Last night the BlizzCast interviews with developers on World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III was held live. Here are some of the more interesting and relevant parts of the interview that dealt with World of Warcraft:

BlizzCast Interview

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Bashiok: One of the debates currently going on is in Icecrown Citadel, the 25 player modes; there is some debate whether the difficulty is too hard or too easy. Some players say people are bad at playing the game and it's too easy and the other ones say they are exaggerating and its way too hard. So what is the difficulty of ICC25 supposed to be? And is releasing the content in small incremental bits over a few months -- does that change the difficulty?

Zarhym: Well I think to start, for a reference point, Icecrown Citadel is supposed to be incrementally more difficult than the previous Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. Players can expect to find more challenges there than in Ulduar or Trial of the Crusader. You should expect to have at least probably Tier 9 level gear before fighting most of the bosses, particularly some of the later on bosses.

Bashiok: So I can't just hit 80 and jump right into ICC because that's what I've been trying to do.

Zarhym: I wouldn't suggest it. I would say use the Dungeon Finder, maybe run some previous raids if you can find groups. Given that we are in the same guild maybe you could.

Zarhym also mentions that Blizzard is fairly happy with the balance of Icecrown Citadel encounters at the moment because we're about to see the first implementation of the zone-wide buff that has been promised. We don't have concrete details on exactly what the value of the buff will be, but it could be anywhere from a 1-5% across-the-board buff to damage, healing, and hit points.

He did, however, mention that the buff will kick in a month or so after the release of The Lich King encounter, and will increase around once a month thereafter. That would schedule the first buff to be implemented two raid resets from now.

BlizzCast Interview

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Bashiok: Alright, next question is in regards to the actual Lich King fight. It's a popular question because no one was able to fight him on the PTRs.

Zarhym: That is correct.

Bashiok: So no one knew what that fight was all about, or maybe some people still don't know, how did we actually test that?

Zarhym: Well we had our QA guys working long hours making sure the fight was very cool. Our developers were obviously very invested in it. We're really excited to see our players taking on the Lich King right now. For those who have yet to get there and actually face the Lich King, I would say “prepare to die, like, a lot.”

Bashiok: Die a lot.

No kidding. Speaking from experience, Blizzard did a heck of a job balancing an incredibly difficult and complicated fight without player input from PTR testing.

I can't speak for the difficulty of the heroic version of The Lich King, but you've gotta assume that Blizzard wants that fight to be a major roadblock for even the strongest guilds. It says a lot when not a single guild in the world has been able to take down The Lich King even on 10 player heroic difficulty after two weeks. It has been a while since that happened. If memory serves the longest standing boss this expansion was Algalon the Observer, and that fight was not only extremely time consuming to unlock -- it also had a 1 hour time limitation.

BlizzCast Interview

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Bashiok: So I guess that kind of leads into another question which is, are we going to see any major patches after Icecrown Citadel? Is there any content, new dungeons, new raids, or anything like that?

Zarhym: Well aside from the Battle.net improvements and some minor class changes that we will probably see, we are getting closer to Cataclysm and really kind of reevaluating classes and class talents so you will see some much bigger changes as we get really close to Cataclysm.

As far as in the near future, we do plan on adding a new encounter in the Chamber of the Aspects. It’s not going to be a full raid dungeon. It’s not going to be a new tier of gear or weapons. It’s going to be roughly Lich King level gear and you are probably going to find some pieces that you might not find too frequently in Icecrown Citadel. You might see some armor and then maybe some trinkets, things of that nature that you wouldn’t find in Icecrown Citadel as much but the new encounter is not intended to be more tough than the Lich King. The Lich King is still going to be the ultimate bad guy of this expansion but yes, we do plan on having a new encounter in the Chamber of the Aspects which will be very exciting.

Bashiok: Gotcha. Very exciting.

This jives with the early news we've had about the new Ruby Sanctum instance. It'll come as somewhat of a surprise if the loot from the new boss is really on par with the ilvl 284 gear that can be obtained from The Lich King's heroic version. I suppose it isn't that unreasonable since this instance will probably have to tide over the raiders that do manage to master Icecrown Citadel on heroic difficulty.

This seems to reinforce the idea that the new encounter will be similar to how Sartharion was back when the highest tier of raiding was Naxxramas; some high level off-set pieces that aren't absolutely necessary but are well worth the effort.