Raids

With the imminent launch of The War Within, players will be chomping at the bit to dive into some of those new dungeons and raids, full of everything from fire bees to angry Arathi.

One thing Mists of Pandaria offered when it was new was group content by the double handful: scenarios for three people of any spec, 5-player dungeons, and raids in 10, 25, and later completely flexible sizes, as well as LFR and later the introduction of Mythic raids.

One of the things that's evolved over time in World of Warcraft, and is going to evolve more in The War Within, is that you can make choices about what you get up to in the game.

I've been thinking a lot about how World of Warcraft essentially has a few alternate game modes as part of its basic retail experience.

Look, no two players are ever going to agree about grind in MMOs.

I'll be up front -- I thought the Mission Table was the best innovation in Warlords of Draenor. Now, many years later, the news that it won't be in Dragonflight fills me with a kind of joy I wasn't aware I was capable of feeling -- a boisterous, almost terrifyingly primal exultation, like unto that you would expect to feel just before you started singing and a musical number just sort of happens.

With World of Warcraft's Dragonflight expansion launching on November 28, we now have details on the dungeons and raids that will be available at launch. Dragonflight includes eight new dungeons, all of which will be available on day one, as well as one raid — Vault of the Incarnates — that will open on December 13.

If you're like me, you have a lot of friends on the other side of the faction divide, and so you may have been waiting patiently...

Raiding in World of Warcraft has seen a lot of ups and downs over the years, starting off as a massive undertaking that required up to 40 people and evolving through the 10 and 25 man raid sizes of The Burning Crusade up into the current flexible/ 20 player Mythic sizes we have today.

I've been thinking about this one for a while -- with timewalking basically extending the life of various dungeons in World of Warcraft almost indefinitely, there's a lot of cool stuff in there, and it scales up to level -- what if we could run old raids with a group of five players and get loot scaled for the current expansion, perhaps even run those raids as Mythic+ dungeons?