A former World of Warcraft designer has said Blizzard lacked tools to calculate the highest possible player damage output when designing the game’s earliest raids. To set encounters at workable difficulty levels, the studio instead relied on exceptionally skilled and dedicated staff to test combat by repeatedly attacking training dummies, illustrating the improvised nature of early MMO development.

The approach was used to estimate maximum damage per second (DPS), a crucial benchmark for deciding whether raid bosses could realistically be defeated. Rather than drawing on detailed telemetry or automated modelling, Blizzard’s developers used hands-on testing by players able to optimise their characters and rotations, reflecting both the game’s complexity and the limited development analytics available at the time.