We may as well start a threat on this since it did seem like an interesting topic area. The basic dichotomy is something like this:
1) In vanilla WoW, Blizzard released raiding content in a very staggered fashion. You had MC, guilds of various levels had time to finish it, then you released BWL, and so forth. For the top guilds, at the end of every instance you had a few months with no new content. You would basically farm it all, and take the rest off. If the upcoming instance was on the PTR, this gave those guilds time to dedicate some real raids there. Guilds farther behind in progression caught up simply because the top guilds had no where to go.
2) In TBC, Blizzard released almost everything simultaneously. Had a lot of the content been functional, top guilds would have likely been waiting for it, but as it was they weren't. Since the patch, however, the gap between tiers in raiding guilds has become incredibly obvious. On one hand you have Nihilum et al literally dozens of bosses ahead of quality raiding guilds, and multiple tiers ahead of many average guilds. There
I think it would be an interesting discussion here to talk about the merits of each approach, and speculate as to what Blizzard should do in the future. What is best for the raiders? What is best for their playerbase? What is best for Blizzard? I'll post some comments of my own shortly but I thought it would be useful to get a discussion going.
I think blizzard would have rather had the Vanilla raid content ready to roll out as fast as they rolled it out in TBC. But I'm not blizzard so I guess I don't know what they think.
<+kenlyric> people who say they want less complex games are just trying to cover up the fact that they are bad at games
Back when MC came out and DM was not a thought, had BWL existed, it would not have been possible without gearing up in MC. Hell, you could achieve some limited success going into Naxx with just MC gear. But you wouldn't get far.
Today, you can gear up in heroics and KZ and be fine through BT. The lack of the gear gap means that there is no longer a need to farm up as much. Attunements aside, I don't see a whole lot keeping the heroic/KZ group from succeeding in what are primarily execution fights.
IMO, Blizzard should do periodic instance releases, and only when the previous instance is sufficiently farmed by the top guilds.
It's pretty ridiculous that Nihilum is working on Illidan when there are only 25 guilds or so worldwide that have downed Kael'thas. I suppose that speaks more to the tuning of the encounters in Hyjal and BT versus Kael'thas than the simultaneous release of multiple instances, but still it's kind of absurd. According to bosskillers, there are a full dozen bosses worth of separation between the #1 guild and the #23 guild. Something's gone wrong with the tuning.
Releasing everything at once gave an interesting spin on approaching raid content once again. It gives raiders a sort of "long-term" view on what to aspire towards, especially now that everything seems to be in a pretty reasonable and attainable progression ladder for most guilds. I hope Blizzard doesn't start machine gun releasing raid instances to keep guilds like Nihilum happy, because if the progression looks too unreasonable to the more average guild, then goals become too far, and most people will lose their motivation.
IMO, Blizzard should do periodic instance releases, and only when the previous instance is sufficiently farmed by the top guilds.
It's pretty ridiculous that Nihilum is working on Illidan when there are only 25 guilds or so worldwide that have downed Kael'thas. I suppose that speaks more to the tuning of the encounters in Hyjal and BT versus Kael'thas than the simultaneous release of multiple instances, but still it's kind of absurd. According to bosskillers, there are a full dozen bosses worth of separation between the #1 guild and the #23 guild. Something's gone wrong with the tuning.
Not really, it's more the case that Nihilum *did* the tuning. They're months more practiced on the end game content (Hyjal/BT) than the rest of the groups are. Also, I'm quite prepared to believe the really are that much better. That's what happens when you have free transfers, and the best can recruit the best.
As for how well the approach works - I think it'll be interesting to see what happens to Nihilum during the period up to the next expansion. Will they still be playing WoW in 9 months when the next expansion comes out?
Originally Posted by Silmeria
I hope Blizzard doesn't start machine gun releasing raid instances to keep guilds like Nihilum happy, because if the progression looks too unreasonable to the more average guild, then goals become too far, and most people will lose their motivation.
Neswflash: it does already, and most of my raiding friends have. Having more than two raid instances between you and the top is hella demotivating. Right now, there's at least three and closer to 4 before you get to the median. We'll see how 2.1 affects it of course.
I think that in their 2.1 forms, Kara through SSC/TK seem to be about right. You aren't going to have the DPS to do Vashj or Kael if you aren't geared in epics from the t4 content and some t5 stuff. You need to gear up in Karazhan and Mag/Gruul to an extent -- no one is beating Kael in heroic gear and blues.
The problem may be not so much with the lack of tiered release, but rather simply with how BT and Hyjal were tuned. Or rather, not tuned.
Forgive the theorycraft here -- we should be in BT next timer, but in the meantime all I can do is speculate, and I encourage those with firsthand experience to correct me if I'm wrong -- but it seems like they simply undertuned the numbers involved in basically all the tier 6 content. I'd suspected this might be the case, but wanted to see how things played out on the live servers first.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that t5-geared raid groups on the PTR were killing most of the Hyjal bosses (easily), and the first half of BT (in the case of the organized raid guild efforts, anyway), as tuning was ongoing? And then, a week before 2.1 went live, Blizzard increased the power of everyone's gear by roughly 10-15%. This change was designed to make SSC/TK encounters that had previously required heavy potting more accessible, and doable for guilds under the restrictions of the new consumables changes. It was meant to equalize "old epics" + "2.0 consumables" with "new epics" + "2.1 consumables."
...except that BT and Hyjal had been tested and tuned for a month around "old epics" + "2.1 consumables." And they didn't go back and buff them after changing all the items. If you think about it, the gear that guilds used back in April to down Naj'entus, Supremus, Winterchill, and so forth, is strictly inferior to the gear that guilds are entering the zone with, on their first day. In the initial PTR build, we got premade kits of loot ranging from ilvl 110 to ilvl 125 (along with random stuff like Rejuv Gem). Today, any guild that's going into BT has ilvl 120 loot in most of their slots, going up to ilvl 138 stuff from Vashj/Kael. But they didn't retune any of the tier 6 fights after they buffed the hell out of the gear. Why not? What did they expect would happen when you took bosses that were dying, quickly, to any organized and serious raid group, and then gave players much better gear across the board?
The simple fact that guilds can go into Hyjal and BT with raids of 23, 22, 21 people, and kill multiple bosses, is a testament to the fact that Blizzard just plain got the numbers wrong, in a bad way. Guilds are going in with one Kael kill under their belts, most members of their raids with maybe two pieces of t5 gear on average (maybe a tank or two with 5/5 or something), and they're functioning as though they effectively outgear the encounters already. Likely because they do. As an analogy, was it possible to go into Naxxramas with only a couple of Nef and C'Thun kills under your belt, in mixed tier 1/tier 2/AQ gear, and kill some bosses? Sure. Could you kill Patchwerk? Yeah, with consumables and skilled play, and some luck, with extreme difficulty. Could you do it with 35 people? No way in hell.
Am I wrong? I'd be curious to hear from guilds that have been doing this stuff intensively for the past week. What I'm seeing, from an outsider's perspective, is fights that have some creative mechanics, but too much margin for error based on the numbers involved.
Query: If you can clear to Illidan in tier 4 gear, what the hell is the purpose of tier 6 gear? Faster farming clears?
Back when MC came out and DM was not a thought, had BWL existed, it would not have been possible without gearing up in MC. Hell, you could achieve some limited success going into Naxx with just MC gear. But you wouldn't get far.
Today, you can gear up in heroics and KZ and be fine through BT. The lack of the gear gap means that there is no longer a need to farm up as much. Attunements aside, I don't see a whole lot keeping the heroic/KZ group from succeeding in what are primarily execution fights.
I really don't think either of these are accurate. In the post-2.1 consumable world, progressing in Naxxramas would not be possible with a little bit of MC gear; not even with entirely MC gear. The gear gap in Vanilla WoW is extremely large between teirs of gear. Maybe buffed to the gills in the old-style way, but it's really not possible.
Similarly, in the post-2.1 consumable game, I don't think it's possible to simply run a few heroics, clear Karazhan once or twice, and think you're gonna be able to hit the ground running in the Black Temple. There is more gearing up that needs to be done. A tank with only 10 or 11k HP is gonna have a hard time taking Frostshock/Windfury combos from Tidalvess. There are plenty of other examples that mirror this.
And in any case, the gear gap is back in a way. Look at your tiered weapons. 80 to 90 to 100 DPS weapons. Healing weapons with 200 to 300 to 400 healing. You can't tell me that's not gear gap. These are not the only equipment slots where this is evident either.
As far as content and release timing goes, I think looking at Nihilum is the worst way to determine your schedule. My Guild has a few bosses down in SSC, and working on TK; I'd like to think that's average or a little below-average. It seems like with gear buffs and content nerfs, progression rate as a whole, across the WoW raiding scene is moving up. People are getting into the T5 instances at a good pace, and they've got content accessable to them in short order as they complete those instances. I think my guild is a month or two off of seeing T6 instances; probably a longer amount of time before we've really them cleared. I imagine there will be another chunk of content for us to bite into around that time, and that's perfect. Let Nihilum farm for a few months, it's the price you pay for being first. Another expansion? I hope it's not that soon.
Last edited by Lum : 06/04/07 at 5:08 PM.
Reason: Stupid enter button.
I used to think that the TBC approach was ultimately better, and perhaps it is in its own light. However, I honestly am starting to miss farm periods where we raid 2 days a week, decimate old content, gear up, and anxiously await the next zone release. I am quite honestly happy that my guild isn't blazing through black temple right now, I'm sure we will be in the next few weeks, but if we were there right now what exactly would we have left to look forward to short of the next expansion?
Anyway, I hope to see a mix of both approaches. I think if Blizzard had a new raid instance going into the game in say 6 months that was harder than BT that would be a reasonable time to farm out all the old stuff and wait for it, however as far as I know BT is the highest up raiding TBC will see.
Perhaps BT should have waited till patch 2.2, it certainly would have made more sense to fix all the existing stuff first before releasing new content, but hindsight is 20/20. All in all I can't complain about anything right now because its simply a good time to be a raider. My guild and I are having FUN raiding and as long as they keep it that way I could care less what their release cycle for raid dungeons is like.
I'm curious what the general opinion on the very top-end guilds' success is among the WoW team. Do they like having a few "rock star" guilds that give others something to aspire to? Do they curse Nihilum for pressuring them to release content at an accelerated pace to retain the "rock stars" and their marketing draw? I'm sure opinions vary wildly across the company, but it would be interesting to get a few candid quotes from Tigole, someone on the marketing team, etc.
On a personal level, I can't imagine Blizzard releasing a post-BT raid until the next expansion. What percentage of all raiding guilds have even one boss down in The Eye? 5%? The furthest progressed guild on Cenarion Circle has 2 bosses in SSC down plus Mag. At this rate, there might be 2 guilds attuned to Hyjal (let alone BT) by the end of the summer.
Without re-hashing the "What is the average guild?" thread for the billionth time, I really don't envy Blizzard's position regarding raid content. For the population of this board, yeah, running out of raid content before the next expansion is a real concern. For a great number of raid guilds, just getting attuned to Hyjal is a very long-term goal, and of course the huge casual population couldn't care less about any of it. I remember feeling pretty miffed (before learning the joys of raiding) when Naxx went live and I was still wiping in ZG. We all know the raid game was neglected at TBC launch, but Blizzard needs to be careful of overcompensating and alienating the "casual" masses again.
I like the new way personally. It really sets apart guilds having all the content laid out at front, whereas in WoW vanilla you had a race that began anew with each instance release 6 months apart. Now it is quite interesting to see how far some guilds can get compared to guilds that were fairly competitive with each other prior.
I also think the pace is entirely too frantic. It was nice in the old days to be able to keep up even while holding down a full-time job.
Unfortunately I'm inclined to agree. I was in my junior/senior year of college during WoW 1.X and I was always wishing that we had more content. Now that I'm working 40-50 hours a week I wish we had our breaks between content if only to recuperate a little bit!
Gurg, I suspect you are right about the tuning around unbuffed gear. It really does appear like guilds are outgearing fights their FIRST time on them which seems a little absurd. You mention Naxxramas and under-manning content. My guild killed c'thun the first night they fixed him and had top 10 on nearly every AQ kill due to our early opening so we started Naxx with as good of gear really as possible for the time. Sure since the first few encounters were tuned around twin-emp difficulty we effectively outgeared many of the first fights and our first kills on several (6-7) bosses were with less than 40 people, gothik included. Anyway I'm not trying to disagree so let me get to the point. Right now guilds should not be outgearing BT/Hyjal because its supposed to be a direct step UP in difficulty, just look at the item levels. The fights are supposed to be harder but they are seemingly not.
I like the new way personally. It really sets apart guilds having all the content laid out at front, whereas in WoW vanilla you had a race that began anew with each instance release 6 months apart. Now it is quite interesting to see how far some guilds can get compared to guilds that were fairly competitive with each other prior.
Heh, and it's back to the same dichotomy.
"X is good because it sets apart the ones that can from the ones that can't"
"X is bad because it sets apart the ones that can from the ones that can't"
Never the twain shall meet.
Let's just say that it looks to me as though Blizzard will end up with the worst of both worlds - alienated hardcore who have run out of content and face 9 months with nothing to do, and alienated softcore who see an impossible ladder laid out in front of them, which whould have looked much less daunting if it had been revealed more slowly.
You're right, the fights are really creative, some being completely different to anything seen before, they are fun, and people will enjoy BT, but it's also really easy so far. BT has only one hard fight which is Essence of Souls and one gear check Mother Shahraz, now if you don't have the resources of the top guilds you can definately get stuck on these bosses for a while just like guilds got stuck on Twin Emps and Vael.
Only Anatheron was buffed from ptr I believe but that's only because one of his skills weren't working as intended, im with you though, I don't think they took into account the buffs to tier 4 and 5 equipment near the end of ptr and didnt buff the bosses accordingly, Shade of Akama phase 2 seems to want to be a dps race but it's just too easy and you can outdps the shade with only 20 people.
Personally I like the way they release content now, it gives guilds alot more options and means when you dont have enough of a certain class you can go try the other instance on the same tier without having to cancel the raid.
There's value in allowing guilds to separate themselves through progression, but the trick is to do it so that they don't get so far ahead that it's demoralizing to the rest of the playing field. Releasing new instances every so often does this well -- the top guilds have had a bit more time farming the previous instance, but that's allowed a lot of guilds to catch up, and it's (more or less) a level playing field when the next instance is released.
The real problem with the current raiding is that Kael'thas seems to be the big bottleneck (and look we're back to arguments about keying requirements). Based on bosskillers info, once he's down the very next reset you'll have 8 or so bosses down in Hyjal/BT, maybe even without having a full raid. The tuning for the post-Kael bosses just doesn't seem to line up with his tuning, and you MUST down him to get to the rest. Like Gurg said, it just seems like the Hyjal/BT bosses are wildly undertuned, and folks are bottlenecking at Kael'thas.
I'm curious what the general opinion on the very top-end guilds' success is among the WoW team. Do they like having a few "rock star" guilds that give others something to aspire to? Do they curse Nihilum for pressuring them to release content at an accelerated pace to retain the "rock stars" and their marketing draw? I'm sure opinions vary wildly across the company, but it would be interesting to get a few candid quotes from Tigole, someone on the marketing team, etc.
I can't speak for Blizzard, but almost every hobby want a "rock star" type player. Or in WoW's case, guilds or arena teams. I don't quite understand why, but there's always a great deal of promotion on the face of the pinnacle of the game. For examples from another hobby, look at Magic: the Gathering's Pro Tour promotion.
On a personal level, I can't imagine Blizzard releasing a post-BT raid until the next expansion. What percentage of all raiding guilds have even one boss down in The Eye? 5%? The furthest progressed guild on Cenarion Circle has 2 bosses in SSC down plus Mag. At this rate, there might be 2 guilds attuned to Hyjal (let alone BT) by the end of the summer.
Without re-hashing the "What is the average guild?" thread for the billionth time, I really don't envy Blizzard's position regarding raid content. For the population of this board, yeah, running out of raid content before the next expansion is a real concern. For a great number of raid guilds, just getting attuned to Hyjal is a very long-term goal, and of course the huge casual population couldn't care less about any of it. I remember feeling pretty miffed (before learning the joys of raiding) when Naxx went live and I was still wiping in ZG. We all know the raid game was neglected at TBC launch, but Blizzard needs to be careful of overcompensating and alienating the "casual" masses again.
The raid content is very strange right now. Before 2.1 we had Hydross and Lurker down in SSC and they were both very annoying fights. Since then, we've killed a new boss or two on a daily basis (raiding three days a week). Looking ahead, we'll probably be killing another three new bosses this week in The Eye. Or if we don't have enough people attuned, possibly killing Lady Vashj. The current level of Tier 5 content (SSC/TK) feels about as difficult as BWL and early AQ40 was when those instances were new. I think most other guilds are experiencing the same rapid boss killing- with the right strategy and a good two to three hours of attempts, the boss is going to die (with the exceptions of Lady Vashj and Kael). In a couple months, the majority of the three-night raiding guilds should be working through Mt. Hyjal and Black Temple.
----
I prefer the old tiered release schedule, because it gave guilds a goal. Multiple people said "We beat the game" when we killed Nefarian, C'Thun, or Ragnaros back in the day. Now, it's strange because the content is so easy but there's so much of it out there. I honestly don't know what it will feel like in a month or so, but for now it's just different than it was in vanilla. It's not better or worse, and I won't be able to figure out if it is until I get to look back at it from the future.
I find it interesting that since the expansion the European guilds have very quickly taken the lead on breaking new content (Curse, Nihilium, Last Resort et al.) I wonder if this is because they have a larger player base that is at once mature (read over 18 maturity aside) and more free from work restrictions (damn you socialism) and are thus better able to keep up with the frenetic pace of BC raiding. I know my guild who pre BC was in Naxx is struggling to meet all the out of raid requirements (heroics keys ect) and still keep up a solid raid schedule while most of us work full time.
This could of course be pure pop-sociology on my part but an interesting trend none-the-less.
I guess after posting that I'd post this thread I should've expected someone to beat me to it before I got home from work.
Anyway, I was discussing this issue with some friends recently, and one thing that the simultaneous content push really does is separate the truly hardcore guilds from the semi-hardcore-yet-still-good. For point of reference, my guild had top 10-20 kills on pretty much every major boss prior to burning crusade, despite a relatively light raid schedule (5ish hours 4 nights a week). We were rarely more than a couple weeks behind the world first kills and managed to keep up instance after instance.
Now, there's very little diminishing marginal value to raid time. If you raid 6 hours a day 7 days a week, there's content for you to tackle that entire time, whereas pre-BC once you killed the last boss of the most recent instance - assuming you were on the cutting edge - you were done for the week. With concurrent content pushes, guilds that raid more get ahead and stay ahead. There's no farming period for the latest instance, no cutting down to one or two nights of raiding until the next zone comes out - just push, push, push.
Now, one could say that this is a good thing, since it provides a constant flow of content for those who want it, but personally I found those farming periods and that time off to be one of the things that made it possible for me to keep up the raiding pace. There's nothing like a nonstop raid schedule with no chance to breathe to cause burnout, and similarly, there's nothing like being literally multiple zones behind the top guilds to frustrate highly competitive players.
I can't speak to the tuning of Hjyal/BT, but frankly I find the difficulty of the content to be much less important than the overall impact of concurrent zones. Granted, it seems pretty silly that Nihilum is poised to kill Illidan before the second instance reset only five months after the expansion comes out too - where do they go from there?
Originally Posted by Copernicus
For examples from another hobby, look at Magic: the Gathering's Pro Tour promotion.
Yes, and buy a copy of my Pro Player card while you're at it
I think I preferred the WoW 1.0 staggered release.
The psychological aspect of the way raiding works now is a lot different. I don't just mean keying and attunements, I mean that the first raids and the last raids are all in the game at the same time. In 1.0, starting MC late meant that you saw people in BWL gear wandering around Ironforge and thought "ooh, I wish that was me." Now, general awareness of what other guilds are doing seems so much higher. My guild is starting into 25-man raids (Gruul/Mag, yes, we're that far behind), and meanwhile the top guilds in the world are in BT. There's a pretty sizable difference there, and I think it has been and still is getting to people.
Last edited by Alhena : 06/04/07 at 5:56 PM.
Reason: In retrospect, my point was off topic.
I mostly agree with gurgthock's point, that it's rather frustrating that we're now seeing people blow through stuff because of it being under tuned. It's unfortunate but it seems that after overtuning Vashj and Al'ar, they've gone ahead and undertuned everything else. Naxx is the perfect example, (and also my favorite dungeon to date) You could kill the first few things undergeared, but you were not clearing to Kel'thuzad (or even sapphiron if you count the FrR block) in the first two weeks while wearing only some AQ gear and mostly BWL gear, and that's what we're seeing now in BT.
I know Nihilum and Curse talked about how difficult Essence of Souls was, but they spent what, a week on it? It's entirely possible that Illidan will be dead within 2 weeks of being released. Horsemen alone took guilds months, I remember when we spent weeks not even doing the fight close to right, and there is no fight like that now in TBC. And really, it's kind of sad that content is being blown through this fast.
I don't think you can even really call Kael'Thas a "bottleneck" in a bad way -- most guilds are just now getting to see him, and he's got a really nice learning curve. It hasn't even been two full weeks since 2.1 went live, remember.
Re: Buiden, this is true, which is why I cited a mix of MC/BWL gear as my paradigm. C'Thun was supposed to be harder than a lot of Naxx content, and a guild that had everyone in ilvl 81/88 AQ set pieces along with BWL loot, Nef loot, etc., was somewhat "overgeared" for Naxx. A guild that, for some bizarre reason, decides to farm SSC and TK for 4 months before setting foot in Hyjal/BT should probably be slightly overgeared for the first fights in each zone. The problem is that if you look at Nihilum's gear, they're in a mix of t4/t5, just like the rest of us, with perhaps a few more tier 5 pieces and boss drops than your average "endgame" guild. But they certainly haven't farmed the tier 5 zones -- they have 3 Vashj kills and 2 Kael kills.
I think the uneasiness that people are feeling with events of the past week is not because Blizzard didn't space its content months apart, but rather because they fucked up, Fury-in-BWL style (maybe not quite so severely, but still...) with the tier 6 tuning. Naj'entus and Winterchill drop loot that is higher ilvl than Kael and Vashj. Shouldn't they be at least as hard? And it's not just PTR learning, because a ton of the guilds that are going in now and doing these bosses with 23 people after killing Kael for the first time never did them on the PTR.
And I don't at all buy the argument of "well of course it's easy for Nihilum, that just means it'll be doable for the rest of us." Nihilum didn't kill Kael'Thas in two days. No one did. It took a couple of weeks to learn that fight from scratch, and other guilds will have an easier time now thanks to guides and videos and so forth. The rapid killrate that you're seeing is being more or less matched by the other BT guilds. The main difference is that guilds like Nihilum and Curse are sufficiently hardcore that they can keep bringing the same finite pool of attuned players back for long hours day after day. If Nihilum can learn a fight in a day, then every guild that's killed Vashj will learn it pretty easily too. Maybe not in one day, but in a couple. I guess we'll see.
Now, there's very little diminishing marginal value to raid time. If you raid 6 hours a day 7 days a week, there's content for you to tackle that entire time, whereas pre-BC once you killed the last boss of the most recent instance - assuming you were on the cutting edge - you were done for the week. With concurrent content pushes, guilds that raid more get ahead and stay ahead. There's no farming period for the latest instance, no cutting down to one or two nights of raiding until the next zone comes out - just push, push, push.
Sorry for the double post, but that's exactly the thing, if you can go ahead and without farming a dungeon and move onto the next without problems, not really much to say, that's just balanced differently than what we're used to, and personally, not something I was hoping for. You didn't go kill ragnaros once, then have the gear to kill Nef the next week, C'thun the week after, and Kel'thuzad the week after, even without the artificial time blocks, you NEEDED the gear upgrades, or at least, that was my view, maybe if everything came out concurrently I'd be proved wrong, but I wouldn't want to be doing the second half of Naxx with 1 piece of AQ gear, 1 piece of earlier Naxx gear, maybe 3 pieces from BWL, and the rest from MC, and that's what's happening now.
Sorry for the double post, but that's exactly the thing, if you can go ahead and without farming a dungeon and move onto the next without problems, not really much to say, that's just balanced differently than what we're used to, and personally, not something I was hoping for. You didn't go kill ragnaros once, then have the gear to kill Nef the next week, C'thun the week after, and Kel'thuzad the week after, even without the artificial time blocks, you NEEDED the gear upgrades, or at least, that was my view, maybe if everything came out concurrently I'd be proved wrong, but I wouldn't want to be doing the second half of Naxx with 1 piece of AQ gear, 1 piece of earlier Naxx gear, maybe 3 pieces from BWL, and the rest from MC, and that's what's happening now.
Right, and I thought that part of what would come out of the consumable changes is allowing Blizzard's raid devs to tune encounters more tightly because they could more accurately pinpoint the intended level of player power for each encounter. With world buffs and mass flasks/elixirs, that of course wasn't possible, but now that consumables are actually maybe 0.5 tiers of gear, instead of 2.5 tiers of gear, I'd hoped that it'd be different.
I'm all for rewarding skill, but skill should allow an exceptional group of players, with extreme difficulty, to overcome challenges that they're undergeared for. But the gear should still be, up to a certain point, necessary. No matter how good you are, you weren't going to kill Patchwerk (or Maexxna, for that matter), if you have Z'G gear on your tanks. A group of real pros might be able to do Gothik or Loatheb with flawless execution in mostly t2 gear, while an average group might need more t3 from other wings in order to get the needed DPS. That sort of thing.
But walking into Hyjal or BT, a tier 6 zone, when your average gear level is tier 4.5, should be a huge challenge, growing easier and easier as your average approaches 5.0, and then with margin for error as you exceed 5.0. Even for guilds like Nihilum. And it simply isn't right now.
As I asked above, WoW is a gear-based game. That's how you progress your character at max levels. No AAs, no extra talent points, no special quest skills. Gear. And Blizzard tried to come up with creative new PvE mechanics on gear like haste and armor penetration, but what is the point of that gear if you can clear 11 of 13 tier 6 bosses in 10 days without a single piece of it?
I don't think you can even really call Kael'Thas a "bottleneck" in a bad way -- most guilds are just now getting to see him, and he's got a really nice learning curve. It hasn't even been two full weeks since 2.1 went live, remember.
True, it's more of a comparative bottleneck with respect to the boss-killing orgy that follows him. I think he's totally approprate for the last boss in the zone...epic feel, many stages, lots going on at once, lots of variation and strategy in things like add kill order and positioning. But it just feels like most guild's first thoughts upon killing him is going to be "sweet, now we can hit all those loot pinatas in BT!" rather than "sweet, we beat WoW!", which is too bad. Kael'thas deserves better.
06/04/07, 4:26 PM
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