World of Warcraft: Dragonflight has finally been approaching the end of its lifespan, with The War Within set for a full release on August 26. As things draw to a close, the developer behind the game has admitted to some mistakes in the climactic raid of the expansion – Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope.
In an interview with Wowhead, WoW’s Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Associate Game Director Morgan Day reflected on the Amirdrassil raid. Hazzikostas, in particular, underlined some areas where he felt the development team had misstepped while managing the release of the raid.
“Looking back on Amirdrassil, there are a couple of misses there. We can all agree that the spike in difficulty going from Smolderon to Tindral was too great, and that’s true in basically all versions of the raid,” he said.
“No matter how many nerf passes were taken, the overall mechanical complexity and execution demands meant that for every guild progressing through Amirdrassil, no matter when they were doing it, getting a 7th boss down meant you were staring at a brick wall.”
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In addition, Hazzikostas also affirmed his belief that nerfs were handled poorly. He went on to say, “The other piece of that is the timing of nerfs… We probably could have been more aggressive with a couple of them and drop them a bit sooner.
“The thing we do need to be mindful of when we do that though, is we always want to make sure that we’re not undermining guilds’ progression experience that are already partway through the fight.”
Nerub’ar Palace has been confirmed as the first raid tier in The War Within, taking players through the culmination of the Nerubian Empire storyline. Players have been testing the raid and general feedback has been positive, though the launch iteration may have significant tuning differences.