The Blizzard Worldwide Invitational 2008 was held over the recent weekend. The Dungeon & Raids panel had a lot of updates on the anatomy of dungeons, and tidbits of information relating to the Dungeons & Raids to come in the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I am going to give my $0.02 on the proposed changes in WotLK.

Cory Stockton, lead level designer; J. Allen Brack, lead producer and Tom Chilton, lead game designer all took to the podium. Here’s a few points that I found interesting:

Heroics will return: really happy with the way heroics played out in TBC, want to bring it back. Lots of plans for heroics, more tuning, changing things up from standard 5-mans. Thinks players will like the direction.

Heroic instances are definetely the way of the future. It’s an easy way of re-using instances that were in place as a levelling instance, much like the structure of Heroics in The Burning Crusade. I am very interested to see how much tuning goes into instances to make them different / harder than on normal mode. I am also very interested to find out how many, if any of the  old pre-bc instances will be re-used (as it has already been stated that a reworked Naxxramus will be the first 25man instance of WotLK).

More nonlinear content. More choices for players, don’t always have one path to take in dungeons. Give players a bit more of a choice so dungeon is a different experience if you do it more than once. The Occulus is a good example.

I’m not too sure about this one. It’s all well and good having multiple paths to complete an instance, but it really opens the door to arguments about which path to take, or which order to do certain pulls in. The issue with having to group with retards who have no idea what’s going on makes me increasingly uneasy about this idea. With that said, it does leave the possibility open to have different paths easier to handle with different group makeups. It would be interesting to see an instance with multiple paths to take where one may be easier for a Tankadin, whilst another may be easier for a cc heavy, party with a Prot Warrior tanking.

Spirit shard reward system for all raids/dungeons based on Wintergrasp PvP. Whoever controls  Wintergrasp can get spirit shards from all bosses in all dungeons/raids in the game. Use them to buy unique items, enchants, etc. Still working on reward system but connects pvp with pve. Help the two merge together over time, somewhat separated, same goal for player: advancement.

The largest issue I found with a system like this is that in TBC, the gear obtainable by these methods was largely worthless due to easily obtainable upgrades from PVP. A large portion of Heroic badges are no longer spent at the vendor in outlands, because the badges gear from said vendor is easily replacable by other means that were put into place after the introduction of the BoJ Reward Vendor.

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level-up dungeons. Similar to TBC. Were really happy with that amount of content. Can always do more dungeons, but would rather keep quality.

As with TBC, I really like this idea. It should allow us to level to 76 or so through instances / levelling zones and make up the final 3 / 4 levels inside instances. This way we can leave the later levelling zones for extra gold. The instances can be re-used at 80 as was the standard in TBC. This is one of my favourite things implemented in The Burning Crusade.

4 level 80 dungeons. Heroics for all Lich King dungeons. So total 12 5-mans, 12 heroics. Three first-tier raid zones.

There were 6 instances designed for level 70 players at the release of tbc, although they don’t all get used all that often these days. These were The Botanica, The Mechanar, The Arcatraz, The Steamvaults, Shadow Labyrinth and Shattered Halls. With Magisters Terrace added much later.

Why 10/25 man raids? Opens up raid content to a larger audience. Takes more organisation and planning but doesn’t mean that content shouldn’t be available. Sometimes the hardest part of a 25 man raid is getting 25 people. So why not give that experience to people in smaller guilds?

Loot separation. Separating loot by a full tier worth of stat points, ultimate endgame content is 25-man so ultimate rewards. Still get great rewards in 10-mans. More loot per boss kill in 25 player raids (because there’s more players). Been talking about giving more loot in 25mans for a while, will see that change in Wrath.

A great idea, this opens up the same content to skilled players who may not have the chance to raid with a proper raiding guild. I know that there are countless players out there in guilds with enough of their friends to run Karazhan, but have neither the time or interest in raiding 25man instances over 3 / 4 nights a week with a proper raiding guild. Naturally the loot from the 10man version of the instance will not be of the same quality, but the thought of a 10man group getting the chance to see a scaled-down version of a fight like Illidan fight warms my belly.

Lessons from TBC. A big project, heroics were an interesting tuning problem, hard enough to be a challenge but easy enough that people just starting out could do them. Were a great success. But too hard, want to make them more accessible. Don’t want e.g. lacking a prot spec tank, holy priest, etc to bar people from doing heroics. Should be available to more players, open up to different classes and groups.

This is a hard one to handle seeing as some healing classes just aren’t suited to healing aoe damage. It’s unfortunate that the Vexallus fight in Magisters Terrace is so much harder for a Paladin or Druid than it is for a Priest or Shaman. The same can be said about certain other fights in TBC. It’s a tough task indeed to work bossfights so that they aren’t so aoe dependant at times without still being challenging.

Naxxramas… Again? Audience cheers; ‘that’s about the same way we feel about Naxxramas’. Huge labour of love. Always felt it was a dungeon that WoW needed. Most players never got to experience it because of the release timing. Loot was still really great but TBC superceded it. Made sense to come back to it and give everyone a chance to experience it. 10-man accessible. Extremely proud, want everyone to play it.

Lore-wise Naxx fits in perfectly, with Arthas/Northrend, history behind Naxx lends itself well to being a part of WotLK and something players can get into really early. Chance to retune it and make it even better. Huge dungeon with a ton of bosses, over 15 bosses in one raid dungeon,
non-linear (wings) giving players a lot of choice.

I can’t wait.. Back to the Future I’m really excited about going back and seeing what changes if any have been made and how they rescale it for both level80 and for the 10man version also.

How does the Death Knight fit in? Will be able to tank both raids and dungeons. Not intended to be ‘the new tank’ but is a unique tank and want to make sure they can tank raids and 5-mans, heroics, as well as DPS. Just going to do it in a different way, keeping classes unique. Looked at what players need — people always need a tank. More tanks = more dungeon runs.

This really settles my uneasiness as to whether more Hero classes will be added to the game come WotLK. I guess they will slowly add more classes as needed, but for now a new type of tank is what they’re adding. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this one pans out.

In Summary

Plenty of interesting changes are in store. With this on the horizon and the announcement of Diablo3 on the horizon I’m going to have my hands full. I’M SO EXCITED!!