◊ Cadfael

I also have this list for a few weeks now and I'm pretty convinced it is a well done fake. Reason being, that each of these, for most of us probably unheard of zones, do actually appear in companion material like Warcraft RPG Source books. Almost all of these zones if not all can be found on wowwiki.com for an explanation what it means. So I would presume someone took all these lesser known names and made a nice arrangement.

It could be true, of course, but I doubt it. Especially due to the level numbers. Why should they already set the level ranges ? Makes no sense. And this file misteriously appears now that the new zonenames for the second expansion were unveiled. If it came before the Northrend leak, I would put more trust in it.

But then again, I've fallen in the past for some of the fake patchnotes. We shall see.

 

Emeraude

Hey Worgen got new animations a few patches ago. We can stilll dream.

 

Howard Roark

Well the only video to go up on the blizzard site since the WLK trailer is a seemingly random one about Sylvanas.

I suspect they are building her up to take a huge role in WLK.

Calling it right now- if we can kill arthas, the way we'll do it is the same way Sylvanas almost did it in wc3, by shooting him with a poisoned arrow which will make him lose a lot of his power.

 

Draele

Or in the case of the alliance, Jaina.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Prinsesa

Outland is a nice place to level because the quests were plentiful, the rewards are awesome, the quest exp is huge and the dungeons are actually fun to run (and just as rewarding). With all of the changes slated for 20-60 leveling (as said in THIS POST), normal leveling might be brought up to a level (pun intended) just as fun as, if not more than doing it in Outland.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Metrosexuelf

Looks like nothing more than a fan taking fifteen minutes to skim wowwiki for potential (and fairly obvious) zones and slapping numbers on them. It's no secret that eventually they will have to turn to the Maelstrom/South Seas, Emerald Dream, and possibly the elemental planes for future content.

The Pandarian and Worgen stuff is silly. Honestly, I think the whole concept that we would ever see new races again is pretty silly, too. You'd face the daunting task of leveling them from 1-90 which is a major time sink even with the changes to experience they are making in 2.3.

 

Axanor

Hero classes alleviate that to a degree, allowing players an instant level 58 of the new race without having to do the newbie stuff. Although the thought of a Pandaren Death Knigt is both hilarious and horrific.

 

BlackCadian

Personally I like this solution best, since it would fit the game world more than just saying "ok here's this evil aura so you can't fly". But since the sky would have to be crowded with dragons or whatever, it still wouldn't be too practical apart from endgame instance zones imho. Maybe a combination would word best, with the "it's simply too cold to fly" and "there's a blizzard coming up".
Being a pen & paper RPGler at heart, I would like the idea of creating a bond between my mount and my character. I won't force it to fly if it would be harmed because of the cold, something like that. Btw, giving it a name would be cool, too

"If teh alliance had shamens, we wud win more battlegrounses" - random ally (Pre BC)

 

Doctah

Well I remember looking at the videos released there were quite often dragons flying around. Probably the most seamless solution would be to have these dragons hostile at first and not unlike the BEM bastards that dismount you, then later on at 80 you can gain faction to become neutral/friendly etc.

 

Keline

Well, undead did have the most powerful anti-air airunit in War3, the Gargoyle. Enter any no-flight zones and have a pack of them on you, meleeing you to death.

 

tunah

And 400 Flying = combat flying mount?

 

PSGarak

Well, it would be 450, except they said that it wouldn't be new riding skill that lets you fly in WLK. Given that, reputation with evil mean flying dragons sounds most reasonable, unless you need to do a quest for for your mount or something silly like that (new riding crop? o O).

Source... sec...
wowblues.com lacks a search function -_-

 

Axanor

Well, technically you could fly with your fast mount once unlocking it. A flying Combat mount would just be an upgrade/sidegrade. Although the one thing that would seem to hold it back is that you'd probably need to slow down the mount in order to make Aerial combat viable.

 

Bill

Correct me if I'm wrong but I was quite sure that we will never see Pandarans in the WoW game because China would refuse to sell WoW with Pandas, a sacred animal, getting killing/harmed in a computer game. Blizzard losing the entire Chinese market not being an option of course.

The conspiracy theory is that Pandas were the originally planned new Alliance race, and then China made the big fuss about it and so they quickly changed gears to Draenai (hence the sloppy storyline backing them in Azeroth).

 

Opioid

All sane commentary until that last point... "short hallway with one or two twists" is not a fun dungeon to run. As painful as some of the vanilla WOW dungeons were, overall they beat the pants off the average Burning Crusade excuse.

Also South Korea complained about Onyxia being too easy and so Blizzard has patched her so she deep breathes more lately, anyone noticed that?

 

Ukerric

China has games in which Pandas or Panda-ren (which means "panda people" in chinese) are getting clobbered and/or killed. Warcraft with Chen sold relatively well, Tekken has an intelligent panda pet, and so on.

 

Jebraltar

I, and many others, disagree. Sprawling mazes of trash where bosses had 1-2 weak abilities were much less fun. BC instances may not have had the same "exploration" factor, but they had a lot more going for them in terms of interesting encounters.

 

Axanor

However, the larger UBRS/Stratholme with the "soft" wings were very cool, and it'd be nice to see a few of them return.

 

Jebraltar

It would be nice to have exploration options return, but the BC instances were still a step up in gameplay for me.

 

PSGarak

The level design of the pre-TBC instances were in general better and more creative, although usually too long. However, the boss fights in TBC are far superior. Personally I'd rather see the time spent on the bosses than the level, since when you're farming the instance they all start looking like a series of tubes to some extent while the bosses stay fun for longer. I do agree they could put a little more effort into level design beyond the wall texture. Shadow Lab, I'm looking at you >=(. The coilfang instances are a bit better.

 

Nezralix

You must be playing a different game than I am, because I haven't seen many 5-man bosses that don't feel trivial after you've done them a few times and/or outgear them. On the other hand, the atmosphere in BRS/BRD/Strat made me enjoy those instances quite a few times after I outgeared them.

 

• Playered

Indeed, Strat and BRD really stand out from a design stance, sure they are both too long but they really felt like everything made sence within themselves.

Coilfang... you have Slave Pens where the bosses dont really have any significance to the theme, Steamvault again things dont really make sence and Underbog is just plain wierd.

It just feels like they lost the relationship between the actual dungeon and the content within it like they used to have... and this shows in pretty much every TBC instance.

Blood Furnace is quite good in most things, but what is a Beholder doing there? what is its purpose to the Orcs? granted its not the final boss, however it just seems odd.

 

PSGarak

They're certainly trivial once you outgear them by even a moderate amount, but they're still engaging to some extent. I think TBC bosses are more likely to still be fun even when they're trivial.

 

Opioid

I'm sure a lot of people have more fun with tic-tac-toe than they do with chess, as well, but that doesn't mean dungeon designers should take inspiration from such a fundamentally flawed model.

Some of the heroics are, but none of the vanilla ones are fun when you beat them by a large margin.

 

Jebraltar

I was just pointing out that the pre-BC instances were certainly not universally adored compared to BC instances. Bosses that fought more like trash mobs, AoE fears, RSTS charges that interrupt, and other heartwarming mechanisms in a ton of pulls were pretty irritating. Being in an instance like Stratholme where I had fifteen minutes of trash before I could pull a boss, especially in Live side, was pretty brutal. Doing BRD without someone who was experienced with the instance beforehand and you didn't want to crawl through a confusing maze of trash was horrible.

What's needed is definitely a middle-way between the two. There needs to be more to direct people to a simple path through the instance, but there also should be lots of content to explore. Hillsbrad is probably the best instance for this, apart from the obviously irritating nature of escort quests. They show you where to go, tell you what to do, give you a NPC to guide you, and there's an entire zone in there. At the same time, the bosses are all somewhat interesting, especially compared to pre-BC where "interesting" meant your group was undergeared.

Being run through on rails is kind of a sucky thing, but so is being completely lost when you just want to do something fun. Trash is not fun. Killing trash hoping to stumble on a boss is even less fun.