I think by making the content more accessible they are moving in the right direction, not the wrong one as so many of you seem to think.
On my server we are the only Horde guild to have killed an SSC or TK boss. AFAIK there are not too many more Alliance guilds that have either. No one has killed Vashj or Alar. It has always been a 'slow' server, with no one downing the 4h ever. But there are other servers like ours.
Right now, post 2.1, I love the pacing. At some point we will run out of content, sure. But that's on Blizzard. They need to make more, faster. And test it and tune it.
People want fun, not tedium. One year between expansions seems completely reasonable to me, even though its pretty obvious its a stretch for them at this point.
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
This reminded me of a thread I saw a few weeks ago: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....86913072&sid=1 which made me laugh, in terrible shame (I'm originally from the US and played on US servers. Since moving to Europe, I can't stand playing on US servers anymore due to the terrible latency).
To the subject of pacing: I honestly believe that WoW 2.1 (with all the added content and tuning) was the original intended form of TBC that Blizzard wanted to release for retail. When they finally realized that their overly ambitious Outland (and CoT) would miss the 2006 Christmas target, I think Blizzard opted to release TBC slightly earlier with the Black Temple still stuck in the development cycle.
This is just my theory, of course, but it makes sense for me since I remember Blade's Edge Mountains and Shadowmoon Valley being very incomplete and devoid of things to do until very, very late in the Beta when people were already clearing through Karazhan. And even after release, I found a lot of the quests in those 2 zones to be incomplete and/or buggy.
I am not cynical enough to say that Blizzard intentionally delayed the Black Temple (and Illidan) for hype and PR, but I cannot refute the fact that I got caught in... well... the hype and PR. To be able to see Illidan (and Kael'thas to an extent) was the winning pitch of TBC. 2.1 basically used that pitch again, and it worked for me :P.
I think Gurg's observation on how the encounters in BT weren't scaled up with the gear is a very valid one, and perhaps the encounters are a little too easy relative to how progression worked before... but I cannot help but think that this design was at least a little bit intentional. I remember the developers saying something about tuning down raid encounters so that more guilds can progress in PVE back in February/March, so perhaps that sentiment was not only expressed in encounter design but also gear design. Perhaps Blizzard is still learning how to tune encounters correctly for 25-man raids, or perhaps these design choices are Blizzard's way of addressing the needs of all the new guilds and player dynamics that were formed as a result of the raid-size reduction.
"Most" guilds I know of on my old servers are still just starting SSC and The Eye. I cannot say for certain whether or not the encounters are too easy since I have not personally seen them, but I believe no matter how easy the encounters actually are, to the general average players and guilds and non-EJ forums readers, Nihilum, Curse, Last Resort, Death & Taxes... etc. are always going to be shrouded in the celebrity myth of glorified high-end raiding. When those average guilds finally get to BT and kill the bosses there, being a part of that "myth" is in itself going to be quite rewarding for them, no matter how superficial it may be.
It would make sense to water down the raiding challenge so more than just the top 5% of guilds can make significant, steady progress, or else they couldn't justify the leaps in arena gear when a new season hits.
Anyone else think that it has something to do with 25 vs 40 man raid size? You simply can't have encounters with 4HM difficulty/learning curve with only 25 people. As a result, the encounters are somewhat easier and require drastically less time to learn.
It's straight up ridiculous that some guilds are as far as they are in BT right now. In less than 2 weeks it has been virtually cleared? This was supposed to be the premier raid content as naxx was to the original game. I cant imagine the people in those guilds are pleased with how easy it is, as much of the sense of achievement is taken away because the victories over the bosses were all so easy.
And then where do they go from there? Use the gear to PVP? There won't be much point because arena gear will always reign supreme. Or they can clear BT a few times to get gear so they can level to 75 or 80 in the next xpac slightly faster. One thing I could see possible would be to add "heroic BT" down the line which would be significantly higher and drop better items.
I guess the short version of my sentiments is that there should be a place for real elite content -- encounters that require prolonged gearing up and masterful play to beat. Should there be many of them? No. Should they exist? Yes, I think so. And if they're going to exist, the end of BT and Hyjal seems like the best place to put them. That way they aren't blocking access to content, and the teeming masses of mid-tier guilds can see these epic raid zones, but maybe not make it all the way through them. I thought Naxx was actually great about this. Any guild that could kill Nef or certainly Twin Emps could down Anub'Rekhan, Razuvious, Faerlina (post-patch), and probably Noth and Maexxna as well. Many could go a bit further. With enough gear, Patchwerk became very doable -- he was pretty damn hard on week 1 in the zone, but guilds that killed Anub/Raz/Noth and got their tanks some Dreadnaught and so forth suddenly had a much better shot. But at the end of the line, you had 4H, Sapp, and Kel. The final 3 encounters in a zone of 16, that were clearly head-and-shoulders above everything that came before them. Killing each of those bosses pre-TBC is and was a mark of pride for the guilds that accomplished it. Maybe Illidan or Archimonde will end up providing that in TBC. But it certainly won't be the Illidari Council!
Personally, I think yesterday was more disillusioning than anything, because of which bosses were the ones dying. The couple of deeper Hyjal bosses to die were presumably finished off by NPCs (and hence not lootable), which really doesn't count. And there's nothing wrong with the first couple of BT bosses or with Rage Winterchill dying easily. After all, Naxx had Anub and Raz, right? Most "top" guilds killed 5-6 bosses on their first Naxx timer, and then hit a small roadblock with Patchwerk, and then soon found themselves at Thaddius. When Nihilum et al. hit Essence of Souls and found it to be a real challenge, that was encouraging. If the rest of the bosses in BT were like that, the quick progression at the start would make more sense. Give players a foothold in the zone and then put the real challenges deeper in. No problem.
But when you have Curse killing Shahraz and then downing the Illidari Council 3 hours later with no prior experience, that's not encouraging, to say the least.
Anyway, to tie this back into the OP, I think the promise of simultaneous content release is to use gear as a pacing mechanism instead of development cycles. Some may recall how, a year ago, I said things along the lines of how I hope BT will be right there waiting for us in TBC, but we'd zone in and get demolished and know we had to do a lot of gearing up if we wanted to stand a chance. Kind of like the time 25 of us zoned into MC the first week of January 2005, right after hitting 60, just to see what it was like, and promptly got destroyed. And that obviously hasn't quite developed.
Regardless of what people think about how raids should be tuned in general, can we at least agree that there should be a progression? That t6 > t5 > t4, and you gear up in the prior tier to tackle the next?
I'm not in a raiding guild but have a couple of questions to you who raid "end game".
1. How do you feel about the earlier strategy of releasing very hard bosses that only the really good guilds could kill and then after some months nerf them to ease progress for the not so skilled/not so hardcore? Do you find it unfair that "newbieguild1" did not have to kill Boss 1.0 to get the same loot that you had to or is it a nice strategy to challenge as many people as possible?
2. Would it be viable for Blizzard to hotfix some of the Black Temple bosses now and add more hp/dps/whatever to make them more of a challenge, or would that stir up a shit storm if suddenly people(including nihilum and curse) are stuck on Teron for example.
With regards to pacing of content releases, I am personally a proponent of the WoW 1.x timetable; whereby, the top guilds farm content and then take breaks while lesser guilds have time to catch up. I am also a strong advocate of meaningful gear progression, as it gives a sense of accomplishment, provides a mechanism for allowing less skilled guilds to succeed by farming the previous tier more extensively, and contributes to pacing within dungeons. Gear progression was very evident in WoW 1.x (and now in 2.1). The transitions in gear from 5-mans>ZG/MC>BWL/AQ20>AQ40>Naxx were all significant and meaningful (with the possible exception of all the side-grades and off-spec gear in AQ40). Periodic content releases give the best guilds time to farm and then take a break while allowing less dedicated or capable guilds to catch up. Furthermore, as Elendril noted, it prevents guilds from having *too* much to do.
If BT and Hyjal were not out yet but the tuning was the same in SSC and TK, Nihilum, the top guilds would still raid those on a weekly basis until they were satisfied with their gear. They might only need two or three nights a week to raid, but they could continue to do that for a month or two now that Kael'thas and Vashj are properly tuned. Instead, they racked up one or two Vashj kills and one Kael'thas kill and jumped right into BT and Hyjal. They have consumed content at a frantic pace because it was there to be consumed and there were no checks in place to impede them. Honestly, I wish that Vashj and Kae'thas only dropped 4 vials again, simply as an artificial method of stretching out content.
At the end of the day, pacing in a MMORPG can only be accomplished in a handful of ways:
- Content release timetables
- Artificial timesinks
- Fight complexity
- Character requirements (aka gear or some other similar limiter like feats, skill books, etc)
Whether intentional or not, WoW 1.x effectively used release timetables to limit top guilds, fight complexity to limit lesser guilds, and character requirements to limit everyone to some degree. WoW 1.x also used artificial sinks such as essentially impossible encounters (like C'thun 1.0) in order to give the developers some margin if they mistuned fights.
The problem with BT and Hyjal is that it seems like Blizzard only used fight complexity and character requirements to dictate pacing, and they failed to properly implement the character requirements. In one action they made SSC and TK accessible, reduced the timesink of consumables, and opened the doors to bosses after SSC and TK which did not require extensive gear from Al'ar, Solarian, Vashj, or Kael'thas. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that fight complexity was effectively maxed out in SSC and TK. The fights in BT/Hyjal can be new and different, but they really cannot be more complicated. The only tool that Blizzard really had to impede the progress of top guilds is gear requirements, and when they missed the mark on those they made it possible for the best guilds to annihilate the new content in a matter of days.
I am glad that the content is accessible and that even a lowly casual guild like mine might one day complete it, but Blizzard took away all their pacing tools except for gear requirements, and then they goofed up those requirements. I can think of no other explanation for Nihilum and Curse killing the Illidari Council within a few hours of seeing them for the first time and within two weeks of their first Kael'thas kills. It cheapens SSC and TK, it cheapens BT, and it really undermines the longevity of all of this new and exciting content.
Ed. What the hell is all the shadow resist gear from the Ashtongue for, anyway? In Naxx they used resist gear as a pacing mechanism, and while it might have been somewhat inelegant, it worked. Why in the world is that gear unnecessary for some intermediate BT boss? I will be extremely dissappointed if you fight Illidan in shadow resist gear instead of shiny Tier 5/6, but, by the same token, I'm going to be flabbergasted if you do not need it for anything (like the badge FR).
Ed. What the hell is all the shadow resist gear from the Ashtongue for, anyway? In Naxx they used resist gear as a pacing mechanism, and while it might have been somewhat inelegant, it worked. Why in the world is that gear unnecessary for some intermediate BT boss? I will be extremely dissappointed if you fight Illidan in shadow resist gear instead of shiny Tier 5/6, but, by the same token, I'm going to be flabbergasted if you do not need it for anything (like the badge FR).
My understanding is that the SR is for Mother Shahraz. But uh, yeah, we saw how that turned out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, just going on what I've been told.)
Apparently Illidan has some spawns that are doing massive fire damage, thats probably what the badge FR is for.
<- Starts a heroic mechannar run to gear up for Illidan. Swaps out drop from SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT.
While part of me would see some justice in this, the rest of me would be weeping. Note: I left out the demon tank for Leothras on the FR comment. That was my mistake.
Originally Posted by Praetorian
My understanding is that the SR is for Mother Shahraz. But uh, yeah, we saw how that turned out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, just going on what I've been told.)
That could be the most depressing thing I have read with regards to WoW in quite a while. If true, that would be completely assinine, because it would mean that two partial clears would be enough to get the requisite resist gear for the raid. How could they have possibly screwed up the tuning on a resistance fight so badly? The Sapphiron method of an aura that hits everyone and makes the healing requirements too high without said gear should be trivial to tune compared to other boss tuning.
Which would be different from all the other "resistance" fights in TBC in what way? Seems like we will have gear for all 5 types of resistance available, but only a few tanks will use it, on Hydross.
Didn't you know? The real use for the epic SR gear is for when you see a shadow priest + warlock 2v2 team running out of the opposite gate.
(Seriously though, it's kind of odd that they've given us full epic resist sets for two elements now with no apparent use beyond one or two specific players in specific fights.)
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.
I'd add "massive learning curve" to that list, but even then, I think the top end of the raiding community has gotten much more used to solving very complex encounters, and complicated execution is no longer as big a deal as it was. Same with consumables, actually, based on what I read here. Even casual raiders like me think of consumables in a different way than we used to.
In retrospect, it should have been clear this would happen when Blizz put the majority of the raid content into TBC at the start.
How fast would a good, skilled, dedicated guild have progressed through the old world content had it all been available at once? That's a serious question. If you could take a top guild, and drop them into WoW 1.0 a few months after release, and make all the raid content available to them, MC through Naxx, how long do you think it would take them to down Kel'Thuzad?
I'll bet you the answer isn't "almost 2 years." The staggered release schedule was a good idea, in my opinion, if only because it prevented the best of the best from devouring the content in one massive gulp. I honestly don't think Blizzard is capable of releasing content as quickly as bleeding edge players defeat it.
Didn't you know? The real use for the epic SR gear is for when you see a shadow priest + warlock 2v2 team running out of the opposite gate.
(Seriously though, it's kind of odd that they've given us full epic resist sets for two elements now with no apparent use beyond one or two specific players in specific fights.)
Maybe blizzard were worried people wouldn't want to run heroics so they put in all that FR kit with the intention of putting in a fight that needed it, as it turned out people run plenty of heroics anyway, so there was no need to carry through on actually implementing the resist fight.
On the subject more of whether Blizzard should have staggered the content, we should remember we're benefiting from hindsight when viewing it now. It's easy to say now that it's been tried out in the expansion that it's probably better to stagger the content, but if you'd asked most people before the release "What'd you prefer, always a next step ready or having to wait for it to get patched in?" most people would definitely have picked the first option.
I know I would have, though due to the fact that I'm not in a cutting edge guild (far from it), that's pretty much how the game has always seemed to me. By the time my guild had killed Ragnaros, BWL was well tuned, by the time we were basically done with BWL, AQ was released, by the time we were practically done with AQ, Naxx was released, I think the only content we've seen that was adjusted after we'd initially tried it was Gruul, Magtheridon and the SSC trash; the rest was already 'tuned' by the time we got there (Chromaggus' Time Lapse is one of the few other exceptions I can think of).
buff /bÊŒf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
The shadow res and fire gear is for Neltharion! Or maybe not.
Wondered one thing when reading through this topic, many people are stating that the expansion is 1 year away, which is probably true, and thus, if Nihilum clears Illidan tomorrow, they got 12 months for wanking.
Afaik, blizz has not stated they will not add more raids before next expansion?
(other than the 10 man troll instance ofc, talking about 25 man).
Sure, it would still give a long time for farming old stuff, but they could "easily" throw in another instance in a half year for example.
Other than that, its hard not to agree that the new encounters seems too easy. Blizz was probably afraid to redo the early BC mistake. But overtuned new bosses really is better than undertuned ones. Since it feels worse to rectify the unbalanced encounters toward being harder after some months.
Whether or not mass releasing instances is the right thing to do, I hope and somewhat believe Blizz has learned from BC, and will tune down the scope of future expansions somewhat (and thus trying to release them more often too). Add less new instances, zones etc per expansion, which has proven to be impossible for them to balance decently at one time. They get a much better knowledge about how later dungeons should be tuned, by watching the progress in earlier dunegons, and ofc, it allows them to test it better on PTR, compared to the awful (non-existing) BC-beta testing.
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.
I love raiding. But I love other areas of the game too, and I agree that I'd like to see an end, if only temporarily, so I have more time to enjoy other areas of the game. I know if I'm killing Illidan several months before the next expansion, I won't be quitting for lack of things to do. WoW offers too many fun alternatives to raiding to simply quit once one is finished until the next expansion.
Well, to retreat from my own griping for a moment, here's a sense of perspective.
MC v1.0: All bosses died as soon as organized groups of 40 attempted them. We killed Lucifron on our second trip to MC (2/5/05) and then continued to kill bosses every day or two until we hit Domo, with no raiding UI and no goddamned clue what we were doing.
Ragnaros: Killed within one week of being fixed in April 2005.
BWL: Steamrolled by Fury on Day 1. Thereafter every boss died immediately upon being hotfixed/patched. Nefarian died ~10 days after being patched, though the main delay there was simply that most guilds did not know how to trigger phase 2. There were all sorts of theories. Once people learned it was "kill 40," kills came quickly.
AQ40: Fury on Medivh had cleared to C'Thun within a week of their gates opening, in January 2006. Most "good" guilds were at C'Thun within ~10 days of their gates opening. Obviously C'Thun/Ouro died the day they got hotfixed.
Naxx: DnT had cleared through Thaddius within 2 weeks of the zone opening, while other guilds had gotten Heigan/Gothik in the meantime. Loatheb took another couple of weeks just because people were still coming to terms with the whole "ok, yeah, you need to world buff for this shit" dynamic. Then 4H. 4H were the roadblock for over a month. Sapphiron died within a week after 4H, and Kel died within a week after Sapphiron.
So yeah, in the history of WoW, there is a grand total of one fight that has taken guilds longer than 3-4 weeks to learn without being bugged/untuned, and that is 4H.
Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised?
Though, to play devil's advocate with myself, I think it might have taken much longer for fights like Loatheb, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad to be learned if not for world buffs. Loatheb was kind of dumb, but Sapp/K'T without world buffs were MUCH harder than 4H could hope to be.
From some of the responses in this thread, I think people who are in average raiding guilds aren't quite understanding what the problem is. People in guilds (like myself) who where having progression problems pre 2.1 and who are now making progress in SSC/TK may not fully understand why Nihilum downing Illidan a month after 2.1 is a bad thing for them, but trust me it is. Without any major gear blocks in Mt. Hyjal or BT there's a fair chance that many average guilds will be downing Illidan by September, and that's way too soon. I never thought I'd actually be saying this but it's looking like Blizzard needs to add more "gear checks" into these instances.
As to the WoW 1.0 vs. TBC progression pacing methodology, I can see value in either. Whether all the raid instances are put in all at once or they are released staggered, I think the most important thing is that they make sense in terms of both gear progression and skill progression. The fights should gradually get more challanging as well as gradually require better gear. Oddly enough, WoW 1.0 got end game raiding right, and for all the improvements in other areas of the game, TBC has had problems with making a balanced raiding game.
Yes I am kind of wondering whats the point of resist gear in TBC, is the blue arcane resist needed for Curator ? No, is the badge turns in FR resist needed for anything ? No
Doesnt look like SR resist gear is needed in BT at this point, unless Illidan morphs into a demon from requiring mass amount of SR gear WC3 style.
Resist gear was handled well for MC and late Naxx, even the NR needed in AQ was good when they added recipes for cenarion hold faction.
So far they didnt do a good job of tuning encounters and balancing itemization. My guess is that most of the content (BT and Hyjal) was tested with old items value, new items value basicly added a tier to all raid epics, so going there with a mix of tier 4 and 5 is like going there while clearing tier 3 zones for awhile.
I am pretty sure having guild blowing thru content like isnt intended. It will get fixed hopefully in next week patch but probably later. If its intended, well this means that they want a big portion of raiding guilds to be done with the current content before the next expansion, or next tiered dungeon is patched in.
Though, to play devil's advocate with myself, I think it might have taken much longer for fights like Loatheb, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad to be learned if not for world buffs. Loatheb was kind of dumb, but Sapp/K'T without world buffs were MUCH harder than 4H could hope to be.
To counter this point: haven't we been assuming that Loatheb/Sapph/KT were tuned with world buffs and consumables in mind?
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.
What if there's another 25 man raid instance that hasn't been released yet? There's certainly room for it given the info that's been datamined as far as maps go. What if the next expansion doesn't raise the level cap? Blizzard reps have already said that not every expansion will indroduce new races, and not every expansion will raise the level cap. Assuming that they are in fact NOT raising the level cap, a new expansion would prove very simple to put out. There would be no massive retuning of class abilities or gear gaps, they would simply be able to pump out a ton of new content, all tuned based on data gathered from people flying through the raid zones we've got, plus my hypothetical 25 man raid instance that hasn't been put in yet.
While I agree that it seems people are flying through content, (My guild has gone from wiping on the 2.0 hydross fight at 10-20% to being on Lady Vashj in just under 2 weeks) perhaps this is intended so that Blizzard really can release a massive amount of content in an expansion with pre-determined game balance. Just something to think about.
[10:42] <BrTarolg> trying shahraz wearing lvl 60 blues would be like, fucking a hot girl but with aids and the wrong kind of condom on.
To counter this point: haven't we been assuming that Loatheb/Sapph/KT were tuned with world buffs and consumables in mind?
Consumbles yes, world buffs no.
Loatheb was clearly tuned around a flasked raid, but world buffs substituted for execution. We had some fucking sloppy Loatheb and Sapp kills that would've been wipes without them, for sure. We've done Loatheb without world buffs and it really required precise execution, debuff management, spore rotations, etc., to squeeze every possible ounce of DPS out of your raid. Same with Sapphiron -- you had to be really precise with your positioning or you'd have people dying to his midair frostbolts and you'd wipe. Give everyone another 1000hp and some runspeed and suddenly you have to be a moron to die.
06/05/07, 10:20 AM
Seems like we will have gear for all 5 types of resistance available, but only a few tanks will use it, on Hydross.
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