Blizzcon Dungeons and Raids Panel

With all of the upcoming changes in Cataclysm, I was interested to see if we’d hear of any new changes or improvements to the system and I’m glad to say that there were some new things announced that I’m pretty excited for. Blizzard’s goal is to make dungeons in Cataclysm more integral to the storyline of the game. With this they’ve also realized that some of the original dungeons of Azeroth were pretty complicated or just confusing (looking at you Maraudon…) and they want to change that and just make them more fun. With this are coming some changes:

Methods for fun:
- Create wings in the dungeons (a la Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle)
- Uldaman will now be in two different chunks
- Maraudon will be broken into two chunks
- Trimming some dungeons
- Sunken Temple will be trimmed down
-Wailing Caverns: about half being taken out of the game.

Blizzard also talked about how they want to change their raid philosophy. We’ve already heard about their flexible raid locks that will be coming in Cataclysm that allow players to join multiple raid groups and not be locked to a specific raid lockout. I think this will be great for players like myself who aren’t able to make consistent raid nights. If I for example get through the first four bosses of Icrcrown with my guild and miss the next run, if I can find another PUG (pick up group) that has also cleared the first four bosses I can just join them and get through more if not complete the rest of the raid. But here’s more from the panel:

Raid Philosophy
- more raid zones for ship
- coolest encounters yet (new mechanics)
- Bite-sized chunks
- Content for everyone
- Dynamic difficulty (switching between heroic and normal on the fly) all worked very well and pleased with the evolution
How it works
- normal difficulty raid progress is saved on your character
- you can join multiple normal raids of either size (10/25)
- you can defeat each boss once
- heroic difficulty remains the same as in WotLK
Benefits
- helps players with erratic play schedules
- a real life emergency doesn’t end your raiding for the week
- raid leaders have more schedule and roster flexibility
- can send your flex raid lock status to others by shift-clicking

Blizzard also announced that they’re going to be enhancing the maps for dungeons. Not only will every dungeon have a map in Cataclysm, but there will even be 3D models of bosses that will also feature the boss stats, abilities and what loot they may drop.

They also announced a bit of a preview for patch 4.1.0 which will bring us a raid and a dungeon: Firelands Raid and the Abyssal Maw dungeon.

Firelands Raid
- Elemental Plane of Fire
- Home of Ragnaros
- 7 bosses (easy to get done in one night unlike something like Uld with 15 bosses)
- Indoor and outdoor sections (able to use mount outdoors)

Abyssal Maw Dungeon
- Elemental plane of Water
- Nothing like Oculus
- 4 bosses

So all in all it was a pretty informative panel and I’m excited to see how the changes work once Cataclysm is released.