I agree that dungeon design doesn't need to be an either-or proposition. Blizzard should include one or two BRD-style sprawlers along with the rail shooters.

I also hope more of the lore in WOTLK stay closer to the main "alliance/horde" storyline. I enjoyed BRS because it was more connected to the core lore of the game (i.e. capital cities). TBC did not really relate much to the lore we had been previously steeped in, and the lack of continuity was jarring. Hopefully, an Arthas driven stroyline in the expansion will be easier to integrate with the "old world".

I think the things I'd like to see most in the X-pac are some innovative raid encounters, right now most of them arent easy by any means, but they arent really that complicated. I know with the old-school raids MC was even easier than the stuff we have now, but when we got into BWL and beyond and even went 'backwards' in progression to stuff like ZG or AQ20, things had this great feel to them where you were actually doing something that was honestly challenging. My favourite boss fight ever was Razorgore, I walked in there as a mage and my guild had us mages kiting the orcs around the room while the tank killed the eggs. What made that fight beautiful is how chaotic everything was, I think the only fight I've seen so far that comes close to that is phase 2 of Vashj, most other fights are fights with just a bgillion different phases that you simply memorize what to do but once you do that its pretty simple to carry out.

Gotta run to school, forum troll out

Auchindoun and the Shadow Labyrinth in general are kind of a kiss in the direction of those that liked the idea of a 5-man Ragnaros.

Originally for BRD, according to Tigole, after you fought Emperor Dagran Thaurissan, you would have a section that would lead further back into the Molten Core, and you'd fight Ragnaros, this idea was obviously scrapped and turned Rag into a 40-man raid, but Shadow Labs to me, has always been that kiss off of the idea that they wanted to do, but didn't with Rag.

The parallels are there.

Murmur's coming into the world caused that huge explosion that created the waste land around Auchindoun
Ragnaros' coming into the world caused that huge explosion that created the Searing Gorge/Burning Steppes

Shadow Council is evil and summoned Murmur for power and lost control
Dark Irons are evil, and summoned Ragnaros to help win their war and became slaves

Murmur is an Elemental
Rag is an Elemental

Identical skins
Similar attacks
Etc

That's always been my take on Auchindoun for the most part.

I actually didn't realize that this was the cause of the explosion. I suppose it should seem obvious, but... it doesn't. Particularly given that Shadow Labyrinth is still basically intact, and Murmur is still pretty much under control.

I don't know, they really need to work on making this stuff obvious.

EDIT: I looked up the "kill Murmur" quest, and sure enough, both steps mention the Shadow Council blowing up Auchindoun by summoning Murmur. I guess I need to read the quest text a little better, but still, it all seems a little disproportionate. Have they really been fighting Murmur in a little hallway for two years?

Yes, they have.

And this is why I like the Caverns of Time instances more than others. The "take a step back into history and see what happened" is much more believable and repeatable without having to seriously suspend that belief. Granted, you can't have more than a minor subset of instances like that, or else it becomes a history story and not a breathing, changing world. In each of those instances however, you are a participant in an event. Not a victim stuck in an endlessly grinding time loop looking for blue and purple icons.

Shattered Sun does a great job of having the world react and be influenced by player activity and participation, and something that WotLK appears to present as well. A tremendously refreshing break. I just hope that Blizzard balances it right, and it isn't too mindless in grinding something for progress, or so reactionary that it is over in a few days and it returns to the grind for the next 6 months while we wait for something new.

Blizzard's product is by far the best on the market, and I don't want to seem like I'm complaining. I just don't want the best product on the market to degenerate into some of the same massive flaws that plagued other MMORPGs. Blizzard has the resources and ability to produce content far beyond what they are giving us today, I just hope they keep tapping that pool more than they currently are.

I'm sure you can agree that Caverns of Time has its own share of continuity errors! I mean, yes, it's more believable that that you might repeat instances when doing so via the Caverns of Time, but this is a fairly minor leap compared to re-running "present day" instances. I'm sure Medivh would get equally sick of seeing you, given that he can apparently see through time and space anyway.

It's a pretty brilliant implementation of "world changing" progress. You feel like you're participating in tangible events that are having an effect on the world, while not particularly consuming an exorbitant amount of development time out of Blizzard. I'd love to see them do more of these kinds of events. For those of us who spend too much time on the game, it makes the whole thing feel a lot more dynamic. Even attaching a couple of simple daily quests to events like the Aldor/Scryers showing up the gates to Black Temple would have been great. Not only does it not have to consume a lot of development time, but it also has the advantage of having a release date that's several months after the expansion.

We know that stagnation following the release of the expansion is a big problem for players, whether it be the non-raiders complaining about not getting new 5-mans to run or the hardcore raiders complaining about completing all the front-loaded raid content too early. Based on this issue, and also on their comments that they want to make the average player feel more involved in the game's plot elements, I think we can expect more of this gradual content rollout model with additional "in-world" activities.

I really enjoy what they did with the Shattered Sun too and I hope they implement this into future (xpac) high level content.

Not sure what would make sense but maybe something with the Naga or Goblins back on Azeroth? Since those might be setup on an island too.

It seems to me that one of the largest problems with "large" dungeons is just the trash. I mean, wandering around an empty dungeon looking for the next place really isn't too bad, assuming you aren't completely lost, but when you have to clear 12 extra trash pulls because of it, well, I could see people becoming unhappy. It seems like the logical solution is to actually make killing trash mobs worthwhile. I'm fairly certain it wouldn't have to be a major reward like a good blue or similar, but perhaps some basic tradeskill mats like motes or ore or gems. Or just raw gold. Or if you wanted to be loretastic, they could have a chance at dropping keys for chests and so forth. I'm not sure what the exact balance is that is required, but enough that people could legitimately say "Well, we might have gotten lost and went the wrong way but at least we got 10 primal fires!"

Beyond that, people getting lost in large dungeons sounds more like a design flaw, one that could easily be overcome. How about a guide the first couple of times? Better graphics inside the dungeon like arrows and sign posts? Mobs who flee in the direction of the next boss? There are any number of things you could do to alleviate problems like that.

It sounds like the optimum design, at least for people in this thread, is a large dungeon with a short path through the middle of it. Lots of extra rooms and trash and so forth, but possible to just train straight through.


One of my biggest problems with level designs is the lack of npc interactions. I'm reminded a bit of diablo2, for most of the game you sort of had villages surrounded by monsters, but recall the first time you got the expansion. You walk out of the village... and people are shelling you with catapults! Your barbarian allies are fighting for their lives right besides you. It's very epic.

WoW has basically none of that. Even the new isle that we're supposedly reclaiming doesn't bother with any of it. I suppose there are the occasional fight between SSO guards and demons or whatever, perhaps they're just drowned out by the 400 players stranding on top of them. As I recall one of the dailies is "defeat the demon reinforcements pouring on to the isle" except that most of the demons are just hanging around by the portal and once players showed up it felt more like a duck hunt than repelling an invasion. Now there's 50 players just hanging around the portal jumping anything that shows up.

I suppose given the amount of content blizzard has already created if they were going to change from static monsters to active ones they would have done it at some point, but hey, at least I've gotten it off my chest.

Edit: I suppose in a way it reminds me of that classic television/movie adage: show, don't tell. Blizzard does a lot of telling. You have npcs standing around describing this semi-grand story, then you go out there and it looks nothing like it.

I guess the overall point is the general feeling of lack of interaction with the world around me. Nothing you do in the entire game ever feels like you matter. From the smallest quest to the grandest, everything resets for the next player.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. I can bear with Shattered Halls being a rail-shooter because they are in fact a series of interconnected corridors, as the word HALLS suggests. Ramparts (or parapets, or crenellations) are generally linear in design too, as they follow the walls, but if you're going to call something a LABYRINTH, you better believe I'm going to want to be able to lose my bearings at the very least.

That's because there are in fact 50 players destroying the demons as fast as they can pour out of the portal. I'd imagine that the place would be decidedly hostile for a single player to clear, especially given how tightly clustered the demons would spawn, assuming they were ever allowed to marshal their numbers completely.

That's really a paradigm inherent to the MMORPG genre (I'm not necessarily considering it a flaw). They can't deliberately obsolete content that you yourself have completed because there's 9 million other people waiting in line to do it after you.

True, there are some touches they could make, such as having NPC dialogues change depending on your reputation, or even the the King of the Ogres storyline was excellently implemented, but to ask for permanent changes to the game world based on your actions because it makes you feel more important is not very likely to happen.

In Shattered Halls, the reinforcements running up to form shooting lines made it look like the place was actually under attack, as opposed to a bunch of dudes standing around waiting to get killed like the loot pinatas they are but should be pretending not to be. Cf: GameSpy: Episode 14: The Scarlet Hootenanny
In either case, it's basically about making the dungeon believable. A fairly generic linear layout of rectangles with mobs lying around waiting to be pulled is not believable (shadow lab). A fairly generic linear layout of rectangles with mobs that act like they're being attacked hides the whole fairly generic rectangles aspect, if it's done well enough (shattered halls). An involved, complicated layout that rewards discovery and exploring can have mobs that just stand around waiting to be pulled but still seem like an interesting and believable place (dire maul). So I guess the point is, level design isn't the only way to get around the just-a-box feeling. But it is something that needs to be addressed, one way or another.

To add to that, the heroic version of Shattered Halls is probably the best one of the bunch.

Not only do you get an extra boss leading the archers to denote they're trying that much harder to stop you this time, you also have the Executioner's timer to work against. The timer isn't just about clearing the trash faster either - it gives you incentive to skip the Gladiator packs to make it in time. Not only that, but the reward for actually beating the timer is pretty tempting: Primals, pots and an extra Badge.

It's one thing to add a 50% damage and HP modifier to all the mobs and add a new ability to each boss. It's quite another thing to actually spur the group onwards with the impending death of an innocent NPC, whilst being taunted all the way.

The obvious choice is the siege on Icecrown Citadel and it's surrounding areas. We know from the recent revelations about the Dragonblight that there's a big ol' gate blocking the way to the Lich King's stronghold. It seems only natural that, when that opens, you'll have a flurry of daily quests to kill all the Scourge pouring out, and to try and set up a forward base of operations.

LoTRO does this quite cleverly, in that not just dungeons but significant parts of the various quest hubs are instanced. To make an analogy, it's as if Stormwind Keep was instanced out, so that once you've done the Onyxia attunement questline and the Onyxia "reveal", whenever you enter the keep after that, Lady Katrana won't be there any more.

The disadvantage is that this necessarily pens all significant events into small areas that can be instanced off - no point instancing the keep if Marshall Windsor still does his tour through the whole city ten times a day. Secondly, it fragments the gameplay area, so that two people can't arrange to meet in the Keep if they're at different places on the questline - they'll zone into different copies of it!

This is the type of thing that bothers me when people claim there's no lore in the dungeons. I read the quests and NPC dialogs and stuff. To me, pretty much all the dungeons have lore and are usually explicitly tied to several quests in the zone in which they are placed. If you're just skipping the quest text, or don't care enough to remember it, is it really valid to claim that there's no lore to a zone? If you really cared about the lore, you'd read the quests...

From the moment you step into Zangarmarsh, you've got Cenarion dudes telling you to investigate the naga presence, you get turned into a bird and do a flyby to see all the water pumps, you investigate what was formerly a lake that was drained completely with one of the giant pump machines sitting right in the middle of it. All the pumps have giant tubes leading down into Coilfang Reservoir... not to mention all the sporelock stuff... and yet people claim the zones have no lore? Someone earlier in the thread said that it doesn't make sense that you're down there until Lady Vashj says "Whoever controls the water controls Outland". Are you kidding me? How much hand holding and shoving of plot down someone's throat does it take? At what point is it no longer Blizzard's fault that a player can't figure out what the story is?

The same thing goes for Auchindoun, the bone wastes quests, and Murmur. I knew that the shadow council had summoned some ancient evil that destroyed Auchindoun and created the bone wastes before I was even level 68, not to mention zoning into slab at 70.

Maybe Blizzard will do more stuff similar to the Magister's Terrace scrying orb, so people can watch little in-game cut scenes since they're obviously never going to read quest text.

I have to agree with ildon, you can't glaze over the quest text and claim that there's not enough lore at the same time.

For me, one of the pivotal moments of Outland was Carinda's quest line in Falcon Watch and the Fungal Giants quest line in Zangarmarsh.

It's not everyday that you discover a Blood Elf researcher is having an affair with another woman, only to have his wife take revenge on the harlot by turning her into a mouse. That kind of catty vengeance was something right out of Desperate Housewives, and I felt genuinely sorry for the girl/mouse when she got chased out of the camp and into the distance where some Helboars were in waiting.

I PM'ed a friend about it, and all he could was "lol never noticed, I just kill everything." What a waste

And then you have the Fungal Giants - the morality of what I was doing tugged at my heartstrings. I had to slay them because they were killing the Sporelings, but the only reason they had to resort to violence was because the Naga's lake drained had killed off their traditional sources of food. Slaying Vashj took a very personal note to put a stop to the evil machinations that turned these two normally pacified races against each other for mere survival.

Actually Blizzard had something like that in Diablo 1, every time you played the game it generated a new random map (made from a large pool of small static pieces) for every level, with a random selection of quests and bosses.

It's probably impossible with current WoW engine (maps are absolutely static and stored client side), but would be very cool if it was implemented.

Murlocs are slaves to the Naga, their working force. In WC3 Murlocs are the worker class to the Naga race. Walking around Quel'Danas you can see little neutral Murlocs camping between the Nagas. It got kind of lost in WoW, since Murlocs often appear without any Naga connection and Naga without Murlocs, but that is the link.
Leotheras probably was given to Vashj to guard him. You wouldn't put some dangerous madman out in the open, but unter the watch of your forces. Why he didn't end up chained in the BT though... Maybe Illidan can't stand to see yet another failure of his. We know he´s not the forgiving kind of person
Morogrim... Uh... Well there aren`t any watergiants in Outland. So one has to assume he originated in Azeroth where his kin lives. This would induce that Vashj brought him with her, and his obvious connection to murlocs and his ability to call them in as his minions makes me believe hes kind of the slavemaster for them.

Those are likely explanations, but there is no proof that they are what the devs had in mind but didn´t get around to implement. What disappointed me big time is all that walking and questing in Zangarmarsh left you hanging open to the "WHY?" and Vashj ends the whole plot of her setup presence in a single line which basically reads "water mighty lolz!".

This one I would have to agree with as something more lacking. MC/BWL seemed to be a little more cohesive in how their bosses were strung together.

Kill the REALLY big Core Hound? All the Core Hound trash stops spawning. You have to (try to) kill Ragnaros' secretary before he wakes the boss up himself. You fight all of Nefarian's failed (successful?) Chromatic Dragon experiments, and one genuinely good dragon that just got corrupted trying to help you.

Karazhan was a little light on the boss lore too, but at least had a general "theme" going on - a Stablemaster, a Butler, an Opera event, a big robot serving essentially as the Home Security System, Medivh's dad, and finally an Eredar whose demonic doings are apparently the cause of waking up all the Really Bad Guys (TM) in the rest of the place.

In comparison, Varedis' quest line in SMV was a lot better fleshed out than Leotheras the Blind ever was. You investigate Demon Hunter training grounds, call upon your friendly Demon Hunter contact to find a way to stop them, grab the Book of Fel Names from the resident bad guy librarian (Blackheart the Inciter) and read the book out loud to stop Varedis cold when he uses Metamorphosis.

I've always been a fan of figuring out what to do with a boss by being told in-game (or even just being clued in), instead of having to read up about somewhere else on the internet.

Actually, while i do like the SSO storyline and the way the isle is continually conquered back from the enemy (and still offering struggle against the former owners and various demons, so players who later joined the game are also able to experience quite a bit of the questing there), i was a little bit disappointed with the narrative presentation of the advancement.

I was curious how phase switching was actually done, so i waited at 99% before the next phase, and watched how they implemented it. And was seriously disappointed. After the new phase was reached, the newly conquered building just spawned the new NPCs, and that was it. No advancing SSO Forces in a little in-game cutscene, no small fight with the former inhabitants (they just vanished), no yells from the conquering forces, no futile tries from the Sunwell Elves to take the building back, nothing. I mean, yes, WoW doesn't pretend to be a roleplaying game storywise (even the RPG servers only have this tag, the rpg-policy there doesn't mean anything for years now, it won't be enforced at all), and there was often stated there won't be any roleplaying events at all (to many servers, no GMs working for Blizzard -the people calling themselves GMs are only technical staff, something different to GMs in actual RPGs-, to much hassle), but at least such small things could have been a little bit more interesting done.

Maybe WotLK will bring a little bit more background scenery back to the game. After stepping through the BC portal i thought, maybe they are getting at it, the scripted constant fight to hold the portal was a nice touch, the wandering reavers in its original versions were fun, but there were not many scripted background events after that. The world is sometimes to stale, even the cities miss some kind of real NPC activity besides the usual kids running around, and the small sidestory of the grifter. This was a major downpoint of Diablo, the lifeless city. They did one step since then, filling the city with people. But the second step is still missing, bringing them to life.

The problem with making a big event out of SSO phase changes would be that then if it happens at 4 in the morning, no one would see it. (And it could be set to happen the next 4 in the afternoon after the requirements are met or whatever, but many many people would still miss it.)

Re: Zangarmarsh, there was lots of investigating, but you never actually got a real answer as to why the naga were draining the lakes until Vashj gives her speech. You determine that it's the naga, that it's bad, that they're doing it through pumping stations, that they'll have to be stopped... and then you head off to Terrokar and that's it.

I do agree that there were a lot of great quests in TBC though. Teribus the Cursed is my personal favourite I think (*big summoning animation* *no mob...* So, it's broken, or...? *looks up* OH GOD DRAGON!).

I think one of the issues I have with the lore is that there appears to be a real disconnect between what is happening in the zones and the bosses that reside in the instances. Other than the cutscene from Patheleon the Calculator in Hellfire Peninsula and the introduction to Magtheridon you get in Blood Furnace, I can't think of a single instance where I was briefed about an instance boss.

Surely it's possible for the game to give sufficient meat to the instance bosses such that when you finally get to see them it has a little more meaning than "so what's the next boss' name?". Examples: what is Void Reaver? why is Al'ar there? I *don't* want to have to read wowwiki to discover their backstories - it should be in the game already.

I'm sorry, but I think in your haste to be patronising you haven't actually read people's complaints. Everyone read the quests - I know I did. And yes, there's a story there.

It's just that the story makes no *sense* - it doesn't hang together correctly at all in their world. In their haste to implement winged dungeons everywhere, they lost a lot of the lore and background that made the old world winged dungeons (Scarlet Monastery, Dire Maul), so good. No matter the amount of lore in Zangramarsh, fundamentally we still have no freaking clue what's going on there. Yes, the Naga are draining the water. Why? Who knows. Aparently water is life, but by this they mean turning it into crappy water elementals any class can solo. Woohoo. So far no-one else in TBC seems to care about the lack of water - Blades Edge Mountains and Netherstorm don't seem to be suffering much. There's a giant elemental "purifying" elementals in SSC, but where they go and why they are doing this is totally unknown. Half the bosses in there make no sense. And that's all topped by the fact that the zone doesn't even give CE reputation - I think that's a big enough sign if there ever was one that it's place in the expansion wasn't properly thought out. Hand in some plants, get rep. Kill Vashj - nothing.

I've done all the Auchindon questlines. I've also done the long hidden Horde questline that explains why the dead are drawn to Auchindon, and why it was built in the first place (as the tomb of a regenerating Na'ru. Same as what's going on in Nagrand and the crystal mountain). The problem was, that yet again the instances bear practically no relation to that. Hall full of random bird men? Random Crypts level that has a burning legion demon in it? Shadow council labrynth that has bosses which make no sense and are frozen in time? Congrats on you knowing why Auchindon turned into a bone waste at level 68. Can you tell me why this happened years ago and yet they are still fighting a running endless battle against murmur? Took how many years to get him to 30%? Why is there a group of damn Skexxis sat in a hall opposite this suppossed nucleur disaster preening their feathers?

The problem is, as much as they write good quest descriptions, the world around them does not match those quests in TBC. At all. In the original game, this wasn't the case - they clearly had longer to develop that aspect of the game, and it showed. Quest lines lead somewhere, they had bosses that made sense, and they were finished. Vashj's storyline was never completed. Auchindon was never finished. (Unless you did the secret Horde questline, and even then it ended with a "meh?"). Someone earlier outlined how they could have made SSC a much better dungeon just by putting some NPC's at the start leading the invasion, and have them explain what the heck is going on in there.

Heck, Molten Core made more sense as an instance than SSC, and that's saying something. The bosses and fights in each instance are much better, hands down, but the background and lore behind them is badly put together and missing. That's the problem - a lot of time spent making the bosses very fun, but little time actually justifying why they are there and what they are doing.