That suggests a far more original raid idea in which the goal isn't to kill Boss #xx, but somehow break defenses and recover stuff. A raid, in the true sense of the term. And find a chest filled with epics along the way, of course.

Almost sounds like a raid-level version of a Dire Maul tribute run, when you put it that way. Combine this with the OS "leave drakes up for a challenge" idea and you could have something really interesting. The raid has multiple bosses, and you can kill them and take their loot, and that's relatively easy. But to win optimally, you leave bosses up, and the challenge level goes up.

Like Hakkar. Was it actually possible to kill him with all the bosses who buffed him still alive, back at level 60?

If I recall correctly, a top 10ish guild (Death & Taxes maybe?) tried it with all priests alive around the 2.0 patch, and said it was possible, but not worth the effort. But that's two years ago, so my recollection may be iffy.

Nope. I still haven't heard of a guild who did it with all animal bosses up, even at 80.

The guild was Elitist Jerks.

link: Is it possible to kill Hakkar without killing any priests pre-TBC?

That would be because that's not worth mentioning. Multiple classes can solo him with the priests down.

An 80 raid of any size would easily blow him up while ignoring the extra abilities. The nastiest ones - Jeklik's silence, Arlokk's aggro wipe - just don't matter to 80's because any 80 has the HP to tank him and, between tank classes being able to solo him and the large mechanic change to heals over time since Hakkar was originally designed, the silence just isn't dangerous to a tank.

The only real problem for the *60* project was Arlokk.

I've done it personally, although I seem to remember it was actually post-3.0 but before WotLK. We just brought 6 or 7 plate wearers and blew him up before he murdered everyone with his multiple aggro drops.

Level 60 Strat 45minute + Wintergrasp/Strand. Break into a keep/castle/fortress/whatever. Fight through the troops. Reach the boss(es). Defeat the boss(es). All before the boss could complete his wicked plan. If you want three drakes difficulties you can layer on guardian bosses - you can checkpoint them on way to master boss, or take alternate routes and main boss calls them in just like 3D.

If they plan to spring Neltharion from his Schroedinger's box (as far as the major NPCs are concerned, he's dead) then I expect we will see him featured in every content patch. I'd expect CoA quick raid each patch with Black Dragonflight involvement. Might I suggest CoA Bronze - attempting to whelpnap bronze eggs, I'm sure Deathwing would love to breed in time travel. I don't think it would be difficult to come up with one for each flight.

They could even go for Meta Achievements - defeat all CoA within a certain timeframe, gain all the 3D equivalent achievements, etc. Or make quests to do them in sequence. You know, backfill the missing motivation and story. Again it'd be a good opportunity to build towards some potential Deathwing raid, if that is their goal (which is still 100% supposition at this point).


Side topic: Where are the World Bosses? Is Blizzard starved for ideas? Just send a giant Thrym stomping down across the landscape.

I had assumed this was Jotun's purpose, but he appears not to have one at all.

I haven't a clue what's goin on with Thym, but Jotun might still have a purpose! Ulduar should be coming out within the next decade or so...

I assume you mean Thrym? I doubt much will come of him since we deal with him already in The Storm King's Vengeance - Quest - World of Warcraft

Edit: Gah, I'm too slow.

So some info on the upcoming book which I'm extremely giddy about

Full Title: World of Warcraft: Arthas, Rise of the Lich King. Comes out in April.

It's going to be a Hardcover book, and 384 pages long, which is the longest for any WoW Novel to date.

It'll cover his life as a child, his PoV during the 2nd War, growing up, his love triangle with Jaina/Kael'thas. Hopefully it'll cover his desperation during the beginning of the 3rd War as well as what happened immediately after he merged with Ner'zhul.

Oh, that's right, we do kill Thrym in that quest. Again, we killed Rivendare in Stratholme, and then he took over for Morgraine in Naxxramas, so it doesn't mean we won't see him again.

But yeah, Ulduar is coming out soon, hopefully more things with the Wyrmrest Accord/Jotun come up.

I'm looking forward to the book as well. I'm more interested in the 2nd War than I am with the merging of Ner'zhul though.

My point wasn't "Let's kill Thrym", yes, you already kill Thrym. My point was "Where are the World Bosses?"

Since Thrym already exists as a model with animations, this is why it would be so easy to duplicate as a World Boss. Use the same model, blow it up 25% larger, give it a different name. Have it wander somewhere. It was a tossed off no-brainer suggestion for a World Boss. Surely Blizzard could actually come up with better.

Here are more tossed off ideas:
Put a sea monster south of Wyrmrest tower as a prelude to something Maelstrom.

Put a huge Titan Construct working to repair something up in Storm Peaks. Maybe one of those spare fly-in mountains (I remember there being more places than you need to go for questing). "Repairs interrupted. Engaging cleaning protocols to remove foreign substance."

Plop a blue dragon in Crystal Song battering at the outside of the Dalaran Teleport shield. "You will not defeat the master!" Nicely ambiguous, even - is it working for Malygos, Deathwing, Yogg-Saron? It's not like it would interfere with questing in that zone as long as it's possible to land-mount ride leveling characters in to reach Dalaran for the first time.


My point remains - Blizzard could easily have World Bosses. They suddenly don't. I don't recall any developer interviews regarding 'Yeah, world bosses never went over well so we've scrapped that idea.' - they're just suddenly not present this ex-pac. A new World Boss every patch would be just as nifty as the rest of staged releasing. I think World Bosses can add to the lore or storyline. Doomwalker trying to break into BT was always a cool idea.

Didn't Blizzard basically say that due to competition over spawns and due to PvP interference, they don't want to have these at all anymore? Archavon (a boss that isn't always up, and for whom getting access involves PvP) is the sort of thing we get instead now, no?

I always assumed the lower itemization on loot was the balance for competition/PvP/etc. Ideally nothing is best in slot on them, so they're just fun additional bosses people can choose to kill.

As suggested, making them achievements also would be fun.

So here's a thought in a different direction: I started up my account again and started playing, and it's pretty obvious that Northrend is a fair bit larger than Outland in terms of single-player non-instanced content. If you look at the number of quests required to get the Loremaster achievements, it's 50% higher for Northrend than Outland. It makes me wonder to what extent some content was left incomplete or cut (Azjol-Nerub, Crystalsong) not because of time constraints, but simply because the leveling experience started to just take too long. I think TBC had about the right amount of non-instanced content.... 60 hours, let's say. If Northrend is up to 90, though, people will start complaining. If they had a couple more zones, than it simply would've been higher. Look at the reaction when Blizzard implemented a leveling pace in beta meant to pace the content - ie. people shouldn't be hitting 77 in Grizzly Hills and 80 in Zul'Drak, they should be hitting 77 in Sholazar / Zul'Drak and then 80 in Storm Peaks / Icecrown. But people found this to be too slow, and thus a more moderate approach was taken.

So in a way WotLK might have suffered from overabundance - the leveling experience already had a ton of content and adding more might have generated complaints unless it were max-level content, which can easily be put off into the content cycle. Azjol-Nerub was originally going to be a 74-76 zone, I believe, but if it were added then we'd just have even more people hitting 80 in Zul'Drak. So why not cut it?

imo there's probably a fair amount of "fat" that could have been cut in WotLK to accommodate these zones at release. Less so than the other content - WotLK did a great job with tying most of the stuff into a developing story - but I don't think we needed stuff like:

- We could've just had a million rather than a billion Vykrul villages in Howling Fjord.
- Most of the Geyser Springs area in Borean Tundra was superfluous, except for the mechagnome stuff.
- The northern Dragonblight quests (kill harpies, kill worms, etc.) quests could've been cut.
- ZD and GH could've been merged together and a bunch of their content could've been shed. Neither the worgen not the drakkari plots really go anywhere, and the latter definitely didn't need 100 quests to do well.
- A couple of the bases in Icecrown weren't really necessary.

Combine these things and you'd easily have 100 quests cut, and room for another zone. Alternatively, more areas could be designated for only one faction, thus driving the quest total for any player down without lowering the total amount of content across factions.

My main suggestion, though, would be for Blizzard to just create more TBC-sized expansions on a faster time schedule. Because there is a point of "too much" that Northrend pushes, I think.

(Note: I do consider this a "lore and storyline issue", I think, because what content makes it in or is selected out is very much tied to how it affects the story.)

World bosses plain suck if you're not in the top 3 or so guilds on the server for the single reason you'll never kill them. Even now your chance of killing Azuregos are pretty minimal, if only because he's a nice and quick 160g for a group of 2-3. If they'd add achievements to it it'd be even worse.

Now, raid quests like the old Battle of Darrowshire and Order Must Be Restored are another matter. I always enjoyed them and wish they'd made the Battle for Undercity like it. The phasing system solves one problem with it (opposing faction interruption) and if they'd made it a daily with some kind of interesting reward it would have been pretty easy to find people for it.

So... You don't like lore and want to cut out content?
And to be honest, the leveling-curve for me was kind of perfect as I was leveling with a friend - starting in HF, shipping to dragonblight, grizzly hills, zul'drak, sholazar, stormpike - after completing all that zones (including quest-achievement), a few instances, several dailies AND a few quests in Icecrown I got 80.
Remember: Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord were meant to be choices to start, there was no cross-quest from one zone to the other.

So I think there is not really too much of content - it's a great portion of content. If you hit 80, either continue questing or just skip the rest, though the choice for all lore-whores should be clear

I don't think achievements would have made it worse. They could have actually fixed them. Look how often people are raiding faction leaders now to get a mount. Make the rewards based on achievements instead of normal loot. That way you don't have to be grouped to get credit for killing the world boss, just have participated. Don't even give them normal loot. A good way to do this I think is to give some sort of achievement award for killing a bunch of them (ie, there is a world boss in each northrend zone) to drive interest in raiding them. On top reward anybody participating in the fight something like a single heroic token. Hell, even both sides could fight the same boss and get credit for it, although unlikely.

The respawn rate should be a LOT faster than once per week then, which is my big problem with the world bosses. But actually you and I seem to want the same thing, we just name it differently.