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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-22-2010 @ 11:11AM
cyanea85 said...
I too notice some issues with "flow" and "quality" of the Cata dungeons versus the Wrath ones. It's the little things...like a lack of a teleport out when you beat the last boss. It's the long runs back to the final boss after a wipe as the teleporters don't seem to go that far (Stonecore and VP come to mind). It seems strange that they designed dungeons in Wrath to be easy to recover from wipes (especially after long runs back like in vanilla Deadmines) so that there's not a lot of downtime or little chance of delays because someone got lost or pulled a pat from nowhere. It seems strange for them to then reverse that. I mean, granted, it's not as bad, but it's still noticeable.
It's also the incongruous nature of some of the dungeon placements, like why is Stonecore ABOVE the Temple of the Earth when it feels like you're going underground? Some of the dungeons don't really seem all that well placed in the lore either, like Tol'Vir or VP. You just get this vague breadcrumb quest "Oh, go check out that guy we sent to that place and see what he wants." Who is Lockjaw or General Whatsisfacewiththeweirdvoice and why should I care about killing him?" I know the stone cat people (blanking on the name this early) are bad, but it just seems weird that for all the leaps that Blizz has made in story telling, they're going back to "bad people are in there, go kills them".
I love what the expansion's done to the game, but I really feel like they rushed or half-assed a lot of the lore.
Reply
12-22-2010 @ 11:16AM
cyanea85 said...
Throne is another one of those weirdly designed ones. It just feels...strange for you to kill this boss, and then have to back-peddle through the entire dungeon again to make progress. Wrath dungeons just seemed to flow better and almost always fit snugly into the lore.
Ignore all my bad writing. It's early, I'm tired, and just got out of a hellacious final.
12-22-2010 @ 11:24AM
JT said...
Why? Because they have loot, of course.
Actually, I'd disagree with you here. I thought Throne of the Tides was a great ending to Vash'jir. Each of the dungeons is tied into the zone that it resides in if you play through all the quests.
It IS kinda weird that Stonecore seems bigger than the Temple of Earth though. Perhaps a fall like in AN might have been in order.
12-22-2010 @ 11:29AM
cyanea85 said...
Don't get me wrong. I -love- the dungeon, and love the lore.
I just think it's a bit weird from a design standpoint to have you go up the elevator, kill Naz'jar, then go back down to the beginning again and go in a different direction, especially with that buggy/slow jellyfish elevator in the way.
12-22-2010 @ 11:49AM
Grovinofdarkhour said...
Something just occurred to me:
They linearized questing, but delinearized instancing.
12-22-2010 @ 1:33PM
loop_not_defined said...
@cyanea85
There's a teleporter nearby that let's you go back down after killing the upper-floor bosses in TotT. It also let's you go up if you die on the Commander immediately following what's-her-name.
I might be wrong (exhausted, shaky memory), but...I know I've never had to go back down on the jellyfish.
12-22-2010 @ 1:36PM
Rob said...
Most of the dungeons don't really have all that much to do with the lore. A little bit yeah, but not much. I'm thinking of most of the BC ones in particular. Oh well, it doesn't matter all that much in the end. If they tied it too much to the storyline it will become mandatory which isn't their design intent. It also screws up the story line if you kill Very Cool Boss X 100 times but yet he's still freaking alive next time. So just go with it, it's a game.
12-22-2010 @ 7:47PM
McRaider said...
@ Grovinofdarkhour
That's a really good point. They boosted up the questing experience a lot, but made the instances, just like you said, delinearized. I like it, though. The lost city doesn't feel like one big alleyway with a few really bad guys, it feels more like a city. VP is more linearized with pretty much only one way to the boss: straight through that trash group, but the place is visually the prettiest of them all IMHO. Can't wait to get to the throne of the four winds.