How is this unfair?

You had the same potential opportunities as those guilds that have went through everything. They messed up and are rectifying it is the big thing not that oh no some guilds got some "free" loot and learning on the bosses in "ezmode".

General point that a lot of people seem to be missing-

It took my guild 6 weeks to learn C'Thun. A similar amount of time to learn Thaddius. These weren't 1 or two shot weeks, these were 2-3 nights dedicated per week- sometimes more (especially in Thaddius' case) . We made it to 3 wings cleared and pulling Gothik by the day TBC dropped- but it was hard. Every step of the way was difficult- it took weeks to get down every boss for us except Grobb.

When 2.1 came out- we didn't kill Hydross the first night he was out. The first week? Sure. But there was still a certain amount of struggle... and we're still only 2 bosses into SSC.

This content may be easily learned for the top guilds. It may be a walk in the park. But I'm willing to bet that every boss in BT and most in Hyjal will take more than a week for a guild like mine to learn- one certainly not at the top but also not filled with drooling idiots. Hell some of the bosses that were killed in a matter of hours will probably wind up taking us weeks or months.

I always laugh a little when one of our raid leaders comes in and makes these pronouncements about progress. Zoning into Naxx for the first time and being told- okay guys, we're going to jaunt over and kill Anub and the next guy and we'll be working on Maexx tomorrow. Yeah. Right. Okay guys a day or two on Hydross and we'll be on Kael'thelas in a month tops. Hahah. HAHAahahahAHahAha. We're a good guild. When presented with the slow release from 1.0 we almost always caught up and were in the zone within a week or two of the release.... but the last real farming delay we had was BWL -> AQ40 and that was only because our server was so incredibly slow to open the gates.

This content may be too easy for the top ranked guilds. My question is, however, if a guild like mine can get to it in 2... 3... 4 months (because god alone knows how long Kael and Vash are going to take us) from the release... is it still going to be challenging?

I'd guess so. I mean it took us weeks to learn Gluth and Heigan- bosses that these guilds simply blew through and never required a ton of theorycrafting.

Hearing that Illidan is the hardest encounter that they've faced isn't comforting. I dont' care if they beat it in 2 hours or 20 days- if it's hard enough to be considered hard, we're inevitably going to choke on it for weeks or months.

That, I think, is the point. To give even 20% of guilds the chance to beat the content in this expansion- they simply can't put in more 4hm encounters. There's nto enough time.

That has a lot to do with gear, and it actually is exactly in line with what I said a few pages back regarding the +sta on all the t5/t6 gear.

When we saw the BT/Hyjal loot on the PTR, the first thing many people said was "Whoa, look at all that stamina...."

To use Rage Winterchill as an example, if you are a glass cannon tailor with 3/3 Spellfire, Spellstrike, Girdle of Ruination, and other low-stam high-dam pieces, he will basically RSTS one-shot you. Ice Bolt, one tick, and you're dead before you can get any healing unless someone instantly blows NS. You need hp for the fight. Fight Doomwalker with 6500hp, and you'll die the first time he does Earthquake. And so on.

Increasing the damage on DoTs, AoE abilities, etc., doesn't stress healers necessarily -- it increases the amount of stamina your raid requires. And without gearing up, increasing stamina means decreasing DPS, decreasing mana regen, etc. Unless, of course, you actually get the progression loot that gives you both great stamina and great DPS/regen.

I just noticed that Supremus is absent from the list. I don't get it.

A lot of the T5 content feels appropriately difficult. Personally I think the Leotheras nerf was a bit over-done...these days we're dropping him with several people dead for most of the fight with zero consumables (aside from mana/health pots). Void Reaver is a reward for getting 25 people attuned, Solarian isn't overwhelming at any point, haven't personally seen Al'ar. Vashj is a great fight, one of those things where you see Phase and you're first thought is "how the fuck are we gonna pull this off..." and with practice you assemble a workable strategy. We should down Vashj this week, in 3-4 nights of work. That's fine. The problems seem to only begin after Kael.

Honestly, this is just the everpresent issue of Lore vs. MMORPG. Yes, a guild plowed through the content and killed him already. Issues of fine-tuning aside, they still report he is quite difficult. I'm happy to inform you that Illidan is not actually dead, no more than Onyxia, and he'll be waiting for the rest of us when we get there, appropriately challenging, epic, and apparently bug-free. I'm looking forward to fighting him in the weeks to come. I'll look back when this game is over at my guild's and my own achievements, more than that guild that did them first. The fact that dozens upon dozens of guilds had already killed Nefarian did not detract from my old guild's very first kill. Someone else did it, sure, but it's still going to be an achievement when you do it.

To respond to some of the previous discussion, I think the biggest factor in perceived difficulty is whether or not we've seen the boss mechanics before. We look back fondly on the MC > BWL > AQ40 > Naxx apparent progression as a model, but that sort of assumes each step of difficulty was planned that way. I think it's closer to the truth to observe that each new dungeon usually added new mechanics and skillsets that had to be learned to overcome the encounters. Even the hardest encounters at first (like Four Horsemen) became apparently easy after learning them.

To take the discussion in a hopefully not-off-topic direction, perhaps the real issue is that we haven't seen many legitimately new boss mechanics in TBC raiding. How many bosses have you faced and said "Ok guys, this is basically C'thun lite" or "here's the Sartura phase" and so on? I am enjoying the majority of the encounters every week, especially post-2.1, but isn't it fair to say that we're learning a lot of these faster because we already have the skillsets required to beat the fights, thanks to previous experience? I think Quigon already observed in another thread how many fights now had berserk timers-- do you think there are still avenues apart from this to make new encounters truly challenging in the old sense?

Just to add, I think these changes are really stupid and aimed at the wrong bosses completely, the only bosses that needed a buff were Supremus, Shade of Akama, Gorefiend and the Council, instead they missed two of those bosses and buffed bosses that didnt need to be. Mother Shahraz was fine, you need everyone in the raid with capped SR (365) to even get close to killing her, like Nihilum said, Illidan was probally already the hardest boss seen in the game so far, certainly harder than Essence of Souls.

This is sounding a lot like the old C'thun situation: defeat with internal crew, increase HP etc. by arbitrary percentage and release content to public. Definitely something slapped together to slow progression, but without the necessary discussion about what to actually change. Yay.

I really really hate to bring this up, but doesn't this mentality totally revert back to the raiding to pvp argument? I mean, if pve gear is both dps *and* stamina and they start tuning instances for massive dps output while still requiring the best dps input doesn't that just take us right back? I highly doubt blizzard will change the arena 2 set to upgrade the damage output, it's going to be as it always has, tons of stamina/resil and pretty much ass for everything else. Not sure I like it.

I don't mean to be flippant, but...

When Gruul and Magtheridon were horribly overtuned and presented a brick wall to all but 5% of raiding guilds, the world enraged and bitched for months.

When BT and Hyjal were moderately undertuned and presented a roller-coaster ride to 5% of raiding guilds for two weeks, the world enraged and bitched again (at least for the past week or so.)

Which is the better option, if you had to choose? For my part, I'd rather know something is beatable than be staring at what might be an unscalable cliff.

It seems that the WoW playerbase has turned into a heap of druids, never satisfied with whatever happens.

There are some good, reasonable points made in this thread, but I think Tigole's point is also a good one: How many people saying, "BT is too easy," have actually been there to kill things? The answer based on this thread is, "Some, but not many." Isn't it possible that the speed with which many bosses died is a testament to the video gaming skill of the few guilds in there, rather than just undertuning?

This thread feels like some good analysis interwoven with a lot of jumping to conclusions. Just my 2c.

I think it's a little too early to start making statements about the true difficulty of BT.

A disclaimer: I'm not here claiming that Nihilum or Curse have Kratos-style Godly Powers of Destruction or any such thing. But (and correct me if I'm wrong, this is speculation) I would hazard the following guesses about the guilds pushing for world firsts:

Their raiders learn quickly. When a mistake is made and causes a wipe, it doesn't generally get made again. Complex execution takes them significantly less time to master than the average guild.

They have no, or almost no, true dead weight. There may be differences in relative skill but even their "average" players are, compared to the general population, good at their class.

Issues that average guilds struggle with, such as attendance, focus, and preparation are much less of a problem for them; their team is dedicated and reliable.

My argument isn't that "Nihilum is so much better than us that a challenge for them would be impossible for everyone else", more that if my guesses above are true, they would learn encounters quickly, not waste time making the same mistakes, be able to take a reliable, consistant team to every raid and thus minimize the need to relearn fights, and make good use of their raiding time. And they'd probably clear even very difficult encounters quickly, in a timeframe that only a similarly tight, focused, and dedicated team could hope to match.

So, my thought is that unless "average" guilds annihilate BT with the same kind of speed, it's a little early to call the place too easy. My prediction is that average raiding guilds will need to have farmed T5, will need a full raid, and will take longer to learn the fights. Not drastically longer, but I'll be really surprised if the majority of guilds tear through BT as fast as Nihilum have.

My interpretation is that BT is working in a way I've seen posters on these boards advocate: If you have the skills and dedication, you can progress quickly. If you're less skilled and less dedicated, you can make up for imperfect execution or average skill with better gear from previous encounters. Isn't this what people were saying should be the case, back when TBC raid loot was basically 5-man loot except cooler looking?

My original expectation is that BT was not a realistic goal for me and my raid. We're casual raiders, I think our attitude was "it'll be really cool and exciting if we make it to Hyjal." The recent news about how quickly things have been dying caused me to reconsider that assumption, that BT would be difficult enough to seperate the best from the rest.

I can see both sides of the argument and they both make sense. On one hand, it doesn't really matter to me if I'm still working on Gruul while Nihilum has downed Illidan; good for them, congrats. There ought to be something for the top players to (deservedly) brag about beating, and loot that's a true status symbol to have.

On the other hand, I keep reading about how awesome Naxx was. I keep seeing people on these boards talk about how it's a shame very few WoW players even saw the place. Maybe Blizzard is trying to avoid BT having a similarly exclusive appeal, and I can see the argument for that kind of accessibility being good for the game.