What's Up With AQ?

[Azunara]

Alright. So, normally, you can't get to raid maps from your world map, right? It doesn't even show up on the list. It just shows where the general location is on the zone. Well, SOMETHING is happening to AQ. While the instance portals and stones are still there, it is a whole new zone. I managed to get into without instance portals, however there were no mobs. The entire zone was a replica of AQ 20, we could see where the various boss rooms would be.

It shows up on the map, on both the drop list AND as a clickable zone. See pics for more ideas. So. What do you guys think? New zones? They're making it so you can access raid maps from world map? Or am I not knowing what I'm talking about?

[Saturo]

Aah, finally I get to see some pictures of this... :D

I would love a Quiraji / Silithid zone!

[Anyia]

My take would be that since it's now possible to fly in the old-world, the outdoor raid zones have to exist and take up space on the surface "properly". So, I'd imagine the non-instanced zones to be empty or only contain your average variety of mobs, while the instances still have their bosses (but what about C'thun? anyone know?).

[Azunara]

Aah, finally I get to see some pictures of this...

I would love a Quiraji / Silithid zone!

Yeah, I finally got on the computer where I could extract pictures from easily. I'd also like to point out, though, Onyxia's Lair, oddly enough, was a continent one could choose from the drop-down list. Meaning they make raid maps available as "continents". We'll see.


And that theory does make sense. It was devoid with mobs. I just hope they at least could put filler mobs, like a few tamable silithids, scorpions, worms...

[Serendipity82]

That's really cool. I had also heard that they are turning AQ 20 into a 10 man raid. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I read that somewhere as well.

[Sarayana]

My take would be that since it's now possible to fly in the old-world, the outdoor raid zones have to exist and take up space on the surface "properly". So, I'd imagine the non-instanced zones to be empty or only contain your average variety of mobs, while the instances still have their bosses (but what about C'thun? anyone know?).

This is what I heard - that the zones will be present in the world and we can fly over them (I also heard that there was a bug that dismounted people flying over them for a while on beta ^_^) but not enter them without going through the instance portal. That's why the outdoor versions are empty.

[Azunara]

Aaaw. I kind of hope they do something with the outdoor version, if only stick a few beasts around there. At least AQ isn't gone, so we can still use bug mounts/farm them.

[ummeiko]

My take would be that since it's now possible to fly in the old-world, the outdoor raid zones have to exist and take up space on the surface "properly". So, I'd imagine the non-instanced zones to be empty or only contain your average variety of mobs, while the instances still have their bosses (but what about C'thun? anyone know?).

This is pretty much the conclusion I've come to. Blizz has to clean up a lot of the messy areas between proper zones. Right now the area behind the portals is basically laid out like AQ 20, but without mobs. It's actually different from what was up there before (which, although unfinished and certainly had some glitches, was pretty interesting).

Most of the AQ 40 instance, by contrast, is underground, so they didn't have to do a lot with that. You can get to Skeram's platform outside, but then there's some invisible walls keeping you from going down into the temple proper.