Why the new 5-man progression is a good idea (Spoilers ahead)

In case you missed Blizzard's announcement about the new 5-man dungeons being added in patch 3.3, take a look here. To give you the TL;DR version, Blizzard will be adding three new 5-man dungeons to Icecrown Citadel collectively called The Frozen Halls. You will need to finish the first one before you can do the second one, and you will need to finish the second one before you can do the third one. Blizzard is doing this so that players who don't have time to raid will feel like they can participate in progression in some way. As a capstone to the whole thing, the final dungeon will culminate in a battle against the Lich King himself.

It won't be easy, however. Each dungeon will drop ilevel 219 gear on normal mode (10-man Ulduar equivalent), and ilevel 232 gear on heroic mode (10-man ToC equivalent). This should serve as a warning that these dungeons will be difficult and will require good skill and good gear. I expect that guilds will be much more able to do these dungeons than PUGs, so you'll want to try to get your guild to run these.

I see this announcement as another way that Blizzard is catering to the casuals who want to see a conclusion to the storyline of Wrath without needing to raid. As I have said before, Wrath of the Lich King seems to be all about getting casuals into instances so that they can see the same content as everyone else, but it seems the Blizzard wants to take it one step further and allow everyone, raiders and those with no time to raid, to be able to participate in the end of the Wrath story, while also giving casuals a lot to do to keep them occupied until Cataclysm.

We could see the seeds of these thoughts when Blizzard put in a 5-man and raid version of the Argent Colosseum (Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader respectively), each of which was harder than the previous content of the same type. Normal ToC5 dropped ilevel 200 epics, while the heroic version dropped ilevel 213, making it equivalent to Naxx-10 and Naxx-25, respectively. However, even though the gear dropped by the normal versions of these new instances will be like Ulduar-10 gear, the gear that drops from the heroic versions will be better than Ulduar-25, meaning we can probably expect the jump in difficulty from normal Frozen Halls to heroic Frozen Halls to be even greater than that of Trial of the Champion and previous heroics.

Still, that's neither here nor there; what I want to talk about is just the idea behind these new dungeons: the idea of allowing players who don't raid to see a conclusion (maybe not the conclusion, but it's still a conclusion) to the Wrath storyline, something that was noticeably absent in Burning Crusade and even Vanilla WoW. Those of us who didn't have the time to raid never got the satisfaction of knowing what happened to Illidan, and though we got to face Kael'thas Sunstrider in Magisters' Terrace, those of use who never ran the Eye had no idea why the battle was so significant. As for vanilla WoW, well, we casuals may as well have not existed then.

As I have already said, the inclusion of three new really difficult 5-man dungeons will allow dedicated players without a lot of time to raid to actually have something challenging to go through and will reward them for their skill by allowing them to see new content, much the same way raids do now. The increased gap of difficulty will also serve to represent the difference of difficulty between running a 10-man raid and a 25-man one. (As someone who has run both 10-man and 25-man OS, I can attest to the difference, and it is not one that can be made up for by gear alone.) Thus players who just want to see the content will be able to run the normal instances, while those looking for a challenge that won't eat up their schedule will be able to run the heroic versions.

I could see one possible objection to the inclusion of these new instances. This objection is based in the assumption that the Icecrown Citadel raid and the Frozen Halls will follow different story-lines, which I am pretty sure they will. Hard-core raiding guilds could see these dungeons as a thorn in their side, since they will want to get through IC10 or 25 as quickly as possible, and if their guildies are all running around trying to see these new instances, that may distract them from the guild's main goal. Still, as long as guild members running these new dungeons doesn't cut into raid time, I doubt the raiding guilds will feel the effect of them, and considering the level of gear dropping from the Frozen Halls, it's unlikely that the hard-core raiders, who are probably decked out in best-in-slot gear, will run the new 5-mans more than once--that is unless Blizzard makes them so fun that players want to run them just for the hell of it.

But it's not all a bed of roses. As I said in my post on the homogenization of solo content in Wrath of the Lich King, though Wrath has been a great expansion pack for casual raiders, it has been a terrible one for solo-ers, and considering that Patch 3.3 is slated to include three new 5-man instances and a 12-boss raid, I don't see much solo content being added in this patch. I could be proven wrong when the PTR comes out, but considering the work Blizzard will need to put into these instances, if we do get any new solo content, it will probably be limited to some Argent Tournament based dailies outside of Icecrown Citadel, and considering Blizzard's track record with those dailies, I won't be looking forward to them. Ah well, let's just hope Blizzard can wow us with those instances, since for us non-raiders, they will be the last of Wrath of the Lich King that we see.