I think I've used all of those examples at least once as my desktop background.

WoW has done raiding right. For all the "problems" and changes it's gone through since its inception, the raid game is truly awesome. Some part of raiding can be experienced by everyone. Out of the ordinary boss mechanics aren't reserved for the ends of elite 25 man instances, you can find interesting bosses in 5, 10, and 25 mans. My first trek through the TBC 5 mans a year ago (in the ~5 days it took me to reach 70) was one of the most fun times I've had in WoW. Seeing all the neat new NPCs. I think the mana tombs consortium are still my absolute favorite. We pulled them and everyone said at once "holy crap these guys' run animation is so cool!" Just working through and tinkering with the different little gimmicks each one had was a one-of-a-kind experience I hope I get to enjoy again in WotLK. Leveling almost exclusively in instances is the way to go!

Expand that to the 25 mans, and you see more really cool things going on. I'll always like the Magtheridon Cubes, fishing up Lurker, fighting Murlocs in a boss fight, getting Legendaries for 10 minutes, and pulling spikes out of my friend's chest to save him.

Certainly once you completely outgear heroics, CC is no longer necessary. But that's not really the point of concern. (And lets not kid ourselves, full epics IS outgearing heroics completely) When you are doing heroics in a blue-geared group, CC is essential to success, and that marginalized many specs for a good part of the expansion. That's something Blizzard did wrong.

Overall they did a nice job with heroics, but yeah I'd like to see more variety, black morass vs every other heroic, for instance. I rerolled with 10 or so close friends and we basically all played strict healers or strict DPS, so when we were doing heroics in blue/greens with a few kara epics it was insanely hard doing say ramparts for example. So yeah if they could throw in a few more instances that would cater to a heavy dps, not so much cc group like black morass it'd be great.

I'd also like for them to throw in some big sprawling non-winged 8-10 boss 5 mans like Strat, LBRS, BRD where you could take multiple routes, skip trash, basically, have some perfectable instances outside of just knowing how to handle groups efficiently. I mean, post TBC what's the best example of this, the first room in Steamvaults you can clear a path on either of the sides? Please. Winged instances work well, but they're designed for pugs, have some in the next xpack, but also throw in some old school 5 mans as well.

For some reason I enjoyED (notice the ED) doing heroics before even the easiest ones were nerfed into oblivion. It's not that you've done them before, but it's rather the feeling of "Holy shit, this is fucking hard, but we can just manage through excellent CC juggling and a light mood".

Take Heroic Slave Pens for instance (and then I mean fresh 70's, barely having full blue gear from quests/mechanar etc), don't object, it was hard, at least for me, who hadn't really raided anything besides a little ZG.
Being just on the brink of whiping but due to a well-timed Fear, Poly or similiar things, we survive and manage to keep on. A warlock (me!) and a paladin as a healer kiting two robots in Heroic Mech after an unlucky pull etc. Things like that, when the tide of the battle turns due to either a lucky miss/dodge/parry or just a quick eye and excellent use of terrain and movement, you really get a special feeling.

And I got a lot of those in the first Heroics, less so in raids.

The fluidity of movement and action is absolutely outstanding. Only Quake 3 and Counterstrike have offered, in my experience, a similarly organic feeling.

Hell, the entire game engine is fantastic. A real work of art.

Nothing new to add, but just want to drive home the point:

The presence of, ease of use of, and community behind UI customizations in WoW have made it very hard for me to play any other MMO since I first dropped CoH and L2 for WoW.

I'd like to second this. I watched my girlfriend play an awful lot of FFXI, and marveled, despite how interesting some of the encounters seemed after they were explained, at how dull it appeared to be. They stood around, doing the same things over and over. That may not be the whole truth of it, but I would watch her and then go and practice Razorgore or something ... it felt like a dramatic difference.

I think that Heroics were done really well, especially the badge concept. The problem was that on release, there were no major differences between most of the instances, and some fights couldn't be done without a well tuned group. That being said, they have learnt. The Epic Flight Form fight in Sethek Halls and that, at Sunwell Plateau, you only get to fight Kael'thalas on Heroic, shows that things are moving in the right direction. Although Blizzard almost certainly don't have the manpower for it at the moment, taking some of the older instances from way back when and adding in Heroic versions of them is something a lot of players would welcome.

On a raiding note, if they tune Naxxramas properly, that is going to be an incredible experience for the thousands of raiders who never had a chance to see encounters like Sapphiron and The Four Horsemen. Sure for some of us it's going to probably be recycled content, but it's not like we're going to be forced to clear Twin Emps trash again...

I agree. If they're reusing raid mechanics, why not use more of them to make interesting 5 man fights?

For example, the Twin Emps teleport mechanic could be used and modified. Or Heigan's dance. Or use some dps checks, to emphasize a group with 3 dpsers instead of 2 and an offhealer.

You want to put the Heigan dance into a 5 man? It'd be the least completed 5 man in WoW's history...

Seriously, though, I'd love to see some more complex 5 man fights, tank and spank is all too common.

The major obstacle in complicating 5-man fights is that it has to be completable with a wide variety of class compositions. You can't have, for example, tank transitions because you can't require there to be two tanks. Even if you do have two tanking-capable classes in your groups, odds are one of them is a healer. Now, having a boss that requires a ranged dps class to tank it would be acceptable, instead of or in addition to a normal tank. I say 'acceptable' because even as the game stands right now, it's not unreasonable to have all your dps classes be melee or melee hybrids. The major problem with it is making the damage low enough that you don't need dedicated mage-tank gear to tank it, and yet the boss still needs to be tanked instead of just letting him nuke rampant.

I'm still hoping for a 5-man kiting boss, myself, like Buru or something.

Agree with everything really. But have to emphasise the soundscape of the game.

I've been recently doing a lot of low level mat farming for crafting and realised that I had turned the music off about 2 weeks after I started. Turned it back on and really listened to it. The atmospherics of the music, combined with the abient sounds plus the varied and highly polished artwork....bloody amazing.

So I've left the music on again for a while.... the Auchindoun soundtrack is perfectly dreary for the location.

I really loved the landscapes amny of the zones created, especially Winterspring which for some reason just made me go: This is awesome. Little details like the sky, or the jagged rocks in Blades Edge Mountain. I really loved the internal architecture of Karazhan, with its stairways winding all over the place, although TK and SSC less so (hoping to see BT/Hyjal soon ^^)

Some of the voiceovers and scripted events also really helped with giving things a more "epic" feel. I don't know anyone that didn't think SM Cath was cool the first time they ran that instance. Leotharas, Aran and Romeo & Juliet Opera Event are also among my favourites although I was disappointed with how Vashj was done, would've liked a bit more from her

I don't think it's unacceptable to mandate at least 1 ranged dps class in a given instance. But there is no reason for what you say to necessarily be true.

Use some creativity. Why not provide an item or a buff to only 1 player out of 5, that makes the damage very low, but the other 4 get splattered?

Or in the stratholme 5 man, provide Arthas with an assortment of healing/tanking armor sets, where 1 player can control him and supplement whatever the party lacks.

Treat it as Black Morass 2.0 where you have to dps at a reasonably high sustained rate.

Don't get my wrong, it's by no means impossible. But in order to do it you need relatively complex, unique, and exceptional mechanics, and that tends to lower the accessibility of the encounter since your average casual 5-man group will get in there without knowing the fight ahead of time, and be totally confused. It's not a matter even of whether they could beat the encounter (with or without practice), it's a matter of making sure the players know what the rules of the encounter are, from just the encounter itself.

On second thought maybe that's not such an obstacle, if you get the buff or item from an NPC just outside the boss room that explains what the hell is going on in terms of both lorelol and mechanics. It does seem kind of cheap though so they shouldn't overuse it. And, of course, expectations for heroics can be quite a bit higher although I dislike the idea of having the fun bosses be heroic-only.

Well, we have exactly that, with Tears of the Goddess. The item tells you it protects you from 'Archimonde's vile magics' or something to that extent, and the player has to figure out when it is needed.

I don't see why Magister's Terrace needs to cater to the village idiot. We have a dozen or so 5 man instances already which cater to the lowest common demoninator with both gear and skill. Why not require normal MT to have at least full ilvl 115 blues on all players, and heroic MT to have a reasonable assortment of kara/pvp epics? When the first guild walked into Kael'thas, they had no idea what the weapons did, or where to move the advisors, or that Pyroblast hits for 20k damage. Why not require groups to wipe and learn those complex mechanics?

If Kael'thas 2.0 ends up being another version of Pathaleon, where 5 members in t5 can simply go in, ignore his abilities, and 1 shot him, I'll be sorely disappointed.

QFT. I burned out on WoW last March, needed a break, and played LOTRO for two months. That game does many things right but I grew increasingly frustrated at the inability to customize the UI once I started doing dungeons with groups. I came back to WoW a few months later, what a relief to be back to my 60+ addons! Imagine if we had been forced to raid/AH/PvP in WoW with the vanilla UI throughout the past three years, there is no way the community would be as thriving as it is.

WoW is open to addons because Blizzard has succeeded (at least since 2.0) in coding the permissions for what addons can and cannot do to the point where expert addon authors can enhance the game in a jillion ways but cannot trivialize it or spoil it for the players who don't use addons. That is a nontrivial accomplishment, and is yet another area where Blizzard's team seems to have developed a strong competency that few competitors can attempt to match.

If I had to choose one thing that makes WoW really special - it would definitely be the details and the amount of things you can do or see. In >200 days played, still I haven´t done or seen everything there is - though I probably did more than 99.9% of all players.
I mean, how many have seen all dungeons and raids from start to end?
Went to Naxxramas to gather an Atiesh or have seen the Stratholme fight live?
Witnessed the 3 world events(Eranikus, Maws, AQ opening) or seen/done things as El Pollo Grande, the MC priest/hunter quests(where the hunter quest should be mandatory for all those rerolling trolls *cough*).

It´s that lot of details and fun things that chain me to this game - and makes it fun.

This was touched upon slightly, but...

I realize that there are some down sides to Molten Core, but I don't think there's an encounter yet that's even come close to the Ragnaros scripting and feeling of accomplishment back in the day. The level of excitement reflected in Ventrilo comparatively to things that die these days is nil. I don't know if this is a result of the game aging, but the whole encounter felt truly epic in every way.

The whole script was easily an all time favorite for me.

I have to say the character in the artwork and animation. I remember playing Oblivion, which is a truly impressive game from both a scale and a graphical standpoint.. and I couldn't keep playing because the animation was so much worse quality than WoW. There was more "character" in my Tauren's animation of idling scratching himself than I saw in the animations for that whole game.

Aside from that, they did an amazing job of looking at what was wrong and annoying about other MMOs and just fixing it. Every MMO I had played before that felt incredibly unpolished compared to a single player MMO - bad artwork, large empty fields, combat that seemed as though they just slapped a graphical front on top of a MUD.

As a pally tank, the swamp trash is actually one of the highlights of the run for me.

I tell the group "Just follow me while I round up the trash, then we'll AOE them down". I suspect that most groups assume I'll round up 4-5 mobs, stop to AOE them down, round up 4-5 more, etc.

So it's always fun to hear their reactions after I ride through the entire area that needs to be pulled and ride back to them with literally 30+ mobs in tow, pop my [Figurine of the Colossus] and tell the mages to unleash hell.

Though this might seem a bit controversial, I'm going to have to put in a vote for outdoor PVP objectives as one of the things that blizzard has deftinately done right. All of the outdoor objectives are relatively simple to learn (practically automatic), rewarding (on multiple levels), and fit well into the larger PVE/PVP balance. I'm going to assume that blizzard never intended for outdoor pvp objectives to replace battlegrounds or arenas, and they probably never intended for them to propogate endless SS/TM style ping pong battles.

Hellfire Peninsula PVP is really pretty awesome- I love the way the PVP zone is visually and spatially integrated into the PVE instance area, and I think the terrain/landscape offered by the fortification buildings is some of the best PVP structure in the game. I also like how the zone integrates two distinct player populations- lower level characters directly benefit (world buff) from their higher level counterparts participating in PVP.

the Zanga PVP objective is pretty fun- I like the way they combine "king of the hill" style capture with a flag return. I think the zone buff is a bit weak (movement of the graveyard is only valuable if you die alot... o.O), but the rewards from the vendor are excellent for lowbies.

the Auchindon Towers introduce an interesting dynamic that requires a sort of dynamic coordination that you really don't get in the other objectives, and once again, the PVE and PVP rewards interact nicely together.

and then we come to Halaa, probably the most complex, engrossing PVP mini game we've seen yet. a large scale, multi-stage battle, that works well whether your 2v2 or 80v80. small groups are constantly trying to outfox each other, and large epic battles have multiple simultaneous skirmishes happening all over the map.


As good as they are, however, there is still some room for improvement- it seems that outdoor pvp was clearly tuned to provide the greatest advantage to players who are leveling, or are just starting with PVP- there are really no incentives for "top end" players to ever consider outdoor pvp. Blizzard could address this by adding a second tier of rewards tied to specific factions, or arena ratings, or even simply purchasable with honor as well as tokens (i.e., imagine a +12ap +6resil orange gem that cost ~8k honor and 25 [].)