Balancing anything around loot is the most horrible idea you can get, sure, of course, you shouldn't be able to beat tier6 content with full greens and blues, but it would be completely insane to only allow progression, in a higher tier instance, if your raid was stacked from the previous tier instance.

The way loot work in WoW is simply to flawed, in theory, you could have raided that same instance for months, and not get the gear you need for your raiders to progress.

I seriously cringe every time we raid, because item drops are so random, that I'm often on the verge of tears, for example, our raids always get way to much warrior items, and leather healing, I mean, even the damn warrior trials or casuals/b-raiders we brought along were almost full tier 5 before I even had a single piece (Reminding you that I still only have 1 tier 5 piece) and I've been in almost all the raids! We were the first to clear both Serpentshrine, and Tempest Keep, yet, a lot of us have maximum 1 piece of tier5, where as others have full sets.

Is that balance, is that skill!? NO! Thats just dumb luck.

You simply can't balance encounters based on items!

If Blizzard would work out a system, that would balance loot drops, then sure, you could base progression on stacking a raid in the previous tier instance loots.
I have loads of ideas on how to do that, but I don't want to derail the thread.


The only way you can get encounters to have a longer learning curve, and still be based on skill, is having more phases, where each is unique and require everyone in your raid to do their part with perfection.

When we get to a new boss, we go wipe, and everyone take screenshots of every skill the boss uses, and whats going on in general, everything from damage, to seconds between spells, various people use CT_Timer to see if skills are timer based etc. We then talk for 10 to 15 minutes about how to counter these, then we try again, get to the next phase, and we do the same we did with the first phase in terms of figuring out the next.
I mean, what more can you ask?
It's not like a boss cast W/E spell, and you're like "ERR WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THAT?"
You talk about it, find a counter, and try again.

The thing that makes the difference is the people you're playing with, it only takes 1 person to wipe a raid most of the time, but even so, most of the time, it's several persons in a raid that aren't really that good, there's 8.5 million subscribers to WoW, I doubt they're all good mmorpg raiders, it's not that they're stupid, I mean, it's like, my grand mother ain't exactly great with a PC, but that doesn't mean she's stupid - If you understand what I'm saying.

We just have 25 people where everyone click well together, have fun, share the same goals with the game, they all follow orders to perfection, and all try hard. I have to admit though, that we of course owe most of our "success" (if you want to call it that, each to their own with the game you know) to our raid and guild leader, Kungen, who have enormous experience with raiding and mmorpgs in general, without him Nihilum wouldn't be where it is today.

Black Temple was 90% fine, encounters like Supremus and Illidari council needed a buff though, Teron is also a bit dull (all it requires is people to have a pet bar really ;p) - But I don't see a reason AT ALL to buff a boss like Mother Sherazz, or Illidan for that matter. Essence of Souls neither (wasn't buffed though!). But given that we haven't ventured into Black Temple yet this week, I can't really give any real input on the newer now improved difficulty of the instance, but we'll be visiting it at some point this reset, and I'll be sure provide some feedback here afterwards.

Raiding should require an upward skill curve. And that's not a problem. The problem comes when you render the sole form of character progression available (Loot) meaningless. This isn't Tetris or Marble Mania, where each successive stage simply gets harder with no continuity. By making loot irellevant, you've taken away one of the key incentives for raiding, as well as one of the things that makes an MMO different from other forms of entertainment.

I wonder how much this sentiment is based on your style of raiding, continuously pushing at content above the expected gearing up curve. If the content becomes more reliant on actually gearing up, it would likely have a direct impact on your raid progression, I wager? Whereas, a much more humble group, like my own, would likely be better geared when we go for the next instance, simply based on the fact we basically have to grind earlier bosses in an instance far longer, due to a slower progress rate.

The random nature of loot drops is of course an old topic, but over all, for a group like ours, the randomness means not -everyone- can expect to get a full tier set collected. But over all, most will, over time. We just don't really suffer from huge fluctuations in gear level, as randomness evens out over time. TAQ of course offerd an interesting exception, where you could tailor the drops pretty much like you wished. But if we went back to that, then it would again be possible to totally optimize gearing to the most critical functions and essentially again be able to bypass the gearing curve.

Still, with the risk of atracting massive flames, I do wonder if your reaction isn't largely based on an aversion against actually having to spend some months farming an older instance before you can rush off and clear the next one, start to finish Because, in the end, every loot drop that isn't sharded will add to someones gear level, and we can even optimize by allocating all the new gear to 1 person at a time (like many do with tanks), should we like to do so.

I can't see how loot is irrelevant in the current state of WoW raiding...

Our raids are quite stacked, our tanks have insane gear, most people have a lot of tier5, all should have the best tier4 pieces or randoms/crafted that is better than tier4 and on par with tier5, except for a small gap in Paladin gear especially due to unbalanced drops, I believe we're pretty good set. Hopefully now with two tokens dropping, we'll close down that gap for us Paladins though!

The lack of gear just means you have to play even better to make up for it.


The thing is, WoW ain't really like other MMORPGs, mostly because it try to cater to a much bigger crowd than usual, and here, most of the people who play aren't really top raiders, I mean, a lot of people don't even play this game to raid, whereas in other MMORPGs, people always mainly played for the same reasons, and the communities were A LOT different.

If Blizzard wanted instances to be hard FOR ALL, they would have kept SSC and TK in their previous state. If you've tried for example Al'ar before the nerfs, it was actually a really requiring fight, especially phase 2. Now, the fight is extremely gimp and trivial. Same goes for a lot of the other bosses, they all received enormous nerfs so casual guilds could progress. Not because they necessarily lack gear, but because they couldn't beat the encounters.

Everything is hard at first, then it gets nerfed so that everyone can progress and see the content, I doubt they have other plans for Black Temple.

I guess it all depends on how much you actually want gear to depend on progression, because, as previously stated, it's a pure luck system to gear people up. You could have raided a instance for 6 months, and the last 2, you've still not seen the pieces you need to progress to the next instance. Whats the skill in that? Gear != Skill. A mix of the two, as WoW currents state is (pre-nerfs at least).

For example, back in the Molten Core days, I looted the Left Binding of the Windseeker, and I never saw the Right Binding, NEVER, and I was in almost every single raid on the boss that dropped it, and I'm not even kidding, I had the left binding for about a year, and I never completed it. That same thing could be the case for gearing up your raid for a new instance.

Well Thunderfury was terrible design for that reason. Blizzard will never do anything like that again.

I don't think you can really say that raid gear progression is just "luck" though. If anything you guys have been fortunate to get lots of warrior tokens so you have decked out tanks. Another guild that got no tank token drops might have a more valid complaint.

If you guys have some people with 1/5 t5 and some with 5/5, then still your raid on average is better off than it was before, and every week you clear SSC and TK, you get more upgrades, even if you have bad "luck" and your personal set pieces don't drop, someone's will. And the people who aren't getting their set pieces to drop can grab good nonset loot for those slots.

And yes, lacking gear should mean that skill is required to compensate, but if you can clear a whole zone in a week with t4/t5 gear, then what's the point of t6? To look shiny in Shattrath? To speed up your farming clear each week, so you can get more of the same loot that you don't really need? When we zoned into Naxx in June '06 we didn't have the gear we needed to be able to kill Sapp and K'T. Each week, as we got more FrR gear, better tank gear, new weapons, and so forth, we moved closer and closer to that goal. When we reached the end, it felt like a structured progression. Most progression oriented guilds don't really play for the loot in and of itself -- they play to see new content and to see raidwide improvement from week to week.

I seriously doubt a TF is required to progress into BWL We'r talking about general gear levels, not specific items. If a TF had been required to progress at some point, quite a lot of groups could never have progressed. Yet we did have gear checks, especially FR gear checks based on MC drops, requiring a certain amount of farming MC to be able to smoothly advance in BWL.

The problem with the late T4 / early T5 bosses, and why they got nerfed in the end (imo), was that there simply was no gear to gather to make them easier over time. Take Gruul for instance, when you reached him, a cloth user could, at best, reach about 10k health. Had T4-level gear allowed you to eventually reach beyond 12k health, he would have become gradually easier as your group geared up. But as we all know, T4 just didn't offer that sort of gear progression before 2.1. Similarily, Hydross would, over time, have become much easier if gear would have boosted the raids DPS. But, again, T4 offerd very little in the way of gear progression, with especially the casters almost maxxed out beyond T5 just by getting available craftables..

More damage doesn't necessarily mean more wasted mana. It can mean deaths. If you have 10k hp and a boss has an ability that will hit you for 9k if you mess up, you can mess up and still live. If the ability hits for 11k, you die if you make a mistake and get hit by it. (Unless you get more gear and now have 12k hp.)

Tuning means margin for error, or the lack thereof.

Take Void Reaver. He's easy as hell, right? Now imagine if Arcane Orb did 10k damage instead of 5.5k,and he had a bit more hp. Same fight, same mechanics, but suddenly he's really hard. Everyone has to play perfectly because if you don't, you die. If you stop focusing for a moment and get hit by an orb, you die. If you don't communicate well and you run into someone else's orb, you die. And if you lose more than 1-2 people, he'll berserk and wipe you. But instead in his current form you can lose several people, or people can get hit by Orb all the time and just get healed, and it's no problem. Same mechanics, but a totally different fight.

Well, if the rumours out there are correct you spent something on the order of 20h on the Ilidan encounter alone? Based on how my group tends to operate, usually struggling to clear the farm bosses, you could expect us to have a single 5h raid night / week on an end boss. Let us furthermore assume my group isn't quite as good on learning a new tactic, so we would have to spend... Let's say 30h on Illidan (ok, just pulling numbers out of my behind here, but you get the point). Ok, that means we spend roughly 6 weeks farming all the previous BT bosses before we get a kill on Illidan (and then add in the many weeks of tme spent on the earlier bosses). That amounts to quite a lot more gear than when you took him down

The point is, at the moment of a first kill, the slower groups will have spent much more farming time than the fast ones. With the risk of really being laughed out of the forum here, let's just look at our current status. We are about mid-way into SSC now. And have roughly 500 T4-level drops on our members. I would think you did the same bosses with quite a lot less similar gear, right?

It goes without saying, that your group will be have a superior level of gear to my own at any given point, but you need to compare the moment of a first kill of the same boss. So yes, you will have the best gear in the game right now, but it is almost guaranteed my group will have a lot more T5 and T6 gear than you have now, when we finally reach him some time late this year. Based on pre-TBC experiences, we would in fact likely be almost fully T5 geared and half way T6 geared (if it made sense to use those items) .

The fact that the gear doesn't improve that much when you go from T4=>T5=>T6 is of course one of the reasons very rapid progress is possible, and "part of the problem", if you like.

Yup, one single change to Gurtogg (debuff changed from every 3 secs to every 1 sec) made us have to come up with a completely new tactic, he still died but it was a totally different fight, and not just for healers. On the other hand Gorefiend is still the same fight, he just hits abit harder on the tank.

You're completely right about raid gear progression, I would still claim it is largely based on luck, judging by my previous experiences with WoW, but it might just be me thats sentimental. I am, as you state, lacking drops personally, whereas others walk in full, yes someones token will drop, and thats great, but how come we ALL can't get tokens on equal terms? I'm sure theres a solution somewhere, rather than depending on luck. Until then, you'll just have to do as always, compensate.

Whats the point of finishing any instance that doesn't have a current successor?

The point is to gear up for the next instance, when ever that may be. I don't think the problem here is not having a new place to visit, but rather that WoW lacks end-game content other than farming gear. In previous mmorpgs I played, gear was just a means to progress and reach the end-game, which was PvP, sadly in WoW, PvP and PvE is divided.

I would be comfortable and happy about spending 1 evening every week, clearing out Black Temple to gear up for the next challenges Blizzard would throw at us, instead of having to spend a enormous amount of evenings, just to collect something like frozen runes to progress. We've cleared out SSC + TK for a long time, and I personally feel thats enough.

I don't like time sinks, but thats just how we're different, theres so many playing the game, so of course we can't all enjoy it the same way.

WoW needs more endgame than raiding! Thats my solution to using tier 6.


Naxxramas is also the best instance Blizzard have made, with Black Temple coming in on a VERY VERY close 2nd place. But some stuff in Naxx was dreadful (trash), whereas most in Black Temple is rather enjoyable, in terms of fun, then BT > Naxx. There was just something about Naxx that was really cool!

I never raided the place super "hardcore" though, due to personal obligations, but whats the difference in having to farm a set amount of frozen runes for weeks, over repeatedly farming trash for a evening or two (heart of darkness for shadow res gear), I can't see how either is more skilled than another.

You have to remember, that Naxx was 40 man, and now we're 25 man, I personally believe that raids are much more skillful now with less people involved, at least that is the truth for our raids.

I would assume the main point in wanting gear to be more important for progression is largely based on the dismay of seeing a few groups rush more or less a full instance ahead of the field. Or, to put it another way, they want to slow you down and speed us up in the future :P

Yes indeed, and I see your point, but theres fights where that is in fact the case inside Black Temple.

Illidan for one, if you lose anyone on that fight, you're pretty much done for, and it's a long hard fight. We had a perfect execution on our kill, everyone performed their best, 0 failures, and thats what led us to victory. Illidan leaves almost no room for error, about slim to none.

Same goes for Essence of Souls if you ask me, everyone need to play their best, if you lose just 1 DPS, you've pretty much lost the fight, depending on when he died though.

Remember Naxxramas? You could easily lose a bunch of people, even a few early on, and still ace through a encounter.


Yes, something like that, luckily it was a holiday for most, so a lot could stay up for a couple of hours past midnight, and we then continued early the next day.



Indeed, but that is because Blizzard wanted to cater a little more to the casual players for The Burning Crusade, or so I speculate, the lesser gap between gear, the less whine you'll hear from those who can't obtain it, I mean, if tier 4 is close to tier 6, but you have to spend little to no time for a casual obtaining that tier 4, then he or she won't whine about it. But if tier 5 is a very major upgrade from tier 4, and then tier 6 is even a bigger upgrade, then you'll have a really large player base whining about it.

Huh? I seem to remember Thaddius, Gothik and Noth all actively punishing raids if they lost members due to the DPS and healing requirements. Sure, you could lose people on the easier fights (and on the dreaded DDR mat), but the top tier encounters seemed to require the vast majority of the raid to be on their feet and playing.

Judging by what have been said here, it seems the buffs everyone was calling for might not be justified. If Illidan is already a fight that is so dependent on skill, then I see no reason to buff it. Curse hasn't downed him yet, so Nihilum just had that extra amount of focus and skill for their try.

Perhaps this thread really has no merit and Blizzard jumped the gun by giving into the cries for buffs - while some of the earlier bosses apparently require buffs, they buffed the wrong ones. I want Tigole to read the past few pages, that would be nice

PS. Make tokens an "All classes" item, tier problems solved.

No one is happy either way.
The encounters people seem to enjoy the most and are okay with its difficulty are execution based ones.

Not gearcheck, not too simple.

Execution based encounter are the best because over time every guild will eventually beat it.

I don't think this is the case and it all depends on tuning. Any execution based fight that is challenging for a top guild will be nigh on impossible for an "average" guild. In your average guild you will have people that will just never get it or just don't have the reactions or lag or whatever to complete it. Recruitment becomes more and more of an issue the further down in the raid progress pecking order that you are too so that's not an option. Fights with less execution requirement can eventually be outgeared by these guilds. For example I think there was probably a lot of guilds that killed 3-8 bosses in Naxx but never killed C'Thun because they just couldn't outgear it and didn't have enough people who could execute it even after many hours of attempts.

(I'm not saying execution fights aren't the best as they're usually the most fun. I just think execution fights are actually often a bigger issue for your more casual guild)

..Saroz...You are telling me that BT needs no Buffs cause 1 other guild in the WORLD! Has not killed him? Saroz?????????? It means that blizard did not understand that buff of gear gave Nihilum! Their honest gear should not be able to enter BT and clear it. Skill is of no matter when gear is and exception. Thats where blizzard messed up.

But when nihilum clears and instance and say this.

"I would prefer some bosses to be harder though, but in the end, I'm sure Blizzard would nerf anyway to let lesser skilled people get through".


I was basically told that I can not kill him cause Nihilum killed BT in Superbuffed gear and unbuffed bosses. Which if you read the patch notes it says the bosses are buffed now. WHY! Cause they should be harder...... WHY when a guild can clear it in 1 WEEK with trash gear that should not even be able too, thats why. Blizzard mechanics. Total trash.

Ilidan being buffed is almost certainly a PR thing, whether he needs it or not doesn't really matter to share holders or the majority of WoW players.

In Magic the Gathering for example the Pro Tour (the idea you can make a living and travel the world playing a game) is a big deal marketing wise. Despite the fact only about 10 people make a sensible living playing, it is a big draw even to players who are not even close to qualifing, end game raiding does that for WoW.

I will probably never clear black temple, but I still find out about top guilds progress, I view the armory profiles, just like Magic players check the decks, the best players play.

However hard Black Temple is it is supposed to be the pinnacle of World of Warcraft achievement, even people who haven't ever raided, know that it was beaten in a week. To people who know no facts (and also many who do) this sounds to easy.

Ilidan could be a 40 minute fight so precise that 1 miniscule mistake from anyone causes a wipe, from a public relations point of view it doesn't matter, it was beaten in a week and so WoW is too easy.

Execution based encounters have one problem. If they are decent, even mudflation will not help lower tier guilds to progress, especially in a game where gear progression is slow. If that's a good or bad thing is to everyones personal judgement.

Let me give a example from ancient history. EQ once got an expansion named Omens of War. This expansion and especially its final boss shifted the focus from gear checks to execution-based encounter design. Even in a game like EQ, where mudflation is insane, it took your average guild more than one additional expansion to beat this boss. Most of them at least more than one year later.

I am all for more skill based boss encounters but they create new problems, simple gear checks do not cause. From what i saw of WoWs current endgame and seeing how gear progression is going on, i see content like BT being untouched by the majority of players even when the second expansion is released. You will see more then one new Naxxramas, content the hardcores praise but the rest couldn't experience, while it was worth it.

Tiering content is cool but actually serving it to two very separated kinds of players is flawed. If it means nerfing it to a point where the majority of your community can enjoy the content they paid for, so be it.

I strongly disagree with this. Execution fights are the best, but it is easy to make an execution fight that most of the player base has no chance of beating, imagine a fight where everyone needs to regularly jump for a timed ability or die with .1 sec acuracy needed, due to latency this fight would be near impossible.

If you continually scale execution eventually some players can't compete, for some people this point is shadow labs on normal for others, it is way harder than black temple.

I think what Gurg was saying is that Illidan, the final boss of the (presumably) final 25 man raid zone of the expansion, shouldn't be killed with little to no gear from said zone. The raid should be decked out in gear from that zone in order to defeat the final boss. Once he's dead, the gear does nothing for you, especially if they raise the level cap in the next expansion. So in the end, the point of the gear in Black Temple should be to allow you to finish off the final two bosses of the expansion. As it currently stands, this is not the case at all, and they have died to a guild that while decked out in T5 loot, is still in only T5 loot.

The progression in Naxxramas felt just about perfect. There were easy fights, there were difficult fights, there were gear checks. Nobody could have killed Kel'thuzad in half BWL and half AQ40 gear, you HAD to have the upgrades from Naxxramas to be able to field enough healing, dps and damage mitigation to defeat the final boss of the zone, and original WoW. What good did that gear do once TBC came out? You leveled faster, and that is about it. However, the gear was an integral part of finishing the same zone that it dropped in, which is, in my opinion, how zones like Black Temple should be designed.

I'd bet you a thousand gold that half of the players on my server don't even know which raid instance comes after SSC.

You are exaggerating the importance of raiding to the overall game of WoW. This has been discussed to death. Instances like SSC and TK are nice for a very small percentage of players. The rest doesn't get there. Let alone kill a boss in there. The main reason is not that those fights are hard (WoW is a rather simple game, after all). The main reason is that large guilds are a pain to be in, a pain to manage for most people. And for the average player they are pretty hard to get in. (You need to be the right class, and you need to have friends in that guild). Having more hard 10 man content is a much better investment of developer resources. Maybe not for the people on this forum. But for the majority of serious players of the game.

I'd love to see the number of players in Karazhan, and the amount of hours played in there. Tigole's remark reflects that, about how they regret not having a follow-up to Karazhan yet.