So The Burning Crusade (this year's expansion for World of Warcraft) has arrived chez Ged and, like most other folk, I've headed off to the Outland for experience, phatter lewt, higher skills, new types of pets, and the simple, touristic desire to just go there and have a look at the place.
And, also like most other folk, I do a few simple quests and see that the items you get as rewards for the most ordinary of quests have better statistics than the items I've spent months chasing down in assorted dungeons, raids and high-end instances back on Azeroth. That leads to a certain ... cheated .. feeling. No doubt it will soon go away, but I do wonder if The Burning Crusade is going to kill instances like the Molten Core and Black Wing Lair stone dead? In a few months time Zul'Gurub may be as empty of senior players as the Deadmines.
That wouldn't matter if these instances were, like the lower-end instances, places where you went to do a bundle of quests, and maybe you got some phat lewt but it didn't really matter if you didn't. But they weren't. You went to Molten Core, time and again, for the drops. The loot was shared out between guild members, and that way, every few visits, you got a rare, epic or even heroic item.
Blizzard have seen this coming, of course, and that's presumably what the new "Heroic" difficulty level on instances is for: better drops. So Molten Core will still get raids of 40 level 70s on Heroic difficulty level. Whether any level 60s will go there on ordinary difficulty level seems doubtful. Maybe we'll see a raft of new quests to take them there?
