BlizzCon 2007 Raid & Dungeon Panel

Raid and Dungeon Panel

The raid and dungeon panel was lead by Jeff Kaplin, Lee Sparks, Scott Mercer, Jeff Goodman.

Tigole opened up the panel by saying that this was for people that earned their epics. "No free PvP welfare epics."
There was a lot of applause from the audience on this, but being a part-time pvper myself, I put in some hearty boos.

Why they create dungeons.

The first reason why they create a dungeon are for lore originations, such as the Deadmines.

The second reason is to fill gaps in level availability. They added mauradon because there was nothing available at that level, and
to finally give people a reason to go out to Desolace. Ragefire Chasm was added because they had put the Stormwind Stockades in, and there was no comparable alternative for the Horde.

They are adding ZulAman in the next major content patch in order to fill the lack of 10 person raids.

The third reason they add a dungeon is for location. For example the Wailing Caverns was placed for this reason.

The final (overiding) reason is because 'Metzen wanted it'. (Because VP Chris Metzen comes into meetings with 'GUYS I HAVE THE MOST AWESOMEST IDEA!)

Philosophy

The original plan for the original WoW release was level 70 and to include Northrend. They showed a list of the dungeons originally planned for the initial launch, and then the dungeons they actually implemented. Overall, it was the same amount of dungeon content.

They have one more unannounced (very difficult) raid zone prior to the release of Northrend.
Blizzard is planning on having more ten man dungeons in Northrend and future expansions.
Northrend will have just as many levelup dungeons as Burning Crusade.

Progression

Progression adds challenge to the game, and without progression through dungeons the game would feel very static. It also allows them to properly escalate difficulty.

The attunement and keying process forces you to go through the back story for the content, and for those of you doing pick-up groups, you know that if someone is heroic keyed, they've at least done the dungeon a few times.

For Northrend, a lot of the content is unlocked in a manner similar to the AQ gates.

1. Trash mobs in dungeons is used for pacing, and it also allows class abilities (such as stuns, polymorphs and banishes) to come into play that they couldn't allow to be used on a raid boss.

Sometimes they do realize they have too many trash creatures in an area, for example Gnomeregan has too much trash. Other examples were
Mount Hyjal getting the number of waves reduced, and the Scholomance 1.0 which had 'more trash than rest of the entire game'.

2. Kill time on mobs.

(... Notes to be continued ... )