Warlords of Draenor Devs Investigate the Game’s Raiding History

Blizzard has posted the second installment of its three-part developer blog on World of Warcraft. This installment covers raiding, and examines the changes from the game’s 2010 expansion, Cataclysm, to Mists of Pandaria.

The first installment of the blog covered the game’s PvP and Skirmishes. You can read all about that here.

This second entry is intended to retrace the the steps of its raid design philosophy and to put the game’s upcoming expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor, into context.

According to Blizzard, the two major concerns they intended to address with Cataclysm was the popularity of 10-player raiding and not providing players with a chance to “prove themselves,” and a burnout from players feeling obligated to optimize their characters by running the same instances over and over again.

“Guided by these concerns, we decided to consolidate 10-player and 25-player modes into a single difficulty, single reward tier, and single raid lockout. So in Cataclysm, we allowed raiders to choose their preferred raid size and experience the content as they saw fit.”

The post then goes into detail about the side effects these changes brought, namely imbalances between the two modes.

Check out the rest of the blog post for details on what went wrong with Mists of Pandaria and where the game stands at the moment.