Some info on the new 25man(sunwell)

[mkeg0dn]

This is straight from the Blizzard podcast. Information on the new 25man and 5man instances coming out.





[ 13:22 ]
Drysc: Welcome to the World of Warcraft portion of the first ever Blizzcast. I’m Drysc, from the World of Warcraft Community Team. Working behind the scenes, actually is Bornackt, to keep all this running for us. Today we’re going to be talking about the upcoming 2.4 patch which features the Sunwell Plateau raid instance, and to help explain some of that, Lead Designer, Jeff Kaplan. Welcome Jeff, how’s it going?

Jeff: I’m doing great. Excited to be here.


[ 13:45 ]
Drysc: Really good. So tell us a little about Sunwell Plateau, like where it fits in as far as progression, I guess, in Burning Crusade. It’s obviously a raid dungeon – is it coming after Black Temple?

Jeff: Sure thing. The raid aspect of it is definitely a progression from Black Temple. We’re tuning it for people in Tier 6 gear, however there’s not an attunement on the front door. The first three bosses are accessible by everybody however they will be tuned for Tier 6, but there’s a lot more to Sunwell Plateau than just a raid dungeon too.


[ 14:18 ]
Drysc: And what kind of reputation are we looking for? Is there going to be a reputation associated with Sunwell Plateau, or is it Aldor/Scryer?

Jeff: There’s a reputation associated with the whole Sunwell Isle. So the Isle has not just the raid dungeon, which is the Sunwell Plateau, but it also has a five person instance which is the Magister’s Terrace, which can be normal or heroic, and there’s also a whole hub of quests that are going to be daily quests and that hub actually gets built up by the players over time. And there’s a reputation associated with all of these things called the Shattered Sun Offensive. And what that is, is the culmination of the Scryer and Aldor storyline. The two groups have finally banded together, a continuation of that scene that was playing out in the inn in Area 52. They’re now banded together to drive out the Burning Legion who are inhabiting the Sunwell which has been re-ignited. So we think it will be really exciting – Shattrath, a lot of the NPCS will be changed that were previously either Scryer or Aldor specific to Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so blood elves and draenei like those soldiers out front by the flight masters – you’ll actually see them change. So it should be pretty cool.


[ 15:33 ]
Drysc: What’s the gear level that you’re going to be getting out of Sunwell Plateau, is it an actual Tier 7 or equal to Tier 6, I guess?

Jeff: It will be definitely a tier above Tier 6 so Tier 7 gear, however there’s not class specific sets in terms of armor looks. There definitely will be class specific armor and armor set bonuses, but the looks will be shared across armor type. So for example, plate will have a paladin version and a warrior version and there will be some colour differences there but it’s not a completely unique look between the two.


[ 16:12 ]
Drysc: And that’s kind of like AQ was to some degree.

Jeff: Yeah Ahn’Qiraj 40 although we really are planning to do the itemization a lot better than we did with Ahn’Qiraj 40 so people can rest assured.


[ 16:26 ]
Drysc: Ok, let’s go back to the five person dungeon. What’s the difficulty of that? Where’s that kind of fall in line, I guess, with the other five persons’? What’s the gear that they’re going to expect to get out of it.

Jeff: The all important ‘what’s the loot?’ question.

Drysc: Right, right.

Jeff: Difficulty-wise we’re tuning it to be a max level dungeon, so level 70. We expect it to be a more difficult max level dungeon but not by much – around the difficulty, I would say, of Shadow Labyrinth or Shattered Halls – somewhere around there. It will also have a heroic mode which will be on par in difficulty with our other heroics. In terms of loot, what we’ll be dropping in the normal version – you’ll get one fifteen dungeon blues off the first three bosses, which is just normal level 70 dungeon loot. But the last boss will drop a one ten epic item which is on par with a Karazhan epic, with a lower level Karazhan epic. In heroic mode they’ll drop lower level Karazhan epics off of every boss, and the final boss will drop an item that’s on par with a Prince Malchezzar Karazhan epic, so a really good epic item at the end of the heroic.
We realize because this dungeon is coming later in the sort of Burning Crusade cycle it’s very important that the loot be relevant to people who are playing the game now, and for people who came into Burning Crusade late, this will give them the opportunity to have a little bit of a catchup to all the players who have been doing the Arena or participating in our PvE content, so it’s kind of win-win, or if people want to gear up an alt really quickly this will be a good place to do that. And of course because it’s only a four boss dungeon, the five person one is, it’s not like you can fully equip a character in this type of gear, there are only so many slots represented.


[ 18:18 ]
Drysc: And just to change gears to I guess a broader overview of 2.4, what else can we expect? You mentioned some daily quests obviously associated with Sunwell Plateau. We looking at any sort of other content aside from the people that are getting into the raids, obviously the five person dungeon stuff is going to be great for almost anybody, but is there anything else that’s going into 2.4, I guess?

Jeff: There’s going to be a lot of little things in 2.4. Right now 2.3 went live recently, so we’re evaluating class balance. We don’t want to do any drastic changes in 2.4 until we see how some of our 2.3 balance changes played out. So you can expect changes there. We’re doing other small things like raising the daily quest limit. Right now it’s at ten quests per day. We’re blowing that out to twenty five quests per day. It was never a design limitation, it was more of a technical limitation on how many things that we could track on the server at any one time. So that will open up a lot of content for players, just being able to do more daily quests per day.

And then we’re also looking into many small but really beneficial user interface improvements – to give a very tiny, small example, we’re improving the ready check, so when a raid leader clicks on the ready check button, everybody who has raid leader or assistant raid leader privileges will be able to see who’s responded ready and who’s afk and who’s not ready. A little bit more responsiveness and feedback and assist them. A lot of things like that going into 2.4.


[ 19:56 ]
Drysc: Well thank you very much, this has been Jeff Kaplan, I’m Drysc from the World of Warcraft Community team and thank you for listening.