// PC GAMER — GAMING
Some of WoW's hardest dungeons and raids have gotten just a bit easier—that's on purpose, developers say
"People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.'"
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World of Warcraft's developers are making some subtle shifts in dungeons and raids to help players with its more-difficult content, in the hopes that a variety of knock-on effects result, including increased participation in the game overall and a better balance of tanks, healers and damage dealers.
In the case of WoW's timed-dungeon Mythic Plus mode, it was a matter of making it just a bit easier to get to the mythic-level rewards of the weekly vault, says Paul Kubit, associate game director in charge of the Midnight expansion. The team tested it out in the first season of Mythic Plus, which just wrapped up.
Players are often less-willing to queue for dungeons as tanks or healers because the level of responsibility is much higher—taking the big hits, keeping the group alive, directing where the party should go—and other players can be swift to judge when things go wrong.
Hopefully the reduced difficulty for the weekly "vault filler" keys, where players are typically looking to complete the minimum level of Mythic Plus dungeons that will get them the maximum level of gear available, helps with those stressors, Kubit says.
"We saw a lot of success in season one making it just a little bit easier for you to get into higher difficulties of Mythic Plus, and get the loot which comes from it," he says. "People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.' Some of the inherent stresses are cut by the approachability of the mode itself."
In the case of raiding, Blizzard is giving players another one-boss instance where they can get their feet wet in Mythic difficulty in a variably-sized group that can even be done with strangers. Midnight's first season was the first in a long time to offer not one, but two different one-boss raids that many players successfully did in pick-up groups even on the highest Mythic difficulty. One of them offered variable raid sizes, allowing groups of 15-25 characters to enter the fight.
As part of this month's 12.1 patch, developers introduced a new raid instance type, called a Lair. Lairs take the place of world bosses, which were simple to kill and could absolutely annihilate the frame rate in the zone where they were being fought as full 40-man raids of players jumped randomly from layer to layer depending on where their members were located.
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