timski

The most interesting footnote is on timing. Over the last 2 years, we've come to expect 6-or-so-monthly patch cycles. But, those "presumed time lines are way too inflated" (to cannibalize Zarhym's comment later in the cited thread).

Which sounds like we could be seeing both 3.2 and 3.3 this year. That would force WoW expansion #3 (which will surely be previewed at Blizzcon) out in the middle of 2010. Unless there's a 3.4 lurking. Or this could all be wild optimism on Blizzard's part, believing that they can suddenly buck their own trend of lengthening patch cycles.

Oh. And, is it not possible that the "surprise raid" will be a... surprise? And as such, won't be previewed so early.

 

Bregonn

My bad. I was thinking about a new Vault of Archavon boss.

 

Liebestod

No, I definitely think we'll be seeing expansion #3 out in about a year.

 

Kaveli

With black down(Obsidian Sanctum), that leaves red, green, blue, and bronze. We've already fought Malygos (blue) as a Nexus boss so I would presume red, green and bronze have the highest probability of being the next ones opened.

If the timelines here are remotely ballpark, I don't see blizzard having enough time to release all of the chamber of secrets dragonflight instances without releasing more then one at a time.

With the next major patch bringing the Coliseum (not a troll instance surprisingly..) and not a full raid dungeon, is it going to be a .5 tier like AQ40? This would be odd in itself since 25 man's are tier 7.5 and 8.5.

This is probably only puzzling since we've only had 3 tiers per expansion and the next step in gear this early would call for 4 tiers in WOTLK for Icecrown.

Food for thought, or maybe just late night rantings, who knows.

 

Axl_Stukov

Has Blizzard ever stated they only will do 3 tiers of loot each expansion cycle? So many norms have already been broken with Wrath anyways, I don't see why something like having 4 loot tiers is out of the question.

 

Keldin

I do not have a source, most likely it was said at the WWI back in summer 2008, but as I recall Tier 9 was supposed to drop before Icecrown. Although it wasn't specifically said like that, it was stated that Icecrown will be a Sunwell type instance. You could conclude that there won't be a full tier set in Icecrown, rather items with matching looks, just like in Sunwell.

This would mean that there could be a proper raid in 3.2. I wouldn't write that possibility off yet. Blizzard said it is a well guarded secret and I don't see why they should not keep it that way until either the 3.2 PTR or even 3.2 Live.

 

Frozenn

A lot of assumption are being made about the coliseum raid here. It doesn't necessarily have to be a short few boss zerg raid. "like ring of anguish but more epic" could mean a lot of things. Like us entering the arena, fighting a few named trashmobs, culminating with a boss. And then arthas attacks the tournament, and we proceed trough an instanced icecrown to beat him back to the walls of the citadel.

Far fetched, yes. But if the coliseum is the real 3.2 raid I would assume it's something larger than just a few fights.

 

Mideci

I don't really know why you are assuming that, when the logic assumption is that it's nothing but a few fights.

Regardless, before getting into a pissing contest, I'll leave it at this: We all believed there'd be a full-fledged raid zone between Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. Based on the timelines Blizzard is suggesting and the massive delay associated with Ulduar, that belief is not only illogical, it's likely wrong.

And nothing in the announcement of 3.2 suggests a full raid zone. Even something as elaborate as Tempest Keep: The Eye seems like wishful thinking at this point.

To keep the expansions tracking at 21-month intervals means making compromises and having contingency plans when development schedules slip. And while this is speculation on my part that's what happened, it's reasonably informed speculation.

21 months from Wrath would be August 2010. Wrath shipped 21 months after TBC. I don't believe there is a hard and fast rule around 21 months, but I believe Blizzard already has a ship date in mind for WoW: The Next Xpac. And everything is going to be "fit in" between now and then. They do run the risk of having the next expansion delayed in the way that TBC and the Ulduar patch were delayed from their originally planned dates. But that risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can bet the corporate imperative dictates another expansion not later than the holiday shopping season of 2010. And that'd be a 3-month delay from the 21-month timer.

If, for example, Icecrown Citadel shipped in December 2009 and the next expansion took 11 months to arrive; it'd be bad. But no worse than what many of you experienced with the Black Temple --> Sunwell window. I suspect that the original timeline for Ulduar was to get it out a good 2-3 months before it arrived ("it's done" they said when Wrath shipped) and had that remained on track, perhaps you'd have seen "Zul'Northrend" with 8-10 bosses pre-Icecrown. I'm sure there's a troll instance on the development charts someone that can be story-told into this expansion or a future one.

But realistically, these raid zones are taking longer and longer to complete. And they are being dribbled out in a way that a couple fundamental WoW assumptions change: There is really no more 'back farming' of the old instance while running the new for serious guilds. Naxx/Maly/Sarth were farmed nearly flawlessly out by the time Ulduar shipped. So basically, gigantic numbers of people are in the same tier together. And it's also true -- as it has been -- that the Fusions, EJs, Ensidias of the world will probably "finish" farming a given zone before the next one ships, enforcing a "break period" for them.

But for the "vast raiding majority", there is an opportunity to be farming Ulduar comfortably for 6 months from it's introduction, i.e. into October. That just wouldn't be "too long" by historical standards -- at least not awfully much too long. If patch 3.2 comes out sometime this summer and 3.3 comes out around the holidays, well we're just not really in a position where a majority of raiders lie fallow at any point.

I can tell you my guild is likely to need the bulk of the summer to finish the meta achievement in Ulduar; I can see that far ahead. That doesn't really give us a ton of time to get bored farming the place. We're not high end by any means, but we're also not terribly low end. To give you an idea, we 1-shotted the instance through Vezax this week (although we 2-shot the medium hard mode on Council, which we'd never tried before). We tried Yogg for the first time the other night.

I'd love a full raid zone in 3.2 as much as many of you. I just don't see it happening, and I think they made a point of not announcing one. And while plans change for Blizzard all the time, the one announcement they did make is that Icecrown Citadel and Arthas would be in the final patch of Wrath. And so if the "neXpac" is indeed in August of next year, there is little chance that Icecrown will fill a window as small as Sunwell did and therefore from a business perspective, I doubt they'd feel a need to add another instance (given that Ulduar will be asked to keep us all busy for less time than BT/Hyjal did and that Icecrown will likely be bigger than Sunwell with a similar or slightly larger amount of calendar to fill).

 

GwolfGarona

I think some of us are still in the mindset of the tiny 100 employee company that worked on 1 (maybe 2 if you count Blizzard North's 100 people) projects at a time.

Currently we have confirmed seperate dev teams for New-IP MMO, SC2, D3, WoW, WoW Expansion.

The storyline, artwork, terraforming, and boss scripting is in parallel development with new content patches now. I do believe this is new for Wrath/Xpac3 which would allow for shorter times between expantion releases as well as have a rapid change in art and design because its a completely different artist team.

I expect xpac3 to be announced at blizzcon and have panels for both the yet to be released 3.3 patch and the beta for xpac3 in october.

 

Jagiya

The entire assumption that the mystery raid was the Coliseum is a bit short sighted. The VoA concept has probably lived it's lifespan and they're expanding on that "accessible quick raid content" elsewhere. Meanwhile, the actual mystery raid remains a mystery. My first impression was they were just throwing the PvE players a bone so they had something to look forward to, without spoiling their big secret.

Unfortunately I have trouble believing this myself, however, as the entire content patch is titled after the Argent Crusade. Hardly seems plausable that they'd have a secret raid (ala Grim Batol or something) ready to spring on us if it weren't even the focus of the patch.

I guess there's gonna be a *lot* of alternate/hard modes for the Coliseum to keep the ball rolling.

I'm not concerned at this point, as Blizzard knows how long the content is supposed to last between patches and they're not stupid. They're not just going to feed us some pithy joke content between now and Icecrown. They know what's required and I'm confident they'll deliver it.

Alot of people seem to be responding as though Ulduar were BT and Icecrown were Sunwell, with nothing but a Gruul's Lair thrown in the middle. I guess the fact that we can see the size of the coliseum as it's being constructed is a bit unsettling, but in terms of scaling, Ulduar has nothing behind the entrance but ocean.

One final point is that this patch is supposed to create the story link between the Wrathgate event and the assault on Icecrown Citadel. Considering the events of Ulduar were completely unrelated, it's safe to assume a juicy touch of Icecrown lore in 3.2.

 

Liebestod

Hoping for a raid other than the AC in 3.2 strikes me as very wishful thinking at this point. 3.2 was originally intended to have Azjol-Nerub, it's likely that this was just changed into a "mystery raid" until Blizzard was sufficiently sure of what they were going to have replace it - and this turned out to be the AC. Voila.

 

Leviathon

Thinking the beta for the next expansion will be in October is massive wishful thinking.


What they meant by the Sunwell type instance remark is that it will be the last instance of this expansion.

I am just hoping the coliseum isn't just a Mount Hyjal type instance in the end with wavers of mobs then a boss.

 

Nidhöggr

hopefully the colliseum will not become another Mount Hyjal


also i think ...

Colliseum will be just 1 part of some other little parts pushing the player towards the icecrown citadelle ...

First: Icecrown as itself
2nd: argentum tournament (3.1) + Ulduar as RaidContent
3rd: Colliseum (3.2) as RaidContent + some non-Raid things
4th: i can't see in the future but i guess ... 3.3 will NOT have "raid-Content" leading towards the Citadelle

and maybe 1 or 2 parts are coming along and then you will start the interence of arthas' winter vacations

 

Sydane

It's foolish to say there wasn't four tiers of gear in BC. While there were only three "tier" sets, Sunwell gear was a full tier higher than BC/Hyjal and all best in slot sets at the end of BC were full Sunwell with one piece of the old tier for the set bonus. The Coliseum will almost certainly be 239 normal/252 hard, and Icecrown will be 252/265. Now we may not see Tier 9 sets until Icecrown, but that doesn't mean there won't be a full tier of gear in the Coliseum (and anything else they may have in the patch) to replace your Ulduar gear. With the current hardmode style of design, it's basically impossible to have a "sidegrade" tier anyway without trivializing it.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Jagiya

I'm fairly sure your claims of "original intentions" are purely speculative, as I've seen fanboy posts from you in several threads stating that Azjol'Nerub was supposed to be the 3.1 Raid, and then the 3.2 Raid, but Blizzard scapped it for X reason. I follow the community posts very carefully and the only information I've ever seen regarding Azjol was the intention of designing a completely subterranean zone, however it was neglected due to technology limitations. Thus it became a 5-man dungeon, and that page had been turned.

To quote Emeraude:
It also strikes me as odd that less than a month ago, they were boasting a big mystery raid in 3.2, and then they casually throw it out there with no major announcement. You'd think they would have at least kept the raid a secret until it was ready for testing? They've done such a great job at building anticipation so far, only to deflate it like this. I think we need a confirmation blue post that the Coliseum is in fact the mystery raid. Until then, I'll keep hoping.

 

Liebestod

If you were really following my "fanboy posts", you would have noticed:

a) That I had sourced this "pure speculation" to quotes from devs made when WotLK was announced specifically indicating that Azjol-Nerub would feature a raid against an Old God.

b) That I had never claimed that 3.1 would feature an Azjol-Nerub raid, as it was clear for a long time that 3.1 would have Ulduar. Perhaps you simply became confused over speculation as to whether 3.1 would feature the scrapped Azjol-Nerub outdoor zone.

 

Ukerric

There is also the possibility that 3.3 won't be Icecrown, which would come in a 3.4 patch. We only know that Icecrown and Arthas are the last raid, nothing more. That requires relatively shorter times than what we experienced so far, but that coincides with the blue post on the subject. You could have the "LK tier9" split over two content patches, both with smaller raids.

 

Ashur25

Unless they suddenly found a new raid for WotLK, Icecrown and Arthas will be 3.3. This was announced back at WWI last year where they stated that 3.1 = Ulduar, 3.2 = Secret Raid, 3.3 = Icecrown.

And so far this is exactly what we got

 

Dubbleutyeff

All speculation of there being a mystery dungeon in 3.2 originates from the Community Summit held at Blizzcon 2008. Ironically enough, for an event called a community summit, no blogs actually put up any transcription of what the developers said at it, and only one site, Curse.com, wrote a summary of the event:

Blizzard Community Summit Details - World of Warcraft - Curse

Maybe Curse was directly quoting a developer when they said "secret surprise raid instance," maybe they just assumed there would be. From what we can tell, the Colosseum is a raid instance, it just might not be what we're used to. We don't have any quotes from any developers stating or promising there to be a whole new raid dungeon in 3.2, we just assumed there would be.

According to GuildOx.com, less that 10% of all raiding guilds have cleared Ulduar (compared to the 90%+ they report have cleared Naxxramas). It would be too soon for Blizzard to release a whole new tier of raid content when so few people have cleared Ulduar, if their goal with WotLK is to make raid content more accessible. This is speculation on my part, but I could see it being that the Colosseum rewards Ulduar-quality gear as an alternative means to help get people geared for Ulduar's hard modes and eventually 3.3.

 

Leviathon

It isn't like 3.2 is going to be next month or the month after just because they gave us a general outline of what 3.2's major features are. It would of been like thinking Ulduar was coming in January just because we knew what the major features were going to be in 3.1. The 10% will be much much higher by the time 3.2 even hits the PTR.

 

Jagiya

Firstly I want to apologise if my tone sounded rude, I just went over my post and realised how it might have been interpreted.

Secondly, I was genuinely curious to know where you got the information from before I made my previous post, so I went through your posts and followed your sources, which were not direct quotes from developers, but rather transcript summaries from people who had attended Blizzcon. The exact quote was:
The word "raid" is not used in that quote. We got the dungeon just as they promised, and they moved the Old God to Ulduar. Given the size, depth and art quality of Ahn'Kahet, we could probably safely assume that they originally intended it to be a raid dungeon with Yogg-Saron as the final boss. But assume is all we can do, because as far as I can see, (after following all links and discussions to Azjol'Nerub) they never admitted to any such intentions.

The nail in the coffin was quite apparent when Azjol'Nerub was released merely as a 5-man dungeon with it's King as the final boss. All speculation after that point seems more to me like wishful thinking than substantiated possibility. Having said that, the opportunity to create a War of the Spider CoT instance increases significantly, so I guess that's something at least.

As for the 3.2 patch, something worth speculating on is what additional raid content we can expect. Just another Archavon/Emalon wing? Surely they won't just feed us a 5/10/25 Coliseum and say, "Have fun till Icecrown!"

 

Mideci

So let me ask again: Why not?

The 10% of guilds that have killed Yogg will have farmed out Ulduar in ~3 months, perhaps 4. The next gigantic mass will need 4-5 months to do that. So, yes, the better you are the more downtime you have. But if the sweet spot to Blizzard of releasing Icecrown is 50% of guilds are "done" with Ulduar -- as in, never needing to see it again gear-wise -- then Icecrown can ship in November/December easily. And it can be big and meaty and whatever enough that it's "done" before the expansion ships next August. The notion that the Icecrown tier should be farmed to the last day of Wrath is kind of silly. They've arguably made that mistake twice already with Naxx I and Sunwell -- the bulk of guilds nowhere near "done". Would it be so terrible for the top 25% of guilds to be on alts / vacation, the next 25% fairly well finished when the NeXpac ships, the next 25% having recently killed Arthas on hard mode and the last 25% struggling to complete the instance at all? (Because they are still in Ulduar a bit longer, for example.)

I don't see that concept as WoW-breaking. And given the amount of downtime top guilds had in TBC waiting for Sunwell, it seems to be that spacing out the downtime in more bite-size chunks is not a bad idea.

 

Vaccine

I'd say Blue made the most sense given how badly things were "concluded" with Malygos and the new Aspect of Magic stuff they are hinting at/pushing in the comics. The rest we don't really have any reason yet to go there. Hell we don't even know where they are going to lead, as no one is sure what they are. I thought they were just portals for travel so that they could easily convene at Wyrmrest when meetings and such were called but others seem to think they are portals to other worlds/phased places otherwise inaccessible. If they are just portals though then logic would dictate that the blue one leads to somewhere in Northrend anyway, or perhaps Mazthoril/Hyjal, the Bronze to the caverns of Time and the Red to Grim Batol.

 

Stopokingme

Well, there's still a big unused temple building in Zul'Drak, and we haven't had a troll raid yet this expansion pack.

Plans tend to change as time passes, so what was announced as fact at WWI last year, might not be as much of a solid fact anymore.

 

Ashur25

That's true, but so far what they said last year is exactly what we got so far, meaning there is no real reason to doubt their plans (yet)