The View From Down Here

Coming soon to a Draenor near you…

So the first patch post-Burning Crusade is due to hit our machines soon – I’d guess at next week or the week after. And it’s a big one. The major thing is of course the Black Temple, which I find it hard to get excited about – at present we just don’t have enough players for the early 25-man raids, let alone one that’s further on on terms of progression. There’ s a lot of other interesting stuff, though – not least the two new (sort of, anyway, in the case of Netherwing) factions and loads of new solo and group content. Give me my netherdrake mount!

I guess I’m unusual, though, in not being hugely excited about all this new outdoor content. Outdoor group bosses are all very well, but to me they too often feel like a waste. Getting a group of five people together for a quest that takes ten minutes at most feels like too much of a waste to me – give me an instance group and a dungeon to mash any day. Grouping for a quest that takes more time to group than to finish the quest just doesn’t feel right. WoW Insider seems to think there’s a new 5-man instance in there. If so, excellent. I won’t count my chickens just yet though.

It does feel like there’s lots more where this came from to come – I’ve always wondered about the apparently abandoned Ogre village above Shattrath City, for example – but the news here makes me wonder if I’m falling between two stools, being too hard core to be casual and too casual to be hard core.

I had a poke around Ethereum a few weeks ago and it struck me that here was an ideal place for an instance or two. Coming in patch 2.2? You heard it here first.

Anyway, back to the patch. Alchemy’s getting nerfed – I can live with that – I only tended to use one of each elixir at a time anyway. I’m interested to find out what will happen to Fel Strength Elixir, which is apparently misnamed and is actually a potion, and I happen to love very much. To have it stack with other things would be a masterstroke.

The patch does confirm one thing, though – Blizz aren’t out to just pacify the people who shout the loudest in this patch. I expect more content that non-hardcore raiders can access. I look forward to Zul’Aman, rumoured to be another 10-man raid, and no doubt many other things that haven’t been announced yet.