Blizzard, who love a dramatic flair, have put together their most arduous raid killing yet. It all kicks off at the Wyrmrest Temple and ends, bloody, at The Maelstrom.
”It’s a very long encounter. You start of at Wyrmrest Temple defeating various minions of Deathwing. There are basically six bosses that lead up to the Deathwing encounter itself,” revealed Blizzard’s Tom Chilton.
Blizzard has made a habit out of keeping ‘end boss’ fights from actually being accessible when an expansion first launches. They add the dungeons, raids and quests necessary later to bring them down. It also gives gamers a chance to beef up their characters.
”Once you get to the Deathwing encounter it takes place, at first, at Wyrmrest Temple, where Thrall uses the Demon Soul to essentially take a shot at Deathwing and wound him,” he continued. Blizzard are going all-out with their boss scripting for Deathwing.
”At that point you get onto a gunship and you para-drop from the gunship onto Deathwing and you fight Deathwing on his back, essentially peeling off his armour plates trying to expose him and make him weaker.”
”Once you’ve weakened him enough to where you’ve got him essentially wrestled to the ground - he’s flying towards The Maelstrom, trying to get away, a lot like he did much earlier when he escaped and tried to gather his strength once again.”
”You wrestle him down and then you fight the final, corrupted version of him, where all the horrible corruption that has affected Deathwing is all coming out, and it all comes to an end there in The Maelstrom.” Notable Warcraft NPCs will be lending a hand throughout.
”There are a lot of the different major NPCs in Warcraft lore helping out. Obviously Thrall plays a huge part in this. He also plays a huge part in the dungeon encounters that lead into the raid. You’re also interacting with Alexstrasza and a lot of the different Aspects.”
Chilton teases that, yes, we will get a unique mount among our rewards for slaying Deathwing. ”Yes, there will definitely be a mount reward for defeating Deathwing. We’re not spoiling what it will be just yet,” he said. You don’t have to jump through all the hoops.
If you really want to just get to bringing down Deathwing then you can, explained Chilton, but many prefer to go through the string of instances for the story.
”You don’t have to. You can go directly into the raids if you choose. But a lot of the story stuff that sets it up takes place in the dungeons. That was the case with Icecrown, and we found that the vast majority of players still went through the dungeons even though they were capable of raiding the Icecrown raid,” he added.
New features of patch 4.3, aside from killing Deathwing, are transmogrifying gear items to our liking. Well, all except those Legendary items we come across that is.
”We decided against it because we wanted to protect the identity of Legendary items, because if you see something that looks like a Legendary, you instantly know that it is a Legendary. We try as much as possible to keep them feeling special and very unusual; it’s still that not all that many players in the game have them,” explained the Blizzard exec.
Transmogrification lets you alter the appearance of weapons and armour to resemble other pieces. It helps keep you from looking a bit too mismatched out in Azeroth. Another new feature is the Raid Finder which can group you with randoms so you can pillage raids.
Have you been chomping at the bit to bring down Deathwing? First though the anticipated patch 4.3 will be on the Public Test Realms ”within a couple of weeks.”
