WoW Forever: raids aim for 2 to 3 weeks of progression

Raids in WoW Forever are meant to take an average guild somewhere between 2 and 3 weeks of progression. Josh Greenfield and Tim Jones said so in a new video interview about the game's raids, ahead of the first raids opening on 9 December.

The team wants encounters to be approachable, roughly in the range of difficulty and complexity of the Season of Mastery raids and baseline Naxxramas. The developers said they may have pushed boss complexity and tuning too far at the end of Season of Discovery, and that Scarlet Enclave was fun and creative but perhaps too challenging. They would still like to bring it back into Forever later. Raids keep the visual language of the original game: no giant outlines on mechanics, and no addons needed.

Instanced content is meant to have one difficulty. The developers called Ulduar's Hard Modes cool, but said they were the start of splitting content into Normal and Heroic, and that there is value in a casual guild taking on the exact same encounter as a hardcore one. Difficult, aspirational fights will still exist, either at the end of a raid or as secrets such as hidden bosses and secret phases, and they will drop gear worth showing off in a capital city. Onyxia will drop a lot of loot.

Item level progression will not be purely flat, so older raids keep some value. The developers suggested that a few patches in, a guild might go back on a free raid day and clear Hyjal to get its healers their Legendary Staff. Because Hyjal has several wings, a group can target a specific boss, and future patches could add shortcuts, much like the Translocation Orb in Naxxramas. The team still wants players to follow the intended path while a tier is current, and ideally tuning will require the previous tier, although well-geared players can probably carry others. Loot details from the earlier interview are in the tier 1 set split across 3 raids.