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Ulduar Preview!
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Pubblicato
18/02/2009 alle 01:01
da
Malgayne
No matter whether you're Blizzard's number one fanboi, or you think they're the worst bunch of screwups you've ever paid $15 a month to—one thing can always be said for Blizzard: They know how to keep a secret. I fully intend to come up with a whole blog on this subject later.
So naturally, when Blizzard releases some info, all of us jump at the chance to go over it with a fine tooth comb. Let's get cracking, shall we? :D
As usual the
preview
has hit the European WoW site before it reaches the US site, but (also as usual) no one is letting that stop them. There are a few especially interesting tidbits I found in here that I was personally excited about:
There are two different halves of the instance: a traditional raid dungeon with a number of bosses, and something a little new—an epic, outdoor battle between the Horde/Alliance forces and the Iron Army. From the sound of it you're going to have to make your way past the Iron Army before you can enter the dungeon.
The friendly forces equip you with siege machines to break through the Iron Vanguard. The siege machines listed include motorcycles, demolishers (catapults), and siege engines. Each one carries a driver and a passenger. A few special abilities are listed—for instance, motorcycle drivers can leave behind tar puddles (which slow down enemies passing through them, and can be lit on fire), or demolisher passengers can be launched via catapult into enemy lines.
The boss of this area is the "Flame Leviathan" (described as "part of the
V0-L7R-0N
weapons platform"). The fight is played using the siege machines, and finishing it off requires launching players onto it's back to sabotage it.
The Flame Leviathan is supported by four defense towers, which can increase the difficulty of the battle in the same way that the 3 drakes can be used to increase the difficulty of the Sartharion fight. More to come on this later.
One of the things mentioned that I found especially interesting is that the raid itself is focussing very heavily on building a system which allows as many encounters as possible to be done on varying difficulty levels. Out of the 14 boss encounters in Ulduar, 11 of them have been written with Sartharion-style difficulty curves built in (like the Flame Leviathan mentioned above). I'm very interested in seeing where Blizzard is going with this.
Obviously a lot of criticism has been leveled at Blizzard for WotLK being too easy. I believe (and have always believed) that it's really important for raiders to have an impossible goal to strive for. Even if you're a casual player, who's
never
going to see the high level content, it needs to
be
there—because otherwise you don't have a reason to keep playing. You clear Sarth + 3 drakes, and...then what? I mean, sure—there's better gear out there. But what do you need with better gear?
You've already cleared the hardest content the game has to offer.
The purpose of getting the gear is to step up your game so you can go try more new content! If I can clear Sarth + 3 drakes with my current gear, what am I going to do with upgrades?
The way Blizzard has this laid out, almost every encounter in Ulduar will have four or more levels of difficulty—10 man normal, 10 man hard, 25 man normal, and 25 man hard. With the extra variation in the Flame Leviathan fight, there are actually
ten
granular levels of difficulty.
So is this the answer?
Do you think Blizzard's technique for addressing the difficulty issue is effective? Or will Ulduar suffer from the same problems early WotLK did?
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