It's not just a matter of decreased difficulty - it's the fact that difficulty is decreasing at the strangest possible point. Imagine if Naxx had required killing C'Thun to enter, but was easier than even BWL, and had the same quality of loot that it ended up with. Designing for wider accessibility is one thing, but widening the tunnel at the end doesn't accomplish that goal.

Well do remember that alot of guilds have suffered a loss of very long-time dedicated players, simply due to the excessive requirements on consumables and untuned trash etc. It simply made raiding seem dreadful and like something you were trying to dodge rather than look forward to, like in the old days, where you would wait outside the raid portals in great anticipation.

The 2.1 patch has helped alot though, unfortunately it was a bit late for some people, and I personally know alot of others that still play but kind of lost the spirit.

I'm almost about to say screw progression pace and wait time, as long as the raids are fun to raid, and not just a painful grind. But then again

Well, one could say that you shouldn't judge D not encounter-by-encounter, but by some kind of trendline. No one complained that Flamegor was easier than Vael, and it's really the psychological discontinuity from Tier 5 to 6 instances which is causing people to complain when Shade of Akama is easier than Kael. His loot is only marginally better (ilvl 141 vs. 138), but progress-wise he's 4 or so bosses ahead. But I don't think anyone has argued that Tier 5, thus far, is on average harder than Tier 6... they just point to a couple outliers in terms of difficulty. I've no real problem with these outliers existing...

Granted, mind you, this is merely a justification for D to decrease in the short run. That it should be okay to have a couple really hard encounters and then some easy ones. Of course, when this "some" refers to 10+ in a row, then I think you have problems, so I'm not exactly trying to defend the current paradigm.. I'm just saying that theoretically, having D vary in a somewhat random manner around a trend line, risking sharp increases or slight decreases, that's what should be important. I can't say whether this trend actually exists, though.

I think one of the biggest problems with Tigole's logic is that he's fine with the hard encounters in one tier being harder than the easy encounters in the next tier, and most of us are, but the problem lies in the fact that, unless in vanilla WoW, you're forced to complete one tier to get to the next. You can't just start into Hyjal/BT at the same time you're practicing Vashj in the same way guilds would start into Naxx when they're on Emps to avoid bottlenecking. It's not an option. Also, it's true that the fact that these easier encounters offer better loot is also problematic - early AQ40 loot < Nef loot, and C'Thun loot > early Naxx loot, which roughly reflected the relative difficulty of the encounters. However, if Tier 6 encounters are mostly easier than Kael/Vashj... this makes a good argument for either nerfing BT loot, or buffing the endboss loot of these instances.

Yes, definitely agree that it's at a strange spot, if it was intended. And if it really was intended there's not a whole lot to discuss since the next move would be to apply a similar reduction to the other raid content.

But I can dream.

Actually, the one way open to Blizzard to try and balance these things at a level where "many guilds" will get to have fun with them by the next expansion, WITHOUT letting them be conquered by the Nihilums in 10 days of solid play...

... is to bring back the "despawns after 2 hours" type of blockage. If Illidan wiped you 6 times and then said "bugger off out of my temple, you are NOT PREPARED" and despawned, it wouldn't matter if you're putting in 18 hour days or 4 hour days. You get 6 attempts at Illidan per week.

I could live with that kind of limitation being put on some bosses as a gateway mechanism. As has been pointed out, the amount of time Nihilum put into BT in 10 days will take many guilds (even advanced guilds) a couple of months to duplicate. And experience spread out over months is more diluted, plus most people aren't as skilled, so then you're out to 3 months, 4 months to beat Black Temple.

How can Blizzard design challenging content around the time commitment of the average hardcore guild when a guild like Nihilum can invest that kind of time? Either you just have to ignore them and let them beat everything early (which unfortunately looks bad to the average WoWian saying "easy mode raiding epics again!"), or you have to artificially prevent them for investing too much time per week.

Actually, I found early firemaw (with crazy random moves) way harder than vael but it's ancedotical.
I don't care about the fact that difficulty is not linear inside an instance or a tier, and i don't care either that some fights are basically free epics but come on, 2 lockouts to down the latest zone just seems ... absolutely untuned ?
People are comparing the difference between kael / rage winterchill or najentus to the difference between nef / skeram but there's a big difference for top guilds here : we farmed the lowest instance weeks if not months before the new one. Obivously skeram felt easier than nef, we killed nef in like october and skeram in january, that's 10+ lockouts of tier 2 loots, 200 epics or so in your raid. That makes a HUGE difference. Maybe skeram would have felt very difficult if we could have reached him just after our first nef kill ? My point is : nihilum or any of the guilds currently in black temple are supposed to be VERY undergeared for the zone, they should find it hard at least, even if they manage to kill some bosses. Black temple easy with 10 vashj and 10 kael clears under your belt ? No problem. But black temple easy with 1 kael and vashj kill and 21 ppl ? Come on.
I don't want 10 kael'thas in bt, but apparently (acccording to nihilum at least), the only challenging bosses in bt are essence of souls and illidan, which makes 2 out of 9 and hyjal is basically a joke since trashs are MUCH harder than bosses. That's a bit disappointing for what should be the pinnacle of tbc raiding.
Anyways, if the point is to get more casuals in the end game, and more guilds to complete the expansion before the next one, then they gonna need to massively nerf Kael'Thas because this fight is way too hard for 90% of guilds atm.

I think you missed the point entirely. Nobody is arguing accessibility of the general public into high-end instances. The problem is that attempting Black Temple/Hyjal in SSC/TK gear should be at minimum just as difficult as attempting SSC/TK gear with Karazhan gear.

And if Black Temple is intended to be the pinnacle of TBC raiding, shouldn't it have even more stringent requirements than just gear? Doesn't it seem strange that there is a resist requirement for Hydross (one of the 1st 25 man TBC raid bosses) and yet no similar effort to obtain specific pieces of gear was required to complete Black Temple? Isn't it strange that bosses that require weeks for most guilds to learn (Vashj/Kael'thas) give loot that is inferior to loot dropped from bosses that can be killed on their very first pull?

Now I will agree with Tigole's post, the proof will definately lie in how fun Black Temple will have been once we've all gotten our fill. But that doesn't explain the difficulty vs. reward discrepancy for both Hyjal and Black Temple as Gurg mentioned previously. Shouldn't it be safe to assume that the highest tier of content should require loot from the tier directly below it? Shouldn't it also be safe to assume the difficulty of the highest tier of content be greater than the ones required to enter it?

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.

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.