The best just got better

December 3rd, 2008

This is, of course, referring to World of Warcraft and the recent expansion to the game, Wrath of the Lich King.

The life of Warcraft lore-fans like me took huge steps to better with the new expansion, Blizzard really got it right, there's so many great quest lines which bring a lot more than any previous quest in WoW or TBC ever did for us, most of which aren't obvious or even noticeable to Average WoW-Joe, that I can't even really start to list those here.

But one quest line definately needing a special mention is the Wrathgate-line. I mean, epic is just a too weak word to describe it! It takes the whole term "epic" to a damn Brann-spanking-new level!

Of course there's downsides to the expansion too, at least for some. Many feel that the "wellfare epics"-trend has gone too far with the new raid-instances, Naxxramas specificly, being too easy. However, this isn't too shocking, not to me anyway, Blizzard said that they will be easy, they will be "Molten Core" of WotLK, back to basics, teaching the people pve-raiding, which of course feels far too easy for those of us who have raided most if not all
of the previous pve content of the game. And don't forget that many of you were also familiar with the encounters beforehand due the old Naxxramas 40-man raid-instance - while the new Naxx is tuned for 10 and 25-man raids, it's still essentially the same.

So I wouldn't be too worried, sure, they're easy and puggable, but already Eye of Eternity gives a bit harder challenge compared to them, let alone Onyx Sanctum if you keep the extra-drakes up. Even having just one drake up raises the encounter difficulty significantly, let alone having two or three drakes up.

Ulduar, coming in future content patch, is only the 2nd "big raid instance" in the game and it should be a challenge for most of us. Sure, it will probably be cleared quite swiftly by Ensidia (ex-Nihilum & ex-Curse (SK-Gaming) combined) and few others, but not as swiftly as Naxx was and definately will take some time for the "normal hardcore" guilds, let alone semi-hardcore or semi-casual guilds.

And Ulduar won't be the last either, Icecrown of course will be the last instance in the expansion, but there's rumors that at least Uldum might be included in the game before it, and who knows what other instances they'll come up with.