May News/Discussions

[Bolty]

IMO, the best solution for Blizzard would be to set normal and heroic levels to the instances. Make it so those people that want a truly hardcore experience can do the heroic level at either 10 man or 25 and get one level of loot higher than what normal would be. You then give the hardcore people the same amount of opportunity at which ever level they prefer while still leaving things open for the less skilled and more casual players to run either at 10 man or 25 man.

Ultimately it comes down to this:

When you first run The Burning Crusade, you watch a video. In this video, a half-demon, half-Night Elf named Illidan tells you about how he was imprisoned for 10,000 years, banished from his homeworld, and now you're daring to enter his turf. You are not prepared.

Now, for the vast majority of players, they will never get to fight him. Ever. Either they are:
1) Not skilled enough
2) Don't have the excessive amounts of time required to play in a successful 25-man guild
3) Don't have the social connections
4) Have other social obligations to people who fall in categories 1-3

Yet, Illidan is the "goal" of TBC. He's in the intro movie. From the very first quest you undertake, you start hearing about Illidan and how he must be stopped. An excessive amount of lore in the expansion points you to the Black Temple. He's big. He's bad. All of this buildup is what makes getting to him so freaking incredible. And most players will never see him.

Utilizing a 10-player version of Arthas, with scaled-down difficulty, allows players of all types to at least have a dream of having a shot at him. He's at least an attainable goal now, something that's not so far out of reach that he's considered not worth trying for. I'm sure he's going to be really really hard. I would imagine that he'd be on the order of difficulty of a Zul'Aman bear run in Karazhan-level gear. But it's still *possible* and gives players something to shoot for.

The only danger of this is if Blizzard scales him to be *too* easy. Quite a few players may take the attitude of "okay, I win WoW, see you next expansion." Nothing wrong with that, but Blizzard's bottom line might not like it. So I expect the difficulty will be pretty up there. This is why the non-heroic version of Arthas cannot exist - killing him still has to mean something. You just don't need to find 24 other players who don't drive you crazy to do it.

-Bolty