Changed my original post a bit to take out some of the gear requirments, but lets go from here.

You had 8 tanks, 8..Most guilds don't, it's a ludicrous encounter design to have a zone, which did not require more then 4 tanks at any point, to jump to 8 tanks.

I have to ask, what does "nothing impressive" mean? Does nothing impressive mean t2/t1 that they got by running through the alt-BWL runs?

Most guilds can only raid 4 days a week, a lot of these guilds made it to the 4h, so lets assume they don't "suck", they simply don't have the farming time..Of them, how many are going to have *alts* geared enough to even tank trash in there?

Lets bring the debate to a more logical progression of thought, however..Why should a reasonably built guild, need *alts* to defeat a sane encounter within an instance? Why does this particular encounter require so much more of a particular class then any encounter, anywhere, before it?

I say reasonable, because where I work, everything is judged off the "reasonable" man..Most, reasonable guilds had 6 warriors..Most guilds I knew who killed the 4h (We never did, not enough tanks, lol) used alts to beef up to 8-Using alts to supliment a raid force shows the encounter is not reasonable, and the method to defeat it was not properly tuned based on *expected* raid values.

Again, I say expected because every encounter up to that point only required 4 tanks.

Hmm, in Naxx, we'd run with 4? DPS wars at times, and like 3 prot for some encounters, it wasn't a huge jump to get to 8. Anyway, I'm not defending the 8 tanks thing, I said it was a raid stack encounter, HOWEVER, I said it is not a gear cockblock. We did have tanks with blues. We had 1 warrior reroll who I believe got his first epic from Naxx. When we did the first half of Naxx, one of our mage rerolls was using a mining pick with spellpower on it. Go check our news history on our webpage if you want. We did all of Naxx with some terrible gear. We apped like 4-5 people from a horde guild on our server that fell apart, and started at lvl 1.

Before that, in AQ, I believe our MT at the time was using the trash blade from Maraudon, while tanking twin emps. Wow, what a gear block!

I don't want a bunch of raids we have to stack the raid and have a bunch of people of a class that can't raid the entire time. But even past that, even with that many warriors, the horsemen took many nights to beat.

Well its pretty simple actually.

Its obvious that they are not tuning the content any more for the hardcore guilds like Nihilum, Curse, DnT etc. Because you have to realize these guilds are the very minority of WoW's playerbase. They could've made Black Temple easiely an hardcore playground, by putting 4HM at the frontdoor, next a resi-fight, then a C'thun mixed with a little Vael type encounter and so on.

But I've raided in a cutting edge guild for the last 2 years and then switched to a more casual guild. You won't realize how bad these guilds are. These guilds, which are the vast majority of WoW just cannot kill stuff like Vicidous or 4HM. Why? I don't know, there obiviously seems do be some skill-gap or something here.

So what do they do? They stopped making content for the minority and started making easy fight for the average consumer, so that everybody can have a shot a Illidan (remember how few people had a chance to see Kel'Thuzad, such an important lore-Figure).

So in the essence, WoW really got to big, to be the hardcore raiding game, that Nihilum & Co want to have, it started when they reduced the raid size from 40 to 25.

My complaint here is that the bosses I have to kill (Kael) to get into these instances are clearly vastly more difficult than the bosses in these instances.

I would much rather have more challenging bosses than these extremely frustrating key requirements. Every time I recruit someone new, I have to run heroic instances because we haven't killed kael, despite the fact that almost anyone I recruit could kill the 3 bosses in TK besides kael, as none of them are even remotely difficult if you have a brain in 3/4ths of your raid.

Now, we know full well we are going to spend probably 3-4 days on kael, which for us will take 2 weeks of actual raids once you assign half our time to farm content.

Basically, we would all be very grateful if instead of having all these keying requirements, making us wait effectively 2-3 weeks of farm on kael/vashj to enter the next instance on any given night with a full raid, you could just make the key requirements substantially simpler and then make the bosses more challenging. I mean, honestly, was it really necessary to make people who didnt do Seer Udalo and the Heart of Fury really go do them before giving them the Al'ar quest. That is just dumb and forces us to do stuff we really do not care about.

Also, a big issue in my view is that too much of the trash can randomly kill someone(See: Crimson battle-mage) which just wastes time even if you understand the mob.

So in a nut shell I like:

-No one shot trash
-Less demanding/time consuming key requirements
-More linear boss progression

To be more clear, It would be nice if you put the harder bosses later in the zones. TK was well designed in this manner, particularly since access to bosses was very lightly restricted, however it would be nice if the difficulty in t6 was in the bosses and not whether I have enough attuned healers online for TK. Having to recruit AND key is extremely frustrating.

I'd believe that if it was consistent across the board, but the difficulty of a number of the prerequisite encounters makes me think otherwise. I don't see truly casual guilds downing Vashj or Kael'thas any time soon, which means that they won't be able to get into the more "average consumer" oriented-BT.

It doesn't feel like this is a sea change from Blizzard in what they want the WoW raiding experience to be. This just feels like a bunch of undertuned bosses.

They might have learned something, but it was the wrong lesson to learn. The issue back in those days was class X was inferior in dps capability to classes Y and Z yet all only brought little more than dps to the raid. Through conscious design choices which they've mentioned and in the end result we still see in the game today, dps is tiered amongst classes and not a situation where if equally geared and skilled different classes will do similar dps.

DPS checks where you need to gear up to have a shot are fine. The issue is Blizzard is instead sticking to the notion that Class Y does the most dps, class Z next, and so on. If they get rid of that notion, dps checks would be alright (and the issue of who to bring would be more on who's been lucky on drops rather than who was unfortunate enough to roll the wrong class).

As far as I am concerned I am excited about the raid game in WoW now. As Cel mentioned, our guild is currently on Lady Vashj with only Void Reaver down in The Eye. I wouldn't call our 5 day raiding schedule "hardcore", but maybe "dedicated" and we have typically run a little ways behind the bleeding edge. It took us longer, but we did clear Naxx before TBC. I would imagine there are quite a few guilds in this general vicinity, and even more a bit behind that.

What that means is we (and lots of others) have lots of good content in front of us for the coming months. Consumable farming is manageable, so I have time to run some heroics or do some fun stuff in between raiding. Come raid time we have a host of bosses that seem to be fairly bug free, interesting and beatable if we perfect our strategy. The drops once again have some of that "wow" factor that was so exciting in Naxx when we dropped a new boss.

This is a stark contrast from a month ago where I practically dreaded raid night and the endless farming to make up for a night of banging our head on brick walls that wipe us if *one* person sneezed at the wrong time. And when we did pull out the win the rewards were underwhelming followed by another brick wall.

I do not envy the leadership of Nihilum in the coming months trying to maintain member interest with new content being so far away. But, it is not the first time they have "beaten" all current WoW content so I'm pretty sure they already know what is in store for them and how to manage it.

Times are looking good for the rest of us though that aren't quite at that level. From a purely selfish perspective, I like the approach Blizzard is taking and enjoyed Tigole's post quite a bit.

@Tigole:

While many people do have concerns about the level of "challenge" they're facing and how hard they have to work on a boss(ie: time investment) in order to make the epics feel more epic when they finally get the kill, I do have to say that in the end that you're right. As long as you're having fun, that's what counts.

On the other hand I think it's important to understand why people are reacting the way they are. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that the majority of people in raiding guilds with any degree of success do not play for the gear. They log on for the experience of working together with their guildmates to overcome challenges and accomplish things, and that sense of accomplishment is very important. If you're one-shotting everything you come across, you're first off going to run out of content very quickly, but also you won't have that feeling that you really DID anything.

Take for example your average trash pull. You walk in and you've never seen it before. You have NO IDEA what it does. You tank some stuff, try to sheep some stuff, and hope it works out. Two or three minutes later you're looting the trash, rezzing the 20 people whose deaths you can't quite explain yet, and planning how to do it better next time, but it's not like "WOO! FIRST TRASH DOWN! WATCH OUT TRASH PACK NUMBER TWO, WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!". There just isn't a sense of accomplishment that comes with killing trash mobs, or most 5-man bosses for that matter. There's probably a psychological element in there, but regardless if you're not putting any effort into getting it down then actually getting it down doesn't mean anything.

I believe the concern people are having is related to what I said above. People are killing Rage Winterchill on their first try with what would be considered average gear for that level of progression and without even having a full raid group. They're taking the 22 people who didn't have to go to bed after Kaelthas, hoping they have something remotely like raid balance, expecting to learn the trash to the first boss and instead they literally 1-shot him. There are trash pulls that they've wiped to and they just 1-shot a tier 6 raid encounter. Yeah, he's the first boss in the zone and the concept of a reward encounter is something I'm very much in favor of, but nevertheless he still got 1-shot by people who had no idea what he did with 90% of a raid group and average gear. I think this in combination with similar stories coming out of The Black Temple is what's causing such an uproar moreso than any world first drama.

I think we're doing about average for a semi-hardcore guild. We've got 20 hour scheduled raid weeks with mopup/karazhan on offdays. We were killing stuff in SSC before 2.1, but Vashj felt much more distant pre-patch than now. For what it's worth, we're finding 2.1 raiding to be extremely enjoyable. We wiped on Hydross something like 30-40 times before finally killing him and all I could think about was how horrible it would have been to do that pre-patch. 40 Shadow Potions, 40 Adepts' Elixirs, 4 Flasks, 40 Basilisk Meat, 40-50 Mana potions...but with those elixirs taken off the list, flask materials reduced drastically, and mana potions available in exchange for coilfang armaments in generous quantities? Sure it was still a bit harsh on the old repair bill, but I didn't get a stomach ache thinking about the hours I'd have to spend farming for herbs each time we wiped, either. Coupled with the changes to trash(which could suck less, but it's much better) I'm honestly loving TBC raiding.

I've done the hardcore Naxx progress thing. Flasks every week for Patchwerk even on farm kills(til 2.0). The massive mats farm-fest for Loatheb. Hell, all of Naxx was a consumable black hole and I loved it anyway because the encounters were fun and challenging. BC encounters might not be quite what Naxx was, but they're still unique and require us to focus and learn how to deal with new challenges that we had never faced previously. We still have to adapt in new ways and even though we're not the only Horde guild on the server who can do it anymore, we're STILL having fun. Quite frankly, I now spend more time PLAYING THE GAME than FARMING SO I CAN PLAY THE GAME and I love it. So what if the encounters are tuned lower than they used to be? We're having FUN. So long as you guys keep coming up with new ideas to keep us busy I don't think I'll ever have any complaints. "Reward bosses" like Lurker and "Epic bosses" like Kaelthas definitely have their place, but I think the majority of encounters should be somewhere in between and it looks like that's what you guys are trying to do. My hat's off to you all; you're doing a wonderful job. I'm especially appreciative of how much communication we've received from Daelo lately when it comes to bugged encounters.

I can't speak for BT/Hyjal and it's possible that there's been a tuning oversight(from vodka's experiences, for instance, it does concern me that they're able to go in and kill a boss on the FIRST attempt with no prior knowledge of the fight), but I can't speak for it 'til I actually see it. However, I do very much hope it's an instance full of Heigans instead of Grobbulusses.

Once again for emphasis: Heigan good. Grobbulus bad.

Damn it, don't do this. Don't shit up the thread, especially with off-topic posts, trying to get your own little "Q&A with Tigole" thing going. (And it's not just you either. I'm only using your post as an example.)

I'm glad Nihilum has "finished" TBC and I really, really, really hope you don't go in now and retune Black Temple in 1-5 weeks so its much harder. WoW is a game, not a job and I am glad you have made the encounters not require 25 insanely geared and skilled players to beat.

I really really hate to mention this, considering I thought the arguements went out the window when they announced Blood Elves would have paladins but...

BoK and Devo aura? When you consider the difference they make on undergeared tanks, it's a pretty serious difference. I remember we were in Naxx, attempting Loatheb, and one of our tanks was helping someone on an alliance guild from the server we used to be on doing Twin Emps. Their tanks had slightly better tanking stats overall than him with raid buffs, even though he was in 5 piece dreadnaught with Widows Remorse and the Plague Bearer, along with some of the best other random items. I'm pretty sure we would've cleared Naxx if we'd had *just* BoS too. Every fight seemed to be a threat problem, especially Thaddius. Unfortunately we ended up collapsing in a heap midway through learning Gothik because of slack raid attendance (having cleared Abom/Spider/Plague wings).

Anyway, less derail, more raiding discussion.

It's very interesting what's being said. Most people seem to appreciate the raid content, and will go through it as it is. As has been pointed out, the time investment that Nihilum/Curse have put in to BT/Hyjal is on par with or possibly exceeds the time put in to Naxx. People have become more efficient at doing things, there are less things to learn because of all the previous encounters that we've been through just getting to BT. It was quite interesting to go in to BT today with 18 people (lack of people attuned/online, stupid SMV quests and IRL commitments getting in the way) and getting Naj'entus down to 71% after 5-6 minutes with 5 healers and me in healing gear while still feral specced, along with a major lack of DPS classes. I see what people mean about some of the content just not quite feeling tuned to the point at which you have to be just to kill Kael in the first place.

I can't praise the Kael fight enough. It's varied, causes a lot of people to a lot of things that they wouldn't normally have to pay attention to, and requires a lot of adaptation of people during the fight to contend with some of the random elements, as well as thinking outside the box slightly for some bits. Vashj is of a similar nature (although I do believe the entire fight is in P2, as many people have said before).


I think the major factor in the "epicness" of fights now is that when we get to a boss that's hard, you just try it, and try it, and try it. There's no more "let's flask up, pot up, world buff up, (soulstone up) and do this" like the first time killing Loatheb et al. I came across a screenshot of the first Loatheb kill we had the other day, which is the only time I can actually remember myself ever using a Flask of the Titans (healing specced back then) and had over 8k health raid buffed. It was truly a one-of-a-kind event for my character. There was serious tension there because everyone knew, if they screwed up that might be it and you've just wasted 39 other peoples last hour getting buffs and their time and money on repairs/consumables to get through the fight.

I think there's also something to be said of the publicness of raid encounters now. Naxx was the first place where people really started publishing exactly what bosses did, because you actually needed really good tactics to get past them. Huhuran was essentially stick NR on melee, assign some healers fairly well, and then the tanks sort the rest. Twin emps was detailed enough to actually need raid wide tactics that everyone appreciated on their own, and that followed through to the Naxx encounters. It seems now that unless you're in the first 3 or 4 guilds to actually get to (not kill, but get to) a boss, you know exactly what it does, with a boss mod already written out for it, and it's just execution to get sorted (which is sometimes easier said than done).