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What's the purpose of a heroic dungeon?
One of the more volatile announcements that we've heard so far from Blizzard regarding Mists of Pandaria is the fact that Mists will not include any more 5-man dungeons. In an expansion where new content seems to be rolling out on a much faster, tighter basis than any expansion prior this seems a little bizarre to players, particularly those that enjoy dungeon-based content. Yet one of the things Mists has been doing consistently throughout the expansion is delivering a wider array of things to do. In fact, there's such a variety in endgame content that players sometimes feel legitimately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. But just because we aren't getting any new dungeons doesn't mean we aren't getting alternate ways to obtain all that sweet, sweet gear we know and love. Patch 5.3 will see the introduction of heroic scenarios, slightly tougher versions of the scenarios we've already seen this expansion. In addition to valor, the heroic scenarios will offer raid-finder level rewards for players that choose to participate in them -- better than any gear you'll find in a heroic dungeon at this point. While this may seem pretty cool for some people, it does make one wonder -- what's the purpose of heroic dungeons?
Patch 4.2: Eight raid bosses confirmed [updated]
In a post on the official Blizzard forums today, Community Manager Bashiok confirmed the existence of eight total raid bosses in patch 4.2 -- six seven in the Firelands, and one new boss in Baradin Hold, all with unique models, animations, and effects. (No word yet on how many will have stubby little feet.) Further, it has been confirmed that Firelands, in Bashiok's own words, "is the raid in 4.2," and will be available for testing soon as part of the "aggressive development cycle": That it? Yes, Firelands is the raid in 4.2, and 7 is the total number of bosses. We think 7 is our current ideal for number of bosses in a raid. (We launched Cataclysm with two full raids of 4-6 bosses each.) We're also spending a lot of time making the Firelands bosses as awesome as possible - - creating unique models, animations, effects, sounds, etc. etc. Previously a lot of bosses were larger versions of existing models, which was fine, but that tradeoff is made somewhere. We shift to making fewer but more epic boss fights and there's a tradeoff somewhere. We're concentrating our efforts into a smaller number of fights so that each fight is bigger and better, they're still obviously going to be extremely challenging, but once it is on farm you're not having to spend two, three, maybe four nights just to clear it because the raid is so huge. source
