The last wing of Icecrown Citadel is set to open in World of Warcraft today and, with it, the final big encounter of Wrath of the Lich King: the face off with Arthas. For the next few weeks, servers will be alive with activity as guilds focus on taking down this final baddie and officially getting ICC to “farm” status.
As with any big, final, patch of the expansion, the next few months are tentative. Many guilds will struggle, getting to the Lich King, and will be occupied for some time to come. Others will beat it fairly quick, gear up their members, and become bored. The better of these situations, of course, is the newer guild taking their time to get through.
Yet, I predict that within 3 months, the truth that there is no new content coming before Cataclysm will settle in and players will become restless. Even those players who haven’t finished the current content.
The truth, as I see it, is that within those 90 days the players able to see the Lich King will have seen it. The others, for some reason, are unable to get into the content. Both types of player face the same conclusion though, nothing new is coming and what’s there may as well not matter. It’s done or a forgone conclusion.
So, once more, we enter into the burnout drought before an expansion pack. We’ll have lots of information on Cataclysm forthcoming, I’m sure, since Blizzard has to keep players chomping at the bit. Despite this, activity is almost sure to drop.
The good news is that players taking a break from WoW is a very positive thing. For the player, they’ll come back with their batteries refreshed. For other MMO studios, now is the time of year where their games will get more traffic and hopefully earn extra subscriptions. The players coming in will get to see how green the grass really is and, hopefully, have a lot of fun too.
At once, the drought is a time of boredom and excitement.
Now where’s my Arthas YouTube video? What do you mean they’re not up yet?
*tap tap* Ensidia? *tap*
Is this thing on?
The scaling buff that blizzard will give to players to fight in ice crown should make the content accessible to most everyone by the end of the xpac I think. I know though that once we kill Arthas quite a few of our serious raiders are calling it quits until cataclysm.
More room for me! Lol. Actually, the past week I haven’t logged on to about any MMO. After the marathon I went on the couple weeks before that, I felt a little burnt out. I’ll be back to my mage at some point, too. I’ve been digging tanking a lot, since it’s a totally new playstyle, but the shininess is starting to wear off. My goal there was to get to 80 so I could start doing heroics and have a tank ready for Cataclysm. The two people I was playing with wound up totally gearing themselves out in triumph and frost gear, so I’m behind the curve enough where Malgos is again looking like my quickest option for some in and out fun.
With the earliest for Cataclysm seeming to be July/August…and I really feel it’s going to be another November release…I think we’ll be seeing another content patch of some sort.
Either way, we’ll definitely be seeing people take a break as you suggest.
Unfortunately i’ve been playing lots of WoW but not raiding full-time with my guild for a year! What Basically happened was I could no longer devote to their raid days (not because I didn’t want to, unfortunately things I had to do fell onto all three of the raid days. Awful, right?)…
However, Catacylsm is about the time I no longer have to be droughted from raiding, and I will be able to raid with my beloved guild again!
Im so excitied.
Its like getting a new guild again,
so whilst you may say “its a boring but exciting wait…” for me it’ll won’t be due to my long peroid of raid break, although i’ve been doing lots of PuGs.
So excitied for Catacylsm, hope it doesn’t come out during exam peroid 2.
ICC 25 is not going to be on farm for most people anytime soon. Blizzard has deliberately tuned up its difficulty to be beyond the reach of the typical raider. Even now, only 15% of 25 man raid guilds have finished even the Plagueworks, less than 7% the Crimson Halls, and less than 2% the frost wing. Strict 10 man guilds in ICC 10 are doing even worse.
The interesting question is: will people who are wiping endlessly on Rotface or Putricide just burn out on the place before they nerf it? It’s not like there’s a lot of other non-obsolete content in the game for them.
Blizzard should have released ICC shortly before Cata was to come out, so people could blaze through it and be psyched for the expansion.