‘There’s Fun In Not Knowing Exactly What’s Going to Happen’ WoW Developers On Dungeons and Raids In a Post-Addonpocalypse World
World of Warcraft: Midnight is almost here. The next expansion arrives on March 2, with early access for Epic Edition owners kicking off February 26. While fans can expect tons of new content in the update, there are also some fundamental changes to the way the release is set up. Rather than a single raid, World of Warcraft: Midnight will have three different raids at launch, and restrictions to its API have drastically impacted the amount of assistance some addons can give to players during boss encounters.
GameRant spoke to World of Warcraft associate game director Paul Kubit and lead encounter designer Dylan Barker about dungeons and raids in WoW: Midnight, and how the addon restriction and other factors have changed them. “There’s fun in novelty,” Kubit said. “There’s fun in not knowing exactly what’s going to happen, or when something unpredictable happens.” This maxim applies not only to the story of an expansion, but to all of its facets, from encounter design and enemy variety to the actual structure of content updates.
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Fewer Addons in WoW: Midnight Means More Creative Encounters
The ‘Addonpocalypse’ Lets Blizzard Stay Ahead of the Boss Battle Arms Race
As of the World of Warcraft: Midnight Pre-Expansion Update, Blizzard has restricted access to certain parts of WoW’s API, meaning certain raid addons cannot access all the data they did before. This means third-party programs like Deadly Boss Mods can no longer warn raiders of impending mechanics, nor can they provide the perfect solutions to navigate them.
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Previously, World of Warcraft struggled to create unique challenges in raids because addons would trivialize any attempts to do so. According to Barker, the most effective course of action was to “shoot at your feet with two six-shooters while you perform the coordination test,” because anything more complex would be handled by addons. Punishing one-shot mechanics and damage races were the only challenges the developers could create, as everything else would boil down to how well the raider could follow an addon’s instructions.
In Midnight, the options for encounter design have opened up dramatically, since addons cannot solve every problem for raiders. “We can now work with coordination elements in raids that are now dynamic,” Barker explained. “Every time they happen, we can assign different people to different things, and that won’t be automated like it used to be by addons.” This allows World of Warcraft to prevent bosses from becoming predictable, keep raiders on their toes, and provide a more dynamic challenge than simple DPS races and healer checks.
“Regaining the capacity to do a really cool coordination moment that asks players to talk, to ping, to think about each other, as opposed to just having an addon say ‘arrange yourselves in this predetermined pattern that I’ve figured out for you,’ that’s very exciting.”
Deeper Instanced Storytelling in World of Warcraft: Midnight
More Raids, Story Dungeons, and Keeping Things Exciting
Beyond the realm of addons, World of Warcraft is making fundamental changes to the way raids are organized as well. Instead of having one big raid at expansion launch as it did in The War Within, Dragonflight, and many expansions before, WoW: Midnight has three raids at launch:
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Voidspire
- Imperator Averzian
- Vorasius
- Fallen-King Salhadaar
- Vaelgor & Ezzorak
- Lightblinded Vanguard
- Crown of the Cosmos
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The Dreamrift
- Chimaerus the Undreamt God
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March on Quel’Danas
- Belo’ren, Child of Al’ar
- Midnight Falls
Were that not breaking the mold enough, Blizzard is also adding midseason raids in Midnight. According to the World of Warcraft roadmap for 2026, Patch 12.0.7 is getting the single-boss Sporefall raid, while Patch 12.1.5 is getting another story-centric raid. “They all come from the same general guideline: Making sure we have new and novel ways of surprising and delighting,” Kubit said. Like with its encounter design, throwing fans for a loop by defying expectations helps breathe life into the game, and prevents it from becoming stale and predictable.
“You should never be able to, before we start talking about it, have a really accurate prediction of like, ‘Well, I know this is this type of patch, so it will have exactly one of these, and exactly one of those.’”
World of Warcraft has only done two other midseason raids in history: the Ruby Sanctum in Wrath of the Lich King Patch 3.3.5, and the Crucible of Storms in Battle for Azeroth Patch 8.1.5.
During The War Within, Blizzard did something unprecedented with dungeons: The Rookery was tied directly into the World of Warcraft expansion’s story, and was compulsory for those seeking to finish the campaign. Using the Follower Dungeons system introduced in Dragonflight, World of Warcraft players can enter the instance alongside Baelgrim and other Earthen NPCs.
In Midnight, World of Warcraft is tripling down on this idea, with three separate dungeons completed as a part of the campaign: the Den of Nalorakk, Magister’s Terrace, and Nexus-Point Xenas. “Oftentimes in the past, we’ve had our dungeons intentionally built as spurs off the main story,” Kubit explained. “World of Warcraft’s audience contains multitudes. There are lots of different people who prefer to play the game in different ways.” But WoW‘s Follower Dungeon system means fans who have physical disabilities, who may need to step away from the game at any moment, or who simply don’t enjoy playing in groups can still experience these structured instances, now with even more story relevance baked directly into them.
Another concern the developers had to contend with was “Void Fatigue.” Players dealt with a fair share of Void entities in The War Within, and there are even more with Xal’atath’s Devouring Host in WoW: Midnight. This risks repeating the problem from Legion, when the abundance of Fel magic and demons led to fans facing what they had dubbed “Green Fatigue.”
Barker, who was a senior encounter designer during Legion, admitted it was definitely a concern. “We struggle with it,” he said. “I can definitely tell you at the point when I was making my 500th outdoor demon and trying to name it and make it look unique, it started to become stressful.” Barker explained that finding “intentional breakup” is the strategy to avoid this. Though many major antagonists have the signature blues and purples of the Void, World of Warcraft went out of its way to incorporate unexpected alternative themes throughout Midnight, including:
- Fel-wielding enemies in the Murder Row dungeon
- Undead in Windrunner Spire
- Troll spiritual magic and necromancy in the Den of Nalorakk and Maisara Caverns
- Light-wielding enemies in The Blinding Vale and the Lightblinded Vanguard in Voidspire
- Chimaerus, the WoW raid boss in The Dreamrift of Harandar who uses blue and gold spell effects evocative of Azerite
Breaking this up is also important for visual reasons. Kubit brought up that creating visual contrast for ability telegraphs while designing encounters can be surprisingly challenging with Void entities. “In a lot of cases, the enemy wants to be purply and voidy and bluey, and also the space wants to be purply and voidy and bluey,” he said. “You want to make sure you can see the purple spell effect that you aren’t supposed to stand in on the purple ground against the purple skybox.” Mixing things up with these alternative creature designs not only keeps things visually interesting, but also gives the developers a break from this problem as well.
There’s fun in novelty. There’s fun in not knowing exactly what’s going to happen, or when something unpredictable happens.
World of Warcraft: Midnight is taking some big swings with the design of its dungeons and raids. Only time will tell if they pay off, but Kubit and Barker’s enthusiasm and confidence certainly inspire hope that the expansion will be full of surprises.
- Released
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2026
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
