Season 7 of Warcraft Rumble is well underway with new units, events, boards and more.
During our recent adventures at Blizzard HQ in Irvine, California, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Art Director Jeremy Collins and Senior Game Designer Brendan Farrell from the Warcraft Rumble development team to chat about the current state of the game and what’s new this season. In particular, we learned about the most recent addition to Rumble’s ever-expanding collection of minis: the Cenarion family.
When designing the Cenarion family, the Blizzard team wanted to give players lots of new strategies to explore but also wanted to bring in some of the magical forest vibes familiar to World of Warcraft players who have explored the home of the Cenarion Circle, Moonglade. We asked the developers to tell us a bit more about the concept of Rumble families at large:
Brendan Farrell: When the rumble first started, there was only one family, and we had a collection of only five or six minis. A lot of them are still in the game, like the Gnoll, the Gryphon Rider, the Troll, and the Kobold – they were the original family. As the game started more built out and we built more of these minis we felt it would be appropriate to have them these sort of buckets. In classic World of Warcraft, there’s Alliance and Horde, and we thought there’s more variety here. There’s more room for strategy and building out these different armies so that’s where the first five families came from. We had Alliance, we had Horde, Blackrock, Undead and Beast. There is so much in the Warcraft universe to pull from and put into Rumble, and I feel like we’ve only tapped 2% of what could be.
Philosophically, whenever we’re thinking about adding a mini or a family to the game, we’re thinking firstly, what’s missing in terms of the World of Warcraft lore, what haven’t we yet represented? Then what does the game, and what do players need strategically? What family or minis would add to the diversity that is already there? Rather than just tuning existing minis, buffing and nerfing, we’d rather introduce new tools to shake up the meta.
That’s kind of where the idea of Cenarion came from. We asked, ‘What is missing from our kit?‘. Cenarion is all about sustainability, building these big pushes, and using the duality of the Druid. Almost all of the Cenarion minis have some sort of utility; they can do more than one thing. Cenarion was a pretty common request from a lot of the team and a lot of the players. Even if they didn’t ask for the family by name, they asked for a lot of the characters that would easily fit into the Cenarion family.
Jeremy Collins: With a phone, you have a limited amount of screen space, so it’s very important to us in Art to make sure that at a glance, you can see a unit and know who that unit is. A lot of the gameplay is joyful chaos; something good is happening in this lane, but something bad is happening in that lane, and you’re constantly jockeying your attention between different places – because of that, we are very intentional about making sure that the characters we design have only have two or three major colour blocks so that when you’re in the middle of the battle and you see green and red, for example, you know that it’s the Warsong Grunt. We don’t want to overcomplicate the design of things.
One of the most exciting aspects of any Warcraft Rumble update is the introduction of new minis. It’s always fun to see familiar and often beloved residents of the Warcraft universe adapted to Rumble and turned into a mini via a process that the developers unofficially refer to as ‘Rumble-fying’. With the addition of several new Cenarion family minis this season, we asked Brendan and Jeremy to tell us about the process of Rumble-fying and some of the minis they’ve had the most fun with over the years.
JC: The first really Rumble-fied character we ended up making was the Kobold. There’s just this magical moment when you’re creating a mini where you’ve talked so much about the design, you’ve created so much concept art, but the character isn’t modelled yet. Somewhere along the pipeline we write the script for the character and then we’ll record it in a VO session and for me, it’s that moment when the mini really comes alive.
We had this amazing voice actor who played Invader Zim, who played the Kobold, and he just started going ‘money, money, money‘ and all the stuff you hear in the game right now, and it was a moment for me where I was like ‘oh my God, this character is real now’. Then, once you pair that up with the model and the animation and the rig, and everybody adds their piece, it’s just this edifying experience.
Here are some of the recently Rumble-fied Cenarion minis you can add to battle this season:
Cenarius
The Cenarion family is named after one of Rumble’s latest leaders, Cenarius. He’s a demigod with an Area of Effect (AoE) healing utility for allies and an AoE root for crowd-controlling enemies. He’s all about control of the battlefield, sustain and buying time to build pushes.
- Deploy Cost: 5 Gold
- Health: 600
- Healing: 28 health every 1.5 seconds
- Damage: 120
- Root Duration: 3 seconds
- Traits: Brambles, Tranquility, Elemental, Resistant, Healer
Onu
If Onu looks familiar, it might be because you’ve already fought him in Darkshore. However, you can now add him to your mini collection. Onu is going to open up a lot of new strategies and play styles with his unique kit. Despite his slow movement speed, he supports other minis that push ahead and protect him while offering a mobile deploy zone for friendly minis. This deploy zone blocks enemy deploys, grants double damage on the first attack and even persists for a short time after the towering tank’s death.
- Deploy Cost: 6 Gold
- Health: 3000
- Damage: 190
- Traits: Safe Arbor, Tank, Vulnerable
Ancient of War
“The designers were like ‘oh, we need a tank character, but we have this cool idea where you have to spend your gold to play it – you can spend a little of it or you can spend all of it, and depending on how much you spend, the size of the tank gets bigger or smaller,’ and we were like, ‘That’s a great idea’. There are characters in Warcraft that can fit that mould. You don’t want to see a thin, spindly character in that role because, visually, it doesn’t work, and that’s how we ended up going with the Ancient of War,” – Art Director, Jeremy Collins
Ancient of War is a tank with some interesting mechanics; its physical size, health pool and attack power is determined by the amount of gold you have on hand to spend summoning it. It can be utilised in battle in a few ways, to drive a strong push or as the last later of defense, making it a flexible and versatile mini to add to your collection.
- Deploy Cost: Consumes all current Gold
- Health: 850 (1 Gold) – 3770 (10 Gold)
- Damage: 60 (1 Gold) – 267 (10 Gold)
- Traits: Surge, Tank, Armored
Moonkin
The Moonkin is a ranged damage dealer useful in single and multi-target encounters. It alternates between a single strike and an AoE attack, similar to the Chimaera, but the Moonkin will typically pursue the same target until it dies.
- Deploy Cost: 4 Gold
- Health: 450
- Moonfire Damage: 165
- Hurricane Damage: 80
- Traits: AOE, Elemental
Bog Beast
The Bog Beast is a low-cost tank, and in addition to its good looks, this mini gains a 30% boost to all healing received, making it a hardy unit that can maintain a push during dicey encounters.
- Deploy Cost: 3 Gold
- Health: 1100
- Damage: 165
- Traits: Tank, Resistant
Warcraft Rumble is free to play and available on Android and iOS devices.
The Author of this article travelled to the USA as a guest of Blizzard.
