World Of Warcraft Dev On Players' Unintended Ways To Beat Skeram
Learn the full story from Wyatt Cheng, who designed the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj's first boss.
Wyatt Cheng, known online as candlesan, is currently Senior Design Director at Second Dinner, developer of Marvel Snap. He previously worked at Blizzard Entertainment, where he contributed to game design across all major IPs: WoW, Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft. He's best known online for sharing various game development insights, and he also has a short video series exploring the design stories behind various WoW bosses, mechanics, and more.
In his latest video, he discusses Prophet Skeram, the first raid boss in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj in vanilla WoW, explaining his two signature abilities and how the strategies he sees in online guides today aren't how the boss was designed to be beaten.
"His Arcane Explosion was intended to be general raid-wide damage that would be overwhelming if he ever split into 5. His Earth Shock was a light nod towards the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, favoring guilds that had Nature Resist, but since this is the first boss of the instance, we didn't want to have a hard Nature Resist fight right off the bat."
There are also his answers to popular questions in the comments:
Q: Can't you just mark the primary with a skull?
A: Yes, but skull-marking was added 2 patches after this boss was first released.
Q: Could you implement it [xyz] other way?
A: Yeah. My implementation was clearly sub-optimal. I think a more robust solution would be to hide the original boss, create 3 clones, mark one of the "clones" as the proxy for the real one, double that one's health, and then swap and adjust the health of the original when the 2 illusions drop. Some extra complexity in the implementation, but would have worked better (and survived the intent of the fight through patches better).
If you want to hear more of Cheng's stories about WoW, check them out here:
Visit his YouTube channel for more game design stories and advice:
Subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
Are you a fan of what we do here at 80 Level? Then make sure to set us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content in your feed.
Keep reading
You may find these articles interesting
