Whenever I’m asked if I thought the game has gotten better in Wrath or not, I will generally say that it has gotten better. But there are, as I’ve mentioned in some previous posts, some exceptions. Having spent quite some time thinking about things I’d like to see come back in Cataclysm, I thought I would share them.
Epic dungeons
When I say epic dungeons I’m not referring to the loot in 5-mans, but rather the size and layout of them. With TBC Blizzard started introducing shorter and more linear 5-mans, they pretty much became the standard in Wrath. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with them, some times you only got three-quarters of an hour or so to spare and just want to pop in, kill a couple of bosses and then log off again. Other times however I find myself wanting to invest a bit more time. While I could do several short dungeons or just do the same several times, it’s not the same, I want to go exploring and experience an epic adventure.
The first place to come to mind is Blackrock Depths. The place is a maze, but in a good way. With its rich lore, multitude of bosses and the many paths you can take to get to the king, you really get the sense of being on an adventurer. Dire Maul, Mauradon and the Blackrock Spire also springs to mind, in fact almost all the vanilla instances gives me this feeling of adventure. While the 5-mans of TBC and Wrath are rich with lore and amazing scenery, they rather feel like they were made to be invaded by a gang of five. You’re constantly being led in the right direction and there is never any question of where to go. As mentioned this is nice at times, but I’d love to get lost in one of Cataclysms new dungeons like I have so many times in Sunken Temple. Why do I have to raid to get that feeling of epicness?
A clear path of progression
I’ve had a go at the badge system before, so I’ll try to keep this short. While it (the badge system) may be useful for gearing up alts and getting that last piece of loot you wanted but never got while your guild were raiding that particular instance, it does have it flaws. The most serious one in my opinion is letting players skipping content completely. With every expansion there will be people who raid for the first time, or people who start raiding again after a long break. By handing these players gear that allows them to bypass a lot of the content, some of which is meant to be introductory to raiding. They go from facerolling heroics where neither DPS or avoiding standing in the fire™ is very important at all and thus are thought they can safely ignore it. A week or two after they set their first foot into the current last or second to last tier of raiding and, with some exceptions, screw up royally.
I can see that Blizzard means well with the badge system, but I believe that there must be some better way of doing it. What if (and I’m pulling ideas out of my arse here, mind you) you had to get the Siege of Ulduar or The Antechamber of Ulduar in order to unlock triumph to drop from heroics, it could work the same way with Naxx where you had to clear a wing or two in order for conquest to drop from heroics. Make it all account based and you would still be able to gear up alts and reach the higher level content quite fast, although not as fast as before, without completely skipping content. I’m not trying to sound elitist, the people I’m talking about are the ones who make your job a ton harder when they could spare you with very little effort on their own part. It’s the guys who go somewhere with no concept of anything, the ones who always claim that it’s your fault when someone dies, even though they just took a giant yeti to the face or decided to hug a blood beast.
This rant turned out to be a bit longer than planned so I think I’ll divide it into parts of two or three. Feel free to leave some feedback on my ideas and what you miss from the pre-Wrath days.
Ah Maraudon… I have such fond memories. That was a truly epic dungeon. I mean, it says something when you need to do a quest to get a magic staff that allows you to teleport straight to the second half of the dungeon, and even when you do this it takes an hour or more to complete!
I really agree very strongly about the epic dungeon feel. I think Blizzard need to create a mixture of dungeon types. Quick dirty linear dungeons are good fun and help speed up the game for a lot of people and should stay in the game. But at the same time, I really hope they give us a few long, epic dungeons that you can get truly lost in.
The “problem” with the epic instances – which I love, btw -is they’re fantastic with a group of friends, nightmare-ish with strangers. Imagine having a Northrend dungeon like Mara? Having to pug for frosties.
*shoots self in head*
That’s a very good point. Perhaps if you make it like BRD is in the LFG tool at the moment. “Lower BRD” or whatever it’s called is rather short and you only have to do about a quarter of the instance to get your goody bag.
I think they got it right with Frozen Halls on the ‘epic instances’ front. You can run all 3 back to back with Sylvanas/Jaina, or one at a time. Which makes them both epic and reasonably PUG friendly. More instances like these please!
And I agree on the badge front, I hate that Naxx, Sarth, Maly, and Ulduar are basically overlooked these days. As boring as Naxx and Sarth got, they are well designed boss encounters which I hate that people miss now. Badges in TBC got it right, though I didn’t like the removal of the BT/Hyjal attunement you could gear up enough to start BT/Hyjal from Magister’s and the later emblem rewards, which was great, but at the same time you didn’t have to skip content too. We ran Kara from the beginning to the end of TBC, even when we were progressing on Illidan, venturing into Sunwell. It was a good 10 man, it gave plenty of badges, it did get boring but nowhere near as much as 10 mans these days because it was the only Kara! Long rant is long.
Never thought about the three new 5-mans. You’re completely right, that’s possibly a good solution to it!
tbh it’s not just the badges mate, I have raided since vanilla and still think tbc had the best way of making raiding possible and exciting.
right now every player can pug the instances that came with patches (icc and toc ones) to get gear supperior than most of the stuff that drops from the expansion opening raids, whilst in bc we needed to get a grip on kara before advancing to gruul and maggy, there was no way a new raiding guild formed of fresh 70’s (see fresh as 2 months old) to easely skip to icc without ever having to do nax and ulda (unless it’s for fun)
other than that i do agree on the dungeons needing their “groove” back, these vocal scenes are nice and stuff but nothing beats an instance with foreshadowing, dead ends and heights that could kill you (seriously i miss those) in em
~tom
[…] wrote a post, I read it, I commented. I realised that my rant about emblems, dungeons, raids, and my opinion on […]
Well, then there is me. Geared up to the level of entering raiding, only to notice the raiding had levelled from Ulduar to ICC and I was… outgeared (ok, ToC10/25 came in between, but I was running heroics to get my gear).
Now the situation is such that you cannot make me pull another PUG because of the anti-social gogogo-yoo suxxorz people running there (and boredom) and can’t make it to the so called pug raiding due to outrageous GS and achievement ‘requirements’ asked.
I would love the kind of ‘mandatory’ gearing progression through raiding, as it has been initially meant to be. I’ve never raided and now it has lost it’s luster after all the crap involved in gearing up has hit my face.
C out
The Mara Instance wasn’t really all that bad.
Now finding your way through the Pre-Instance Mara was a nightmare!