There's value in allowing guilds to separate themselves through progression, but the trick is to do it so that they don't get so far ahead that it's demoralizing to the rest of the playing field. Releasing new instances every so often does this well -- the top guilds have had a bit more time farming the previous instance, but that's allowed a lot of guilds to catch up, and it's (more or less) a level playing field when the next instance is released.

The real problem with the current raiding is that Kael'thas seems to be the big bottleneck (and look we're back to arguments about keying requirements). Based on bosskillers info, once he's down the very next reset you'll have 8 or so bosses down in Hyjal/BT, maybe even without having a full raid. The tuning for the post-Kael bosses just doesn't seem to line up with his tuning, and you MUST down him to get to the rest. Like Gurg said, it just seems like the Hyjal/BT bosses are wildly undertuned, and folks are bottlenecking at Kael'thas.

I find it interesting that since the expansion the European guilds have very quickly taken the lead on breaking new content (Curse, Nihilium, Last Resort et al.) I wonder if this is because they have a larger player base that is at once mature (read over 18 maturity aside) and more free from work restrictions (damn you socialism) and are thus better able to keep up with the frenetic pace of BC raiding. I know my guild who pre BC was in Naxx is struggling to meet all the out of raid requirements (heroics keys ect) and still keep up a solid raid schedule while most of us work full time.

This could of course be pure pop-sociology on my part but an interesting trend none-the-less.

I guess after posting that I'd post this thread I should've expected someone to beat me to it before I got home from work.

Anyway, I was discussing this issue with some friends recently, and one thing that the simultaneous content push really does is separate the truly hardcore guilds from the semi-hardcore-yet-still-good. For point of reference, my guild had top 10-20 kills on pretty much every major boss prior to burning crusade, despite a relatively light raid schedule (5ish hours 4 nights a week). We were rarely more than a couple weeks behind the world first kills and managed to keep up instance after instance.

Now, there's very little diminishing marginal value to raid time. If you raid 6 hours a day 7 days a week, there's content for you to tackle that entire time, whereas pre-BC once you killed the last boss of the most recent instance - assuming you were on the cutting edge - you were done for the week. With concurrent content pushes, guilds that raid more get ahead and stay ahead. There's no farming period for the latest instance, no cutting down to one or two nights of raiding until the next zone comes out - just push, push, push.

Now, one could say that this is a good thing, since it provides a constant flow of content for those who want it, but personally I found those farming periods and that time off to be one of the things that made it possible for me to keep up the raiding pace. There's nothing like a nonstop raid schedule with no chance to breathe to cause burnout, and similarly, there's nothing like being literally multiple zones behind the top guilds to frustrate highly competitive players.

I can't speak to the tuning of Hjyal/BT, but frankly I find the difficulty of the content to be much less important than the overall impact of concurrent zones. Granted, it seems pretty silly that Nihilum is poised to kill Illidan before the second instance reset only five months after the expansion comes out too - where do they go from there?

Yes, and buy a copy of my Pro Player card while you're at it

I think I preferred the WoW 1.0 staggered release.

The psychological aspect of the way raiding works now is a lot different. I don't just mean keying and attunements, I mean that the first raids and the last raids are all in the game at the same time. In 1.0, starting MC late meant that you saw people in BWL gear wandering around Ironforge and thought "ooh, I wish that was me." Now, general awareness of what other guilds are doing seems so much higher. My guild is starting into 25-man raids (Gruul/Mag, yes, we're that far behind), and meanwhile the top guilds in the world are in BT. There's a pretty sizable difference there, and I think it has been and still is getting to people.

I don't think you can even really call Kael'Thas a "bottleneck" in a bad way -- most guilds are just now getting to see him, and he's got a really nice learning curve. It hasn't even been two full weeks since 2.1 went live, remember.

Re: Buiden, this is true, which is why I cited a mix of MC/BWL gear as my paradigm. C'Thun was supposed to be harder than a lot of Naxx content, and a guild that had everyone in ilvl 81/88 AQ set pieces along with BWL loot, Nef loot, etc., was somewhat "overgeared" for Naxx. A guild that, for some bizarre reason, decides to farm SSC and TK for 4 months before setting foot in Hyjal/BT should probably be slightly overgeared for the first fights in each zone. The problem is that if you look at Nihilum's gear, they're in a mix of t4/t5, just like the rest of us, with perhaps a few more tier 5 pieces and boss drops than your average "endgame" guild. But they certainly haven't farmed the tier 5 zones -- they have 3 Vashj kills and 2 Kael kills.

I think the uneasiness that people are feeling with events of the past week is not because Blizzard didn't space its content months apart, but rather because they fucked up, Fury-in-BWL style (maybe not quite so severely, but still...) with the tier 6 tuning. Naj'entus and Winterchill drop loot that is higher ilvl than Kael and Vashj. Shouldn't they be at least as hard? And it's not just PTR learning, because a ton of the guilds that are going in now and doing these bosses with 23 people after killing Kael for the first time never did them on the PTR.

And I don't at all buy the argument of "well of course it's easy for Nihilum, that just means it'll be doable for the rest of us." Nihilum didn't kill Kael'Thas in two days. No one did. It took a couple of weeks to learn that fight from scratch, and other guilds will have an easier time now thanks to guides and videos and so forth. The rapid killrate that you're seeing is being more or less matched by the other BT guilds. The main difference is that guilds like Nihilum and Curse are sufficiently hardcore that they can keep bringing the same finite pool of attuned players back for long hours day after day. If Nihilum can learn a fight in a day, then every guild that's killed Vashj will learn it pretty easily too. Maybe not in one day, but in a couple. I guess we'll see.

Sorry for the double post, but that's exactly the thing, if you can go ahead and without farming a dungeon and move onto the next without problems, not really much to say, that's just balanced differently than what we're used to, and personally, not something I was hoping for. You didn't go kill ragnaros once, then have the gear to kill Nef the next week, C'thun the week after, and Kel'thuzad the week after, even without the artificial time blocks, you NEEDED the gear upgrades, or at least, that was my view, maybe if everything came out concurrently I'd be proved wrong, but I wouldn't want to be doing the second half of Naxx with 1 piece of AQ gear, 1 piece of earlier Naxx gear, maybe 3 pieces from BWL, and the rest from MC, and that's what's happening now.

Right, and I thought that part of what would come out of the consumable changes is allowing Blizzard's raid devs to tune encounters more tightly because they could more accurately pinpoint the intended level of player power for each encounter. With world buffs and mass flasks/elixirs, that of course wasn't possible, but now that consumables are actually maybe 0.5 tiers of gear, instead of 2.5 tiers of gear, I'd hoped that it'd be different.

I'm all for rewarding skill, but skill should allow an exceptional group of players, with extreme difficulty, to overcome challenges that they're undergeared for. But the gear should still be, up to a certain point, necessary. No matter how good you are, you weren't going to kill Patchwerk (or Maexxna, for that matter), if you have Z'G gear on your tanks. A group of real pros might be able to do Gothik or Loatheb with flawless execution in mostly t2 gear, while an average group might need more t3 from other wings in order to get the needed DPS. That sort of thing.

But walking into Hyjal or BT, a tier 6 zone, when your average gear level is tier 4.5, should be a huge challenge, growing easier and easier as your average approaches 5.0, and then with margin for error as you exceed 5.0. Even for guilds like Nihilum. And it simply isn't right now.

As I asked above, WoW is a gear-based game. That's how you progress your character at max levels. No AAs, no extra talent points, no special quest skills. Gear. And Blizzard tried to come up with creative new PvE mechanics on gear like haste and armor penetration, but what is the point of that gear if you can clear 11 of 13 tier 6 bosses in 10 days without a single piece of it?

I like the new pacing a lot better then pre-TBC. With the way things are I will always have a new boss to look forward to killing each week. All the content is there, it just will take awhile to get to. I'm fine with that. My guild raids four nights a week for 3-4 hours. It seems like things are paced more for people like us rather then the really hardcore. Nilhilum will kill Illidan soon. Great. What's there left to do now? The new expansion is probably over a year away, atleast. With the way TBC raiding is set up it looks like we could possibly kill Illidan in time a little before the next expansion. There's no worry about running out of content.

I was really bummed out on raiding before 2.1. I wasn't playing too much and just avoiding a lot of raids. It appeared that if I wanted to make any progress at all I would have to join a more "focused" guild and up my playtime. That's really hard to do working 50 hours a week and having friends and family. There just aren't enough hours in a day. The patch fixed all that and brought back some interest to raiding for me. Blizzard did a really top notch job there.

The gear gap isn't so bad. It can be argued that this is bad because it doesn't really give you much incentive to get the gear. Why get T6 if you've killed Illidan? You can't even use it to PvP like in vanilla WoW. That doesn't really bother me much though, as I know I'll always be seeing new fights until the expansion is here. Gear doesn't really matter in my head. It seems like they are opening raiding up to more people and lighter raid schedules will eventually reach the end.

I could say the new style is worse then the old if the alchemy changes never happened. Right now I never really feel stressed out with raiding. If I had to farm as many herbs as I did before 2.1 I know I would not feel relaxed like I do now. The only reason I used to like downtime inbetween instances was to save myself from farming pots and gold for repairs. Daily quests are now pretty quick cash to cover repairs. Pots are not an issue.

I think there are multiple factors that make Hyjal and Black Temple like a joke for guilds like Nihilum:

- First, the flasks and elixirs changes. People no longer have to spend a lot of time for farming, and if they continue to spend their time for farming they can raid always with a flasq on. This is a big change because before 2.1, guilds prefered to make a lot of try without consumables and then use 1-2 flasq per day. Now they can raid 8h or more with flasqs.

- Second, the PTR is not working correctly for me. People have to test bugs against boss' abilities, not make strategies and then applies when the content are up on live realms. Too many bosses weren't changed or the difficulty adjusted to lower the progression rate.

There are a lot more reasons explained in this post.

What can Blizzard change for future content?

They can put a debuff for exemple: you can raid 4h in 25man content, then you loose 5% stats for 2 hours more raiding, and you have to stop raid 8h to reset this debuff. This will prevent raiding 8-12 hours straight and go trough content too fast.

They have to recruit 25-50 raiders to test raid content (the ptr only test outsides bugs, talent's changes etc.) They test raid content when there is a new instance scheduled, and when it's released they act like gm (it's just an exemple)

I am going to fill the void with some numbers.

According to Blizzard there are:
7,000,000 Players
4,000,000 Players in EU+US

Now if we use 40 players per guild, according to Bosskillers this many people have killed the end boss of a raid instance:

Gruul: 49,920 = 1.2%
Magtheridon: 32,480 = 0.8%
Vashj: 5,840 = 0.1%
Kael'lthas: 880 = 0.02%

I understand that not every guild is registered on bosskillers, but all of the guilds on my realm that killed at least Magtheridon are. The statistic is probably quite accurate for the high end.

Now for my opinion: It is bizzare. There are about 880 people capable of entering BT upon its release (I did not even include attuning in Hyjal). Blizzard could have individually sent each of them a patch CD and save expenses for bandwith. Black temple is obviously a marketing gag, similar to a Bugatti Veyron. It is meant to be known, not to be used.

Your post is very hard to understand, but I can sort of get your idea.

The PTR and raiding content is a real toss up. Back in the beginning of the raiding game, there was none. MC was released into the game with very little/no testing done. BWL was intentionally locked out of the PTR to preserve the "raid race"; they didn't want guilds figuring out everything on test, and blowing through it on Live, as you say. But what happened? We got a poorly tuned raid instance that barely worked(Fury anyone?), and it was nerfed/buffed/changed a half dozen times in it's first weeks. That's not any good. AQ got tested, Naxx got tested, and they came out beautifully, aside a few buggy encounters. Gruul, Magtheridon, and the T5 instances got no testing in Beta, and they ended up in bad shape. So while I can understand the need, or desire to preserve the "raid race" mentality, I am equally as interested in seeing content that *works* when it's released.

But your suggestions here just won't ever fly in the real world. An anti-raiding debuff? Unlikely. They're not going ever make people play less of their game; especially not the hardcore raiders that "inspire" the lesser players. That makes very little sense from a PR point of veiw at the very least.

A typical test team for an MMO ranges from 30-50 people. This is common across many companies; I know, I've worked on a few of them. The test team at Blizzard numbers in the hundreds; and even then, they're not going to touch every single thing that the millions strong player base, or less so, the thousands strong PTR/Beta player base will be able to. It's just numbers. Not to mention, they don't have to pay us to test their content. ;-)