Normal And Heroic Lockouts Will Be Shared in WotLK Classic

10/25 Man Lockouts Confirmed in Blue Post Featured Image

In a new Feedback post, Pazorax has explained that 10-player and 25-player versions of the same raid will not share a lockout, which they had previously hinted at. Instead, Normal and Heroic versions will share a lockout. They go on to explain that this change was made to reduce the amount of raids each player feels “required” to do weekly to make sure they keep up. A later reply explains that this will only be for Trial of the Grand Crusader so far, being the only raid with a toggle-able difficulty..

The reasoning for this change instead of the previous 10/25-player shared lockout they had discussed is that people often do 10-player and 25-player raids in different ways and with different people, which fostered social aspects in the community, something that the post also clarifies that Blizzard will be focusing heavily on during WotLK Classic.

To go along with this change, you will not be able to wear a Normal and a Heroic version of the same item, such as trinkets. In the original Wrath of the Lich King release you were unintentionally able to wear duplicates from different difficulties, and this eventually lead to the introduction of Unique-Equipped categories in later expansions, so in order to make sure players don’t have to alternate between Normal and Heroic difficulties these items won’t stack.

Pazorax also confirms two somewhat controversial topics, character-based collections will be the plan going forward and that they have “no plans to add the Random Dungeon Finder”. Character-based collections have been a point of curiosity for most, but others that have decided to remake their character as a better race have also been concerned that they will not have access to their rare mounts and achievements, which this post confirms to be correct.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic releasing without Random Dungeon Finder has been a hot button topic since it was first mentioned, and glancing at the comments on this post shows that is still the case. Fortunately, this does seem to line up with a bigger overarching philosophy for WotLK Classic, in that the social aspect is the #1 priority and everything else seems to be secondary. This is a massively-multiplayer game after all.

Another change from the original Wrath of the Lich King release is that 2v2 Arena will now give achievements and titles, which were originally restricted to 3v3 and 5v5. This was previously done alongside an attitude of balancing PvP around 3v3 and just letting 2v2 fall to the wayside without specific adjustments. The post does also confirm that they will not be attempting to make all classes equal in all brackets, and instead will let certain classes and specs flourish in different brackets.

Pazorax – (Source)

Hey everybody!

Now that we’ve announced that Wrath of the Lich King Classic will release on September 26th, I want to give you an update on some of the items we’ve been collecting feedback on since our Beta began.

Raid Lockouts

We’ve decided that lockouts should be shared between Heroic and Normal versions of the raid, but NOT between 10/25-player versions of the raid. You’ll be able to do both the 10-player and 25-player version of each raid every lockout period but will have to choose between Normal and Heroic for the raids that offer that choice.

Our original concern was with players feeling “required” to do the same raid multiple times per week in order to “keep up,” but that came more from the original experience of Trial of the Crusader than from Naxxramas. Trial of the Crusader’s original release allowed you to run four different versions of the same content in a single week, all of which provided better loot than anything that had been previously available, which created enormous pressure to run all four versions in order to leapfrog over the Ulduar loot. Making the Normal and Heroic versions of Trial of the Crusader share a lockout does a lot to mitigate that, by cutting the number of weekly runs in half.

Additionally, players have pointed out that in many cases they want to be able to run the 25-player version of the raid with their guild, while pugging the 10-player version. Ultimately, that positive social aspect of having raids of various sizes available each week is compelling to us, and fits our goal of providing a vibrant social ecosystem, for friendships to form and develop in. You might, for example, find yourself pugging 10-player raids with a few of the same people from time to time, and end up inviting them to fill an empty slot on your main raid roster later. By contrast, if you could do both Normal and Heroic in the same week, you’d be incentivized to push your existing group to run them back-to-back, which isn’t the same sort of positive social experience.

This was recently bugged on the Wrath Classic Beta, and both 10/25-player version of Naxxramas appeared to share a lockout, but that was unintended and will be fixed before we launch.

Related to this, we also plan to make any trinkets with both Normal and Heroic versions (such as Death’s Verdict) share a Unique-Equip category, so that you can’t have both versions of the same trinket equipped at the same time. While it was originally possible to do this, it was never intended, and motivated us to create the Unique-Equipped categories back then. Prior to creating the Unique-Equipped categories, we could only prevent characters from wearing two copies of the exact same item.

Race and Faction Change

While it won’t be ready for our launch in September, we have changed our minds on this, and we’re working on adding the Race and Faction change as a paid service in a future patch.

Originally, we planned not to offer Race and Faction change at all, because it felt like it removed some of that fantasy feeling of having dramatically different physical attributes that affect your gameplay. We were also a little worried about players chasing the “flavor of the month” in terms of racial abilities However, we’re convinced by the argument that being able to play with your friends is more important, and that you should be able to bring your accomplishments with you when you do. This turns out to be the same tradeoff provided by transferring between realms, which is already available as a paid service, so it makes sense to make the same decision with respect to Race and Faction change.

In short, this fits our aim to nurture and protect social experiences, so we’ll work on it for an upcoming patch.

Character-Based Mounts and Achievements

As before, we plan to have mounts and achievements be per-character, rather than on the account.

This originally came up in response to our plan to not include Race and Faction change, as a suggested alternative way for players to preserve their accomplishments when re-rolling. Since we’ve been convinced to allow Race and Faction change in an upcoming patch, we’re going to focus our efforts on that, and preserve the original Lich King behavior of keeping mounts and achievement associated with the character that earned them.

LFG Tools

We continue to iterate on the bulletin-board style Looking for Group tool, and we do not have plans to add the Random Dungeon Finder.

For players, this has probably been the hottest topic of discussion since our announcement, and we welcome all the continuing feedback on how to improve the tool and make it better. I know this will be disappointing news for some, but we want to settle this topic before launch so everyone knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

We remain hopeful that our recent anti-boosting changes, especially on Fresh Start realms, will invigorate the lower-level dungeons around launch. We also expect the LFG tool to help facilitate long-term friendship formation for players who are looking for it.

2v2 Arena Achievements and Titles

We’re going to award achievements and titles for the 2v2 Arena bracket, just like we did in Burning Crusade Classic.

Originally, Wrath of the Lich King dropped achievements and titles from the 2v2 Arena bracket, but due to popular demand, we’re going to preserve them in Wrath Classic. When we originally stopped awarding titles and achievements for 2v2s, it was because 2v2 was difficult to balance. Nowadays, rather than try to make all classes equally capable in all brackets, we want to preserve the existing class balance and celebrate the unique play style for the classes that perform well in each bracket.

We’ll always continue to listen to feedback on these and all topics. I hope this answers many lingering questions about what the state of things will be when we release.

Thanks, as always, for your interest and support!

About the Author

Passion

I love MMOs of all shades, especially the nitty gritty numbers parts of them. You might recognize me from the Shadow Priest discord, otherwise I play a little bit of everything, especially games with support roles available.

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Vitellius
Vitellius
1 year ago

A whole blue post that I have nothing bad to say about.

I am at peace with the changes to RDF/LFG, which was my biggest source of discontent and having played the pre-pre-patch PTR which has the LFG tool on I can say that it is actually a good tool and will work well for Wrath.

Race/Faction change overdue imo. I wonder what price they’ll charge

I’m glad achievements are going to be character based, it adds meaning to each character and doesn’t water down levelling an alt. I know that heirlooms do this to some extent. I hate on retail how I make an alt and pretty much EVERY mount I have ever collected is available to ride at level 20.

I don’t do arena so have no opinion on the changes.

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