Originally Posted by zeidrich

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.

Originally Posted by Praetorian

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.

Originally Posted by dalien

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.

Originally Posted by Aphyrax

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.

Originally Posted by Epica

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?

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?

Originally Posted by lazerpewpew

So to sum it up, are you saying the gears got buffed a bit out of scale or the fight is tuned too easy?