion or Method starts heroic progression, if the normal mode item level is basically equally to what they’re coming out of in the previous tier, it means they’re as well-geared as they possibly could be to begin that progression. And, as we’ve seen and you mentioned earlier, in the context of item upgrades, it works really well when the first guilds that reach content have much worse gear than the guilds who reach it down the line. The first guilds really have to challenge themselves to overcome their gear deficit, while a guild that progresses slowly and steadily through the zone, killing a new boss every week or so and accumulating upgrades, ends up in a very different place stat-wise than the cutting edge guilds.

As far as tuning goes, the larger the jump in tier to tier for item level, the better. We’re confident we can do that without item inflation issues we saw in wrath of the lich king were stats were simply getting too high, but that was more of a numerical problem we shouldn’t encounter this time around.

The Thunderforged gear was represented as a way of incentivizing players to stay in 25s. Some raiders are skeptical that increased gear is what is deterring players from doing 25s, and instead the issue is that 10s guilds are much easier/quicker to start up, with 10-player raids being easier to do when you have a deteriorating 25-player raid. Have you considered any other plans to make 25s appealing or to start up?

It’s something that we talk about a lot. We certainly recognize logistical hurdles. One of the hurdles of maintaining a 25-player roster is the need for recruitment and churn. You have a certain churn rate with one officer in charge of that who needs to get two and a half times the amount of people as the person in charge of a 10 player guild—that takes a certain amount of effort. The more people we can incentivize to do a 25 player raiding, the easier those logistical hurdles will be overcome. If more people want to do 25-player raids, then it will be easier for people handling logistical challenges to meet them.

Now that said, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that the primary purpose of the Thunderforged items is to incentivize 25-player raiding. I would say that’s more of an ancillary benefit. The primary purpose really is to issue some more variability and allow continued progression as players are spending weeks or even months working through a raid zone. One of the problems we run into today pretty frequently is looking at players who are working on, say, Tsulong, in Terrace of Endless Spring, who have most likely killed Zor’lok and Ta’yak in Heart of Fear 9 times. You probably have everything you need from those early bosses, and its quite likely that you still kill them and everything is disenchanted, or maybe goes to off-spec or for someone’s transmog. That’s not super-satisfying.

With Thunderforged items as a possibility, odds are very good that you’ll kill a boss and a Thunderforged item drops, and it will be an upgrade for someone even if they’ve killed that boss a lot. This makes you more excited that you’ve killed that boss every week, as opposed to viewing the boss as something you have to slog through to reach the bosses that drop loot you actually need. It also lets the average item level of the raid continue to improve in a way that lets that catch-up difficulty-curve mechanic that we talked about earlier work. It makes it easier to overcome those challenges that you haven’t yet been able to overcome, because your gear continues to reliably improve even as you’re killing bosses you’ve farmed many times.

It’s definitely good to hear about other angles since many players have interpreted this as mostly a solution for 25-player raiding.

I think the genesis of the idea was what I just described, but once we had this idea, we realized it offered a bit more granularity, first to incentivize 25-player raiding a little bit without offering something 10-player raiding couldn’t get. If we just said that 25-player raids dropped higher item level gear, period, that would be too harsh of a distinction. You don’t want to force people who enjoy running 10 player raids to feel like they’re doing it wrong. So now you have slightly higher chance of getting better items in 25-player raids, but you still can get them in either setting. It’s like the slightly higher loot/progression ratio we have in 25s. It’s just another way of incentivizing a little bit without offering something that’s exclusive to 25s.

Over expansions, there’s been all sorts of different rewards for killing things in a timely manner, from Realm First titles in Wrath or the Tier 7 metadrakes going away in Tier 8. With this current tier, we have normal and heroic clears rewarding Feats of Strength (Cutting Edge, Ahead of the Curve). Are you happy with the current reward of rewarding Normal and Heroic mode raiders with Feats of Strength, or could more changes be in store (mounts from end bosses returning, titles tied to Feats, etc)?

We’re certainly going to continue to award titles and mounts, and things like that for killing bosses. The mounts bosses drop now will become very rare mounts down the line once players become more powerful. But the Feats of Strength are to memorialize the players accomplishments, the “I killed it while it was relevant accomplishment,” as opposed to, “Everyone has the same achievement, but if you look very closely at my timestamp, you’ll notice that it happened during this period” type of achievement.

It’s something to reward players for pushing ahead and finishing an entire tier and being rewarded for it, before, it was trivialized potentially by the availability of higher end gear. It’s an incentive for players who are maybe close to the end but not quite there, to stick with it and finish out the tier so you have a lasting accomplishment to record what you’ve done. This is in place of “well, I’ll just wait until the new patch comes out and I’ll be better geared then anyway, so why bother now?”

Yeah, I remember some servers had Realm First! Fall of the Lich King completed in Cataclysm, which seemed to be an awkward measure of progression.

Legendaries have always been tied to raiding but MoP’s legendary questline does a few things differently–it removed class restrictions (and loot drama) but also is obtainable via LFR. Did designing this new type of legendary system present any challenges, either from a design perspective or integrating into the various raids?

It’s certainly it’s an experiment for us, and with any experiment, there are various challenges we have to face as we go through the process of designing and iterating on it. We were happy with the cool epic events we created as part of legendary questlines in the Cataclysm expansion–the Dragonwrath quests or the Fangs of the Father questline that rogues got to go through if they were lucky enough to have those weapons. We would have liked to share that with more players because it’s pretty cool content, so the 5.2 patch has something fairly similar, in terms of the lore and challenge as part of a legendary questline. We’re excited to share that with all interested players.

It’s been challenging to strike a balance between accessibility–making it available to players who participate in the experience without making it trivial. So, you know, the various grinds, collections of items in the various raids, building up rep. We have to learn how to pace those objectives and figure out when players will complete them. We have to make sure it doesn’t take too long or it’s not too fast. We got some of the droprates not exactly right in 5.0 between the Sigils of Power. The way we unlocked the 5.0 raids, many players had 20 Sigils of Power and 4 Sigils of Wisdom in late 2012 which was not ideal.

But yeah, It’s certainly a different type of legendary experience, compard to something like Warglaives, which just dropped and you got them for being lucky. They were super-powerful and you couldn’t count on getting them, but if you got them, you were guaranteed to top damage meters for the rest of the expansion,

And the Warglaive bonus had such a huge impact in Sunwell, which was full of demons…

Yep–here’s a really hard raid zone full of demons…and now you have these weapons that are super-powerful against demons!

Many players now with legendaries are like ‘Is this good as Warglaives or Atiesh was in the day?’ It’s just different. A pitfall of Dragonwrath is that we made a transformative legendary that was also accessible. That caused all kinds of balance problems. It’s one thing if one person is lucky in a raid and has a legendary–you know he’s going to top meters, people accept that they’re not going to be competitive, and you’re never going to sit that person as a raid leader. That’s okay because there’s 24 other spots and everyone else gets to feel involved. But then when you have a guild that has 9 Dragonwraths because they farmed them up during alt raids, well now it’s like…if you don’t have a Dragonwrath and you’re a caster, you’re just not competitive. There really is no place for you on that roster. The mix of ‘powerful transformative legendary’ plus accessibility with Dragonwrath did not lead to great results.

But now that we have something that everyone can participate in and experience, which avoids many of these issues. If you don’t have a legendary, ultimately it’s your choice because you haven’t participated. It’s not because you weren’t selected by the raid leader or were lucky enough to be in a guild that saw the needed content. Pretty much anyone who wants to can pursue it on their own time.

The questline also appears to have taken an abrupt turn in 5.2. We’ve moved away from obtaining and enhancing a Sha-Touched weapon to acquiring legendary metagem in 5.2–was this part of the original legendary design?

It was part of the original design. We didn’t precisely know it was necessarily going to be a meta gem in 5.2, but we never had the notion that the Sha-Touched weapon was something that would persist from the start to the end. it was tied to the story we were telling in 5.0 and 5.1 that’s centered around the corruption of the Mantid and the Sha of Fear in Terrace of Endless Spring. The Sha really aren’t part of the story we’re telling in 5.2, and we’re going in a different direction there.

Part of the excitement of going into a raid zone is getting a new weapon upgrade–it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to your character, and we wouldn’t want to take that experience away from players entirely. So I think part of the design for the sequential steps is that you can use them for a little while, and maybe they overlap with the next patch’s content…but eventually they get retired. At the end of the line, you’ll get something pretty cool.

We changed it so that item you got in 5.1, the socket, will also work on weapons that you obtain in the Throne of Thunder raid so players can enjoy and reap benefits of their earlier work in 5.2. But I think it’s safe to say that’s not going to work in the next raid zone after Throne of Thunder. It’s something you get to use for a while, but then you move on.

Since the progression model for MoP has no additional 5-man dungeons, as LFR is the new catch-up mechanism, are there any plans for more challenge mode features (new challenge modes, additional rewards for those who have completed them), to draw new people in who enjoy dungeons?

We definitely would like to introduce new challenge mode dungeons within the Mists of Pandaria timeframe. Details are not set in stone, but I think there’s a lot of dungeons we’ve done in the past that would be fun to revisit. Getting to run a Shattered Halls timed run again would be interesting, also Arcatraz and Halls of Reflection. Some of the highlights of past expansions could be easily updated to a max-level challenge mode setting and that would certainly add some variety and gameplay. While Challenge Modes do take a backseat to character progression at first, (if you’re given the choice between doing a challenge mode and working on a rep to unlock a trinket to make your character stronger, or between your core raid progression, you’re going to pick those things), as you finish your raid tier and max out those reps, suddenly Challenge Modes are a great way to get Valor–it’s a whole new avenue to check out. And we’re seeing on a regular basis players getting into that and really enjoying what they’re finding there. We’re happy with how the feature has played out and plan to expand upon the future.

The current rewards seem to be really good incentives–players especially seem to love the Silver phoenix mounts and wish they could be account-wide or could collect more of them.