Sunday, June 8, 2014

Vignette Encounters

One of the fun new things discovered in the Warlords alpha is that there will be a new kind of outdoor enemy we will come across. These guys are essentially outdoor bosses, and it looks like they can be soloed, but the main idea of them is that they will have interesting and complex mechanics that go beyond your typical mob.

One of the defining traits of WoW is that bosses have their own unique mechanics. In Vanilla, a lot of dungeon bosses, and indeed raid bosses, were basically just buffed-up versions of typical enemies, but this has evolved so that now we have some insanely complicated fights, like Horridon, or Jin'do the Godbreaker.

Out in the world, however, it's pretty rare to come across an enemy that has more than a couple abilities. Even named enemies will often be fairly simple and fall to our usual attacks without too much trouble.

Vignettes appear to be a new way of doing rare mobs, though to be clear I'm not sure if these guys will really be rare spawns.

Firstly, these vignette enemies will be elite when you first encounter them (though I think this is more about trickiness of fighting them than an actual indication of difficulty.) Defeating them (and doing so sometimes involves fighting your way through numerous additional enemies) will yield blue-quality loot specific to that encounter.

What's interesting is that supposedly, once you have defeated a Vignette enemy, you will be able to return to them and fight them again, only this time they will be non-elite.

Blizzard has stated as a goal that they want to make questing a more dynamic and enjoyable experience, and I think that little challenges like this, especially with their valuable loot, could make exploration a more rewarding experience.

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