The upcoming Chains of Domination patch for World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands expansion lets players battle Banshee Queen herself, Sylvanas. It is a battle that has brewed for year, and the players now finally get the chance to go to war against her.
Sylvanas is the latest boss in the Sanctum of Domination raid to come to Shadowlands with the 9.1 update. At BlizzConline recently, we had a chance to talk to World of Warcraft technical director Frank Kowalkowski, who gave his thoughts on the long-awaited game and what players can expect from it.
“This has been years in the making. This has been a very long arc of history,”
Remarkably, Kowalkowski also teased that the aftermath of the fight against Sylvanas will have big ramifications.
“The aftermath of this match is going to be a very important moment, not only for Shadowlands, but also for Sylvanas,” he said.
Before the players can fight Sylvanas, they must succeed in getting through the Sanctum of Domination, which sounds like a really challenging raid. The raid has 10 bosses and many meetings, which culminated in the fight against Sylvanas.
Chief game designer Jeremy Feasel told GameSpot that players may notice that Blizzard’s developers have implemented some changes and improvements in the new Sanctum of Domination raid. In particular, Blizzard created the raid with an eye on giving players greater clarity in the boss that surrounds them.
“We’ve worked very closely with the visual effects teams to make sure we have custom images for raid battles, and that they really stand out from the player’s graphics,” said Feasel. “We also look very closely at what we call the ‘noise’ of the player class’ visual and player pact visuals, and make sure that in a raidroom they do not override the boss’s abilities. To make sure we have a level of clarity there.”
As for the meetings themselves, Feasel teased that Blizzard created some “new and interesting and new mechanics”, and went on to say that there will also be narrative elements woven into the raid battles.
“The purpose of posting a whole 10-boss raid is that we have a great story to tell there, we have many characters we want to see in the prison guard’s personal torment chambers that may be signs from our past,” he said. “There’s a lot to achieve there. We have a lot of great ideas.”
Finally, Feasel said he’s excited about the Chains of Domination update to get to WoW’s public test world, so that the team at Blizzard can collect and examine feedback before it is rolled out publicly to everyone. There is no word yet, as to when Chains of Domination may hit PTR or public servers.
For more on our conversations with the WoW team at BlizzConline, along with some of the biggest news from BlizzConline, check out the stories below. There was a lot on both Diablo 4 and Diablo 2: Resurrected, where the latter was officially announced during the opening ceremony:
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