Difficulties of World of Warcraft

What Makes Sartharion so Unique?

There has been a lot of chatter online about the newest breed of raid that Blizzard has tossed into their uber hit MMO – World of Warcraft. Exemplified by Sartharion, the core boss of the Obsidian Sanctum, the guardian of the eggs there, this raid is technically only one encounter with a few adds, but it has 8 different ways to play through it, all with different loot results depending on the difficulty you decide to complete it under. This freedom and flexibility has made the raid both incredibly easy and incredibly hard and is a possible blueprint for future raids that can then cater to both casual and more hardcore players.

Difficulty Levels in a Nutshell

Unlike other raids where the only way to delineate difficulty is to bring a different number of players (10 or 25), Sartharion has an option to kill the adds in the fight prior to taking him on. There are three drake adds that you can face before Sartharion, all of them relatively simple to defeat on their own. However, you can also choose to leave any number of them alive and face them alongside Sartharion in the final raid encounter. Each additional add you leave alive makes for a slightly harder boss fight and rewards you with better loot.

Standard loot tables apply to only the fights with all three adds dead and then additional loot is added to each level with higher level items up to Level 213 being added. With all 3 drake adds faced alongside Sartharion, players get a mount and an achievement, as the task is considered incredibly hard and is probably the hardest current end-game task available in World of Warcraft.

The Future

Already, Blizzard has said that this style of optional difficulty scaling is a good example for future raids and they have mentioned possibly using it in Ulduar when it launches with the 3.1 patch. It would also represent a chance to make content much more open ended to both casual and hardcore players, a major problem that is plaguing the game currently as Blizzard tries to draw more casual players without alienating its core fanbase of loyal players.

Whatever route they take, this kind of multi-faceted approach to raiding is sure to become a long-term strategy that, if the quality is maintained in the raids, will become a standard part of most end-game content in the years to come.

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