Initial WotLK thoughts

I hadn't really planned out what I was going to do when I first started playing Wrath of the Lich King last week. I have had very little free time nowadays and been working a lot of extra hours. Still I've been impressed so far with what I've seen in the expansion. It feels bigger then the Burning Crusade, which probably has a lot to do with it having ten zones instead of seven. Also the two separate starting areas seems to contribute to the feeling of size in the expansion. I'm glad they put a dungeon in both areas since that seems to be making them equally favored by the players. So far the questing seems up to the high standards of Blizzard and remains chock filled with pop culture references. I particularly enjoyed the DHETA quests which force you to go against Nessingwary's hunters.

I've done both the Nexus and Utgarde Keep a couple of times and I'm enjoying being back in a dungeon oriented game. Warhammer was great and I'll probably keep my account running for awhile, but it's dungeons were a little too different for my tastes. I'm a little worried that the number of group instances seems to be lower in Wrath of the Lich King. The Burning Crusade had fifteen single group instances spread across five different dungeons. In Wrath of the Lich King it looks like there are only twelve though they are spread out a bit more. I'm hoping that the 10-man version of the raid instances are easy enough that they sort of count as single group ones. I just hope the recent death of Malygos by TwentyFifthNovember doesn't encourage Blizzard to overbuff the raid content in a hotfix. People with lives want a chance also.

The raid content seems interesting in the expansion, but just like the single group dungeons there much less of them this time around. When the Burning Crusade launched there was the massive Karazhan raid zone, 3 smaller sized raid zones, and then 2 single boss encounters. So far in this expansion it looks like Naxx will serve in a similar capacity as Karazhan, but at the moment there are no smaller sized raid zones. There does seem to be single boss fights in the Obsidian Sanctum, the Eye of Eternity, and the Vault of Archavon. Still as TwentyFifthNovember is finding out there is much less raid content to burn through. Blizzard has plans to quickly patch in raid content for Ulduar and eventually the Icecrown Citadel, but it's probably not happening any time soon.

Still there's no reason for the power levelers to despair. Blizzard is being smarter this time around and has put in some encounters that allow raiders to adjust its difficulty. The Obsidian Sanctum in particular can be done so that you fight the main boss with several mini-bosses at the same time. You can kill the mini-bosses ahead of time, but the more that you leave up the better the loot. I wouldn't be surprised if the other aspect encounters are set up similarly so the content can be done by guilds in different stages of progression. After all the big failure with the Burning Crusade was that they tuned everything for the very high-end guilds and locked almost everyone else out of the content. This new way of thinking might make it a little bit longer for a raid zone to be developed, but it should allow a lot more people to experience it.