World of Warcraft Patch 4.2 Interview

Ten Ton Hammer had the chance to corner Blizzard’s lead systems designer Greg Stress for a very interesting four pages long interview about the upcoming 4.2 patch. Here’s an excerpt:

4.2 is a much bigger patch with more than double the content of 4.1. Do you think players are going to be excited by the size of Rage of the Firelands?

GS: It’s a lot, yeah. Compared to 4.1, which was a much smaller patch, 4.2 is a much more traditional for us. Overall I think we don’t want to fall into anything that feels too formulaic. We don’t want players to be saying (Oh the third patch is always the five-player dungeon and the fourth patch is the new battleground.) Mixing it up a little bit keeps it fresh and the announcements exciting.

So who is your favourite boss in the Firelands raid?

GS: I really like Beth’tilac, the spider. That one’s going to feel the most unusual to players because of the vertical movements. As a designer, I also really like the Fandral Staghelm fight because it’s a very simple fight – on paper at least. But the devil’s in the details and actually pulling it off is going to be challenging. All the druids want his staff too! That said, it’s always fun when you have a personal reason for killing a boss for more than just his loot.

So we’ve got seven bosses to fight in the Firelands raid, do you think it’s enough or are you worried people are just going to zerg on through?

GS: We hope so! The heroic modes are going to be very challenging so anyone who wants to zoom through normal mode and not heroic may run out of content quickly. We thought that, perhaps, we had too many raid bosses in the Cataclysm launch so we were trying to find out what the sweet spot is. We also like to keep it fresh, we’ll do seven this time but that doesn’t mean every raid from now on will only have seven bosses.