Tournament Review

Blizzard has once again graced us with a small sneak peak at some of the new content from the coming patches. The latest is a more detailed description of what the completed Crusader's Coliseum, promised to come out in the upcoming 3.2 Patch, something many of us tournament grinders have been waiting a long time for. These include the following:

"New epic 10- and 25-player raid dungeon with five encounters, with each encounter being unlocked one week at a time."

"New 5-player dungeon with three encounters that will include Champion’s Seals as each one is defeated."

"A more intuitive structure for harder encounters. This raid dungeon will have four different versions: 10-player, 25-player, 10-player Heroic, and 25-player Heroic, with each one using a separate lockout."

"New tier of armor and weapons that are modeled with Alliance- or Horde-specific themes."

There is nothing like cheering your players with a new coming up raid dungeon, however where in the difficulty scale will it be? My hope is that not above Ulduar the least, since though lots of people have been doing Ulduar, it is still a fresh raid dungeon for a lot of raiders. Another dungeon that holds challenges on the difficulty to Ulduar is much more desirable in my mind, rather than upping the encounters once again.

Anyone remembering playing some of the many Star Wars games? The common theme in the jedi games was always to give the player an option to be either good or bad, thus having two possible endings for the game. My first reaction to the "more intuitive structure for harder encounters" was a pleasing smile, but having now mulled the thought I am not so sure anymore. Like in the old Star Wars games, all this really does is forces you to complete the same content more than once - in fact, four times this time.

Aye, it is a nice thought that we have two versions, 10- and 25-man so the more casual guilds can go with the easier content but it is soon going too far. Anyone who has played 25-man Naxxramas knows that the encounters have only few aspects in difference to the 10-man versions and if the same paradigm continues here, all Blizzard is doing is making us complete the same instance four times.

Just so this review does not seem too harsh, let me finish by saying I am still pleased by the update and excited for its release. The idea that we will be getting new gear with special, new looks is especially welcome. It is hard to describe the disappointment in starting your death knight from level 55 with good looking pieces, only to end up in level 80 with identical pieces, and this pattern repeats throughout the WotLK content.

So for this piece of news, Blizzard takes the points home I think.