I’ve noted the game has a lot of cinematics for each expansion. I wanted to know if they will play themselves as you advance through the expansions or you just can watch them by other means.
Also, I know the expansions have one final boss each, Illidan for BC and arthas for WotLK for example. Can you only face them when you are at 120 with a group or sooner? How does this work?
I’d appreciate your help. Thanks!
Cinematics will automatically play every time you complete the related content, although some addons such as DBM will automatically skip the ones in dungeons or raids after you see them the first time, however it is possible to turn that setting off if you desire.
As for “final bosses”, as most people are not interested in running old content, the best way to see those fights is to wait until you are at least 10 levels “over” the content - so for Illidan in BT, you would want to be level 80 and for Arthas in ICC you would want to be 90 and solo them. Obviously this gets easier as you increase you level, but 10 levels is the bare minimum I would recommend.
Alternatively, you can ask someone who is at a higher level to carry you through the old raids, as many people do that anyways in order to farm xmog, mounts, and pets. You can do this as long as you meet the minimum level requirements for the raid.
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If you are talking about beginning expansion cinematics, then you can watch any of them anytime from the character selection screen. Just click on Menu and then Cinematics and all the start of the xpan cinematics will be there. I don’t remember if they auto play while advancing to each new expansions content while leveling.
If you mean the story cinematics that play while questing or killing raid bosses, those should auto play once you complete the required quest/kill the boss.
You don’t need to wait for 120 to fight the final boss of each expansion if you don’t want to. You can solo them (or try to find a group wanting to do them) whenever you feel you are high enough level to. So right now you could probably go solo the vanilla raid content.
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Thank you very much! I just didnt want to find out what happens in the story until I played it myself. So, how do u start each quest to get the final boss? And will that boss level be scaled down to yours? I ask this because in some dungeons I’ve met the Lich King and he has over 1000 K of HP if i remeber correctly
There aren’t quests to go fight the raid bosses, per se. When you feel you’re ready to take them on, you simply head to the appropriate raid instance and walk in. You will have to fight your way through the raid in order to reach the final boss.
Instance bosses do not scale to level. A level 80 raid boss such as the Lich King is scaled in difficulty to match a party of ten (minimum) level 80 players in raid-quality gear, which is why we recommend being at least 10 levels “over” the level of the content you’re attempting to solo. I would not recommend attempting to enter Ice Crown Citadel (the Lich King’s raid) until you have reached at least level 90. At your current level, you will not even be able to walk through the instance entrance, as you do not meet the minimum level requirement for the raid.
I see, so there’s not a storyline of quests to follow the story of Warcraft’s main characters until you meet them? You simply walk into the instance and face them and the cinematics will be played?
Pretty much. There is a sort of loose story as you quest through the various zones for the relevant expansion, but WoW has never been really strong on providing lore-as-gameplay.
I will add, however, that the “final” boss is not the only thing you will have to face in a raid instance. There is also a large amount of “trash”, as well as a number of other bosses before you encounter the final boss of the instance. Raids are just really big dungeons.
There is generally some kind of questing storyline surrounding the raid it just isn’t generally a quest to go kill the final boss. There used to be long attunement quest chains before you could even set foot in certain raid instances but they have done away with that.
The raids themselves are typically the culmination of the overarching story of the expansion. You’ll see bits and pieces of the story throughout the leveling experience of that expansion. Icecrown has the most in regards to the Arthas story, but he appears in other WotLK zones as well. You’ll see other story arches as you level; the Sha corrupting Pandaria (and Garrosh by extension) in MoP, Deathwing destroying the world (revamped 1-60 & Cata zones), and so on.
The raids themselves don’t require that you quest or know why you’re killing things. Some used to, back when BC was current, but that model has long been left behind.
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Thank you very much for the info! I will get to lvl 80 and go to BT.
One last thing, as I will be ten levels above the content, the gear I will get will be Ilvl 70 or will it be sclaed to my lvl?
The gear from raids doesn’t scale up. It’s exactly the same gear that dropped when the raids were current. If you are going in there 10 levels above that content, then the gear is really only good for transmog or vendoring for gold.
Or if you wanted to hold onto some of it for timewalking.
Ty, you have been really helpful! I like this community, they help everyone who want to understand the game mechanics. Have a good day!
Glad we could help.
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Don’t expect to breeze through it easily right away. BT was next to the last raid released, and the final raids of an expansion are generally more difficult than the first ones. It was also the first raid redone for Timewalking, which is a special event week when you can queue for certain instances you’ve out-leveled, and has since been more challenging to solo than the other BC raids. Between that and all of the scaling and stat squishing that’s happened, don’t be surprised if you need to gain several more levels before it becomes doable.
Burning Crusade wasn’t only about fighting against Illidan’s plans either, there’s also his lieutenants Kael’thas Sunstrider (the former leader of the blood elves) and Lady Vashj, who both have their own back-stabby agenda, as well as Sargeras’ cohorts Archimonde and Kiljaedan. The final raid involves (temporarily) stopping the Burning Legion’s invasion and restoring the Sunwell for the blood elves.
Likewise, Wrath was more than just stopping the Lich King and his zombie apocalypse. Questing through the zones and running the dungeons gives you a sense of the story, but as explained there’s no defined storyline leading you directly to a single villain. It’s all just episodes of a bigger picture.
wow.gamepdia. com is a good place to look up the lore and its various components, and you’ll want to check there and places such as wowhead for information on the raid boss fights. Most fights have mechanics that you’ll need to know about, and sometimes there’s a special strategy when soloing at a higher level.
[e]Oh, and this is a list of all of the game cinematics. It doesn’t have the actual videos, but you can use it to look them up at youtube (they used to be available on the main WoW site, but if that page still exists, it’s buried deep):
wow.gamepedia. com/Videos
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Nice. Yeah, I read the Illidan book and found out a little about Kaelthas and lady Vashj and wanted to know too if u ever face or meet them in the game (alll this with the sole purpose of finding out what i havent read about the story itself, like a movie or a book). Thank you for the info, I really appreciate it!
8.0 dramatically changed the curve for the bonus damage you get for overleveling content. You will not be able to solo raids at 10 levels over as a general rule. (And from my testing so far, it’s a lot more complicated than it was pre-8.0.)
Before 8.0, you started getting a damage bonus as soon as you were one level over an expansion cap, and it increased until you were 7 levels over the cap where it maxed out. So, at that point, 10 levels over was plenty.
Now that 8.0 is out, the bonus damage doesn’t start until usually a level before the next expansion cap. (So, you won’t see any bonus damage in BC raids until level 79, and it will increase all the way to 110. That damage bonus won’t be high enough to start soloing the raids until closer to 90. I have a character that just did a bunch of the BC stuff at 90, and even at that level, the fights are not trivial. (And I ended up leveling up to 92 to do Sunwell, as I didn’t have the dps at 90 to get the first boss down in one rift phase, causing the fight to reset.)
You can probably start doing the BC heroics by 81 (where you’ll have about at 6x damage boost. At 80 it’s a 2x boost, which may not be enough on some classes/specs.) It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but for BC, heroics will be easier than normal dungeons to solo because the heroics are locked at level 70, but the normals will scale to 80.
Wrath has 10 man versions of all of the raids, which will allow you to see the content on those a bit sooner. While I haven’t yet tested any of the Wrath ones after 8.0, by 92, you’ll get a 20x damage bonus for that content, which should be enough for the 10 man raids. (And with some specs, you might pull off some of them at 91 with it’s 12.5x bonus.)
Edit: When looking at the damage multipliers, remember that it’s not just about how many people you need to be the equivalent of. Because stats are now much flatter through those ranges, it also has to account for the old gear growth when expansions were current. (So, for example, a well geared level 70 back in the day might have done 2-3x the damage of a fresh 70, and it was those well geared players doing the hardest raids.)
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They seemed to brought them back with Legion. Khadgar gave me a quest to go into some Legion raids to seal the tomb with the artifacts collected from the Legion dungeons. There was Sumar raid quest that took in the Emerald Nightmare to complete it on just one of your toons and it auto-completes on your alt toons.
Some of the BC questlines do require a raid or dungeon run. Most notably, story lines in Shadowmoon Valley but also for a couple of other zones. Unless you are going for Loremaster, you can skip them and/or come back when you are a higher level.
Remember that we’re 7 expansions and 12+ years into the game now. When WotLK was current, we spent two years in Northrend, and the main story line was slowly meted out through the zone quests, essentially.
Fast forward 10 years and now you spend only a couple of days in Northrend while leveling, and will only see 10% of what WotLK had to offer before you out-level it and move on to the next expansion to repeat the process.
Don’t worry about main storylines or raid bosses for old content until you’re max level, tbh. If you really want to see the full story of Storm Peaks or Shadowmoon Valley from BC, you can always go back.
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