The Spider Wing

The first wing we looked at was the Spider Wing. We now start you directly inside the underground area that is the central feature of this wing; there’s no more outdoor portion. The feedback revolved around 4 major points. First, the mini-boss fight with Breosal could use some upgrading to make it really feel like a mini-boss. Second, the difficulty wasn’t quite up to snuff. Third, this was our major spider encounter: more webbing and interactive elements would be nice. And fourth, the challenge quest needed to be hard . . . really, really hard.

Breosal was the first point to tackle. Her initial fight had her come out, summon a couple of spiders, then run away at a health threshold. The upgraded fight involves many more initial adds, several slowing webs appearing all over the floor, Angmarim entering partway through the fight, and her retreating at a much later point. Additionally, when she does retreat, several adds come up the hall in the other direction. This creates a more “set piece” style encounter and builds her up to a larger character within the space.

Second was the difficulty throughout the space. Several spiders had their difficulty increased, and a new Angmarim was added to the mix: a Spider-singer. He has an aura that only affects spiders and greatly increases their damage output and attack speeds. He also features life drain and shadow skills.

The third point was interactivity. We have these great spider-web walls that fall away when opened. These have been spread through the dungeon, blocking critical pathways. Near enough to each of them is a torch that can be picked up and carried for a short period of time. When you approach the webs, the torch burns them away, and they open. Nearby spiders don’t take kindly to those that burn their webs though.

Then we came to the boss fight and the new challenge mode. As the ranking spider in the game until we get to Shelob, this had to be a strong, very challenging set-piece encounter. The first step was to fix a bug in how the waves of adds worked that allowed an entire wave to be locked down and its respawn disabled. Definitely not working as intended! Once that was resolved, the initial fight was fairly close to the intended level of difficulty. Now it came to challenge mode.

Most challenge modes we’ve attempted focus on doing the existing fight in a slightly different manner – kill these 2 monsters within 10 seconds, defeat the boss before defeating any of his adds, things like that. Mostly these challenges don’t involve dramatically altering the fight – just making the player do it in a less intuitive and more challenging way, hence the name. This one needed to be different. For those unfamiliar with the fight, you approach and see Breosal surrounded by Angmarim Silkspinners. You fight one Silkspinner and its spider companions. Each time you defeat a wave of Silkspinners, Breosal throws another at you until you’re fighting a wave of four. The final wave all wear white robes, while the previous waves wore red. Once all of the Silkspinners are defeated, Zaudru enters the battle. That’s how the fight works on normal. On hard mode, things get decidedly more interesting.

In the middle of the arena is a pair of bonfires. Surrounding the Silkspinners are a set of 4 cocoons. When the wave of 3 Silkspinners is defeated and the final wave of 4 white robes enter, the challenge quest updates to inform the players they need to set the cocoons ablaze. This is done by using the bonfire which will equip you with a torch. Running to a cocoon will then set it ablaze. All 4 cocoons must be lit. However, while you are doing this, none of the final 4 white robed Silkspinners may be defeated, they must all survive until all 4 cocoons are ablaze. Once this is done, Zaudru enters the battle early. At this point, players must defeat her and the 4 white robed Silkspinners, challenging fights separately, but together they require the highest level of coordination and skill.

The Drake Wing

The second wing we dove into was the Drake Wing. Similar to the Spider Wing, this has its own underground space that we send you directly into. The initial feedback here was more positive than the Spider Wing, but there were still some base issues present. First, the lever puzzle at the beginning didn’t do a very good job of explaining what was going on. Second, the instance was visually bland, as you were seeing the same model, appearance, and color of monsters throughout the majority of the space. Third, the boss fight needed some work to explain the mechanics better and to provide some better staging throughout it.

The first issue was fairly easy to address. Adding obvious glowing ground FX when you were standing in the proper locations, billboards that indicated what pulling the levers had done, and one reinforcing the reset when you messed up provided the right amount of feedback to players and made the puzzle more polished. The second issue was also addressed without much difficulty. During the development of the Mines of Moria™ expansion new dragonet appearances were created. The hatchlings were swapped over to use the dragonets instead of being scaled down drakes. Because dragonets fly when they’re idle, they presented a very different visual profile than the large adult drakes. Next, we created new Shadow-drakes for the instance and replaced about a third of the Ice-drakes with them. This added a new color, skillset, and damage type throughout the space, mixing up the trash encounters just enough. We also set the Shadow-drakes to focus on doing melee attacks, while the Ice-drakes prefer range.

The boss fight saw some minor tweaks to how it was staged out. First, we gave the worms and drakes visual FX that indicated they were protected and had a special invulnerability. Second, the way the fight was initially structured, the drakes and worms didn’t become invulnerable until after the Angmarim had died. This provided a two-stage fight that was heavy on required tanks. We shifted this to add three stages to the fight. These stages transition as the Angmarim’s health hits certain thresholds, and the third stage is reached before the Angmarim is defeated. This reduces the dependence on tanks and allows for more DPS to be brought to bear.

1. Angmarim is vulnerable, worms are invulnerable, drakes are invulnerable
2. Angmarim is vulnerable, worms are vulnerable, drakes are invulnerable
3. Angmarim is vulnerable, worms are vulnerable, drakes are vulnerable

The challenge mode here works off of what was already present within the space. Surrounding the boss’s platform are piles of eggs. Throughout playing the instance, we learn that if we step on these, we get hatchlings to spawn. The challenge quest involves smashing all of the eggs and defeating all of the hatchlings (more dangerous versions than found in the lead-up) without finishing off the primary boss fight.