World of Warcraft Designer Diary

Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan has written up a designer diary for WorldofWar.net that discusses the team’s plans for raid encounters in World of Warcraft. An excerpt to follow:

We know that loot will always be the end goal of a raid. For many people, loot is the end goal of the game. There is no denying the loot factor. Our raid loot will have unique look too. When they see Onyxia loot, they’ll know that you killed the dragon. Obviously the loot has to scale with the difficulty of the encounter, so raid bosses that are lower-tiered will still give good loot, but not nearly as good as that from higher-tiered bosses. Despite this, even the lowest-tier raid bosses will give better loot than a typical dungeon boss, even a level 60 one.

Most dungeon bosses drop at the most two items. We haven’t nailed down exactly how much loot a raid boss will drop, but we want the loot table to be very deep; not only in the number of items that drop, but also in terms of what those items will be. She is also going to drop loot that is necessary to beat a higher-tiered raid boss, but that loot can also be fashioned into some of the best equipment in the game. So players will have to make a decision: do they want to equip themselves to take down the next raid boss or do they want this really cool item? And because we are instancing her, many raid groups will be able to face this choice, and keep raiding her. In addition to that, we’ll put very deep loot tables on the rest of the monsters in her raid instance, as well.