Expansion speculation will be a bit more relevant in a month when the media blitz occurs at E3.

http://www.bosskillers.com is good for rankings now, they seem to do a good job with updates. I find http://www.mmo-champion.com a better source of info now than WoR, lets face it, very little changes in WoW raiding so either of these sites will provide updates if you visit once every few days. I just hate the layout of WoR, feels like a myspace page.

I don't think Blizzard has any WoW related announcements at this years E3.

I thought the E3 rock star event was done away with. If they have something to announce I don't think they will be waiting for that time of the year, just waiting until everyone has signed off on the announcement.

E3 had a major re-structuring and will not be nearly the same scope as it was in previous years. It's now a way smaller event.

Everyone, including raiders, said TBC was a great success the day we hit 70. Only when we settled at 70 and started doing raids and other top-level content did we start hitting issues: untuned raid bosses, gear balance, etc. That's exactly the same thing that happened with WoW 1.0, where everyone acclaimed the 1-60 game for being fun and exciting, but at 60 the whines started about BWL not coming fast enough, gear being unbalanced, etc. Same issues, only now that a lot more people are veterans of how to play a MMO, and the fact that we only have 10 lvls instead of 60, we are hitting them much faster. I personally think we won't see a mass exodus, people are going to keep playing, maybe less than before, with some people canceling for a few months. But if the next expansion sounds as exciting as TBC did, and if any company can make a product sound exciting its Blizzard, then people will buy it, because after all TBC was a success, at least the bulk of it was.

The content that Blizzard has put forth in the game is by no means boring. Most of the boss fights are pretty unique. On the other hand, there are some encounters right now that are completely halting progression which is unacceptable but not unbelievable. Vashj is broken, her stage 3 mind control can completely destroy a raid in a matter of seconds but aside from that, the encounter is fine. There are however, some fights in The Eye that seem untuned. I'm not going to say that they're impossible because as soon as I do, it's going to be killed.

Nevertheless, I really don't see a mass exodus away from WoW. Blizzard has always made amazing games. Blizzard has shown that they can make some truly amazing and enjoyable content, just look what they did with Nax. I personally believe that Blizzard is going to revive that design because they now understand that it is things like Nax that keep their raiding player-base happy.

edit: Yeah, I forgot to mention, the equally interesting yet non-epic-dropping non-bosses is also another main problem aisde from the clockblocks on certain bosses though after what Tigole mentioned, I have faith that they're going to make the needed changes.

It's still a media event just not opened to the public or supposed to be about the booth babes.

I don't believe it was ever open to the public per se. In any case, starting in 2007 it's going to be a much smaller-scale event--from the Wikipedia article, "As of 2007, E3 will be invitation-only, meaning that instead of around 60,000 people at E3 there will only be 5,000. "

Yeah the boss killer rankings are terrible. Curse is apparently world 11th or some nonsense. Karazhan kills mess it all up, and half the guilds I know aren't even listed.

So its been a week now since Nihilum has killed him and afaik no one else has, is this the longest in WoW boss kills between first and second? Is anyone else even trying to kill Vashj? Just curious how the next 1-2 months are gonna drag out, since it doesn't look like Blizzard intends to tweak Vashj (or SSC) anymore until patch 2.1.0

I believe there was a fairly sizable gap between the first and second 4H kills. I think it was <around> a week IIRC.

Unless I'm missing something, they haven't killed her again either. By their own admission she glitched out somehow and lost a bunch of health on their kill. Whether or not she's "impossible," she's clearly very badly untuned at this stage.

Not that we are on her yet, but I imagine it being difficult to motivate people to work on a boss that is very likely to get changed.

Motivating people to work at anything resembling a Nihilum-level of progression seems so mind-bendingingly impossible to me, that who can say why they raid at all?

Eh? It's not like they raid 24/7. I'm not familiar with their raid schedule but if I had to guess it would be 6 days a week ~7 - 12am which isn't uncommon for high end raiding guilds. I myself recall raiding that much back during Naxx, but then again the motivation of loot and 'server firsts' was more prevalent.

No...

As has been discussed there is still an E3 its just been toned down a lot and can't just go hey I got $200 and get a pass for E3 anymore no matter who you were. E3 will be on July 11th-13th this year in Santa Monica.

And the people who goto PAX really aren't the same group of people unless a ton of media people show up as well at PAX (which might be possible). Its more of anything a bunch of gamers which wasn't what E3 supposed to be about.

Anyways you can read all the info about E3 at http://www.e3expo.com/



On Lady Vashj, its not like she's a simple boss and as has been said she kinda just fell over dead hence why she respawned on top of them. Hell, it appears possible to bring her from 70% to dead by repeating a certain bug multiple times (we've accidently seen it occur twice in a row and understand how with some weird stuff you could repeat it even more times).

Really really OT, but the downtown LA successor to the E3 media circus is http://www.eforallexpo.com/

Sorry to resurrect this thread but in earlier posts it was said that the nether vortex that dropped for some guild off a trash mob was probably a fluke. Last night we were clearing the trash around lurker and one of the caster nagas dropped one for us. I did not take a screenshot but I will try to grab one from a fellow guild member as proof.