Tom Chilton, J Allen Brack and Cory Stockton hosted a panel about the raids and instances in Wrath of the Lich King. The first part of the panel covered the reasons behind some of Blizzard’s choices and design in the past and future. Stockton explained why Blizzard felt the need to make raids available in 10 and 25 man versions, and stressed that the 25 man version will be much more rewarding in terms of loot (a whole Tier higher). He also revealed that Blizzard were very happy with Heroics, but were going to make some positive changes:
- Faction requirement to enter heroics will be removed completely
- Instances will receive more tuning to make them slightly easier for varied groups to complete them, they were too hard in TBC.
They also felt some instances were too long, so will try to make normal difficulty instances no longer than 1 hour, they promised dungeons in future will be more non-linear and will have other ways of varying them, with timed events for example. Quests will feel more connected with the instances too, rather than being just about killing the end boss.
After this section, Stockton went on to look at some instances in Lich King, and included the basic layouts, storyline, and any special features such as the fact that the level 80 instance,The Oculus, will allow players to fly inside. The mounts they chose will have different abilities like healing, tanking or dps, so a healer could chose a tanking drake, or vice versa if they wanted to.
After reviewing these instances, there is a brief Q & A session. See the full movie below:
