After a lot of thought and deliberation, we’ve decided to remove the attunement requirements to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep: The Eye. While many of our attunements in the Burning Crusade have been good progression checks, a few of the attunements have turned out to cause unnecessary stress on guilds either doing the content or attempting to do the content. With Black Temple and Battle for Mount Hyjal thriving, we want to encourage (rather than prevent) new guilds and raid groups to attempt Serpentshrine and TK. We are going to leave the current attunement quests in the game so that players can still engage in the challenge and the lore of those quests should they choose to. At a later point, we are considering adding a final reward step to those quests as well (that way those who have already completed them would not miss out on a *new* reward).
We’re listening to feedback from you guys constantly and your opinions are important to us. We want this game to be the best possible MMO experience for our players.
Enjoy Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep =)
(Please note: This change will go live later today -- it's not yet active)
Seems pretty sudden to me...It'll certainly make recruiting a bit easier for those of us not getting TK scrolls yet though.
So in 2 months BT attunement is being removed aswell?
Jokes aside, seems like an okay change, you still have to clear SSC and TK to enter Hyjal/BT. It does change the progression track a bit, making Magtheridon optional, which I am not so sure I like.
Edit: Perhaps the better solution was to remove the requirement for heroics and just make Magtheridon the requirement to enter TK, and Gruul for SSC.
Wow, such a simple change, but a tremendous help to guilds trying to get through those instances. I can't tell you how new recruits we've had to run through all the heroics to get keyed to TK. At first we had to get most recruits through their SSC attunements as well, but most people seem to have gotten that done by now.
I guess that it won't speed up anyone's progression by a noticable amount, since you're probably not going to kill Hydross if you can't kill Gruul (although you might be able to get Void Reaver down before you beat Magtheridon . . . ). Doesn't change anything for very high-end guilds; we have more scrolls than we know what to do with. I suppose the only real consequence of this change is removing some tedium for those who haven't seen SSC/TK yet. Removing tedium is always a good thing. Kudos to the devs for a good change, albeit a completely unexpected one.