Spooncraft

We’ve been discussing this a lot. The PVP aspect of the game is a big lure for me but more than that I enjoy this universe and the lore as well as the raids and dungeons. It’s just appealing to me. With that said right now we’re engrossed in some major discussions about the raiding and instance game in Wrath of the Lich King. I can’t divulge information on the new PVP stuff coming because frankly Blizzard has released NOTHING and even the Alpha stuff is so sketchy that I’d rather not even think about it.

So people are pissed about the new changes, well just a few people, I think they’re great. The merging of 10 and 25 person raids having separate progressions is awesome. I’m not even a casual player but then again I’m not a hardcore raider. The end game really isn’t something I fap over and think about all day long like some of the reets on my old server. There’s still a lot to be said about the social aspect of the game and of course, PVP. Bornakk has been doing a great job corraling threads in the official WotLK forums.

We are making the raid dungeons have the 10 and 25 person sizes so that it is not nearly as limited as before though as a lot more people can get involved in 10 person raids. We don’t plan to remove the concept of raiding from the game though as that sounds like what you are looking for. There will be 5 person dungeons with their heroic versions available as in the past and they should be a lot of fun if that is the content that fits your play best. (src)

It depends on what you consider “end-game content”, there is already a lot of quests that can be complete solo that are the end-game of solo play - some of them are a fairly long series as well and they will reward players with gear appropriate for the level of difficulty (like the blue item rewards). Some of these series in The Burning Crusade required players to go through the 5 person dungeons, so these things already exist to a degree.

If players were able to complete a long quest chain while solo-ing and it provided end-game gear, then it would be like removing raiding (as I previously brought up) because this would allow players who play a lot to race through it all and get things very quickly. So the rewards for any series of quests or dungeons will always need to be on par for the challenge and not automatically end-game gear.  (src)