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The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of VGGEN.com as a whole or any of its affiliates. This is simply one writer's opinion, and should be accepted as such.

MC, UBRS, BWL, LBRS, BRD, SCHOLO, STRAT, DM… What does this alphabet soup have in common? Well, as you all know, it’s a partial list of the pre-Burning Crusade end-game instances and raids. Now that the highly anticipated BC finally launched, I couldn’t help but wonder what the new content will mean for these instances. Will they remain popular? Will they become just another stop on the road to 70?  Will they be skipped altogether? Or will they become the playgrounds for newly minted and still resentful 70s?

I think the answer is all of the above. However, my personal feeling is that most of these instances will not be visited nearly as often as before. They will become the equivalent of Maraudon or the Sunken Temple, a quick stop for alts to get a few (class) quests done and some decent gear to level with. Let’s face it, how many times did you run ST and Mara on your main? And then with your next alt, did you return to them as often? My guess is no. Personally, I went a few times with my main, and then skipped Mara entirely and went to ST once to get all my quests done with my alts. I went more for the XP and disenchants than the actual loot or love of those places. After that, I sent them off to hit level 60 as quickly as possible for eng-game raids. Now that BC is active, my sense is people will only bother leveling to 58 and head straight to Outland because the content is fresher and the gear/money/rewards more enticing.

Since 60 is no longer the level cap, I think that a lot of the long quest chains (e.g. Onyxia) will be skipped entirely by a vast majority of players. Why bother? Unless you’re in a large guild, there is little incentive to go week after week to kill Onyxia or some of the old 40man raid bosses. Sure, you can go a few times to get some purples and some XP, but after a few runs, you’ll be ready to move on to higher level instances and better loot, both from regular quest chains and new instances in Outland. I can hear some of you hard cores begging to differ: you can take a few level 70s to do MC to run through a few level 60 alts and it’s still fun. True. But again, you need to be in a relatively large, geared out guild, and have guildies willing to take time from their new raid schedules to run you through to Rag or Nax or whichever boss you want to drop. It’s possible, but frankly I don’t see the real fun in it, nor am I sure how realistic this is. Plus now that I am level 64 and have replaced most of my Tier 1 gear with greens and blues from Outland, I don’t really see the value. Only Tier 2 items seem to hold out for a few levels above 60 against regular greens and blues in Outland…

It’s kind of a shame. All this raiding content is now pretty much obsolete, except maybe for hard-core raiders. This group is the most likely to be willing to sink in the time to get the long chain quests done to be able to re-visit these instances at a higher difficulty level. While this sounds great in theory, I still have a lot of questions and some healthy skepticism on how this will all play out. I mean: how much time & effort will I need to invest to do this? And how does a high difficulty Onyxia compare to a regular level 70 instances in terms of difficulty and reward? Is it worth it, or should I just be content with running the new end game instances over and over, while waiting for new content and the next expansion?

So even though I ponder some this, I find myself really enjoying the Outland quests. Having run MC and BWL/AQ40 on two characters (one on the alliance and the other on the horde side), I am really sick of those places. Plus I am really looking forward to smaller raid groups. It’s a lot more fun to go with a small guild or some close buddies then 40 people. It’s also logistically a lot easier to get 25 schedules aligned versus 40. So now that the new end game content is (smartly) going to be instances up to 25 players, I am not sure that there will be a lot of 40 man raids easily formed for the MC, Onyxia or AQ40 on steroids version. Unless, again, you are part of a large, well run guild of hard-core players. But how many of you can really say that?

My last thought for the day is about the reputation grind. These long, arduous grinds are one of my major complaints about WoW. I work in business, so I can understand that the concept of getting people to do simple, repetitive stuff (e.g. collecting twilight texts or Arakkoa feathers) is easier to code/implement then a brand new instance. Plus it’s good for business: it takes many, many hours of farming and/or raiding to hit exalted with the Cenarion Circle, Argent Dawn, and other end game factions. These many hours translate into longer subscriptions and more money. Bingo! Makes sense from Blizzard’s perspective, but from mine, it’s pure torture. I absolutely hate having to collect those darn items or PvP until my hand falls off to get a cool purple weapon. But if you are not into constant raiding, rep grinding (I include honor rep) is the only real alternative to get some good gear. To me rep grinding is really just filler time between new content, which as we all know, has been far and few between… I really wish we could get fresh content and quests more frequently.

But I digress. My point is that all the Azeroth reputation your characters have gained does not translate to the new factions in Outland. This means that existing characters will have to start from scratch with the new factions. And what does that mean for new players? My guess is that they may skip Azeroth areas and quests entirely on their way to 70. Why bother? You can get better rewards for being exalted with the new factions then with the old ones. And you may as well grind on slightly higher mobs to get better XP in Outland so you can hit 70 faster.

So although I already love the Burning Crusade, I also feel a bit sorry for all the old level 60 content that I think will soon be deserted. Already the EPL and Silithus are very empty. As much as I love to complain about these places, I had a great time in those instances, and have some good memories torturing the opposing faction in Silithus and EPL. With that said, I am curious to see what Blizzard will do with those old instances and factions, if anything. The new difficulty level is a good idea to keep these “old” areas popular, but I am not yet convinced that this will really work out as easily as Blizzard claims.  I guess only time will tell…

As usual, if you have any comments, complaints, concerns, or fan mail, send them to weeklywow@vggen.com. I’ll try to answer all E-mails personally, and you may wind up in a future mailbag column.

Posted: 02/19/2007

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