The Queue: Wrath's current raids and their difficulty
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
Today's edition of The Queue is a little raid-centric with a heavy splash of opinion, just as a warning, starting with kevin's question...
There are currently only four raids in Wrath: Vault of Archavon, Naxx, The Obsidian Sanctum, and The Eye of Eternity. Later on Icecrown Citadel. Is that all? What other raids are to be include into Wrath?
Blizzard has laid out the basic framework of their next few content patches for us, so we know a little bit. Patch 3.1 will bring us Ulduar, a raid in Storm Peaks using the Titan motif. Patch 3.2 will contain a new raid instance, but Blizzard hasn't announced what it is. My money is this raid will take place beneath Azjol-Nerub/Ahn'kahet and focus on Yogg-Saron and the Faceless Ones. Patch 3.4 will, most likely, contain the Icecrown raid, and that will have brought us full circle on Wrath of the Lich King and prepare us for the next expansion. Sunwell Plateau was in 2.4, so it makes sense.
RMCEACHI said...
What's going on with Shadowmeld? Is it broken?
I have no idea what you mean, you're going to have to be a little more specific. Every Night Elf I asked about a Shadowmeld bug didn't know of one, and are really excited about the ability. A racial Vanish when you're out questing is pretty freaking awesome.
Omnishinzui said...
People have been saying Naxx is easier then Kara when it first came out. Can you or someone compare the two? Is it easy as kara after the 3.0.2 hit or is it just not like what Zul'aman was where you had to wipe about 10x before getting the entire raid to understand how to survive a boss fight (pre-3.0.2 patch)?
The best comparison I can come up with is that 10-man Naxxramas is a lot less like Karazhan and a lot more like UBRS, if you're old school enough to remember that place. It's not really a raid so much as a 10-man dungeon, if that makes any sense at all. The bosses have their gimmicks, but you hardly need finesse or team coordination to pull them off. You can blunder through it with a PUG, and you don't need to really gear for it at all. Are you level 80? You can kill Kel'thuzad with 9 level 80 friends.
I really think they're all a little too easy. I completely agree that the intro raids in The Burning Crusade were too hard in the beginning, but they swung around to the other extreme. That's not much better. If you could still zone into raid instances before top level like you used to be able to do, I have no doubt level 78s would be clearing the places. The Obsidian Sanctum is the first raid that will pose any challenge, and that will be with 3 drakes up, the 'hard mode' of the raid.
This is all made worse by the fact that... if you were a high-end raider before, you're probably really good at learning/following strategies and adapting to things going to hell. Raiding does hone your PvE skill, whether people like to admit it or not. If you're going from something like Black Temple or Sunwell... or even Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine, going into Naxxramas is a massive step backwards in difficulty. That's how it should be for new players, but it's jarring for everyone else. The new Naxxramas is perfect for people who have absolutely never stepped into a raid before in their entire lives, but I'm willing to bet that most people who plan to do Naxxramas have done at least a little raiding in The Burning Crusade and this content will be rendered trivial. A little challenge would have been nice. I don't think anybody expected it to be a step up from Sunwell Plateau, but we also didn't expect the new raids to be done in PUGs with greens. That's too much.
Players are going to run out of raid/dungeon content really, really fast early on, especially those people that play specifically for that. Patch 3.1 is going to need to arrive fairly quickly, and I hope Ulduar is more of a challenge.
Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
