Blizzard has revised, in no small way, the very mechanics of the game and the classes players can choose. One of the problems raiders faced by the end of Burning Crusade was a need to have one or more of each of the 27 different character types... and somehow fit them into a raid with a 25-person limit. But this too was not without its challenges.
By: Simon "Soulrift" Ludgate
Published: Feb 4, 2009
Updated: Sep 2, 2010
It's been a bumpy launch for Wrath of the Lich King. Many high population servers got hit with lots of returning players, leading to huge queues, sometimes 2000 players long, with players waiting all night just to log in and play the game. Free transfers to new realms largely eliminated this problem, thankfully. There was also major lag issues in raid instances, which were suspected to have been caused by arenas and the new PVP area: Wintergrasp. Thankfully, after both areas were briefly shut down for repairs, everything seems to be up and running again.
It's not surprising that Lich King has had some bumps along the way. It was a very ambitious project for the expansion of WoW, adding entirely new and potentially problematic features like phasing, which allows different players to see the world in different states from each other.
So while one player might have completed the quest at the Wrathgate, another has not, so they will see different things when they fly near the Wrathgate.
Blizzard has also revised, in no small way, the very mechanics of the game and the classes players can choose. One of the problems raiders faced by the end of Burning Crusade was a need to have one or more of each of the 27 different character types... and somehow fit them into a raid with a 25-person limit. With the introduction of the new Death Knight class, Blizzard would have faced an increasingly difficult problem of fitting 30 roles into a 25-man group. Faced with either the option of re-designing classes to allow for overlap, or increasing raid sizes up to 30 or possibly even the original raid size of 40, Blizzard opted for the first strategy and has designed several character types to fill classic roles.
This re-design also fits in with Blizzard's strategy of making raiding more accessible to the masses. 10- and 25-man raids are easy enough that players don't need to join special raiding guilds and set aside four or five days a week to work their way through the dungeons. While this makes content more accessible to a wider range of players, it has also left the small group of 'hardcore' raiders rather dissatisfied with the lack of challenges in Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard has said they will release a new raid instance, Ulduar, in the upcoming 3.10 patch, designed to offer greater challenges to serious raiders, but it will still remain accessible, especially in its 10-man version, to a wider audience of players.
Then again, many serious raiders are still occupied with the new achievement system implemented by Blizzard. Where players used to have nothing to do other than kill enemies and gather loot, players now have a extra goals to work towards in the form of achievements. Many of these are quite challenging, like requiring a raid of 25 people to clear a huge dungeon like Naxxramas (which has 15 bosses!) without a single player dying. And since you can only try each raid achievement once a week, it could take groups months before they finally manage to get through without anyone dying.
I think Blizzard has done a great job of listening to its gamers and giving them more of what they enjoy. World of Warcraft, especially with the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion, is very deserving of its huge and faithful following, that continues to grow each day as more people pick up the game and take their first steps into Azeroth. Who will you be in the World of Warcraft?
{slot15}Whatever choice you make, the journey into the Wrath of the Lich King, is a journey worth the effort. You will find new WoW goodness around each corner making this expansion more than just an expansion. It's almost a complete retooling of the very game itself. And this keeps changing every week as Blizzard updates and tweaks this work of art into a very living and breathing creation.
We here at GameSHOUT are fans of this MMORPG to a great degree. Yes, we also enjoy many other fine MMOs, but there is a reason that World of Warcraft is at the top of the list when ranking MMORPGs. So if you have not yet taken the plunge, it is time to do so and expand your little heart out and as always, we'll cya in there!
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