A Trip to the Evacuation Zone Gives Control Resonant an Infusion of Stakes

 In my last post, I talked about how the need to broaden out the options for players to do countless tasks across Control Resonant's open-world warped Manhattan can wind up messing with the game's pacing and stakes. Yeah, I'm never going to complain about a very good dog appearing in a video game, but I don't know that it needs to appear in every zone with more or less the same task each time.

The Resonants are, so far, all banger boss fights, with unique designs and exciting challenges. But I sort of wish that their role was felt more across their respective zones as an embodiment of what in particular is going on there. Instead, these bosses feel more like just another category of objective on the map, which is a shame.

However, a mission sending me into the Evacuation Zone was a real highlight. Simon Arish, just a plucky mid-ranked security agent in the first game who got very suddenly promoted to Head of Security after everyone above him turned either Hiss or dead, is now also acting co-director of the FBC along with Emily Pope.

I guess we gotta start doing spoiler cuts.

Control Resonant and the Open World

 I love the world of Control - the corner of the larger Remedy Connected Universe that puts mundane government bureaucracy against the bizarre and unusual.

Indeed, I think the crux of the appeal is to make the familiar strange: one of the, not exactly common, but not rare either, Hiss-associated enemies you fight is a city bus that is turned on its nose, the back of the bus warped and deteriorated, with poor passengers hanging out the windows, their Hiss infection lending the bus its animation. Altered Items, a key part of the world's lore, are objects that look utterly normal but behave in unusual and often dangerous ways.

A few more hours into the game, I've defeated another Resonant, this one "The Dancer," who also appeared in various trailers for the game (as far as I know, I think at this point I've beaten all the bosses that showed up in the previews).

While Remedy downplayed the open-world-ness of Resonant in its marketing, I can't really think of a different way to describe the game. Manhattan is divided into various zones that each tend to have their own iteration of many of the features found in others - you have your Resonant, a mapping station, a vendor ice cream truck (usually hidden out of the way - I haven't found the one in the Western Incursion Zone,) etc.

The game takes a Breath of the Wild approach to its open world - there's no set order in which you're meant to complete the zones (at least as far as I know - I imagine some might unlock later on) and even going to a zone's Resonant boss isn't really treated as something the entire zone is driving you toward, but more of an additional objective.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know that this is the right choice for the game. I've seen some critiques of the game that bemoan its adherence to Open World game design tropes that originated in Assassin's Creed nearly 20 years ago.

Remedy's strongest suit is its storytelling, and I think that the open-world nature of the game makes it feel like that primary plot is only dripping in on occasion. It also leads to a sort of rote recursion even in what feel like story-critical parts, like when we enter Faults to commune with the absent sister (and previous game protagonist) Jesse, which is also where we learn important traversal abilities. (Shift, for example, lets us re-orient our gravity in areas where there are streets and rooftops that are jutting out at 90 or 180 degree angles).

I think that the promise of Open World games when they first emerged (probably Grand Theft Auto III is the one that truly codified the format) was a sense of freedom. But the danger can be a lack of structure.

Remedy games that I've played at least are not interested in making a whole bunch of different endings based on player choices, and Control Resonant evidently just has one ending. As such, I wonder if Control Resonant would be better off with a somewhat more curated path through its messed-up NYC.

The first Control flirted with Open World ideas, with some ideas that worked and some that didn't. It's probably unfair to compare this with Alan Wake II, which is a totally different genre of game, but while you could swap between Alan and Saga through the middle of the game, each character's story was essentially linear, which I think worked quite well for it.

To be clear, I'm still enjoying the game quite a lot. But I think I've been getting more intriguing and enticing stories out of side quests so far, like reuniting a set of speakers that act as conduits to some other plane of existence, or a weird Taxi dimension that someone's trapped in (said Taxi dimension feels weirdly similar to the Dark Place, including similar camera angles when Dylan is talking on a payphone to the trapped civilian as the ones when Alan talks with Tom Zane in Noir York City).

As for "lore" spottings, I have finally gotten some explicit mentions of the word Blessed, which are involved in the speaker side quest. I have yet to find out if the Organization is actually central to the plot, but I imagine that that requires some more progression (with the Western Incursion Resonant dealt with, I think I'll be heading to to the Evacuation Zone, which seems to be where the true main quest plot is actually directing me).

There's no mention of anything Alan Wake related, other than that Ahti appears not to have returned to the Oldest House after the events of AW2, and we also see some posters of Ahma Beer, which I guess must be thriving given that it used to be a local microbrewery. (Hope Ilmo is doing ok). Fingers crossed for an Old Gods of Asgard song, which at this point is expected.

Again, I still feel like I haven't progressed the "main plot" forward much since being unleashed in the open world, but I also really wonder if we might see Barry Wheeler pop up - a sore absence from Alan Wake II, but also someone who for sure got involved in the Blessed Organization.

Once again, I've been finding secret hideouts across the city that I suspect are Blessed installations, though that's unconfirmed. Whatever this "Secret Organization" actually is, it uses similar memos, documentation, and jargon to the FBC, but it's all just a bit different - referring to "Extranormal Objects" in contrast with "Altered Items."

Now, I do think that the Blessed Organization could be slightly Scientology-coded, and the Church of Scientology has been known to pull off some pretty extraordinary feats, including a massive infiltration of the FBI, using its own pseudo-governmental acronyms and abbreviations.

The Secret Organization, as the documents we find about it are classified in our personal archive (oh yeah, there are a bunch of documents,) uses a symbol that appears like a keyhole or possibly a beacon of some sort. I can't remember if any of the Oceanview doors had that symbol, but it's worth bearing in mind.

(Oh yeah, so far no Oceanview Motel.)

In terms of difficulty, I'm sort of inclined to maybe push forward a bit more aggressively. It's very rare that I die to non-Resonant enemies, though both the Central and Western Incursion bosses took me four attempts each.

Enemy variety, even though I've fought almost exclusively Hiss, is step up from the first game, and there are basically no "this is just a corrupted dude with a gun" enemies to fight. You will start to get familiar with them - the ones with giant hammer-like heads are probably the most common of the "Heavy" Hiss foes - but I think we're already at a more interesting variety than we got in the first game, and I've only fought like one group of Mold enemies.

It is strange, though, that in stark contrast to the first game, where Hiss would teleport into a room without warning and endlessly respawn, here once a group is dead, they're dead, at least until you beat the area's Resonant. But I don't think you can re-fight bosses and I assume once you beat each enemy group a second time, that's it. This does mean that the resources you gather from fighting foes is presumably finite, and I don't love that. (I could be wrong, though).

One thing that's kind of interesting is that upgrading your weapon, even by unlocking other weapon forms, is going to help you even if you don't care to use said forms, because each unlocked form and trait for those forms will improve the overall damage you deal with the weapon.

Each Resonant gives you a choice between two (maybe one gave three?) Powers, which are similar to the various OoP abilities Jesse got in the first game. You can try each one out separately, but you get locked in after you leave The Gap (your little Mind Place/Writer's Room equivalent) and require a Reset item to change them after that. I assume this means there will be six Resonant bosses in total, given that we can equip six at a time (swapping between sets of three at least on a PS5 controller).

I suspect that there is a kind of Mega Man-like ideal progression path - the boss in Central gives you fire-based abilities, which are extra-effective against the Mold.

One of the things that makes Dylan an interesting contrast with Jesse is that he literally trained through his entire adolescence to work for the FBC, so he's already well aware of Bureau protocols, procedures, and terminology. Even if most of the Rangers hate him for his past with the Hiss, he knows what the job entails.

I think Dylan's generally going to be a pretty heroic character regardless of what dialogue options you pick, which does make it kind of interesting that he's sort of a new character in this game - the Dylan we encountered in Control was really the mouthpiece of the Hiss. I'm eager to see how he reckons with that contrast.

First Impressions of Control Resonant

 It's finally here!

With Control Resonant downloaded nicely last night, I booted the game up this morning and have been playing it, well, most of the day (had a doctor's appointment in the middle).

I've now beaten my second Resonant boss - the major monsters whose power dominates each of the various zones that the warped Manhattan is broken into. The first, I'll note, is basically part of the tutorial, coming before you even (if I recall correctly) get your secondary Aberrant form.

Thanks presumably to a day-one patch, the reports of intense difficulty in the early game seem to have been addressed, as I didn't really struggle much. Indeed, this second major boss, the Central Resonant (who has appeared in some of the previews and trailers) is the first time that I really had to work, dying three times before taking it down on the fourth attempt.

First and foremost, let's talk about the action gameplay:

I actually really like it, despite a lot of reviews poo-pooing it. Each button does something different, and at least with my build, it feels like each ability and weapon serves a clear purpose. My heavy secondary attack, using the titanic hammer form seen in the announcement trailer, is for building Falter on foes, which can eventually stagger them for an execution. Likewise, my launch-like ability gained from the first boss gives me a ranged option and also inflicts some Falter, while my wide-sweeping scythe main attack is a quick source of damage that hits lots of foes. I have a combo finisher that launches enemies into the air, during which I deal bonus damage to them, and I cant then bring the hammer down on them.

Falters and Executions are a really interesting mechanic: while executing a foe doesn't give you back health, you will gain a buff that increases your damage done and the health gained by defeating other enemies, so I try to get something staggered as quickly as possible and then slash at the remaining foes with my main attack as much as possible during that short "Dominance" window.

One of the issues I have with a lot of action games is that there's often little that really distinguishes attacks, and you wind up spamming the same things over and over, but here, it feels at least as if you're constantly making tactical decisions.

Now, the flow of the game is something I'm still wrapping my head around: monsters (mostly the Hiss early on, though I've seen some Mold and there's also a new enemy faction called The Pattern, which seems to actually be the central antagonist of the game) don't respawn until you beat the area's resident Resonant, and thus as far as I can tell, you get to fight each just twice, so I think maybe you want to fully clear a zone before going after the boss to maximize the resources you gain.

Completing objectives within a zone will level that zone up, increasing rewards dropped from enemies and enhancing the offerings at the spooky ice cream trucks that serve as your merchants. There are various objectives to complete across a zone, including side missions with their own little plots.

There are a few familiar faces: I did a side quest for Langston (though I don't know if he'll pop up elsewhere or if he's just a one-scene appearance). The overall plot is a bit slow to develop so far, though I've also been really pushing side quests and side objectives rather than driving forward with the main stuff.

Dylan traverses Manhattan with the weight of his role as the herald of the Hiss, and also the destruction that he wrought while he was in training as P6. We did get a Dr. Darling video, though sort of non-diagetically. His role in Dylan's abusive upbringing is something the game seems eager to explore further - as charming as Darling is, and as much as he plays a role of kind of absent guide for Jesse in the first game, Dylan naturally has very complex feelings about him.

Similarly, the FBC has very mixed (mostly negative) feelings about Dylan. Zoe, the FBC agent he meets when he first exits the Oldest House, becomes his handler, and while they're working together, she's also got a kill switch for the "Mobile Containment Device" attached to the back of Dylan's head, which will give a lethal blast of electricity if they decide he's too much of a threat. I'm curious to see how much of a Chekov's gun this is.

But despite the atrophy of being in a coma for seven years, Dylan is an absolute beast. Traversal abilities that took a long time to get in Control come much faster here, which makes it a bit easier to traverse the tall buildings of NYC (though there are buildings too tall to climb still, meaning you need to either find a way to get up shorter buildings or need to unlock Shift at some point.

Dylan is, of course, nothing like was in the first game, and it's really interesting to see someone who is clearly a good guy deep down reckon with the traumatic loss of identity that the Hiss, and his upbringing as P6, which pushed that kind, heroic personality back.

A few notes:

There are some secret hideouts hidden in various buildings around Manhattan. There's no proper nouns here to associate with any existing lore. They issue memos with verbiage similar to that of the FBC. If this is the Blessed Organization, it would imply that that organization is far more professional than we might have assumed, and I even wonder if it's a splinter cell of the FBC itself. Either that, or this other faction has nothing to do with Blessed.

Expect a lot more posts about this game.

Details for the Oath of the Ebon Blade and Forsaken Species

 Insight Check recently posted a video with a bit of content out of the upcoming D&D World of Warcraft book related to the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins, which allows us to create the equivalent of WoW's playable Death Knights, as well as the Forsaken species, which equates to WoW's playable Undead race.

Notably, both of these are doing some unprecedented things.

Let's actually hit up the Forsaken first, as I think it's less dramatic:

Forsaken are free-willed, sentient undead. Mostly former humans, the collective identity is linked less to their original species than their shared experience of having come back from the dead and reconciling their free will and memories of life with the grim reality of being a walking corpse.

For the first time in all of 5E, the Forsaken are a species with the undead creature type (something even Reborn don't have). This, thankfully, is much more viable now that healing spells like Cure Wounds work on Undead and Clerics' Turn Undead allows you to pick which targets are affected. Note, though, that Raise Dead and Resurrection won't actually work on them. Crazily enough, True Resurrection will actually turn them back into humanoids, so you might want to talk to a DM if that means you become a Human (or High Elf, potentially, depending on your backstory). Revivify and Reincarnate will both still work, though. Given the special nature of your undeath, I would talk with DMs to see if you could get special dispensation to allow you to be brought back with these spells.

(As a note, in WoW, despite the race being called, literally, just Undead, your creature type is actually humanoid, for game balance reasons.)

From there, the features are a little more standard. You are Medium or Small, have a 30 foot movement speed, and 60 feet of darkvision. You get resistance to Necrotic damage as well, and like Reborn, you don't have to eat, drink, or breathe, and you only need to stay inert for 4 hours to get a long rest.

Touch of the Grave lets you, once per long rest, add a number of d4s equal to your PB of necrotic damage when you deal damage to a creature, and then you regain HP equal to the amount rolled.

Finally, Will of the Forsaken gives you advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Charmed or Frightened conditions.

    So, overall, I think this reflects the WoW race pretty effectively. I do think the issues with resurrection magic might potentially pose a challenge, though I think at the very least, building some alternate means of bringing a fallen Forsaken PC back ought to be in the cards. Frankly, I think it would be reasonable to allow Animate Dead to work in place of Raise Dead, for example, or maybe you need to conduct some kind of necromantic ritual that works similarly to Raise Dead.

Now, let's talk Ebon Blade Paladins, aka Death Knights.

Here, the video doesn't get the whole subclass, but we get a number of interesting features that are, interestingly enough, for levels 1 and 2, which you'll note is not a pair of levels that any established subclasses get anything for.

That's because while Ebon Blade Paladins use the Paladin class as a framework, they aren't actually meant to be Paladins. Even if a lot of canonical Warcraft Death Knights were Paladins in life, not all of them were. Essentially, this isn't going so far as to make a whole new class, but it's retrofitting the 5.5 Paladin to make it fit the Death Knight better.

First off, more of a flavor thing, you can carve a rune into your weapon, giving you the flavor of Blood, Frost, or Unholy - the three Death Knight specs in WoW. According to the video, this doesn't have extensive mechanical implications, but we'll just have to see.

Next, the first big change: like Forsaken, Death Knights are undead. Similarly to all the issues we discussed before, this will give you immunity to certain spells that affect humanoids, but it also means you have to worry about resurrection magic not working. Once again, the funny thing is that in WoW, even if Death Knights were raised in undeath, they're mechanically still humanoids for game balance (though they do have a class ability called Lichborne that temporarily turns you undead for various reasons, including something we're going to touch on right now:)

Death Coil fully replaces Lay on Hands. Yeah, that's right: you don't get Lay on Hands as an Ebon Blade Paladin. Instead, Death Coil lets you use a bonus action to send out necrotic damage or bursts of healing that affect only undead targets. You have a pool of d8s equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1). As a bonus action, you can spend up to your Charisma modifier of those d8s (makes me wonder if our pool gets bigger at higher levels, otherwise this limitation seems redundant) to force a creature you can see within 60 feet to make a Con save. On a failure, they take damage equal to the number rolled, or half as much on a success. You can also target an undead creature (and you are an undead creature) and heal them for the amount rolled.

You regain these d8s on a long rest.

    So, to break this down: this is obviously more aggressive than Lay on Hands, which is purely defensive. Makes sense given the priorities of a Death Knight. The damage will be great at early levels, but I think unless that pool expands to, like, twice your Charimsa modifier or somehow also gets expanded, I'm not sure that this is quite the compensation for the loss of Lay on Hands. Again, unless we get a larger pool later on, we're talking like 5d8 at most extra damage once per day by level 17.

    As self-healing, or potentially healing for minions or allies (maybe you have a non-Death Knight Forsaken party member in the group?) it's a bit better, though again, I think it starts to fall behind Lay on Hands pretty quickly.

Runic Smite replaces Divine Smite.

Here, there's a much more direct parallel to the Paladin feature. Runic Smite has the Rune Strike spell always prepared, and lets you cast it once per day for free.

Rune Strike works identically to Divine Smite except for the following changes:

Its damage is Necrotic, and rather than dealing an extra d8 of damage to Fiends and Undead, it instead deals an extra d8 to Celestials.

    This makes perfect sense as a flavor change. But we do run into a couple problems: First off, more monsters can resist or be immune to necrotic damage than radiant damage. Second, there are far more Fiends and Undead monsters that we tend to fight in D&D than Celestials. Even in an Azeroth-based campaign, we're far more likely to be fighting Fiends like the demons of the Burning Legion or Undead monsters in the Scourge. In fact, the only creatures I can think of off the top of my head that would inevitably be Celestials are the Naaru, who are both rare and usually friendly (in fact, when they go "dark," they probably become aberrations). Maybe Val'kyr?

Obviously, we need to get the full picture before we can really get a sense of how the subclass transforms the Paladin into the Death Knight. These changes certainly don't make the class unplayable or anything, and I really applaud the boldness to tinker with the inner workings of the base class beyond simply plugging in subclass features at the appropriate levels.

Indeed, if this proves effective with the Death Knight and Demon Hunter, this could be some exciting "tech" for WotC to bring to other supplemental products outside of the Universes Beyond line.

The Minor Agony of Not Playing In Early Access for Control Resonant

 I only became a Remedy fan three years ago, and as a relative newcomer, I've only played three of their games, but those three games, Alan Wake, Control, and Alan Wake II, left a huge impression on me, so I've been getting hyped up for Control Resonant, nervous about whether I'll actually enjoy the switch to fast-paced melee action gameplay.

I mean, I was nervous about Alan Wake II's switch to full-on survival horror, and even though I don't actually think that I loved the combat in it, the atmosphere and experience of the game and its story was superlative, almost instantly becoming probably my favorite narrative in all of gaming.

I had considered getting the super-duper deluxe edition, but I think the main reason to go for such deals is if they include free access to the DLC(s), which all three of the Remedy games I've played have had. But that means I have to wait a little bit longer.

And, stupidly, I scheduled a doctor's appointment for the middle of Thursday, the day it comes out. Stupid physical body requiring maintenance!

Anyway, I'm eager to get lost in the game. Remedy does game narrative like no one else, and their particular blend of horror, modern fantasy, and sci fi ideas (or rather, the blurring of the lines between said genres) speaks very directly to my own taste in genre fiction.

I know that there's only one ending to the game, but I'm slightly nervous about reports that certain quests/missions can go poorly if certain decisions are made or challenges failed, as I'm a real perfectionist with my games. I prefer a game to just let me keep trying if I didn't get the result I wanted.

I'm also a little nervous that reviews seem to suggest the game is on the difficult side. That might seem absurd coming from someone who plays FromSoft's games and loves them, but I think there's something about their style of difficulty that clicks with me - being generally slower-paced, it's often not hard to figure out what you did wrong, while fast-paced action games can sometimes be hard to parse.

But yeah, I mean, I died plenty of times in Alan Wake II (though I maintain that my struggles with the Cynthia fight were more due to glitches that probably got fixed in patches) and it didn't make me adore that game any less. So maybe I've got nothing to worry about.

It's notable that Sam Lake has been almost totally absent from the marketing of the game. I believe that he was not as directly involved in it as he was with the first Control or, of course, Alan Wake II. Given, well, the entire story of Alan Wake II, I imagine that he's somewhat uncomfortable being the "face" of Remedy (almost literally, given that he's the likeness for Max Payne) even if his creative vision has been the guiding one for the studio's games for the last quarter-century or so.

I'm sort of skeptical of the "auteur" theory, which arose in the 1960s as a somewhat subversive response/contrast with the institutional studio system of early Hollywood. It's interesting that this framing and philosophy around art (cinema in this case, but it applies to other media) began as a rebellion against stuffy, corporate institutions, but at some point, it started to justify a lot of egoism and erasure of the auteur's collaborators. I truly think that the central crux of Alan Wake II's themes was the need to release that drive to own the enire creative process and make your work all about you, specifically. Alan only succeeds by allowing others to put themselves into the art he began, and I for sure think that Sam Lake was thinking about how he needed co-writers and other people to contribute for Remedy to finally crack the Alan Wake sequel after thirteen years.

I'm very curious to see how Control Resonant carries on and elaborates on the themes of Control. Seven years is less time than thirteen, but it's still actually a pretty big gap between an original game and its sequel (though Alan Wake II lands nearly smack dab in the middle of that gap,) and obviously they're changing quite a bit with the second game.

But I don't think I'll have the chance to read into the subtext, or perhaps meta-text is a more precise term, of how the game relates to its own creation until I get to play through it.

I've heard that there are fewer findable lore documents than there were in the first game, which is a shame. It might sound insane to someone who hasn't experienced the original game, but truly one of the most fun things about Control was finding some office memo to read. Still, it might simply be that they wish to explore alternate vehicles for conveying that background lore.

Speaking of vehicles, apparently there are shops that you can find that are ice cream trucks with a discordant melody playing from them. I'm so profoundly into that Control aesthetic.

What New Specs Would Make Sense?

 The Devourer Demon Hunter filled a gap.

When Demon Hunters were introduced in Legion, they were quite unusual in that they had only two specs - one tank, one melee dps. Blizzard had said that they avoided giving the class a ranged dps spec for fear that they would be forced to water down Havoc, such as removing Eye Beam to give it to them.

Obviously, that philosophical choice changed, and Void Ray, while similar to Eye Beam, has a somewhat different feel in Devourer's quite different rotation.

Only two prior times did we get a spec added to the game.

I would guess that Evokers were meant to ship with all three of their current specs, but the weirdness of Augmentation, a dps spec more concerned with boosting others' damage than their own (I have no idea where they currently land in the overall meta - it's hard to evaluate just how much they're adding to a group's damage) likely took them a bit longer to figure out, hence the wait for 10.1 to roll them out.

The other was a weird byproduct of the redesign of how talents worked in Mists of Pandaria. For youngsters and newer players (and you can just play Classic to get a sense of this,) the talent system in WoW initially worked by simply having three threes you could invest points into each time you leveled up starting at level 10. There was no limitation on how you spread the points, though you needed to spend 5 points in a row before the next row unlocked. The idea was that you would invest most of your points into one of the three trees, which thus established your specialization, but there "spec" was an informal thing, simply referring to how invested you were in a given tree (typically you'd hit the capstone of the tree about 20 levels before the level cap, so you would then invest later points into one or both of the other trees - like, boosting damage to Consecration was a Holy talent, so Protection and Retribution would want to pick that up).

Things changed a little in Cataclysm, where they now forced you to pick a talent tree to stick with as you leveled up until you had either gotten the capstone or at least invested the number of talent points you would need to get into that capstone before the other two trees would unlock. Also, with the rising level cap, Cataclysm also made it so that you would only get a talent point every other level, alternating with getting new abilities.

Mists of Pandaria threw the whole system out, and further formalized Specs as the main determinator of what spells and abilities you got as you leveled up (I think that you also no longer had to go to a class trainer and pay them to teach you new abilities) while Talents would be choices you made between three different options every fifteen levels, usually giving all three specs the same talent options to choose from.

That remained the system until Dragonflight, when they sort of re-constructed something reminiscent of the Classic/Cataclysm system, but retaining the formal definition of specs brought with Mists.

Ok, that history in mind, the first spec they ever added to the game outside of a new class (obviously, Blood, Frost, and Unholy were not in the game before there were Death Knights - well, not that version of Frost) was Guardian for Druids.

Prior to Mists of Pandaria, Druids who wanted to focus on either tanking in Bear form or doing dps in Cat form would both take the Feral talent tree. The talents you chose, though, strongly leaned toward one role or another, so the actually arrangement of talent points would look very different between characters who wanted to go one way or the other. (During Wrath of the Lich King, it was similar with all three Death Knight specs, which were designed to allow you to go as DPS or a Tank).

Thus, with the simplification of specializations, it was necessary to carve out a separate spec for Druid tanks, giving us their weird fourth spec.

    All that long preamble aside (sorry, sometimes I go into WoW historian mode,) one of the periodic speculations about upcoming expansions is the potential to add new specs to existing classes.

I'd argue that Devourer is really the only time that they've truly done this in the manner people imagine: Guardian was simply enabling an existing playstyle in a way that was compatible with a pretty enormous shake-up of a core game system, and Augmentation had to have been planned from the beginning of Dragonflight, with the entire class built with it in mind (there's no way that the spec was conceived of after the launch of Dragonflight, merely months before its debut).

So... what classes might get new specs?

First off, I think one of the early iterations of this form of speculation was the idea of ridding the game of pure DPS classes. WoW of course has the most room for DPS characters in group content, but the relative ease of playing this role also sees probably a disproportionate number of players gravitate toward that role. The notion of giving Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks, and Mages either a tank or healing spec was born, I think, out of a hope that by giving them that option, we'd see more people playing those roles.

I'm... skeptical that that is how that would work. I mean, plenty of people play Warriors who don't tank or Shamans who don't heal.

I started tanking very early on in my WoW career, and so I'm pretty comfortable with it as a role (I think it's basically just like melee dps but you have to be a little more careful about your positioning and can't ignore monsters when they go after the healer). But with very rare exceptions, I've basically never played as a healer (I did briefly level a Mistweaver Monk back when "Fistweaving" allowed you to pretty automatically heal the group while fighting in melee, but I don't think she ever hit the level cap).

Still, I think there's one example of this that bears exploration: the Warlock Tank. Now, I think in WoW Classic's Season of Discovery (which was basically their dry run for WoW Forever,) there was a way to unlock new abilities for Warlocks that allowed them to tank. Prior to the introduction of Demon Hunters, Demonology Warlocks were actually built around DH-like Metamorphosis (Legion saw a dramatic redesign of the spec, and I guess I was lucky that I liked both versions). This actually makes sense for Classic and Forever given that I don't believe either are expected to have playable Demon Hunters in them (I guess Legion Classic would). But for Mainline WoW, "retail," or just WoW, I don't know if this is the approach they could take.

Another perennial ask is Shaman Tanks. Here, I think you've got a lot more of the pieces that could work. Shamans are the only non-Tank class that can use Shields (which I think was primarily just so that Horde guilds had someone to give the Shields with Intellect on them back in Vanilla before there were any Horde Paladins - notably, WoW Forever is going to have Dwarf Shamans and Undead Paladins, giving each faction all the classes, because they realized that limiting the classes to a single faction in Vanilla was a mistake.) Still, I actually think there's some logic here: Shaman specs often focus on certain elements, with actually both Elemental and Enhancement tending toward air and fire (lightning and lava,) and Restoration tending to focus on Water. A Shaman Tank could very much be one that focuses on Earth, creating stony bulwarks to defend themselves.

There are currently no Mail-wearing tanks, which is funny given that half the tanks wear Leather armor, which is actually a less "heavy" armor type than Mail. But given that the only items you really need to make distinctly for tanks are Trinkets, and there are already plenty of Agility-based tanks, it would be pretty simple from an itemization point of view to just make a Shaman tank spec. You'd have to put Agility on shields, but that doesn't seem that difficulty (it would make them the one gear type that would always have all three primary stats on it, but who cares?)

Now, I'm... less convinced that we could make a Healing Mage. Maybe, maybe, possibly you could do some kind of time-magic thing where they're able to reverse time and heal wounds that way, but I don't really see it on a thematic level.

What about Hunters? Well, there's a vague notion that you could have a Hunter's pet tank, but given how imprecise it is to control your pets, this seems like a disastrous way of doing things (likewise Warlock minions).

The truth is, there's probably a way to conceive of any melee class acting as a tank - if you can fight in melee, maybe you can fight in a way that make it hard for them to kill you? And thus, a Hunter tank might be a bit more similar to Survival, with a pet that just supplements you rather than taking the hits for you.

A Rogue Tank, though, feels a bit like a contradiction in terms, simply because the whole vibe of a Rogue is that they stab you in the back while you're distracted by some seemingly bigger threat. Now, I do think Outlaw is a bit of an exception here, living less in that "sneaky backstabber" space and more in that "charming scoundrel" swashbuckler vibe. I wouldn't advocate turning Outlaw into a tank spec, but a tank Rogue would probably have to lean into that vibe a bit more, which I don't love given that Outlaw already feels like the exception rather than the rule.

One thing I never hear anyone talk about is a new Priest DPS spec. Priests are the only class that has two healing specs, and so if you want to play as DPS, you have to take a pretty dramatic shift in flavor and vibe by going Shadow.

What we don't have is a ranged Holy-damage-focused spec.

I honestly wonder, if they were building the class today, if Discipline would have been this. With Holy as the straightforward healer, you could have Shadow with its dark and insidious damage-over-time focus and Discipline focus on bursting foes down with holy fire.

But obviously, 22 years of Discipline being a healing spec would mean that changing it now would have people up in arms.

However, I do think there's very much a niche open for this archetype: a Fire and Brimstone Inquisitor, who smites foes with Holy Light, maybe mixing Holy damage spells with Fire. (Frankly, I always wanted my Blood Elf Priest to have a bit more of this vibe, but I just don't like playing a healer. And actually, both the introduction of Void Elves and everyone in Silvermoon making mean remarks to him in Midnight makes me really wish this was an option).

Devourer did sort of introduce the idea of a kind of off-brand version of the class - Demon Hunters are tied to Fel magic, but Devourer allows them to focus instead on Void magic.

Would giving Warlocks a Necromancer spec make sense, allowing them to raise undead minions? My answer is that it would, except that Unholy Death Knights exist, and especially with their Midnight re-work, Unholy DKs are the necromancer spec, and I just cannot conceive of a Necromancer class or spec that doesn't inherently have to utterly dismantle Unholy as it exists currently to appropriate its kit.

But what if, instead of a Necromancer, Warlocks got something a bit more Witchy? WoW's attitude as to what class is strictly a Witch is pretty ambiguous, but in Battle for Azeroth, we got the Heartsbane Coven, the most direct and straightforward Folk Horror Witches WoW has ever seen. (While I didn't like BFA much overall, I freaking adored almost every moment of Drustvar).

Now, maybe you could argue that Witches ought to be their own class (I wouldn't complain. Give them a healing spec). But I could also see Warlocks studying the Drusts' use of Death Magic and going that route rather than that of the Fel. Mechanically, I have no clue what this would look like (arguably, Affliction feels a little less demonic in vibe and a bit more death-magic focused) but I do think it could potentially be cool. Hell, call the spec "Witchcraft," and I think you'd have a lot of people super on-board. (Maybe tie in other woodsy spookiness, like the magic of Satyrs.)

I guess my last idea would be some kind of spec that combines arcane magic with martial prowess to give us a sort of Battlemage (or to use D&D terms, an Eldritch Knight). I had thought perhaps of a kind of arcane paladin, though it might also make sense as a Warrior spec. I think that there's less clear lore precedence here, though, so this is more pie-in-the-sky.

I'm skeptical that WoW would be likely to drop a whole lot of "fourth specs" in a single go, and it might be more exciting for players and hype around a new expansion just to launch a new class. This does have the benefit of not being tied to existing class mechanics (though given how distinct some specs play these days, I don't know if that's as much of a design constraint as it used to be).

Still, some of these ideas would be fun to see.

I think the ones that currently feel most appealing in my opinion would be the Shaman Tank, "Inquisitor" Priest, and Witchcraft Warlock.

Level Ranges of the WoW D&D Dungeons

 I don't know how big the WoW D&D book is, but it sounds like it might be pretty hefty, given that it details seven different dungeons along with various player options and other stuff.

One of the complaints we often got during the 5.0 era was that very few published adventures actually took people all the way to the level cap. Indeed, many adventure books would only take players to level 10, cutting things off before hitting tier 3, or sometimes going about halfway in, like Descent Into Avernus, which wrapped up around level 13.

This, combined with a relative dearth of high-level monsters (not that there weren't any, but the balance certainly skewed more to CRs below 5) led a fair number of DMs to feeling like they didn't have the tools or examples of how to build high-level adventures.

At this stage, I think I've run more D&D at high (11+) levels than low level simply because of the epic length of my ongoing Ravnica campaign, in which I (foolishly, in retrospect,) really sped players through levels 1-10 building on the very generous Adventurer's League rules from 2019 (I also imagined the game as a more rotating cast kind of thing).

This party doesn't have a Wizard in it, and I think that a surprising number of shenanigans that high-level characters can pull are not quite as difficult to build around (read: preserve challenge) if you don't have someone who can, for instance, Scry-and-Fry. It's not that there haven't been any challenges - with a Bard who has expertise in all four Charisma skills and also has Glibness, it ironically makes social challenges involving attempts to influence NPCs sort of dull, because he can't roll below a 27 (all the character at some point or another got the equivalent of Tomes and Manuals that raise their primary ability score and max for that score by 2. The Artificer has an Ioun Stone of Mastery, so between that and Tool Expertise, any tool-based Investigation or Arcana check gives them a +20 and advantage).

Still, I've found that at the end of the day, a crapton of damage will challenge even a high-level party, or at least put the fear of God in them.

Also, as a note here, WotC has actually for quite a while tried to address this, adding a lot of high-CR monsters in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and then releasing Dungeon of the Mad Mage (the epic mega-dungeon crawl that goes from 5-20) and Vecna: Eve of Ruin (which goes from 10-20) and most recently, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, which goes 11-20. While some of the issues of how vastly capable PCs can get at those high levels does sort of remain an issue, you at least have a lot of creatures to choose from to send their way, and I think the 5.5 Monster Manual helps a fair bit with high-CR humanoid monsters and souped-up versions of lower-CR monsters.

But this is all preamble!

The WoW D&D book (it's going to be awkward to just call it "WoW" given that this blog is also pretty heavily dedicated to World of Warcraft) is meant to be pretty comprehensive and cover potentially any era in WoW's 22-year history (though it won't have the "filling in the gaps" stuff from the just-announced WoW Forever - a game that I somewhat reluctantly feel like I should try out even if I wouldn't want to swap to it at the expense of the mainline version of the game). That being said, the dungeons presented in the book are all, with a single exception, from WoW's "Vanilla" era, prior to any of its expansions, which ran from 2004 to the very beginning of 2007 (I think The Burning Crusade came out on like January 7th of 2007. Hang on, Googling... Damn, Jan. 16th. Off by 9 days. Still pretty close).

Now, D&D broadly has some notions about how different tiers should reflect different stakes in a campaign. Tier 1, meaning levels 1-4, is when your characters are regional heroes, dealing with issues that are pretty local - the kind of classic "small town with a bounty board" in which you face bandits or the kind of monsters that create problems for the local farmers. Tier 2 steps things up to more serious threats, where an entire kingdom might be under threat by some more organized and serious villain. Tier 3 is when you really get into super-hero mode (though I guess that's imprecise given that sometimes Spider-Man and Batman are just dealing with bank robbers while other times they're dealing with reality-warping threats) but more precisely, you're dealing with global threats. Tier 4 is then when you're dealing with stuff that could affect multiple planes of reality.

In practice, of course, this doesn't necessarily play out that way. For example, Deadfall sees the party trying to thwart the plans of Szass Tam in trying to wrest full control of Thay away from the rest of the Zulkirs and reduce most of the country to his own mindless undead servants. As epic as that is, technically that counts as a tier 2, or "nation-wide" threat, though it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that that could then become a big problem for the whole of the Forgotten Realms. But Deadfall instead goes to level 20, and I think it's mainly because they want it to feel truly epic.

By these metrics, different WoW expansions would, I think, qualify at different tier levels. Legion and Shadowlands are unquestionably tier 4 expansions, while Wrath of the Lich King, as epic and beloved as that is, would by this metric be considered a tier 3 plot (though given how important Azeroth is to the overall Warcraft cosmos, you could argue that any global threat is inherently a cosmic threat).

But we know that the Icecrown Citadel dungeon is presented as a tier 4 adventure (it's also sold separately, which is a bit annoying, though perhaps it just wouldn't have fit in the book. ICC in WoW is a raid, which is both built for a larger group of players and is also just larger than a standard dungeon, with more bosses. I'm not going to get into all the complexities of dungeons versus raids here, but it's a fairly distinct thing even if they operate on similar principles).

Ok, sorry, getting to the actual point of this post:

GameMasters, a D&D channel that often sneaks a little preview of upcoming D&D books, has... snuck us a little preview of the new D&D book. Evidently constrained by some sort of NDA (he apparently wasn't supposed to tell us that Arthas got a stat block in the book, but I mean, the dude's on the cover and is WoW's most popular and iconic villain, so I'd only have been shocked if he didn't have a stat block), he was nevertheless able to show off some of the dungeon maps and their level ranges.

Deadmines: 1-4

Deadmines, the vast mine complex that serves as the headquarters for the Defias Brotherhood, a group of bandits founded by (rightfully) disgruntled Stonemasons after they were stiffed on the reconstruction of Stormwind, is the first dungeon that Alliance players are likely to run (well, Horde too given that you can access it via the Dungeon Finder these days, but it's more part of the questing path for human characters). The Defias have an interesting story with some real nuance (I mean, again, their grievances are very much real) they are, ultimately, a group of bandits, colored in by a sort of political edge, and thus they make perfect sense as a tier 1 challenge.

In the Cataclysm expansion, Deadmines was updated with some new characters. After players killed Edwin VanCleef, the leader of the Defias (and former head of the Stonemason's Guild) in the original version of the dungeon, his orphaned daughter Vanessa hatched a plot to revive the Defias and take over as its new leader. The general vibes of the dungeon were similar, though it was updated with more modern design philosophies. (We also fight Vanessa, though it's revealed later in the Legion expansion that she survives our encounter, and even winds up reluctantly teaming up with Rogue players as part of their class storyline).

Shadowfang Keep: 1-4

This also makes a fair amount of sense: Shadowfang Keep is found in Silverpine Forest, the second zone Undead characters are likely to quest through much as Deadmines is in Westfall, the secondary human zone. The real question, though, is which version is presented here. In Vanilla, SFK was "the Worgen dungeon," where the Archmage Arugal retreated after going mad, the source of his madness being his disastrous summoning of the Worgen to combat the undead Scourge. Worgen - WoW's version of werewolves - had initially been created through the efforts of Night Elf Druids trying to create a Druidic shapeshift form based on Goldrinn, the wolf god, but his ferocity proved overwhelming. Arugal had stumbled upon fragmented records telling of powerful wolf-creatures who were immune to diseases like the Plague of Undeath, and figured these would be ideal defenders of his home nation of Gilneas in fending off the undead threat. But the Worgen overran Gilneas, turning most of the population.

However, Shadowfang Keep became a vastly different dungeon in subject matter in the Cataclysm revamp of the original two WoW continents. In the plot there, the Forsaken invaded Gilneas in an effort to expand their territory. While the Gilneans had found alchemical means to restore the human minds to those who had been turned into Worgen, there were some of the high-ranking nobility who refused to bow down to a society that was now trying to incorporate these "mongrels" into it. Turning traitor and welcoming in the Forsaken, the three treasonous lords were killed, but then raised by the Forsaken as undead in their own right. However, the three were equally unhappy about being forced to serve the Forsaken, and betrayed Sylvanas (the Banshee Queen of the Forsaken) and even straight-up murdered her (she got better - turns out having the means to raise people into undeath can be useful if you're targeted for assassination) before fleeing to Arugal's old stronghold.

There's certainly more plot to the newer (like, 2010, but still newer than 2004) Shadowfang Keep, with tons of motivation for both Alliance and Horde players to want to take Lord Godfrey and his co-conspirators down. But I do sort of regret that the one real "Worgen" dungeon ceased to be that with this change.

Either way, it's a story of local threats, and I think makes sense as a tier 1 dungeon.

Blackfathom Deeps: Levels 5-10

Blackfathom Deeps is in the zone of Ashenvale, where the ancient forests of the Night Elves begin to butt up against the expanding territories of the Horde, who seek its lumber to fuel the construction of the new Orcish nation of Durotar. This dungeon, though, has nothing to do with that conflict.

Instead, this is an ancient Night Elf temple that at some point became a hotbed of worship of the Eldritch Old Gods (WoW's Great Old Ones/source for its Aberrations - continent-sized, mostly-underground flesh-monsters trying to corrupt the planet).

I'll be honest, this is one of the more nondescript dungeons from the old Vanilla days. It got a revamp at some point, but unlike Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines, it didn't then have a max-level Heroic version to play through at the time. I believe they may have shifted some of the focus between the factions involved here, but I don't really remember how it changed.

Elements at play here are the Naga (ancient Night Elves who were transformed into serpentine sea-monsters that honestly look a lot like Merrow, but think Merrow with the culture and broad power of Menzoberranzan Drow, who are associated with but not strictly loyal to the Old Gods) and Twilight's Hammer (a vast cult seeking apocalyptic destruction, and the closest thing the Old Gods have to a mortal cult dedicated to them). The final boss here is a massive Hydra who is an ancient "pet" of the Old Gods.

Scarlet Monastery: 5-10 and 11-16

Scarlet Monastery was one of the most popular dungeons in Vanilla, or rather, four of the most popular dungeons, as it pioneered the notion of a "winged" dungeon, with bite-sized pieces you could complete quickly (winged dungeons sort of stopped being a thing by Cataclysm, actually, but in BC and Wrath, they were the rule rather than the exception, though each wing in those were actually quite filled-out dungeons). In Mists of Pandaria, extensive revamps of these dungeons consolidated them into two: Scarlet Monastery and Scarlet Halls, effectively combining the old Graveyard and Cathedral into the former and the old Library and Armory into the latter.

While the dungeons are in the Undead starting zone of Tirisfal Glades, players would have to adventure a little bit beyond to hit the level they'd want to be before running these.

Scarlet Monastery is one of the main bastions of the Scarlet Crusade, a group of zealous religious fundamentalists who went a bit crazy in the face of the Undead Scourge. Primarily dangerous for the Forsaken, as they make no distinction between the dominated wills of the Scourge and the free-willed, sapient undead of the Forsaken, they're also just generally evil religious zealots who became deluded into thinking that all of Azeroth was infected with the Plague, and so would slaughter everyone if unchecked. (Later, in the Stratholme dungeon, we find that its leader is actually a corpse possessed by a Dreadlord, the most insidious and manipulative of demons, which explains all the evil, torture, and burning people at the stake).

Given that the natural progression of the story of the dungeon has us eventually confront High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral, I suspect that it's this half that is saved for tier 3, while the Halls half is probably our tier 2 half.

(In its 2012 revamp, most of the existing bosses from the original four wings were replaced with similar characters, but with different names, the deaths of the olds bosses evidently being canonical. The exception were Whitemane and the undead Thalnos the Soulrender, but while Whitemane's champion, Renault Mograine, in the Vanilla version of Cathedral was a fairly important lore character, overall the dungeon feels basically the same).

I have a great deal of nostalgia for this dungeon, as it's where I learned to tank on my Paladin way back in the day, and the Scarlet Crusade is a villainous faction that's a lot of fun to hate.

Dire Maul: 11-16

Dire Maul is an ancient, ruined Night Elf city. (It was this dungeon that the video gets to go into a lot of detail about.) In ancient times, it was a place of arcane scholarship among the Highborne Night Elves (the ancestors of the High Elves/Blood Elves/Void Elves) and home to Prince Tortheldrin and his Shed'ralar scholars. After the loss of the Well of Eternity (the enormous font of arcane power that was destroyed 10,000 years ago at the conclusion of the War of the Ancients,) the arcane-addicted Highborne began to struggle with deadly withdrawal, and so Tortheldrin summoned a demon called Immothar to have his people feed off of its energies. This corrupted them over time, and they began sacrificing non-Shen'dralar citizens to the demon to maintain it as a source of arcane nourishment.

The dungeon is sort of divided into three areas, with one involving the ghosts of the dead citizens and the Shen'dralar (who are, interestingly enough, actually a faction you can gain reputation with, even if Tortheldrin is clearly a villain and can be fought as a boss) but as the city has fallen into ruins, it has also become host to a clan of ogres as well as some Satyrs seeking to corrupt the local wildlife.

Quick important sidenote: Satyrs in WoW are very different than those from both D&D and Greek Myth. Far from whimsical fey beings, Satyrs are actually former Night Elves who became demons, and are closely tied with an eldritch corruption to the Emerald Dream (an alternate plane of a pristine, pre-civilization Azeroth that is core to the practice of Druidsm and the function of the natural world - very vaguely akin to its Feywild) called The Nightmare. Satyrs are thus tied to both the demonic Burning Legion and the eldritch madness of the Old Gods (two forces that are usually quite vehemently opposed to one another), and are seriously bad news.

I'm actually a bit surprised that this is a tier 3 dungeon, as it feels like it could fit pretty safely in tier 2, but I guess the presence of ancient arcane practices and the binding of a powerful demon make it sufficiently big for a tier 3 adventure.

Azjol-Nerub: Levels 17-20

When this dungeon came out in Wrath of the Lich King, it was considered almost scandalous, because it featured the Scarab King Anub'arak as a mere dungeon boss, and the dungeon itself was fairly quick and small. (Anub'arak later reappeared, resurrected, as the final boss of Trial of the Crusader, itself a sort of weird and underwhelming raid that probably could have been happily skipped).

Anyway, there's a lot of history here:

The Nerubians are one of the arthropodal peoples descended from the Aqir, the bug-people created by the Old Gods to populate their Black Empire some profound eons ago. After the Black Empire was dismantled by the Titans, the Nerubians began to develop their own distinct and necessarily culture (though they are spider-people, so it's not what we'd consider to most lovely society to live in. Yes, I realize that their king is a Scarab-Lord, which is very different from a spider. But just roll with it. Nerubians are spider-folk that also have giant scarab things that are somehow the same species).

Anyway, Azjol-Nerub was the Nerubian kingdom beneath the continent of Northrend, which meant that when the Undead Scourge got its start there on the frigid northern continent, the Nerubians came under attack, and ultimately the kingdom fell and got absorbed into the Scourge, its king, Anub'arak, becoming one of the Lich King's fiercest lieutenants.

Notably, this is the only dungeon in the book set outside of the Vanilla WoW continents, but it's a pretty distinctive look and feel. The Nerubians live in what is essentially WoW's Underdark equivalent (in The War Within, the expansion that ran from 2024 to 2026, we spent a lot of time in another Nerubian kingdom, Ahj'Kahet, and got to know their culture and even ally with a resistance movement there).

It's a little funny to me that the level range is the same here as it is for Icecrown Citadel, given that Anub'arak is unquesitonably subordinate to the Lich King, but perhaps they are making it up to the people who claimed the Scarab King didn't get his due back in 2008.

Onyxia's Lair: 17-20

My only real question here is how you'd have enough content here to span four levels. Onyxia is a pretty epic character - the daughter of Deathwing, the mad Black Dragon Aspect, Onyxia lurked in disguise within the court of Stormwind under the guise of a human named Lady Katrana Prestor (Deathwing had taken over the human kingdom of Alterac under the identity of Lord Daval Prestor, and betrayed the Alliance during the Second War). Leading Stormwind's House of Nobles, she arranged for the Stonemason's Guild to go unpaid, effectively spurring the creation of the Defias Brotherhood (see the Deadmines, way up above) and also orchestrated the kidnapping of King Varian Wrynn in an effort to undermine Stormwind and sow chaos.

Once her ruse in Stormwind was discovered, she fled across the Great Sea to Kalimdor, and the remote wilderness of Dustwallow Marsh, where she had her vast volcanic lair.

Onyxia's Lair was popular back in Vanilla, as it was a very simple one-boss instance with just a few "trash" enemies to fight through before getting to the big boss fight. While Onyxia's brother Nefarian served as the final boss of Blackwing Lair, a more extensive and full raid instance, both black dragons made for pretty cool and epic fights. (Both were somehow resurrected in Cataclsym, featuring in the final fight of the Blackwing Descent raid.) (Also, in 2009, for WoW's 5th anniversary, a level 80 version of the raid was opened up for players during Wrath of the Lich King, and I believe the current version of it is that version, though between the Shadowlands level-squish and level scaling, I don't know if you could tell the difference, really).

Anyway, as cool as that was, in WoW, Onyxia's Lair is really just a single boss fight in a big volcanic cave. The build-up to that fight, of course, was pretty cool, with an extensive quest chain to reveal Lady Prestor's duplicity, but I'm very curious to see how the book actually approaches this to give us something between being level 17 when we start it and then fighting Onyxia presumably at level 20.

Icecrown Citadel (not appearing in the book itself, but as a separate and I believe digital-only product): Levels 17-20

The final (well, there's a weird asterisk there because of the single-boss Ruby Sanctum raid, but we don't need to count that, as it was more of a prologue for Cataclysm) raid of Wrath of the Lich King, this is a massive fortress built around the Frozen Throne, the magical shard of ice containing the cursed armor of the Lich King that unleashed the Undead Scourge upon Azeroth.

Just in case you didn't know, the history of the Lich King is complex: Originally, the Orc Shaman Ner'zhul, attempting to flee the secret demonic masters of the Old Horde after their loss in the Second War, tore the Orcish homeworld of Draenor apart, and was immediately captured by the demon Kil'jaeden. Kil'jaeden bound his soul to a suit of armor (the origin of which got expanded upon/retconned in Shadowlands, but it's just so much to cover) and sealed him in an ice-like crystal to hurl down to Azeroth.

As a disembodied spirit, Ner'zhul, as the Lich King, reached out and empowered necromancers to begin raising the dead and bringing about a plague of undeath that could spread his influence and bind their wills to the Lich King. The most prominent of these necromancers, Kel'thuzad, came to the human kingdom of Lordaeron and began spreading the plague, before he was defeated by the Crown Prince and novice Paladin, Arthas Menethil. Arthas, a hero initially, began to lose perspective and his humanity in his zealous efforts to stop the Scourge, including slaughtering an entire city to contain the infection. Eventually, in an effort to defeat the demon he believed to be the head of the Scourge, Arthas took the soul-entrapping cursed sword Frostmourne (though he had done a lot of bad things even before his soul was taken).

Frostmourne turned Arthas into a Death Knight, and when he returned, seemingly triumphant, to Lordaeron, he shocked everyone by murdering his father, King Terenas, and then unleashing his undead minions upon the capital. Via the disemboided spirit of Kel'thuzad, Arthas learned that it was the Lich King who had created Frostmourne, and that the Scourge needed him to help break them free of the control of the demons. Arthas thus became the Scourge's greatest champions, eventually defending the Frozen Throne from forces (led by Illidan Stormrage, but we can't get into why that was who he was up against) that sought to destroy it. In victory, Arthas ascended the Frozen Throne, smashing the ice and freeing the armor. Placing the Helm of Domination upon his head, he merged with the Lich King, and eventually overcame Ner'zhul's will to truly become the master of the Scourge.

Icecrown Citadel, thus, is a massive complex with some of the Scourge's most powerful monstrous servants, between the Frankensteinan creations known as Abominations created by Professor Putricide, to the vampire-like San'layn led by Blood Queen Lana'thel (the San'layn created through the corruption of the blood elves who had fought for Illidan) and the undead dragons led by Sindragosa (basically a Dracolich).

Like Scarlet Monastery, I have immense nostalgia for this raid, as it was the time when I was most consistently raiding with my guild (which is now more or less defunct,) and Arthas is both mine and I'd guess a huge portion of WoW players' favorite villain.

I wish that we simply got this in the book, but I also sort of get it. Let's talk about Dungeons versus Raids.

In WoW, most of the world is shared by those on your server - if you're playing on the same "realm" as another player, if they show up at a location, you can find them there (there are exceptions I won't get into here). But "instances" are separate areas that have a fresh version of them for each group that enters. That way, you don't have to worry about some other group of players having killed the boss you want to fight and having to wait for them to respawn.

The most common form of instance is a dungeon, which is built for five players, and typically has 3-5 boss fights, with less powerful enemies ("trash") between them, and typically can be cleared in a single sitting in roughly half an hour (notably, back in Vanilla, there were far larger dungeons, but very early on they decided to make dungeons more digestible bits of content). Dungeons have a hard limit of 5 players, with one player in the tank role, one in the healer role, and three "DPS" or "damage" players who are there to just make sure the enemies go down efficiently.

Raids, on the other hand, are for larger groups. In vanilla, raids would be for groups of 20 or 40 players (the more epic and plot-centric ones being for the huge groups,) but in the first expansion, much as they standardized the shorter dungeons, they also shrunk raids to have some be for 10 players and some for 25. In the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, they instead made multiple versions of each raid, with a 10-player version and a 25-player version. Eventually, they would create "flex" raiding, where the instance itself would scale for groups of 10-25 players, the exception being the hardest difficulty mode, Mythic, which was designed solely for 20-player groups.

Unlike dungeons, raids are not designed to be completed in a single sitting (at least not until you get good enough at the fights and have good enough gear to consistently beat early bosses in a single attempt). They can have far more bosses (I believe the largest is Naxxramas, which has 15. Icecrown Citadel has 12).

Working your way through a raid is the sort of thing that players will take several weeks to do - the race to Mythic World Firsts - beating the final boss of the latest raid on Mythic difficulty - is something WoW fans will follow like a season of sports, with famous guilds racing to get that boss down as quickly as possible, which usually doesn't happen until after the raid has been out for a week or two (or sometimes longer, depending on how hard it is).

Thus:

It sort of makes sense to me that Icecrown Citadel wouldn't fit in this book: just the map alone is far larger than the dungeons portrayed in the book (and Onyxia's Lair, while a raid, is a very simple and small raid).

I do have a few questions, though:

First off, there's far more to WoW than its dungeons - you do a lot of stuff out in the world, and dungeons often serve as the sort of climactic conclusion of an ongoing story that you've done mostly out on your own in the open world.

The maps of the dungeons look pretty faithful to their WoW equivalents, and so I really have to wonder if something like Onyxia's Lair will involve us slowly pushing through it before exiting to do other things.

The other possibility that just occurred to me, and makes me feel very silly for not thinking of it sooner, is that these level ranges might not be a guarantee of the levels that these dungeons will cover, but might instead simply be level ranges that are appropriate times for a party to visit said dungeons. Like, you might be capable of facing Onyxia by the time you hit level 17, but it'll remain a challenge through level 20.

Honestly, that might make far more sense, though I do think that puts a pretty serious onus on the tier 1 dungeons, given that the difference between a level 1 character and a level 3 character is a much bigger gulf than, say, a level 12 versus level 14 character.

One last note! (I know this post is getting insanely long):

Evidently, the book will suggest paths that a party can take if they want to focus on particular stories and antagonists, not just for these dungeons but also for the various zones of World of Warcraft. Peppering in these dungeons where appropriate could be a way to have various heightened periods in a campaign about certain things.

It seems that dungeons are designated as being associated with such recurring villains, like The Burning Legion (I think Dire Maul is considered a Burning Legion dungeon).

As I was telling my players tonight, I know Azeroth far more extensively than I do the Forgotten Realms, and I think that's what would excite me about running something there - that I would easily be able to pull in details I know about the world while also curating the story to focus on particular threads.

Ironically, while Warcraft tends toward high-stakes, epic tales, it would probably be relatively far easier for me to run a truly character-driven sandbox game focusing on players' individual stories because I have such a hard-wired sense of the moving parts of WoW's world and plot.