As Blizzard’s fast-paced mobile action strategy title Warcraft Rumble kicks off on a new season, players can look forward to new game modes, new minis, and new emotes that elevate the young game further. As one of the central features of season six, Warcraft Rumble introduces the Siege of Stormwind, which takes players to the familiar heart of Alliance power.
Stormwind’s iconic status has been celebrated by fans recreating it in base building titles like Valheim or Minecraft, and in Rumble it’ll fall to players to topple it by taking on three powerful bosses alongside one of their guildmates. In a recent interview with Game ZXC, Rumble producer Elhora Davis and senior designer Brendan Farrell discussed the Siege in detail, as well as the rest of the updates coming with the new season.
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Laying Siege in Warcraft Rumble
Stormwind is no pushover. Beyond the iconic white walls, the city’s champions stand to protect the castle from the players’ onslaught. Davis explained that the three boss fights on the path to victory are characters associated with the city, befitting Rumble’s general approach.
You'll be going up against Highlord Bolvar, Innkeeper Allison and General Marcus Jonathan. They are some very interesting characters. Innkeeper Allison is in particular my favorite because she is kind of, I don't know if I'm allowed to say muscle mommy, but she kind of is, and she's great.
Sieges, she explained, are something of a stepping stone on the path to the game’s raids. For players not yet at Rumble’s endgame, Sieges give players a taste of that experience, and help introduce mechanics that will come up in raids later on. Farrell described the experience of laying siege as a form of puzzle combat, where players will need to work out the right strategy for the challenges the siege brings.
Determining what approach to use in a given experience is an integral part of Warcraft Rumble, Blizzard explained. Choosing the right minis, putting forth the right leaders, and testing out different approaches are fundamental parts of Rumble’s design, and Farrell highlighted how these aspects play out in the Siege of Stormwind. Though, he said, there’s a wrench thrown in by sieges.
After you've beaten one of the three levels in the siege, you can't use that same leader that you used for the next two. It encourages you to expand your collection and, and level up more than just one leader and diversify your strategy and your approach. You're doing this alongside a guildmate, so it's important for you to be communicating and working on your strategies together, and it should be a lot of fun.
The siege’s reward is a tool for helping solve the game’s combat puzzles, as players gain a wildcard slot for their army. Slots in Warcraft Rumble can have traits, and these traits confer bonuses to matching minis loaded into that slot. The wildcard slot will confer its bonus to any mini loaded into it, making it a powerfully flexible tool for players in forming their armies. That’ll come in handy when figuring things out in the season six raid, the Molten Core.
Ragnaros Brings the Heat in the Molten Core Raid
Alternating weeks with the Siege of Stormwind is the Molten Core raid. The Molten Core within Blackrock Mountain has not only served as a raid in World of Warcraft, as it has also been featured in the spin-off Hearthstone and as a raid deck in the Warcraft trading card game. The Molten Core wouldn’t be complete without the presence of Ragnaros the Firelord, who calls the core his seat of power.
In Warcraft Rumble, Ragnaros is both a challenge to overcome and a potential leader for players to employ. If players defeat Ragnaros, he can become a powerful ally to defend buildings from attack, and to punish those who would dare attack the player. He acts both as a leader and a spell when in a player’s control, first attaching to a building and then activating his Blast Wave, which forms rings of fire around player buildings and knocks back enemies that are too close. Farrell explained how Ragnaros as a leader captures the identity of the boss.
If you play him near a base or a tower or meeting stone he effectively replaces that structure temporarily and just sits there. He has these two really cool, melee-like cleave abilities, where he'll swing at enemies in front of him. And so he's kind of like a big meat shield for your buildings … The fantasy is that Ragnaros is out, and now you're using a spell to activate his big ability, which is tons of fun.
Of course, to get Ragnaros as a leader, players will need to overcome him and the rest of the Molten Core raid. The puzzle-solving combat approach is present in this raid as well, both as an aspect of confronting Ragnaros and as part of progressing through the raid in general. It was such an interesting challenge, said Davis, that developers doing technical tests got distracted by trying to come up with different ways to take on the raid.
There’s no right way to solve these combat puzzles, Davis said, just ways that work and ways that don’t. Players will have to experiment with various strategies in order to reach and best Ragnaros, with Davis sharing that her approach was to rely on chickens.
We were initially just playtesting it as a technical kind of testing to try and look for bugs. We tried to put some soak time into features before we release them, and we completely forgot the objective of the play test … there are these kinds of situations that happen within Molten Core that are these puzzles, and you'll have some success trying a bunch of different things. There's no one way to overcome the challenge, but I can assure you that they are varied and interesting and you'll have a lot of fun just trying different stuff out with your partner.
A tool players can employ against both Stormwind and the Molten Core is the new Cenarion mini Earth and Moon, which has similar duality to it as Ragnaros. Earth and Moon can either be in the six-gold Starfall form, which does high area of effect damage, or its Entangling Roots form that costs three gold to immobilize and poison enemies within the same area of effect.
Players can expect to see these highlights as well as new emotes like the Banini Gun and the orc booger emote as season six burns its way through Warcraft Rumble ahead of season seven.
Warcraft Rumble
Blizzard's Warcraft Rumble is a mobile action strategy game that features both a single-player campaign and multiplayer PvP matches.
