The case for solo raid instances

Back when I started playing WoW and began to understand what raiding was, I came to grips with the fact that I would never be able raid seriously. I just don't have the time to dedicate to it, and as much as I would love to be able to see the new content that Blizzard puts so much time into making, I probably never will. It's a shame, because the vast majority of Blizzard's development time for patches is spent developing raid content, and yet so many players like me will never be able to see it. Then the idea hit me: what if each raid dungeon had a version where all of the trash and bosses were non-elite, regular level 80-something enemies? That way, players who don't have the time to raid with others could still experience the same content and do so on their own time.

I know many people's knee-jerk reaction to that suggestion will be that it is a bad idea, but maybe the details of my idea will placate them a bit. Let me start by explaining the lore behind my idea. The gnomes and goblins are known for their engineering marvels, so they would make virtual reality machines to match the raid experience, though toned down to make it accessible to single adventurers. Their practical reason for doing so would be to allow the adventurers of the world to be more prepared when they enter a raid instance. However, because these engineers would need to gather information from people who actually enter the raid in order to make their simulations accurate, each solo raid would not become available until some time after the actual raid has been implemented. Perhaps they would have weekly quests that would ask players to finish the actual raid itself and report back with their findings. When enough people have completed these weekly quests, the solo raid would be unlocked.

Because these solo raids would be virtual reality, they would not award any money, gear, or tangible rewards of any kind. Let me reiterate that, since I feel it is one of my most important points: there would be no real reward for running these raids, so people would still be motivated to run actual raids. The solo raids would probably not cause any durability damage to gear either, since the player won't be taking any actual damage. The trash enemies would range from level 79 to 82, depending on how tough they are in the actual raid. The bosses themselves would range from level 81 to 83, with earlier bosses being 81 and later ones being 83, in order to make them suitably challenging for players. Obviously, some boss fights would loose much of their challenge due to the fact that the player is alone, but perhaps the engineers running the simulation would chime in with quips about how being in a raid would affect the boss fight.

I'm sure one of the first objections people will have against this idea is that it would remove one motivating factor that keeps people raiding: seeing the content. If solo raids were implemented in the way I am suggesting then players will still definitely want to run regular raids, for if a player didn't go into actual raids, he'd be forced to see the content later than everyone else (I think a one to two month delay is sufficient), he wouldn't get any gear to show for his efforts, and his only reward would be seeing the lore behind these instances, meaning people probably wouldn't take advantage of them more than once. If players need even more motivation to run actual raids in lieu of running these replications, we could add durability damage to them, meaning the player would actually lose money by running them. Still, I don't think we need to revert to such drastic measures.

Some may also say that they would rather Blizzard spend their time balancing the actual raid content than spend any of it balancing some bootleg solo content, but how long would it really take to balance the solo content? Even if, in their first iteration, the raids were too difficult or just unbalanced, the fact that players are going in on their own means that problems with the fights would become apparent very quickly and fixes could be implemented just as quickly. Because players will be fighting alone, Blizzard will know that any problems players have will not be due to lack of raid synergy or raids not bringing the right combination of classes. If 1v1 arenas were possible, it would bring the state of PvP class balance into sharp focus. Why? Because so few people are involved. Thus, if you only have one person involved in a situation, any balancing issues with the solo raids should be clear as day and easy to fix, thus won't take up much of the developers' time.

Considering how much time Blizzard spends on developing raid content and how much they have been catering to the casuals recently, I find it surprising that they haven't mentioned any ideas like this yet. I hope they do implement something like this, for I am just as eager to see the end of the Lich King storyline when patch 3.3 comes out as everyone else is. If you have any other objections to my idea that I haven't brought up, leave them in the comment section and I'll give you my response.

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.