Where is the fun in that?

"Where is the fun in that?", my wife, an archetypical casual WoW player, asked me after having watched how we repeatedly got wiped in the ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ20). And I didn't have a good reply. It was certainly fun to see the dungeon for the first time, and to be with my guild, trying to work out a strategy to beat the first boss. But that first boss simply was too hard, and having to give up after over 3 hours and several wipes was no fun at all.

Now my guild isn't one of the "uber" guilds, but we are nevertheless more powerful than the average. We are six bosses deep into Molten Core, and I don't know how many bosses we regularly kill in Zul'Gurub. So we do have several people with a number of epic items, we do have raid experience, and we do have the numbers and organization for regular raids. And then the first boss in the easier of the two new raid dungeons just wipes us repeatedly until our armor is broken, we repair, come back to wipe once more, until we finally give up.

We had 5 warriors and 5 priests, plus 10 damage dealers of different types, and most combats against Kurinnaxx ended with him having over half his health remaining. We tried different strategies, had information from the internet, switched between tanks when they got too many debuffs, but it didn't help. Kurinnaxx uses a kind of sand trap, and when you see one appearing next to you, even if you run as fast as you can, it still damages you and silences you for 15 seconds. As a priest, with shield up and a nature resistance buff I barely survive such a trap explosion, and then I can't heal for 15 seconds and can only watch the tanks dying. And the tanks die fast, because Kurinnaxx puts an anti-healing debuff on them. Even switching after 3-4 debuffs to another tank doesn't help much. And while switching aggro from one tank to another, there is a risk that the tanks lose aggro, and Kurinnaxx summons a priest or mage and insta-kills him with one swipe. This encounter is really, really tough.

The game basically tells us that we are n00bs, and that we should go back to Zul'Gurub and Molten Core repeatedly for next couple of months, until we are all so dripping in epics that we can start tackling Ahn'Qiraj. And, oh yes, the next dungeon planned, the floating necropolis Nexxramas, will be even harder.

Basically World of Warcraft is falling into the same trap as Everquest did, creating content mainly for a small minority of hardcore gamers, and leaving not only the casual gamer, but also the average gamer far behind. Creating content that the majority of your players can't access is basically a waste of time. Ahn'Qiraj should have been created at a difficulty level that at least in the AQ20 part an average *raid* guild manages to kill the first bosses after working out the strategy in 2 or 3 wipes. The *final* boss of AQ20 should have the difficulty level of what is now the first boss.

What good is it to have so many raid dungeons, Onyxia, Blackwing Lair, the two Ahn'Qiraj and Nexxramas, basically standing empty? With just the most powerful guild on each side being able to visit these places?

The waste becomes particularly obvious if you think that before the end of the year the Burning Crusade expansion set will raise the level cap to 70. Is Ahn'Qiraj supposed to become a tourist attraction for bored level 70 players, who just go there to have a look around a place they couldn't visit at 60, but where the loot isn't really interesting enough any more for a level 70 player?

Shane Dabiri, WoW's lead producer, said in an interview with the BBC that "Increasing the level cap will definitely give players a lot more power. It's very similar to the current level 60 players going back to a level 40 dungeon." Imagine a raid dungeon of Scarlet Monastery level now, who the heck would go there with their level 60s? Who would want an epic, bind on pickup level 40 item, when he can easily get a green or blue level 60 item which is better?

The time it took the developers to create all of this content which stands empty could have been much better spend creating dungeons for all those average level 60 players who are getting increasingly bored. Moving from "being level 60" to being able to beat Ahn'Qiraj is not an inevitable process, like leveling. For many people it poses an insurmountable barrier, and seeing more and more content created on the other side of that barrier just serves to frustrate the majority.