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Breaking News - Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King Presentation - World of Warcraft The Unofficial Site!

"Heroic Mode" for raid instances after all.

Interesting. Now I guess the 10man is supposed to be the easier variant, because the contrary does not make too much sense. At least if the basic idea is to open up raid content to be visited by a larger amount of players.

Very interesting. I wonder what this does to the raiding community if you can visit the bosses basically in easier mode first.

How would Arthas not be in both versions? Have a sporregar holding up a sign saying "Thanks for saving me raiders, but Prince Arthas is in another castle?"

I do agree that they might need to make the 25 mans attractive enough for people to attempt. They've probably already considered this, so something like Frostmourne will probably only be availalbe from the 25 man version and the like. Or maybe in the 10 man version, instead of dying he uh, Scroll of Town Portals out of there, so you never actually get to "defeat" him unless you try the 25 man version.

I'm torn in two minds about this. I will be interested to see how they deal with keeping 25 man encounters complex enough without making them completely different in 10 man fights. How they pull off a 10-man 4 horesmen will be very interesting to see! But the flipside of this is it gives them a much faster turnout on developing content as they don't have to worry about both crowds. I would imagine if Zul-Aman had come out with a 25-man version at the same time as its 10-man version the gripes about the 8-month content gap for end-game raiders wouldn't have occured.

In a german interview with Jeff Kaplan after the event, he mentioned that they think about a unlocking mechanism like "unlock 10-man instances by clearing the 25-raid zone once on a server"

I am going to guess the encounters will be completely different and they will simply use the same character models.

Most of the development time in raid dungeons, I believe, goes towards the physical creation of the dungeon, art assets, rendering and world creation. I have a feeling we are going to see two distinct progression paths, one ten, one 25, with loot from one being a "tier above" the other within the same zone..

IE

Nax 10=t4 Nax 25=t5
Nebrukhan 10=t5 Nebrukhan 25=t6.

So, in essence, you can even use the same loot, and simply pattern the 25 man dungeons loot one ahead...This should decrease zone creation times by quite a bit, and hopefully be better for everyone..Everyone gets to see content, and everyone gets "more" raids (10 and 25) and everyone gets progression.

This is all dependent on Blizzard actually using this "short cut" to make more dungeons though.

Another point I am wondering about are the two starting zones vs. the starting instances. When leveling in TBC, I tried to avoid 'spoilers' as much as possible, and follow the story through quests: ie, don't enter a zone unless your quests tell you to go there, don't go exploring aimlessly.

Now, I wonder how they will allow the Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord people to comfortable mix together for instancing in Utgarde Keep and the Nexus instances. From what I understand, the two zones are quite independent 68+ zones, designed specifically to split the player base into two, and provide a choice between zones. So I wonder how/if the quests make allowances for travelling to the other starting zone and do an instance there. Or do I still have to do both zones at the same time to be able to do both instances fully (with all quest rewards and possible reputation gains). I guess, what I'm trying to say is: If they are going to split the playerbase in two "starting factions", how will they fit in the instances, as they are inevitably going to be run by both groups of players. Does that make sense to anyone else?

I thought he already mentioned that in the interview? In a 10 man you have one full time tank, and one off tank. They can be expected to handle a certain amount of mobs. In a 25 man you have 3 tanks at least, and some OT's likely, and they indivudually can handle the same amount of mobs. So for each player the difficulty and complexity of the tasks they do can stay relatively unchanged.

If a boss in the 10 man has a collection of adds that needs a tank to manage; possibly together with some DPS type to kill them and a healer type to keep that little group healthy then they can tune the task of dealing with that group of adds so its sufficiently difficult. In the 25 man they can just throw more such groups of adds at the raid and force use of more tanks/healers/dps to deal with them. But for each group of players difficulty is the same.

I'd guess that would be the perfect way of dealing with 10 vs 25 man instances? Something like that is what I imagined when it was said that it shouldn't be a difficulty choice to go with 10 or 25, but a play style choice, at least.

The interesting thing will be what is their main focus though. I'd imagine they focus on the biggest group of players first. So they'll design the instances and boss mechanics to suit a 10-man group first. Then they'll probably try and add some extra mechanics, adds, or whatever to give the additional players in a 25-man group something to do. But if the initial focus is on making a good 10-man encounter I'd imagine the 25-man encounter perhaps wont feel as creative always.

Eurogamer have a nice preview - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Hands On // MMO /// Eurogamer

Mentions a lot about vehicle combat, apparently with handling, acceleration, inertia etc. Was originally going to be PvP only but then got added to a load of quests too. Sounds pretty crazy (in an awesome kind of way. Time to steal a steam tank and invade Stormwind!)

Now if you could have a permanent plaque or sign (similar to the reward posters) outside the instance on your server, with the names of the first 25-man raiders to clear that instance, I think that'd be a great incentive and reward.

"On X day, 25 brave adventurers entered this dungeon. Bringing their weapons and courage to bear, they faced the mighty dragon and were victorious. Following their victory the dragon was weakened and some of its forces scattered. Even so, it doesn't want to face the sting of defeat again. Enter at your peril.

The victorious adventurers:
Name 1
Name 2
etc ..."

It'd depend entirely on the encounter. All of Hyjal and roughly half of Black Temple would work in a 10-man setting, assuming the mechanics were rebalanced appropriately (in terms of damage, cooldown etc). The encounters which need significant changes are the ones where you have to split up the raid into many smaller groups; something like Vashj, Karathress or Illidari Council would require more changes than Archimonde or Reliquary.

Actual we experiment with atunments: Perhaps it will be necessary to complete the 25-player-part by a guild on the server to unlock the 10-player-part.

Interviev vs. interview

There is honestly 0 reason for me to run 25-mans if they don't offer anything unique compared to the 10-mans. Knowing Blizzard the 25-man loot will look exactly like 10-man loot (Arena anyone?). Why would anyone consider 25-mans if the gear only gives increased stats?

Really I see Blizzard going 2 different ways:

1) The 25-mans and 10-mans have different loot tables with different looking gear.

2) The 25-mans and 10-mans have the same loot tables with the same looking gear but different stats.

If it's the latter I have no reason to run a 25-man ever again.

Regarding to the Gamona.de interview, the 25-raid loot will be a tier above the 10-raid loot and looks completely different.

Well I guess it comes down to how much you enjoy raiding as a large raid group. I certainly have more fun doing 25 mans than doing Kara/ZA. Also the fights are almost undoubtedly going to be more difficulty in the 25 man versions, so if you draw your enjoyment from the challenge of a fight and mastering it like so many on these boards do, then it makes little difference. It seems your primary concern is loot and the like. I do understand the looks issue, looking different is important in an MMORPG which is based on progression and character advancement and I sincerely hope that for WotLK Arena looks are seperated from PvE tier looks. For the same instances though I would expect recurrent looks and themes to be reused in what is esssentially the same instance. It would be nice if the 10 man stuff could be slightly downgraded in looks from the 25 man stuff (think BS weapons) but I can't see it happening.

On the poisitive side:
- Provides an easier way to gear up new recruits/rerollers to a nice level. More importantly it allows you to do this out of raid hours meaning there shouldn't be a need to farm the lower raid dungeons for newbies once we're halfway into the expansion.
- Pretty much obliterates the casual vs hardcore fighting for dev time debate for good.
- More incentive for all players to participate in server based events if it relates to a 10 man as well as a 25 man.
- Many more options for gearing alts.
- Allows small guilds to have a clear line of progression in parallel with the bigger guilds.
- Allows all players to be involved in and experience the story and lore of the game.
- One boss "Onyxia" style instances could be very nicely done on 10 man and be fun and rewarding for little time investment.

Cons:
- Runnning the same dungeon 2-3 times a week on 25 and 10 man mode could make both modes life spans decrease rapidly. (Any guild who killled Illidan last year, imagine how sick you would be if you'd also been clearing the identical 10 man BT twice a week for the same period).
- Raiders with a more fragile ego may feel threatened or have their e-peen diminished to see <Cazualz R Uz> running round with a lower level epic sword that looks identical to a guys in <Hardcore Anonymous> legendary. (not a big concern for me though i would like differentiation more to avoid the clone syndrome wow is suffering from now).
- If it isn't handled delicately it could tear a whole in the bottom of the enchanting market as far as the epic variety of gem goes.
- 25 man raiders who have no wish to play in these instances (or no time as its all devoted to 25s) will have to farm them anyone as there are bound to be the odd irreplaceable item in there (do you really want to have to farm the 15 or so bosses in nax each week to get the DST MKII off KT?).


That raises another question, think it will apply to Nax as well as the new ones?

Yes, they gave Naxxramas as an example (well, the writers of the article did, though Blizzard itself apparently said "all of them").

I wonder how literal "one tier lower" is.. Taking TBC as an analogy, would they actually have Tier 5 tokens drop in 10-man Black Temple? Then it would look like (taking TBC instances as examples).

Tier 4: Some kind of 25-man & 10-man SSC/TK
Tier 5: 25-man SSC/TK & 10-man BT
Tier 6: 25-man BT & 10-man SWP.
Tier 6.5: 25-man SWP

This could mean that at a certain tier, you would be running a 25-man and the 10-man version of the "next" dungeon side-by-side to maximize upgrades. Which means that new content will almost always be seen in the 10-man version first, unless you purposely restrict yourself to only running 25-mans.

Of course, this is assuming 10-man instances will be easier. I suppose they would be, as they will apparently have lower gear requirements.

Well, they also said they considered adding a mechanism where 10-mans are only available once the 25-man has been cleared on the server. If they do this - cutting edge guilds will not be able to do this. But the "2nd wave" guilds would have the option to this. However, these are guilds for whom optimization is probably not as important, so they might very well choose not to do so on a strictly dual-clear basis each week. For new guilds forming later - it would mean gearing up is faster (badge loot + 10-mans + possibly pvp rewards usable in pve). But I really do hope they implement the mechanism of not unlocking 10/25 man mode at the same time. However this might lead to the interesting scenario of casual guilds transferring to highly progressed servers to be able to have access to more 10 mans. We'll see what happens. In the end I think this option will probably end up as a good thing, barring any nasty guild drama over deciding who gets to be in the 10-man raids every week, if these do have progression-relevant loot.

I guess the 10/25 man raids will boil down to how they can manage the difficulties between them, and risk/reward ofcourse.
The loot will be well... Items are already near-duplicated alot, will they just make the same items drop in the 10man as the higher level 25? or make a batch of new items with almost the same stats and different names.

They would have to stick to 10man being 1 token, and 25man being 3 tokens atleast, and keep a fair chunk of items being specifically for the 25man raids as a prestigue - not to mention if they dont use different items/names/graphics it will mess up with their wonderful 'Logical Loot'.


Im actually looking forward to this concept though, and if gear will be available this way perhaps they can destroy the horrible badge system and turn the game back to killing bosses for loot not going to your local vendor with your prize tickets.


Perhaps we will finally get a full raid sized Troll dungeon now atleast =)

According to gamespy (GameSpy: Wrath of the Lich King Raid and Dungeon Update)

Hopefully this means that even level 80 dungeons will have completely different loot as Heroic (like MrT), which should make them a bit more interesting and solve the 'which is the most optimum badge farming instance? Mechanar HO!' syndrome early TBC suffered from.

To be honest, why not just make it so that t7 drops from the first batch of 10mans, t8 from the first batch of 25, t9from second batch 10, t10 from second batch 25 etc. Difficulty scales like usual. Maybe put in a more distinct difficulty-difference so ppl wont skip from first batch 25 to last batch 10 etc.

And I do think they will reuse alot of the artwork on items, they've stated multiple times that that takes a LOT of effort. It doesnt worry me a tad, what matters are stats, but then again I dont have the easiest bruisable cyber-ego.
Just make the batch items decently different and we're g2g to be honest, avoiding the look-homogenization.

An Interview With WoW's Lead Designers

Curse has a long interview with "Tigole" and "Kalgan", mentioning the possibility of that system being put in to place.

"One thing we're also talking about doing -- we haven't finalized it yet -- but one possibility would be that the instance actually has to be defeated by somebody on that server in 25 man mode before it can be unlocked for 10 man."

they have stated they want separate 10man vs 25man progression possible. This means instance2-10man can't give better loot than instance1-25man* as that would effectively rip apart both progressions.

So they would have to do something like this:
instance1-10: tX
instance1-25: tX+1

instance2-10: tX+1 like - maybe the same set, maybe a different set with nearly the same stats (1)
instance2-25: tX+2

* I'm sure there will be some DST somewhere in a "lower" instance.
(1) I'm sure they'll be able to get it completely wrong