What do you consider these 'worst raiding mistakes' are? Just wondering if you are thinking of the same things as I am.

* attunements being completely overdone and ludicrous in scope
* drops from instances being functionally worse or the same as previous instances
* lack of blue -> epic upgrade path in raiding instances
* 40-man -> 10-man -> 25-man?
* difficulty scaling in encounters not being tuned to the 50th percentile, but rather the 99th
* consumables being ridiculously broken, and tuning dependent upon such (i.e. Hydross)
* trash being set to a fast respawn (why?) and being too difficult for its purpose
* testing being near nonexistant on numerous encounters (Vashj, for example)

We went from Naxx, which was (mostly) polished, tested, and PTRd ... to the absolute retardness that was the post-Beta Gruul. Making him difficult because DnT killed him is not a sensible reaction. Then you had Magtheridon, who was tuned too hard for his place in progression, followed by Hydross, which was consumable land.

And if you beat all that, you got to experience SSC trash ... oh joy.

Now you sum up some typical pre-2.1 issues.
I believe most people are aware of these.

I am curious about the pre-2.2 issues.
This list is shorter I believe:

- Shahraz quickly buffed and now taking an annoyingly long time to get tuned properly.
- Archimonde his abilities being difficult to deal with.
- Hyjal trash being dull and unrewarding (no reputation). Further contrasted by the rewards BT trash gives you (gems) but are unable to use by lack of Hyjal reputation.

We need a list of how long to say that 5 months per patch isn't okay? I just want to know before I write one.

Those are not just pre-2.1 issues. If the goal of reduced raid sizes was to get more people doing the 40/25 man content, they've failed miserably.

i could not agree more with you guys about the failure to make raiding more accessible.

Its considerably less attainable now as the progression depends on you doing a 10 man 1st, then you can go into a very steep learning curve of SSC where its way to hard for the very few rewards you receive.

Then you have TK where the end guy is one of the hardest encounters in the game, how is the game not broken if the hardest encounters are not last in the game? Especially when that encounter is a progression block for encounters which are called "free epics", basically Blizz works on making something stupidly hard then nerfing it over time as more people get to the encounter, which is why every man and his dog is just quitting, hitting walls of progression due to blizz seeing the top of top guilds defeating them saying its balanced is ridiculous, My guild only raids 9 hours a week (3 sets of 3 hour blocks) not 5 days of 5 hour raids (25 hours), the game should be balanced around people spending less time in raids.

They got it correct for PvP, But PvE needs far too much time investment and they won't change it and that is why I don't see myself continuing much longer. As stated:
Worse is when they are totally bugged and don't work, I work in Game dev, now I don't work on an MMO but there is no way we would ever release anything without our full internal QA making sure every encounter works, I don't know how big their QA is, but when the end boss of an instance just simple never works someone should be fired.... Unless the QA actually reports it broken and the producer doesn't care and releases it broken saying "We'll fix it later so its a blocker till then" And that type of attitude disgusts me.

Yes, but Naxxaramas wasn't release concurrently with Ahn'Qijag. At one point C'Thun WAS the last boss in the game.

I dunno...I think they need to get rid of Tigole. I think his "old school EQ" raider mentality is starting to the hurt the game for the people who want to enjoy PvE content but either don't have the mass amounts of time to put into the game or the desire to be a part of an organization that we all call a raiding guild.

The time required is definitely a problem. Trash timers are hurting the ability for raids to learn content at a reasonable pace. Blizzard's unfortunately too-transparent policy of nerfing raid content as time goes on in an artificial effort to usher guilds through raid zones at their predetermined expansion-release-date-guided pace is not a great solution, but at least they have methods that they seem to be actively employing to open up raiding as time goes on.

Don't you dare! :-p

This is how I think of SSC honestly. If AQ40 was required to key for Naxxramas it would have been a huge headache for a lot of guilds. I hated reclearing aq40 - that trash after huhuran/twin emps. It bothers me there is no backflag for BT/hyjal, but this is not necessarily in line with your comparison.

To be honest, how many didn't see that coming though? I was laughing at all the "Casuals win, reduced raid sizes mean epix for all!" threads that appeared on the WoW forums because I knew exactly what was going to happen largely because its a similar thing to what we were faced with doing. It didn't suddenly mean the "lesser players" (wont call them casual as they weren't all casual, they simply weren't good enough) would get full access to BT, it simply meant that guilds which had 40+ people were gonna trim out the worst players and kick them from the guild. People who slacked off, didn't prepare as much etc were first out the door come TBC in almost every guild, many pre-TBC guilds on my server imploded as a result, we were about the only alliance one on my server to actually survive the transition though the horde ones seemed to fare a bit better overall largely due to the reroll factor I presume. People who were in raiding guilds pre-TBC suddenly found themselves out in the cold and could no longer cling onto the coattails of the better players and thus overall the number of raiders I'll wager actually decreased a lot in TBC, especially if you exclude Karazhan.

Then ofc we had the mess that was raiding pre-2.1 and that alone probably caused a lot of people to quit the game or stop raiding and go pvp instead. Even post 2.1 the difficulty of many of the raids, even the "entry level" ones are pretty high especially in comparisson to pre-TBC raiding further excluding guilds from the possibility of taking "slackers" to raids, there simply isn't room for people who cant hold their own. That's why there's such a massive gap between the top and bottom end's of the progression ladder atm and it's largely due to the lack of available good players, the ones that are around congregate on the same guilds/servers and you see a massive gulf.

(Disclaimer, I'm retired)

One annoyance with smaller raid sizes is the simple thing we've seen where each individual is more important. Most people who read this will go, hey, that's a good thing, I'm a good player, we weed out the slackers. We all also know how it didn't quite seem to work this way. Personally, I believe the reason is purely statistical.

Let's say even good players make mistakes, especially after long sessions. It happens, but hey, not too often. Maybe you make a small error twice a month, and you raid four nights a week for five hours per session, so you raid 80 hours a month. That's probably not too far fetched from the readers here. :-)

Now, see, that means you'll make a mistake once every 40 hours. With 25 players, that's one mistake every hour and a half across the raid. And, well, if you read WWS stats and see how much time you actually spend in combat (usually well under half your raid time, but let's say you're efficient and spend half the time in combat), one combat error every 45 minutes across the raid. Ouch.

Errors would happen more often with 40 people, *but* the design of those instances made those errors acceptable. They didn't wipe you unless you were one of a few key players (or you were doing Thaddius, with friends). On Mag, how many key players do you have? Pre-nerf Gruul, everyone could easily wipe the raid. As everyone becomes important, anyone failing becomes a problem.

How come top end guilds still manage? Because enough hours, enough work, enough mentality manages to avoid mistakes to the point where you can progress.

Now, the funny thing, this doesn't mean that 40 > 25 or 50 < 2234, but it does mean that once a number is selected, the designers need to look at the implications between encounter design and raid size. Lowering the raid size *and* decreasing the amount of slack you provide is very hurtful for even good guilds.

Raid size as such is arbitrary. Encounter design can make 25-mans harder than 40-mans, and vice versa[1]. The important thing is to make encounter design fit your arbitrary number, and see what the general public wants, both socially and in the game play itself.




[1] Imagine pre-nerf Gruul scaled for 40 people. Each mistake from one person wipe the raid. Transfer all the problems of having everyone doing the job from 25 to 40 people. Welcome to Naxx on acid.

For me, the by far biggest headache is the fact that 2 x kara groups doesn't make 1 x "endgame" group (in lack of a better way to put it).

2 x ZG groups = 1 x BWL group
2 x AQ20 groups = 1 x AQ group

I just cant for the life of me understand how this is a good design change. Having 20 man beeing the max would've been so much easier to handle.

Yep the move from 10 to 25man was a lot more troublesome than anyone really expected and many guilds ofc still have problems with it. Most guilds will manage 2x10 man raids but will struggle to fill a 3rd yet they need to gear an extra 5 people up each time somehow and ultimately the 7 day lockout timer was a big problem in cases like that, it caused no end of drama when we were only fielding two Kara groups and had to leave people out.

Ideally they should probably on their own little progression ladder seperate to the 25mans similar to the way ZG worked, it wasn't a requirement to do ZG before MC but most did it anyway when it was introduced simply because it was easier to. Also gives some of the more casual guilds which have lower player numbers a sense of progression as well without having to expand into the 25man raids. Again something I hope they take into account when doing the new raids for WotLK and from the initial discussions they at least seem to be adding progression, just hope they make it more optional this time.

Would it have been impossible to make the encounters challenging without making so many of them dependent on the actions of so many players being mistake free? Perhaps it would have, I haven't seen but 5 bosses in SSC and 1 in TK.

But that said, in 40 mans if enough people were on the ball, things were fairly well trivialized.

I think this defies any easy solutions across the board. It's one thing to allow Magtheridon clickers to only need any 4 cubes to win the fight. It's another thing to place time limits on fights in order to make them sufficiently challenging execution wise yet allow them to be beaten with 3 dead dpsers.

This 10 vs 25 thing doesn't seem like it's set for fixing going forward. Perhaps it's time for guilds to adapt.

Worst raiding mistakes in the history of the game? I think someone has a rather short memory.

How about BWL not being on test resulting in pretty much every single boss being either horribly bugged (chromaggus is a good example) or *horrendously* mistuned q.v. disarmable broodlord (easiest boss ever?), untauntable drakes (what the FUCK were they smoking?!), or how about the trash that chain summoned felguards? I'm sure you've seen the screenshots with 20+ felguards.

I'm actually *happy* that my guild got stuck on vael for two months (longest ever... don't ask...) so we didn't have to experience that bullshit first hand.

Or the C'thun clusterfuck that was discussed/exposed on these very forums if my memory serves me right. A boss being outright *unkillable* for months is IMO a much worse mistake than things being overtuned, but still doable.

The BWL mistakes were fixed much faster than that in TBC.
As for bosses being unkillable for months, what about Vashj/Kael?

In the time it took the devs to tune Vashj, the first players in vanilla WoW entered Molten Core, cleared up to and through ragnaros, then farmed for another 2-3 months, and then got a completely new instance, BWL - during which time Ragnaros himself went through at least 2 major iterations. We also had probably 3-4 patches from January 05 to June 05 including new BGs and tuning passes.

So far we've had 1 major patch in 9 months - and each step along the way has been delayed, delayed, delayed... raid fixes are at the mercy of content features no one asked for. Seriously, why doesn't that inspire a reaction of "what the fuck is going on here?"

The difference between these eras extends far beyond just simple boss tuning - the actual raid paradigm which is detailed already many times above.
TBC raiding has every mistake from the past, then adding in some scaling issues and a bit more. Its like the worst parts of every previous zone put in one fell swoop.

Exploitable Bosses, Check
Untuned/untested bosses, check.
Unkillable key bosses, we got that!
Loatheb, plenty.
Consumable issues... sure.
Itemization issues, you see the point.

I also do not understand why backflagging was removed. Devs seem to have forgotten their own words on this one.

I think it a large portion of all these issues reflect upon WoW not having the perspective of wanting between 25-33% of the population to reasonably expect to see all content. We currently have like under 5%, and has been that way forever as far as I know.

Many of the things we see go wrong would have been approached from entirely different angles, or simply not exist at all, if the focus of the Devs was to have as many players as possible "see the game". There is no clearer example of this than PvP stuff. The "reward for non-success" theme is continually found in all aspects of PvP from tokens for a loss, to arena rewards for losses, etc. By no means am I saying this is wrong (that's for another discussion) but I am saying that is not the approach given to the rest of the game.

Even if they had to introduce a "Heroic" system for all raid content, up to and including Illidan, that would at least allow a more reasonable percentage of the players to experience the game. Having such a huge portion of the Devs work go towards 2% (or less) of the population seems obscenely short-sighted. So 1 or 2 guilds blow through all the content because they put in a lot of time and have a large contingency of good players ..... so what. That should not be the primary factor in design, ensuring that to limit that small amount of players, 90% of the players never see said content. It's a primary philosophy flaw that permeates into all the other decisions in the game, continuing to be the source of most of it's issues.

The point you are discussing now is why the curve (in terms of time and skill requirements) is not linear from leveling, to 5-mans, to 10-mans/heroics, to early 25-man content, to mid tier 25-man content and to end tier 25-content. That curve has some very steep sections which results in players hitting designed walls. And if I would work for Blizzard I would spend significant time trying to identify the design elements that casue the steep sections of the curve from 5-mans up to mid tier 25-man content and try to do something about it.

I am not sure the metric that only 5% of the player base gets to see Illidan is a good one though. I do not see a problem with that.

Two interesting points in the last two posts.

The first is the "awared for loosing" aspect which all parts of pvp have been designed with to some degree or another (loosing in AV is more rewarding then loosing 3:0 in WSG).

The closest thing here is that you, theoretically, can chainkill trash in kara for months to get your epic ring without actually managing a single boss. It's hardly comperable though.

Lets not discuss wether or not this is good, but it's very interesting to think about when discussing raiding.

The second, to me, is wether or not it's "right" that only 5% (I've no idea of the correctness of this number but it doesn't matter) of the playerbase has access to all the content.

It's impossible to reasonably discuss that topic as people will have very different opinions. I'd be willing to bet though that most of the players who currently have access to the content thinks its pretty fine while the majority of the players who don't have access thinks it's too hard.

I've allways thought people should have access to say 95% of the contet if they're willing to put in some effort, this was pretty much what was the case pre-tbc with bwl and aq40 beeing fairly accessible while Naxx was (for me that is) a clusterfuck of consumable usage and required more time then I could devote. Fair enough, more power to those who could.

In the TBC world we currently reside in though, the equailent would have to be that TK & SSC where more accessible whilst BT and possibly hyjal was a bit more out there.

Really, Gruul's Lair should have been at least 5 bosses long - just for a 25man step-up from Karazhan. Retune SSC/TK a smidgen down. Create an item that somehow makes Kael'Thas a little (not alot) easier obtainable via faction with TK, but only at Exalted. So those who have been clearing TK for months and months will have a slightly better chance at killing KT.

The biggest arguement is that the learning curve is near vertical when going from 10-25man. I'll even argue that Karazhan is too hard for an "introduction" to raiding. Maybe make a 10 man instance ala UBRS that feels like a normal dungeon clear (only takes 2-3 hours 2 day reset timer?), but has a few raid mechanics built in just for an introductory raid zone. 1 relatively easy add fight, a tank and spank and a boss with 2 or 3 mechanics built up from 5 mans.

Everyone I work with is wearing greens and blues, they have a 1600 arena rating, etc - and I hear about the challenges they face and I realize that this is the majority of the WoW population. To them Karazhan is an impossible task - they can't even find a tank for Mana Tombs, much less Karazhan. Make raiding at all spectrums a little more accessible. They shouldn't have to go from T-ball (5mans) to the Minor Leagues (Karazhan). They have to do little league first.

Hmm? According to Bosskillers World of Warcraft Bosses, Guides, Movie Reviews and Guild Kills, at least ten guilds killed vashj within ~1 month of killing leotheras, and Kael was dead within a month of killing alar/solaian. best i can tell, c'thun (and, while we're at it, 4hm, kz, nef, maybe even rag?) were "unkillable" for far longer than any of the TBC bosses.

Are there really that many *unique* encounters in kara? Imo, many of the mechanics in kara are ramped up versions of mechanics used throughout the 5mans (and, actually, watered down versions of mechanics used in 25 mans). There are a few relatively stand-out moments (i.e., big bad wolf, aran, netherspite), but everything else is pretty basic.