[WoW]Wotlk:Raid instances to have 10 and 25 man versions, Death Knight starts at 55

[The Ancient]

I know it's a 10 man vs. a 5 man, but Karazan offers almost everything you are wanking off on BRD for, but done better, thanks to back doors and teleports. So I really don't see this whole Blizzard can't make good dungeons anymore argument.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Karazhan has been in development since how long though? They were talking about it during WoW's initial release iirc.

Though SSC/BT leave me with some hope. Sunwell is a disappointment layout wise. The encounters are great, but fuck not being able to jump off shit. If you don't want me leaping to my death over a cliff, then don't fucking put a cliff there. 8(

[Grave]

Karazhan is pretty widely praised as a well-designed dungeon. I don't think it's really an issue of Blizzard being unable to design good dungeons, it's just that they are opting not to in order to accommodate the "fast food" playerbase who wants to get in and out of an instance as quickly as possible.

A dungeon like Karazhan would be an absolutely incredible 5-man though.

[Etwynn]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

The guy hit the nail on the head dude.

The instance was full of faggy gay trash (dark iron dwarves were gay in Uldaman, lets put some more in). The design was mediocre at best, it only stands out because most WoW dungeons sucked back then. The dungeon sucked for xp, sucked for quests (especially that alliance one), and sucked everytime we had to go through it to get to MC before the attunement was implemented.

I only played WoW before TBC so I don't know about the newer stuff, but BRD was more challenging and had a better layout than scholo, strat, or any other 6-mans in the game.

Obviously BRD is easy when you're 60 and have all blues or better, but that's not what it was designed for. It's been a while, but as I recall I only had fun in BRD pre-60 when I was ungeared. I ran that place a lot at 56+. Yeah the loot sucked, but that doesn't make the dungeon itself suck. It just means there wasn't much incentive to go there. For me it had some cool priest drops but otherwise, meh.

Anyway, the best parts about BRD:
it was long (the right side at least)
it actually scaled in difficulty meaning good groups got farther than bad groups
trash mobs were tough (assuming you're the right level for it)
Wasn't completely linear (the right side alone was *somewhat* maze-like, but this obviously could have been better)
It had an event (the dudes that spawn and if you kill them all you loot a box)
It was really long if you include the emperor room
It had another event-type-thing (lighting the torches in the room before the emperor)

Also, I PuGed this all the time. Sure, there were some terrible PuGs, but it's kinda what made the place good--the bad PuGs give you a standard, something to compare the good PuGs with. And it's not like scholo where losing didn't suck entirely...it was like "OK, our collective gear isn't good enough to kill fast enough" or "our tank handle the Baron (or whatever the end boss was) but at least we got the other dudes for that set gear." Bad groups in BRD were more like "fuck, we just wiped in the jail area...this is going to be terrible." I think the difference was the length of BRD and its scaling-in-difficulty nature, which means that if you suck you spend so much wiping/running back that you literally don't have time to get to the better bosses to get the better loot. Scholo was so short that you could just keep going back when you wiped. Yeah, I realize that Scholo had some crazy-fun pathing especially in the harder area, but pathing only makes the dungeon harder for one person, the puller. For everyone else, all they have to do is stand where they're told and suffer the consequences of someone else fucking up.

Anyway, yeah I PuGed BRD. I was a priest, and as someone mentioned above, if you're a tank/healer it's much easier to lead a successful PuG. But PuGing that place was my favorite thing to do in WoW. But I PuGed pretty much the whole game until I got into a good raid guild and did MC/the jungle 20 man/BWL/AQ20 which is as far I got until I got bored of raid healing which was so unfulfilling compared to the difficulty of healing in places like BRD.

[Etwynn]

Originally Posted by Grave

Karazhan is pretty widely praised as a well-designed dungeon. I don't think it's really an issue of Blizzard being unable to design good dungeons, it's just that they are opting not to in order to accommodate the "fast food" playerbase who wants to get in and out of an instance as quickly as possible.

A dungeon like Karazhan would be an absolutely incredible 5-man though.

I think they're entirely capable of designing a good dungeon. Part of it is the "fast food" issue, but as I said earlier I think it's really more about pushing shit out as fast as possible. Small dungeons may satisfy the kids with ADD and the parents with 6-month year old babies, but more importantly it's much faster (faster = more $$) to design a linear dungeon rather than having to plan and implement a cool layout. Patches/content takes forever as it is because Blizzard is so OCD , but could you even imagine if every dungeon blizzard made was a large "maze-style" dungeon rather than these tiny strait shots to the final boss? They design their dungeons around the fact that they're instanced for one party. Or rather I should say that they implemented instancing so they didn't have to "waste" dev time designing large, well-designed dungeons that can accommodate multiple groups at once.

So yeah, they're capable. But they just don't want to spend the money.

[Pyros]

About the scaling mechanics and difficulty reduced in a 10man.

They could do a few things, since it's a new expansion, they can bring in new rules.

First I'll start by saying, not challenging isn't entirely true. ZA isn't really what I'd call a walk in the park. It's not EXTREME, but at the supposed gear level, it's quite fucking hard. Even when you outgear it slightly(aka T5 and some T6), it was still challenging enough that you'd need a decent group of non retards to complete. The 20th time through it though isn't the same story, after we started doing bear mount runs, we could easily do the speed run every week, and we even managed to get a bear mount with one guy crashed after 3rd boss until 4th.

Second, in terms of new mechanics, they could just, for once, have some shit that scan your group composition upon engaging to figure out what abilities to use. Something that like, check the class and do basic priorities, say you have a warrior with 30+ in protection, it's safe to assume he'll be tanking. Maybe add another check on his AP, to find out if he's in dps gear(tank AP is very predictable). Then the boss uses abilities that can be reflected.

If it doesn't find a prot war though, it checks for a prot paladin, then do abilities for that, like spawning shit adds that take a few seconds to start moving, so they're in consecration when they pop, but give a stacking debuff that helps tanking them all+the boss by altering dmg taken or whatever.

If it doesn't find either, it checks for a feral, and do something based on feral stuff, like no more crushing, but bigger base hits. Same for DK with whatever they'll have.

Sure it'd take longer to design but it'd also make content dynamic enough that maybe, just maybe, the 12th time you go through the boss, it's not as boring as watching paint dries, because the boss is slightly different than the week before(assuming you're not robots and don't bring exactly the same group every week). Thus alleviating the lack of content feeling.

Could very well work with 25man too, but at least for 10man, it'd let them design hard encounters, since they wouldn't have to design them around the worst conceivable composition you could get, which trivialize content when you get good compositions. This can't be avoided when contrary to 25man, you can't fit every class and every spec.

Anyway I think there's ways to make interesting content with 10man, but it'll be much easier to stack your raid to trivialize it if you're into that. While finding 5 geared shaman for sunwell isn't exactly easy, finding 2 for a 10man is. Hell I remember once we ran a ZA speed run with 4shamans and 2destro locks. It was retarded. You couldn't even stack a 25man to get the same kind of results.

So in the end it also depends on you, if you just want to beat content I guess going for 10mans will definitely be easier. If you just have a group of friends and can't really make a full guild out of it complete with every spec in the game and replacement and stuff, 10mans would be just fine.

[Chaotic]

i am VERY excited about the death knight and their abilities. It finally seems as if i'm getting back a shadow knight. Fuck having a paladin without a counter-part. In every game like this i've played i played a shadow knight.

Shaman at release until high warlord burnout was the closest i could get to dps hybrid, and i've been crying for once since.

The abilities look awesome and alot of fun and i'm totally psyched. I'm banking vacation to take at release to rush one to 80 just for giggles.

WOTLK in general seems pretty damn cool, call me a fanboi don't care.

[Lanludar]

Anyone who thinks this is coming out soon is nuts, unless they really have no raid content in at release. One of the interviews even said they hadn't designed a single raid boss yet. I'll find the exact quote later or someone else can, it was from a Gamespot interview I think.

[Kobalt]

Anyone remember what the death knight abilities that were reveled months ago were?

[Rezz]

Originally Posted by Chaotic

i am VERY excited about the death knight and their abilities. It finally seems as if i'm getting back a shadow knight.

Those words up there? I agree with them completely.

And as for BRD being the best dungeon in the game, I'd say it's tied with Karazhan in concept if not in execution. Wings within the dungeon, not dungeons within wings.

[Chrisb3]

Wow well I guess BRD does have awesome loot if your a minmaxer and need that one trinket or dagger... I guess everyone here is a rogue. And yeah it is awesome if you remove the trash, but it is still full of fucking trash with boring bosses.
I agree about Karazan though, I can't think of anything that I would do to improve it.

About the scaling, I think it's just going to be like along the lines of 5 man and 25 man Keal'thas, so the bosses will be similar but different at the same time. It is going to be interesting to see how they pull it off, couldn't you just progress soley on the 10 man content and skip striaght to the last 25 man? The loot will have to be two teirs behind in the 10 man version to prevent that.

[Rezz]

I think conceptually they're trying to make it so that doing the 10 man is still roughly as difficult as the 25 man, just requiring less people. It wouldn't require the gear to be 2 tiers behind so that people couldn't do 10 mans up until the last one and then go 25. A single tier would make sense. So that the 10 man for the last dungeon would have loot on par with the 25 man from the previous dungeon. That way once they have learned the layout with the 10 man they have still have to farm the higher tier gear, but they are geared well enough to begin doing so.

This is of course relying on the concept that the 10 mans will be roughly the same difficulty, which is what I thought they were hinting at.

And BRD had great loot, I don't know what you're smoking sir. Ironfoe, the tanking trinket, hand of justice, the healing hammer from the 7 event, the idols and shit they added for the hybrids. Considering it's not a max level dungeon it had awesome loot. Far superior to Sunken Temple.

[Azrayne]

Originally Posted by Rezz

I think conceptually they're trying to make it so that doing the 10 man is still roughly as difficult as the 25 man, just requiring less people. It wouldn't require the gear to be 2 tiers behind so that people couldn't do 10 mans up until the last one and then go 25. A single tier would make sense. So that the 10 man for the last dungeon would have loot on par with the 25 man from the previous dungeon. That way once they have learned the layout with the 10 man they have still have to farm the higher tier gear, but they are geared well enough to begin doing so.

This is of course relying on the concept that the 10 mans will be roughly the same difficulty, which is what I thought they were hinting at.

And BRD had great loot, I don't know what you're smoking sir. Ironfoe, the tanking trinket, hand of justice, the healing hammer from the 7 event, the idols and shit they added for the hybrids. Considering it's not a max level dungeon it had awesome loot. Far superior to Sunken Temple.

Correct me if I'm wrong, since I avoided the place like the plague, but wasn't Sunken Temple 4 or 5 levels lower than BRD?

[Cybsled]

I agree about Karazan though, I can't think of anything that I would do to improve it.

Remove those magic immune worms from the library!

Sucks major ass when your raid is caster heavy. Fear those 13dmg melee swings of doom!

ST was a lvl 50ish dungeon. It was actually the highest lvl dungeon in closed beta before they let players go all the way to 60 instead of the 50 cap.

[Rezz]

ST was used in a previous post by someone as an alternative to BRD, I was saying it's not. They are different levels completely, just like doing ST instead of Dire Maul is a waste of time comparatively for people who are above ST levels. BRD was great because it was a zone where you could go two different ways if you wanted, get totally different (and awesome) loot at differing levels of difficulty. Hell for the first couple months it was the only dungeon you could do in the mid 50s, everyone and their mom hit that place up.

Now that everyone simply solos to 58 then hits outland (or goes there before to kill boars) all the dungeons are empty for the most part, though I still get people trying to get my warrior to tank BRD for them. The only dungeons from the old world that get any "love" anymore are like WC/Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery.