Filed under: The Burning Crusade

I did a post this week about raiding in previous expansions and in vanilla WoW, and how people often say those raids were harder and my opinion that it is easily demonstrable that current raids are if anything more complicated than they have ever been. I frankly believe there is almost no room for comparison between the game at 60 and today in terms of raid complexity and difficulty. Part of this stems from the many different variations on what the word hard means in this context. Something can be harder because it is conceptually or executionally more complex (the difficulty can stem from how much is required to successfully complete its mechanics) or it can be hard because it is laborious and/or time consuming. Was raiding with 40 people in classic WoW more laborious? Absolutely it was. It wasn't mechanically harder, but it was more time consuming and took a great deal of effort to organize and plan. It's the difference between working out a complex multi-stage math problem and carrying five thousand pounds of rocks from point A to point B.

But there were some points worth addressing. It absolutely has never been easier to level, even without heirlooms, than it is right now. Vanilla leveling to 60 took more time and effort than leveling to 90 does today. Even without heirlooms, one can easily and without much stress reach level 20 in a few hours, level 40 in less than two days, and be level 60 within a day of that, and this isn't spending all day staring at the screen either. This is a fairly casual leveling pace. I leveled a blood elf warrior to 35 in two days of rather casual play, an hour on followed by a half hour reading websites or having a snack or even going for a long walk.

It's also far easier to do the following things:

1. Get a dungeon group. You can queue for dungeons at level 15, and from that point on, all you ever have to do to run a dungeon is hit that queue. If you're playing in the tank or healing role you can effectively chain dungeons all day, and even leveling as DPS there are stretches where you don't even need to quest or do anything but dungeon.
2. Run a battleground. While you could argue that doing well at BG running as you level up and at max level takes some time and effort, if you want to risk queueing in whatever gear you have, it's simplicity itself.
3. Getting ready to raid at max level. The game now has catchup mechanisms in place for players who start later. If you just got your alt to 90 and are switching to it for raiding, deciding to give raiding a try for the first time, or what have you it's not the case that your raid group is compelled to run you through previous raids for attunements and keys, much less gearing you through older raids to get ready for the current content.
4. Find something to do. You could even argue that there's too much to do, or that it feels too mandatory. But you can't argue you don't have options - if you don't want to run dungeons, raid, or PvP there are pet battles, daily quests and scenarios you can do.

So the question then becomes this: is it better or worse for the game that these things are easier? For that matter, are they easy enough?

Vanilla raiding was not mechanically more difficult than current raiding. In fact, in terms of encounter difficulty, raiding in World of Warcraft has never been as challenging to remember and execute as it is right now. Fights like Lei Shen, Twin Consorts, Iron Qon, and Durumu ask players to learn mechanics and execute awareness at a level rivaled only by fights like Mimiron's Firefighter mode. And I'm not even talking heroic difficulty for those fights. Yes, it was often harder to get 40 people together, I'm not disputing that. But that's not design difficulty, that's social difficulty. The argument that WoW was objectively harder back then is beyond absurd.

I was there for all of those raids. I've raided in vanilla, in BC, in Wrath, and in Cataclysm. I've done hard modes and heroic modes since they were introduced. I'm neither the cutting edge progression raider nor someone who raids occasionally for fun -- I've been everywhere from a raider pushing for realm firsts to one leading a semi-casual 10-man while tanking. One thing I can and will say with absolute certainty is this: every single expansion to World of Warcraft has increased the complexity of the raid design.

Last week I wrote about what I considered to be the best fight from classic WoW, so this week we're moving into The Burning Crusade. Though I stated that I try to stay away from obvious choices, this boss is so infamous that I really couldn't choose anything else, despite considering several others. The picture at the top of the article has already given my answer away: Kael'thas Sunstrider, the final boss of Tempest Keep: The Eye.

This could be the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia speaking, but looking back, I really do believe that The Burning Crusade had some of the most interesting, fun, and infuriating boss mechanics of any expansion so far. Mage and/or warlock tanks? Check. Necessary item usage? Check. Guaranteed aggro resets? Check!

And Kael'thas had all of those.

Today's Activision-Blizzard financial reports states World of Warcraft took a subscriber hit this quarter, losing 1.3 million players since February.

The loss brings the total number of WoW players down to 8.3 million, its lowest level since the launch of the Burning Crusade expansion in 2007. Subscriber levels have fallen by about a third since WoW's post-Cataclysm peak of 12 million subscribers. The loss is hardly unusual -- you have to remember that WoW is a 9-year-old game, and we're at a pretty uninteresting time in the expansion cycle.

Have we mentioned yet that we're really excited to see if Blizzard is announcing a new MMO at BlizzCon?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

So the other day on Twitter someone asked me "Why were we in Karazhan, anyway" and since it's a question I've been asked before, I thought I'd address it. The primary reason we went to Karazhan was to kill a whole lot of guilds that were trying to transition to 25 man raiding from the 40 man of Classic by forcing them to run a 10 man instance and two 25 man instances at the same time. Ha. I kid, because I'm still bitter.

The question can actually be answered in several ways. We went to Karazhan because the Kirin Tor were investigating the tower and asked Khadgar for help. They had noticed that, decades after Medivh's death, some new malevolent force was infesting the tower (and since it sits on a ley line nexus, that concerned them) and as we investigated we discover the horrible truth. The Burning Legion has infested Karazhan and seeks control over the powerful arcane secrets held within, and they must be stopped.

But why did Prince Malchezaar lead his Legion forces to Karazhan in the first place? Well, for that, we have to talk about Medivh.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Spoilers for patch 5.3 to follow

Back in the day, and be not mistaken the day was well before The Burning Crusade was even a glimmer in our eyes, I rolled a tauren warrior. His name was Vorn. Vorn went on many quests, because questing was my favorite way to level. Vorn went all over the world, exploring the Horde and the lands under its control, and he found a lot he liked about his allies. He could respect the orcish ferocity and skill in war, the trollish craft, guile, and restrained sense of humor (the Darkspears are sardonic in their way), and even the forsaken seemed to have a wide disparity of personality types. I met forsaken in Thunder Bluff who sent me across the world to return a locket to a tombstone, and that quest moved me to explore the forests of Silverpine, and in time to go to Undercity itself. To be sure, I found there to be aspects of their unlives that disturbed me, but they displayed a strength in adversity that I found admirable.

And then they ruined it.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Let's just be up front about this now -- the Titans left stuff everywhere. It would be hard to disbelieve in them, frankly. They left bases, research stations, fortresses, labs and more. We don't even know what everything they left behind originally did or why it was there in many cases. Some places have somewhat clear reasons for existing (Ulduar, for instance, was tasked with holding the Old God Yogg Saron prisoner, but the Halls of Stone and Lightning point to other goals for the complex) but others, such as the ruined complex now known as Ahn'Qiraj was simply a 'research facility', and we have no idea what it was researching or why such a complex was needed so close to Uldum.

At any rate, there are a lot of Titan complexes currently known of on Azeroth.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Spoilers for patch 5.3 to follow.

Well, if you like spoilers, this is going to be the post for you. Because it is based heavily in the spoilers revealed in Olivia's post about datamined patch 5.3 sound files, and my own musings about what certain things revealed in those files really mean. We find out that yes, as we've already suspected, the seventh Sha did in fact remain free from bondage for the past ten thousand years, that its sinister hand can be felt in everything that's befallen Pandaria, and that the mists parting did in fact have to happen for the good of all. We also hear hints that Y'shaarj may not be as dead as we all hope he is. The fact that digging in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms has something to do with his return is even more portentous. What does this all mean?

This week, I'm going to speculate wildly on one possible thing it could all mean. The Prophecy of C'thun has always fascinated me.

In the time before time, when the world was still in its infancy, a battle between a Titan and a being of unimaginable evil and power raged on this very soil. The prophecy is unclear about whether or not the Titan was vanquished in this battle but it illustrates that a Titan fell. An Old God had also fallen - or so it was thought.

The interesting thing is in the lines "The prophecy is unclear about whether or not the Titan was vanquished in this battle but it illustrates that a Titan fell." Falling doesn't have to mean death. There are many different ways to fall, after all.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi will be your host today.

This isn't meant to imply that one is harder, or a better benchmark of skill, or what have you. It's simply a personal realization based on thinking back on the past years of World of Warcraft and the changing roles I've played.

People who've read the site know that I tend to fall into certain patterns - I start an expansion tanking, switch to DPS for a big chunk and then, somehow, I end up tanking again. I did this in classic WoW, where I played as a DPS as I leveled until about level 40, then tanked until Four Horsemen in Naxx 40. Cut to Burning Crusade, and while I tried to level as a tank, the rage problems and lack of AoE threat meant that I went DPS for a while, only to end up tanking post Karazhan as bosses began to hit harder and the ranks of tanks willing to endure it thinned out. Wrath of the Lich King I tanked for the same guild, left and ended up a DPS for most of Naxx 25 and Ulduar, only to switch to tanking in Trial of the Crusader and stay there until Arthas was dead. Cataclysm? I tanked 10 man Tier 11 raids, switch to DPS in 25 man Firelands and stayed there for most of the expansion only to switch back to tanking for Dragon Soul. And finally there's Mists of Pandaria, where I began as a draenei tank, switched back to a pandaren DPS warrior, went through my orc phase, DPS'd as a tauren for a while and am now a worgen arms warrior.

Last week Adam wrote a piece about how tanking changes you as a player. What's interesting to me is how much I have to unlearn from tanking. There's a DPS mindset, where you learn to watch for spell effects, learn to avoid damage if at all possible (rather than learning how to survive it) and to Always Be Attacking, to constantly get as much activity translated into damage on whatever it is you need to be damaging. Tanking comes second nature to me. I could go tank right now and be fine. DPS requires much more attention from me, it's more demanding and while I'm competent at it, it's always something i have to consciously work at. It's made me a better tank because it's challenged my preconceptions. DPS isn't easy. Especially not being good DPS. There's a ton of work that goes into it.

I just wanted to say that, as someone who has tanked and DPS'd, I admire really skilled DPS players.

Adam ‏(@Adamdm_) asks on Twitter:

Saur-priests say saurok were created by mogu, but they mention a belief they evolved from devilsaurs. Which is more likely?

We have plenty of evidence that the mogu meddled in saurok evolution. Between the Dagger in the Dark scenario, Primordius' existence in Throne of Thunder, Progenitus on the island proper, archaeology in the game, we know the mogu made the saurok to serve as soldiers. What we don't really know for sure is what, exactly, they made the saurok from. There's no dinosaurs on mainland Pandaria, but there's plenty of them on the Isle of Giants to the north, and there's no reason the mogu couldn't have included a few in their experiments to make the saurok.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept of "twinking" in WoW for PvP. It generally entails decking a low-level character out with all the best possible gear available to them and then tearing up the battlefields. In these post-experience locking days twinking is more straightforward than ever, and our own Olivia Grace has already covered a lot of the gearing aspects of twinking, for both PvE and PvP.

PvE twinking is a bit of an unusual idea. Mostly it refers to locking experience at one of the former level caps - 60, 70, 80, or 85 - in order to enjoy the challenges of old raids or to accomplish something limited to players of a certain level, such as the Herald of the Titans title. These are fun and interesting ways to spend time in the game, but what about PvE twinking at even lower levels? Say, level 20? Or 40? Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

My first day at WoW Insider, I was brainstorming ideas for articles when Adam Holisky piped up in chat, "Hey, why not write about writing for Blizzard? I'd love to hear about that, and I bet some of our readers would, too." It's a topic I could discuss at length, and based on some of the chatter I see around various online forums, there seem to be some pretty common misconceptions about how the process works.

So I'm going to discuss some of the structures Blizzard has in place to work with their external authors as well as my personal creative process. Please note that this is only the way I have experienced things, and Blizzard's longer-standing authors such as Richard Knaak or Christie Golden may have a very different routine.

Working with Blizzard

In my experience, an outside author really does not have any control over what stories get told. Once upon a time Blizzard did ask me to pitch them some ideas, but ended up scrapping them in favor of the leader stories project. I am really not in a position to suggest I write something for them. If they want me for a project, they'll contact me and ask if I'm interested.

Once I have verbally accepted an offer, contracts are mailed and signed, and I head off to Irvine for a meeting with the Blizzard Publishing team, which is the primary point of contact for authors working on expanded universe content.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Before we get started, let's cover the previous posts in this series:

• Leveling a new warrior
• Levels 1 to 30
• Levels 31 to 60

What levels 61 through 90 cover is a staggering array of content, if you think about it, going from Burning Crusade (in many ways the oldest content still available in WoW) to Wrath, then Cataclysm and finally Mists of Pandaria itself. Even without raiding or running heroic dungeons, you're still looking at over 30 zones (I'm being conservative and not counting the DK start zone, the Worgen/Goblin start zones, Wintergrasp or Tol Barad) of content. And that content varies greatly, since it ranges from first being introduced in 2007 to 2012. That's over five years of game design iteration, and you can really feel it - in many ways, going from the Cataclysm revamped old world to TBC era Outland to start this patch of leveling off is like stepping into a time machine. Hellfire is a scattered zone, with multiple quest hubs only loosely connected and even with the quests having been adjusted to be much easier to solo it feels like the artifact of its time that it is.

Still, since both Outland and Northrend have had their experience requirements relaxed from their debut periods, it's not hard to get through them. Ironically enough, it's when you hit level 80 and start in on Cataclysm content that the game starts to feel bogged down. Several heirlooms currently stop working at level 80 (the hat, cloak and legs currently available last until 85, and new heirlooms are coming in 5.2) and the experience requirements, while reduced, are still more significant than the previous two expansions.

Still, let's talk about what you, as a warrior, will find when you hit these levels.

When I returned to World of Warcraft after an extended break -- about two years -- I was astounded by how little I knew about the game anymore. (How to play my former paladin main, for example, remains a mystery as I've spent my time on new characters.) But while change can certainly be scary, I can't help but enjoy this new revised version of WoW, so much like and yet unlike the game I remember. I'm enjoying it so much, in fact, that it's hard to pick out my favorite change. There are so many leveling improvements that I've appreciated, like auto-populating flight paths, quest info on the in-game map, and new skills learned automatically. Mounts are cheaper to buy, reputation is easier to gain, and storage space issues have become almost moot with void storage. The clown armor problem everyone had while leveling through Burning Crusade has been fixed (or at least alleviated) by transmogrification, which I've become dangerously addicted to.

But my favorite change so far is definitely the revamped Darkmoon Faire. Not just because there are cool prizes to be bought, but because the huge space the Faire now resides in has given it room to grow: there are more games, more quests, more prizes, and a lot more silliness. It doesn't do much for game advancement, but it's just plain fun.

So, dear readers, I'm asking you what your favorite game change has been. Something useful, like a buffed class skill or a new utility? Or something silly, like transmogrification?

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This isn't the game I started playing!

This is a paraphrasing, of course, but the mentality is real enough. People lament that the communities have changed, that raiding has changed, that gearing has changed, that dungeons have changed, that how we play has changed, that our classes have changed. And every individual has to answer for him or herself whether or not the game has changed enough that it's not worth playing for you anymore.

Personally, I recommend that if you feel that way, you stop playing. But more importantly, it must be stated that the change we're discussing is an inevitability, especially since it's basically stated that World of Warcraft is more likely to see expansions and additions than a sequel ala Guild Wars 2 or EverQuest 2. WoW is going to keep changing as long as it exists, trying to address player concerns and improve its systems even as it gains new levels and sees new content. This is the nature of the beast - it will never be 2004 again, and I will never be a low level warrior getting Charge for the first time and ramming myself headlong into spiders.

The game cannot, will not, and most importantly should not freeze, not even to stay at the exact combination you found the most fun.

Blizzard has made numerous comments over the past year that 15-man raiding seems like a good size compromise between 10-man and 25-man. The 15-person raid can provide enough slots for the necessary class balance, yet let flexibility come into play in exactly how many players of each class are taken.

While some players are keen to enter the era of 15-man raiding, others loath the roster moves and guild shakeups this would cause. For those that were not around during the 40-man to 25-man transition in The Burning Crusade, many many guilds fell apart over having to make drastic cuts from their rosters. In a series of tweets, Ghostcrawler notes that the transition to 15-man raiding would cause guilds to prune 10 people from a 25-man roster, however I'd contend it'd be much more than that (around 15 people would need to be cut), due to the fact most 25-man guilds carry several more folks than necessary, which wouldn't be needed in a leaner and meaner raiding crew.

However, it appears that a transition to 15-man raiding is essentially off the table. Ghostcrawler tweets: