When he say 8 dungeons on Outland I wonder if he means Outland + the new dungeons in Azeroth (just like they said Azeroth would be 25% larger, while they meant Outlands :) )
Surely hope its 8 new on Outland itself (otherwise I guess we have heard about all 8 already?).
Also, when they say "Too early in development to say anything" but at the same time mention names and show screenshots from instances it always mean its so finished nothing will change. Normally they never talk much about an instance before its pretty much finished.
Probably because they dont want the whine if something is changed.
Hope they are going to tell about some real end game instances soon, while I like raiding, it would be great with some real 5 mans at lvl 70 too, not just Dire Maul semi-end games. Hopefully one so hard that you would need to gear up in other 5,10 or even 40 mans to have a chance.
10 man karazhan sounds like a step in that direction, but more would be great.
My guess is most people (currently in instance blues/few epics) will hit 70 in about 6 weeks. Then they'll try the level 70 5-10 man instances and get annihilated, realizing they have to go backwards and farm the 60-65 instances. The whining will be unprecedented.
Only partly true.
(b) Do you really think they'll realize they need to go backwards and farm the 60-65 instances? I honestly expect they will spend most of their time asking to have the new level 70 content nerfed instead. The whole idea that you need the right gear for some instances just seems like a very foreign concept for a lot of players. Because, as somebody pointed out earlier in this thread, it isn't something you learn levelling from 1-60. If I go to Scarlet Monastary at one level with my crappy green gear and get owned, what a lot of people do is blame the other 4 members of their group and try to go back again with a higher level party. The problem being, of course, at level 70 there is no higher level party to go with.
The easy solution is to put cool stuff in the 60-65 instances, and unique gear, as well as stuff like Librams and rare drops for tradeskills.
Would I like to do Scarlet Strat ever again? Hell no, but when get a new main hand, I'll sure as hell be going back to farm some orbs. Same thing with BRD, it's lower level but there are still cool drops such as Hand of Justice. As long as stuff like that persists (and it will) there will be a reason to visit every instance.
My biggest fear of the expansion is that all the dps classes have gotten very good gear for grinding / completing new content at a quick pace, they will eat away at it fast.
I don't know about paladins, priests and shamans really but speaking as a druid I know what it's still like when I go out to kill some monsters. I wack them to death with my stick while keeping moonfire + insect swarm dotting away. It takes ages and ages and really no gear I have gotten makes this go any faster. I could wear my feral gear that I have collected and try to use that, I tried it once at Ebonroc but my damage was so pitiful that I never repeated it.
Anyways, my point is, that unless the content is going to favor mostly grouping I'm afraid that all the dps classes will leave all the support classes in the dust on the long road to level 70 and I really can not take another 1-60'ish experience with my druid. Maybe I should just switches my talents around and take more feral talents? Time will tell, in the mean time I'll quake in my boots :P
The only way I made it through 1-60 as a paladin was with lots of 5-man instances on the way up. When I tried rolling an alt, it was nearly impossible for me to grind levels, inspite of warlockness and rest xp. I suspect many support players will spend a fair amount of time convincing their more DPS oriented guildmates to do group content instead of solo grinding.
If using "he or she" seems awkward to you, try using a neutral gender term. Some people use s/he, others find that clumsy, and try using variations on pronunciation, such has zer or zier. Unfortunately, English doesn't really have the concept for neutral genders, so there's no real consensus yet. But that leaves room for one to be built.
A good guild which aims at doing the new lvl 70 end-game fast will take care of its support classes, either by making sure there is a lot of grouping, and/or helping the lower ones when the faster ones reach 70. I expect we might also see a few respeccs to more damage oriented builds for a while on druids etc. Time will tell I guess, might be lots of group content, but I am sure there will never be a point where you have to do it. Considering all the playing people from general forums with 0 friends list and a wish to do epic instanced 1 man stuff.... (asside from those crazies, the instances and bigger quests on the way to 60 were all good helpers, but you could always do solo quests, or *shudder* grind)
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
I'm also kinda with Gurgthock on this one. Not sure if I'll be able to refrain myself from grinding at off hours in the expantion but I kinda hope they make it worthwhile to do the 5 man content while leveling.
When I hit 40 I started doing alot of instances, sunken temple eventually, at 52 I started doing BRD, did this for a few level. There was entire quest areas like felwood/winterspring I never did because I was mostly leveling in instance.
When the expantion open I kinda want to go there, maybe do some quest solo while figuring out which instance we should hit, then get a group and go there and spend most of my time in an instance doing elite quest and killing bosses. Kinda like we did in eq. In eq the casters would always ditch us but we could always get rogue/warrior with shaman and clerics to do groups early in each expantion like in karnor.
I would really be disapointed if I can't get a group going to some instance because everyone is solo grinding and that I soon find myself lagging behind in lvl for days.
I just hope Blizzard doesn't make the same mistake of completely forgoing quests in specific level ranges. The 40s are STILL a bitch, considering I'm going through them again. It's so nice having about 2 zones to level in with only about 3/4 the quests really needed to actually level up! There are certain portions of the game where you pretty much have to grind unless you like painfully unfun quests.
They've been doing better on that. Adding new quest hubs and all. Reventusk is a nice 40-50 spot, and Cenarion Hold is great for 50-60(Light's Hope Chapel will probably be more of the same). Blizzard doesn't like to force you to grind, so I'm sure they'll be trying their hardest to give you enough quests to get to 70.
If you aren't a goblin, why not?
If you are a goblin you rule
Ye Henaki, agree on that. Ive made 4 lvl 60 horde chars, and lvling one alliance char these days. All of them has been with 95% questing at least, and as litle grind as possible.
Before Raventhusk Horde was really annoying around lvl 40-50, but the quests there helped a lot.
Alliance is not very nice in that area either (my alli char is 46 and kinda stuck :D), the quests is spread out in zones very far away from eachother, and only a few quest in each. Its really begging for grinding instead of questing unfortunetly.
Hope there will be so many quests that you cant do them all in BC :)
I had heard through the grapevine that the desired time would be on par with the grind from 30-60 (roughly 12-15 played days) which seems to match pretty closely with most of the speculation in this thread.
When the game came out I flew as quickly as I could to 60 and I regretted it. I will definitely be doing all the quests I can and actually doing the new 5-10 man instances even if it is not the fastest path. I think people would bitch and moan about having barrier quests but it would be neat if maybe you had to complete quest lines to get your post 60 talent points.
As a guild I am sure it will be a point of strife with people levelling at different rates but it will only be a month of pain than back to normal.
Everything said I suspect there will be some crazy xp possible with our current gear. I think a shaman/warrior/warrior or shaman/warrior/mage could absolutely plow stratholme skipping bosses and get roughly 1k xp a minute.
Next up was a brief discussion on the instances opening up in the Burning Crusade. At this time, Blizzard is looking to add an Amazing 20 – 30 instances at launch time in the Outlands. They will be found in 8 dungeons located through out the Outlands. All of the dungeons will be winged dungeons featuring generally 3 instances.
For instance, the Hellfire Citadel will likely feature a 60-65 level-up wing, a 63-65 loot wing, and a 40 man raid wing. Most non-raid instances will be 5 man instances, however they are still early in development so he could not provide specifics.
Some instances at realease were poorly designed gimps (RFC, stockades, SM graveyard), some stand alone instances are marathons to complete all at once for a pug (ZF, LBRS), some instances have "wings" but are poorly done (ST, Ulduman), some instances have wings that blur together in various ways but are too long to take all at once (BRD, Strath, Maraudon), and then you have the stright-up easily puggable instances that anyone will do (Deadmines, WC, any SM wing, Dire Maul). Blizzard is modeling their expansion instances after the last, most successful group. Makes sense!
Also, you can make some pretty sweet post-60 rogue power grinding builds with remorseless/initiative/improved ambush/seal fate.
Looking back on my 1-60 run, my most memorable times were with 4 other people, doing an instance. After that comes getting one or two others and doing quests together. Last of all comes questing or grinding on my own. It's not just the social aspect...the group stuff is simply better-made and feels far more epic than "Get 10 owlbeast heads. Okay, here's 50 silver. Now kill 10 of these harder owlbeasts. Great, here's 60 silver. Kill a named owlbeast. Great, here's 70 silver and an item. Now shoo, along with you. Doug over there needs help with some hawkbeasts. I hear there's an infestation!"
This DPSer will be helping his non-DPS buddies level with the group content. Even if it slows me down. ;)
But why would it be an "awful grind to access new content" if the grind is the new content? On some level, isn't that what WoW was about, from the beginning? Questing and sometimes getting 5 people together for (Elite) quests and instances? Wasn't the original selling point of WoW, "hey, leveling is fun now? Maybe on some level it's still a grind, but all these quests do a wonderful job of disguising that fact"?
Isn't the puported grind itself the new content? When I say I want it to take 16 /played, I don't mean that people should have to grind mobs for 400 hours. I mean that there should be enough content packed into the new zones that you can spend 16 /played getting from 61 to 70 without ever having to sit down and grind because you're out of quests or instances.
I'm a bit on the fence with your previous post and this... I had a bit of confusion while leveling on what I wanted to play, but it's always been straight DPS classes. I started out as a rogue in beta, and LOVED questing. I even moreso loved doing duo stuff - things that I could 2-man were extra fun for me, because I usually game with 1 person specifically (at any time).
So retail comes out and I decided to try a mage, just for shits one day. I ended up taking that to like 36~ before realizing that it wasn't my slice of cake. So I rerolled a rogue (bad idea). Now I still enjoyed all that quest content, and probably to a different extent because I was able to do a lot of it solo, but when I got to about level 50~, most of my buddies were already level 60, and just venturing into the (then 10-20 mans I believe) BRS/Strat/etc instances and soon enough MC. So I'm sitting at level 50 being told by my buddies that I really can't enjoy the same content because I rerolled. That made me have a distaste for the leveling aspect. At that time, I literally sat myself in a house in EPL and grinded undead for days on end. I would log out in that house and log in and kill undead over and over. I spent literally levels 55-60 in that house leaving only to restock food and skill up as necessary. This wasn't a very enjoyable time, but when I hit the cap, I was then able to play with my buddies again.
Since then, I became tired of my rogue after switching to a combat spec (like a year afterwards). What I long enjoyed as my rogue being dagger and having a nice combination pvp/pve spec really fell behind until I switched. All of the fun I enjoyed went away becoming a fairly mindless game with fist spec.
So I rerolled a warlock. Now, I pretty much powerleveled my warlock. I think it was just short of 9 or 10 days played when I hit 60. 90% of it was done solo, but I did only the quests and instances I knew were fairly time/xp profitable in a sense. I did do a LOT of questing, but I knew all the answers and I knew all the secrets and stuff, so it was fast.
I actually had the most fun leveling my lock out of any class I think. I had already grown somewhat tired of raiding MC at the time. I was still able to continue raiding BWL with my rogue as I leveled my lock, and since my rogue was done with MC, I used much of that time to work on him. I had no pressure to be that next level, because I already had a character that could enjoy that content. Getting to 60, I think I had much more appreciation for a lot of the 50-60 quests as well. And as of since, I've gone back and completed almost all 50+ quests that are available to my lock. This has given me a much better appreciation for those quests now. I just didn't have to spend nearly as much time doing them, and I got another view of the same quests, so it was a lot of fun for me.
I think the true problem though lies in the fact that you NEED to be that next level if you're behind your buddies. The rested bonus system helps this, but not really because playing = leveling, and despite rested bonus, you really can't catch up aside from grinding. The one thing that really bothered me about questing in areas that required a group is that if you have a very tight group of friends that you play with, if you even take the tiniest break, you're so far behind that they literally have to help you through your quests. Since I've capped my chars, my group has grown quite a bit larger, so I don't know how this will pan out in the future, but I can only hope that as you say, we'll have a ton of content to keep us busy.
All in all, there is still the major divide between two types of people, those who like to get to the finish line, in any means, and those who enjoy the journey. I figure there's always going to be lots of both, and some in between. As long as everyone's having fun, it's all good.
I'm really curious how they'll play the balance between going from 60-70 on a BWL+ geared character vs a T0 geared character. It's going to be incredibly easy for people with our gear levels to just blast the content away it seems. That is, unless they make a 'harder' version of the content that's made for people who raided a lot in the level 60 capped days.
Anyway, I hope they follow the same curve, and they give us lots of stuff to do so that I don't end up having to grind to 70 too!
There's a few ways they can discourage ginding, and encourage grouping/instancing.
Make clusters of difficult quests, without single drop quests. There's a bunch of elite troll killing quests (horde side) where you can knock out 3-4 quests in 45 min, if you have a good balanced group.
BOP tradeskills, especially the new jewelcrafting ones, in the dungeons.
Key quests.
4-5 quests per trip to a dungeon. If you can do 4-5 quests on top of your kill XP, instancing is a good way to level. Unfortunatly after BFD, it seems pretty rare to do that number of quests at one time.
There's a few ways they can discourage ginding, and encourage grouping/instancing.
Make clusters of difficult quests, without single drop quests. There's a bunch of elite troll killing quests (horde side) where you can knock out 3-4 quests in 45 min, if you have a good balanced group.
BOP tradeskills, especially the new jewelcrafting ones, in the dungeons.
Key quests.
4-5 quests per trip to a dungeon. If you can do 4-5 quests on top of your kill XP, instancing is a good way to level. Unfortunatly after BFD, it seems pretty rare to do that number of quests at one time.
After BFD or BRD? I remember doing a quests 3 or 4 at a time in BRD. In fact, I think that BRD is one of the better designed instances questwise in the game.
After BFD or BRD? I remember doing a quests 3 or 4 at a time in BRD. In fact, I think that BRD is one of the better designed instances questwise in the game.
I meant BFD. BRD is close though - but I found most of the times the quests were too far apart to get more then one or two at a time. It might be different for alliance who have more quests there, I think.
In general I like the size and the amount to do in BRD, and the fact that there are several ways to get around. It does suffer from the fact that there is a sudden glut of content at that level, and other people want to move on to strath/scholo/dm as quickly as possible.
BRD would be an amazing dungeon as the last pre-raid instance. It's huge, has tons of stuff to do in it, and has a lot of ways to get somewhere. Unfortunatly, most people just level past it, then do it for MC Attunement/Ony stuff and nothing else due to that there's better, easier to get loot.
I'm really curious how they'll play the balance between going from 60-70 on a BWL+ geared character vs a T0 geared character. It's going to be incredibly easy for people with our gear levels to just blast the content away it seems. That is, unless they make a 'harder' version of the content that's made for people who raided a lot in the level 60 capped days.
I doubt there will be harder versions, there will be really really hard 5 man stuff for joe average, that we breeze through fairly easy, the closer we get to 70 though, the less of a difference there will be. But the gear we've spent a year collecting, will definetively give us a head start. Which seems fair to me.
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
I'm really curious how they'll play the balance between going from 60-70 on a BWL+ geared character vs a T0 geared character. It's going to be incredibly easy for people with our gear levels to just blast the content away it seems. That is, unless they make a 'harder' version of the content that's made for people who raided a lot in the level 60 capped days.
I doubt there will be harder versions, there will be really really hard 5 man stuff for joe average, that we breeze through fairly easy, the closer we get to 70 though, the less of a difference there will be. But the gear we've spent a year collecting, will definetively give us a head start. Which seems fair to me.
It makes sense that the new levels will be tuned to the casual gamer. The raiders are understood to want to raid, thus there is not reason to artificially try to hold them back on level 65 or something. Obviously, they are going to want to hit 70 fast (most of them) and start raiding the new 40 man zones and they will be able to do that. For them the game will start at 70. There may be some novelty items still useful a few levels back much in the way of Blackhand's Breath is now, but for the most part I think they will ignore the inbetween stuff.
As far as going backwards to gear up, I really doubt that the current 60 level zones like Scholo and Strath are going to need to be refarmed in any serious amount the way they need to be run now. Even casual players are bored to death of them. If 30 new instances for the next 10 levels is accurate then more than likely you will be instancing for your upgrades in a new 65 level 5 man or whatever. Besides the usual boredom factor refarming old places on overlevled characters (say 5 level 65's hitting Strath) would be even more tedious. It would not be a challenge but simply a collossal waste of time running them over and over just hoping for some rare 3% drop that I cant imagine actually being needed to level to 70. Most likely level 60 will just be a slightly longer bump in the road than other levels, but still very much pass through territory just like Scarlet Monastery, Mauradon or any lower level zones.
The idea that players that have never seriously raided, and also dont want to, are now suddenly going to form up 20 man groups of level 65s to go hit MC or BWL as a necessity to advance wouldnt seem like a smart move on Blizzard's part and doesnt seem likely to happen.
By going back to gear up, he didnt mean farming lvl 60 existing dungeons, since, you know, we've allready done that. He meant people who powerlvl to lvl 70, might go back to lvl 65 instances, to get the needed gear to kill lvl 70 elites in lvl 70 5-10man instances, the gear they used to grind greencon non-elites just wont cut it.
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
The idea that players that have never seriously raided, and also dont want to, are now suddenly going to form up 20 man groups of level 65s to go hit MC or BWL as a necessity to advance wouldnt seem like a smart move on Blizzard's part and doesnt seem likely to happen.
No, they won't. But there are lots of 20-man guilds that farm ZG and AQ20 now that can't be bothered getting another 20 to do MC. Open up the gates for them (Blizz has said they expect MC to be farmable by 10-15 level 70 characters which probably puts BWL at 15-20man) and they will have a serious interest in them unless Blizzard makes level 65 and 70 blues significantly more powerful than we would expect.
The idea that players that have never seriously raided, and also dont want to, are now suddenly going to form up 20 man groups of level 65s to go hit MC or BWL as a necessity to advance wouldnt seem like a smart move on Blizzard's part and doesnt seem likely to happen.
No, they won't. But there are lots of 20-man guilds that farm ZG and AQ20 now that can't be bothered getting another 20 to do MC. Open up the gates for them (Blizz has said they expect MC to be farmable by 10-15 level 70 characters which probably puts BWL at 15-20man) and they will have a serious interest in them unless Blizzard makes level 65 and 70 blues significantly more powerful than we would expect.
Honestly, if you don't think the level 70 blues won't outdo level 60 epics from BWL and earlie (or at least be on par)r, how do you think progression will work? If they aren't on BWL calibur, all of the ZG purples/blues are equal competition, and that's not progression for a majority of people. There would be nothing worth picking up in level 65 instances if that were the case, there needs to be *some* progression from 60 to 70, so how do you propose it would work? Currently ZG/AQ20 gear is almost on par with some of the better MC stuff, maybe a couple ilvls worse on the epic level, and the blue stuff is the best in the game (hell, if MC gear didn't have dabbles of resistances they'd be near equal in a lot of cases). The only way to go is up, and the only upward equivilent is BWL.
I expect MC/BWL to be dead when the expansion comes out unless Blizzard is gonna give us a reason to go there.
Honestly, if you don't think the level 70 blues won't outdo level 60 epics from BWL and earlie (or at least be on par)r, how do you think progression will work? If they aren't on BWL calibur, all of the ZG purples/blues are equal competition, and that's not progression for a majority of people. There would be nothing worth picking up in level 65 instances if that were the case, there needs to be *some* progression from 60 to 70, so how do you propose it would work? Currently ZG/AQ20 gear is almost on par with some of the better MC stuff, maybe a couple ilvls worse on the epic level, and the blue stuff is the best in the game (hell, if MC gear didn't have dabbles of resistances they'd be near equal in a lot of cases). The only way to go is up, and the only upward equivilent is BWL.
Rare base armor is green armor * 1.1
Epic base armor is green armor * 1.2
green base stat value: (ilvl * 1.21 – 9.8 )
Rare base stat value: (ilvl * 1.42 – 4.2)
Epic base stat value: (ilvl * 1.64 + 11.2)
So ignoring the constant offsets, epics are about 9% better than rares in terms of armor and 15% better in terms of stats for a given item level.
So for a level 70 blue (item level 75), an epic with item level 69 would beat it in terms of armor, and an epic with item level 65 would beat it in terms of stats.
In other words, I expect progression will work just fine for people who haven't done MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx to death. I expect you will see epics drop in non-raid expansion instances at a similar rate as what you get in ZG/AQ20 today; i.e., not uncommon but not 2-4 per boss either. But if I can suddenly do BWL with 20-men raids (when previously I had never gone past AQ20) I have a choice of all epic gear from BWL or a bunch of blues, a good many of which I will be d/eing, and the odd epic from the expansion 20-mans. In other words, BWL will represent progression for people who haven't done it before.
Granted, if they are the type who hate anything bigger than 5-man, even those epics won't be enough to entice them into BWL. Which is fine, they sound like they get a lot of new content in the expansion anyway.
To be honest, I expect to be wearing a lot of my Naxx epics when I hit level 70 with only some new items to replace them. Until we get underway with the new raid content.
I expect MC/BWL to be dead when the expansion comes out unless Blizzard is gonna give us a reason to go there.
For today's high end raider, they will be absolutely dead. Hell, I'm hoping to stop running BWL long before the expansion comes out. But for todays player who likes smaller groups, I think there will still be value to those instances. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Yes, old epics will have naturally higher armor, but look at these numbers you just gave me:
"MC: 66-76"
ZG: 65-68
Ony: 70-76
BWL: 75-83"
An epic level 65 item beats an epic level 70 blue. That's relatively fair, however, for progression to work properly, a lot of people have ilvl 65 epics. The game is in fact, designed for people with enough time as casual as they are, to have MC calibur gear. When you walk into level 70 with a Tier .5 set, there needs to be some sort of upgrade for them. How will they scale? How will a server with rampant PuG MC runs scale? They will have nothing to do until the MC equivilent for them is on a PuG farmable level or they join a raiding guild. Older servers have many casuals with epics, not the greatest of epics, but MC epics for sure. There *will* be a void for players if the blues do not scale above the weakest epics, there will be almost nothing to do for them. That is how I see it.
I have a character on Sargeras, almost 80% of the people who play do have a partial T1 set and many many ZG epics/blues. Tell me how they scale in the expansion. They leveled up, recieved their blue sets and did BGs for a long time until the server eventually became mature enough to handle PuG MC runs from 1-60. I expect the same thing to happen in the expansion from 60-70 otherwise Blizzard will have a bunch of bored assholes complaining again for good reason. The point is, for a lot of people, BWL is going to be progression, but how is it progression compared to the 70 endgame for casuals? BWL will be an upgrade center for them, but then the majority of blue instances may become worthless, and how will the epic 20mans in endgame work? Would BWL become our level 70 ZG?
There needs to be upgrades for everybody's playstyle, and the "hardcore-non raider" will need something until the weaksauce 70mans are on farm for the entire server. Mind telling me what it is? I'm not criticising your argument but rather, I think it's pretty difficult to make this all work without level 70 end game items being at or just barely below BWL level, blue *or* epic. Where is Blizzard gonna make the sacrifice? Kill off MC/BWL? No 20mans at level 70 and scale MC/BWL/Naxx to them? (this seems like the lesser of all evils here) or make the majority of level 70 5man instances total garbage for itemization on servers like Sargeras?
06/11/06, 4:59 PM
Similar Threads
