So, lately we've been bashing our heads against Hydross. The fight itself is fun, the mechanic is new and the requirements are easy to meet. However one thing that takes most time of it all is the trash. Who doesn't love bog lords really, but having them on a 45 minute spawntimer... Isn't that overdoing it?

There's the same issue in Karazhan and Gruul's, I haven't been past Hydross and not even visited Magtheridon so I can't speak about that (I'm not even sure I should be speaking about this, there might be worse later on?). In Gruul's Lair there's this stupid respawn that actually walks into the door if you're a bit slacky.

Is it just me or is the TBC trash kind of killing off peoples motivation when it comes to raiding? Naxxramas was awesome, long trash spawn but somewhat challenging at first and the trash stopped spawning when you killed the boss following them. Am I the only one thinking this? How can 45 minute spawns for mobs with 1m HP, spawning adds with 250k HP when they die, be fun?

Apologize if this has already been brought up, couldn't find a thread regarding this.

We are doing that, but that's not what this thread is about either. Of what I hear the trash after Hydross is just the same, and there's even more of it >.<

This has been discussed a lot in other TBC raiding threads.

Basically, it is decidedly poor design. You will not find anyone, anywhere, who will defend the way trash has been implemented in the 25-man zones.

It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will address this issue in 2.1.

I hope they will. If they do not, there is going to be a massive torrent of complaints as more and more guilds get into SSC.

This is coming from an outsider to TBC trash headaches, but I do wonder if it's time to take a new direction with raid trash more generally. Obviously trash provides a time sink and a way to avoid doing nothing all night but beat your head against a boss. The usual solution to too much trash is to nerf its difficulty and respawn timer.

What about going the opposite direction? What if trash was made genuinely challenging and fairly long, placed on a 10-15 hour respawn timer so it only had to be cleared once a night, and dropped enough loot to moderately defray raiding consumable and repair costs? You could even include a few minibosses with more special abilities, and have them drop useful items at a low rate such that clearing all in the trash in an instance might net the raid 1-2 items a week.

You would still have the time sink; each night rather than kill boring stuff three times for 20-40 minutes you kill interesting stuff once for 60-90 minutes. You also still get the diversity in fights; trash would still serve as a warmup on the way to work on a boss for the evening. And you don't waste your flasks reclearing trash.

I can sorta kinda justify the trash respawn for Attumen by assuming that the trash is part of the boss fight -- in a weird kind of a way, it's a timer for Attumen himself. Phase 1 of the Attumen fight is clearing his trash.

But then we hit Moroes and I couldn't fool myself any longer.

I don't really have any problem with Karazhan trash. There isn't all that much of it between any given boss encounters, you can skip a lot of it, and it's all tied to bosses in a logical progression. It's also highly varied, and you aren't really doing the same pull 20 times in a row.

Apart from the "drop cash" part, you just described the Twin Emps -> C'Thun trash, which everyone hated. To a lesser extent, the Huhu -> Emps trash. The point is that interesting trash is only interesting a few times. Colossi and Flayer packs were actually excellent trash mobs. They required a decent plan and good execution, but when you were fighting them for hours, it sucked.

Trash serves a double purpose in most zones:
Prepare you for upcoming bosses by using similar abilities.
Timesink.

The timesink part is something everyone hates, which is why it should be minimized. Keep 4-5 packs between each boss, each taking 2-3 minutes to kill, and make it not respawn, ever. Progress will be slightly faster, but enjoyment will be up a ton.

BWL still owns the crown with respect to trash in instance design.

Entry: No trash to boss. Then a mini-sequence trash to Vael, which as a neat chase character and doesn't feel like trash clear. Then 2 somewhat interesting packs after Vael. Then a gauntlet, which by its gauntlet nature didn't feel like an honest-to-good trash clear. 2 packs to Firemaw. Then the only longer stretch of trash clears in the instance, with 5 techie packs and 2 Draconid packs. Then without intermediate trash: Ebonroc and Flamegore. Just 1 trash pull to Chromaggus and no trash to Nefarian.

And still way better cash per clear than any instance in the game.

BWL should wins many categories in terms of instance design. While it does have a gauntlet, it's not as tedious or frustrating as others, especially as the Boss linked to it is arguably the easiest in the zone.

No trash respawns except for the gauntlet too. Anyone got any clue why Blizz left the design philosophy that made BWL?

In some sense I felt respawning trash was Blizz's way to let locks restock shards, but shard consumption is down since TBC thanks to the 10-for-1 HS dispenser.

It's going to take a lot to get Blizzard to change this though Prae. It was a gigantic design decision to switch to 1 hour respawns when no other dungeon had anything like it. Which means that the entire idea is the baby/brainchild of a senior designer somewhere. The problem with that is, when a design decision comes from that high up, it's very hard to get a designer to admit they were wrong and completely change it, as you do lose a little bit of face when you have to do a 180 on a decision (that probably had some internal conflict in the first place on making it).

Best example I can give of this being an issue would be original meeting stones. A completely god awful idea that had no shot of really working. However because it was some senior designer's baby, it stayed in the game for *far* too long. Trash repopping in instances will be much the same.

It doesn't bug me -- I mean, it's fairly rational and not hard to deal with. But it was definitely a signpost saying "our design philosophy on trash respawns changed a fair bit."

The AQ40 Supertrash would've been fantastic if Blizzard just reduced their number to about, oh, 20% of what was actually there. Hell, even the normal trash that came before the Twin Emps was about twice as long/populated as it needed to be. Pre-Huhuran trash packs? The Fankriss tunnel? Skeram to Sartura?

That stuff was hard to swallow when you had what seemed like the perfect balance of trash/bosses in BWL (after the atrocity that was MC, of course). People might complain about the Suppression Room, but that was just part of the boss encounter really. And the Lab Packs seem long but when you consider that they're the aggregate trash for 3-4 bosses almost entirely in a row, you don't mind as much.

Naxx was a fantastic mix of trash and bosses. The trash was hard but not too long, was never more difficult than the bosses themselves, and there was a lot of variety. And a lot of the trash made sense, like the Gargoyles before Noth - if you can't kill those, don't bother trying to kill Noth.