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Wrath of the Lich King Dungeons & Raid Overview from Blizzard WWI ‘08

by Ingrid on June 29th, 2008

Today during the second and last day of the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, Blizzard revealed several tidbits about what can be expected from the WotLK dungeons and raids.

For the Wrath of the Lich King expansion we can expect:

• All raids to be available at both the 10-player and 25-player level, with 25-player loot being one tier higher than that of the 10-player raids.
• Heroics - all dungeons will be available on a heroic setting
• More nonlinear content - Blizzard revealed that they’ve been trying to move away from the linear content currently available in WoW dungeons and instead give players a variety of choices when entering an instance.
• New gameplay scenarios such as gauntlets and timed events
• Spirit Shard reward system for all raids and dungeons based on Wintergrasp PvP
• 8 level-up dungeons
• 4 max level (80) dungeons
• 3 first tier raid instances ready to go at the launch of the expansion with more on the way

Blizzard also went on to discuss the decision to introduce 10-player and 25-player raids. They stated that this move allows content to reach a wider number of players that wouldn’t otherwise ever see it. However, they made it clear that loot would be kept entirely separate (one tier apart). They also revealed that there will be more loot per boss kill in the 25 player raids.

The developers also discussed the following lessons they learned from The Burning Crusade:

• Heroics were a great success but entirely too hard
• Some dungeons were too long and they would like to keep future dungeons to 1-hour clear times
• Quests didn’t feel as connected as they should. They want you to know why you’re killing a boss.
• Summoning changes worked out great and they’re very happy with the decision to allow Warlocks to summon from within instances (there was lots of cheering from the crowd at this point)
• Patch order is very important. For example, they hurried to release Black Temple before Zul’Aman and realized after the fact that they should’ve released Zul’Aman first. So they will be watching what people are playing to determine in what order future content should be released.

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POSTED IN: MMORPG, News, World of Warcraft