How difficult are these bosses really? When i ask this, I mean, all the way from the bottom (Attunemen) to Kael (im excluding Hyjal and BT for their undertuning reasons).

This sounds kinda wierd, but every boss in TBC seems just as difficult as the previous, excluding a few bosses.

In vanilla wow, it boiled down to MC was 1 boss with adds and 1 ability the entire time (no phases), then came ragnaros and he was a bit of a big leap in difficulty (onyxia too) with multiple phases, and in rag's case, if you didnt kill the adds in time, rag was back anyway to kick your ass, essentially the first version of a DPS check.

BWL, well there was Razorgore, which was the first truly execution fight. Over a year ago when we had Razor on farm, I said that a group in full UBRS blues could kill Razorgore if their execution was essentially what one could consider Curse or Nihilium's to be. Vael was an entirely different beast, and to this day, one of my favorite bosses because of how well designed the fight is (for its time at least, especially considering how bad other bosses in the zone were designed). In the middle of BWL, theres Broodlord thru Chromaggus, and to sum up these bosses nicely, the key attribute that increased their difficulty between them and MC bosses was movement, and instead of 1 ability, it was 2 to 3 now (think about that, up to 3 abilities, even the first boss in kara is more complex). Chromaggus was a bit different in that he had 5 different breaths, but really still only 2 abilities a week. Then came nef, and when learning nef, theres the gauntlet that is phase 1, then you get to phase 2. for now, think of it as you are the first to nef, and are now the first to see phase 2 ever in wow. he lands, he hits hard, he shadowflames, you still have adds up from phase 1, and on top of all this, he has class calls, which (until you get him on farm status) keep you on edge for what the next one is. and then theres phase 3. this was a boss that when learning it, was definitely a full step above what you previously fought.

Then AQ40 came out, if say skaram was less forgiving than he was for a guild that was killing nef before AQ40 was released, this is a boss with multiple abilities and a significant increase in the coordination. Bug Trio was definitely innovative in its own right. Now theres Satura, the first boss in the game with a real berserk timer, and for good reason, had she been tuned to be above BWL, it would have been very interesting (or not so much in the rogue's cases) to learn it because it would have been a decent DPS and idiot check. Fankriss's Snakes were a similar story, not killing them in time made them berserk. Huhu was 1. a NR check, 2. DPS check, 3. Tank check. All bosses up till this point (presume that they were in fact all tuned to be huhu difficulty in terms of unforgiving-ness) raised the bar as far as difficulty, 3+ abilities, adds aplenty, and with satura, berserk timers.

After Huhu, theres Twin Emps, which dramatically increased not only complexity, coordination, but also number of abilities and the truly first encounter where consumables were in some fashioned required (always needed to flask the tanks).

Fast forward to naxx, most inner bosses were twin emps difficulty, some more so, some not so (grobbulol!). Thaddius required an incredibly amount of overall raid coordination above everything else in that fight. Now: Four Horsemen, to me, this is the last boss to ever really increase the difficulty. Every boss up till 4HM was about nuke it quick, nuke it dead, kill adds, watch out for this ability, all the while, the raid is basically moving as 1 team. Not so with 4HM, this forced people to instead work as independent units, understand their role in the fight completely, and not die. I remember seeing in the WoW R&D forums a post about all the abilities (at that point, the most damage to any single horsemen was that there was a shield wall at 50%, no 20% shield wall or 100 mark berserk). This introduced the concept of taking your time while still going balls out.

Kael'Thalas may perhaps be the only boss to really prove otherwise, but I suppose the entire point of my post is that I don't think there is anything blizzard can do to increase the level of difficulty in which it would a guild like Nilihium a month to figure out, aside from being such a gear check that every member must have the best gear possible previous to the new boss, which I hope never happens. In my mind, the difference between Prince and Leoth is that one is a T4 boss, and one is T5, they are both as complex as the other.

What, no C'thun? Even Nef had his interesting moments when learning the strats. a

Anyway, i'd prefer not to have to face various gimmick bosses (Raz for instance) but think there should be some tuned for various groups so everyone can participate (melee-friendly) ones for instance.

A raid should be about using various classes and abilities so all contribute something and a raid boss should be challenging but still fun. A little lore and something unique also help. And while I think some boss fights are total disappointments (especially when on farm), most are designed with all of that I mentioned in mind.

If anything, I think there are way too many bosses in TK/SSC that have good ideas and absolutely terrible implementations that make it un-fun. I hope to see a little more room for error in BT/Hyjal and maybe some less irritating mechanics.

Morogrim, Karathress, Lurker, Al'ar, and Leotheras are reasonable fights in that the design allows some room for error, but at some point you are punished for it. The mechanics are not unreasonable, and nothing awkward happens that you cant deal with. VR of course is a joke, but a good idea.

Hydross: The tripline idea is great, except that his flipping is just not programmed well.

Vashj: I understand the concept of adds being necessary, but this fight took it way too far. You sit there killing piles of adds, and if anyone dies, you are screwed. It just isn't fun at all. In P1, if a low hp(8500) person gets static charge/multi-shot, it can one round them, which forces u to walk backwards and die since you can't win unless u combat res. That is the epitomy of not fun. I do think it should be hard, but this fight just has too many elements that make it un-fun.

Astromancer: This is a pure gimmick fight. You either have 2 tanks with 500 arcane resist, you stack a ton of dps, or you go home. The concept of wrath is great, but the RSTS arcane missiles ruined this fight.(we obviously 500AR'd it)

What I want to see in hyjal/BT:

#1: No gimmick fights- I'm sure this won't happen, but hopefully theres no more than 1.

#2: No random mechanic/luck fights- Can anyone tell me how many fights are just random from experience?

#3: Margin for error- As perfect as my raid can be at times, the other 90% of the time, it would be great if one or two deaths didn't hose the raid on entry bosses like pre 2.1 SSC. Fortunately, it seems blizzard took this into account, whether intentionally or not, and made the fights more forgiving. While certain fights have to require perfection, they should be very limited in deployment, as banging your head on the same wall for days on end is less than entertaining.

I have to agree.

We're working on Vashj right now but I'm just not that excited about killing her. I think of her more like I think of Maexxna than like I thought of Kel'Thuzad (who I never got to). Killing her will be more of a "Yeah! We're partway there!" than "Woot! SSC Clear!!!!!!!!" that I felt about AQ or BWL.

I regret that... I wish things felt more epic.

We killed Kael on Sunday night. Kael is perfect, the absolute best raid encounter that has ever come out of this game. The design of it is incredible. It took us four full nights to learn it - but the fight is so controllable, so dependant on execution, that I have no doubt that we will drop him within an hour this week. An endless parade of perfectly-tuned Kaels would make me very happy.

After we killed Kael, we went to Hyjal for some attempts on Rage Winterchill. Only three or four people in the raid had ever been in the zone, and none of them had done anything but trash. We killed Rage on our first attempt. Even so, the fight probably isn't too terribly far from where it should be, as the first encounter in the zone. The trash, on the other hand, is a bit excessive. Our first and only run through the waves of undead assailants was great, but if the following bosses are the least bit difficult, the "all of the trash leading up to the boss instantly respawns if you wipe" mechanic is going to get old fast.

Tonight we went to the Black Temple. Najentus is a good fight. It requires a certain degree of execution, and feels about right as the first boss of the zone. We killed him quickly, but we had already had a few hours on him on the PTR.

Supremus, on the other hand, is an abomination. Terrible encounter design, and untuned. I think a guild working on Hydross would have a much easier time dealing with this guy. I would suggest that he be made harder, but that would just make the (already uninteresting) encounter that much more agonizing. One pull to learn the fight, one pull to kill him.

Shade of Akama is a great fight. The lore tie-in is excellent and the mechanics of the fight itself are very interesting. Without ever having seen it before, though, we beat it within an hour or two. It could probably be made a bit more difficult.

On the one hand, I am pleased that bosses are finally falling over dead without massive resistance. On the other hand, I am concerned that we are going to run out of content three weeks from now. I don't think that it's really that big of an issue; in the long term, an extra month of learning doesn't really extend the life of the content that much. It would have been nice if the difficulty of the tier 6 stuff were tweaked up just a bit, but it's probably too late for that now. The bottom line is that Black Temple is very fun so far, and as long as my guildmates and I are having fun, there's not much to complain about.

Yea, it seems like people have already expounded on my views on the issue, which may or may not be relevant because I've yet to see anything beyond Gruul's Lair.

There are a combination of factors which lead to the huge leaps which guilds make once they complete Tier 5 instances:

a) The final bosses of the Tier 5 instances are quite complex and apparently have a decent learning curve
b) The initial bosses (and arguably beyond) in Tier 6 don't
c) There's not a huge discontinuity in the gear requirements between the Tier 5 instances and the beginning of the Tier 6 ones.
d) To even start Tier 6 encounters, you have to have completely cleared Tier 5.

The result? Players end up bottlenecked at hard encounters (Kael), then break through them and face a series of "easy" encounters. This situation would have arisen in vanilla WoW if, say, killing C'Thun were a part of Naxx attunement... you would've seen guilds work on C'Thun for weeks, kill him, and then go into Naxx and kill a bunch of bosses in quick succession. A lot of guilds made significant progress in Naxx without killing C'Thun at all, even. Thus you can divide the instances into tiers of difficulty, but usually there's some overlap - the hardest BWL encounters were harder than the easy AQ40 encounters, the hardest AQ40 encounters were harder than the easier Naxx encounters. This appears to be roughly the case in TBC as well, but now there's bottlenecking.

To some extent, then, unless the attunements are reworked, we should accept some degree to which guilds who pass the bottleneck will rapidly kill a bunch of bosses. The alternative would be that everything would have a steep learning curve like Kael (not going to happen) or simply require much better gear. I think Blizzard has stepped away from huge gear check fights, and arguably this is a bad thing. There should be a Vael on BT or something.

I agree with the opinion that being able to walk into these dungeons and 20-man the first 5 bosses or whatever, even for the top guilds, is a bit disturbing, and is a sign that the encounters are significantly undertuned. I think we'll see things stealth-buffed, like Blizz did when AQ40 went live (right?) I doubt that they really expected for guilds to be taking shots at Illidan a couple weeks in. So we'll see.

So what happens when all the top guilds kill Illidan and there's nothing to do for 6-12 months? What happens to the raiding community?

Simple, people will quit. Farming an instance was fine when you know you had to do so to be able to progress into the next zone, but with no content on the horizon, where's the motivation? Especially considering what happened to raiders and their gear when TBC hit.

It's become evident to me that Blizzard are no longer designing this game for the bleeding-edge. I for one cannot really say I blame them, they are after all in this to profit. If they can double the amount of people "beating the game" from the amount of people who beat KT, this will greatly increase the amount of people believing they can beat the game (thus playing more and increasing profits). They don't want another Kel'Thuzad. Does this suck for the bleeding-edge guilds? Of course it does, but that's not the point. They don't care how fast a boss dies, they care about how many guilds kill him.

Well, as someone pointed out with crude math and figures, the "bleeding edge" that have killed Kael as of now is somehwere around 0.02% of the WoW population. Again, not getting into the "average raiding guild" discussion - but an estimate of the average raiding guild being around the level of working on Mag/Hydross.

Why cater to the minority when it makes $$ sense to cater to the majority.

Well that was the point several other posters were making. Other than broken bosses, high consumable requirements, or staggering instance releases, there is simply no way to make a fight a guild can't beat in a week or two of work. So since they released it all at once, they are left with the real possibility of having many people having worthwhile to do in a few weeks and months.

Given the other choices, I think staggering releases is a much more elegant solution to making content endure, and it also has the bonus of making each last boss feel more epic, rather than just another stepping stone.

I wouldn't say Hyjal was badly tuned, the boss encounters we've done (First two) have been taxing for a raid that recently conquered The Eye but the main 'difficulty' is in that you cannot try the boss without the 30 minutes of fairly intense trash waves.
The third boss has only been killed by the two guilds at illidan (I think), both of which had to get thier loot via GMs because an NPC was the one to actually kill it.
My point being that Hyjal seems tobe quite nicely tuned when it comes to difficulty wether its the actual boss thats hard or the entire 'encounter'.
I can't talk about the difficulty of BT as we have 5 healers attuned because GMs didnt fancy fixing our bugged quest items

Continously improve gear that the 'average raider' has access to from previous content (like better rep grind epics that you can't fail at getting) until outgearing the content so much that the gear makes up for lack of skill? That is move the game away from 'skill' to nothing but pure time-sink.

Further once the people who want to raid but not badly enough to bother with the worst farming/time sinks run out of content to try; they can relax the time sinks by making shortcuts?

Nerfing encounters by giving out better and better gear kind of has the downside of making every other thing you can do in the game booring though. Just as getting the best instance blues (and the rep grind epics) is enough to make more or less every normal instance in the game too easty. Sure Heroics are still challenging (for me not having tried Magtherion yet); but wonder what will happen to them once getting better epics from raids? There is a risk that gear inflation leads to a situation where only the latest raid instances in the game are challenging enough to be fun to play.

Couldn't there be a risk that players quit because of every other thing beaides raiding is nerfed into oblivion by raid gear; while at the same time farming the same raid instance over and over again is booring; and not enough variation in gameplay? With some Kara epics its already the case that normal instances are booring. With an Alt, already knowing what quests/grinds to do for gear and with some crafted/pvp epics, it has already gotten to the point where the normal instances are booring before even getting heroic keys.

Let's not forget that we are only 3 weeks into the period after 2.1, which for many players "opend up" the T5 content. What today might be 0.02% (or whatever) of the player base going to BT will be 20+% once they beat the T5 bosses (1-2 months from now?). And the more I read posts like one of the above (where the posters guild apparently has cleared 4 bosses since sunday), the more worried I become.

Progression through gear should really be an important part of this game. Now, take Patchwerk. I bet he wasn't exceptionally difficult for most readers here. His mechanics are quite straight forward, really and doesn't take weeks and weeks to learn the execution. Now, would you say it would have felt like an "epic" fight, if his damage output, HP's etc had been tuned to be doable in pre-raid gear / MC epics with a handful of T2 thrown into the mix? That's the sort of situation we have in BT now. People doing content in gear more than 1 tier below the instance.

Say you are designing the next BC boss.

You can it hard by making it hard execution wise, dps wise, farming wise, random or bugged.

So far the only encounters that have stalled Nihilum for a significant period sound like they were bugged/random at least to some degree, and they beat some of those. I can't imagine killing a lady Vashi in the state they first beat it.

The first 3 have proven to be no issue to Nihilum, I suspect many Nihilum players are likely churning out 1400+ dps on most fights without significant movement (apologies for taking a guess but based on wws thread from other high end guilds). Even extremely good guilds will have some pure dps below 1000. If you push the dps barrier beyond what Nihilum can do you are basically balancing assuming optimal professions and 1 or 2 semi exploits most likely (or have giant upgrades in each instance which makes balancing much, much harder as classes scale differently).

You can make the encounters incredibly complex/precise the problem here is that you can't scale this as easily, so when anyone normal shows up the encounter is mind boggling (Netherspite already is pushing on this for many guilds, our first tactics run through took 20 minutes here). Blizzard can almost make two encounters for same boss, by heavily nerfing a key ability that makes a fight precise but this is basically making content for 1% and is fairly tricky to get right.

Anything that is a significant farming requirement for Nihilum like resist gear or pots gets blasted to smithereens here and rightfully so imo.

Completely random or bugged isn't fun for anyone.

It does sound likely Black temple has been pitched a bit easy, the last 6 encounters of a year are the ones where the complexity can be a bit above Joe average. Note Nihilum has praised Black Temple, it probably won't be a simple run through, I know I don't expect to ever finish it before level cap raise.

As regards the topic, when the content is released makes no difference to me really as long as it is ready when I need it and isn't made very badly in order to hit a schedule.

PvP discussions will be interesting, especially as soon several guilds may have nothing else to achieve in game and the obvious route if they keep playing is to go hard core PvP

The removal of huge gear gaps might be the premier reason why we see content conquered so fast. Blizzard seems to be intent on keeping things more or less equal with multiple progression paths gear-wise.

Thus they have effectively removed the only real limiting factor for hardcore guilds like nihilum where superb skill, coordination and a never changing core of raiders are a given. Having steep gear requirements for a fight also has major side-effects on guilds, it forces them to have a very active core of raiders with high attendance, a well working and fair dkp system, and it presents a huge problem when members quit and new ones have to be geared up. All this is much less severe than it was before.

I haven't taken a good look into current end game itemization but from what I've seen there are no outrageous upgrades on the horizon, and more importantly there's a wide range of items available for most slots that you can get. There are multiple great trinkets that you can get from rep and heroics, while in vanilla you had to wait until downing nef to get one of the first proper caster trinkets, just as an example.

My experience is much like Heel describes. I absolutely love the Kael'thas fight. I really wish they would make more fights like that; where you have to deal with various abilities in different phases, where abilities overlap and by improving one phase will make the next one easier. We had 3 fulll evenings on Kael'thas and got him in the first raid ID after 2.1.0. That felt about right. If we would have to beat our heads against this encounter for weeks and weeks it would become boring (as the fight is very long) and feel a lot less tuned.

However, the first couple of bosses of Mount Hyjal and Black Temple are just silly easy. Rage Winterchill fell the first time we made it through the mob waves with a reasonable number of raiders alive. High Warlord Naj'entus is slightly harder, but if you have a decent raid setup it doesn't take many hours to learn him. Supremus is just a joke, not sure what they had in mind with that encounter. It's boring too. You have that huge open space inside the Gates of Black Temple where he's standing. They could have made that such a cool encounter.

We only got a few pulls of Shade of Akama last night and already the fight seems highly doable. He should fall tonight. The fight is interesting enough, but I think they could have made it a lot more interesting by adding more phases and make them overlap like the Kael'thas encounter.

What really concerns me though, is that fact that the Illidari Council could be beat within a few hours of attempts... I really hoped that would be the 4h encounter of Black Temple. In stead it looks like the Chess encounter of Black Temple.

I agree that content should be available for more people in Burning Crusade, but gearing up should still be required. I also don't think there's anything wrong with encounters beeing gradually nerfed. Hardcore guilds can enjoy the challenge and glory of beating encoutners pre-nerf and then it can be more fine-tuned for the masses later on.

On the question what will keep the very best guilds motivated: What if Illidan is another C'Thun? In all honesty, if I were the dungeon designer, I would have made him completely unbeatable and if anyone questions that decision reply "Not even Arthas could defeat him, yet you dare to even harbor such thoughts?".

So, ok, maybe I have a sick mind, but we all know that C'Thun was deliberately overtuned a bit. Could that happen again, and what would it cause?

I agree. I don't think guilds should be prepared to kill Illidan at this point _at all_. I hope the fight is so extremely hard and requires such insane dps that even the best guilds have to farm Black Temple for weeks if not months to manage it.

Seeing what a joke the Illidari Council apparently must be though, I doubt it.

If killing Illidan doesn't feel like the greatest achivement in WoW once achieved, then they truely ruined the epic feeling of end game.

I don't think the European player base is much bigger. I don't know how it is in the U.S. but on my server there are 2 guilds killing Kael'thas and 2 guilds trying to kill him. In these guilds I'd say 90% of the raiders are 18+ and from max 2 ( mostly 1 ) time zones apart from eachother which makes raids pretty easy to schedule. Most raids are from about 6/7pm-11/12pm(+1gmt).
In my previous guild about 70% were going to college, and the European college system allows you to have a lot of free time ( for example I had 2 compulsory classes a week ). For jobless people we have social systems which basically gives you a minimum wage. For those who go out at night, parties don't start before midnight etc. It makes it very easy to raid hardcore without having to sacrifice a whole lot.

Note that I speak for Belgium and not all European countries though :p

Have any of the fights in BT needed all that crafted shadow resist stuff yet? If not, that might be one way that blizzard intend to slow things down albeit slightly.

On one side I hate bosses are just falling dead to Nihilum and Curse, on the other hand I like the fact that more casual guilds won't be (I hope) cockblocked for weeks on boss after boss.

Everyone is playing catch-up to Nihilum and Curse, some won't see Illidan for another 3-4 months, but at least they will see him - unlike many Naxx guilds that never saw Kel'thuzard.

It's a tough position for Blizzard, either you make encounters SO HARD that even the most hardcore guilds will spend weeks on it, but everyone else will spend months -- or you make them easier and accept that hardcore guilds will fly through it.
I agree though, they could have released Hyjal and frozen Black Temple for 2.2 -- or pushed the 2.1 content to 2.2, and just release the gear changes for 2.1 and then tune Hyjal and BT accordingly.

Now let's just hope Blizzard isn't pushing out anymore instances in the near future. Just killed Tidewalker yesterday and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the bosses ahead of us -- We were on Loatheb when TBC came out and we never got further, killed C'thun the day before Naxx was released and I really hope this won't happen again, cause it was a major letdown.

i would have to agree that the current "zerging" of content released annoys me.

I remember combating Ragnaros and wondering how he (and i) fitted into the scale of warcraft. Could i take out such and such hero from wc3. Then KT came out, and i was finally given the validation, "you are now attempting the crony of Arthas, his right hand man. and you shall defeat him." and i loved it.

Now, my guild was working on loatheb when the expansion thing came around and everyone quit raiding, but still it was a great feeling. And i savored the idea of unleashing myself into the outlands, and taking out Illiden and his lieutenants.

But honestly the attraction is diminished. I mean it seems like vashj, kaelthas and more importantly hyjal and BT are just being demolished and dont feel anywhere near as tremendous as the azerothian encounters.

My guild isn't that progressed, were working our way through SSC, and i dont think its overly hard but at the same time, our inability to progress (mainly based on lacking members, some due to dodging raids and some just not getting there keys) is annoying.

I guess ill just hope that the rising rocket that is our progress shall shoot unto the stars and burn brightly for all to see.