Blizzard promises that WoW's next raid will appease both casual and hardcore players.
When super-guild Ensidia finished all of Wrath of the Lich King’s (WotLK) raid content the weekend after the expansion launched, there were many people wondering just how far Blizzard had dumbed down raiding. It was a case of learning from the past – in both vanilla World of Warcraft (WoW) and The Burning Crusade, the initial raids were incredibly tough. This led to a situation where very few WoW players got to experience raid content.
With WotLK, Blizzard made some pretty interesting decisions in order to fix this situation. It adopted a philosophy of delivering both 10- and 25-player versions of raid instances. Then, with the Obsidian Sanctum one-boss raid, it introduced the concept of ‘hard mode’. This is quite an inspired way of scaling boss difficulty and associated rewards.
In the Obsidian Sanctum, the boss is a dragon called Sartharion. He is in an area surrounded by guards that need to be dispatched before fighting him. Among these guards are three smaller drakes (adolescent dragons, if you will). You can choose to kill any or all of these before attacking the boss – any remaining drakes will become a part of the boss fight. Each one has abilities that increase the difficulty level of the fight and also the quantity and quality of loot from the boss.
Currently, the ‘three drakes up’ version of Sartharion is the hardest fight in WotLK. The title associated with the achievement for doing this satisfies hardcore raiders’s e-peens, and the ability to scale up difficulty allows less-hardcore guilds to continue challenging themselves as they get better gear.
Blizzard has mentioned in the past that this ‘hard mode’ philosophy will carry through the rest of WotLK’s raids. It wasn’t present in the Naxxramas raid zone because it was a rejigged instance from vanilla WoW, but overnight, Blizzard released the first details about Ulduar, the massive raid instance coming in the 3.1 patch.
Ulduar will have fourteen boss encounters, eleven of which will have attached ‘hard modes’. The instance will also be tuned for groups that have geared up in the current raid content. These two factors will add an extra level of challenge to the raid. As I discovered last weekend, you can currently hit 80 and start raiding 25-man content straight away. Ulduar won’t have this ease of entry.
Ulduar, itself, is designed to complete the story arcs from the eastern side of Northrend. It is a massive complex built by the Titans, the demigods that created Azeroth and the life on it. Most of the questing in the Storm Peaks zone of Northrend revolves around the disappearances of the guardians assigned with protecting the city of Ulduar. It appears that these missing guardians will be bosses in the Ulduar raid, with Thorim, Freya, and Hodir confirmed so far.
Blizzard has also confirmed one major source of speculation that has significant bearing upon future raids. The final encounter in Ulduar will be against Yogg-Saron, an ‘Old God of death’ much like C’Thun in the Ahn’Qiraj raid in vanilla WoW. Essentially, a giant creature upon which the entire continent of Northrend sits, Yogg-Saron features prominently throughout WotLK and was expected to show up as a major boss at some point.
With confirmation that Yogg-Saron will, indeed, be in Ulduar, it opens up speculation as to what Blizzard will follow up Ulduar with. It has stated that the WotLK development strategy is for a major raid zone in each major patch, with Ulduar in 3.1, a ‘mystery raid’ in 3.2, and the eventual showdown with the Lich King in 3.3. If Yogg-Saron didn’t appear in Ulduar, then it was almost certain that the mystery raid would be the underground kingdom of Azjol-Nerub. This was the location of an encounter with the Old God in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. While Ulduar doesn’t necessarily preclude this, the latest news really opens up the possibilities of other raid zones.
It looks pretty likely that Blizzard will be putting the 3.1 patch up on its public test realms soon. Unlike recent raids, it will involve very limited testing of the raid encounters. The company will also be splitting up bosses between the US and EU test realms in order to avoid hardcore raid guilds learning all the fights and then chewing through the instance Ensidia-style when the patch goes live.
It certainly looks like Blizzard wants to lay down some challenges for the hardcore while still appealing to the masses. If the inclusion of hard modes works as well as promised, then Ulduar will hopefully quell the complaints of hardcore raiders while still allowing the rest of us to enjoy new content.
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