Friday afternoon, Blizzard’s Scott Mercer and Cory Stockton hosted a Blizzcon panel talking about new dungeon and raid goodies on the way, both in the upcoming WoW: Cataclysm expansion as well as the first major content patch to follow. Most of the dungeon chat centered on how Blizzard was going back and adjusting older instances to make them more fun. And let’s be honest: as much as people like to pine about great vanilla WoW was, a lot of those initial dungeons left a lot to be desired.
First up on the block are Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines, which, in addition to the normal lowbie versions, will also have special level 85 heroic versions. We’ve known this for a while, but it was also mentioned that both normal and heroic versions will contain some new encounters, and to make that point, we were shown a slide of …”Vanessa Van Cleef.”
Next up was Uldaman, which wasn’t an awful dungeon (remember the Indiana Jones-inspired map room event?), but turned into a total maze by the end. To make it more manageable, it’s being split in two, with Ironaya being the final boss of the first half. Maraudon is also being bisected (I actually thought they might go with three wings), with the front and back halves being two separate instances.
In other cases, some dungeons are having sections chopped out wholesale, and as soon as the Blizzard folks said this, I started flashing back to last year, when they revealed the upcoming stats overhaul and the crowd let out one stunned gasp after another. But in this case, the reactions were overwhelmingly positive as we saw what was getting cut. Sunken Temple’s basement? Gone. Wailing Caverns’ … umm, Nondescript Area #17? Gone. Any bosses who resided in the deleted sections would likely be relocated elsewhere. Thumbs way up.
In one of the most “duh” revelations of the panel, we were told the instance maps rolled out in WotLK were a huge hit with players. Realllly!?! The success of mods like Atlas hadn’t clued people in that in-game dungeon maps might be popular? Not only are all of the older dungeons being retrofitted with proper maps, but eventually, bosses will be marked with little 3D models and loot tables.
Through all the talk of older dungeons getting tweaked, one noteworthy example was initially omitted but brought up during the Q&A session: Blackrock Depths. Since there isn’t any natural split point for what’s basically a giant city, BRD won’t be turned into multiple wings, but instead, Ulduar-style teleporters will be added to the dungeon, making corpse runs or backtracking for quests a lot easier to handle (which is brilliant, frankly). Additionally, most quests for each dungeon will be available right at the start of the instance, instead of having to scrounge each zone for them (which I have mixed feelings about).
There wasn’t quite as much info on the raid end of things. Unlike Wrath of the Lich King, which had only one launch raid in Naxxramas, Cataclysm will have three different raids at ship, a nice improvement. Additionally, the trend will be to move to smaller raids of 6-7 bosses, making it easier to complete a raid in a night rather than having to deal with continuations over multiple nights and raid lockouts.
The topic of the new raid lockout system turned out to be a popular one during the Q&A, despite several attempts to explain it during the panel. Rather than having a raid ID that various people get saved to, you now get saved to bosses on an individual basis. When you join a raid that’s already killed several bosses, you get hit over the head with a list of all the bosses in the raid and which ones will be available to you. 10-man and 25-man raids now share identical loot tables, so it’s really just a question of which works better for your guild.
Looking ahead, Blizzard showed off the upcoming Firelands raid, which will be based in the Hyjal zone, is planned to ship with the next major content patch (i.e. 4.1), and will bring back Ragnaros as a raid boss. The panel wrapped up with a look at the Abyssal Maw dungeon, which will be located in the Vashj’ir new underwater zone, which I can’t help but be filled with panic over. As much as the developers swear that they’ve done a lot to improve underwater combat — such as locking your feet to the ground and reducing the issues of dealing with enemies who might be above you — I’ll have to see it for myself before I believe it.
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