At the same time, most of this tier 5 learning was done before the gear increases. Would they have had as hard a time with that content with the 2.1 balance changes?

To some extent I maybe worry less because the game changed *so much*, all at once, and some discontinuity as a result is only expected.

2 Compelling responses, I think both have some merit:

1 - This is an Intentional design decision to allow more flexibility in raid composition resulting in a lowering of the target difficulty of any tier x encounter in tier x-1 gear (D) created past the decision date, without a vast retune of preceding content.

2 - The inate difficulty (D above) has not changed, however player skill/playtime/commitment is not adjusted for, thus making future raid encounters (as they are encountered) become progressively faster to defeat.

A stacked raid of 22 killing a boss, or _any composition_ of 25 killing the boss is a fine trade off in my humble opinion. In fact, as someone interested in the dynamics of forming/maintaining a raiding group, I think it's pretty critical that there be enough leeway that you can bring someone who is functionally braindead and still complete a farm encounter (this in turn means that new encounters with a full raid of ace-players will be easier). I don't think it's reasonable to ask raiding guilds to run some "training wheels" content to recruit, nor should they have to give up satisfying 20+ members with successful raids just because random new guy needs to be tried out. This is especially critical if the game is to be accessible to raiding guilds that are smaller and don't intend to raid 7 days a week. Having 2-3 trash slots in a 25 man raid is good for the group building aspect of the game because it lets you take your new people to things that _matter_.

Now, that said, maybe the composition that hits the 22 number needs to be less "avg" for the placement of the early BT fights in a similiar way to the "optimum" 4h raid having a vastly different looking raid than the one that gets there, but that's more a question of how acceptable do you think cockblocking for cockblocking's sake is than a failure in design. The main reason that 4h stumped the wow raiding community was that it really did reward you for having 8 geared warriors. They could make supremus a cakewalk with 8 geared rogues, and brutally difficult with less than 5, and I bet he'd have taken much longer to kill, even though in theory his difficulty level would have been "lower". Clearly there's some compromises to be made, but it's entirely possible that the first set of Hyjal/BT bosses are just _attackable_ by the avg raid composition as an optimal composition, which would shorten the learning curve dramaticly. There are certainly plenty of valid encounters where you could 20 man them with a perfect composition, or to put it differently, many raids currently 25 man them with some moonkin/retpallies/hunters what have you. Low manning the content is not an indictment of the content - it might be an indictment of the raid composition.

One of the largest complaints about TBC has been how brutal it is to the managers/organizers of group content. To my eye, the BT/Hyjal period would be a predictable place to adjust that brutality given that it had not been released (and thus changes could be made internally) when some of those complaints were being aired in a compelling manner.

Does anyone find BT to be less compelling than hello kitty online adventures or going back to play rygar on the nintendo? I haven't heard that so far. I've heard a fair bit of complaining about "This is easy compared to X" and a fair bit of "This fight is awesome" but I haven't heard much of the "This is not a fun game". It's ok to me that the progression difficulty varies. I don't derive my sense of self worth from watching my friends and aquaintances fail at wow nor do I have an asocial rivalry with someone about pixels.

Now, to sound a bit less fandboi-ish: What I think stands out as potentially still unresolved (and thus not-ok to me) is the implementation of a well-planned multi-path progression. It's clear that the raid stuff is interesting, and issues of "horribly broken" content are being addressed. It's not clear that there's a good place for the "Loved karazhan" crowd to go, and it's too early to judge the PVP/5-Man side. I think the implementation of _more_ and _meaningful_ quest content in 2.1 bodes well for that side of the progression though, and I hope ZA the 10 man Kara 2.0 is amazing. Personally, I find the _storytelling_ in the 10 man zones to be simply top notch, so I'd like to see some more of them. So the part of me that looks at the overall game progression and evaluates it says there's still some work to be done.

As for the second option - remember when raiding ragnaros was bandaids and maybe a healthpot or three? Remember when we all went to bed at a reasonable hour? Yeah, that raid group isn't killing illidan (maybe ever). I don't think it's fair to compare even naxx to current Nihilium, because they are playing wow as a carreer at the moment. That's their choice, but you should keep it firmly at the front of your mind that the amount of time/skill/analysis applied to wow is growing every new release, and that this will very much shrink the time between accomplishments, simply because more resources are being deployed to meet the goals.

So to wrap up: Yes, content appears to be being defeated more quickly. However, this is not a sign of the coming appocalypse. The change in difficulty might be an intentional change, which I can justify as being _good_ for the creation of organized raiding structures, or it might be a perceived change in difficulty as a result of additional resources being brought to bear, but neither case is _bad for the game_.

Now, to the mass frothing at this post, you might belong to the encounter-as-art school of game design, in which case all I can suggest is that you take up chess or go. If you're really interested in challenge for the pure joy of challenge, that's a better medium than wow, as there is signifigantly less tertiary distractions from the pure art view. If you're interested in the tertiary aspects of wow, you're going to have to accept that the _pure_ gameplay challenge value is going to fluctuate some as a result of other factors. (Or you can be determinedly unhappy, but really that seems pointless.)

I didn't miss the point. I recognize that there's no logic to having a later tier being easier than an earlier one. However, it's pretty obvious by Tigole's post that they're happy with the BT difficulty. So there are two conclusions: 1) blizzard is out of their mind 2) They're adopting a different design philosophy and implemented it somewhat awkwardly.

At least that's how I see it.

Yeah, this is something I'd like to stress. When we got the first Rag kill, it was because we spent 1 hour clearing up to Domo, and 2 hours working on Rag for 6 nights in a row, with zero consumables used other than mongoose potions sub-30% because we didn't want to waste any on a bad run. This was the effort it took for a game-wide first back then, a whopping 18 hours over the course of a raid timer.

If a guild like Nihilum existed then, spending 8+ hours a night using everything at their disposal, with the same type of WoW experience as they have now, Rag would have died the same night it was patched (and hell, probably before it was patched even though it was horribly out of tune). I don't really know anyone that didn't like the raid-game back then, and it wasn't until the horribly out-of-tune BWL came out that our guild saw any attrition at all.

Perhaps some people enjoy playing WoW as a professional sport, but as someone who most "casuals" would deem to be a 'hardcore raider", I'm the first to admit I'm happy as fuck this stuff isn't going to be ruining my summer in an attempt to defeat.

To give my guild's experience, post-patch we're downing every new boss within 4-5 pulls of it. We haven't hit The Eye or Lady Vashj yet, but I think the initial three boss in The Eye are easier than Leo.

Eye/SSC are supposed to be parallel content, though. So VR/Alar/HAS being easier than Leo is acceptable under any definition.

Regarding the gear progression issue.

I happen to subscribe to the "D should remain (roughly) equal" school of thought. If D decreases, as appears to be the case with BT then the only purpose SSC/TK serves is a massive keying 'quest'. Personally, I enjoy improving my character as well as the "because it is there!" factor of conquering new bosses. I do want to be prepared, and find it discouraging that apparently I am prepared enough right now, but just not allowed to try it. Considering the time and effort so far spent on the T5 content, I would like to think it has a bit more meaning than simply another Naaru Trial type hoop to jump.

Of course, one should not forget the negative aspects of building content on top of content either. We found ourselves in the unfortunate position to loose a significant number of our healers during Naxxramas, forcing us to reach ever deeper into the past for gear, in order to have any hopes of progressing. Even farming Ragnaros for T2 pants was suggested. You can all imagine how things might end up if you try to farm 3+ raid instances worth of bosses each week, and still try to find time to actually do new content. That sort of situation burns out people rapidly.

So, if you want to maintain a steady D, you might need to look in new directions not only for keying, but also for gearing. The new Nether Vortex BoE patterns could be such a mechanism, providing the raid bank could collect the instance only materials..

I am fascinated by the difference you describe between cutting edge and casual guilds. How far in terms of progression is your current casual guild?

I don't consider myself a casual raider. I love to raid and regret not having done more raiding pre-BC. My first "main" turned 60 some time after Naxx was released, having just rolled on a wholly new server that only ever got as far as a couple guilds killing Prophet Skeram within weeks of BC's release.

That said my guild just now entering SSC and working on Hydross. In terms of server progression we're the only guild on the server to kill Magtheridon as of yet. Certainly we are not "cutting edge." But looking at the WoW raiding community as a whole we surely must be average. Does this mean that we are bad, as you described?

It's really depressing hearing so many people recall such fond memories of Naxx - "the best raiding zone ever." It's something I missed entirely for having joined the game late and on a new server. I thought, naively, that BC would level the field and give the guilds on my server a chance to progress in high end content. I'd love to complete the content BC has to offer before the next expansion arrives but considering the difference between cutting edge and average guilds, BT seems like a million miles away and I begin to doubt that it will happen.

I really think a lot of it comes down to smaller raid sizes. There's simply a lot less that can go wrong, and a lot less that can be done when designing an encounter around 25 people compared to 40

I forget who it was who made the analogy (Gurg maybe), but I'm pretty certain that the four horsemen wouldn't have taken nearly as long to die if they were the 2.5 horsemen instead

Black Temple still isn't designed around the "average consumer". Kael is still a fairly tough fight to learn, and even Vashj is much harder than Rag was

also, include your server in your profile

Well, I must say all the reports of black temple i'm hearing are pretty disheartening. While i'm not there yet - my guild has all of SSC cleared and currently will be downing kaelthas this week - there are many guilds that consider black temple to be a huge joke. Come on, 5 bosses killed within days of zoning in? Bosses in Hyjal killed with 21-22 players? Come on!

Tigol, I appreciate that blizzard is attempting to make raiding easier for the masses by heavily nerfing ssc/tk, but think about the longevity of this game. I'm pretty sure many raiders play for the challenge and enjoyment more than the loot, and if black temple isn't a bit higher on the difficulty scale a lot of players will be leaving this game. Thats how mmorpg's are designed, right? To keep people playing?

I think many of us hoped BT to be comparable to naxxramas in difficulty, which sadly doesn't appear to be the case.

There's SOME hard fights in BT, obviously, but it has no real ramping up or risk/reward that the other instances before it had/have. Seeing Curse not 'instantly' kill Illidan was a little refreshing at least, it just goes to show that Nihilum really did put in.. a.. lot.. of effort!

It's just gonna feel like; coast long on a loot rollercoaster, focus for a hard fight, rollercoaster some more, then another hard fight.

As for Hyjal, I think tuning Hyjal is going to be much, much, much more difficult because of the trash it takes to get to the bosses. Balancing 8-12 waves of very varying mob types (past the Human base) vs different raid compositions, and then fighting a boss right after is probably a lot more time consuming and hard than just tuning a solo boss! So to make people not pull their hair out at how impossible and futile it seems, they likely purposely made most of the bosses quite easy while they figure out how they want the trash to work.

Does that *really* belong in this thread? It's not related whatsoever.

Me personally, am quite satisfied with the new approach. Often in vanilla, farming the instance over and over did get to me quite badly. I did not enjoy it whatsoever after the 10th time of doing the same farming over and over. So this new approach is welcomed by me, however the difficulty level on BT seems a bit off for being the last zone in TBC. Granted, they might pull out a few tricks but Illidan was supposed to be TBCs boss. The whole TBC revolves around Illidan ruling Outland whilst fighting against the Burning Legion. And yeah, he's dead already. I would've expected to take a little longer, at least.

I realise that not killing Kel'Thuzad must've sucked. I killed him pre-TBC, but I know a lot of people who didn't and I feel sorry for them. Everyone (or well.. almost everyone) should have a chance to see the pinnacle of each instance really. I know this is near impossible to tune, so I think Blizzard needs to find something in between the two extremes we have now - Kel'Thuzad vs Illidan. Kel'Thuzad was an epic fight. No doubt. I don't even concider thinking Illidan isn't. But the whole buildup around getting to Kel'Thuzad was great.
People killed a lot in the first month of Naxxramas, but then it started staggering and we ended up with top guilds claiming encounters to be impossible. Then a few weeks later, this same guild kills this so called impossible boss. That's amazing. That's also spot on tuning. Four Horsemen was a really good fight, if you could afford the stacking. Bleeding edge guilds could, but many couldn't. This is why Kel'Thuzad was so far out of reach for many guilds. I know we ended up having the warrior accounts shared throughout the guild, just for the sake of practice. Heck, I even used 2 different accounts while we practiced them.
Let's not forget Loatheb - At start looked impossible, but then people realised you needed the consumables. A retarded mechanism in many ways, maybe, but it worked. Once the strat was out, people killed him in one night of practice - easily. All you had to do is buff up and go for it.
Sapphiron was a stop too - you needed X amount of Frozen Runes to craft everyones gear. Therefor you needed Y time spent inside Naxxramas. Or a lot of help from other guilds.
Kel'Thuzad was an execution and took a lot less long to learn, but it was very well done.

I remember going "Ooh!" "Aaah!" when DnT or Nihilum downed a new boss in Naxxramas. Frankly, for BT - I don't care. It has less of an epic feel to it now that they breezed through it like that.

I'm not quite sure how much Naxxramas was tested, but it was surely not tested as much as Black Temple was. I mean, we had well over a month of raids going in there daily, which I'm positive we didn't have with Naxxramas. I doubt Loatheb was tested, I doubt anything past Razuvious was tested too. I don't think Patchwerk got killed either. And so forth.
We had 7 bosses killed on PTRs for Black Temple however, I believe. That's a massive difference. I think Gurg is spot on with the reasoning behind why it's so easy, though. The gear buff was pretty late and I think Blizzard reasoned it wouldn't be necessary to re-evaluate the encounters.

I wouldn't call it a mistake. Maybe now more than 10% of the WoW raiding community will get to see the pinnacle of Black Temple. A wise decision, I believe.

Naxxramas was tested on PTRs signifigantly more than BT was, actually - and i'm fairly sure 99% of raiders that experienced it think the end result is/was much better than what we have in TBC. Naxxramas had content for everyone - even more casual guilds with less skilled players could beat 5-6 encounters and the more experienced guilds could down the later content.

Warlocks should do more damage than mages or you fall into the pre 2.0 naxx train of thought with minmax raids throwing a warlock in a raid for ele/tank imp/healthstones and mage mage mage mage mage mage. I agree that having destro spec nukelocks or SL locks outdpsing a fire mage is pretty idiotic but really an affliction warlock with the available debuff slots for maximum dps simply has to the better DPSer since the class limits its own slots pretty much whereas mages don't.

Alright, I accept to be wrong on that point.

As I mentioned, I liked Naxxramas too. I was one of the people that got to witness the whole thing and as until today, I still mention it to new people in the guild how great it was. Killing Kel'Thuzad was such an epic feeling, gave so much adrenaline for me the first kill that it was not even funny. Adrenaline rushes over computer games, imagine that!

Not to mention the lore around the actual thing too. I was the first person to gather Atiesh in our guild and I was just in love with the way that was built up. It even sent you back to in my humble opinion the second best encounter in the game, C'thun. The actual Splinter collecting was fun too, although a bit farfetched
Why the hell would Kel hand over splinters of the most powerful caster weapon in existence to the likes of Anub, Maexxna, Gluth, Loatheb and so forth? I could imagine the humanoids, as they had some sort of role - Faerlina being the 'recruitment officer', Noth being his personal necromancer together with Heigan being more attracted to the cult side of things, Razuvious is the one in command of the recruits and Gothik was another Necromancer. Four Horsemen was self-explanatory, as they were his most powerful deadknights.

Black Temple and to an extent SSC are missing that. Who the hell is Morogrim and what is he doing there? He doesn't even fit through the freaking entrance!
Why is Leotheras in SSC? What is the Lurker and how did he get there? What is Hydross' role in the scheme of things? I can only suppose he's there to purify the water for the Naga as they want to keep control of all water in Outlands - as explained by Vashj.
I guess Karathress and the Fathom-Guard are just a few of Vashj's lieutenants, but not much else you can account them for.

As for Black Temple...
I can imagine Naj'entus being one of Vashj's commanders and residing in the Black Temple - for whatever purpose really =/
Supremus? Why? How? What for?
Why's Teron Gorefiend in Black Temple? He's a Dead Knight, no? Why would he follow Illidan's orders?
Essence of Souls don't really fulfill a purpose either - unless I missed something..
And so forth...

[Edit: Sorry for the derail.]

What this comes down to is this:

Pre-TBC, a 4-5 day raiding guild with 30 skilled players probably was going to get most of the way thru naxx, getting halted at either loatheb or gothik/4h near the end of vanilla, maybe making minor progress. The hardcore had about 2 months to farm KT to gear up for leveling.

In TBC, the dynamic is different. The hardcore will have 6+ months to farm. Yet the raid size is smaller. These guilds will literally have nothing to do for 3+ months unless new 25 man content is added.

On the other hand, the 4.5 day raiding guilds such as mine will have a much more comfortable pace. With 6 months to go, we are at kael. It will likely take us 2-3 months to get all of BT down, assuming we allocate roughly half our time to new content and half to farm. Add another month for Hyjal, most probably for archimonde, and that figures to be 3-4 months till we finish all content. Thus we get 2-3 months to farm content, unless new stuff is added. More appropriately, if they add new stuff in 3 months, we'll be ready to do it, whereas a similar guild pre-TBC would not have.

Basically, TBC has allowed the slightly less hardcore, but still not casual guilds to ascend up a tier or two in progression, but has allowed the super-hardcore to frankly devastate the games content. The casuals are never going to see BT, just like they never saw KT, because of the key requirements and kael/vashj.

Honestly, I think this is good long term for most of us. When we are just farming BT/Hyjal 2-3 days a week, can anyone say they won't find something to do with that extra 2 days off?

Having both EU and US accounts, I've played on both EU and US PTR's, I'd like to comment that the PTR for Naxx was awful for the first 2 weeks, Cubes (those buggy cubes for graphic bugs), random crashes, people running around with premades playing classes they never played before causing server lag, servers having 2k+ queues and that time we had the problem of "Another character with that name already exists" making it impossible to get back on time when you get DC'ed or kicked out.
However, on BT PTR, i've noticed that it went smooth, not much lag as Naxx's PTR, way less peeps just PvPing with the free shiny purples.

Could anyone say they cant find something else to do with 4-5 days either?
Why even farm BT/Hyjal after the initial kill, if gear isnt used for later raiding. (obviously this might depend on what the next expansion is, great gear does help with lvling, even if it starts to get replaced rather fast). If gear isnt required for moving on to the next content, you kinda removed the reason for people to even farm this content other than for the people where "zomg purplez" is reason enough
Now you or some Blizzard dev would add, oh, but you play to have fun... Which is true indeed, but I dont know many people who thinks farming is fun. They farm to have fun in future content, not because the farming itself is great. If farming even lose that single goal, it gets totally pointless. However, not farming, and just stopping to raid for X time waiting for a new expansion or content isnt fun either, and can kill peoples will to play.
Pre-BC, most guilds kept farming old content waiting for the new, because they realized it would be needed for this new content... well, until they heard about BC, and some of us remember how that killed many peoples will to play, unfortunately.

This is only a problem if lots of the raiders manage to beat the content before new is released ofc, but it very much looks like they will.

Hey that's really cool....


So when are we getting new battlegrounds?

I just read Tigoles post and want to post a comment on this.

I am guild leader of a small german guild and we are able to do Karazhan on our own and have a alliance with 2 other small guilds to raid 25man content. At the moment we spent a lot of our raiding time (4-5 days) in Karazhan (2-3 days) and so we got only 2 days left to raid 25 man content which is fully OK for now, it will become better as time goes by.

All we want is the ability to raid, seeing new encounters and whats most important: progression. Nothing is more frustrating than doing a encounter, knowing you will never beat it without farming mass consumables or stacking raids. This is not fun, we do not have the time and will to do that. All we have is our people and its hard enough to get everything coordinated.

Thats how it should be: Learn the encounter, get used to it, get everyone to do what he has to do, see progression and finally beat the encounter. Thats it, it should not require excessive stacking of outside materials or sth. Challenging encounters are OK, but needing to stack raids or buffs is not.

Our progression has always been slow but steady and thats fully OK for us. With only 1-2 25man raids a week we are currently up to Hydross with Maulgar, Gruul and Magtheridon down so far.

I am very happy about patch 2.1.0, without it and the alchemy/consumable changes we would have stuck at Magtheridon forever.

Give people that do not raid every day the opportunity to progress and everything is fine, thats the majority of the raids. guilds like nihilum are truely dedicated and deserve their effort but they should never be taken as an example for a average raiding guild.

Btw. the problem with options is you have to make decisions and you know. 25 people, 25 problems

This is the point where I reference the thread on average raiding guilds, where I think we agreed that the average raider got to somewhere in BWL before TBC.

To be honest neither is your guild an example of the average guild in this game. There are a lot of guilds who want to raid all the current content but let's be realistic, who just can not be as dedicated as it takes to be able to raid the current endgame.

I am in the same kinda situation. We have a small guild running circles in Karazhan for months now, trying to convince people to progress further and looking to partner with other guilds. It's just very demanding for a guild like this to progress any further without making heavy sacrifices.

You no longer can carry less dedicated members by the more focused members. You need a full blown focused setup for anything further than Karazhan and we are unable to built such a setup without ditching our own members. It's more easy to rise the "l2p" flag than to reform more than 6 year old guilds just cause suddenly old members are good enough anymore.

I am all for changes. I experienced raid size changes a lot in EQ and how it affected guild structures. Somehow we always survived. BC right now though is putting a lot of pressure inside the guild cause we can not adapt as easy as many people trying to make it look like..