Since all of the raid bosses are going to require 40 players of 60th level, how are you going to ramp up the challenge from lower-tier raid bosses to higher-tier ones?

One of the most powerful things a raid group can possess is knowledge. That's why we're trying to keep so much of the raid game confidential. We don't want to put a lot of this type of content in the beta, because the number one advantage you can have going into a raid is the strategy for beating it. We know that the first time people take on a raid encounter, they are going to wipe out and think it is very, very difficult. People will feel we've made it too hard, and that's with 40 people in the encounter. But a couple of weeks, if not a week, later that same group is going to be beating that raid boss with 30 people, and then 20 people by the time they ramp up in gear and discover the correct strategy.

That actually happens in every dungeon - not just the raid areas. I added Blackrock Depths to the current beta a while ago, and the testers went nuts. They said "This is the hardest dungeon ever. I can't believe how hard this is tuned. This is impossible. There is no way it can be done with a group of five."

So I posted on the forums and said, "Let me know how you feel about it in a week." Sure enough, a week later, groups of five were beating it. And now it's attacked regularly and beaten pretty easily. They'll figure it out, and I think knowledge is the best advantage that they can have. Plus, we can make higher-tiers harder just by playing with the numbers, and then players will have to ramp up in gear and resists to beat these higher challenges.

The raid content sounds great, but why not also design some for lower-level players? Why design the content to restrict raids to max or near-max level characters?

Not everybody wants to hover at 20 and let everybody catch up. So what we did to create a raid experience for those players who aren't yet max level is we took advantage of our instancing and designed some dungeons to in effect play as five-man raids. And then more than five players that are just a few levels lower than the recommended level for this dungeon can get together and attack it as a smaller raid. That's how players are turning these instances into raids.

Take Blackrock Spire and Stratholme as an example. We were capped at level 55 when these two instances were introduced. You can't really beat those dungeons with a group of five level-55 players. So the testers started hitting them with 10- and 20- and 30-person groups; they were making their own raids out of them. So designing raids specifically for lower-level players is almost something you don't need to do. As long as we make cool instances and have them play as five-person raids, players can always attack them with more lower-level characters.

So how did you arrive at the number of 40 players for a raid?

But just from previous raiding experience, I felt that the fewer people you took into a raid encounter, the more important each individual became and that's what made it fun. A smaller number also increases everybody's chance for good loot. But we also had to contend with the fact that since we are hard-capping the raid instances at 40 players (meaning no more than 40 can be in a raid), we needed a little bit of wiggle room for the bench warmer strategy that players will use.

To use Onyxia as an example, we might tune her to 35 people, meaning 40 people are going to beat her fairly easily. But if we set the hard-cap at 40 people, most guilds will inflate to such a level that not only will they have 40 people online but they will also invite several players over the limit. If you invite 40 people to your guild, the odds of all 40 being online at any one night are pretty slim. So you are going to want 50 in your guild or more. Inevitably, though, what is going to happen is that you'll have more people than can go on the raid. So we wanted a number that was low enough where individuals felt like they were contributing, yet high enough so that guilds who were already big wouldn't have to leave too many people out.

It's a number based on feel, pretty much. What do we think would feel about right? We also had to think about what's going to look good. What's going to look good in the engine when we have 40 people on screen? And it's not always going to be 40 people and one dragon. It might be 40 people and 100 silithid flying around the screen.

Whether or not we were going to hard-cap the raids was a huge debate, and made a big impact in our decision. But we felt in order to preserve the integrity of the raid encounters we had to have a hard-cap. Or else everything was just going to be trivialized. It will be a much more rewarding experience for everyone involved in the raid if they do the encounter with 40. It's a hard call to make, but I think it is the right one. We went through our progression and we ranked the raids by tiers of difficulty. Then we decided that for some tiers, we wanted to force you to progress through lower-levels to get to higher ones. However, we didn't want to force you into a linear progression through the raid game. We tried to make the progression more natural, such as requiring you to defeat a lower-tier raid boss so you can acquire the power and equipment to fight a higher-tier one.

With 40 players in a raid, it might get unwieldy trying to manage the entire group. How is the raid interface going to help?

We added a number of things to the UI because we had so many experienced raiders on the design team. We were all just chomping at the bit to design a raid interface we could use.

We color-coded everybody by class. So when you pull up the raid interface, its got the 40 slots right there. And you can see everybody color-coded by class. It makes it easy to see if the groups are balanced. You might want to put all your healing classes in one group, and the priests are all blue, so all the blues could be one group. Or maybe you want a priest in each group. Just at a glance you see if there is a blue in each group.

If you want to move people around, you can just drag and drop them between groups. If I drag your name over another player's name, it will just swap your two positions. So a raid leader can really organize the group strategically on the fly. With our raid interface, the raid leader has complete control of these things or he can promote people to assistant raid leader so they can help too. They can just invite people into the raid and quickly swap the groups around.

Creating a raid is easy. Once you have a group, you can press the "convert to raid" button and then keep adding members after that. If we had a group of five people and converted it to raid and then invited a sixth person, that person would just become the first person in group two. We could keep going until all 40 slots were filled. Then if I looked at the groups and found that we ended up with five warriors and no healer in group two, I could just drag an extra healer from another group in there and it would be done. It's really cool.

Are you happy with the implementation of raid content so far?

The raid bosses are going to be spectacular. The mid-level dungeon bosses are incredible, so we had to really raise our game when it came time to design the raid bosses. For example, there's a boss named Archaedas (he's a Stonekeeper) bringing 40 stone dwarves to life and calling 2 stone golems in the Uldaman dungeon. You can't have something cool like that at level 45 and then have Onyxia in the end-game content be anything less than amazing.

We hope players to have a lot of fun with our raids. And we want to have fun too. Sometimes we come up with crazy ideas, but rather than just saying "This is too hard," we say, "How can we make that work?" That's been the goal all along and is one of the reason why World of Warcraft is coming together so well.