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 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.
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.
Uh, a shitload of guilds aren't registered on Bosskillers. We aren't and most of the guilds on our server aren't. It's a random site that's handy for tracking the top kills of bosses, but otherwise a horrible basis for broad conclusions.
And the "not meant to be used" bit is asinine trolling. Almost every guild that currently is making progress in SSC/TK (and many, many guilds are -- the BWL/AQ40 guilds on our server that never really saw much of Naxx are having success in SSC these days) is going to be in BT in a few months.
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)
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. ;-)
How do you make content that's challenging for the strong players, but not impossible for the "normal" players.
I did a heroic slave pens run yesterday. Trying to get my friend some nethers, so it was myself (prot pally tank), him (arms warrior), guildy (holy paladin healer), pug warlock and pug mage.
The run went smoothly, we finished in an hour. In the end, my friend had done the most damage, beating me by ~20%. I had done the second most, just clocking barely ahead of the mage. And the warlock had done ~70% of the mage's damage.
Now, I wasn't even trying to dps. I was occasionally consecrating when away from CC targets but most of my damage was coming from holy shield and seal of righteousness. Yet I'm still well ahead of the real DPS classes. Now it's not meant to be a braggart, because my dps is low. It's more to show the variable ability of these particular players.
These guys were not horrible. They did their jobs for the most part, and I would group with them again if I had to. Their DPS was just low. They obviously haven't put the same time into theorycraft and gear decisions that those on this board do. And guess what, most players in most guilds do not.
Now, how do you implement a DPS race that's both accessable to my pug groupmates, but still challenges those guilds with DPS who CAN in fact outdamage a prot paladin in tank gear? The short answer IMO is, "you don't". You either give the middle finger to those who don't spend as much time as you and I do with spreadsheets and wowhead, or you can give them a shot, but make it a free ride for those of us.
Personally, I prefer the easier line. My guild has players of fairly diverse skill capacities in it at the moment. 25 man raid days our attendance varies greatly, some days we bring in pugs, some days we're just short, some days we have all of our A players online. Recruitment is difficult on our server ATM so we do what we can with what we've got.
Now we can easily down Mag and Gruul, and are getting started in SSC. If we're in a situation where we're down a few people, it's nice to know we can progress. Personally I really much prefer being able to slap together a less-than-optimal raid and still manage to get somewhere, rather than being forced to min-max and use max consumables, or swap people out between encounters.
"Most guilds" will never be as organized or skilled as curse or nihilum. No matter how much time you give them. Likewise "most guilds" wont have the DPS of curse or nihilum, no matter how much gear you give them. If you guys can do it with 20 people, then "most guilds" will really struggle with 25.
So the question is, does blizzard want most guilds beating their content? Or does blizzard want to challenge the bleeding edge guilds? It's a difficult question, but I think at the moment they're sitting at the former.
Presuming Gurg is right and the content is simply undertuned, the interesting question will be, what next? I always had the impression that Blizzard intentionally overtuned past encounters, especially end bosses, at first to have some margin of error in case they messed up on the easy side.
Imagine the PR nightmare of massively undertuning an instance, giving Nihilum and a couple of other elite guilds essentially free loot only to tighten the screws later and leaving everyone else in the dust. The newly retuned content will still be easy for Nihilum because they already got the gear, while the rest of us are stuck farming the lower tiers and falling further and further behind.
Or don't imagine and wait. Will Blizzard suck it up and restore meaningful progression or will they leave the truly hardcore without anything to do for 6 months? Personally as someone who is not in an elite guild, the current state of balance means that I actually have a shot at seeing all the content before the next expansion. Maybe that is Blizzard's intent.
How do you make content that's challenging for the strong players, but not impossible for the "normal" players.
I did a heroic slave pens run yesterday. Trying to get my friend some nethers, so it was myself (prot pally tank), him (arms warrior), guildy (holy paladin healer), pug warlock and pug mage.
The run went smoothly, we finished in an hour. In the end, my friend had done the most damage, beating me by ~20%. I had done the second most, just clocking barely ahead of the mage. And the warlock had done ~70% of the mage's damage.
Now, I wasn't even trying to dps. I was occasionally consecrating when away from CC targets but most of my damage was coming from holy shield and seal of righteousness. Yet I'm still well ahead of the real DPS classes. Now it's not meant to be a braggart, because my dps is low. It's more to show the variable ability of these particular players.
These guys were not horrible. They did their jobs for the most part, and I would group with them again if I had to. Their DPS was just low. They obviously haven't put the same time into theorycraft and gear decisions that those on this board do. And guess what, most players in most guilds do not.
Now, how do you implement a DPS race that's both accessable to my pug groupmates, but still challenges those guilds with DPS who CAN in fact outdamage a prot paladin in tank gear? The short answer IMO is, "you don't". You either give the middle finger to those who don't spend as much time as you and I do with spreadsheets and wowhead, or you can give them a shot, but make it a free ride for those of us.
Personally, I prefer the easier line. My guild has players of fairly diverse skill capacities in it at the moment. 25 man raid days our attendance varies greatly, some days we bring in pugs, some days we're just short, some days we have all of our A players online. Recruitment is difficult on our server ATM so we do what we can with what we've got.
Now we can easily down Mag and Gruul, and are getting started in SSC. If we're in a situation where we're down a few people, it's nice to know we can progress. Personally I really much prefer being able to slap together a less-than-optimal raid and still manage to get somewhere, rather than being forced to min-max and use max consumables, or swap people out between encounters.
"Most guilds" will never be as organized or skilled as curse or nihilum. No matter how much time you give them. Likewise "most guilds" wont have the DPS of curse or nihilum, no matter how much gear you give them. If you guys can do it with 20 people, then "most guilds" will really struggle with 25.
So the question is, does blizzard want most guilds beating their content? Or does blizzard want to challenge the bleeding edge guilds? It's a difficult question, but I think at the moment they're sitting at the former.
There's another option that you didn't list and thats to nerf content after it comes out. I actually think this is the best solution as it allows the the best guild to face content that is difficult for them but over time the content gets easier and easier with direct nerfs and gear upgrades and then less talented guilds are able to do the content. This is pretty much what Blizzard did in vanilla WoW until Naxx, which wasn't really out long enough.
How do you make content that's challenging for the strong players, but not impossible for the "normal" players.
In a word: Gear.
The idea being that the first third of a new instance that drops Tier X gear consists of bosses that are downable with Tier X-1 gear. Once you've accumulated a bit of Tier X gear you can move on to the middle third of the bosses, and once you've geared most of your raid up in Tier X you can move to the last of the bosses. Presumably there's some coordination/complexity ramping in there too, but gear isthe major limiting factor.
Of course it's not that simple, and it implies that a Tier X-1 to Tier X upgrade is sufficiently substantial. But it's one way that you could have non-hardcore guilds still progress through content, just not as quickly as the top-tier folks that can substitute skill for gear.
Uh, a shitload of guilds aren't registered on Bosskillers. We aren't and most of the guilds on our server aren't. It's a random site that's handy for tracking the top kills of bosses, but otherwise a horrible basis for broad conclusions.
How much do you think the numbers are of? How much can they even be off?
Let's assume that Gruul killing guilds are not less likely to register than Kael'Thas killing guilds. Say each and every player in WoW has killed Gruul. That means at least 1.2% of the guilds registered and consequently less than 1.8% of the population killed Kael'Thas.
I am not buying "that is not accurate". Maybe it is off by some factor of 2, 3 or 5 or so, but more than 80? Never.
I think a part of the problem is that they made BT attunement too easy (in comparison to Hyjal). When your guild first runs into Vashj and Kael'thas, they are both challenging, complex fights with a "skill check" and a nice learning curve. Defeating them both is a pretty epic experience and really makes you feel like you earned entry into the next zone.
So say you've killed both these bosses, grats you're in Hyjal now! All that's required to complete the BT attunement is killing the first boss? Forgive a bit of theorycrafting here as I don't have any Hyjal experience, but I have a hard time believing that Rage Winterchill is anywhere near the difficulty or complexity of the Kael'thas fight.
If they had required say, Archimonde down in order to enter BT, it would at least pace out the speed that guilds enter BT a bit more. Maybe this would just mean Nihilum enters BT this week instead of last week, but it would make more sense then guilds skipping most of Hyjal and going straight for Illidan.
Its still pretty disheartening to see guilds breeze through in what are supposed to be the signature raid instances of TBC. I prefer the tiered release that WoW 1.0 had because of those nice breaks you got to have between instances to farm content and fully gear everyone up for the next tier. It also gave you chance to catch your breath from an initially hectic raid schedule and recharge your batteries for the next one. With the way things are laid out now, it puts alot of pressure on guilds and individuals in general to get to that top tier as fast as possible without any kind of slowdown.
I guess one could presume that if Blizzard does release an expansion pack at a yearly rate as was quoted a while back, that this type of release of raid instances will continue for a while. Personally i don't think Blizzard will be able to stick to that kind of timetable and we will probably see an expansion in about 1.5-2 year increments and given the current raid content that seems to be well enough to allow most guilds to progress to the end of the endgame.
I think a part of the problem is that they made BT attunement too easy (in comparison to Hyjal). When your guild first runs into Vashj and Kael'thas, they are both challenging, complex fights with a "skill check" and a nice learning curve. Defeating them both is a pretty epic experience and really makes you feel like you earned entry into the next zone.
So say you've killed both these bosses, grats you're in Hyjal now! All that's required to complete the BT attunement is killing the first boss? Forgive a bit of theorycrafting here as I don't have any Hyjal experience, but I have a hard time believing that Rage Winterchill is anywhere near the difficulty or complexity of the Kael'thas fight.
If they had required say, Archimonde down in order to enter BT, it would at least pace out the speed that guilds enter BT a bit more. Maybe this would just mean Nihilum enters BT this week instead of last week, but it would make more sense then guilds skipping most of Hyjal and going straight for Illidan.
I have to agree that this is another thing that is somewhat troubling. By making Archimonde a requirement to attune to BT it would have spread the pacing out alot better in the long run.
Presuming Gurg is right and the content is simply undertuned, the interesting question will be, what next? I always had the impression that Blizzard intentionally overtuned past encounters, especially end bosses, at first to have some margin of error in case they messed up on the easy side.
Imagine the PR nightmare of massively undertuning an instance, giving Nihilum and a couple of other elite guilds essentially free loot only to tighten the screws later and leaving everyone else in the dust. The newly retuned content will still be easy for Nihilum because they already got the gear, while the rest of us are stuck farming the lower tiers and falling further and further behind.
Or don't imagine and wait. Will Blizzard suck it up and restore meaningful progression or will they leave the truly hardcore without anything to do for 6 months? Personally as someone who is not in an elite guild, the current state of balance means that I actually have a shot at seeing all the content before the next expansion. Maybe that is Blizzard's intent.
I've been playing a little LOTRO casually on the side of WoW. The devs over there have stated something along the lines of, "we can't keep up with the hardcore crowd, no one can. We won't be trying to". I thought that was a very interesting statement to hear from a developer. So, is it even possible to keep up with guilds that are going to throw themselves at the content almost every night of the week? Personally, I don't think so. Is Blizzard thinking along the same lines or did they just simply goof up?
I have to agree that this is another thing that is somewhat troubling. By making Archimonde a requirement to attune to BT it would have spread the pacing out alot better in the long run.
Blizzards seems to have the new strategy of offering two parallel instances. Gruul/Mag. SSC/TK. Hyjal/BT. I can only speculate, but it looks like a way to avoid that one guild is totally stuck on a single fight and breaks up (razorgore, twins).
I've been playing a little LOTRO casually on the side of WoW. The devs over there have stated something along the lines of, "we can't keep up with the hardcore crowd, no one can. We won't be trying to". I thought that was a very interesting statement to hear from a developer. So, is it even possible to keep up with guilds that are going to throw themselves at the content almost every night of the week? Personally, I don't think so. Is Blizzard thinking along the same lines or did they just simply goof up?
I hope they are, to be honest.
Someone asked, earlier, "So what now for Nihilum?"
You know what the answer is? *Who cares*. Those guys know that by throwing themselves at the content the way they have, they're likely to clear everything and have a bit of a wait for the next piece of content.
Meanwhile, the mythical "average raiding guild" can look at that progress and think to themselves "Hell, if they can do it in a day, we can get that down eventually." I *don't* want to see another Naxx: yeah, I killed KT. I saw everything in Naxx, and it really burns me that friends of mine who are perfectly good players, just in less organized/progressed guilds, didn't. And won't. I do think that the average raiding guild should be just about done with all the raid content when the next expansion rolls around, obsoleting it. I don't think that having a zone where only 5% of the raiding population even kills a boss is a good thing for the game.
So I look at this tuning and say "Oh well. I'll keep playing at my own pace." Nihilum can clear it all tonight, and it won't change the way I play one bit. Blizzard seems to have tuned for the second and third tiers of guilds, not for the bleeding edge players, and that's honestly a good thing.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
So to sum it up, are you saying the gears got buffed a bit out of scale or the fight is tuned too easy?
Originally Posted by Praetorian
I think that in their 2.1 forms, Kara through SSC/TK seem to be about right. You aren't going to have the DPS to do Vashj or Kael if you aren't geared in epics from the t4 content and some t5 stuff. You need to gear up in Karazhan and Mag/Gruul to an extent -- no one is beating Kael in heroic gear and blues.
The problem may be not so much with the lack of tiered release, but rather simply with how BT and Hyjal were tuned. Or rather, not tuned.
Forgive the theorycraft here -- we should be in BT next timer, but in the meantime all I can do is speculate, and I encourage those with firsthand experience to correct me if I'm wrong -- but it seems like they simply undertuned the numbers involved in basically all the tier 6 content. I'd suspected this might be the case, but wanted to see how things played out on the live servers first.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that t5-geared raid groups on the PTR were killing most of the Hyjal bosses (easily), and the first half of BT (in the case of the organized raid guild efforts, anyway), as tuning was ongoing? And then, a week before 2.1 went live, Blizzard increased the power of everyone's gear by roughly 10-15%. This change was designed to make SSC/TK encounters that had previously required heavy potting more accessible, and doable for guilds under the restrictions of the new consumables changes. It was meant to equalize "old epics" + "2.0 consumables" with "new epics" + "2.1 consumables."
...except that BT and Hyjal had been tested and tuned for a month around "old epics" + "2.1 consumables." And they didn't go back and buff them after changing all the items. If you think about it, the gear that guilds used back in April to down Naj'entus, Supremus, Winterchill, and so forth, is strictly inferior to the gear that guilds are entering the zone with, on their first day. In the initial PTR build, we got premade kits of loot ranging from ilvl 110 to ilvl 125 (along with random stuff like Rejuv Gem). Today, any guild that's going into BT has ilvl 120 loot in most of their slots, going up to ilvl 138 stuff from Vashj/Kael. But they didn't retune any of the tier 6 fights after they buffed the hell out of the gear. Why not? What did they expect would happen when you took bosses that were dying, quickly, to any organized and serious raid group, and then gave players much better gear across the board?
The simple fact that guilds can go into Hyjal and BT with raids of 23, 22, 21 people, and kill multiple bosses, is a testament to the fact that Blizzard just plain got the numbers wrong, in a bad way. Guilds are going in with one Kael kill under their belts, most members of their raids with maybe two pieces of t5 gear on average (maybe a tank or two with 5/5 or something), and they're functioning as though they effectively outgear the encounters already. Likely because they do. As an analogy, was it possible to go into Naxxramas with only a couple of Nef and C'Thun kills under your belt, in mixed tier 1/tier 2/AQ gear, and kill some bosses? Sure. Could you kill Patchwerk? Yeah, with consumables and skilled play, and some luck, with extreme difficulty. Could you do it with 35 people? No way in hell.
Am I wrong? I'd be curious to hear from guilds that have been doing this stuff intensively for the past week. What I'm seeing, from an outsider's perspective, is fights that have some creative mechanics, but too much margin for error based on the numbers involved.
Query: If you can clear to Illidan in tier 4 gear, what the hell is the purpose of tier 6 gear? Faster farming clears?
I really hope they don't go back and do a tuning pass on this stuff. After Naxx -> Original Gruul -> SSC 2.0 -> TK 2.0, nothing would make me happier than going back on farm mode for a few months, with a night in SSC, TK, Hyjal, then BT to wrap everything up, enjoying the rest of the week to play with my new toys. Wiping to "farm content" because it's so tightly tuned is not my idea of a fun game anymore; perhaps I'm lazy/selfish but that's the way I feel.
I think the most fun I had playing the game was after we got our first Rag kill and had 2 nights of farming Onyxia/MC, and the rest of the time to PVP or do whatever.
Someone asked, earlier, "So what now for Nihilum?"
You know what the answer is? *Who cares*. Those guys know that by throwing themselves at the content the way they have, they're likely to clear everything and have a bit of a wait for the next piece of content.
Meanwhile, the mythical "average raiding guild" can look at that progress and think to themselves "Hell, if they can do it in a day, we can get that down eventually." I *don't* want to see another Naxx: yeah, I killed KT. I saw everything in Naxx, and it really burns me that friends of mine who are perfectly good players, just in less organized/progressed guilds, didn't. And won't. I do think that the average raiding guild should be just about done with all the raid content when the next expansion rolls around, obsoleting it. I don't think that having a zone where only 5% of the raiding population even kills a boss is a good thing for the game.
So I look at this tuning and say "Oh well. I'll keep playing at my own pace." Nihilum can clear it all tonight, and it won't change the way I play one bit. Blizzard seems to have tuned for the second and third tiers of guilds, not for the bleeding edge players, and that's honestly a good thing.
I think you may be making an error of degree here. Should most serious raiding guilds (i.e, not casual/social guilds, but guilds that recruit and want to progress, even if they don't raid 40 hours a week or don't have a roster of amazing players) make it to the last tier of raiding before the next expansion? Yes.
I think your reaction would be appropriate if it had taken Nihilum 2 months to clear the zones, leaving them with half a year at the very least with nothing to do. But we're not talking about two months here. We're talking about not even two weeks. We're talking about the Illidari Council (untouched on the PTR afaik) dying within 3 hours of Mother Shahraz (to Curse), with presumably some of that time spent on trash clearing. We're talking about guilds with no knowledge whatsoever of what Rage Winterchill does killing him on the first pull ever, with 22 people. Surely you can see a problem there?
By all accounts the tier 6 content is easier in many cases than the nerfed tier 5 content. How does that make any sense?
So to sum it up, are you saying the gears got buffed a bit out of scale or the fight is tuned too easy?
I think I was pretty clear. I'm saying that the fights were tuned such that they were quite killable (and in many cases easily so -- basically every serious guild that spent some time in BT on the PTR killed bosses like Supremus), and then they buffed the gear without retuning them, leaving them in many cases trivial.
PS: That is not your real character name in your profile. Fix it, or you will be banned.
I think you may be making an error of degree here. Should most serious raiding guilds (i.e, not casual/social guilds, but guilds that recruit and want to progress, even if they don't raid 40 hours a week or don't have a roster of amazing players) make it to the last tier of raiding before the next expansion? Yes.
I think your reaction would be appropriate if it had taken Nihilum 2 months to clear the zones, leaving them with half a year at the very least with nothing to do. But we're not talking about two months here. We're talking about not even two weeks. We're talking about the Illidari Council (untouched on the PTR afaik) dying within 3 hours of Mother Shahraz (to Curse), with presumably some of that time spent on trash clearing. We're talking about guilds with no knowledge whatsoever of what Rage Winterchill does killing him on the first pull ever, with 22 people. Surely you can see a problem there?
By all accounts the tier 6 content is easier in many cases than the nerfed tier 5 content. How does that make any sense?
It doesn't. But I'd still rather see the content go down too easily than not at all. Yeah, if they retune it, bleeding edge guilds will bitch about having to relearn the fights the hard way, but again: who cares? They'll do what they do, and *Blizzard should not be paying attention to how quickly the very best clear their content* if they want to see the average guild clear all the content. Presumably the content will be tuned again, and it will be made somewhat harder. So the top tier got some easy loot in the meantime. Oh well? They deserve some kind of payback for being the beta testers for everyone else.
2 months for Nihilum would leave me with zero confidence that the average guild would be finishing up the content at the right time. Absolutely *zero*. I think players from the "power" servers (Mal'ganis certainly being one of them) tend to vastly overestimate where the average raiding guild is at by this point. It isn't TK.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
There are 13 bosses in BT+Hyjal. If each of them took ~2 raid sessions to learn on average, with the last few (Archimonde, Illidan, etc.) being closer to a week, then that'd be around two months, factoring in farming old content. That doesn't strike me as unreasonable. Particularly when you consider that the Nihilums of the world will probably be less well geared when they first hit BT/Hyjal because they didn't spend as long stuck in the prior tier of raid content. A guild that clears SSC and gets to Kael but takes 6 weeks to kill him is going to have a ton of tier 5 loot when they finally get him down, and will thus have an easier time in the tier 6 zones.
The problem is that multiple bosses are being downed in a single night of clearing, by undergeared and undermanned raids. I think it's a fair point to say that if a fight takes Nihilum 2 weeks of dedicated effort to learn, it's probably too hard for almost all non-top-tier guilds to ever do. But at the other end of the spectrum, if a fight takes Nihilum less than 2 hours to learn, it's too easy. They're good, but they're not that good.
A raid zone full of Grobbuluses isn't really in anyone's interests.
Well what's the point of raiding these places if there is no challenge to begin with? I think thats the jist of what Gurg is trying to get to. Sure loot is nice and all but most people want it to accomplish it while being challenged at the same time.
Someone asked, earlier, "So what now for Nihilum?"
You know what the answer is? *Who cares*. Those guys know that by throwing themselves at the content the way they have, they're likely to clear everything and have a bit of a wait for the next piece of content.
Meanwhile, the mythical "average raiding guild" can look at that progress and think to themselves "Hell, if they can do it in a day, we can get that down eventually." I *don't* want to see another Naxx: yeah, I killed KT. I saw everything in Naxx, and it really burns me that friends of mine who are perfectly good players, just in less organized/progressed guilds, didn't. And won't. I do think that the average raiding guild should be just about done with all the raid content when the next expansion rolls around, obsoleting it. I don't think that having a zone where only 5% of the raiding population even kills a boss is a good thing for the game.
So I look at this tuning and say "Oh well. I'll keep playing at my own pace." Nihilum can clear it all tonight, and it won't change the way I play one bit. Blizzard seems to have tuned for the second and third tiers of guilds, not for the bleeding edge players, and that's honestly a good thing.
Thanks Kalman, you took the words right out of my mouth.
I'm one of those who never got to see most of Naxx, and whenever I hear people reminisce about it I feel a twinge of resentment towards Blizzard for not giving my old guild time to complete it. I hope I won't suffer the same fate in TBC.
06/04/07, 6:03 PM
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