WoW's newest raid will build on 20 years of large-group encounters, with new twists—and perhaps less help from mods

World of Warcraft's newest large-group adventure will stand on the shoulders of 20 years of raids that came before—and break new ground. Literally.

The Liberation of Undermine, the latest eight-boss underground raid that will launch as part of the 11.1 Undermine(d) update to The War Within expansion early next year, will contain new twists on old mechanics and some entirely new features that players haven't yet seen, game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer in an interview.

WoW recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and its raids have changed dramatically over the past 20 years. So have the tools that players use to beat them, ranging from guides and tier lists (for both class/specializations and gear) posted online, to sophisticated add-ons and WeakAuras that interpret the game's code and make some mechanics easier.

"Player sophistication has grown," Hazzikostas said, especially compared to the experience people had when they stepped into WoW's first raid 20 years ago. "When I first went into Molten Core, none of us knew what we were doing. That first pull of two molten giants may as well have been a raid boss as far as we were concerned. Many groups that went into Molten Core for the first time did not kill those two mobs, and if they did, the fire lord right behind them spawned a million fire spawns and that was the end of your run.

"Now those things would seem simple in a dungeon, let alone a raid."

The upcoming Liberation of Undermine raid will include many more-complex mechanics, including those that turn the environment around bosses into part of the fight—a trend that has developed in WoW's raids over time.

"There are certainly new encounters built upon lessons learned and things tested in old ones, but part of the encounter team's job is to evolve those experiences," Hazzikostas said. "They put a fresh coat of paint on old mechanics, but also come up with some genuinely new mechanics that no one's ever seen before, sometimes delivered by new tech—like slippy, slippy floors."

(WoW raids' slip-n-slide floors mechanic first appeared in the Sennarth spider boss encounter in Vault of the Incarnates, the first raid in the previous Dragonflight expansion.)

The Liberation of Undermine will include more new environments-as-mechanics.

"We go into the Grand Casino in Undermine, and we're making our way to face off against Gallywix," the former leader of the goblins and end boss of the Liberation of Undermine raid, Hazzikostas said. "The environmental framing of that is going to be part of what makes it a unique experience. It's something we've really been trying to lean into over the last 10 years in a way we didn't originally."

An exhibition event at an early BlizzCon fan convention pitted the top North American guild against multiple random bosses from raids, which were spawned into an arena together and had to be defeated. Now "there's something quaint about the idea that you could spawn in a Molten Core boss in any old room and it would still work," said Hazzikostas.

So the fights have gotten more complicated, even as 20 years of experience has made many of those players savvy veterans. And the tools at their fingertips—game changing mods and add-ons—have become powerful and robust.

The result has been something of an arms race. Players invent different displays and handling of raid boss mechanics using mods that can trivialize some encounters. Blizzard developers respond by making those fights even more complicated to keep them interesting, which then causes players to complain that the bosses are a bullet hell that can't be beaten without using the mods, and around it goes.

Blizzard experimented with making some mechanics unreadable by mods, with varying success. Players responded by creating add-ons that perform complex actions when players push hotkeys to indicate that the "invisible" mechanics are happening. In other cases, the mods add tracking and player positioning for fights where characters must respond to triggers incredibly quickly.

It's not a great experience for either the designers or the players, since those mods are frequently finicky, requiring everyone to be running them precisely in sync.

For example, in the current Nerub-ar Palace raid, the Broodtwister Ovi'nax fight pits players against a giant worm, with clusters of eggs that hatch and release adds, which must be defeated. On Mythic difficulty, players randomly assigned a debuff must overlap a modest circle around their feet on specific clusters.

It's complicated, because two players must stand on each cluster, in a very limited amount of time. If more than two characters stack on a cluster, there won't be enough to cover one of the other clusters needed around the boss. If players performed the mechanic without the assistance of mods, accidental overstacking is highly likely, even with competent groups.

So instead, a complex WeakAura assigns two of the players to each cluster, which has been pre-marked by the raid's leaders. When my Cutting Edge guild (a guild that kills the last boss of the raid on Mythic difficulty before the tier ends) tackled Ovi'nax, it took nearly a full night of progression just to get the WeakAuras working properly—not exactly compelling gameplay.

As a result, Hazzikostas said, players can expect Blizzard to remove more functionality from WeakAuras in raids in the future—and, hopefully, to add more in-game sources of information and more time to react, as a result.

"We can't be ignorant to the fact that many of our players are using add-ons, and it will shape the feedback we get about how engaging an encounter feels," he said.

The problem comes when mods can do the thinking for players when raid mechanics happen. If a fight has three or four mechanics, and a WeakAura consolidates all of them and only yells at them when they need to do something, players don't have to process much.

"A player might say this was a boring encounter, because I was doing my DPS rotation for three minutes except for the one time my mod told me to do something," Hazzikostas said. "That may make us add a new mechanic, which in turn can make the encounter feel complex or overwhelming for someone who isn't using those add-ons."

That's why future raids may have more limits on those mods, he said.

"I think it's an area where we likely will want to start clawing back some functionality, as long as we can make sure that our baseline game experience is offering players the information they need to have an engaging, elegant time."