You can't really trust those sites because they are mostly self-reported, but it definitely does seem like the proportions are correct. I see the EU guilds quite dominating over the US ones. It just may be that the EU guilds are boasting more of their accomplishments, however.

People are rushing to get videos out to make their claim to fame. The funny thing about it is that we've had a couple of top 10 kills (or close, never can be sure) and we've actually been able to view what the fights were beforehand both times. It's really amazing how transparent the raiding scene is now.

Historically, people don't even mention bugs unless they make it harder.

Maybe. I think there's ample examples of people reporting bugs that make an encounter easier and those being fixed. From day 1 BWL to Fankriss with tauren tanks to kiting Patchwerk -that was reported in video, for God's sake- to Gruul and immunity to shatter (albeit you could call that a change of design decision rather than a bug).

Especially if I expected other guilds to see the encounter before its fixed, I know I'd mention if it turned out there was an obvious easy-mode bug, if only so that when those guilds got there they wouldn't turn around and say "ROTFL, such a hard fight amirite guys? That phase 3? SO HARD".

The "only 4 vials" thing seemed terrible when I first read it, but in reality, from the way it's being presented, you probably are going to want to farm the "Raid 2" content for a while to help in Hyjal and/or BT (at least most guilds).

Oh wait, I guess that's assuming the drops in the zones are clear upgrades............

Gonna go with Praet on this one: as each week passes w/o 2.1, the expectations of what it will deliver grow even more.

edit to add hyjal

edit2: And on the reporting bugs thing. Bugs that make things easier are brought just as fast as ones that make things harder. Gluth insta-kill anyone?

Does anyone know if they manager to kill her again?

Using Gluth's devastate(the attack that drops everyone to 10% life) on the whole zone, thus murdering other bosses was the best 'beneficial bug'.

With all due respect to those playing devil's advocate and comparing the game to vanilla.

It isn't vanilla anymore. We should at least expect content tuned as well as what we have seen in the past. This game should do better than EQ in terms of content, and better than Naxxramas in terms of testing. It should do better than AQ40 in terms of trash. It should do better than pre-buffed tier 1, pre-buffed tier 2, or nexus shard AQ40 in terms of loot... This is called basic History 101. Why does the study of history exist? Why do we even care...
Anyway, SSC fails all of those checks, most of them it fails so horribly that people are leaving 2+ years of solid end game raiding. You're now losing people who tolerated the AQ40 lull (where some guilds had attrition rates that just gibbed them inside out), people who tolerated the post KT lull. I mean how much abuse do people have to take in raiding? Fixing shit like this is not that difficult. People on these forums had viable Gruul fixes that weren't just random or reckless almost 2 months before they were put into play. I just can't understand how a business can get away with such slow progress. I don't buy the whole nonsense about "but it takes time." Bullshit. Nothing takes this long unless it orbits a star.

There are many major issues with WoW at the moment. They need to give someone with a clue the power to simply override all this terrible decision making and lay the hammer down. There are countless issues. 2.1 won't even begin to address the problems.

I would imagine most of the encounters in the game are currently not working as intended, and not tuned, and not finished. Just because they're loaded on the live servers doesn't mean they're "ready to go." Its a marketing trick. I don't consider the current set of encounters to be more content in raiding than WoW vanilla had... I don't consider this progress over Naxx, and I don't consider any of this acceptable or reasonable. Devil's advocacy should pertain to something within reason. I mean come on, 4 keys? Why not just go back to 1, cause that worked for the onyxia key chain? Oh wait... No lets do twice the drakisath number AFTER being fixed, and put it on a 1 week CD, instead of 3-4 times a night.

7 weeks is the bare minimum to key up a raid. Realistically you're looking at 10 to 12 kills before a guild like mine (which has very low turnover), would be in there. Hell I think we have keyed more than 3 people for every gruul, and have maybe 8 frags on him by now.

Couldn't stand to read the entire thing with the awful typos and formatting but I saw enough to get the general idea.

I wonder what changed between then and now since I recall Awake coming here and telling us all that loot is fine and l2p.

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...028#post295028

I'd imagine that wiping to a buggy and mistuned boss for dozens of hours will change one's perspective in a hurry.

Well, yes, I'm sure it would...my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Still, though, it's not like the rest of zone is well itemized with the exception of Vashj.

Isn't WoW at about the same age and maturity of an MMO when EQ started to show some serious signs of problems? Actually, perhaps we're on an accelerated pace.
Are we expecting too much? I can't for the life of me accept that. Perhaps the devs are playing the game instead of working on it? I just don't know. Perhaps its too big of a monster, and any changes have to be pipelined like a government, with all sorts of red tape. Perhaps they really think the gruul nerfs had to be thoroughly tested... Surely Vashj respawning would've been noticed within the first 5 minutes of testing her on a live server...

Edit, just read awake's rant... far better than anything I could have said; and more pertinent and clearly emotional due to their situation.
They down Vashj, and thats the reaction - not elation? Thats a big problem.

thebuddha, if you are bored, feel free to correct the grammar/typos in my post and PM it to me. English is not my first language, plus I really couldnt care less if there's some typos and grammar mistakes. Personally I like the formatting our website has, but each to their own.

As for the comment about me changing my mind? What I said is still mainly how I feel. But please, Karazhan quality loot from Lady Vashj is absolutely retarded. Not to mention Vashj herself is.. well, you can read my news update.

It's perplexing.

I don't doubt that post-Kara raid content and heroics were the very very last things to be finalized in the TBC production cycle. I mean if I were the guy setting the priorities, it'd be tough to suggest setting them differently -- obviously polishing the leveling content that people will see, and upon which they will base their opinion of the expansion, right away, is more important than the raid content. And sure enough, if you'd polled WoW players on February 1st, you'd have found nothing but unbridled optimism and enthusiasm about the expansion.

The question is, simply, isn't 2 months enough to polish what couldn't be polished on release day? It seems like it should be. If they've been devoting any resources to Black Temple while SSC/TK/etc. were anything short of near-perfect, that's a huge mistake.

It's beyond stupid that they are still trying to get Black temple out the door as priority #1 now.
Getting in what they promised for release ASAP is one thing, but this is crossing the line; damage control mode should have kicked in about three weeks ago.




Edit: and it's especially pathetic when they knew that they had a 4-vial-drop cockblock to even get into the raid instance *below* Black Temple in the progression cycle.

To Praetorian:
Thats the thing! Look at how wonderful TBC is... until you get to raiding. And there it is just a disaster. It just doesn't make sense at all. It has been a long time since launch as well, at least IMO.
Although, I will admit I love a few of the encounters in TBC. Magtheridon, Tidewalker, Fathom lord... but I guess we only have a couple left before we're boned now. I also wonder how long before most guilds ever get to experience this stuff. We also purposely waited on a few things since it was so obvious it needed tuning. Still, even for those still making progress a lot of the points awake made are pertinent... namely: loot, and tuning; and i'd add trash, but w/e.

I've become so acclimated to trash and such that the original Magtheridon trash I bitched about to my guild now feels like a welcome release.

It was an effective rant, grammar or not. It'd be meaningless out of context, but coming right on the heels of the world first on the first major endboss of a TBC raid zone, it says a lot. Congrats on the kill -- in some ways it's more than just a world first; it's also an important moment in the course of the expansion, and I think your experience with Vashj is going to open some eyes and force actions to be taken.

I don't think that the 4 vials/kill is a serious issue, by the time guilds progress to Kael they'll have more than enough vials and will still continue to clear the zone if the loot retuning is done properly. Now if Kael only drops 4 of his piece...

Also, I can confirm that Nether Vortexes DO drop off the SSC trash, although I've only seen one. This was about a month ago, maybe it's been changed since then.

I'm still holding out faith that SSC will have its bugs addressed and its loot actually made worthwhile. They managed to do Nax right, and there's no reason they can't bring the TBC raid zones up to par.

I don't think "fixing" loot will be so trivial. There is the huge concern of how to balance PvE items against PvP ones.

Wonder if Vashj jumped out of a cardboard box and said something witty when she respawned. hmmmm

I wonder if inherently one of the problems is getting it implemented in the first place? You know SSC isn't right. I know it's not balanced in any way, and my info is second hand. BUT, if you have something that's standing so players can enter it, management is going to have the rank and file leave that part alone because there's something *else* they promised which doesn't work to the point you can't zone in. Go go management.

I understand that reaching the perfect balance on the first release is a foolish dream, but if Nihilium is effectively testing the encounter, what has their actual QA/Testing team been DOING? Someone clearly decided "good enough" was in fact good enough, when it wasn't. Also, QA should also be evaluating loot compared across instances. What a joke.

This brings up a clear point - it's not really a gaming company anymore, it's fully become a bureaucratic software company. This means someone's going to have to own up to this FUBAR, and it ought to be expected that it not be repeated. Is this reasonable? Sure. Is it likely? The pragmatist in me is laughing his ass off at that one.

I've not really been in a rush to get back in to the raiding scene for that reason. I love the teamwork, I love the challenge, but there's no tangible gain. Someone at Blizzard needs to learn the old adage "Honey and a stick works better than a stick alone."

Edit: Re-reading the other posts, I can just picture a tauren beating Vashj growling "God damnit! Why don't you stay dead?!"

In Awake's rant he mentioned Astromancer, a fight I don't think I've heard a single word on. Can we get some info on it? Is it bugged? Too hard with current gear?

Well, here's the thing with the 4 vials/kill:

1) More than anything else I've seen in WoW, it looks to me like an artificial bottleneck to keep people out of content that may be unfinished. With this system, even if Blizzard completely completely fucked up tuning on SSC and TK and Vashj and Kael were both pushovers, it'd still take until May or so for a guild to get a real raid into Hyjal, giving them time to finish it.

2) It drastically elevates the "30-man core with 90% attendance" guilds over the "50-man with attendance ranging from 100% to 30%" guilds. Prior attunements were one thing -- it took us three weeks to get enough people into Gruul kills to field a real SSC raid, whereas smaller guilds with a higher average attendance did it in 2 kills. But here, the bare minimum is 7 weeks, but in reality, for a guild that really needs a pool of 40+ to consistently be able to field 25, because they simply don't have dozens of 90%+ attendance players, you're talking months of extra farming.

It is the extent of the problems/bugs that annoy me. In a world where Lady V stand-alone needed some fixing (encounter, loot or both) I think it would be worth critique. It would not be game-breaking in any way though. It is once again the compounded picture of problems that makes at least me quite down with regard to the current state of end-game WoW.