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

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.

Sorry, but I disagree that people just quit because they have to wait a couple of months maybe for a new raid instance. Cutting edge guilds just farm up, stock up and take a well-earned rest. That's what a lot of guilds did before AQ40 was open.

Now that there seems to be a long term aim from Blizzard to introduce regular solo/small group content and 10man instances I'd much rather complete 25man raid instances, farm the ones my guild needs and enjoy some small group content until the next big raid instance is released instead of burning out the guild by hammering encounters 24/7 against ever-receding goalposts just to say "we've done it".

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 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 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.

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.

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?