I may be alone here but I found BT to be disappointing look/feel wise. The music is decent, but the atmosphere/look (at least up to Teron) is IMO very weak. I think Blizzard rotated in a bunch of new artists for/after TBC so they haven't really come up to par with previous raid instances. BT is very 1-dimensional in the gfx department - the first area is mostly green, the second is all brown, the third is black, etc.

It also feels like a mashup of previous instances/raids instead of really something new. All the way up to the first boss you keep thinking "umm... so kind of SSC/Slave Pens, with just bigger monsters".

The voice acting is good though, they put in a ton of new voices in 2.1 all over the place. The music is decent although most people turn that stuff off in raids after a while. I've seen now pretty much 90% of the trash and bosses and IMO graphically they are all fairly substandard, just riffs off stuff we have seen before.

i will be the first to say if trivial trash is all there is, keep it coming, trash is a necessary evil but it shouldnt be so difficult that even "mastering" it will guarantee at least 5 deaths (pre c'thun trash).

but about bosses, im quite surprised the clever mechanics of some bosses, and other bosses are previous boss's abilities thrown together. tbh, considering the range of abilities and the huge amount of bosses this game has done to make each one relatively unique, it is kinda hard to make a completely new and unique boss. example: i love the polarity shift on the heroic mech boss eventho its thaddius's signature ability.

I was very ready to make a commentary about how remakes and rehashes are what a lot of people want in today's society (read: Hollywood/gaming remakes and sequels), but I'm going to spare the bore. Instead, I'd like to ask who didn't find the fact that the final encounter(s) of Arcatraz amusing at the very least? Going "hey, that's Shazzrah" or "oh shit, Skeram" brought a smile to my face the first time I fought it.

Thaddius/Capacitus is a great example, too--it's something you've seen before, but in a new atmosphere (40man vs. 5man) and it becomes a bit of a different fight in that regard. Some of the 5 and 10-man encounters being revamped for 25-mans and made more deadly could be fun. For example, Teron's sounding similar to Jin'do's, with a bunch of extra twists and potential fun for everyone.

I'm curious as to how many HP the hostile shades have?

And I'll just make this one final comment, since I don't want to derail:

Of course, if you create itemization that doesn't include the key stats for one build, another build will do better on damage relatively. Saying "nuking does a lot of damage when there's a lot of crit on the set, and dotting doesn't perform as well" certainly isn't surprising in any way.

But I and many other locks had been quite happy with what happened in 2.0 (debuffs plus the dotting changes) since we could play with a style other than "mages who don't have poly but have banish instead." I have nothing against the destruction playstyle, I just prefer affliction -- and affliction had been designed, with 2.0, pretty aggressively to be the big raiding tree. Affliction has with pretty much all the raid talents (imp cow, malediction, shadow embrace, dark pact) -- so marginalizing it as a poor dps tree leaves me scratching my head.

And having it marginalized by "simply" itemization decisions is even more perplexing. It seems far less purposeful and more on the negligent side. (yes I know there's precedence with druids.)

By the same token, that screenshot with the 50 +shadow dam and spell hit cloak (I think that was the german translation) leads me to believe that affliction will do fine in the hands of warlocks that collect the necessary pieces. It's not like the current affliction warlocks are running around in full T4 for optimal dps, why should T5 or T6 be any different?

We ventured on the PTR (EU, pve) today as well. Our setup was a bit mediocre (6 priests, 5 shamans at some point :P) and we had to get some pickup guys as too many guys were not interested but it turned out to be fun.

The trash is on a 2h repop, before the first boss there's some annoying elementals on a 30 min timer, but 2h for the big pulls. One trash group frustrated us a bit, but after a few pulls we got past that too.

Also we had a very nice trash drop, this 1h mace:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/4902/macewh9.jpg

Random gems seemed to be quite frequent drops as well, we got three or four.

The first boss, High Warlord Naj'entus, didn't seem all THAT hard, if there's not something difficult happening later in the fight. He does some aoe stuff that requires the raid to be spread somewhat, he throws a thing at random guys that needs to be picked up and used against him. Also more then 8500 hp is very much needed. :P

We just started to get a hang of it when a friendly GM showed up and spawned this dude here:
http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/9...skataurub4.jpg

The next attempt the poor boss got touched to death, dropping this:
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/8...ordlootsj7.jpg

After that I found myself kissing the floor here:
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2344/gurtoggmp8.jpg

The GM had killed all the trash up to Gurtogg Bloodboil and teleported the rest of the raid to him shortly afterwards. We wiped on him about 45 minutes or so. Also a very cool encounter it seems. The boss is not-tauntable but you will have to switch tanks at some point (there might be an aggro reset though). After a certain time he puts a *your actions do not matter* debuff on 24 guys and a +30k hp on another, enrages and immediatly attacks that one dude. When the enrage wears off, the fight continues.

Apparently the GM had seen enough and killed the poor orc:
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/6...ogglootqf8.jpg

After that we got moved over to Teron Gorefiend:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/3...refiendgz6.jpg

All I know is that the whole raid better has a pet bar avaible for this fight. Also Mr Gorefiend had 4.6 million HP, I think I read that another raid encountered him with 6 million before, so that apparently got nurfed already.

The three boss fights we saw there all seemed interesting at least. Although if you hardly have to do any trash, I suppose every instance feels good. :P

Kaib, what is that loot mod you have? I have not beable to find it anywhere.

that's http://files.wowace.com/ - XLootMonitor.