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.

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.

The only thing seperating 100+ guilds from BT/Hyjal is the attunement, its clear that kael'thas is more taxing than alot of the 'tier 6' content...

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 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

If the goal is to ensure the average WoW raider sees "the endgame" defined as something nebulous as being, let's say, the expansion's Patchwerk (I'm presuming there's a Naxx2.0-to-come), and this ( http://www.3hoys.com/raids/seventy.html ) is a representative sample ( the servers that I believe to be arbitrary that I follow all seem to follow that mold ), then what's a designer to do?

Make a rollercoaster to catch people up. Get over the hump, and it's all downhill screaming with glee until you reach the next climb.

My view of changes in the past is that Blizzard is afraid, to epic degree, of letting the gear genie out of the bottle, because stuffing it back in ("Hay, Nilihium got the cool epix ez11") is an epic PR landmine waiting to happen. Well, if this was a mistake... the genie is out, and it's time to make peace with one's maker.

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.