BC Raiding in Review

The BC raid content is for all intents and purposes done. Blizzard has stated previously "There will be no 2.5." Whether they hold to this or not we will see. We can now evaluate BC's raid content and see where Blizzard can improve going into WotLK. There may be some overlap in these points, but I think they are distinct enough to warrant separate discussion.

Trash

In general trash in BC raiding is less of an annoyance than pre-BC. Gruul and Mag follow the Onyxia design and work well for what they are. I only got a glimpse of pre-nerf SSC/TK trash, and I think its nerfed form is the correct level of difficulty for the tier of content they are. There is maybe a bit more trash pre-Lurker and pre-Leo in SSC than there needs to be, but in general it's pretty well balanced. Hyjal presented its own challenge, and while the way the trash was handled makes learning time consuming, fortunately the bosses are generally straight forward enough that it never becomes too much of an issue. It might have been preferrable to allow 2-3 attempts on a boss before having to go through the trash again, but I would not be too upset if CT:Strat uses the same setup. BT trash is fairly varied, and there is notably more of it than in SSC or TK. It can be assumed that this was done due to it being the "top" instance (pre-Sunwell anyway), but is this valid? Does simply being the biggest instance of the expansion necessitate more trash? BT could do with a bit less trash before Teron and Council. It is also interesting that Blizzard chose to have no trash before Vashj, Archimonde and Illidan, but to put a significant amount before Kael'thas. Was this decision to drive the already challenging level of Kael'thas even higher? To simply draw out the learning process even longer while they finished Hyjal and BT? It would be preferrable in the future if all final bosses stuck to the "No Trash" rule. They should rightly be more challenging than anything before them, and the lack of trash helps to keep the learning process less frustrating.

Related is Trash Drops. This was a huge improvement over pre-BC raiding, both in the quantity of drops being far greater and including more best-in-slot items.

Boss Encounters

Here is a big source of the common complaint of BC raiding being a step backwards from Naxxramas.

Naxxramas boss encounters included an amazing amount of innovation. Brand new mechanics not seen previously in WoW. Most BC bosses are commonly described as "Pre-BC Encounter (Rank 2)" or a combination of 2 pre-BC encounters. We can only speculate why Blizzard chose to re-use so many mechanics in BC, but this is an area where WotLK needs to improve. Blizzard should swear off some over-used mechanics for WotLK raiding. At this point Blizzard needs to avoid re-using directly any mechanic which we first saw in MC or BWL. In Hyjal and BT we have seen good alterations of those mechanics. In particular, there should be no more Resist Fights that require one or more members of the raid to load up on gear that is only useful for this single purpose. It is not interesting or challenging and simply an annoyance. On a similar level, bosses which are immune to any school of Magic are not interesting and making Mages waste 126g/week on Al'ar (or Illidan for that matter) and making Elemental Shaman useless for half of Hydross are not interesting or challenging, simply annoying. Giving the mobs Resistance to these schools would at least give Spell Penetration a purpose.

WotLK instances need to continue to innovate. Re-use can be done well, but I think in general it was overdone in BC and this was a big source of disappointment. Instead of encounters feeling new, many felt familiar.

Instance Design

The Airport Hangar designs of TK and SSC harkened back to MC. They did not feel particularly interesting or special. This was emphasized by them not being differentiated enough from the 5-mans that surrounded them. More effort needs to be spent on making the raid instances look and feel interesting. Details are important here. Huge, expansive rooms cease to be impressive and interesting when the whole instance is made out of huge, expansive rooms. Hyjal's design was good, BT's was better than SSC/TK.

Itemization

The T4/T5/T6 token systems were much better than the T3 system requiring additional materials or especially the T1/T2 system. Especially T2 gloves. How many times have you heard your guildmate cry out in agony when Flamegor's loot was linked? But I digress. Switching up the class matchup for T6 was the intelligent choice, and should continue to be done. One can argue there is an "optimal" setup for how the classes should be matched up on tokens, but really, this is going to vary from guild to guild. So the best solution is to change it up every tier.

The multiple Tier sets for classes with multiple roles were also appropriate, though the itemization was hit and miss here, even moreso than elsewhere.

Itemization in WoW continues to be a problem. While I fully appreciate and agree with the fact that if every item is optimally itemized the game would be far more boring, that is no reason for items to be as horribly itemized in some cases as they are. It is perfectly possible and advisable to have varying quantities of sockets, damage, hit, crit, haste and even stats on different items, and avoid doing it in such a way that makes some items just utter garbage.

There is also severe disparity in the availability of certain types of items compared to others. As one example that is familiar to me, there are a ton of available Mage belts, but very few cloaks. An example of too much; Hydross drops a nice robe, and Vashj later in the instance drops one that is strictly better. Why both? Get rid of Hydross' robe, and put a caster dps cloak there instead. This is just one of many examples.

Additionally, while I appreciate the additional damage of an item like Hellfire-Encased Pendant, it makes little sense to give this item to Mages and then force them to respec Frost for the final boss in the instance, thus dictating that they should have the neck off of Kael'thas anyway. This shows that either the itemization team does not know what's coming down the road, or just a lack of big-picture consideration.

But perhaps the biggest problem with itemization is the tier sets themselves. While going to 5-piece sets was advisable, and probably a good decision -- and expanding it to 8 pieces the way it is done in Sunwell is also probably the best way to go -- the fact is that the set bonuses were a major failing of Burning Crusade. Your initial response may be one of bafflement, but perhaps you have forgotten. For me, in pre-BC raiding, one of the major things driving me to complete BWL (besides the encounters themselves), was that 8 piece Netherwind bonus waiting for me. Wow. Proccing Presence of Mind?! Are you serious?! To be sure, this is one of the coolest set bonuses, and not every class had this, but many did feel this way about their set bonuses. Nevermind the fact that the Netherwind bonus was only a 2-5% increase in DPS (depending on Frost vs. Fire), the coolness factor was and is huge. A straight 5% increase to DPS just does not have that same allure. Yeah, it's actually better, but it's boring. A lot of the set bonuses are either uninteresting or underwhelming, or both. The loss of interesting, fun set bonuses is a huge loss to people's enjoyment of raiding. The enjoyment of collecting your set and then unlocking that set bonus is a huge part of character progression. While the min-maxer in anyone who frequents this forum is happy with the 5% DPS increase, the little kid inside of us would rather have something cool happen when we launch a Fireball. Bring back sweet set bonuses, which are not only effective, but also exciting.

It can also not be overlooked how much the addition of Arena gear has dulled the luster of raiding gear. Yeah I might have the T6 hat, but some guy who does nothing but lose every week has one that looks pretty much just like it. They really need to have their own model. I'd recommend having a single PvP set for each class which changes colors between seasons, rather than recoloring the PvE set. Each progressive PvP season set could gain more particle effects as well for extra "Ooh-ahh" factor. This is another thing the min-maxer in us would like to pretend doesn't matter, but the truth is that it does.

Summary

The drop from 40 to 25 man is blamed for the lack of "epic feeling" of BC raiding, and there can be no doubt that having more people around does make it feel "bigger". But I think I've gone over some of the bigger problems with BC raiding, most important of which is the lack of innovation in encounters. There was some, but not enough. I think this is the single biggest problem. Encounters in WotLK should not feel like re-hashes. If they do, this same problem will plague WotLK raiding.

I doubt anything that I've said will make it to Blizzard. In fact, it is probably all stuff they already know. But I want to post it so that I can say "Hey, I tried to tell them." when WotLK comes out with any or all of these problems still present. I am a bit neurotic, and this way I can assure myself that it isn't my fault.

I will give Blizzard credit in one place. The drop to 25 man raids has accomplished the main thing that it was meant to accomplish; allowing more guilds to raid and to get further in raiding. I'm with the same guild I was with pre-BC. Pre-BC we got Nef and Twin Emps, but we barely got started in Naxx. "Naxx Night" became a running joke, because people would literally log off when it was announced. The reduction to 25 mans allowed guilds like mine to succeed in BC because we didn't need to rely on so many shitbags to have a full raid. We killed Illidan last night. Eight months late to be sure, but we did it. We'll be able to go to Sunwell. It would not be possible if we needed 40 people to raid, and I thank Blizzard for that.

edit;

Changed the title because I chose it before I started writing and I ended up attacking things from a Review angle rather than a "Going forward" angle as I had planned.