I'm going to respectfully disagree here. If you read past that 2 sentences, I said "it's not". It most definitely is not a 25-man KT. It's similar, in the way Huhuran is similar to Faerlina. Yea, he uses the same elements as KT, but if you go in and expect KT, you will die. If you read my whole account, we basically lost people because we assumed it was going to be like KT. Because we spread out so it wouldn't chain, all the way around him. If we go again, trust me, we won't be doing that, and we won't have a ton of deaths. Not that it matters, he's free loot with no challenge whatsoever except the trash, joy!

Yeah exactly. You can have 2 guilds only separated by 1 week or so, and then suddenly one kills Kael while the other one is still learning him and bam, first one gets 10 server firsts just because of this kill. It's a bit strange that almost all tier 6 content seems to be way easier than Kael, except for 2 or 3 bosses.
A question for tigole if you're still around : did you mean we can expect new 25 men instances, harder than bt, before next expansion ?

I have only lurked through the thread but my impression is that many people here aren't only theorycrafting, numbercrunching min-maxing hardcore raiders but also quite involved with the game world and beginning with Naxxramas, continuing at a faster pace through BC, us fluff-lovers have seen major Warcraft characters die - very quickly.
Beginning with Kel'thuzad, the right hand of the mightiest being on Azeroth - the Lich King whom even Illidan feared. Was killed rather quickly after having many guilds locked down on the Four Horsemen before.
With Lady Vashj we saw two characters go which maybe weren't among the mightiest on the Warcraft universe's scale of power but they sure had a lot of fans who'd expected one hell of a fight. Vashj dies even before she's been properly tuned/debugged and Kael'thas shortly afterwards.
Then comes Illidan - advertised in the beginning as the final raid boss of the Burning Crusade and a major character in Warcraft who even had a lot of fans among the players.
Yesterday we got news that the Illidari Council fell and Nihilum already had Illidan down to 42%. Today, Illidan died. Yes. Died. Noone would've thought that a character as powerful as Illidan would die to a raid group after just one evening of practice.
At least we'd have expected a very steep learning curve and maybe a hefty gear check when facing the self-proclaimed ruler of Outland. Back when BC was in beta, I remember reading many threads here, on SA and on other boards claiming: "Never is a player going to defeat Illidan. He'll most likely utter something about us not fighting him at his true power, vanish and leave a chest behind." Noone thought him to be quite that possible and now many expectations of the fight are just... ruined.

As a mere casual raider, I feel in fact a bit relieved that content seems to be so doable. With 2.1 I have hope that my guild which is just about to enter SSC just now will quite possibly SEE and DEFEAT this enocunter. I was never able to experience Naxxramas past Maexxna but - attunement worries aside I will possibly have a solid experience of all TBC raid instances (and shiny T6 loot) before they become obsolete and we're sent to Northrend, the Emerald Dream or whatever.

You are obviously right about tuned bosses being beatable (its kinda the definition), but at the same time, killing Illidan within 1 day after seeing him, is that really epic?
What many people want is challenges, where they feel they overcame some impossible challenges the moment the boss finally die.
As Gurg says, it shouldnt be all bosses, but there should be room for some of those.

Whether or not we have actually killed any BC bosses is beyond the point tbh, I havent set my foots in BT, and I wont for a while. I dont know if the bosses are easy for me or my guild, they probably arent, but the topic is, whether or not people generally progress through them too fast, removing the feel of actual progress and accomplishment. If Illidan isnt "harder" than Kael, doesnt require better items etc, then it hardly feels like you are moving upward in progress.
Pre-BC consumables could somewhat remove this feel of progress (and thank god this has been improved in 2.1), but still not the way it seems to be now.

This isnt really a question about time to kill the boss, if it takes 5 hours or 5 days, but the fact that you feel stronger when you meet Illidan than when you fight Maghteriodn, and you feel this boss is in fact a lot more difficult, even if your improved gear makes up for this difference (and thus you have a gear check that might slow down progress a bit too).

Beside that, while you say you can just add more raids, and thats your job, you also know it takes time. I believe most players will rather have to "gear up" a little longer for a slower progress, than wait months upon months for the next instance. When new instances cant be added with unlimited speed, then some sort of slowing down might be better than no slowing down. And gear checks is probably the best way (better than untuned bosses of course).

I guess my point is, when you are geared for Illidan or some other boss, then yes, it shouldnt take more than some hours or days to learn the encounter and beat it.
When you arent geared for it however, it should be very hard, very skill-based, luck-based etc. if you manage to overcome the undergearing. Now of course, maybe people arent undergeard for Illidan, but if they arent, thats the exact problem. No real progress. (Before I get flamed, no, Im not saying illidan isnt difficult... as said, the difficulty itself isnt the issue, its the gear and raid progressing).

Other than that, thanks for anything you post here. Even if people might disagree with your posts its great to get information or Blizzards point of view on everything

It depends on how much hours you put into it during those 10days.

As for Nihilum and Illidan, they put a lot of hours into it. They were up to at least 5am last night (I was leveling my alt on Magtheridon), after having killed the council at 18h the same day. They had Illidan dead at ~16h today.

Most guilds won't put as much time into a fight in one day as they did, so I guess you can expect a bit more time for most guilds out there...

Congrats to Nihilum and thankyou to Tigole for one of the most interesting posts I've ever read, even if it did take my access to the forums down for a bit.

Really looking forward to Zul Aman now if as seems to be indicated is harder than Karazahan.

Well, I think this is a silly comment. The majority of the playerbase aren't the top 10% of guilds or even their fanboys. They also are not the same people who afk'd in the tunnel to get their AV wolf super fast back in the day. They want challenge, but they don't have the time or energy to run this content in a manner that will enable them to move through it nearly as quickly as a top end guild. It seems like things are tuned so that a non-uber raiding guild that got through the first few Naxx bosses before BC has a chance of downing Illidian before the next expansion hits. That seems like a pretty decent pacing to me.

I'm sure if all the top end guilds were tied with the current leaders pre-PTR and spent as much time on the PTR as N/C did that we'd see a more competitve race. But you can't really blame blizzard for that.

Tigole, sorry for speaking directly, but I'm curious how you feel about Illidan, the key figure in your TBC story, the guy who yells "YOU ARE NOT PREPARED" when you install the game and sends chills down your spine, being downed within a week of a guild setting foot in Black Temple? With a day worth of tries?

I don't think anyone is asking for a wall, but I think we all want to feel a absolute sense of "We finally got this guy, FINALLY... WE DID IT" , once we kill Illidan - same feeling we had at Ragnaros, C'Thun, Nefarian (heh) and some people had on Kel'Thuzard - the ones that got to him in time... At the end of the day, that's all any raider really wants.

Perhaps you are right, once the "World first" dust settles we will all have our time to enjoy BT and noone will really care about Nihilum killing Illidan in 24 hours.

A repeat of Gruul 1.0/Mag 1.0 would be far worse for everyone than an undertuned BT. Raid content that's accessible to more people than Naxx may be good for the game as a whole but some of the magic is lost in the process of opening it up. The progression rate through Naxx wasn't so bad: 4H first kill after 8 weeks, KT after 10, but I can understand Blizzard not wanting to repeat an instance that was completed so little. What's disconcerting is to see the mark being wildly missed, first in one direction with Mag 1.0, then the other with BT.

From what I understand, Nihilum was raiding 12-14 hours a day to do this.

So, take the time they spent, and multiply it by 3 or 4, to get a "reasonable" estimate of the number of days most guilds would have spent on it. And you come up with 6-8 weeks of time investment, 3-4 days learning Illidan (which is not that far off the Sapph/KT mark).

They're not all going to be 4H fights.

Let us know if that happens on Kael'Thas. =p