If this is true, it would call into question some of the accomplishments that are being made today. Not only would the first-kill guilds have a serious leg up in terms of gear when the presumably re-tuned versions of the instance came out, but they'd never really have to experience the "harder" version of the fight (unless they're going to shift to the lower tier of gear just to say they did it. I don't think anyone is that much of an idiot). We're only looking at 1-2 weeks of gearing up in the zones so far, but that's still a fair amount of loot.

Obviously they never would have been in a position to do this if they hadn't beaten the seriously difficult v2.0 encounters, but what does that do to the morale of a guild like that? Presumably competition and respect are what drive them to do what they do. "We're the best". "We beat it first". If you beat the easymode version of a fight and the next guy beats the harder version later, which of you can claim to be the better player? Does it matter? If they put in hotfixes now, does that really help much?

I think the lesson here is that one instance at a time is a good approach for Blizzard. It gives the QA team time to test things and prevents problems like this from coming up. Rather than blowing through 2 instances at the launch of v2.1 they would have only been able to blow through one.

It's definitely a tuning problem. Blowing through BT as fast as Nihilum did simply shouldn't be possible... there's no internal progression like there was in Naxx, where you had to gear up within the instance. If you can clear to Illidan (and possibly kill him even) with virtually no T6 gear, the dungeon is too easy. There are plenty of bosses in BT/Hyjal to create an internal progression, the tuning just went wrong somewhere.

The mass-release of raid content combined with an arduous keying process combines to move raiding away from skill and back towards time investment. The time-management challenge of Naxxramas, where you had to clear 4 wings to get attempts in on the last two bosses, returns with a vengeance. The more casual your guild is, the harder it is to key your guild, as the more people you have to key. A guild of 25 players playing 8hrs/day are naturally going to progress exponentially faster than a guild of 50 players playing 4hrs/day. We just never saw these extremes as the perfect storm was never created.

Ultimately though, this isn't a major concern, as average guilds will probably get to BT/Hyjal and complete most of it anyway; again, it appears the major challenge to raiding is again time management. The days where a guild of "talented casuals" (EJ included) could compete with full-bore raiders are gone. BT and Hyjal fights aren't harder, in fact judging by how long Nihilum takes on boss X, they're significantly easier than SSC/TK 1.0. They just take longer to clear to.

Our real concern should be, is Blizzard substituting gear/skill checks for key checks, instead of having them work in tandem? How many guilds currently in SSC/TK are capable of clearing BT, but just lacking the keys for it? Could we kill Supremus and Rage Winterchill in tier 4 epics?

Note that I am biased, being a casual "passenger", just like my girlfriend is (though we were both hardcore before, her playing our best geared tank for our first 4H kill, for example).

So now that I'm in casual land, and having experienced being told "You can't come with us to Mag and Gruul because your gear isn't good enough", I personally would like it if some bosses had more passenger space.

Now, I think they should have probably put passenger-friendly bosses in the SSC and the Keep as opposed to Hyjal/BT. Keeping the early raid game accessible is a great thing for general-populace morale, imo. When one of the horde guilds on our server would lead Naxx PUGs (literally) with a few of their alts, killing Razuvious, Anubrekhan, and Noth, I think everyone benefitted. There's no way they would, or could, have killed Thaddius with that group, but people on the horde side loved it.

I think a large part of the genius of Naxx was the fact that passengers could visit, but only the hard core could complete it.

Aye, it sounds like either something's gone wrong with the tuning, or we're missing something.

Hypothesis: Heroic modes for raid instances?

Even if it is a simple tuning screwup, implementing a heroic mode might be a better response PR-wise and guild happiness-wise than tuning it all back up again.

3/20 25-man raiding guilds (definition of a raiding guild is a guild who has killed at least maulgar and posted a thread about it on our guild progression forums) have killed any boss in SSC as of yet.

Obviously 17 guilds are being challenged by SSC level content and at least 3 are being challenged by TK level content.

These posts make it sound like everyone's gearing up in Karazhan and just casually popping in and downing Vashj and Kael'thas, heading over and taking out rage winterchill and the popping into BT.

If there's such a lack of challenge, why are we still not though SSC? Why is only 1 guild on our server past Vashj? Is it because we all really really suck?

I don't think so, it's just that some people are really really good.

The fact that a guild like nihilum is downing these things in record time is heartening. It means that we might see the end before the next expansion comes out. We didn't get that with Naxxramas.

It's nice to know that if we can't do it with t4 we can get t5 and get through it based on stronger gear. It's nice to know that if we can't fully do BT with t5 we can do it with some t6.

The point was that the Tier6 zones were too easy, not the Tier 5 ones. Actually getting attuned to T6 seems like a bigger hurdle than the bosses. Like for example, the first guild on a server to get attuned is likely to leap a dozen bosses ahead of everyone else just by getting that attunement key

If that really is true, I couldn't imagine any bleeding edge guilds still playing this game by then.

Not so. Those 17 aren't having trouble getting through SSC content - as you say, they haven't killed a single boss there. They're having trouble getting into SSC at all. I suspect that this will prove to be a general phenomenon. At this point (post 2.1), the challenge lies more in getting *into* SSC than in getting through it.

A hardcore guild needs to get ~30 people keyed to have a 25-man raid most nights in SSC. A less hardcore guild, with lower attendance, will need to key 50-100 people just to have a chance of having a well-balanced raid-full of people all online at once. The logistics of pulling that many people through Karazhan and Heroics are incomprehensible to anyone that's not out there trying to do it. In the face of that, many of the less hardcore players that once were raiders have simply turned completely off the raid game. I'm considering throwing in the towel for my own group at the moment after we just couldn't get enough people to go and take a look at Maulgar - too many of our past raiders have just given up the game in toto. 2.1 came too late, and didn't touch the logistics problems.

Note that the logistics problems apply even before you consider the passenger/ability issue. Those 75 people with ~40% attendance may be just as technically good as the ~95% attendance people in the hardcore guilds. In practice they're probably not, so you have that much more of a problem maintaining group cohesion, morale, etc.

Once you do have enough people attuned to SSC and able to form the nucleus of a happily raiding group, it looks as though progression has now been carefully set up through SSC and TK, and is weirdly tuned thereafter. But I don't know how many more groups are going to be crossing that initial hump any time soon.

The way vanilla content was organised is a similar way to how BC should have.

You couldn't realistically get through more then 1-2 bosses of a new raid instance without a decent amount of gear from the previous one. Razor could be killed without farming Rag but Vael probably not, Skeram could be killed without farming Nef, Raz/Anub etc. You should not be able to destroy T6 content in T4.5.

The leading guilds through old content used consumables/world buffs et al to make up for the lack of gear to complete content first, and once they reached the required gear level didn't have to bother anymore.

Something is wrong if guilds are ploughing through BT/Hyjal when they are CLEARLY undergeared for the zone - being soo early. They cannot make up for the gear with consumables/world buffs anymore.

What is the fix? I don't think they can now - its too late now.



On the subject of raid pacing, I prefered the tiered release approach. As a not-so-hardcore raider it is daunting and slightly depressing that some guilds are near clearing T6 content when many are still working on T4 content, but that is just my preference, not what is best for the game or the rest of its subscriber base.

The tiered approached allowed many guilds to start the next raid instance on par with the top guilds and gain some sense of pride knowing, once they beat the current content, they had "beaten the game" at this point in time. This also allowed for the farming content period to unwind and relax and wait for the next zone.

Being able to do any Hyjal/BT without a full raid, let alone those people not being completly pimped out in every slot of the best gear beforehand is just wrong no matter how you look at it.
I wouldn't even consider doing some fights in SSL without a full raid, and yet this is possible on people in generally 50/50 T4/T5 gear in T6 zones?

Im finding it hard to put into words exactly how I feel about the situation, things are 'too easy' and yet obviously not 'easy' if you can get what I mean, gear checks should be around so that you need to spend some time farming the content to move on (Patch, 4HM etc..).

The difference between gear is taking its toll now aswell, while the increase in raw value maybe similar as it used to be the actual effect of that increase is minimal now that we are so far ahead, and I doubt this can be fixed either.

Its just another mistake due to Blizzard rushing everything at once, honestly they should of just left BT alone untill people had been atleast entering Hyjal on the level people were entering TK/SSL with decent progress pre 2.1.

TBC they broke a working formula for raiding, and the saying "If its not broken, dont fix it" doesn't persist for no reason.
Not to mention with them making instances so 'small' that they just get devoured too quickly

If the next expansion would be a year off, what is Blizzard going to do in the meantime? I know that Zul-Whatever is coming next but nothing beyond that. Another high end raid is not warranted by the numbers, nor does it fit in the lore as BC was themed around Illidan from the start.

Blizzard has announced to produce one expansion per year. It looks to me they are really trying to make it happen this time.

This sums it up for me:
Too much, too soon, with too much raw time required

What type of schedule does the "mythical" average guild use?

We do 4 maybe 5 raids per week lasting ~4hrs per day, that seems pretty average to me. It's well over the top for totally casual guilds and way below the hours hardcore progression guilds do. Anyway with that kind of schedule (4-5 days, 4 hours per raid) there's simply not enough time to do Kara + Gruuls Lair + Magtheridon + SSC + The Eye + BT while learning new bosses.

Even worse many many people now prefer to do only pvp/arena/heroics and avoid 25 man pve raiding all together.

I know in our guild lots of people still need kara/mag/gruuls lair loot and skipping all together isn't going to be an option for quite awhile.

The pacing for the release of vanilla content was good imo:
Onyxia >> MC >> Dire Maul >> BWL > ZG >> AQ20 & AQ 40 >> Naxx

After awhile you could just skip doing MC, pugs or guild co-operations ran MC for alts and people that still wanted rare drops on spare days in the weekend. Later on the same thing happened with BWL. With the amount of content in the game at the moment there are no spare days.

They are clearly in a rush to just dump as much raid content into the game as possible so they can dedicate everyone to working on something else (xpac) this seems like a pretty bad way to do things. People that get lucky with drops and get what they want quickly are going to want to be doing the next instance. This means either farming instances for loot people need will fall by the wayside, or people with all the loot they need will abandon ship for a guild doing the next instance. Some might call that natural but there's something to be said for holding the extreme hardcore back by not releasing content and pacing out new content. If anything people may get bored faster this way and many people put off pve raiding by the sheer amount of to cram in at the moment.

Basically should new top end raid content be opened while the majority of guilds are not even close to done with Gruul/Magtheridon/SSC, personally I don't think it's a good idea at all.

Most people will accomplish it while being challenged.

Nihilum and Curse and co. aren't most people.

Maybe they will use CoT to make another instance, after all, as they said, it has pretty much endless possibilities.

One of the complaints echoed throughout the thread (by some) was that there aren't as many gear checks in the T6-level dungeons, so you could afford to not spend months farming an instance in order to progress through the next.

And there are also people saying so much content is bad, because it's difficult to both farm and progress????

That doesn't make much sense. If you don't need the gear to progress (as much as before), then you don't need to farm dungeons for years. I'm not sure how that's a bad thing at all. People raid to learn and beat new content, not to farm MC for over a year.

As for farming content and it being difficult for a guild that raids 15-20 hours a week:
My guild does 4 25-man days a week, 3 hours a day, maybe 3.5 on a "push" night, so we're well below your standard hardcore guild.

We're at your typical spot for semi-serious raiding guilds - 4/6 SSC, 1/4 TK, and working on Leotheras. You can absolutely spend two of your four days to clear Gruul's + Mag + 4/6 SSC - leaving two days to learn new content.

My advice for your guild? As you put new content on farm, push farmed content off the table altogether (optional off-nights). In your case, push Karazhan to optional nights so that only people who need loot can dedicate themselves to going. Spend your 4 nights on 25-man content and you will see progression. Don't hang on to farmed content too long because *you don't need the gear* to progress.

At this point, time is more valuable than gear. Time and a decent measure of skill, of course.



... In the end, whether Bliz is jumping the gun on releasing all this content... it's all a matter of preference. Personally, I like seeing stuff fall - it gives me confidence that we can eventually see and conquer said encounters instead of hitting a brick wall tuned to the creme de la creme. I'm pretty sure most guilds who don't care about the existential world progression race will agree. /shrug. Oh and, I'm not surprised a guild that spent hours learning and tuning the encounters on the PTR are ripping through said encounters.

Given that on PTR -everyone- had full top end T5 level loot to do this, and due to previous drop rate I highly doubt that is the case now.

Take Naxx for example, it was tested on PTR well, quite a few guilds had pretty much top end pre-Naxx gear for it, and yet we didn't have even 2 wings of it cleared within a month did we?
If anything Naxx progress should be faster than BT progress due to this.

With all the fuss about badly overtuned 25 man content in 2.0, maybe blizzard have finally decided to act to defend their market share, they have decided they aren't going to deliberately leave stuff untuned to block the top guilds.

People in this thread have mention the inspirational and/or aspirational aspects of 'rock star' guilds, but surely having the highend guilds declaring content broken or impossible would harm the morale of less progressed guilds because if random uber guild cannot kill boss x then what hope would the lesser guild have that they would be able to do so anytime in the future?

If the likes of nihilum have time to farm bt, get bored and quit before the next content turns up is that really going to hurt wow's subscriber base beyond the few dozen accounts in that guild, not really.

Top end T5 gear, with no enchants or no gems in it was pretty much on par with T4 gear. Unless you transferred over with a shitload of the reagents to kit your gear out, you weren't really better off in T5 unless you had mediocre gear before that.

Well what is happening in BT is probably caused by Blizzard constant change in direction. Sometimes it looks like they dont know where they are going.

Pre BC you had Naxx a 40 man with by far the best items in the game. Then a few months later the raid zones are now 10 man and 25 man. The epics in those zones are barely better then level 70 greens and blues. Then another change in direction, they completely change the elixir and flask mechanics making them much less important then before. Then another change they bump all raid epics by about 15 items levels, at the end of the testing phase of the patch. And I am not even talking about the difficulties of raids going from extremely hard tier 1 encounters to trivial tier 3 encounters.

Too many major changes and complete turn arounds from one patch to the next, no wonder they cant tune there raid content properly. Now what they need to do is to retune BT and Hyjal in the next week patch making them at least require some tier 3 to progress. They need to settle down, the devs look like headless chicken running around they need to figure out a direction and stay with it for awhile and not change things constantly when noobs complain in the general forums.

An overlooked aspect of this whole thing is PvP. T6 gear is in many cases also highly suitable for PvP. If you have to farm BT to be competitive on PvP then this would be a major setback for the PvP system and undermine WoW's credibility as a competitive PvP game.

So, if T6 is too readily available to the elite guilds (which is a side effect of the content being too easy) then they will have to boost the PvP gear to similar ilvls so that top PvPers not in top raiding guilds will be able to compete at the highest level. But where does this leave the majority of guilds that cannot do BT? If you make the PvP gear ilvl 140+ in the next patch all those guilds just now working through SSC are in trouble because people will come in with higher ilvl gear than drops in the zone. And like it or not, item upgrades are a significant motivator for a lot of people.

Blizzard will have to make a tough choice. Screw the PvPers not in top raiding guilds or screw the lower-tier raiding guilds. The third option, making T2 PvP as good as BT but extremely expensive so that second-tier PvPers don't have easy access to it was already ruled out when Blizzard announced that PvP T2 will cost about as much as T1 does now.

I have a slightly different view to the alchemy changes compared to some posters here. I see that as part of an attempt to slow down progression for the "rock stars". However much some fights HAD to be done with full consumables, the "air guitar star" guilds were never going to go into them with maxed out consumables. Hence the rock stars have long been able to progress way ahead of their actual gear level, as compared to the air guitarists, who had to spend more time gearing up. Reduce the edge consumables give and you have a more level playing field.

Now, it is obviously very difficult to drawn far reaching conclusions about the T6 content, just because it is only the rock star guilds who have access to it right now. The data we would -like- to have is how fast a Nihilum progresses there compared to a more average group. The only thing we can do is to compare the star guilds progress in the T6 content to their previous progress in older content. I think we can conclude that the progress rate has accelerated remarkably much when they get past the T5 stage. As such, I would also find it likely that the "average" guild will feel, when the time comes, that the T6 encounters are too easy.

Now, if my conclusion above actually is correct, a pretty tricky question arises. How should Blizzard deal with it?

Whatever they decide to do, they don't have very much time to act either. Because, once the number of people playing T6 content starts to go up, it becomes ever more difficult to tweak the numbers upwards. And if they leave it like this, and a large faction of the players end up completing the end game content in TBC many months before the next expansion... Well, that seems like a very bad thing. I guess a rock star guild not having much anything to do for 6 months is no big deal, but if a lot of player grow bored with no content, they are likely to go find another game to keep them occupied.

Personally, I hope the T6 content is taken offline asap, and gets re-tested. And I fear it won't, and that I will run out of things to do some time early this fall. Assuming, of course, TBC isn't intended to get a T7 instance added after the summer.

And to tie back into the topic of the thread. No, I'm not at all happy about the pacing of new content in TBC. I doubt most players actually enjoy being 10-20 bosses behind the spearhead, as that will always feel, at some level, as a failure. And even worse, if the "progression by checkpoints" instead of "progression by gear" is actually -intended-, then I don't realy know what to say anymore. I happen to, on a deep level, find it fair that everyone, regardless of how skilled and how many hours / week they spend on raiding actually have to spend some minimum # of weeks getting gear for the next step ahead of them.

All of this guitar talk is making me want to go play Guitar Hero.

The current situation is a direct result of how Blizzard's itemisation philosophy has changed over the last 2 years. When MC came out, I probably took a few pieces of Felheart before I realised it was complete garbage for PVE compared to my DM, Scholo, Strat, UBRS blues with lots of +damage and crit.

Then BWL came out and I was still wearing items from PVP and ZG because it just had more damage. That and you still had to do MC if you wanted to complete your Tier 2 set. So people did. It wasn't uncommon to hear of a whole guild of people rerolling to another server and taking down Chromaggus within 3-4 weeks of the realm opening (Nefarian was a cockblock for them for obvious reasons). The gear in BWL wasn't necesary to progress in it. Once you had the threat-management deal-e-o and pot farming sorted out, the place was a cakewalk.

Eventually AQ40 came out and we saw another bizarre collection of gear with spell penetration and the like, but for the most part, it was awesome gear. Eventually the Twin Emps, Ouro and C'thun were the only reasons you'd go back to AQ40 once Naxx came out. Every piece of gear from Naxx was amazing and you had to gear within the instance in order to progress in it, which slowed things down for a lot of guilds and really separated the men from the boys.

Now what do we have?

In 2.0 we had quest rewards, 5-man blues and crafted items beating the pants off of raiding items. Why farm Kharazan for 6 weeks of minor upgrades before going into SSC/TK? Just hop straight in there with a buttload of pots and kick ass.

Now in 2.1 we have all that semi-garbage we picked up from Kharazan, Gruul, Mag, SSC and TK the last couple of months beating the everloving piss out of our old blues and we don't even need to flask up for every boss. Now content is being butchered left and right.

Who's to say this isn't what Blizzard wants? Maybe they want a greater proportion of the playerbase to experience raid content than the last 2 years. Why not? Make it easy, get lots of people in there, have experience more of the content their development team creates and keep paying for their account instead of hitting 70, having absolutely fuck-all to do and quitting the game.

The number of people who would quit the game from burn-out from not having any new content for the next 6 months will be a LOT less than the number they lost over the last 2 years of level 60 characters getting bored of farming scholo/strat/ubrs/dm. Raiding is still not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but places like Kharazan and the (relative) reduction in difficulty of Gruul, Mag, SSC and TK makes it an easy target for a much larger proportion of the population.