Got this in my email today:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/bcattunement/

A lot of it was already known but there some more info on the last steps for attunement. Some of their minimum levels are funny and some of their attunement chains don't seem right to me.

On a related note they posted some info about Mag and how they went to balance 25-man raids:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insid...agtheridon.xml

Nice find!

However I like to nit-pick the Balancing section of it xD

Something feels abit wrong there, especially considering around half of the final bosses in raids have been bugged/untuned.

You must wonder here, what exactly do they feel is tuned correctly? & didn't they have to patch in the requisite polish to SSL about 2-3 months after releasing it live in the game world?

I heard something like EQ2 has even worse polish.

Take the whining elsewhere please.

Good find, I especially liked the mag article, always fun to see how they're thinking.

You know what the attunement system really needs? A Gantt chart, that would be pretty interesting to look at. I might whip one up in Project later

This is frustrating, anyone who has reached 'phase 2' of mag will know that instead of anything complicated they just let all the abilities clash (you take damage and a debuff) and it 'counterspells' mag ... not improving the balance at all.
In my opinion this encounter is made hard by the 'gear check' on phase 1 and the coordination in phase 2 (and '3') - its made too hard when 1 person makes a mistake in a 5 man group (which you need 4 of) can cause 2-20k damage to everyone in the room leaving 5 substitutes, one of whom is tanking mag.

Sure lower group sizes allow for geater coordination and complexity. Relying on 80% of the raid doing something perfectly is harsh, if 5 people out of this 80% are somehow out of action then the encounter becomes impossible. I dont think any encounter has ever relied on such a high percentage of the raid being up, 15 out of 40 for huhuran - now those are more balanced dependacies.

I think this is blizzards new 'tuning' mechanic, how many people the fight depends on.
For example some SSC encounters depend on a certain number of tanks ( nothing new but still with a 25man raid make the encounter hard by reducing dps as the number of healers is fairly constant) and others depend on AOE classes

Clearly the intended method is to have druids chain NS-Rebirth in midair while mages chain AP-PoM-Pyro

Maybe that's the absolute minimum level the instance portal will allow in. It seems silly to list that number though, I agree.

You need a little more AFDB. This is obviously a mechanism to facilitate teleport farming

The minmum lvl for the vanilla wow raid instances are 51-55, it's just the lowest possible level you can enter the instance, it has nothing to do with when you can start making progress in it. They should perhaps make that clear, though.

Right, but how does a non-level 70 get to the zone in for those zones? =p

Perhaps a handy announcer explaining the task at hand would help?

You may be required to perform simple tasks, such as locating an exit. These simple tasks may be supplemented with insurmountable obstacles.

At level 65, the instance is floating in the nether and you can not fly. I suppose it's nice to have knees though. You can at least make it an extra few feet towards your destination.

Druids can fly at 68 right?

Certainly, so a Druid can do the TK instances pre-70.

I like that their are minimum levels for the instances, and showing the numbers was interesting.

I find the following line very interesting and telling:

I had been under the mistaken impression that with TBC, the gear reset, and the raid size change, that Blizzard would intentionally design their initial raid encounters to be straight forward and easy to learn. My assumption had been that their goal was to grow the raiding population and allow more people to experience at least some of the raid content for the first time.

Requiring a high degree of coordination from more than a few people in one of the very first raids strikes me as an odd choice. In addition from all accounts multiple learning attempts become very annoying due to the high respawn rate of the pre boss trash. These two aspects, heavily punishing mistakes made by a few, and making retries time consuming and boring, result in quick burnout and frustration for new raiders.

I had thought that I was part of the target audience for growing the raid game. Small friends and family guild, mixed skill level of players, never able to field 40 people, but capable of getting 25 together for a few hours once a week. To be blunt I doubt we will ever be able to finish either of the first raid encounters. We have players who will just never be able to achieve that level of coordination or class mastery.

I know I should not read too much into a few lines of text in a marketing blurb, but if the raid designers seriously started out in TBC trying to make the raids incrementally harder than raid fights in pre-tbc they will gain very few new raiders. Which if you ask me makes the raid size change, and the gear leveling, all rather odd.

Yep, that line is the line that made me wonder on that page what the hell was Blizzard thinking. I believe there is a place for 25 man Raids harder than Naxx but the first 25 man raids wasn't where they belonged.

At least it explains why the fight is the way it is.

No, I believe they alluded to the content being "legacy content" and something done for fun/free time.

Magtheridon is not 'that' hard to execute, neither is Gruul. Just the numbers are a bit too high for the current gear. It's just a reiteration of Loatheb healing, razuvious mcs, old days' razorgore.

We are very well ahead of lucifron level, I dont think anyone would want molten core all over.

No, I don't think so. I think they expect new raiders to learn the necessary skills in 5-mans, heroic 5-mans, Karazhan and the finally at Maulgar. Doing these is easily within reach of the 'casual' player. And tbh, I think someone doing these learn far more than they would in MC or BWL.

Also, 'new' raiders don't enter the game in vacuum. They will join up with experienced people, or at very least talk to such people, and will gain a lot of knowledge through this.

I agree that any raider pre-TBC is far beyond lucifron. My point is that the smaller raid size, and gear rest, seemed to point to Blizzard attempting to grow the raiding population. In order to do this however you would need to make the initial raid groups a slow learning curve. This idea is nothing new and multiple threads here talk about this. I highlighted that statement though as it is one of the few insights we currently have into the why behind the design.

If the design is for incremental difficulty beyond pre-tbc this means brand new raid groups will be a very rare thing. Before the expansion we had the skill to clear molten core, we just never had the numbers (we were forced to run with other groups which caused a large number of other problems), so we stuck with ZG and AQ20. After the expansion we have the numbers to run a full raid, but we lack the skill.

Having 5-10 players who basically suck (spouses, friends, siblings, etc) is not going to stop you from doing much of MC, it will however stop you dead in your tracks in TBC. That’s the designer’s choice though, I am sure the BC raid game will continue to be fun and enjoyable for all the current raiders once things are tweaked a bit.

Gruul/Mag are not excessively skill-reliant fights in the abstract. The mechanics are not "undoable" or anything. The error does not lie with "guy in giant circular arena, he tosses you." it lies with "any deaths of dps compromise the raid's ability to kill him. Hell, having a bad dps in raid compromises the raid's ability to kill" type stuff.

The trouble is that blizzard appears to be tuning for "25 people who prepared in non-intuitive ways beforehand and are all alive at the end kills him" instead of the more realistic "18 people alive at the end with minimal non-linear preparation" which would be a semi-rational place to start raid content if your goal is to have people who have never had to raid before pick it up.

Just tracking 25 individual friendly entities is overwhelming for a "new" raider.
Trying to understand "just your job" when explained in cogent descriptive english, is massively massively difficult for very smart capable players if they are new to the setting. This is very basic stuff that needs to always have a meaningful introduction. Sure, the super-hardcore and the veterans will blow through it, but you want to sell mary and jane a copy of your game, it helps to have some levels they can compete in. We don't need lucifron style fight mechanics, but we sure as hell need lucifron style tolerances.

Gruul (for a talking point) has too much HP, for whatever reason. This, when combined with a random element that is eventually going to fubar you and the progressively higher damage output, in turn makes the fight very very unforgiving to sub-optimal raid composition or preparation (see not stacking ranged dps or bringing all the dps consumables etc)

Taking a step back, it's not at all intuitive what you have to do to get into raiding in tbc. The breadcrumbs (such as they are) suck ass. How does timmy the new guy know where the hell karazhan is, etc. This in turn offloads all the work of "teaching someone to raid" onto the playerbase (no, it's absolutely not our job to do this - the game should teach you.). The amount of hidden information that is very very relevant to success in pve is pretty ridiculous. (By hidden I mean there is literally no reference to it in game in any meaningful sense, and the only reason we know about it (we being the community) is that some poor player slogged through, scientific-method-or-die like, and then was kind enough to share it with us.

I hope they plaster this attunement chart prominently on the launcher, and sticky it on the RD forums so there's some hope for the people who go looking. (Similiarly I'd love it if kadghar gave you a "I Sense a disturbance in the force" type quest to go to kara.

Ditto for the serpentshrine attunement.

Laying aside "omg so hard, I beat my manly bits with a mallet" type discussion - the progression in terms of "put circular peg in hole, success. add a hole. Try circular peg in square hole. fail. try circular peg in circular hole, success." type stuff is sorely lacking at 70 for anything but arena (where the playerbase + matching system feedback provide it).

There's a reason deadmines is great. It's incredibly well breadcrumbed and everything about it is well thought out in terms of teaching someone new to 5 man. I haven't seen any sign that something similiar is coming for 25 mans. That's really a shame.

It strikes me that looking at ZG and AQ20 is probably a fruitful angle of attack. If the intent truly was to broaden the scope of raiding, and allow the smaller groups that can't muster 40 people to get into end-game content, then that's where they need to start.

If entry-level TBC raids were tuned to be incrementally more difficult than Hakkar, Jin'do, Moam or Ossirian, that would be an appropriate "step up" for the supposed target population. Note that that's quite a larger step up from MC - if you're skill level lets you kill Hakkar/Jin'do, you can trivially take any fight in MC, given 40 people of that level.

So the question is how close they are to that aim. *Technically*, how difficult are the Gruul/Magtheridon/SSC fights? If you leave aside the attunement and gear check aspects of it (say you were given a pre-attuned character with sufficient gear) - could a ZG/AQ20 guild have a hope of getting into TBC raiding?

If not, why not? What are these people supposed to do? Stop at (the first half of?) Karazhan?