There has been much discussion over the past couple of days about the newest five man instance, Magisters’ Terrace. I shared my initial thoughts about the instance yesterday, and I was not alone. A lot of folks in the blogging world took the time to share their experiences as well.

Big Bear Butt Blogger, Asleep at the WoW, and Ferocious Bite are just a few of the bloggers to have thoughts about the new instance. It’s also not hard to find approximately 1.2 billion posts on the subject over on the official WoW forums. Everybody’s talking about it, so what are they saying?

Well, my take is that the overall reaction is positive. I think most everyone can agree that it’s a very pretty instance with great music. For the most part, people agree that it is also quite challenging, even on normal mode. The reaction loot-wise is that there is some good stuff in there, but perhaps not great. I would suggest that the loot in normal mode is better than any other five man out there overall, and the heroic loot is perhaps slightly better as well.

There is some divergence here, however, and I thought we’d take a look at that. It seems that overall the instance can be a bit of a “gear check.” Even in normal mode, you can’t take a freshly minted 70 in mostly green quest rewards and expect to succeed, as you can in other instances. This is even more true in the exceedingly difficult heroic version of the dungeon. I haven’t personally been in the heroic as of yet, but from what I understand it is VERY challenging, on par with or more difficult than the other “tough” heroic instances, like Arcatraz.

People also differ in how hard they judge the instance to be. I personally started a thread on the official forums asking if Magisters’ Terrace was now the most difficult 5-man in the game. A lot of people agreed with my assessment, that it is the most difficult 5-man, but a few people did not.

I noticed something interesting about the posters who claimed the instance wasn’t all that difficult. When looking at their respective armory pages, most of them were sporting Tier 5 gear and beyond. Well, in all honesty, I would HOPE that someone in tier 5 gear wouldn’t have too much trouble with those encounters. If you’re working on or have downed the real Kael’Thas, I would hope you could handle his watered-down twin brother!

But of course, as is the case with most topics on the official forums, you have a large swath of board trolls who like to brag about their accomplishments incessantly. I’m used to it.

As a player in mostly Kara gear, I found the instance to be a nicely tuned challenge. It’s tough, but I think it’s doable. I also believe it will actually help me progress as a player, as some of the trash pulls and boss fights required more “advanced” strategy. Frankly, this is the kind of thing I was hoping to see with ZA. A nice difficulty progression from Karazhan. As it turned out, ZA is too tough for most Kara geared guilds, and doesn’t act as the bridge to 25 man content we maybe hoped for.

Overall, I think Magisters’ Terrace is just the kind of instance to keep guilds that are stuck in limbo somewhere between Kara and SSC occupied until Wrath hits. It is challenging, but I wouldn’t say frustratingly so. It might take some time to get all the fights down, but at least you only need to drum up 5 people to try it. I think it’s a find addition to the available 5-man instances, and goes to show that Blizzard doesn’t necessarily need to create bloated, ultra-difficult 25-man raids to please a lot of players. Some of us out here are awfully happy to have our new 5-man to master, Magisters’ Terrace.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.