How to Make a Good World of Warcraft Boss Fight
Imagine spending weeks and months with a group of friends, fighting the same, amazing looking boss on the hardest difficulty available in the game. The boss is a 10 minute epic of incredible visuals and engaging mechanics that keep you on your toes throughout the whole fight. After being the last member of your group standing, you land the final blow, slaying the boss and granting loot and riches to your group. Delighted, you click on the boss to get your share… and the only thing there is a thumbs-up on a post-it note. Enraged, you immediately go on the forums to tell the developers that they suck and then you quit the game forever. As a developer and designer, this is a situation that you want to avoid, and it is certainly avoidable. So what made that boss fight so good, and where did it go wrong? The answer lies in three parts: Visuals, Mechanics, and Rewards.
While visuals are not necessarily essential, they are certainly capable of making a great boss fight into an amazing one. In certain cases, they can even turn a relatively boring fight mechanically into one that is fun for players just because of how good it looks. One example is the Star Augur Etraeus fight from the raid, The Nighthold, which has relatively simple mechanics to keep the player from falling asleep at their keyboard, but not a huge amount else. The main attraction is the arena around the players, which changes based on the boss’ health, and depicts a scene in space (not commonly seen in a high fantasy world), showing stars, planets, and nebulas, all of which are beautifully drawn.
It leaves an impression on the player in a completely visual aspect, which certainly influences how players view the fight — I know it did for me personally. This can also work in the opposite direction though, as a good mechanical fight can be dragged down by its drab or mediocre visuals. An example of this is the giant dog boss called Shad’Har in the raid Ny’alotha. Shad’Har requires the raid to constantly feed it food (on a timer) to keep it from becoming ravenous and eating your party, and it adds a few rotating mechanics on top of that to keep the players on their toes throughout the fight. While relatively simple, the gameplay loop is fun and requires each player to be active. While the mechanics are fun, the fight takes place in a relatively uninteresting purple, circular room.
While it may not look too bad from the picture, imagine how it would look after the first few times you kill this boss, or even after the 10th attempt on the boss in one sitting. I have personally spent a little too long in this room, and I hate it. In retrospect, it was a mechanically good boss, but the visuals were subpar, which left a mediocre impression on me, which is a shame, as it could’ve been a lot better.
Mechanics are important to every boss fight. Even if the visuals of a fight are lacking (see Shad’Har above), the mechanics can carry the weight of an otherwise lackluster fight. The key to making a mechanic engaging is the ability it has to make players play in a different way. An example of this is the difference between two mechanics. Let’s say you have a fight that consists solely of mechanics that just cause constant damage to the players. The only way to counter or play around such a mechanic is with healing or damage reductions, which is uninteresting for a majority of the group. Now let’s say that this constant damage only applies while moving. On top of that, let’s add in a mechanic that causes the size of the arena to shrink over time. These changes cause the players engaging in the fight to think about when or how they have to move, which gives an originally boring mechanic a potential to be interesting, especially in combination with other mechanics.
An important takeaway is that trying out new mechanics is perfectly acceptable, and should not be shied away from. If it doesn’t work out in the end, you learn from it, iterate, remake, scrap it entirely, etc. — in the end, it’s up to you to decide how a mechanic works and whether you want to spend time on it later. Blizzard does this all the time in WoW, with a notable instance being the boss Dark Inquisitor Xanesh in the most recent raid, Ny’Alotha. This boss’ core mechanic involves 3 players hitting a straight-moving ball from one point in the arena to another point, avoiding obstacles along the way — essentially soccer. While this mechanic is fun for the 3 players playing soccer, it is incredibly boring for the rest of the group, and any mistake caused by those 3 players causes the entire group to suffer. In the end, the mechanic didn’t play out the way the developers at Blizzard had envisioned it, but it certainly was worth trying.
While I mentioned using mechanics to keep players engaged in your fight, sometimes it can go a little too far. The image below depicts all of the abilities of the last boss of a single raid.
While one may say that the number of abilities is justified for a final boss, I believe that having to read a novel to understand what the boss does is not a good thing. While players can certainly learn all of these mechanics through experiencing them during the fight, there is some degree of cognitive overload when trying to get a deep understanding of the fight, especially so when teaching another player or for less-experienced players in general.
The last aspect of a good boss fight is the rewards you get from completing it. One thing that is relatively consistent across WoW boss fights is that (generally) the harder the boss, the better the loot. This means that the loot itself is more powerful numbers-wise than other loot, or has interesting effects on it. The rewards could also be cosmetic items, themed to the boss or the overall theme of the raid. A good example of a cosmetic item is a weapon that rarely drops from the last boss of the raid, Antorus, the Burning Throne, a blue scythe with constellation engravings and stardust flowing across it.
It’s an incredibly cool looking item, drops rarely, and comes from a very challenging boss fight — it’s the perfect example of a ‘chase item’. A ‘chase item’ is a term for a goal set by a player that wants a specific item from a boss, and it causes that player to come back to that boss fight for another chance at the item. The scythe is also a symbol of a player’s achievements — other players that see you using that scythe know that you’ve completed this difficult content, which creates a certain level of prestige around having the item. The scythe is a great example of a reward that makes a boss fight great.
So, what have we learned so far? To start, a boss must have either interesting visuals, or interesting mechanics. While having both isn’t entirely necessary, a great fight distinguishes itself from a mediocre one by outshining it in one or both of these categories. Experimenting with mechanics should be encouraged for designers, as finding new ways to make mechanics engaging is necessary for creating more and better content in the future. On the flip side, too many mechanics doesn’t make a fight interesting — it only causes confusion in players and pushes people away from your content. Finally, the rewards from the boss should be interesting enough to get players to come back and do it again, as well as being proportional to the difficulty of the boss itself. No one wants to spend months killing the hardest boss in the game to get scraps of cloth. Overall, it may seem like a lot to take consideration of, but as long as you have an engaging core mechanic loop, visuals that hold up after the first few pulls, and loot that is useful to at least a few people in a group, you have a good World of Warcraft boss fight.
Image credits:
https://i.imgur.com/rewxpSp.jpg
https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/guide/seo/9539.jpg?1578372264
