Ramblings of a Gamer

So it was about a year ago as of this post that the second expansion for World of Warcraft was released. Months of scrounging around for tidbits of info from the beta testing, or even leaked alpha info, and it was now in our computers ready to be played. Wrath of the Lich King had been hyped big time for months, and I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t wait to hop online and level a Death Knight, experience the wonders of Northrend, and everything else WotLK had in store. Now here we are a year later, staring down the gates of Icecrown Citadel, soon to be released with patch 3.3. Wrath will be coming to a close in the relatively near future, and the hype is already building for expansion #3, Cataclysm. So let’s take a minute to look back at what Wrath has had to offer so far, and how it has changed the game.

Wrath has had some pretty monumental revolutions for the World of Warcraft, some of which even Blizzard themselves didn’t foresee going in. Before I touch on that though, I want to paint the picture of what the average player will experience, outside of raiding and hardcore group play. The journey from level 70 to level 80 is exceptional, there simply isn’t another word for it. Sure it can be a pretty lengthy process, but Northrend is a very enjoyable land. The zones are all very beautiful (especially if you take advantage of the new, more powerful graphic settings) and full of fresh wonders that far surpass everything we saw in Azeroth and Outland. The music, while most people don’t listen to it at all, is what you would expect from Blizzard: an orchestral masterpiece. On the whole, just running through Northrend is enjoyable experience. None of this is likely to matter to much to the average player, but if you take a step back and spend a little while just exploring and soaking it all in… It added a lot to the feel of Northrend being a fantastic new world.

Probably the biggest thing that blew me away in the leveling experience, and perhaps in the whole expansion, was the quests. There certainly are a lot of the old hat “kill this, gather that, go here, do this” type quests. Scattered among those are quests that are pure gold. One of WotLK’s selling points was vehicle combat, and we got it in spades. From a simple “use this cannon to kill a ton of baddies” to “hop on the back of a giant and duel other monolithic foes”, the variety is breathtaking. No other game comes close to the questing experience in Wrath of the Lich King, and it has only gotten better as we get new patches (though some might disagree with me there). It is a long process, but a fun one to be sure. That isn’t even mentioning the Death Knight Starting zone.

Death Knights start off at level 55, in a new section of the Eastern Plaguelands, called the Scarlet Enclave. There you play your way through the experience of your character going from a full fledged peasant slaughtering, zombie raising, enemy torturing soldier of the Lich King, to a member of the Horde/Alliance. All along you get to see first hand the wonders of Blizzards new “phasing” technology. As you quest in the Scarlet Enclave, completing quests changes the zone. You get to see the village you just raided in flames, you get to see the enemy base you infiltrated be occupied by your allies. This is the stuff games are made of, a world where you can physically see the changes directly wrought by your actions. The Death Knight starting zone is the epitome of questing in Wrath, and I honestly believe that anyone who has yet to experience it is doing themselves a disservice.

So aside from questing, a big part of the game both while leveling as well as at max level, is 5-man dungeons. Blizzard took a lot of what they learned from the Burning Crusade and applied it here. The Northrend dungeons were designed to be shorter 30 min dungeons, so anyone can hop in and have the time to finish and that worked pretty well, assuming a smooth run. They also did a lot more “winged” dungeons, of the 11 5-mans in Northrend, only3 of them are not a segment of a larger building (think Scarlet Monastery). This isn’t something I particularly care about, but its kinda neat. They also realized how popular the caverns of time is, and added the Culling of Stratholme. This dungeon, in the ultimate irony, has you protecting Arthas in the past as he lays waste to Stratholme so as to maintain the time stream. A very neat instance that is very reminiscent of TBC’s Durnholde Keep. On the whole the 5-mans are a lot more attractive than they were. They are shorter, and more desirable than they once were. Heroic modes remain intact, and there are even special achievements for certain tasks, such as beating the instance in a certain time period, or without getting hit by a certain ability. The only complaint here, is that so much of a focus was put on heroic dungeons, that normal dungeons are almost useless beyond experience. Even as a fresh level 80 Death Knight, I skipped almost exclusively to heroic dungeons.

Finally that brings us to the real meat of the game; the endgame. I can’t really comment too much on PvP, sadly. PvP has never really been my thing, but all the more so in Wrath. I will say that Blizzard did manage to do a pretty good job of differentiating PvP players from PvE players. PvP gear is almost always universally inferior to PvE gear (for PvE), and the pieces that aren’t are difficult to get. Arena ratings are required for all the good pieces of gear now, and long story short, there is no reason to PvP unless you intend to PvP a lot. I don’t know if that is what Blizzard intended to do, per se. It’s good to have a barrier between the two, because in Burning Crusade pretty much anyone could get upgrades for at least their weapon slot by losing 10 arena matches a week. The downside though, is that anyone not serious about PvP is more or less alienated. They do have the new battlegrounds, but those are more of a tool to waste some time and mess around than anything, with the advent of arenas. Lake Wintergrasp is new as well, and I personally thing that it was less than it could have been. Wintergrasp is a “pvp zone” where one faction has the keep, and the other faction has to try and take it. Battles occur every 2.5 hours, and ultimately it is little more than a large-scale battleground that occurs at set times. The defending side seems to almost always lose, which I suppose is only fair seeing as the faction which holds the keep has faction-wide benefits, including access to the Vault of Archavon raid instance. Wintergrasp is a neat distraction with some fun quests and achievements, but not really my thing.

Now raiding.. That’s my thing. This is where all the raelly big changes happened, in my opinion. The biggest things are the advent of 10 and 25 player, as well as normal and “hard mode” raids. Hard modes didn’t exist when Wrath Launched but have since become a staple. 10/25 man raids was a stroke of genius, though. Basically, any raid instance in Northrend can be cleared with 10 or 25 players. If you have 10 the instance is scaled appropriately, and vice versa. 10 man rewards are not as good as 25 man rewards, but having a 10man option essentially means that the raid content is available to a whole ton of people that it wasn’t before. Hard modes were introduced in the next tier of raiding, and basically they are simply a way of allowing the raid to decide to make the encounter harder, and reap larger rewards if they succeed. In many cases this completely changes the fight, but in some it doesn’t mean a whole lot beyond the bosses having bigger numbers. While the rest of the content is readily available to pretty much anyone who seriously seeks it out, hard modes are where the hardcore raiders now rest. Personally, I really like this setup.

The raids themselves are a mix of good, bad, great, and so-so. The first tier of content, available at launch, was kind of weak. All of it had been available for testing in the beta, and was cleared completely by some guilds within days of Wrath launching. The big instance here was Naxxramas 2.0. They were so pleased with their masterpiece from Vanilla WoW that nobody got to see, that they brought it back. This caused a lot of crying about recycled content among the elite. Personally I was glad to see the instance, but it felt a bit like a bastardization of what was once the epitome of raiding. Kel’Thuzad’s necropolis was now easier than Karazhan ever was. Along with Naxxramas, there was also Obsidian Sanctuary and the Eye of Eternity. The Eye of Eternity is an interesting area because it’s a 1-boss no-trash zone where you face off against the keeper of magic himself, Malygos. Malygos is a very complex 3-phase fight, but to me it was a fight that I absolutely loved the first time and hated every time after that. The big thing that kills it for most people is the third phase, wherein you get the assistance of the Red Dragonflight, and your entire raid mounts dragons to finish off Malygos. These dragons have completely different abilities than your characters and so the chances of having some or many people in your raid who completely fail at using them are high. I personally like the dragon part, but the annoyance is largely in that all 3 phases are very different, and require entierly different skill sets, so there are lots of places to screw up. It was fun the first time at least. Finally Obsidian Sanctuary is technically the first “hard mode”. Basically there is one boss, Sartharion, and 3 mini bosses, Tenebron, Vesperon and Shadron. Killing the 3 mini bosses weakens Shadron to a laughably easy loot pinata. However every drake left alive when you engage Sarthation must be taken at the same time. So not only do you have multiple boss targets to kill, but the drakes all have auras that buff every enemy present, as well as portals. Every drake left up increases the difficulty and potential reward. Sartharion with all 3 drakes was the hardest encounter for a long time. Its a neat concept, but in the end it was an instance that people didn’t really care about. Everyone and their grandma killed Sartharion with no drakes, and so a lot of people saw adding drakes as just a frill for an extra achievement.

After every person even the slightest bit interested in raiding had farmed the living daylights out of Naxxramas, along came patch 3.1 and Ulduar. Now this was what raiding was all about. This place was huge, and a truly breathtaking spectacle. 19 completely original bosses, 9 of them with hard modes, 1 of them only available through a quest chain that starts with a hard mode. The bosses were way more epic and way more inventive than the mostly-recycled Naxxramas bosses; this felt like what raiding should be. This place was hard, but so many of the bosses were just really cool. I maintain that so far, Ulduar is my favorite instance, and still the hardest barring hard modes. The only complaints I have about Ulduar are mostly nitpicks. The place is so big that you need to do it in multiple nights. Getting around isn’t too bad since there are lots of teleporters, but there are just a lot of bosses, most of them with some amount of trash (though most aren’t too bad). This was less of an issue after they implemented raid extension. Basically, you can choose to extend a raid ID past 1 week if you want to take your time clearing through an instance rather than starting at the beginning every week. Some of the bosses in Ulduar are also just really annoying, but you would get that in any instance.

Finally we got Trial of the Crusader. There isn’t really a lot to say about this place. It’s short, 5 bosses. There is no trash. The bosses are still pretty neat, though most of them are pretty easy. Like I said, Ulduar is still harder barring hard modes. I like the bosses, and blowing through with no trash can be fun, but this place doesn’t have anywhere near the epic feel of Ulduar. You spend the entire time (except the last boss – the only really cool part) in an arena ring calling out boss after boss. It feels more like a loot pinata than an epic, challenging instance. Where in Ulduar I made a point of going all the way to the end and beating all the bosses, in Trial of the Crusader I was able to beat most of them on the first try. When I go there now its because I want to spend 30 mins to see if my loot will drop tonight. The whole tier of content comes off as kind of lazy to be honest. That said, I think a lot of Blizzard’s efforts for a long time now have been focused on the upcoming patch 3.3, and Icecrown Citadel. It looks amazing so far, but I suppose we will have to see!

All in all, Wrath changed the game big time, that much is agiven. There is a lot bigger focus on accessibility now than there ever was before. Blizzard really learned their lesson from Naxxramas and Sunwell I think. Both were superb instances, but neither were seen by very many people. Now everyone can see the content, but the harcore people stand out because they do the hard mode stuff. Gearing up a character is pretty easy these days too, with a little commitment, some spare time and some luck. All in the name of spreading the experience around. It’s pretty common sense really, I mean when a small percentile sees the content like the original Naxxramas, you just arern’t going to get the same mileage out of your design time. This is essentially the overall shift that Wrath has seen. A lot of people claim to be dissatisfied with it, claiming that catering to casuals is ruining the game. Maybe they are true, but I doubt the casuals would agree, and there are far more of them than hardcore players.