By: Joe “jwbarry” Barry

Hey everybody! This is Joe “jwbarry” and in this, the fourth of a series of Dev Diaries about our new Scaling Instance systems,I’m going to be talking about Helegrod and all of the changes and upgrades it experienced and a lot of the reasoning behind why.

Helegrod Cluster

Up to this point, we had successfully converted a couple of Small Fellowship spaces and a couple of Fellowship spaces. Now, it felt like the system needed a raid to round it out for launch. We decided to go with Helegrod before the Rift because the space seemed easier to adapt and apply scaling to, it was less played than the Rift, and we wanted to feel it out and see how things worked before tackling something as complex and beloved as the Rift. So Helegrod got the nod.

(As an aside, because I can hear many of you yelling at your monitors that you want the Rift instead, yes, the Rift is coming at some point in the future; in fact, it’s on my machine in a carved-up Frankenstein sort of state as I attempt to sort out exactly how everything relating to the Balrog works and how I can address the issues present within that fight without horrendously breaking it. It’s a pretty scary thing on the back-end, and not something to be attempted lightly or without full knowledge of exactly how the scaling is going to interact with and impact it.)

12 or 24?

Helegrod got a somewhat unfair shake from the beginning. Assembling 24 players at cap to run something that takes several hours to complete can be a challenge at a number of levels. When you’re talking about something that isn’t at cap anymore so it doesn’t offer valuable rewards, and it’s nowhere near the cap in terms of content or challenge, and it’s still going to take hours to complete, and then you throw raid-locks into the mix… It’s going to be a long night.

As a result, the conversations revolved around what group size was really appropriate given our stated goals. We’d talked internally many times, and at length, about converting Helegrod down to a 12-man raid or finding other ways of making it more accessible. Instance Join would certainly make it more accessible, but even then, getting 24 people together was a lot to ask. But losing the only 24-man instance content in the game didn’t feel right either. It was important for something like that, something larger and grander, to be there, even if it doesn’t get run much. And really, if anything is going to require 24 people, a Gaunt-lord putting his spirit into a dead dragon certainly feels like the right place. But getting 24 people around to test something is a feat in and of itself.

The conversation went back and forth for a bit, until we really looked at the length of the space and how it was already sectioned off. It begged to be split into 4 wings: drakes, spiders, giants, and finally Thorog. Each would play 45 minutes to an hour and, best of all, it resolved our size debates. The Drake, Spider, and Giant wings would all become 12-man raids, and Thorog would remain a 24.

We ripped out all of the raid-locks, and instead there is now a deed that is completed by defeating the bosses of the three 12-man wings. Each character must have this deed completed before they are able to fight Thorog. It is a one-time personal gate. Once completed, that character can always access the dragon fight. In addition, once the dragon is unlocked you can play him as often as you wish.

I’ll repeat that again because it bears repeating, this is a one-time gate. Once you have personally unlocked access to the Dragon Wing you can play it as many times as you want as frequently as you want.