I'm going to respectfully disagree here. If you read past that 2 sentences, I said "it's not". It most definitely is not a 25-man KT. It's similar, in the way Huhuran is similar to Faerlina. Yea, he uses the same elements as KT, but if you go in and expect KT, you will die. If you read my whole account, we basically lost people because we assumed it was going to be like KT. Because we spread out so it wouldn't chain, all the way around him. If we go again, trust me, we won't be doing that, and we won't have a ton of deaths. Not that it matters, he's free loot with no challenge whatsoever except the trash, joy!

We'd like bugged quest items off rage winterchill that you refunded to you-know-who!

Yeah exactly. You can have 2 guilds only separated by 1 week or so, and then suddenly one kills Kael while the other one is still learning him and bam, first one gets 10 server firsts just because of this kill. It's a bit strange that almost all tier 6 content seems to be way easier than Kael, except for 2 or 3 bosses.
A question for tigole if you're still around : did you mean we can expect new 25 men instances, harder than bt, before next expansion ?

I have only lurked through the thread but my impression is that many people here aren't only theorycrafting, numbercrunching min-maxing hardcore raiders but also quite involved with the game world and beginning with Naxxramas, continuing at a faster pace through BC, us fluff-lovers have seen major Warcraft characters die - very quickly.
Beginning with Kel'thuzad, the right hand of the mightiest being on Azeroth - the Lich King whom even Illidan feared. Was killed rather quickly after having many guilds locked down on the Four Horsemen before.
With Lady Vashj we saw two characters go which maybe weren't among the mightiest on the Warcraft universe's scale of power but they sure had a lot of fans who'd expected one hell of a fight. Vashj dies even before she's been properly tuned/debugged and Kael'thas shortly afterwards.
Then comes Illidan - advertised in the beginning as the final raid boss of the Burning Crusade and a major character in Warcraft who even had a lot of fans among the players.
Yesterday we got news that the Illidari Council fell and Nihilum already had Illidan down to 42%. Today, Illidan died. Yes. Died. Noone would've thought that a character as powerful as Illidan would die to a raid group after just one evening of practice.
At least we'd have expected a very steep learning curve and maybe a hefty gear check when facing the self-proclaimed ruler of Outland. Back when BC was in beta, I remember reading many threads here, on SA and on other boards claiming: "Never is a player going to defeat Illidan. He'll most likely utter something about us not fighting him at his true power, vanish and leave a chest behind." Noone thought him to be quite that possible and now many expectations of the fight are just... ruined.

As a mere casual raider, I feel in fact a bit relieved that content seems to be so doable. With 2.1 I have hope that my guild which is just about to enter SSC just now will quite possibly SEE and DEFEAT this enocunter. I was never able to experience Naxxramas past Maexxna but - attunement worries aside I will possibly have a solid experience of all TBC raid instances (and shiny T6 loot) before they become obsolete and we're sent to Northrend, the Emerald Dream or whatever.

You are obviously right about tuned bosses being beatable (its kinda the definition), but at the same time, killing Illidan within 1 day after seeing him, is that really epic?
What many people want is challenges, where they feel they overcame some impossible challenges the moment the boss finally die.
As Gurg says, it shouldnt be all bosses, but there should be room for some of those.

Whether or not we have actually killed any BC bosses is beyond the point tbh, I havent set my foots in BT, and I wont for a while. I dont know if the bosses are easy for me or my guild, they probably arent, but the topic is, whether or not people generally progress through them too fast, removing the feel of actual progress and accomplishment. If Illidan isnt "harder" than Kael, doesnt require better items etc, then it hardly feels like you are moving upward in progress.
Pre-BC consumables could somewhat remove this feel of progress (and thank god this has been improved in 2.1), but still not the way it seems to be now.

This isnt really a question about time to kill the boss, if it takes 5 hours or 5 days, but the fact that you feel stronger when you meet Illidan than when you fight Maghteriodn, and you feel this boss is in fact a lot more difficult, even if your improved gear makes up for this difference (and thus you have a gear check that might slow down progress a bit too).

Beside that, while you say you can just add more raids, and thats your job, you also know it takes time. I believe most players will rather have to "gear up" a little longer for a slower progress, than wait months upon months for the next instance. When new instances cant be added with unlimited speed, then some sort of slowing down might be better than no slowing down. And gear checks is probably the best way (better than untuned bosses of course).

I guess my point is, when you are geared for Illidan or some other boss, then yes, it shouldnt take more than some hours or days to learn the encounter and beat it.
When you arent geared for it however, it should be very hard, very skill-based, luck-based etc. if you manage to overcome the undergearing. Now of course, maybe people arent undergeard for Illidan, but if they arent, thats the exact problem. No real progress. (Before I get flamed, no, Im not saying illidan isnt difficult... as said, the difficulty itself isnt the issue, its the gear and raid progressing).

Other than that, thanks for anything you post here. Even if people might disagree with your posts its great to get information or Blizzards point of view on everything

I would say while things might be a lot of fun while learning. Encounters aren't a lot of fun to farm for absolutely no purpose besides PvP and then have what the gear means wiped out in the next expansion is what most people's concerns.

Frankly I plan to just quit once my guild gets Illidan and Archimonde down for to me farming content for no reason is well just boring (and the PvP in this game is blah in comparison to other games).

Congrats to Nihilum and thankyou to Tigole for one of the most interesting posts I've ever read, even if it did take my access to the forums down for a bit.

Really looking forward to Zul Aman now if as seems to be indicated is harder than Karazahan.

Well, I think this is a silly comment. The majority of the playerbase aren't the top 10% of guilds or even their fanboys. They also are not the same people who afk'd in the tunnel to get their AV wolf super fast back in the day. They want challenge, but they don't have the time or energy to run this content in a manner that will enable them to move through it nearly as quickly as a top end guild. It seems like things are tuned so that a non-uber raiding guild that got through the first few Naxx bosses before BC has a chance of downing Illidian before the next expansion hits. That seems like a pretty decent pacing to me.

I'm sure if all the top end guilds were tied with the current leaders pre-PTR and spent as much time on the PTR as N/C did that we'd see a more competitve race. But you can't really blame blizzard for that.

That's going to be patched soon. Hell, it might have been patched in today.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...06676024&sid=1

Tigole, sorry for speaking directly, but I'm curious how you feel about Illidan, the key figure in your TBC story, the guy who yells "YOU ARE NOT PREPARED" when you install the game and sends chills down your spine, being downed within a week of a guild setting foot in Black Temple? With a day worth of tries?

I don't think anyone is asking for a wall, but I think we all want to feel a absolute sense of "We finally got this guy, FINALLY... WE DID IT" , once we kill Illidan - same feeling we had at Ragnaros, C'Thun, Nefarian (heh) and some people had on Kel'Thuzard - the ones that got to him in time... At the end of the day, that's all any raider really wants.

Perhaps you are right, once the "World first" dust settles we will all have our time to enjoy BT and noone will really care about Nihilum killing Illidan in 24 hours.

A repeat of Gruul 1.0/Mag 1.0 would be far worse for everyone than an undertuned BT. Raid content that's accessible to more people than Naxx may be good for the game as a whole but some of the magic is lost in the process of opening it up. The progression rate through Naxx wasn't so bad: 4H first kill after 8 weeks, KT after 10, but I can understand Blizzard not wanting to repeat an instance that was completed so little. What's disconcerting is to see the mark being wildly missed, first in one direction with Mag 1.0, then the other with BT.

From my own experience of just being in SSC, raiding just feels strange now. In vanilla WoW, we'd have two to three farm nights and one learning night a week. It was a comfortable pattern, because having more than one learning night a week would lead to burnout with people banging their head against the same wall over and over. Now in TBC, it feels like there are no more learning nights. We pull something and it will die that night. It doesn't feel like a hollow victory. But it does feel wierd to just go into a fight, explain what happens, and then watch the boss die that night. It feels like a complete reversal of pre-2.1 raiding where we'd spend a lot of time on message boards discussing, preparing, and doing post-mortems for each fight. Now it's get to the boss, explain the mechanics, then collect loot in one to three hours.

The raiding is more fun than it was pre-2.10. However, it has a completely different feel than any previous raiding in WoW.

Let us know if that happens on Kael'Thas. =p

I have to say after reading Tigole's insightful post on the 'new' raid scene it gives me a little glimmer of hope. I would much rather the devs focusing on how "very cool and very fun" an encounter can be, also keeping in mind that the instances need to be cleared multiple times (ie. tuning for overall enjoyment). I mean that is what this should be all about.

Developers will never, never "beat" a group of focused addicts, it is just not possible without making the encounter quite literally impossible for everyone.

Disclaimer: I'm not even raiding Karazhan right now due to various RL circumstances.

That said, I think a lot of people here are hugely underestimating the benefit of 2.5 years of raid experience. Nihilum has been plugging away at raid encounters for a long time now; a lot of their players were on the cusp through Rag, Nef, C'thun, 4H, KT, Nightbane, and then into ridiculously overtuned Gruul/Mag/Vashj in early TBC. How difficult can you possibly make these encounters before you realize that you're carving out content that can't be done without a guild that operates as a finely-tuned machine? For players that have done Four Horsemen until it's farmable "ez sauce", how do you approach ratcheting up to the next level? Do you mash 4H and Heigan together until you've basically got a 25-man Nintendo button-masher for every encounter? Do you turn the game into something that demands first-person-shooter levels of responsiveness and basically makes it impossible to do for players without sub-100ms latency, or only doable at 6:00am server time? Do you just ratchet up the numbers until the tank is getting hit for 100% of his hit points until he he's got Tier X+1 gear, or demand that every raid be stacked with the right sort of DPS classes so that you can just *barely* get in under the enrage timer if all players are operating at 100% effectiveness with Tier X+1 gear?

At some point I frankly think hardcore players need to admit that they're just so good at raiding that Blizzard can't design encounters for them without dabbling in the "release it impossible and then return later" model that everyone seems to find so unpleasant. If Nihilum says "yeah, we beat this encounter and it was the most difficult one in the game so far", then is it really fair to ding Blizzard for not making it even harder? Maybe it is, but I won't be convinced until another 10 guilds have done it, and even then it's a pretty tough call to make. Developer effort can't be spent so disproportionately on content that's inaccessible to everyone who hasn't been working at it for years, and it's not particularly fun or realistic to make ultrahard content and then just arbitrarily nerf it when it's time to let the masses move forward.

I have killed a boss in Black Temple and feel that it is too easy. Last night was our first night in Black Temple and we managed to kill Naj'entus, Supremus, and The Shade of Akama. We killed Naj'entus in 2 attempts, Supremus in 2 and the Shade of Akama took 4. We had killed Naj'entus on test, but I expected it to take us sometime on live since most of the raids gear is much worse. On Supremus we lost 3 of our rogues 30 seconds into the fight and still managed to beat a 15 minute enrage timer by a large margin. Why is his enrage even so long? Does he even have an enrage? Shade of Akama felt like it would be difficult after our first 2 attempts, then managing the adds clicked, and we zerged him down 2 attempts later.

We ended our night with an hour and a half on Gurtogg Bloodboil. It felt like a challenge and it seemed like we were doing a difficult Naxx boss. It was fun. However we missed a few of his gimick abilities and fell short of being able to kill it. On our final attempts we figured out the tricks to the encounter. I expect him to die the next night we are in there. It should take more time to kill this boss. Early in our progress on Gurtogg it had an epic feeling that Naj'entus, Supremus, and Akama certainly didn't have, but as we progressed he lost that feeling.

When do we get to do fights like Loatheb, 4HM, Sapphiron, and Kel'thuzad again? These fights were epic and their challenge stayed from beginning to end for us.

I think another issue that should be raised is yes, the first few bosses of an instance should be easy (see Anub, Raz, etc.). However, when you tie the start of the instance to the end of another, the difficulty progression gets out of whack. People that were killing Anub and Raz and going no further were the same people that were stuck on Huhuran and the Emps. Killing the first few Naxx bosses is progression for them. However, if C'Thun was required to do Anub, I would be a little thrown off.

Nihilum spent a lot more time in BT than people give them credit for. As far as I'm concerned, the stride for world firsts begins on the PTR. Whether or not guilds learning half the instance on a PTR server with free consumables, infinite repair money and top of the line gear is a good thing is up for debate. However, the moment the PTR is active is the moment X Raid Content is truly released. When it hits Live, it's all semantics and the term "world first" can be claimed.

Judging by the hammering of the forums, I think you are going to be required to become a benefactor before you're allowed to post here again.

I for one am encouraged that there is an end in sight to the progression that the elite guilds have blown through. I didn't get to see Naxx or even late AQ and I am quite sad that there is so much content that goes unexperienced. I think it's realistic to think that I may yet get to see BT or Hyjal by the time the next expansion is released, and that's encouraging for me.

Loatheb was difficult because most guilds could only try him for a couple attempts a week. Four horsemen was hard because of it's requirements. Sapph was hard because most guilds didn't have a full frost resist set ready. The key aspect was to run behind the iceblocks, our guild didn't manage to do that perfect on the first few nights. I can imagine nihilum doing things like that perfectly on their third try though. Kel'Thuzad took us 3 days. Take the time to get the worldbuffs into consideration and we're speaking of maybe 10 hours total tries.

And yet, those last fights in Naxxramas left a very very good memory in the hearts and minds of our guildmembers. Epic fights don't have to require heavy class-stacking or a complete new set of gear. Kael'thas was killed the day after blizzard released 2.1 and yet I see nothing than excited remarks on the fight.

There is 2 ways you can make an encounter challenging.

Skill-based: You are right, we dont need encounters to be harder skill-wise really, Some of these encounters already require people to coordinate, great timing etc. and thats all fine. making this even harder would just make the bosses impossible for most people, which isnt desirable for us nor Blizzard. Bosses like Cthun, Magth, many Naxx bosses etc. already did a terrific job here, and most of us dont need more than that.

Gear-based: A perfectly tuned boss, which everyone can kill, can still be impossible because of failing the gear check. And its here you could see improvements.
The early bosses could have nearly no gear-check, and thus die prety fast after entering the instance. But the later bosses requring you to stay in the instance and gear up for a while. Thus, the bosses gets quantitatively harder (number-wise), but is qualitatively the same (requires same skill). That should imo, be the goal. Since it gives you both a 1) feel of progress, 2) gives the gearing up/farming some purpose, and 3) slows down the progress speed, by requiring you to farm bosses a bit before moving on, compared to clear it all, and then farm without a reason, until "the next big thing" (which arguable is more boring than the former).

Sure, it can be fun to steamroll bosses fast, and thats what Tigole argues here. But its similar to the piss in your pants analogy... You get somee short fun, until its all cleared, and then what? Compared to the fun you get from the challenges from fighting hard to beat a new boss while you slowly reach the intended gear-check level, and look forward to beating the encounter while gearing up etc. which will last longer.
It can obviously go too far in both directions, and noone want to farm for 4 months to beat the next gear check. Its all about finding the right balance.
A balance that surely isnt found with Hyjal and BT as I see it.

For the record, I would like people to stop saying that 4h required a ton of tanks with 4pc t3. When we first killed him, 3 of our 8 tanks had 4pc t3. In no way was it necessary. Did it help? Sure. So did your dps and healers having the best possible gear. It also helped on EVERY OTHER FIGHT IN THE GAME. Gear helps, we get it. 4h had -NOTHING- to do with a gear check. Yes, it took raid stacking, that was it.