Deep Dive Suggestion: Bring Back Solo-Endgame Content (SEC)

[Qyune-exodar]

So, I thought about how to present this suggestion for a while, and I couldn’t decide how. On one hand, I want to provide the foundation for where my reasoning is coming from. And on the other hand, I want this to be readable. So, rather than me deciding, I will let you decide which way makes the most sense to you. So, I will present this in several formats:

1. Executive Summary. Very, very basic borderline over-simplified summary of the suggestion.
2. Outline. A listing of all major talking points that will be presented in the Deep Dive.
3. Outline Summary. A summary of each major section in the outline and the purpose of each section.
4. Deep Dive. A detailed explanation of each bullet point within the outline.

So, what is my goal in writing this short novel of a suggestion? My goal is to provide a well-balanced and comprehensive suggestion to not only bring back, but also maintain Solo-Endgame Content (SEC) within WoW. I will establish the necessary foundation, framework, building materials, and plans for a successful SEC. I will then provide an example of how new features could be presented in the next iteration of Solo-Endgame Content.

Who am I writing this for? I am writing this for the developers of WoW specifically as well as WoW’s community. My angle will focus on what is fun for the player as well as what is good for the community, because what is good for the game isn’t always good for the player, and what is good for the player can be terrible for the community (including the game).

To those who read this post in one session, I am jealous of your ability to focus for that long, and I want to thank you. Most people will not be able to finish reading this suggestion. However, I hope those of you who are WoW developers can take some time away and read through this post entirely – and, if possible, tear it apart. Tell me why you would consider some things to be accurate or feasible (or not possible) when it comes to Solo-Endgame Content.

Finally, from here going forward, I will refer to Solo-Endgame Content as “SEC”, because I don’t want to write the entirety of “Solo-Endgame Content” 1,000 times.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Currently, there exists a gap within WoW that has not been seen for 8 years. Over the last decade, WoW has grown to a point where there is more content than ever! Raiding has been a pillar of content for large groups as it has evolved to include 4 levels of difficulty – one of which you can queue solo (LFR). Even dungeons (for smaller group activity) have grown from simple leveling adventures to challenge modes to Mythic+. This content has also evolved to include a form of solo-queueing for Normal and Heroic dungeons (LFG). With cross-realm grouping, the solo player can now find players from different realms to complete this content. And now we have Solo Shuffle, a method to allow the solo adventurer to get their feet wet within the Arenas.

Additionally, we have seen tremendous growth of solo-player focused content. From Proving Grounds to Mage Tower to Horrific Visions to Torghast, the growth and development of this type of content has been continuously getting better! Each of these iterations of Solo-Endgame Content (SEC) has paved the way to a better experience in the next iteration. For some, this might generate some laughs, but this will make sense by the end.

However, despite near a decade of continuous improvement and lessons learned, there is no Solo-Endgame Content in Dragonflight. Through of the evolution of content and the expansion of SEC, there has never been more interest for this type of content as there is today. This style of content allows players to better themselves without the potential of demoralizing scrutiny of others, compete for furthest progression against themselves and/or others, and ultimately provide another avenue of challenging content for those with stricter Real Life schedules!

OUTLINE

1) Solo-Endgame Content in World of Warcraft
a._____Growth of Solo-Queueing
b._____Evolution of Solo-Endgame Content (SEC)
c._____Defining Solo-Endgame Content (SEC)
d._____5 Core Elements (Reasons) for SEC
2) A Review of SEC in WoW
a._____Proving Grounds from Warlord of Draenor
i.__________Strengths
1._______________Soloability
2._______________Range in Difficulty
ii.__________Weaknesses
1._______________Balance
2._______________Variety
3._______________Slight Requirement
4._______________Rewards
b._____Mage Tower from Legion
i.__________Strengths
1._______________RNG Dependence
2._______________Rewards
3._______________Short-Term Repeatability
4._______________Soloability
5._______________No Requirement
ii.__________Weaknesses
1._______________Difficulty
2._______________Long-Term Repeatability
3._______________Balance
4._______________Grouping
5._______________Little Variety
iii.__________Proving Grounds to Mage Tower Development Growth
c._____Horrific Visions from Battle for Azeroth
i.__________Strengths
1._______________Soloability
2._______________Difficulty Range
3._______________Variety
4._______________Long-Term Repeatability
5._______________Partial Success Rewards
6._______________Horrific Vision Talent Tree
ii.__________Weaknesses
1._______________Cost of Entry
2._______________Rewards
3._______________Balance
iii.__________Mage Tower to Horrific Visions Development Growth
d._____Torghast
i.__________Strengths
1._______________Anima Powers
2._______________Soloability
3._______________Difficulty Range
4._______________Variety
5._______________Law of Averages
6._______________Vendors
7._______________Rewards
8._______________Total Ability Usage
9._______________Twisting Corridors
10.______________Jailer’s Gauntlet
11.______________Leveling
12.______________Custom, Temporary UIs
ii.__________Weaknesses
1._______________Mandatory Requirement
2._______________Rewards
3._______________No Pause, No Save
4._______________Pseudo-Timer
5._______________Loss of Control Mechanics
iii.__________Torghast Development Growth
iv.__________System Design Feedback
3) A Review of Lessons Learned
a._____Purpose of Solo-Endgame Content (SEC)
i.__________5 Core Elements of Purpose
ii.__________Core Rule of Solo Gaming I
iii.__________Core Rule of Solo Gaming II
iv.__________Core Rule of Solo Gaming III
b._____Necessary Features
i.__________Soloable and Grouping
ii.__________No Cost of Entry
iii.__________Ability to Save or Pause Progress
iv.__________Range of Difficulty
v.__________Not a Requirement
vi.__________Talent Tree
vii.__________Repeatability
1._______________Duration
2._______________Massive Variety
3._______________Partial Progress Rewards
4._______________Alt – Account Progression
5._______________Bad Luck Protection
viii.__________Foundation for Expansion
ix.__________Contingency Plans
4) Feasibility Concept
a._____Lore
b._____Instantized Location Hub
c._____Factionless Grouping
d._____Talent Tree
i.__________Time Lock
ii.__________Vendor Item Increase
iii.__________Vendor Access
iv.__________Portals
v.__________Scale Cap
vi.__________The Second Hand
vii.__________The Third Hand
viii.__________Auto Loot
ix.__________Timesmith
x.__________Ripple Balance
xi.__________Call of the Infinite
e._____Vendors
f._____Record Keeper
g._____Queue-and-Go Gameplay
h._____Layers and Floors
i.___________Outdoor Zones
1._______________Legion Worlds
2._______________Sub-sections of Zones
3._______________Pandaria Scenarios
4._______________New Content
ii.__________Partial Instance Wings
1._______________Dungeons
2._______________Raids
3._______________Wings of Torghast
iii.__________Rotation of Mobs
iv.__________Floor Bosses
v.__________Buffs / Debuffs
vi.__________Sandbox Layouts
vii._________Floor Objectives
i._____Varying Difficulty Levels
i.__________Raw Difficulty
ii.__________Affixes
iii.__________Special Modes
1._______________Infinite Layers
2._______________Infinite Floors
j._____Account Progression
k._____Recognition System
l._____No Timer
m._____Scaling Caps
n._____Potential Evergreen Continuation
o._____Not A Requirement
p._____Rewards
q._____Partial Rewards
5) Summary

OUTLINE SUMMARY

Section 1: Solo-Endgame Content in WoW
The Outline Summary section should be seen as (1) a summary of the section as well as (2) the summary of the section’s purpose. For example, in Section 1: Solo-Endgame Content in WoW, the purpose of this section is to clearly define parameters SEC, explain design intent, and establish focal points for what SEC is as a genre of gameplay. While this section is not all-encompassing, it should provide the general framework for Solo-Endgame Content.

Section 2: A Review of SEC in WoW
The purpose of this section is to provide us with a deep dive into the history of Solo-Endgame Content in WoW, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the following:

1. Proving Grounds from Warlords of Draenor
2. Mage Tower from Legion
3. Horrific Visions from Battle for Azeroth
4. Torghast from Shadowlands
5. Honorable Mention: Island Expeditions

The importance of this section is to illustrate the continuous improvements, growth, and lessons learned by the developers throughout the development of SEC. As we make our way through this section, many of you may notice trends of what has been successful and common traits of weaknesses. Using the example of our metaphoric house, if Section 1 is the framework, then Section 2 should be seen as the material testing. What worked? Why did it work? What did not work? Was it circumstantial? If it failed, then why?

Section 3: A Review of Lessons Learned
The purpose of this section is two-fold: First, we are going to revisit the purpose of general solo gameplay. What makes solo gameplay fun? And more importantly, what can make solo gameplay feel like a waste of time. The intention of this section is to prevent the design creep of features as well as set up a scope of boundaries for the next iteration of SEC.

The second purpose is to list out the best strengths of the previous iterations of SEC. These features will be the drivers for actual playable content. This portion may feel a little redundant, but it is necessary for us to group up all the strengths of each iteration of SEC into one section. The culmination of these features is what makes a system design that encourages continuous gameplay through enjoyment, skillset growth, and recognition. Returning to the metaphorical house, we are planning our foundation and selecting our materials, respectively.

A bonus objective in this section comes in the form of contingency plans. The purpose here is NOT to list out a million things that could go well or poorly, but rather pinpoint when these continency plans need to START. They will need to be periodically reviewed and updated. If done well, then developers should have the solution to concerns before the concerns exist. These contingency plans will reduce the pressure and stress of sorting feedback, and THEN brain-storming countermeasures, all while the problem continues to grow - seemingly without a response. Think of these as the drawings for a house – when unintended changes happen, the drawings make sure we are still going to end up with a well-built house.

Section 4: Suggestion: Solo-Endgame Content - Epochs of Infinite
The purpose of this section is to take the framework of our project, select all the tested and proven materials, establish the limitations of our scope, design the foundations of our intentions, finalize the drawings of our contingencies, and finally render them as presentable concept. We will call this hypothetical content the Epochs of Infinite.

The numbers presented in this section are just placeholders. You can multiply any number by 113 or divide them by 17 if they make more sense in your thoughts and ideas. The story is a placeholder as well. This could be brought about by the Infinite Dragons or Sylvanas as the new Jailer. The most important takeaway of this section is that each suggestion makes sense with respect to the 8 years of evolution, development, and lessons learned from Solo-Endgame Content.

DEEP DIVE

Solo-Endgame Content in World of Warcraft
So, we all know that MMORPGs survive because of the community. The content is what provides the community with goals as well as methods to reach those goals. This of course includes the Four Horsemen of group content – Raiding, Mythic+, Arenas, and RBGs. However, as the community has grown and evolved over the years, player preferences and priorities have changed. Instead of standing in Ironforge for hours waiting for a tank, we now have the solo queueing of Group Finder. Instead of being purely at the mercy of realm size and guild availability, we have cross-realm group capability (now with factionless groups). Instead of only 1 raid difficulty, we have 4 to allow for greater range of challenging content – one of them, LFR, available via solo queueing. Recently, arenas now have a Solo Shuffle form of gameplay, introducing a solo-queueing capacity for Arenas. As far as RBGs, nothing official is in place, but there are community-driven “YOLO” groups where people simply and quickly join up and try their hand at the content.

You should notice a common theme with each of these genres – they all have a method of introduction through solo gameplay. As each of the 4 genres have grown and evolved over the years, all of them have had some form of solo queueing gameplay incorporated into them. Solo-queueing is about reducing the barrier to entry for each of these genres of gameplay. The idea here is that the most challenging part of content should not be gaining access to it – even for players who haven’t found their guild or team yet.

So, we’ve established that there is a demand for this style of gameplay through the evolution of content. There exists a large portion of the community that simply want to play some form of endgame content, and they would not have access otherwise. We will get into the reasons for their lack of access in detail later, but for now, we can at least confirm many players enjoy the ability to simply queue into content and play. At this point, we can see Solo-Endgame Content (SEC) emerging as a genre of content in and of itself.

For the sake of clarity, there are two terms being that seem the same, but are very different. The first is solo-queue which is simply the ability to queue up for the content as an individual player (typically, the easiest variant of the genre). However, while solo-queueing may happen during Solo-Endgame Content(SEC) gameplay, SEC is completely different in its nature and purpose. Solo-queueing reduces the barrier to entry and allows players an entry-level access to a genre of content. Solo-Endgame Content is content designed to be played individually up to a Mythic equivalent level.

SEC is an environment where players can face the most challenging of obstacles by themselves if they wish. These players can continuously improve themselves and push their limits. For those unfamiliar, I am referring to the Proving Grounds in Warlords of Draenor, Mage Towers in Legion, Horrific Visions in BfA, and Torghast in Shadowlands.

So, what does Solo-Endgame Content provide for the WoW community? This content should provide gameplay opportunities for everyone – meaning anyone can at least try. Specifically and categorically, SEC should provide new opportunities for those who cannot commit to long durations of challenging gameplay at a time.

A lot of players have heavy school workloads, work multiple jobs, work a rotating shift, and / or have physical or mental limitations that prevent them from raiding or Mythic+ progression. Other players are unable to find a guild that matches their own interests, skill level, intensity level, and time slot availabilities.

Solo-Endgame Content also provides players the opportunity to participate endgame difficulty gameplay while also providing a training ground of sorts for those wanting to grow as well.

For example, a lot of players don’t want to join groups, because they know their skillset is insufficient. And sure, they could learn by watching a video, but many people learn by actively playing. However, if they are learning and struggling in a group, they are likely to experience some form of verbal abuse disguised as “constructive criticism” or just outright berating. SEC provides an environment where players can push themselves and experiment with different playstyles without the fear of wasting other people’s time or their failures placed on a stage.

Most importantly, this type of content is simply fun for many. It’s fun to be able to push yourself as far as you can go. It’s equally fun to be able to compare your progress to others within and outside of your league. If you are a warrior with the Mage Tower weapons, then were you the 50th or 50,000th warrior to earn the Fury weapons. For many people, this is important, as the competition drives them. Numerically speaking, rewards need to be centered around where difficulty is balanced (for example, KSM at Mythic+15). However, many find it fun to compete beyond that balance against those of the same class (such as players completing Mythic+30 just because they can).

So, to summarize what we have talked about so far, solo-queueing as entry-level tier content provides two things primary benefits:

1. Reduce the barrier to entry to discover a category of content players may enjoy
2. Provide experience to content they may not otherwise be able to play

Continuing the summarization, we have begun to realize that there is an entire genre of content within the 2nd point. The Solo-Endgame Content provides content specifically for those who:

1. Wish to learn how to develop their skillset through solo gameplay
2. May not be able to find a consistent endgame guild / team
3. Want to continuously push themselves / compete with others
4. Do not enjoy grouped content
5. Enjoy grouped content, but want more challenging content outside that genre

These 5 categories are our “core elements” for Solo-Endgame Content. Throughout the document, I will reference these core elements several times. These are extremely important as they are the reasons for this content. Now, we understand the benefits of solo-queue content and how that differs from but has led to Solo-Endgame Content.

Furthermore, we found SEC to be a genre of content that provides numerous benefits to the WoW Community. Think of the discovery process of solo-queue content expanding to Solo-Endgame Content as discovery process of going cave-diving, where you find a narrow tunnel that opens up into its own massive cavern.

However, we need to dive a little deeper and breakdown this content into its material building blocks. Within these next sections, I will breakdown the strengths and weaknesses of the Proving Grounds, Mage Tower, Horrific Visions, and Torghast. This will NOT be all encompassing as we do not have the time to go to that level. Additionally, many of these points will be major points, and will not go to the depth of, “The Blood DK’s Mage Tower was easier, because of spells X,Y,Z.” This would derail us into a class balance conversation which I would like to avoid for now.

Proving Grounds Strengths

Soloability. The Proving Grounds from Warlords of Draenor was Blizzard’s first real attempt at Solo-Endgame Content. So, I am not going to critique much here, but rather point key features.

However, I would like to provide a little bit of development insight: designers, engineers, and developers rarely successfully release their first product with many features. The first reason is that the risk is too high. They cannot be expected to invest extremely heavily into something that has not had a chance to prove its worth. Furthermore, if a product is released with a million features and fails, then it becomes difficult to assess the root cause of the failure. Did the product fail because there is no interest? Or did design creep skew so heavily into product features that the core elements where forgotten? So, for the Proving Grounds, it was just nice to see the introduction of content that you could play on your own.

Range in Difficulty. There were 4 basic reward levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Endless. It may seem obvious to some, but it is important to highlight things done correctly and understand what made them correct. The idea here is to establish a level of interest in the content initially. Blasting a novice player with expert level mechanics, doesn’t allow them to process where their failure comes from. More importantly, if a player cannot envision themselves as successful, then they will not spend their time on that content. I think the Endless design inclusion to be the most interesting, because it feeds into the concept we talked about earlier - that many people like to challenge themselves.

Proving Grounds Weaknesses

Balance. I am not going to go into much detail here. It was Blizzard’s first iteration of this content, and the class-to-class details would be more derailing. However, it is worth mentioning that there were some balancing issues.

Variety. There wasn’t much change in scenery here. Same arena with more and more difficult waves. Again, I not going to say much here, except to point it out.

Slight Requirement. This one is extremely important, and something we will review again with Torghast. There was a requirement to get Silver to be able to queue into LFG Heroic dungeons. This immediately changed the dynamic of the Proving Grounds for many players as it reduced it down to simply a hurdle to get through. Not for all, but for many players this changes the objective from, “How do I get better?” to “How do I get done?”. In other words, what is the least I can do to check this box so that I can play what I really want to play?

Now, there is a whole argument to be had here regarding whether or not there should be skillset thresholds to gain access to certain content. Let’s skip that today. The important part today is not whether or not it was correct, but rather that it existed here, and it changed the goal of the Proving Grounds for many people.

Rewards. Outside of the achievements, there wasn’t much of anything. So, yeah, you could push yourself as much as you wanted, but there wasn’t anything in game that said you were the best Monk tank on your server. There was no transmog to showcase your achievements. So, combining that with the requirements, if players did not develop an interest in this content on their way to Silver achievements, then there was no reason to come back.

Mage Tower Strengths

RNG Dependence. Having the BiS Legendary could be the difference of 20 – 30 ilevels assuming the same skillset. So, there was a bit of an RNG game here, but it wasn’t in the instance itself unless you are referring to fight mechanic timing or something along those lines. I place this as a strength, because class, spec, and Mage Tower balance wasn’t perfect, and this RNG element has a way of evening out that balance. We will come back this topic, but for now it is an introduction to the Law of Averages.

This concept could be a good thing as it may provide more incentivization to participate in endgame content, picking up a legendary or simply gearing up a bit more. In other words, if you didn’t have enough skill, then you could potentially make up for it with a little luck or progression in other parts of the game.

Rewards. The Mage Tower presented a challenge that was different for each spec of a class, and for each of these 36 specs, there was a transmog reward (that also functioned as a steppingstone to get 3 additional color variations). Due to the difficulty of the content and the uniqueness of the rewards, these transmogs provided massive motivation for players to continue trying their hand at the content.

Short-Term Repeatability. For the most part (healers may disagree), the Mage Towers were pretty quick. Even quicker if you failed. On the surface this sounds like a bit of a joke, but the fact that you could quickly fail and get right back in for another attempt cannot be overstated. It is critically important that failure be separated from success without punishing a player. For most people, simply failing is punishing enough, but if you tack on the loss of 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, or 150 minutes for each failure, then players will begin to reassess the value of participation as a whole. So, here, the quick death and repeat worked out well.

Soloability. If there was anything I could say in my quest to acquire all 36 appearances, then it would be that the Mage Tower forced me to learn how to play that class and spec. I was able to fail and fail and fail in my own little corner of the game without the fear of bringing down my raid or dungeon team. Sure, I could blame a million different things like not having my legendary, bad RNG placement, cooldown timing, or just not geared enough. However, there was no escaping the fact that my failure was mine and mine alone. This forced me to learn how play my class.

No Requirement. One of the best aspects of the Mage Tower, is that you could spend an entire weekend working on it, or you could do a couple runs while waiting for people to get online. Or you could even ignore it entirely. Regardless of your Mage Tower progression, it had no impact to your endgame progression (unless, of course, you were part of a team that required Mage Tower success, but that is more of subsection of community stipulations and requirements).

Mage Tower Weaknesses

Difficulty. So, the Mage Tower was the first iteration of very difficult solo content for each spec. This alone is something worth noting as it was new at the time. However, there was only 1 level of difficulty, and it was a challenge. As you geared up or lucked out with the right Legendary, it became easier, but still for the majority of the playerbase, it was a challenge. So, the weakness here is not the difficulty, but rather this was the ONLY difficulty.

Long-term Repeatability. This may differ from person to person, but I think a large portion of the playerbase enjoys having the game tell them, “Good job. There are no more rewards here. Go do something else.” And I think there is another portion of the community that enjoy the freedom of doing whatever they enjoy over and over until they get an absolutely perfect score or whatever the equivalent may be. I tend to find myself in the second group. I prefer soft caps to my content – these soft caps mean that you will still benefit from doing this activity at a continuously reduced level, if not on a character level, then at least an account level.

Balance. For those who have spent any amount of time in the Mage Towers, they are difficult, but not equally difficult. While to some this difference will be negligible, to others it will be frustrating. There is no solution for now (that will come later), but it is simply important to note that the Paladin, Druid, DH, and DK tanks were very different experiences each with its own strength and weaknesses. This is especially true between different Mage Towers. Thwarting the Twins and Feltotem’s Fall were not the same difficulty. You have heard about the imbalance for a long time now, so I won’t spend a lot of time here. The important thing is that we just acknowledge there existed an uneven playing field.

Grouping. The Mage Tower didn’t have a grouping element to it. Which, sure, it’s kinda hard to justify rewarding a Frost Death Knight his weapons while he was teamed up with a Disc Priest. However, there wasn’t a mode available to group with others - even without a reward. This could have been something fun to do between friends and guildies, or just a good teaching tool from one player to another. This didn’t really impact the success of the Mage Tower, but I think it would have been a nice option for some.

Little Variety. I hesitate to place this as a weakness, because I know some people actually prefer it to be the same each time. This allows players to learn and develop that muscle-memory for the encounter. Again, these are not necessarily my words, but it will make sense why I am bringing up everyone else’s complaint later in this post. For me, 7 different Mage Towers was fine for the 2nd iteration of SEC.

Proving Grounds to Mage Tower Development Growth
So, in summary, the Mage Tower was an excellent 2nd iteration at Solo Endgame Content! Comparing this to their first iteration, it provided growth in the genre by:

1. Removing Requirements
2. Provided 36 Spec-Specific Rewards
3. High Short-Term Repeatability
4. Increased Variety of Gameplay

Right now, we only have two large data points, but it is worth mentioning that the core elements (again, the reasons for the content) where built on even further than Proving Grounds. Not only did we have challenging solo content, but it also provided incentives for player growth through rewards and improved repeatability. Now, let’s move to the next iteration of the SEC – the Horrific Visions from Battle for Azeroth.

Horrific Vision Strengths

Soloability. I am going to pick up with the Mage Tower weaknesses first, because I think it is important (and interesting) to see what the developers learned from the previous iterations. First, you could now queue up with your friends and/or guildies! While I think it is important to provide Solo-Endgame Content for the individual player, I think that this content should have a version where players can team up together.

Difficulty Range. There were 5 difficulty levels. I don’t want to make this a long point, but I think it worth noting that the barrier to entry was reduced. Therefore, the incremental progression increasing from one difficulty to the next allowed for many players to perceive their success where they otherwise would not have.

Variety. So, if you remember the Proving Grounds weakness of no variety, you will notice that we went from 7 Mage Towers to 2 Visions. However, there was an enormous amount of variety within the encounters. You could choose to do some wings over others. You could choose to skip wings entirely. And of course, you could skip mobs if that helped you as well. Likewise, there were different affixes / curses depending on the week that you went into the instance. In short, the same instance could change depending on the difficulty level, buffs and debuffs, the route, and the mobs you encountered.

Long-term Repeatability. Depending on what you were there for, you could do this once and be done. However, if you wanted some extra chances at currencies and gear procced with corruption, then it was something you could continue doing. Now, this where the conversation gets grey with opinion. Does adding a gear reward make this content an obligated requirement each week? Maybe. For the best gear, you were likely doing Mythic+ and raids, but this was something on the side if you wanted to try. However, at the end of the day, if you really enjoyed Visions, there could be a decent reward that gave your character a little growth. If it wasn’t great, then maybe you still had fun, and there is always next week.

Partial Success Rewards. So, the Visions could definitely take a little bit of time, but as long as you hit certain thresholds, you knew that you had a reward waiting on you. Obviously, if you didn’t get the big guy at the end, you were not going to get the big reward. Welcome to gaming. However, if you were successful along the way, you had something waiting for you at the end. This will be important later.

Horrific Vision Talent Tree. So, this one may divide some of us a bit, because I know many players did not like the Titanic Research Archive, which used a currency to give you more powers as you progressed through the Horrific Visions.

The reason I like these talent trees in general is because they provide a character with growth with respect to the specific content. Typically, this is achieved by successfully (or at least partially successfully) participating in said content. Think of it as powering up without gear. So, if you cleared a Vision, but didn’t care for the loot at the end, you still picked up currency that could be used in the talent tree. Ultimately, this made you more powerful in that instance – again without a gear upgrade.

Horrific Vision Weaknesses

Cost of Entry. This sucked. So, in short the way this worked is that you needed a currency to purchase another currency to gain access to Horrific Visions. However, these were limited to the amount you could get per week – due to the content that would provide them. So, they became a limited resource – which immediately makes them worth more to the player. So, you might be asking, “Well, sure, it sucks to be limited in your number of attempts, but is it really that bad?”.

Yes, the Mage Tower had a cost to entry that was extremely low (I can’t remember if they removing that). However, because there was so little cost, it encouraged more and more attempts. Think of it this way, if you have enough currency for 1,000 attempts per week, you would probably be more willing to participate in the content. Perhaps, you need to kill 15 – 20 minutes before the raid that night or friends signing on. Or despite not having all your buffs, you may decide to try a few attempts. However, if you only had enough currency for 5 attempts per week, you would likely wait to strategically and statistically give yourself the best odds of success right? In other words, it introduced a fear of failure element to the gameplay that actually causes players self-govern themselves to the point they are hesitant to participate.

Let’s stop for a moment. I am talking from the perspective of the average, casual player. If you are one of those who are very skilled in whatever genre you focus on, then this may not be relatable. Just view this section as the insight of an average player.

Continuing, when it came to Horrific Visions, you could ‘scale’ your difficulty from 1 to 5. So, what did this do? Naturally, players were going to progress more cautiously, because if they were too ambitious, then they would end up wasting a currency for that week. This isn’t the behavior you want for solo-able content! The reason its solo content is that you are lowering the barrier to entry so that more people are willing to participate. Placing a cost of entry defeats this core element of Solo-Endgame Content.

Rewards. The rewards here are a mixed bag. There were definitely some neat things like the mount from the mailbox, some toys that dropped, or if with enough currency, there were a few things you could buy outside from a vendor. However, there wasn’t a I-took-my-class-to-the-top like reward from the Mage Tower. So, once again, we are beginning to lose the plot for this genre of content as this hurts another core element of SEC. If there is no reward for doing the most challenging of content AND there is a hard cap to the difficulty, then that is going to leave out a massive reason to return.

Balance. The class and spec balance as far as doing the content wasn’t as strong as it was with Mage Tower, but at the same time it didn’t really have to be. There were no longer rewards for each class, much less each spec, so the balance wasn’t as important. And while this makes sense on papaer, I feel like it is similar to saying, “It OK if the table isn’t balanced, because we didn’t put anything on it.”. It’s just half-baked reasoning and effort all-around.

Mage Tower to Horrific Visions Development Growth
So, where are we now? We started with the waves of mobs in the Proving Grounds, and then we used that foundation to continue expanding into the Mage Tower. And now we have improved even further with Horrific Visions by adding the following:

1. The Option of Solo or Grouped Gameplay
2. The New Range of Difficulty
3. Partial Success Rewards
4. Long-Term Repeatability
5. Variety

However, this did not come without cost. There were a few core elements of SEC that were completely negated with different features.

1. Barrier to Entry – the required Cost of Entry partially negated one of the core benefits of Solo-Endgame Content, which is to reduce the barrier to entry and allow more people access that content (obviously on a lesser difficulty).
2. Personal Challenge – The removal of high-end and specific rewards did little to motivate players to take more than one character through as well as continue pushing themselves that much further. Again, if we reference the reasons for Solo-Endgame content, we are reducing the value of two core elements of SEC.

So, now this sets us for Torghast. We now have 3 iterations of Solo-Endgame Content to build upon! However, something is amiss. Even though the cost of entry and a lack of high-end rewards are easily remedied, it foreshadows a greater problem. We have forgotten the reason for SEC, and design creep is starting to detract from the content itself.

For those that were around at the early part of Shadowlands, try to remember back when most interviewers and posts were saying the same thing after the release of the Twisting Corridors: We want a reason to go back! It sounds weird now, but there was a moment in time where this existed.

Torghast Strengths

Anima Powers. This is one my favorite mechanics in the entirety of WoW. I know some people didn’t care for the RNG factor of them, and I will touch on that later. However, I found that the anima powers were so diverse and fun to discover, learn and, build with. Even the stacking of passive spells gave me the chance to play my class in a completely different way. Through the acquisition, reading, and stacking of Anima Powers, my understanding of each class greatly improved after each run. The seemingly randomness of which Anima Power you were offered and how they stacked without limit, made it like I was playing an entirely different game within WoW.

Now, a few things here. First, there were some Anima Powers that did, in fact, have a stack limit that was NOT told in the UI. This was a stupid oversight – as it completely wastes an Anima Power choice, and the player is none-the-wiser until they look up information later on a third party site. These Anima Powers should have stopped dropping after the limit and explicitly told the user that they have already hit their cap. Many people lost many Anima Powers and wasted a lot of time due to this.

Second, for me personally, I noticed later in the expansion that there was a lot more ‘controlling’ of the Anima Powers (which I am assuming was for balancing purposes). However, this partially took the charm away from the Anima Powers, and ultimately Torghast, for me. I can understand some RNG control, because you don’t want people having billions of health, but they can only generate 2 DPS. However, if there was a chance that I was going to get a bad roll of Anima Powers, then supposedly there was a chance I was going to get the stars to align with ridiculous amounts of power. And that was one of the most enticing elements of Torghast – there was unlimited potential (or at least it felt that way).

Third, regarding teaching a player how to play their class, the Anima Powers were genius in and of themselves. For those who have experienced failing in the Mage Tower or the Horrific Vision and trying to learn where you went wrong, you will understand that it can be so time consuming and/or frustrating trying root out where your failure is coming from. The Anima Powers made the learning process 100x easier as they intuitively cause you to reassess your spell rotation and/or passive spell build-up. In all my time playing World of Warcraft, I found the 100+ stacking of Anima Powers in Twisting Corridors to be the most fun I have ever had in WoW.

I want to introduce a topic we will cover again with the Twisting Corridors, but there is something immensely fun about seeing your character grow from your everyday-run-of-the-mill stick swinger to a god over the course of 30 minutes to 3 hours! It was truly addicting to know that the next mob you killed could get your one step closer to that level.

Soloability. I won’t go too far into detail here, but, in short, you could solo queue for this content. Now, depending on who you talked to, there was definitely a preference for the playstyle per class of some Anima Powers over others. Some classes frolicked where other classes tread – especially with different boss types. However, the ability to queue and push yourself, learn, readjust your gameplay was still nice to have.

Difficulty Range. The range in difficulty continued to expand, which is a good thing. The barrier to entry was low, and the difficulty was scaled up significantly with many levels of Layers in between. The blessings and the curses were also a nice concept that was introduced at later levels. All-in-all, I think the continuously expanding range of difficulties from the Mage Tower to Torghast has been a fantastic call by the development team! This is one of those decisions that is so easy to shoot-from-the-hip and get wrong.

Variety. Within Torghast there were definitely some consistencies from one wing to the next, but you have to admit there was decent amount of variety in the floor plans (or map layout), types of enemies, types of bosses, types of blessings, types of curses, anima powers, rares, and which mobs you decided to kill. Did it all fall under the more depressing aesthetic of Torghast? Yeah, but again, you definitely can see the growth within the developer’s scope and range, right? From one linear path in the Mage Tower to several pathways in Horrific Visions to now rotating laying outs from one floor to the next from one wing to the next. Even more so when you consider the Twisting Corridors and Jailer’s Gauntlet variations of gameplay. There is a ton of growth here!

Law of Averages. So, earlier my discussion of RNG and Balance in the Mage Tower section, I mentioned that we were looking at the initial development of the Law of Averages. When it comes to balancing an entire encounter from one class to another or spec to another, there are incredible amount of factors to consider. For example, let’s list breakdown factors and a range of each factor that contributes to the difficulty of an entire Layer:

1. Good, medium, and poor Anima Powers
2. Easy, moderate, and difficult floors
3. Easy, moderate, and difficult bosses
4. Easy, moderate, and difficult mobs

I always considered the instance difficulty recommendation (ilvls of a character) to be balanced around what the player would experience with mediuml Anima Powers, moderate floors, bosses, and mobs. For example, if you had a floor with easy mobs then it was offset with a low number of Anima Powers or a difficult boss. However, this is grossly oversimplified, so let’s just add a little more complexity.

So, any one of these could have 20 different ranges of difficulty within them. So let’s just pick for the sake of example, Anima Powers (assuming a simplistic breakdown of good, medium, and poor):

1. Offensive Anima Powers
2. Defensive Anima Powers
3. Movement Speed Anima Powers
4. Utility Anima Powers
5. Active Spell Anima Powers
6. Passive Spell Anima Powers
7. Universal Anima Powers
8. Covenant Spell Anima Powers
9. Rare-Mob Spell Anima Powers

So, even within the idea of good, medium, and poor Anima Powers, this could be comprised of 30+ subcategories of balancing. Also, you couldn’t have a universal template or layout of Anima Powers, because what is good, medium, and poor Anima Powers would change from one class to another. If you pick up extra Stamina with a Hunter is a very different experience than with a Monk. Furthermore, if you picked up a lot of offensive Anima Powers, then you would hope to get a decent balance of defensive Anima Powers. Otherwise, you end up being a glass cannon.

This Law of Averages concept would then continue to compound from one floor to the next. For example, if Floor 1 had an abnormally high amount of Anima Powers, then Floor 4 would contain lower-than-normal amount of Anima Powers. Or if you had poor Anima Powers on Floor 1, then maybe you would make up for that over the course of the next few Floors. In short, the balance of difficulty for a Layer came from what you would expect if everything was at averaged out to be moderate/neutral per level.

So, why is this relevant? Well, if we go back to the Mage Tower, your difficulty was set in stone. The only way to find success without increasing your skill was to either gear up or hope for a lucky legendary. However, with Torghast, the range of Anima Powers, floors, bosses, and mobs allowed for RNG to push you past that skillset threshold marker. In other words, with a little bit of luck, you could find further success with the same skillset.

Now, just like with any RNG in WoW, there is a dark side of the moon where there is no bad luck protection. So, you could experience difficult floors, bosses, and mobs all while picking up poor Anima Powers. Of course, I don’t know the parameters that are set for those things, but I didn’t experience that level of bad luck too often – at least not until the Jailer’s Gauntlet. However, there was a solution to this we will cover in the Vendor section.

So, conceptually speaking, I give the Law of Averages application a pass. I think it was very cleverly done, and I would love to see what the developers could do in the future with all their lessons learned regarding the Law of Averages. It is an interesting way to balance out the perpetual imbalances that come from 13 classes and 38 specs.

Vendors. I love the fact that there are vendors within Torghast. They eventually added transmogs that could be purchased from them, so it was something to look forward to during and after the run. However, the most important reason for the vendors is that they offer some degree of bad luck protection.

So, if you had poor luck with Anima Powers, then you may be able to offset that a bit with the Anima Powers offered from the vendor. Now, if you were really unlucky and there was nothing good there either, then it could make for a rough run. However, through the talent tree you could complete research where more items appeared on the vendors such that this scenario didn’t occur as much. The utilization of vendors as bad luck protection could use some more improvements, but I thought it was a great decision to include them!

One thing I would make note of here, is going back to the vendors selling transmogs. This is a good thing! I like the fact that there was a reason to keep participating in Torghast! However, the difficulty of these transmogs is the RNG of appearing on the vendors. That should have been where it ended. For example, if you talked to a vendor and there were no transmogs, not a big deal. Maybe you will see it on the next vendor.

However, if you did happen to see the transmog, you then had to hope you had enough Phantasma to purchase it with the same currency used to buy Anima Powers. Again, with the same currency used to buy Anima Powers! In other words, you needed to be careful spending Phantasma to improve your run, because purchasing an Anima Power from the first vendor could rob of the chance to buy a transmog on the second vendor.

This is nothing more than swinging the bat of Choices-Make-For-Fun-Gameplay in the dark, hoping to strike fun. If RNG is going to be the game, then allow the vendor to freely give the transmog (or purchasable with gold). This type of decision-making paradox typically results in, “I am not going to spend my Phantasma just in case there is a transmog on the 2nd vendor, making me less powerful and my run longer, but in reality, I am likely just going to complete the Layer with 800+ Phantasma.” That wasn’t fun.

Rewards. Spoiler alert, rewards will also be in the weakness section, but it is important to see what was done correctly. I would imagine that over the course of an expansion, the development team have a lot of items that just don’t make the cut into dungeons, raids, and PvP with respect to weapons and armor transmogs. As large as WoW is, I would not be surprised to learn that there are more things that were never put into the game than the number of items that have made it into WoW.

For the random pieces that may or may not match Tier sets, what better place to put all that random gear than into a solo encounter like Torghast! I had hoped they would continue adding more than just a bunch of shoulder slot transmogs. It would have been neat to see this extend to the other armor slots. However, I think by this point, the overall opinion of Torghast was starting to turn sour and adding to it was coming into question.

Total Ability Usage. Initially, this one may come across as a little odd, but throughout our normal day-to-day gameplay, raids, Mythic+ content, you are severely limited on your CC usage. You can’t use a DK’s Strangulate on raid bosses and even some specific elites. You cannot continuously stagger certain stuns in PvP. You are sometimes unable to slow many bosses, elites, and rares. However, this makes sense, right? It’s challenging enough to balance 13 classes and 38 specs, so it’s simply easier for developers to remove the ability to neutralize a boss or tougher mobs. This could also potentially upset the balance of traditional roles of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 DPS, if 5 DPS were able to stagger stuns and slows on a boss.

However, it was nice to have access to all these abilities and be able to effectively use them on normal mobs, elite mobs, and bosses within Torghast. In fact, some Anima Power incentivized the usage of these types of spells and abilities. Again, it was one of the several aspects of Torghast that caused me to reevaluate my character and the different spells and abilities I could utilize.

Twisting Corridors. The Twisting Corridors was where I had the most fun in all my experience of WoW! It hasn’t been since the days of Vanilla that I needed to force myself to go to bed or turn off the game! I loved everything about it! It was so much fun experiencing all the different types of gameplay, spell rotations, ability changes, and all the power that came from having 100 – 120 Anima Powers by the time you got to the end. It felt like Blizzard said, “Hey, we removed all the governors and bumper railings off Torghast. Go have fun!”

I think this brings up an interesting question: Does everything need to be balanced with respect to everything? If the content is solo, then wouldn’t the balance just need to be between the classes? Let’s say there were class-based rewards for Layer 20 of Twisting Corridors. Sure, the class vs class balance would need to be such that the same skillset, gearing, and luck would net the same level of potential from each class. However, beyond that it would have been so much fun to compete for highest level Blood DK or Top 10% of Frost DKs.

Twisting Corridors had its weaknesses regarding length, and we will talk about that in the next section. However, in a game were everything is so controlled for the sake of being fair or for the sake of balance, it was so fun and refreshing to be able to play in a manner that made the power of your character feel unrestricted. If you were flexible and the Law of Averages was on your side, your character felt like a god in the later floors to a point where you were almost disappointed it was over on the last floor. And those are NOT just empty, place-holder words. There was real excitement for beating the Layer, but there was genuine disappointment with no option for it to continue.

Jailer’s Gauntlet. As far as mechanics go, the Jailer’s Gauntlet was the opposite of Twisting Corridors design-wise. I did find it fun, but there was definitely a gear dependency in getting through the first Floor of a Layer. If you lucked out with the right Anima Powers, then you could do it. However, it was a little more fun for me to try to take out weaker enemies in Twisting Corridors, take their Anima Powers, then hunt down the Elites, take their Anima Powers, and then finally attempt to knock out the Floor boss. I would really be interested in what the developers saw regarding numbers, feedback, and etc. concerning the Jailer’s Gauntlet vs Normal Torghast Wings vs Twisting Corridors. I do think there is potential here, but I am not sure where I would place improvements yet.

Leveling. I found the ability to level in Torghast to be really neat. Half the XP came from the daily quest you turned in after the run, so I had mixed feelings about that. Numerically speaking, Torghast was already a requirement at max level, so making it BiS or even equal speed for leveling might have been too much.

A concept that I really like from the developers was the ability to earn points for your Torghast talent tree while leveling. However, I would have liked to have seen something where successful and partially successful runs from your main would provide a Bind-on-Account (BoA) form of that currency that could jump start the alts progress.

Custom, Temporary UIs. Much of the playerbase was never aware of the fact that if you changed your spell bars around while in Torghast, and then they would return to normal once you exited Torghast. Initially, I was hesitant to change my spells around, because I would never remember how I had them initially setup. However, this single quality of life feature completely changed my willingness to explore different playstyles and rotations. I cannot emphasis enough how much this single feature improved my Torghast experience.

Torghast Weaknesses

Mandatory Requirement. If you remember back to the Mage Tower, one of the strengths that came with it was the fact it was 100% optional. In fact, it actually provided a little more incentive to gear your character up. Maybe if you couldn’t complete it, then you might not be able to get into a guild or whatever, but that is a community-based restriction. At the end of the day, not doing the Mage Tower has absolutely no impact on the content you could do.

However, for Torghast this concept was completely flipped around, and now you absolutely had to run that content over and over and over for your legendary progression. This change, in and of itself, absolutely changed everything when it came to Torghast content – and, more importantly, how the community perceived it.

Going back to the Proving Grounds, we lowered the barrier to entry to allow for easier access to difficult content, because it always takes more effort to do things as a group vs on your own. However, we forgot a very important lesson from the Proving Grounds: When you make endgame content a prerequisite for other endgame content, the prerequisite becomes a hurdle. And the only purpose of a hurdle is to get by it as quickly as possible. Therefore, the dynamic of the player shifted from, ”I am here, because I want to get this reward.” to “I have to be here, because if I am not, then I cannot excel in what I really want to do.”

So, what about all the people that wanted to go back to Torghast? Especially, with Twisting Corridors, once many people were able to complete it, they just wanted another reason to go back! That should be a testament to how much fun many (maybe even most) players initially found Torghast. However, developers mistakenly took the player’s desire to go back for more, as a free pass to make this a weekly requirement. And then the tides of opinions began to shift. It was so sad to watch a player’s mentality shift from “How can I progress further” into, “How can I get this done quickly?”

Rewards. When it came to the Mage Tower, if you failed in your attempt, then it only took a few minutes before you were back in there again. When looking at the Horrific Visions, those encounters where a little longer, but if you failed, then you would get some partial reward depending on your progression. However, with Torghast, a successful Layer took much more time (especially initially for those progressing), and there was no reward for the portion that you were able to complete successfully. If you made it 95% of the way through a Layer and died, then you get 0% of the reward.

You can allow failure to be frustrating, but you cannot make failure punishing and expect people to view it as a risk-free. When players can set their difficulty and view failure as punishing, here is what is going to happen:

1. Player sets objective to push limits and clear difficult content.
2. Player attempts to clear difficult content.
3. Player clears 95% of difficult content but fails.
4. Player fails to clear entirety of difficult content.
5. Player receives no reward.
6. Player feels time on difficult content is wasted.
7. Player refuses to try again due to risk of wasted time.
8. Player chooses to do lesser difficulty out of fear of failure.
9. Player is unchallenged in lesser difficulty.
10. Player becomes uninterested in game mechanics in lesser difficulty.
11. Player develops new objective: to clear uninteresting content quickly.
12. Player finds any impedance to completion as annoying.
13. Player finds content annoying and punishing.
14. Player now resents entirety of content and considers it a waste of time.

So, let’s take the requirement of running this content and combine it with the lack of partial reward system in Torghast. Torghast has now become a requirement to progress in core endgame content. Furthermore, should you happen to fail while trying to push yourself in this content, you receive absolutely nothing for your time and effort. It should be easy to see why content that was so well developed and constructed came to be hated by a large portion of the community.

Torghast became content that turned into a hurdle, whose reward system discouraged players to push themselves and encouraged mundane gameplay. The mundane gameplay encouraged the concept that speed and completion where the only metrics of success. Through these reinforced metrics of success, any impedance was seen as an annoyance, which then makes the content itself an annoyance. Here, an elemental core of SEC was forgotten. If we go back to who benefits the most from this type of content, then we see the metrics of success in Torghast discourage player self-developing behavior.

No Pause, No Save. So, there are many, many players who have the skillset and ability to play endgame content on a high-end level, but they are not active in those communities. They may work rotating shifts in the medical field or at the factory. They may be in half a dozen study groups as they try to progress through their semester. They may be tethered to their work phone and required to come in at any given time. They may be stay at home moms and dads with a child or 3. They may even have physical or mental conditions that prevent them from sitting for long periods of time. Whatever their reason, they cannot sit down for 3 hours at a time uninterrupted at all. In other words, for these members of the community, they may raid or do other endgame content, but their Real Life requirements prevent this.

So, when the Twisting Corridors was released, it fit the same exact mold as a raid with respect to sitting down for 3 hours. And this would have been completely fine if the developers were able to treat the floors like bosses and allow players to save their lockout for the week with respect to the Layer. Furthermore, there could have been a toy – we’ll call it Medivh’s Pocket Watch – that allowed you to freeze time at any time out of combat within any of the Torghast wings. This would freeze everything from your character movement to mob movement to your cooldown timers. These two changes alone would have made Twisting Corridors feasible for many at the very least.

However, that didn’t happen, because another elemental core of Solo-Endgame Content was forgotten – once again, the target audience. Those who are able to spend 3+ hours at a time doing challenging endgame content are already doing so via raiding and Mythic+ content.

Pseudo-Timer. At some point in development, it seemed like there was going to be some sort of integration of a timer in Torghast. My question is why would that be your first card to pull for “additional features”? Timers are the entire premise for the Mythic+ content and much of the raiding content. Why would you even consider this as a scoring metric for this type of content when literally half of the endgame progression content centers around beating an overall timer or rage timer. To the developer’s credit, they backed off this a little bit, but there were still timed metrics in the wing scoring which resulted in odd and unnatural playstyles. For example, you use your Empowered ability toward the end of the boss’s health, so that you can use it clear more pots and trash on the next floor.

Torghast should have been content that centered around, “How far can you push yourself?” We already have timed content – it’s everywhere. What about something along the lines of an Infinite Corridors where you see how many floors you complete on a Layer, or maybe keep the number of floors the same but make the Layers infinite. The point here is that, once again, the target audience is left with another version of the same – Time based challenging content. It’s just within Torghast you could do it on your own with the risk of no reward.

Loss of Control Mechanics. Stuns, blinds, fears, and polymorphs are 1-dimensional gameplay designs that have become archaic defaults for unimaginative gaming mechanics – especially for Solo-Endgame Content.

If a player is feared, then their spells and abilities should be scrambled and blacked out with all directional controls swapped. These means if your are feared in Torghast, and you press a spell, you have no idea what it does for that time duration. These means you would end up panic pressing – you know, as if you were feared. For blind, the mechanic is already in Torghast – total blackout – perhaps where you cannot tell friend from foe. If you are polymorphed, then you run around with three abilities as if you were a Battle Pet. Of course, there would be need to breaking of addons that tried to circumnavigate this mechanic, but that would be a conversation for another time.

There is so much more opportunity for engaging gameplay, rather than, “You have lost control of your character, you can now resort to spectator mode until your health hits zero.” And we haven’t even gotten to the worst design I have ever seen. The entire premise of Torghast should have been to push your limits and see how far you can go, right?

Well, let me introduce Thanatophobia: When brought below 40% of your maximum health, you are horrified for 3 seconds. In what game would you ever consider this fun? Where is the fun in every 2 minutes if you hit 40% health, you roll the dice to see if you lives or dies in the next 3 seconds. What is the difference between that and the hypothetical spell Super-Thanatophobia, where if you get down to 70%, you are instantly disconnected from WoW and you have to try and log back in before you die? But good news, it can only happen once every 10 minutes!

It was the inclusion of mechanics like Thanatophobia that served as an indicator that we have lost complete control over design creep with no orientation towards our 5 core elements for this type of content.

Torghast Summary

So, that brings us to now. The developers have grown by leaps and bounds when it comes to the development of this Solo-Endgame Content! I mentioned it earlier, but I will say it again here. I have never had so much fun in WoW as I did running through Torghast, and especially the Twisting Corridors! It is a travesty that so much time, thought, and effort was so quickly undermined by a few decisions. So, having written this I am not too surprised that we do not have any SEC currently. It seems we have forgotten the reason for this content to begin with.

Let’s just think about how much the Solo-Endgame Content has grown and developed over the years! We went from just the WoD arenas of just dealing with waves and waves of mobs to Torghast with 10+ different floors with dozens of different mobs infused with buff enriching gameplay that changes from one run to another. The Solo-Endgame Content has definitely improved over the years, and the quality is at the highest it has ever been. There is no question here.

However, little by little, we lost the purpose of this content. We forgot who this content is primarily for, and what makes this type of content fun for this audience. We stripped the high-end class and spec rewards from the content and replaced them generic mounts and achievements. We punished the player base for failure, resulting timid character growth. We added mechanics that measured success with respect to time as if the game wasn’t full of that content already. And then we made the content a hurdle to access other content resulting in players treating it as an impedance.

As developers you have gone from a Ford Model T to Ford Mustang in 8 years, which I have all the respect in the world for. And I truly mean that. The growth between Proving Grounds and Torghast is absolutely insane. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion when players are angry their Mustang is stuck in the mud. You made a better product, but the player base wasn’t just looking for speed. They needed a vehicle that allows them to explore their character on their own. You’ve made an amazing product that just got stuck in the mud.

System Design Feedback. As a developer, designer, engineer, architect, or any other creator of products, it can be absolutely crushing to have someone hate what you poured your heart into. I am sure it is absolutely infuriating when you are trying to balance seemingly 100 input factors, only to get a response of, “This is bad. Do better.” However, I would like to break down System Design Feedback.

It’s easier to provide an example of System Design first, then we will define it, and then we will explain how to incorporate that into user feedback. So, let’s say you are driving your vehicle, and you need to adjust the temperature. So, while still sitting upright, watching the road, and only using the motion of your arm, you adjust the controller. You didn’t even need to take your eyes off the road, since the temperature adjuster could be seen in your peripheral vision. And once you touched the adjuster, your Heads-up Display (HuD) showed the numerical value of the temperature on your windshield. This feels good. This is good system design. The user / consumer typically doesn’t know how to put this into words, and many times somewhat correctly describes it as quality. However, this system design is the culmination of direct and indirect effects of intuitive design of individual components or systems.

So, why am I taking 3 paragraphs to explain this? Well, if go back to our example of the temperature adjuster, let’s replace it with a touch screen. Now, depending on the software, the user needs to take their eyes off the road to navigate the menu to gain access to the temperature operations. Additionally, from this menu, you can control the air flow for each individual vents in the vehicle. So, we have more features than the previous example, but it is taking us 10x longer to make the same changes – and our eyes are not on the road. You now have a user that is more anxious and a lot more dangerous. Then they accidentally press the wrong part of the touch screen, and 100% of the air flow is coming out of the rear, passenger vent. Then, the user just yells out, “What a piece of junk!”

Due to poor system design, the user, despite having more options and better controls, hates the entire system and potentially wants to sell the car (a larger system) itself. This is what happens in WoW too! People say, “This is so bad.” because they are unable to consciously breakdown the details of why something is frustrating. So, when we talk about Torghast, yes, it is important to listen feedback. However, it is equally important to separate the root cause of the frustration from the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, when we look back at Torghast, there were a million complaints, each one a different straw that broken a different camel’s back. However, the root cause for a lot of this frustration comes from the fact that people wanted to be playing in a different part of the game, but felt obligated to be in Torghast. So, the vast majority of the feedback from the community focused on how to get out of Torghast sooner – and not how to make Torghast better.

A Review of Lessons Learned

Purpose of Solo-Endgame Content (SEC). Over the years, the playerbase and developers have had a lot of experience with this content. Many of the decisions that were made were largely successful, and there were others that didn’t turn out so well. This is all part of the natural learning process, and the best we can do is take the lessons we have learned from the mistakes we have made and apply them to our next endeavor!

Now, sometimes during this learning curve, a person gets so caught up in the moment of testing new ideas that they lose total sight of their original objective. For example, why even present some sort of SEC form of gameplay (in no specific order)?

1. It is to provide people with a fun environment in which to continue to sharpen their skills, without the harsh criticism of others.
2. It is to provide a means for people to showcase their prowess mastering their class and dominating the content with unique rewards, perhaps even competing with others.
3. It is to provide an outlet for those who may not be able to dedicate an entire afternoon’s worth of time in one day with a chance to play something competitively.
4. It is to provide an avenue to challenging content for those who may not enjoy grouped content.
5. It is to provide just another form challenging content for anyone to enjoy.

We have re-established our 5 core elements of purpose for this content. Now, we need a guideline of limitations to give us our boundaries to keep the design creep in check. This guideline should prevent the inclusion of “features” that do not belong in the content. So, let’s go back to the very, very basics of solo gaming. We need a list of parameters that define the limitations throughout the development of content.

1. Core Rule of Solo Gaming I. Unless the game is paused or the core gameplay has ended, there should not exist a point in time where a player who continues to actively participate should net the same result of a player who no longer actively participates.
2. Core Rule of Solo Gaming II. A player’s loss or failure in a game should be designed to stimulate exploration, reinforce resolve, and inspire continued attempts. Additionally, this failure should never cause the player to reassess the value of what they do with respect to time.
3. Core Rule of Solo Gaming III. A low barrier to entry will result in participation of novices and masters of a game alike. Novice and intermediate players will still fail, but they are likely to perceive their success as possible. A high barrier to entry will result in novices and intermediates unable to envision their success, and they will consider continued efforts as waste of time.

If we look at the first rule, then another way to say this is that if you are actively participating, then your results should always be better than if you simply stopped playing altogether. A good example of this can be found in the Torghast Weaknesses section under Loss of Control Mechanics. At no point should loss of control mechanics utilized in solo gameplay.

The second rule centers around losing in a game. There will always be winners and losers in a PvP match. So, a good design would provide a motivation for winning, while encouraging continued participation for those who lost. For example, there is a PvP quest that requires participants to win 4 battlegrounds. Players who are participating to complete this quest are not in the battlegrounds to participate or even win. Winning just happens to be a requirement for the quest completion. Therefore, when the outlook of a game appears to be a loss, they leave.

Then the next person who is in queue for BGs is placed into a losing battleground. If this person also happens to be on the same quest, they must decide to either (1) endure the loss and hope they don’t queue into another losing game or (2) leave like the person before them. Now, you have two people with the Deserter debuff that are just going to do the same thing in 30 minutes or maybe tomorrow. All this nonsense, rather than just allowing for partial progress in the form of honor kills, honor, and/or corpse looted items.

In other words, if the objective is to kill ‘X’ number of players or gain ‘Y’ amount of honor, then that changes the likelihood of them remaining until the end of the game. However, for the quest requiring 4-wins, if the player loses, then they make 0% progress regardless of their time investment. The same thing is true when it comes to any other part of the game, people would rather not play than feel they are wasting their time. This is extremely important as each attempt in the Twisting Corridors is a 3-hour gamble hoping that their skillset and the Law of Averages works in their favor. Many people that could try, chose not to.

The final rule outlines the majority of any playerbase of any game – novices and intermediates. While it is important that there be difficult content for any genre of content, there must be a ground-level starting point. This is obvious when we reference the difficulty of raids or dungeons – the easier content can be queued for.

However, there are other barriers outside of difficulty levels. There are pre-requisite requirements, such as a short or long series of quests to gain access a specific piece of content. There are costs such as the Horrific Visions requiring a currency that took varying amount of time to acquire (depending on player knowledge, skill, and efficiency). The more of these barriers preventing players from participating, the less people will be willing to even attempt it.

Necessary Features
So, we have 8 years of SEC to dig through and determine what makes the most sense to keep. I will keep most of these short, since many of them have more detailed summaries in earlier paragraphs. Also, keep in mind, that the previous sections of the strengths and weaknesses was NOT all-encompassing, so this will only be a partial list at best.

Soloable and Grouping. Solo-Endgame Content is pretty much the entire point of the post, so soloability is listed. However, it should be noted that grouping for this content should also be available.

No Cost of Entry. This one is also a lesson learned that comes from Horrific Visions. Players should be able to queue whenever they want. Let their skill, gear, determination, and luck decide the level of their success.

Ability to Save or Pause Progress. This one was a costly lesson, so let’s not forgot to include the capability of saving some sort of progress over the course of the week. Additionally, having some sort of ability or item to freeze time indefinitely should be included in the new SEC.

Range of Difficulty. This seems to have been something that has progressed nicely over the iterations of SEC, and it should continue.

Not a Requirement. I can already tell some developers will not like this one. 95% participation in content that is mandatory will always look better than 50% participation of optional content to the clueless reader – and of those, there are many in leadership positions. Sometimes, as an associate, it is easier to present what the boss wants to see and let them figure out the fallout, than it is to explain why something is doing well despite a seemingly low metric.

However, burnout within the WoW community is not easily recovered from, and I would highly recommend allowing the next iteration of Solo-Endgame Content to be free from the risk of becoming a hurdle for other content. Sure, load the SEC up with a crazy amounts of rewards and trophies, but do not allow it to impede progress in other endgame content.

Talent Tree. Now many players do not understand that talent trees are NOT time gates. One more time: Talent trees for zones and instances are NOT time gates. The rate of acquisition of talent tree currency is where the time gate exists.

The talent tree, itself, is a method for your character to become more powerful within the content they are participating – even if they are not gearing up. The talent tree should also have account-wide progression.

Repeatability. This is something that is much more easily said than done. There are so many factors that contribute to repeatability. However, I will only focus on the immediate, direct, and larger factors.

1. Duration. As mentioned earlier, for longer adventures, there should be mechanics set up for saving progress and/or pausing gameplay. The duration of the instance must fall somewhere between progression feeling like an achievement, but regression isn’t demotivating to the player.
2. Massive Variety. From the Mage Tower to Horrific Visions to Torghast the variety within the gameplay has continuously improved, and I highly recommend continuing with this.
3. Partial Progress Rewards. WoW is a massive game comprised of many design systems (or mini-games if you want to think of it that way). Long gone are the days content being fun the only requirement for successful content. In a game where each genre of content is competing for a player’s time with rewards, if a player finds their time at risked of being wasted, then they would avoid said content. Not providing some degree of partial progression or the feeling of partial progression is to doom that content. The game will cannibalize it.
4. Alt-Catchup and/or Account-Wide Progress. Our community, the WoW community as a whole, has changed over the years. It was once a bragging right to be able to say you took 2 or 3 characters that ran the entire unmitigated gauntlet of leveling up, gearing up, and becoming a part of endgame progression. Many people simply don’t care to do that anymore, and they would rather not play. SEC is one of those things that is fun and exciting your first time through, because you are gaining new powers and learning new things as your progress. But starting from square one the second or third time feels underwhelming as you just try to get somewhere near your mains level of progression.
5. Bad Luck Protection. For those who missed my short book on Bad Luck Protection with respect to RNG drops, I will post a link here. Similarly, bad luck protection would be necessary in the same way that the Vendors are necessary in Torghast to mitigate just getting a bad hand of Anima Powers. There is almost no limit to how this could be implemented from talents on the Talent Tree to vendors to bonus levels.

Foundation for Expansion. One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses with WoW is the cycled routine of progressing a character and repeating the process when a new patch comes out. This is even more significant when it comes to a new expansion. This cycled routine is vitally important for the life of WoW, but, unfortunately, this means many well-built systems are abandoned for new projects. For the next SEC, I would like recommend laying out the foundation of the new system such that it could be carried forward and built upon in future expansions.

Contingency Plans. For those who may not be familiar with contingency plans, these are plans for a series of actions for when a ‘What if’ scenario occurs. This is one of those things that developers get better at with more experience, but even too much success can cause a product to fail if the team is not ready with a premade plan, instructing them how to respond. Contingency plans are critically important for any project, and the best plans have trigger points for activity. These tend to be time consuming, but they do pay off.

FEASIBILITY CONCEPT

Example: Epochs of Infinite
So, finally we are here. We have broken down everything as much as possible. So, let’s try to present an example that would exemplify all of our talking points so far.

It is so important that you understand that I am not pitching an idea – I am giving an example of what could be done with the 8+ years of lessons learned. The numbers, the names, and even the lore outline are all placeholders. To help illustrate the difference, in the following paragraphs I will present a formula illustrating the focal point, the purpose of the focal point, and a supporting description of how the purpose could be facilitated through the focal point.

Lore. The purpose of this section is just to give an example of a potential story for this set-up. I thought about writing out something that would be interesting regarding the story leading to this type of content. However, that isn’t the purpose today, and I am not a massive lore person myself. Also, my poor presentation of the lore may take away from the more important talking points of feasibility and features. So, I will give a rough outline of what could kick off the content just so that we can get a visual, and we will move on:

1. There is in-fighting within the Infinite Dragonflight
2. This in-fighting leads to the shattering of a time-lost artifact
3. This time-lost artifact contains the infinite Sands of Time
4. Each of these grains of sand skip through timelines like a stone over water
5. These skips through time create rifts to different timelines
6. These the timelines have infinite possibilities / combinations
7. We must go through and close these rifts / recover Sands of Time
8. Most of these rifts have a guardians that must be defeated
9. Some of the guardians are part of the Infinite Dragonflight
10. Some of the guardians are mobs of that particular timeline

Instantized Location Hub. The purpose of this section is to provide a reduction in barrier to entry. The location that houses the access to this SEC is completely instantized away from the open world. Everything you need to access for this content is in this one room - the queue font, the talent tree, the vendors, the random buffs that occur, and the Record Keeper.

Factionless Grouping. Again, we want to reduce the barrier to entry for starting this content. So, we might as well get this in now. Therefore, while in the Epochs of Infinite, let players group up regardless of faction.

Talent Tree. The purpose of the talent tree is to provide players with the opportunity to become more powerful with respect to this content without gear. Any progress you make here will cascade to all your alts. The talent tree could provide none or any of the following (not in any order here).

1. Time Lock. These is an ability to completely freeze time indefinitely regarding character and mob movement as well as spell cooldowns. Everything is frozen in place – this should allow for the player to get up if necessary.
2. Vendor Item Increase. Unlock more items on the vendors.
3. Vendor Access. Unlock access to vendors within Floors and Layers.
4. Portals. Unlock portal access from all major cities.
5. Scale Cap. Unlock a series of ilvl caps for gear to scale up to. This would also reverse the problems of the Proving Grounds and Torghast, by allowing participation within the Epochs of Infinite allows the usage of more powerful gear. For players who find their limitations come from their gear would then incentivized to participate in other endgame content.
6. The Second Hand. The purpose of this section would be repeatability. Let’s take Critical Strike, Mastery, Haste, and the rest of those stats. The first point may cost 10 currency, the second point may cost 100 currency, and the third point may cost 1,000. The idea is that regardless of your progress, participation within the content is still giving you some degree of progression.
7. The Third Hand. This would the exact same thing as The Second Hand talent, but this would apply to tertiary stats like Speed, Avoidance, and etc.
8. Auto Loot. Unlocks the ability to just focus on gameplay and automatically loot everything. By the inclusion of this talent into Torghast came from someone who truly understood how Torghast worked! This change allowed for the player to continue to be rewarded for killing mobs, but did not allow the mechanics of the game to slow them down!
9. Timesmith. This talent increases your chances of opportunity to choose your next Floor. Would you prefer the rift leading a segment of Redridge overrun with Murlocs or would you prefer resetting the Ley lines in Borean Tundra?
10. Ripple Balance. This allows you adjust your Affixes by 50%+ percent (increasing 25% for each point). Let’s say you get Thundering and Fortified as 2 Affixes, this talent would allow you to move up to 50% of one two the other. So, maybe you are a Mage, and you find you would rather have 150% Fortified and 50% Thundering – now you would be able to set that. Certain mechanics simply impact classes differently, so having the capacity to trade one for another could make of interesting gameplay.
11. Call of the Infinite. This would allow you to open a rift to another Floor to clear. One of the issues players had in Torghast was that the combination of class balance, their skillset, their gear, and the Law of Averages placed them in a scenario where they were unable to defeat the Layer boss. This could remedy those scenarios.

Vendors. The purpose of the vendors will provide players with some degree of bad luck protection and gameplay repeatability. Some vendors will provide food, buff items, transmogs, mounts, and other items. The availability of what you are eligible to purchase will NOT be unlocked by reputation, but rather by the points spent in your talent tree and/or progression. For some items, specific talents. For other items, you may need to loot something from your adventures to trade.

Record Keeper. The purpose of this section is to provide repeatability, recognize target audience, present a challenging environment, and provide developers groundwork for further development to a stronger recognition system. There could be an NPC, “war map”, or any other interface for a player to interact with that would show their ranking with respect to anything. I will go further into detail in the Recognition System section.

Queue-and-Go Gameplay. The barrier to entry should be as low as possible, so whatever city you are in, find the portal, zone into the room, click the font, and choose the variant and difficulty of where you want to go. I would likely encourage the ability to unlock a portal from each major city via a talent tree.

Layers and Floors. In this example, we can pull directly from Torghast just to keep things simple. Each Layer will be comprised of 5 - 7 Floors, and the completion of all Floors will mean the completion of that Layer. As far as the Floors, they would be roughly the same length as Torghast with respect to traveling and mob density. This will vary, of course, from Floor to Floor, but for now we have a working template. Also, if you die, you go to back to the beginning of that Floor. There are no limits as far as the number of attempts. The idea is to allow the player to keep trying until they figure out a way to succeed. Regarding the environment, we would pull from the following:

1. Outdoor Zones. Any zone from any expansion would be fair game as far as a Floor layout is concerned. Here are a few examples of where, Floors could exist:
   a. Legion Worlds. Invasion Point Worlds Aurinor, Bonich, Cen’gar, Naigtal, Sangua, Val, and perhaps any others worlds that didn’t make the Legion cut.
   b. Sub-sections of Zones. In Dun Morogh, there is a large cave or two in the zone that could be utilized as an entire Floor. Another example could be clearing pathway through the jungle villages within Stranglethorn Vale.
   c. Pandaria Scenarios. The old scenarios from Pandaria could be used or segmented as a one of the Floors for a Layer.
   d. New Content. I am sure there is content floating around in the archives that just haven’t really fit for anything, and this could be a good way to utilize that.
2. Partial Instance Wings. Any part of a dungeon or raid could be used to facilitate the challenges of a Floor. As opposed to the outdoor environments from the previous section, this allows the players to experience some of the instances, or at least portions of them.
   a. Dungeons. Many dungeons within WoW have very unique landscaping about them. For example, the portion of Underrot from after the first boss to just before the last boss could be an excellent Floor.
   b. Raids. If we go back to Molten Core, then we could start at the opening of Ragnaros’ Lair. This, in turn, could present players with the option of killing all the enemies along the circular path or go all in and attempt to cut straight to where the Floor boss is located.
   c. Wing of Torghast. There could be a timeline, where the Mantid are the dominate race in this timeline, and they are the majority of the guards suited up in the armor and weapons of the Jailer. (It may be a little soon to revisit Torghast, but the concept is still there).
3. Rotation of Mobs. The possibilities here are endless. You could have something similar to the Island Expeditions, where mobs are broken down the variety by the following:
   a. Race.
   b. Melee / Caster.
   c. Quantity / Power.
   d. Rares.
4. Floor Bosses. Again, the possibilities here are endless. You could recycle old bosses, make new bosses, and/or make old bosses into new bosses. For example, in one of the timelines, Death Wing is a Basilisk whose carapace opens up like a beetle as he flies from one location to another. Or just give him a different name and be done with it.
5. Buffs / Debuffs. I won’t go into detail here, because we have plenty of data for successful and need-to-be-worked-on affixes. However, I do think that the combination of affixes and the hypothetical talent, Ripple Balance, would provide for more unique experiences.
6. Sandbox Layouts. One of the fun elements of the Island Expeditions was the fact that you could go anywhere you wanted to gather your resources. This would be an interesting mechanic to introduce to zones that are considered ‘Outdoor’. For example, if zoning into a Floor in Elwynn Forest, the player could choose to skip 80% of the mobs and go straight for the rift guardian. Of course, they would have less Anima Powers from killing less mobs, but they would have the option to choose that if they wanted. Or maybe, conversely, they just got out of a Floor that rewarded many ‘poor’ Anima Powers, and they have the option now to kill all the mobs on this Floor for more power.
7. Floor Objectives. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how diverse the mobs or bosses are, because at the end of the day, it is all just killing anyway. However, I think this could present the opportunity for other floor objectives. For example, let’s say you land on the beaches of Borean Tundra where Ley lines have been destroyed. Here, your objective would be to rebuild a series of Ley lines by clicking on fonts throughout the zone. Once complete, a rift will open up with rewards, and you can move on to the next level. Also, there may be some temporary nooks that you may want to route the Ley lines to unlock treasures and/or Anima Powers.

Varying Difficulty Levels. This will be pretty straight-forward. There should be a very low barrier to entry for this content with a near limitless cap to the difficulty. So, difficulty here can be many different things, so the following list is a breakdown of each component:

1. Raw Difficulty. This is the obvious stuff. If you go from Layer 1 to Layer 2, then you would expect the mob HP and attack power to also increase.
2. Affixes. Getting to ridiculously high Raw Difficulty numbers is fun in its own way. However, it can begin to feel a little stale and lacking. So, this is why we have more raid boss mechanics at higher levels, and more affixes at higher level Mythic+ content. I won’t go into too much detail here, but I would like to make mention of the fact that this is not timed content. So, there could be the introduction of affixes that require more planning and strategy.
3. Special Modes. One of the missed opportunities of Torghast was the lack of limitless exploration regarding how powerful your character could become and just how far could you push the encounter’s limits. That would change here in either one of two ways or both.
   a. Infinite Layers. In this scenario, assuming we keep it at 5 - 7 Floors per Layer, allow the player to continuously access the next Layer indefinitely. The game would need to be balanced to a point, but beyond that, let’s players have fun!
   b. Infinite Floors. One of the weaknesses or strengths (depending on how you look at it) to Infinite Layers is that it will have a soft cap first the first Floors, because success on those Floors are more reliant on your gear vs the few Anima Powers you may have picked up. However, with Infinite Floors, it starts to become more of a test between the scaling of the Floors vs the stacking of your powers.

Recognition System. The purpose of this feature is to recognize the amount of progression that a character has had within WoW or a section of WoW. Yeah, we have achievements, but unless you know the release date for a raid or season of Mythic+ or PvP, it’s kinda pointless. Some people love to compare their progress to others, and it provides them a reason to keep pushing. This has been true since the days of Pacman, when people would compare their high score to the high score of others at the arcade.

So, let’s address the boundaries of comparisons. It is impossible to take 13 different class, 38 different specs, and endless multipliers, and expect things to be balanced perfectly from class to class. So, I would have a means of keeping track per class instead of across all the classes – at least for comparative purposes.

For example, maybe in game, you could see what rank you were as a Warrior within the Infinite Floors. At least here, you could see you were rank 581 out of the 157,221 warriors who have participated on this Layer.

There could also be random fun counter comparisons such as you have killed 18,312 critters across the 12,301 timelines you have come across. Perhaps, you rank 78th Critter Killer in the Epochs of Infinite. Or maybe you rank 1,452nd Murloc slayer with 5,213 murlocs slaughtered. Having a means of comparing yourself to someone else in game is 10x more valuable than needing to pull up a website to take a look. And, again, the first iteration of this doesn’t need to be all-encompassing of all stats, but it should lay the groundwork for future development.

Scaling Caps. The purpose of this section to provide a challenge to the player. In order to control the longevity of the content, there should be ilvl caps that are raised similar to how the ilvl increases for World Quest rewards. However, instead of the player’s ilvl being the determinate, the player’s progression within the talent tree sets the limit. Why?

So, here, we need to remember our purpose of this content – and it is not to gear players, especially in any way that is comparable to raiding or Mythic+. It is to provide an environment where the individual player can have access to challenging content. In addition to this, there should be rewards for completing this challenging content. So, if there are rewards involved completing a certain threshold of difficulty, then there should be some degree of balance around said difficulty – like the Mage Tower.

Unfortunately, perfect balance is impossible, and there will always be some that have an easier time than others simply due to the class they chose. So, here, we introduce Scaling Caps, a point in the talent tree, where the player can raise the limit of the cap that their gear scales to. This would incentivize the player to attempt raiding, Mythic+, or wait until the next patch to get better gear while also progressing through the Epochs of Infinite. This would give developers a little more control over the scaling of the difficulty of the content.

Naturally, over time, it would become easier and easier to get this more challenging gear as more patches are released and the ilvl cap raises as well. This is fine, as this is what happens to every other area of the game, and it would give more incentive to add more items at higher difficulties later in the expansion (and potentially into future expansions).

CONT.

[Qyune-exodar]

CONT.

(Character limit seems to be 99,000 for those who were interested)

Account Progression. The purpose of account progression is to provide repeatability. Account progression is something that will need to be mapped out (with respect amounts of various currencies and rewards) the same day as discussing contingency plans. However, all currency regarding the Epochs of Infinite and its respective talent tree should be considered account-wide progression on Day 1.

So, that means the currency acquisition rates should be something that are tailored so that someone does not exploit the system by playing multiple characters or just one character. Some of these currencies would be used for the talent tree, while others would be used to purchase items and/or buffs.

No Timer. The purpose of this section is to remember the target audience. There should be no timer for this content, since we have time-based difficulty content in almost every other aspect of the game. This content should be focused on completion. If it takes you 5 minutes or 3 hours, then that is up to you. If you are able to clear the Layer with 0 deaths or 142 deaths, then you should have that opportunity to keep trying.

Potential Evergreen Continuation. The purpose of this section is to illustrate the chance to design content that continues throughout expansions. If we continue with the concept with Scaling Caps, then the developers could potentially continue this into the next expansion. Now, just to be clear, I am not saying they should make this content stretch across several expansions. If this content was currently in the game, then we would need to look at the playerbase’s feedback first to get a feel for what is working and what is not working. However, I am saying that the framework to continue building on this system should be designed into it from Day 1.

Not A Requirement. The purpose of this section is to remember the target audience. This content should not be a requirement to play endgame content in the same way of Torghast or Proving Grounds. Naturally, there may be parts of the community that require some degree of success here in order to be a part of their team, but that is community-driven and bound to happen anyway.

Rewards. The purpose of this section is to provide the player with repeatability. The rewards here should be vast and plenty. Anything from transmogs to mounts. For perspective, the rewards pool should be 10x the size of Island Expeditions. This incentivizes the continuation of gameplay and repeated efforts.

More specifically, there should be a Class / Spec specific rewards for content cleared at certain difficulty thresholds. These are the rewards that incentivize player growth and learning. Again, there are two types of rewards for two types of players – those who need reason to play the content and those who need a goal to push themselves.

Partial Rewards. The purpose of this sections is to provide the player with repeatability. There should be partial rewards for clearing each Floor. While the attempts of the player may not be limited, they should still be reward for the time and effort of participating in the content. Naturally, the values of this reward to promote exploration and determination while simultaneously negating all exploitation.

So, let’s make an example. Let’s say you complete Floor 3 of Layer 1, but your grandma just came over, and you need to log out. So, you exit Epochs of Infinite, and you get 14 Infinite Scales and 2 Grains of Sands. The Infinite Scales can be used to purchase buff items, transmogs, mounts, and etc from the vendor. And the Grains of Sands can be used as your talent tree currency. And there might even be a chance for a grey, white, or green quality transmog. So, even though you did not finish the Layer, you still made incremental, account-wide progression.

SUMMARY

To those who were able to read to this point, seriously, thank you. It was a long read, and it took even longer to write it out, so I appreciate you. Any sort of edits that you eventually see will be me finding grammatical or formatting errors.

At the end of the day, I truly believe that despite WoW being and MMORPG where group content is dominate, there is a place for challenging Solo-Endgame Content. We have 8+ years of experience and lessons learned that has allowed the developers to build an amazing genre of content. Unfortunately, the design intent has been splintered, and design creep has been undermined the quality of the content, but this doesn’t mean that the entire system is bad. I have no doubt that if developers plan to make a 5th iteration of SEC, it will be the best we have seen so far!