We get asked about the solo server almost every week: when it opens, what will be in it and whether you really will be able to clear a raid on your own. Here is the answer without any fog: the mode opens in September. We are not dragging it out to be difficult — the bots are not yet in a state where you could call them groupmates, and raid tactics are still being written for them.
What solo mode is and who needs it
The solo server is the same World of Warcraft 3.3.5a, only built around a single player. The group is not assembled in a looking-for-group channel but out of bots: you pick the role you find interesting and the server fills the remaining slots. Prime time simply stops existing in a mode like this — a dungeon at seven in the morning on a Tuesday is no different from a dungeon on Friday night.
Who needs this in practice:
- people whose schedule does not line up with the guild's: shift work, children, a different time zone;
- people who want to test a class on a live boss rather than a dummy — a rotation in combat and a rotation on a training dummy are two different things;
- people working out unfamiliar content who would rather make their first mistakes without witnesses;
- people coming back after a long break who want to refresh the mechanics before taking up someone else's time.
What solo mode does not do is replace the normal server. A living guild, a voice cracking on comms at the boss's last few percent, and the person who calmly explains the tactics for the third time — that is a value of its own, and nobody intends to cancel it. If that format is closer to your heart, head for guilds and raids, and where to begin on the project at all is gathered on the start page. The solo server stands alongside, not instead.
Why September and not now
A bot that can follow the player around and auto-attack a target is furniture with a health bar. It does not get in the way, but it does not help either. Any content harder than "clear a pack of mobs in a field" turns, with a group like that, into playing ten characters at once, nine of whom say nothing. We could open the mode in that state tomorrow — there would just be nothing to play.
For a bot to count as a groupmate it has to cover a very specific list. That list is how we measure whether the mode is ready.
| What a bot has to be able to do | What happens when it cannot |
|---|---|
| Roles and positioning | The tank stands in the crowd, the healer takes the first hit |
| Interrupts and dispels | The cast goes off in full and the group falls apart out of nowhere |
| Moving out of ground effects | The bot honestly stands in the fire until its health runs out |
| Threat and target switching | The adds run at the healer and the tank chases them across half the room |
| Cooldowns and consumables | The hard phase is done dry even though everything was ready |
| Loot and distribution | The item goes to a bot that will never wear it |
Part of the list already works: basic group behaviour, roles, normal dungeons. Everything breaks in raids — and that is exactly why the date is not "next week".
Raid tactics: where universal logic runs out
The general bot logic sounds simple: hit the tank's target, heal whoever has the least health, do not stand in the bad stuff. In a five-man dungeon that is almost enough. In a raid it is not, and here is where it tears.
- Phases. The correct action changes as the fight goes on. What was right a minute ago kills the group in phase two.
- Adds on a timer. They do not just need to be noticed, they need to be anticipated: turn around in advance, hold an ability back, avoid dumping everything into the main target.
- Positioning by geometry. Spreading out to a set distance, stacking up, standing behind cover, not facing the boss towards the group — this is not "step out of the fire", this is separate logic for every single fight.
- Covering a role. The tank died — somebody has to pick the boss up and hold on, not carry on calmly hitting a wall for damage.
- Knowing how to wait. The least obvious one. Sometimes a bot's best action is to do nothing for ten seconds and not burn a cooldown.
And that is not all: every boss demands its own tactics. Naxxramas, Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader are built differently, and a "generally smart" bot behaves equally badly in all of them. So the work is not on one universal algorithm but on a set of scenarios — it is slow and dull, but there is no other way. Anyone who remembers how a raid got repaired here by hand will recognise it: the same story, only with bots this time.
We have a single readiness criterion: the raid can be cleared without manually micromanaging every bot. As long as the group has to be steered by hand, the mode is not open.
What we promise and what we do not
We do not promise perfect bots. Some tactics will have to be fixed on the fly, once the mode meets live players and their imagination — that is how it went with everything we have launched, including the move to a new core. We do not promise that a bot will play better than a good player: it is not supposed to.
What we do promise is something else — clearable raids without playing ten characters at once. A group that understands the fight rather than merely standing next to you. And an honest statement of status: if in September some bosses still cannot be cleared properly, we will write exactly that instead of pretending it was intended.
While the mode is being prepared, you can see how the bots already work on the project on the page about the server with bots. The specifics on the date, the roster and the entry rules will be where they belong — in the news.
