Icecrown Citadel : 3.3Follow

Yeah I have already had a few swipes at the ol'elf already. He popped up in UP and at the end in DK. Still he keeps on hiding behind his minions and making an exit. Best just stick to killing Anub'rekan.

The 5 man fight with the Lich King will probably end similar to the fight with Illidan in the Black Temple.



Arthas: Enough! I grow tired of these games!
*knocks everyone down to 1 HP and freezes them solid for 60 seconds*

Jaina/Sylvanas: NOT SO FAST ARTHAS!
*attacks Arthas*

Arthas: Wait... what are you doing here? I should have killed you long ago. Bah, I'll finish this later.
*Arthas runs away*

Not if the instances are designed so that you are only going to enter one of them in the first place.

Hardcore raiders aren't going to kill Arthas in the 5 man (at least, it isn't designed for them to) and casuals aren't going to do it in the 25 man. The large, hard-mode version will likely have more bosses and such, and possibly more wings.

But, since each players is only supposed to experience one avenue of killing Arthas, it isn't an issue.

Look at the loot reward iLevels for this instance. No one is going to be able to use it to gear up for much else. You'll have to do other instances if you want to try a harder ICG instance.

But, the basic story in each will likely be the same. Jaina/Sylvanas and, possibly, Tirion all helping you kill the LK.

Don't think of it as the LK dying in different instances. Think of it as the LK dying in different modes of the same one (even if they do offer completely different raids for the more hardcore players, they are meant to replace this one).

And I still don't think the LK actually "dies" in these 5mans.

Ilvl 219 drops in Uld 10 actually....

As Arthas is/was a paladin, when he gets to 1% HP he will simply bubble+hearth, naturally ;)

Lol, right? Like, Ragnaros is "coming back," but there are millions of toons who played in a world where he had never been banished back to the fire plane. XD

That's why Cata is coming, probably. To try and even up the timeline for newer toons. Otherwise, they'd have to keep rolling back the clock, like they did in BC (yeah, bet most of you didn't realize that. BC brought the time in Azeroth back a year or two).

If we say the cataclysm happens 5 years from the start of WoW, then we can just say that all the stuff that is gone after it was completed by others, before your little Worgen or Gob ventured out of town.

I'm still curious about what they intend to do with OL, though. It makes sense for certain changes to occur (in the face of tragedy, various people escaping to and returning from it, etc). With Illidan and other leaders dead, it makes sense for the enemy forces to have changed position and command over the past year or two, which allows for quest changes.

sorry, i meant the 5-man, not the patch. My bad.

Previous post edited

Fair enough, except that it's extremely unlikely he'll be killed in the 5-man, even though he may be defeated or suffer losses. Killing him is what the raid instance is for--the heroics look like they're designed more as a lead-up to the final raid, storywise, similar to how Magister's Terrace set the stage for Sunwell.

I don't recall necessarily any hints that they want everyone to be able to kill him even if they don't raid. I do recall them having said that they don't want the "advanced" raid content to be out of reach to all but the most organized/dedicated raiders as was the case with BT and certainly SWP in TBC. People who are not in Ulduar and or ToC these days aren't in those raids because they've either got some exceptionally wonky scheduling restrictions or they simply choose not to be a part of a group that is able to make those raids happen on a regular basis. If Blizzard alters the emblem drops in heroics again (ie. Emblems of Triumph instead of the current Conquest emblems), people will be back to spamming heroics to fill out their T9 sets and will suddenly find themselves adequately geared for IC10. I'm usually one of the last people to kvetch about Blizzard making the game "too casual", but if your idea ends up being the reality (two different scenarios where you defeat Arthas with finality) and I'd say Blizzard had completely lost touch with reality. It's an MMO. If the extent to which people are willing to take part in it is 5-man content, they've really got no reason to complain about not being able to see the content. It would be like people complaining that they never get to see all of Outland because they can't be bothered to level past 20.

I could see a scenario where the lore around Arthas consuming Ner'Zhul during his dormant phase after putting on the cursed armor turns out to have been not entirely accurate...that Tirion's wish to see Arthas redeemed is made possible through death, but then Ner'Zhul re-emerges and is the actual final raid boss for WotLK. That, or similar to what happens during the Wrathgate event, the Lich King is only incapacitaed in the 5-man encounter but manages to escape, the party gets to loot a chest, and then they leave and the next time they see him (aside from repeated instance runs :P) is in the Icecrown Citadel raid instance.

There are abundant ways that Blizzard could implement a viable 5-man encounter that doesn't make the raid encounter seem redundant and pointless.

What's next? Make Arthas a solo boss off in some corner of Icecrown somewhere for the players who can't break 1200 dps in a heroic just so that they too can say they got to kill Arthas?

There have been too many changes to raiding since TBC for anyone to cry foul at the idea that the final WotLK encounter with Arthas would be in a raid. Take a look at ToC10 right now. It's been available for what...6-8 weeks now and it's already an easy one hour clear in a PUG if you're geared and actually managed to learn a thing or two about how to play your class in the 250+ hours it took you to level from 1-80.

TBC raids were about progression through multiple tiers of raid content, picking up gear as you go that would allow you to succeed in subsequent tiers of raid content. Badge gear alleviated the strain on newer players if they had a hard time finding a guild that was willing to help them gear through tier 4/5 to get a leg up in T6/SWP, but it wasn't a complete substitute. And pre-3.0, if you weren't in an established raiding guild, SWP was only the raid you heard about, never the one you actually saw.

Now look at T9. I fully expect Emblems of Triumph to start dropping off of heroic bosses, which means you can get a complete 5pc set of tier 9 raid gear without setting foot in a T7/8 raid, with trinkets and relics/librams/etc. also from emblems and then a weekly 1 hour jaunt through ToC 10 for bracers, belts, boots, rings, and weapons and huzzah! You're geared for IC10! Not heroic IC10 and possibly not quite IC25, but at least you're viable as a contributor to see the content. Yes, you'll have to wait several weeks before PUGs become viable while everyone else learns the encounters and gets comfortable with the idea of potentially bringing in dead weight to fill a spot, but you'll eventually get to see it and it won't be anywhere near the onerous task it was in TBC.

And if that's still not good enough for Joe Casual, then Joe Casual needs to accept that he can't expect to get the most out of an MMO if he can't get involved in content involving groups larger than 5 people.

It's not about holier than thou. Not at all. Put the shoe on the other foot. How would you feel as a raider to blast through the 5-man on patch day and...oh. Arthas is dead. Okay, now let's go progress through the raid dungeon and...kill him again? "It's just like Kael'thas!" Nope. There was a story behind the return of Kael in MagT. And you sure as hell never saw Illidan in a 5-man.

I think Blizzard has done a pretty decent job of dividing the content so that more dedicated raiders can enjoy the game while simultaneously allowing not-so-dedicated players to see what all the fuss is about. They don't need to take it the step further. Arthas should be an end-game PvE encounter, and end-game PvE encounters in WoW involve raids, not 5-mans.