Friday, June 30, 2006

All Instances between 60-70 will be 5-man

I seem to be running on a World of Warcraft cycle of news lately but I stumbled across this interview and found a nice little tidbit of information. Rob Pardo the head of Blizzard let some more facts slip about the upcoming expansion. The main one I want to point attention to is that all dungeons between 60-70 will be 5-man instances. It can be reasoned then that all raid content will be designed for level 70s. I would like to throw some pros and cons out there to see if this would be good game design.

Pros:
New 5-man instances that players can try out right away. This will most likely keep casual gamers busy and happy right away.

Will automatically provide loot so that non-raiders can start working on competing with level 60 epics in pvp. Chances are lvl60-70 blues will be better then tier-1 but not tier-3 epics. Thus non-raiders will see upgrades before raiders for the most part.

Cons:
Raiders will skip 5-man instances for the most part since the gear will probably not be better then a complete set of tier-2 armor. This might cause raiders to rush to level 70.

Once raiders are level 70 and start doing the new raid instances we will begin to see a huge difference in raider vs non-raider gear.

Conclusion
Frankly unless Blizzard takes steps I see the raider vs non-raider arguments starting all over again three months after the expansion. One thing they might want to try is introducing rare epic drops off instances bosses. Stratholm and Scholomance main bosses both have a chance to drop a single epic item about 1% of the time. I don't think it would water down the epic population too much to allow every boss in the new instances to have a 1% chance to drop an epic.

Rob Pardo Interview

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