Gear checks generally aren't fun. You can have Patchwerk arbitrarily one-shotting tanks until you're blue in the face, but more than one or two of those fights gets old very quickly. And even then, the best guilds in the world are going to circumvent those gear checks whenever they can; DPS gear checks are particularly pointless, because if you choose to make them extremely demanding then they're going to impossible for the somewhat-slackers in 95% of raiding guilds, and if you give them a little more room then the really sharp guilds are going to have relatively little trouble completing them even in Tier X-2 gear. Unless you make the difference between X and X+1 be something like a 30% increase, in which case people in X+3 gear are gods amongst men out in the "real world". Healing is the same deal; if they design encounters for a certain gear level, then top-notch guilds with extremely efficient healing and group synergies are going to squeeze by in Tier X-2 gear.

So what you're really saying here is that you want more fights where tanks get one-shotted.

My only contention with the Black Temple is that despite the changes in consumables, world buffs, and soulstones which allow for improved balancing, the back half of the Black Temple did not require gear from the front half. It did not require gear from Hyjal, nor did it require significant gear from Vashj or Kael'thas.

I'd like to reference a post that Praetorian made back in the middle of March when the discussion was about the over-tuning of Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK:

I have no problem with the top guilds blowing through the first encounters of the Black Temple. I think that the fights should take a few tries to work out the mechanics (which could be done on the PTR, of course), but I'm complelely content that Nihilum downed a number of other bosses the night they killed Kael'thas. However, I'm dissappointed that there was no Sapphiron like gear check in the middle of the zone to slow their progress. They are the best in the world, but gear progression should be meaningful enough that Illidan requires the raid to have cleared the zone a few times. I just want the death of Illidan to have been a bit more suspenseful.

I'll say that in restrospect, I wish that the vials from Kael'thas and Vashj only came in fours. Then there would have been a bit more build up between the death of Kael'thas and the first forrays into the Black Temple.

Yeah, 4pc t3 was always overrated. (Actually a fishing reel was a much better bet because you could almost guarantee taunts when you REALLY needed them.) The problem was mainly the tank requirement, as you note. Our first weeks of attempts on the fight, we had ~6 tanks, because that's what we brought to most fights, and I didn't want to design a strat that mathematically required 8 since I never imagined that would be something we could easily repeat, kind of like how we didn't use a Gothik strat that assumed we had 8 priests to shackle a million things. It wasn't until the first few guilds did it and it became apparent that, yes, you really do want 8 tanks, that a lot of other guilds started to see results. A large portion of the "block" on 4H was the fact that you needed to think outside the box to an extent (raid stack heavily) in order to find the right solution. If you were trying to learn the fight from scratch with 6 taunters, you were in for a world of pain.

There is a difference between time spent because the boss is difficult then finally winning, and simply feeling like you've beat incredible odds. I was more adrenaline charged after beating Kel'Thuzad than I was after beating Nefarian, and yet Kel'Thuzad only took 2 raids to learn where the guild I was in for Nefarian took 3 weeks at least. Basically, time does not mean the boss will 'feel epic' and accomplished following a kill, which seems to be the goal of every raider: to achieve that feel. Kel'Thuzad was the thing to kill, and not everyone was going to be able to get there. Being one of the few was part of the reason we felt powerful as a raid being worthy of entering Kel's lair.

Being months behind Nihilum is somewhat daunting, but I imagine when we do get to Illidan (We're working on Vashj at the moment), the fight will inspire awe much like Kel. Nihilum has spoken well of the encounter, and that encourages me. We were months behind on Kel too.

Im not talking Patchwerk types of gearchecks, where it all comes down to one boss. Im talking a progress throughout the instances where you "slowly" need the better gear to keep going.
Patchwerk is an example of going too far in the other direction, yes.
There is a difference between killing all t6 boss in pretty much the same old t4-5 gear (I dont know if its possible, and its not the point either to come up with such exact numbers, the point just is, they wasnt geared out in the new Hyjal/BT items at least), and having to farm some very exact gear to be able to overcome Patchwerk (you can say, the fun thing about him was, that gear needed to kill him "easily", came from the bosses after him). The gear should obviously come from doing the bosses before. It doesnt have to be "go back and farm these bosses for 4 months or you are screwed", but rather, to clear the last few bosses in BT, you should probably have farmed gear from here for 2-3 weeks... (again, numbers are arbitrary).

Whether that is fun or not I cant decide for everyone, but to me it seems more rewarding with a continued "gear-check" all the way through the instances, and it doesnt have to be the gearcheck-to-rule-them-all Patchwerk.

Edit: Buiden says it so beautiful in his last sentence, next post ^^

The block on 4 horsemen was most definitely not a gear check. The block was "do you have 8 warriors" and "have you learned rotations that will work and are repeatable".

My guild only took so damn long on them because we didn't even have 8 warriors in the guild and had to recruit 2 more just for this fight. Our first 4 horsemen kill we had maybe 4? Tanks with 4/9 T3. No shit one of the tanks we had on our first kill had just re-rolled alliance to join us and was in 50% green gear, tanking in a fucking Icebane breastplate because he literally had never raided on that character prior to that fight.


Back to pacing. Tigole, I agree with 90% of what you said but come on man, 22 manning BT encounters on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th try? It should at least be super hard if you don't have a full raid.

Whats the point of getting BT gear if you can clear the zone without any of it? Leveling for the next expansion? :P

Whats wrong with seeing a little mudflation so that guilds have to GEAR UP before they can tackle the next tier of raiding, EQ style. I want to zone into the next tier zone and get my face smashed off because my gear isn't good enough and have to upgrade my gear before I stand a chance.


EDIT: Please don't get me wrong, I am having a lot of fun raiding again since the last content patch. I am more worried for the precedent this sets. Can we expect every new raid zone cleared within 1 or 2 weeks of release from here out? I certainly hope not.

Tigole, if you are still here, could you comment on the PvP implications of raid content being plentiful and readily defeatable by the top guilds? Looking at the staff that dropped from Illidan, it is quite droolerific for PvP. Will arena gear keep up fast enough so that those of us who won't see Illidan until arena season 4 (if ever) won't be at a massive disadvantage? In general, how far behind will/should PvP gear be? That is, how many guilds have to have killed Illidan for PvP gear to reach equivalent ilvls?

Honestly, I had assumed that stamina was going to be the answer. Why else would all the t5/t6 gear have so much of it? Doomwalker requires a raid that can live through an 8k AoE. You could have encounters with abilities that were overly deadly if you didn't have something like 11k+ hp raid buffed (sort of like how Rage Winterchill's Ice Bolt is bad news for a cookie-cutter tailoring glass cannon), and at the same time have nontrivial DPS requirements to keep up with adds or the like. With pre-t5/t6 gear, you might be able to get the hp to survive the burst damage, or the DPS to keep up with the adds, but only the high-end raid gear could give you both at once.

I mean Hydross's Water Tomb, Morogrim's Earthquake + Grave... all of these mechanics suggest a certain desired hp value. Hell, look at Gruul 1.0 -- one of the real challenges was balancing survivability with DPS.

But obviously there isn't anything in BT that isn't manageable with a mix of t4/t5 gear if you play well.

The trouble with those sort of 'progressive' gear checks is the same as any other check: No one will like where you set the bar.

Someone will say, "Oh, it should take 2 months of kills off the first few bosses to have enough loot for the last!' and someone else will say "Oh, well it should only take 3-4 weeks, because 2 months is way too long!', and then another will say "Oh, you shouldnt have gear checks, just make it skill dependant, cause only X,Y,Z type of guilds have the skill to win!" and we end up back to the same arguments that are going on right now.

Right now, my guild downed Hydross last week (working on getting our start fine tuned) and are looking to progress into TE and SSC now. I would hope, if we had a full month to learn all the boss fights in SSC and TE, that we could walk in one week and beat them with our assortment of Tier 4 and Kara/Mag/Gruul loot, except for Vashj/Kael.

If anything, TBC raiding has shown Blizzard has taken the raiders cry of "We want skill based encounters!' and run with it. And much to many raiders dismay, it turns out there really are guilds skilled enough and dedicated enough to pull ahead of the pack. Its a bitter pill to swallow knowing you thought you could hang with the best, till the best decide to show just how good they really are.

Anyway, congrats to Nihilium.

I think this sentence answers a lot of the questions I've had since beginning my meager TBC raid career. We've been debating here whether Blizzard is ok with a few guilds absolutely destroying any content in their path, and just how "exclusive" they intend raiding to be. The answers were apparent from their systematic boss nerfs and player buffs, but Tigole has finally laid it out pretty explicitly.

Starting the 25 man game at late-Naxx difficulty and ramping up was a mistake--intentional or not--and an instance that only 1% of the WoW population even enters is not their goal. It's certainly an interesting change in philosophy (creating a ludicrously intricate encounter to stymie even the most hardcore, versus accepting that they will steamroll any content that's meant to be accessible). For whatever reason, they felt that was appropriate for Naxx. Maybe because it was "the last raid" and needed to tide people over for a loooong time. But I think almost anyone who is not seriously competing for world firsts will agree that the new philosophy is the most rational, at least for anything prior to "the last raid". I was expecting at least one 4H type encounter prior to (or as) Illidan. I wonder if they intend Archimonde to be that encounter, or if they don't ever want another 4H.

Yeah, you are probably right. It is damn hard to tune it right, and Blizz might be tring.
Then I would like Tigole to say that this was really their goal to have Illidan (or any other boss) designed for BT gear, instead of saying all bosses just have to die within a few hours, and its intended.
The fact Illidan dies with a few hours of trying him is pretty okay for me, I just think the people who did it should use the gear from the instance before it was possible (and without this gear, maybe they would get lucky and kill him anyway, but it would be damn hard and luck-based to fight against the gear-check numbers).
Now Im far from BT, and when I get there, maybe Ill feel the gear-check in effect, because of being less skilled than Nihilum.
But right now we have to discuss from what we can see, and here its difficult to see they even tried to add in the gradual gear-check.

No one doubts Nihilum is very skilled, and has used lots of hours on this, and they deserve all their kills. But personally I would find it more interesting to suddenly hit a brickwall, where it was clear that the raidgroup overall just needed X% better gear to stand a chance.
Maybe it will be this way for 90% of the raiders out there, but its not the impression you get so far.

How much gear should the comparative skill level of Nihilum be worth?
1 tier?
2 tiers?

vs. what?

I look at WWS parses for kills from other guilds and it feels like, DPS-wise, I'm about 1 tier behind "top end" guilds. Hard to really judge, but I'm pretty sure it's at least a tier.

If Illidan took Nihilum, one of the best guilds out there, 50% T6, 50% T5 to kill, that's too much for us, ever. We could only outgear their kill by half a tier at most ( by waiting until we had full T6), and based on looking at WWS parses etc, we'd need an entire tier, not just half. I'd like to kill him eventually.

Having them kill him in half T4/half T5 is maybe too low, that's 1.5 tiers lower than where we could be at full T6, maybe it's half a tier too low, but I don't think it's ludicrously low.

EDIT: (Add in "raid stacking - better class composition" with "skill" - not all guilds have as much flexibility in membership)

I have the same feelings as well. Gearing up is a part of the process, and to suddenly have my gear upgrades near-meaningless as part of progression takes something away from it.

While they could certainly tune the bosses to be more difficult or require more gear, ultimately what we're dealing with is a result of "cockblock" free raiding.

The bosses don't despawn after you try them (Ragnaros, Nefarian). They aren't bugged all to hell (C'thun). They don't require you to farm an absurd amount of consumables for every attempt (Loatheb), and they don't require world buffs for successful attempts (Various Naxx).

If you die, you can try again. You might have to go get some more potions, flasks, food, oils, but you can easily spend less time doing that than raiding now. You have to pay repair costs, but those are covered by doing daily quests. Basically it's like playing a game with unlimited continues. You have to be good enough to win, but you can now keep trying until you win or you can call it a night.

It's a lot more fun this way.

No one said it required 4pc t3..It did require 8 geared tanks...Unless, you used DM geared tanks?

How many guilds, world wide, had 8 tanks with reasonable raid tank gear..Hell, how many guilds had *8 tanks*?

You assume "gear check" means t3, it didn't..Gear check means having 8 raid viable tanks, which was an is an asburd number considering that every fight up to that point didn't require more then 4.

I think this is a good representation of middle to upper tier guilds who aren't on the very top. I mean, let's face it, even though raiding is a pretty tame competition (instanced content and all), progression would be a hell of a lot slower than it is if people didn't feel motivated to progress past other people. The social pressure this creates really pushes you to "clear something as long as there is something to clear." It was a nice component of having time off, so to speak.

But it is somewhat funny to be complaining about having too much to do. =P

This did seem like a pretty elegant solution, but I wonder how much of it has to do with considerations of arena gear and PvP. Of course, they could have just easily tacked on even more Stamina into arena gear to compensate for PvE gear also having high stamina.

I never got to experience Patchwerk, but I remember a wave of resentment sweeping over the Hunter community at the time as their guilds felt forced to sit them in order to stack the raid until additional gear eased the fight. Fortunately Tigole learned from that one:



On a general note, I'd also like to point out that even if a guild clears an instance in a couple of weeks, they're still going to have to farm it for months to get everyone their set pieces. Maybe those have gone out of style though heh.

Changed my original post a bit to take out some of the gear requirments, but lets go from here.

You had 8 tanks, 8..Most guilds don't, it's a ludicrous encounter design to have a zone, which did not require more then 4 tanks at any point, to jump to 8 tanks.

I have to ask, what does "nothing impressive" mean? Does nothing impressive mean t2/t1 that they got by running through the alt-BWL runs?

Most guilds can only raid 4 days a week, a lot of these guilds made it to the 4h, so lets assume they don't "suck", they simply don't have the farming time..Of them, how many are going to have *alts* geared enough to even tank trash in there?

Lets bring the debate to a more logical progression of thought, however..Why should a reasonably built guild, need *alts* to defeat a sane encounter within an instance? Why does this particular encounter require so much more of a particular class then any encounter, anywhere, before it?

I say reasonable, because where I work, everything is judged off the "reasonable" man..Most, reasonable guilds had 6 warriors..Most guilds I knew who killed the 4h (We never did, not enough tanks, lol) used alts to beef up to 8-Using alts to supliment a raid force shows the encounter is not reasonable, and the method to defeat it was not properly tuned based on *expected* raid values.

Again, I say expected because every encounter up to that point only required 4 tanks.

This is exactly the thing I've been trying to put words to while reading this thread. Excellent post.

Hmm, in Naxx, we'd run with 4? DPS wars at times, and like 3 prot for some encounters, it wasn't a huge jump to get to 8. Anyway, I'm not defending the 8 tanks thing, I said it was a raid stack encounter, HOWEVER, I said it is not a gear cockblock. We did have tanks with blues. We had 1 warrior reroll who I believe got his first epic from Naxx. When we did the first half of Naxx, one of our mage rerolls was using a mining pick with spellpower on it. Go check our news history on our webpage if you want. We did all of Naxx with some terrible gear. We apped like 4-5 people from a horde guild on our server that fell apart, and started at lvl 1.

Before that, in AQ, I believe our MT at the time was using the trash blade from Maraudon, while tanking twin emps. Wow, what a gear block!

I don't want a bunch of raids we have to stack the raid and have a bunch of people of a class that can't raid the entire time. But even past that, even with that many warriors, the horsemen took many nights to beat.

Well its pretty simple actually.

Its obvious that they are not tuning the content any more for the hardcore guilds like Nihilum, Curse, DnT etc. Because you have to realize these guilds are the very minority of WoW's playerbase. They could've made Black Temple easiely an hardcore playground, by putting 4HM at the frontdoor, next a resi-fight, then a C'thun mixed with a little Vael type encounter and so on.

But I've raided in a cutting edge guild for the last 2 years and then switched to a more casual guild. You won't realize how bad these guilds are. These guilds, which are the vast majority of WoW just cannot kill stuff like Vicidous or 4HM. Why? I don't know, there obiviously seems do be some skill-gap or something here.

So what do they do? They stopped making content for the minority and started making easy fight for the average consumer, so that everybody can have a shot a Illidan (remember how few people had a chance to see Kel'Thuzad, such an important lore-Figure).

So in the essence, WoW really got to big, to be the hardcore raiding game, that Nihilum & Co want to have, it started when they reduced the raid size from 40 to 25.

My complaint here is that the bosses I have to kill (Kael) to get into these instances are clearly vastly more difficult than the bosses in these instances.

I would much rather have more challenging bosses than these extremely frustrating key requirements. Every time I recruit someone new, I have to run heroic instances because we haven't killed kael, despite the fact that almost anyone I recruit could kill the 3 bosses in TK besides kael, as none of them are even remotely difficult if you have a brain in 3/4ths of your raid.

Now, we know full well we are going to spend probably 3-4 days on kael, which for us will take 2 weeks of actual raids once you assign half our time to farm content.

Basically, we would all be very grateful if instead of having all these keying requirements, making us wait effectively 2-3 weeks of farm on kael/vashj to enter the next instance on any given night with a full raid, you could just make the key requirements substantially simpler and then make the bosses more challenging. I mean, honestly, was it really necessary to make people who didnt do Seer Udalo and the Heart of Fury really go do them before giving them the Al'ar quest. That is just dumb and forces us to do stuff we really do not care about.

Also, a big issue in my view is that too much of the trash can randomly kill someone(See: Crimson battle-mage) which just wastes time even if you understand the mob.

So in a nut shell I like:

-No one shot trash
-Less demanding/time consuming key requirements
-More linear boss progression

To be more clear, It would be nice if you put the harder bosses later in the zones. TK was well designed in this manner, particularly since access to bosses was very lightly restricted, however it would be nice if the difficulty in t6 was in the bosses and not whether I have enough attuned healers online for TK. Having to recruit AND key is extremely frustrating.