[News] Initialization Core Y-83: The Deep Dive

NCSOFT | Greetings, Internet! I am Tom Cassera, otherwise known on the forums and social media as “Hildogen” - one of the dungeon and raid designers on the WildStar team. Now that we're best friends, we can get to the real reason we are here today. It is time to discuss next upcoming 20-player raid: Initialization Core Y-83. For this raid we decided to try something a little different from our previous raids, so let's break it down.

The Prologue
Unlike our previous raids, Initialization Core Y-83 will not require the completion of an attunement process. However, we still wanted to give the raid a little bit of an introduction so we have what we refer to as the prologue of the raid. The prologue is an optional quest line in the Defile that takes players through the story leading up to the dilemma that occurs inside the raid. This quest line can be completed solo (but feel free to grab some friends!) and is in no way required to participate in the raid. Completing the quest line will give you a handy reward.

Rockin' the "Boss-In-A-Box"
Some of you may have heard us throwing around the term "Boss-In-A-Box" quite a bit over the past few months. For those unfamiliar with the term it means an instance with a single boss encounter, and it's exactly what we did for Initialization Core Y-83. So why a "Boss-in-a-Box" anyway? Well, our previous raids (Genetic Archives and Datascape) are massive in scale and require multiple hours to complete. For Initialization Core Y-83 we wanted a bite-sized raid experience that could potentially be completed in less than 30 minutes. But don't let this raid's size fool you - your encounter with Prime Evolutionary Operants will be no pushover!

Choose Your Difficulty!
Trying to decide where this raid would fit in WildStar's current endgame progression was a long and tough conversation. We wanted to make sure that late-game raiders got some fresh and challenging content, but didn't want to leave others feeling neglected. In the end, the decision was unanimous: why not offer both?

The boss encounter in Initialization Core Y-83 therefore offers two levels of difficulty, both of which are available in the same instance. The base level is about as tough as the Dreadphage Ohmna encounter at end of the Genetic Archives raid. For those of you craving an even greater challenge, a higher (optional) level of difficulty is available to put your skills to the test. This will crank up the challenge level to roughly match the Elemental pairs near the end of Datascape.

Whether to start the encounter on the higher difficulty is completely your choice! If you want to take on the base level, simply charge the boss. But if you think you're up for the challenge, you can begin the boss encounter by triggering an object called the Organic Incinerator. Doing so adds an additional mechanic to the encounter while increasing the damage, healing, and tanking requirements to survive the fight. This option presents itself every time the encounter resets, so the only risk in giving it a shot is a trip to your friendly neighborhood holo-crypt!

Mad Lootz!
Awww yeah! Everyone loves loot! It's shiny, makes you stronger, and you look like a total badass. What's not to like? Though I think we can all agree that the best part is the surprise...the anticipation of what sweet, sweet rewards will come bursting from the corpse of your recently dominated enemy. So let's not ruin the surprise!

When completing the encounter on the base difficulty you can expect to see some new décor items, gear and rune sets. Like the difficulty, the new gear is meant to help close the gap between Genetic Archives and Datascape. (The rune sets are a bit special compared to our existing ones, so we will leave exactly what they do as a surprise.) Completing the optional higher difficulty grants players everything from the base difficulty version as well as even more décor items (only available at the optional difficulty), better versions of runes, and the best part - which you'll have to discover for yourself.

This encounter design was originally planned for the Genetic Archives, but we just couldn't manage to squeeze it in. The new version of the encounter gives us the perfect opportunity to experiment with a few new things and now we've decided it's finally ready for your systematic destruction. The only thing left you for you all to get in there and show the Prime Evolutionary Operants who's boss!

See what I did there? "Who's boss," because it's a boss-in-a... oh, never mind.

Good luck. Don't die!