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Editor’s note: Please welcome Sippycup to the Rawrcast crew. I am sure that you all that listen to the podcast have heard the name mentioned when Stomp and Haf talk about Bound and their raiding experiences. Chris brings a wealth of information and old-school perspective from the game, and I am proud to have him on the team! -Ozimandias

On site here at Blizzcon 2010 sharing with the Rawrcast community an experience like no other. Day 1 at Blizzcon has come to a close, as most of you know by now, much to the dismay of us all, Blizzard blew it’s proverbial load in the weeks leading up to Blizzcon having already a street date for Cataclysm, and the cinematic trailer. Instead of putting it all out there during Blizzcon, and one has to wonder why? The following is a recap of the events of today. I hope you enjoy.

This year we all gazed with hope in our hearts to the main stage during Blizzards opening ceremony. What did we get for our cost inflated tickets? Was Blizzard going to show us their new IP? Were they going to announce a soft release date for Diablo 3? Or perhaps a soft date for Starcraft 2′s expansion? In a word–no! Mike Morhaime came to the podium setting up the stage for Chris Metzen, getting the crowd amped up! Chris drags his feet for what seems like a life-time, all of us salivating for what was to come. A huge silence fell over the crowd as a single word was ushered across the screen. The word was “Geek” in an attempt to rally the community together behind the word. While the presentation was comical to say the least, with still photos of transformer action figures, Thundercats, and the like, it fell on def ears, as the only thing we cared to hear was the “BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!” Surely now was the time for Chris to make his move, What he had for us was the trailer to Diablo 3′s new playable class the “Demon Hunter” truly a Amazon look (and feel) with a crossbreed of Lady Sylvanas. Surely, Chris couldn’t hold back any longer, now was the time! After the lights came on much to all of the crowds dismay we were told to enjoy the rest of the show…. Wait, what?! Blizzards big announcement was something we all knew and expected? WTF?! I could go into great detail about how much money was spent by all in attendance for this. I could go into detail about the amount of nerd rage I had. None of which I will do, (for you the readers benefit) doing so would accomplish nil. But to me Blizzard really lost some clout with me this weekend. Well at least we still had a few things to look forward to, the dungeon and raid segment for patch 4.1.

Ushered into the main stage area once more, like so many cattle, we took our seats, at least this information would be something we as a community hadn’t seen yet. They talked of fixing old school 5 person dungeons to make them less confusing, which for new players I totally understand. Wailing Caverns was a maze, especially for someone that may have just installed the game. For those that aren’t in the know yet, Blizzard intends to “chop” dungeons in half that were to long, and cannibalize them into 2 dungeons in some cases, and to completely axe some parts in others. IE it appeared that Blizzard intends to do away with the huge multi tiered tower in Sunken Temple. Okay, I get it. It’s a good move on Blizzard’s behalf to fix the dungeons of old, if the landscape is changing, it only makes sense to change the dungeons as well. The nostagalic rage will subside, and give way to progress. However I would not be doing all us old school WoW players justice by at least commenting on how we all, at least in part, will miss the dungeons as they are now. This would be a great time to really soak in those dungeons one last time, before they all change forever. The following dungeons are on the chopping block: Mauradon, Sunken Temple, Wailing Caverns, Uldmn, so give those dungeons of yester year one last whirl.

The next topic for this segment was the Raids of 4.1. I’ll save you the readers from having to read a wall of text and summarize this portion. Apparently, when we fought Rag back in MC, it was a image of Rag, and not the real Rag, the real rag lives in the elemental plane, and in patch 4.1 we’re going there to raid. (I will apologize for the blatant sarcasm now) Yea, Rag again…… It will be a 7 boss dungeon that is in part outside, where it ends with a  fight inside a cavern where we get to face off with Rag once again. I can’t stress my enthusiasm for this…. (okay the sarcasm meter just broke) There was talk of a Throne of tides Raid dungeon where we fight in the water portion of the elemental plane. The sound of it felt fresher than squaring off with Rag again. Then they went on to talk about how each boss will have an in game tool tip with detailed info on their abilities.

Now, after talking with a few people it sounded like there were two camps on this matter. In one camp, you had the people who were opposed to this, because it felt like more “hand holding” from Blizzard trying to get that casual player to do what us raiders do every night. That it will encourage more people to be relaxed in not doing research for fights, because they feel they have sufficient in game information. While the other camps perspective is that it is nice to have a in game tool tip as a tool, so you don’t have to scroll through copious amounts of combat logs, spend time wiping on a boss trying to figure out the mechanic(s)  wiped your raid. Now I haven’t made up my own mind which camp that I’m in, the cynical side of me subscribes to the fact that it will promote lazy players to be even more lazy, and not watch vids/read strats. But the raider in me says a professional group will utilize this tool in their raids. Guess I’ll have to sit on the fence to see it’s implementation come to fruition before I‘m willing to say I‘m for it, or opposed to it, I have a feeling this is going to different for each person. That was the end of the announcement portion, the Q&A portion was up next, and without seeming like a elitist jerk, I didn’t have any want to listen to people ask questions I all ready knew answers to, or didn’t pertain to my future raiding endeavors.

While for the most part this article has been about how Blizzard really dropped the ball, I don’t want to portray Blizzcon in a negative light, not just because I’m a fan boy, but because I’m having some the best times I’ve had in a long time. I hope to go into this more, but, as is, this article has been a wall of text, it is my hope I can bring you day two coverage from Blizzcon, with talk of high praise of Kevin Michael Johnson’s The Raid documentary, and later about the high lights of this whole experience, also known as the social aspect.  I will be shooting to make this into a 3 part article, well I hoped you enjoyed the first part, with any luck part 2 will be up tomorrow.

Until then.