Beta Blog 6: Wrath of the Lich King

What's the endgame looking like? Liz Skuthorpe has the dirt, and is going on a special trip...

I’ve been mostly busy exploring the new zones in Northrend during my time in the Wrath of the Lich King beta so far, and taking my time doing so. This means that I’ve still not hit the level cap on any of the characters I copied over to the server – and this has meant a distinct lack of level 80 discussion. With this in mind, I’ve copied some template characters over to the PVP server, Murmur and had a look at the newly retuned Naxxramas raid instance.

Naxxramas is the first major raid instance to get an overhaul for the higher level cap and to reclaim some of the pre-Burning Crusade content. Naxrammas was released just prior to the first game expansion and so didn’t get much of a look in before players started levelling past the content and into the new zones. Just before the first expansion, raiders complained that Naxxramas was too well-planned and designed an instance to be replaced so quickly by the new non-raid content in Outland. While the reclamation of older content is obviously a shortcut for the developers to create more playable areas for less time and money, in the case of Naxx, whose usefulness was never fully exploited, it’s also quite canny.

Developers have already stated that Naxxramas is intended to be the easiest raid in the expansion and that the raiding will steadily progress in difficulty in both the 10-man and 25-man versions. This retuning has reduced the raid group to 10, reduced the amount of trash to clear and altered some of the boss encounters. Overall, at level 80, this instance seems reasonably easy to complete – our PvP gear-clad pick up group had a pretty easy time running around the Arachnid Quarter and the only difficulty we had was in keeping the DPS high enough while wearing the PvP template gear. It was too heavy on stats such as resilience, instead of PVE-oriented stats for raiding.

The new Naxx features bosses from the original 40-man version with encounters tweaked to a 10-man game. It’s somewhat like Karazhan is now – though with significantly less trash to pull; it’s a simple job to get from the entrance to each boss and Blizzard seems to have stuck to the shorter dungeon planning that has already had a impact on winged instances in BC and the Wrath 5-man encounters.

There have been some interesting changes to some bosses such as Instructor Razuvius (who hits really hard); so hard that you’ll actually be mind controlling his two adds in order to tank him. The result is a fun encounter that is a little orchestrated, requiring debuff timing and mind-controlled-tank swapping, but without being so convoluted that you will wipe again and again to learn the fight.

BlizzCon 2008
I’ll be heading off to BlizzCon 2008 later this week and that means I’ll be on the ground hunting around for cool stuff and, with luck, harassing developers for tid-bits. So, what do Atomicans want to know? Are you after info on Star Craft II, Diablo III or Wrath of the Lich King? Are you a PvPer or do you want raid info – let us know and we’ll track down the developers and demand answers! As well as attending panels on the future of Blizz gaming we will be catching up with key Blizzard designers for WoW, StarCraft II and Diablo III.

And for those who would like to experience BlizzCon without having to go through an arduous international flight the ‘con will be available to watch in Australia via Pay-Per-View provider Foxtel's Main Event. Plus, subscribers will receive the exclusive BlizzCon gift – the polar bear mount, complete with flag waving Murloc passenger!