You havent said what you didnt enjoy?

If you didnt enjoy raiding before, why would you enjoy it now? The only thing that has changed is consumables.

I fail to see why raiding pre expansion was better, it was a chaos filled free for all, carrying 10-15 complete retards, or atleast thats my take on it.

Mistakes in 25 man raiding can and will wipe your raid, in 40 man raids, half your raid could mess up, without it causing a wipe.

Shadow pots for Loatheb? That was pre-4H already. I imagine that if you had to use old resistance potions in TBC(the ones using 1 primal each), it would be quite annoying as well.

It's stating the obvious but here goes: Blizzard has stepped back from the philosophy of developing raid difficulty with the world's top 25 or so guilds in mind. The curve has to be set somewhere and, in my opinion, it's much better set so guilds like Nihilum, etc, blow through new content that average raid guilds still find challenging rather than give Nihilum the challenge and the proverbial 'brick wall' to the average.

I'm thankful that Kaplan and the others have taken this new approach to design encounters and taking that approach all the way through to things like alchemy. Stacking a flask, a school specific potion, an adept's elixir, some level 40 ghetto arcane elixer, etc. was just a stupid mechanic.

Keep in mind a lot of people raiding in WoW today are a lot like me: 25-30, just playing their first MMO, don't have a pedigree dating back to Everquest and such. I'm a pretty bright guy, I have a graduate degree, but my game reflexes aren't the best of the best and I probably require a few more attempts at an encounter than the average top flight end game raider does in order to get comfortable with it.

I raided up to Gothik/Loatheb in Naxx on alliance and, on the whole, I would say the raid encounters in TBC are a lot more interesting. I don't see why 15 more people make an encounter 'epic.' I don't see what was so great about Thaddius. It's a fun mechanic to be sure, but one that can easily be pulled off with the same entertainment value in a smaller setting (Heroic Mechanar).

I've only just started Hyjal and, yes, it does seem a bit easy but my gut tells me Hyjal is sort of a 'reward' instance. Of course if you only came from WoW from another MMO and not from Warcraft 3 then you'll appreciate it a bit less.

With respect, Quigon, but if your esteemed guild takes a week to down boss X, how long is it going to take an average guild? A month of wiping without progress is pretty clearly the ingredient for attrition.

Two stories -

I have, for some time, been a straight B student. On the first test for a class, I got an F, and the instructor approached me with concern. The usual, "You can do better, eccet, why'd you do so bad, why didn't you study?" I told him that I didn't understand how they asked questions on that test (yes, they were in English), and that with exactly 0 more effort, I would get a B on the next test. Sure enough, I did. Having understood how they asked questions, I was vastly better prepared to answer correctly. (This is the source of my straight B-ness - I have an absurd amount of practice at testing). While it is absurd to say, "Gosh, you mean I've gotten better at mashing the sunder key over the last three years?" the more pragmatic answer is, "When they throw in a variation, the set from which they can pick and your ability to figure it out has vastly improved - no?"

Ever play Zork, or Quest for Glory, or any of those Adventure games? Take string from a ball of yarn in the study, wax from the candle in the kitchen, click them together with the lightswitch, and advance to the next room, obviously. First time we did Razorgore, I thought for sure there was some gimmick with the curtains and balconies, and I spent a few wipes running around searching for a hidden lever (it may have required Lieutenant's Insignia to operate ~).

The answer to OP is as follows - the game is still World of Warcraft, if you didn't enjoy it before, you won't enjoy it now. Are some hassles removed? Yes. But they didn't suddenly implement Civilization IV as an alternative game mode. If you just don't enjoy dungeoneering with 24 of your closest pals, or PVPing with 4, or doing insane-bizarro reputation grind for handful-o-epix, I'm not sure there can be any change to WoW for you.

(Most of) The fights in SSC and TK have been improved. Vashj was reasonably easy, but still challenging. Kael'thas is an awesome fight. Solarian went from "really stupid" to just "kinda dumb". Al'ar we retardedly bugged before, and is now not-so-bugged but too easy. Leotheras was made less interesting, but more forgivable for melee. Generally SSC and TK were made more enjoyable.

However, Hyjal and Black Temple suffer from the problems that SSC and TK initially faced. For starters, Hyjal trash, even after the most recent changes, is still the least enjoyable and least rewarding experience in World of Warcraft since Alterac Valley v1.0. The bosses are pretty cool, but most are too easy. What's really disappointing is the Archimonde fight. It goes back to the LOL@MELEE approach to raid design. There are a few really refreshing concepts in the fight, but they're completely wasted. Melee DPS classes are beyond useless; they are a detriment to the raid. The AoE fear thing that Blizzard said they'd do away with is as gay as it has ever been. As for Black Temple, while there are a couple genuinely challenging bosses, the rest are ridiculously easy. I'm talking Void Reaver easy. Gurtogg Bloodboil, while fully possible, is obviously not tuned properly. While the trash is actually kind of fun, and the boss concepts are interesting, much tuning is needed.

I love raiding for the macro-management aspect and the concept of 25 friends working together to maintain a healthy raiding team. The content itself is pretty cool, but still leave a lot to be desired. I'm guessing the Hyjal and BT will be reworked in the future. It this is the case, the guilds who are currently finishing up on SSC and TK have much to look forward to. In the meantime, raiding is OK. It's better than SSC/TK was from the very beginning, but it's nowhere near the Naxxramas glory days.

He's no Void Reaver, but if you can get to him, you'll kill him in three hours tops. Even less once the strategy is released to the public. I'd classify it as free loot.

As has been said before, you'll probably never hear anything like Orange Hammer!!! on your vent server in TBC, mostly due to the fact that raiders have gotten used to killing bosses.

Now it feels like more and more people are getting to experience raid content; a bigger percentage of players are raiding, or getting further than the TBC equivalent of MC.
The bosses are less forgiving, but that gives the 1.0 non-raider a better understanding of game and class mechanics.

The sappy truth is that the people you play with are what keeps the game fresh and fun.

Arena is great, heroics are a good addition, servers are significantly improved.

Raid wise in general there are less annoying time sinks, most fights have something slightly challenging for everyone, not just the tanks and the 3 specific people important for the encounter. This can mean you wait for ages while some idiot screws up, but at least you normally have at least some small element of skill while its happening.

In lots of fights in the past like twin emps and especially as a threat capped warlock in BWL, I could AFK and it wouldn't really matter, either tanks & healers had control or they didn't, this isn't the case anything like as much now and its both a good thing or a bad thing.

In general though TBC is a fairly big improvement, expectations have risen though, in many cases by a lot more than the improvement.

TBC improved alot imo, I am way more hooked to it than I used to. So many things to do, it just never stops !

Because even once you got a first kill on a Naxx boss, it wasn't an instant 1 shot every week. Maexxna was a trial when you were undergeared and your tank had to survive 2 web spins under enrage, after our first Gothik kill I don't think we were able to repeat it for 2-3 weeks, and it was a difficult fight even after we were farming KT, I'd say week in and week out we had more problems at Gothik than 4H. Heigan was a very trying fight for most guilds, although it was one of the fun fights in Naxx, and could be done by 15-20 people who could dance, it took a while for most people to get to that point, due to the gauntlet (which I think was excellant design looking back). Patchwerk until your tanks got some gear always held the possibility of a dead tank and a wipe, Gluth we put on farm rather easily, and Thaddius you definitely need to be at more than 35people for the length of the fight. Now virtually as soon as the boss dies the first time, they die every single week, usually with very little effort. There's not really any form of re-progression.

You may be approaching the fight differently but our WWS reflects absolute melee dominance of this fight, and this is considering we run 0 enhancement shaman, our first kill was without a warrior DPSing, and our second was without a feral druid.

I think part of what you've identified is to do with the scaling of raids from 40->25. There is less slack there which means people feel the need to concentrate a lot more. I know that when we were playing well, we could easily one shot every boss we'd done in naxx, but it just took a couple of people to be playing badly or not concentrating well to make the boss suddenly kill someone, and because of the larger raid size it was hard to identify exactly who it was (unless it was something stupid like missing the jump at thaddius).

Gear progression is more of an issue now imo too. Because of the smaller raid size and the frequency of token drops, you can kit out half a raid with one or two t5/6 drops in a week if you're up to half way through BT/cleared hyjal. This kind of gearing is way in excess of the gearing that went on through Naxx, partially because of the spreadoutness of loot and partly because there were a lot of non-set items that were a complete waste (digested hand of power for example, and the frost resist pieces that although useful later gave you nothing if you weren't up to saph yet). I'm not saying that theres no waste now, but generally people are wearing much better gear every week, instead of going for a month with no upgrades.

Archimonde has about as much armor as Aran or Solarian, doubtless to offset the natural disadvantage melee would seem to have here. Our rogues dominated DMs on the fight (top 4 being 400k, 400k, 365k, 330k -- top 3 were all rogues, #4 was a hunter).

Anyway, I think I generally disagree with Maraudor's elevation of Naxx above BT and the TBC endgame. I think the current endgame is better-tuned, better-paced, and I'm personally enjoying it more. As a raid leader, I don't have to worry about class-stacking and the horrible logistics involved in that (tanks for 4H, priests for Gothik, fire mages and fury warriors for Loatheb, etc.), coordinating world buffs, spending days reclearing old content in order to get to the new boss(es) we still need to kill, and so forth. Again, we were hardly worldwide frontrunners in Naxx, but we had Thaddius down on July 12th, killing multiple bosses per week up to that point, while still farming BWL and AQ40 on the side. Heigan and Gothik had died to different guilds in the meantime (hey Xi do you remember when you called out Conquest for exploiting Heigan? haha, good times). That's pretty quick, honestly. Loatheb was a problematic fight that people put off because of the "Does Blizzard seriously expect us to chain-chug GSPPs here?" factor, and once people realized, "Ok, yeah, they really do," Loatheb died to a bunch of guilds. 4H were an obstacle because they required 8 damn tanks.

I think the reason that you went nuts when Patchwerk died but not when Teron died can't be fully attributed to Patchwerk just being that much better a boss. Face it: you've been around the block a few times since then. You've killed a lot of bosses, and you know what to expect from raiding. You know how to analyze fights, you know how to learn them, and you expect that most well-tuned fights will die. If you succeed, it's because you performed as you should have; if you fail, it's because your raiders suck at execution. When we killed Ragnaros, we honestly had no idea that we were even capable of killing Ragnaros. We were just some random guild that had barely known each other for a few months, and suddenly we were "beating the game"? Holy shit. It was a big moment.

Information-sharing about bosses has also skyrocketed, which drastically changes the learning curve. There's videos galore, Bosskillers (eventually), WWS parses, and so forth. I haven't seen Illidan yet but I could competently explain every phase of the fight with only a few holes in my understanding. Veterans of these forums surely remember all the talk that a boss as simple as Patchwerk spawned, don't they? I mean even after he was killed by some guilds, we went on for months discussing Hateful Strike. More information in the hands of more experienced raiders drastically simplifies the learning curve. We're definitely not Nihilum, Forte, LR, Curse, etc., but we're pretty well-progressed I think (4 bosses left in the game), and I've gone into every fight in BT with a pre-laid plan that yielded pretty much immediate results. We learned Gurtogg from first pull to kill in about 1h 45min, before trash respawn. Teron took just over 2 hours, but it was more a matter of figuring out the logistics of keybindings and such for people whose bars kept fucking up. Are those bosses trivial? No, they aren't really, but with full information going in, we can basically have a strat mapped out before our first pull. That kind of helps.

I've actually really enjoyed Hyjal this past week because for once I really knew nothing about Kaz'Rogal beyond "uh he has an AoE Kazzak mark..." and nothing about Azgalor beyond the fact that I was pretty sure he did "Howl of Azgalor" based on a thott search, and that I'd heard guilds bitching about his rain of fire killing Thrall, so he probably had a rain of fire too. Not knowing what to expect, for once, was fun.

Personally, I have an expectation of success at this point. When you do what you feel you should, is it going to prompt an enthusiastic outpouring like when you accomplish something you didn't think possible? Of course not. When we kill a new boss, I am satisfied. When we don't, I am disappointed. I suppose that's less fun than things used to be? I'm not sure.

The two common themes I'm hearing are "Bosses die so much faster in TBC that it's a letdown" and "It's so much easier to wipe for stupid reasons because the fights aren't designed as well". That sounds contradictory, but those perceptions are both results from the same change:

Raid size went from 40 to 25.

That's all. When someone messes up in a 25 man raid, it has a larger impact on the raid as a whole. Two people dieing in a 40 man raid was not great but you could handle it. The same two people screwing up and dieing in a 25 man raid will probably cause a wipe. For the most part it's not that the CHANCE of dieing is higher. It's that the IMPACT of dieing is worse.

And conversely, when all 25 people get things right, bosses really DO die faster. But it's more likely that 25 people will perform perfectly than 40 people will. TBC raiding is easier if people have their act together and harder if not. There's just a wider variation.

What we're really dealing with is the mathematical fact that smaller sample sets (eg. 25 man raid) have wider standard deviations than larger ones (eg. 40 man raid). That's what accounts for the varied stories of "stuff is too hard" and "stuff is too easy".

Doesn't this seem kind of mundane to you and the exact reason people say they're disappointed by the end game? Teron is about halfway through the last raid zone in the game and it took you 2 hours to learn him because of keybinds? Not because he was hard, but because people's UI's aren't set up for pet bars. Isn't that just Intructor Redux. Less than 2 hrs on Bloodboil? How long would it take you to learn Gothik, even if I gave you a complete strategy, picture, and video. I considered DnT very, very good at raiding even before Naxx came out, and we still got excited for every boss we killed because they tested us.

Btw re: Raid stacking. You like to point our fire mages, and fury warriors for Loatheb. I would contest that there are encounters in TBC which are fundamentally impossible without shadow priests.

I think Xi's comment about idiot checks is the big thing I'm seeing. In Naxx, learning patchwerk meant you needed to figure out everything from how many tanks to use, to how to maximize dps, to how to maximize burst healing, and guilds could do it differently. Even knowing "Hey we use 3 tanks and heal them" still left room to learn.

Gothik was a huge one, as Xi said, send a death knight 2 seconds early and you probably just wiped, Thaddius we went through at least a few positionings before we found one that worked, Gluth we improved our strategy with a month left before TBC, I don't even have to explain the horsemen.

So far, everything I've seen in TBC was, don't play like a complete retard and you're fine, maybe it's that we've all gotten better and something that would have been difficult before is easy now, but it does hurt the feeling of accomplishment when you sit there knowing that the difficulty is in not having too many people zone out or fall asleep and die, not having the raid play well, just not play terribly.

I disagree. There are still fights where 1 person makes a mistake, like a Misclick, and the raid is going to most likely wipe or is in big trouble.

Think back 6 months, to learning Mag... Someone clicks twice, or a clothie clicks early, your headed for some pain. Same with Hydross, the MT screws up for 1 second, and you have a double transition.... I got crit by RL as our guild was learning Hydross, so I don't have much experience past that, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear about other further along bosses that require 105% attention from 1 person or everyone dies.

That's the part that I think you're missing. In the 40 man content, there was more of each class, and more people to cover for someone who was having a "bad 5 seconds". I think that lowered the attention needed to "80% kill the boss is my job, and 20% pure fun".. With 25 man content, and the lower number of people, I think raiders need more focus... where that number is more 95/5 or even 100/0.

The other parts that I think suck are the random elements, and the class balance... When your just learning Mag, you need X number of warlocks.. If you don't have that number, Mag is going to be a PITA. Or when your just learning Prince, you can spend an evening wipefest dealing with having to run Prince back and forth across the open field due to bad luck(random Infernals).

Edit: The funny thing is that now thinking back, these types of fights did exist pre-TBC. Grobbulus/Instructor/others in Naxx each had it's 1 man parts, but I don't remember them with any great ill will.. Maex had it's random LOS problems... I guess It's just nostalgia.

Yes, any one of 10 people on Magtheradon can mess up and wipe the raid. But any one of 40 people on Thaddius or C'thun could mess up and wipe the raid too.

And as for encounters where one mistake on the tank wipes the raid, pre-expansion raid content had a lot of that too. What about the tank standing in the wrong spot on Heigan? Or not taunting at the right time on Gluth? Sure it's easy to do these things right, just like it's to click a cube at the right time on Magtheradon. But people can still make mistakes.

What you're really getting at is the "passenger ratio"-- what the minimum percentage of the raid can be incompetent and still enable you to kill the boss? The passenger ratio is pretty similar to what it was in mid to late Naxxramas, but because the raid size is 25 instead of 40, the NUMBER of people who can be passengers is lower. So it's more obvious when those people appear. I personally believe that's a good thing though. I put in 100%, and I think everyone in my raid should too (and generally does).

I'm having feelings of deja-vu though. It seems like we're rehashing the "Is Raiding in TBC Fun?" thread from a month ago and perhaps have already answered the original poster's question. I believe the basic conclusion of that thread is the same as this one: "It's better or worse, depending on your perspective."

In that case, not only does the loot progression basically mean that completing all the stages *becomes* a part of the expected progression, but it also creates a situation where Blizzard has to tune the same boss four times.

I think one of the main challenges that I see right now is how you can have your guild spread over multiple levels of content with no reason for the more advanced to go back and help. After you finish your revered attunements there's no reason to do regular instances...after you finish your few heroic pieces there's no reason to run heroics...after you get your handful of pieces in Kara there's no reason to keep going back there.

I think its pretty clear that Bliz tried in TBC to make content more accessible to various levels and more things to do as you progress, but that implicitly creates these gating mechanisms that is causing a lot of headache for people. I mean we try to recruit new folks into the guild but who has time to go back and run the old attunements, or for your alts?

You were in the fortunate position of having to come up with all your strats and learn what all the bosses did, though. That's where a lot of the challenge is. Honestly, I disagree about Gothik. The challenge in Gothik was entirely in fine-tuning our strat. We spent probably 8 hours on that fight over 3 days before he died, and 7 of the 8 hours were spent revising our strat, our class distribution on each side, and so forth. We had to work out how and when to use our CC, and how to space out our shackles/polys in order to control the flow of mobs going over to the dead side. If you'd given me our final strat that we settled on after all those wipes, we would've been done with that fight in one day. Sure, you'd have some execution wipes ("Oops, mage missed the frost nova so the DK intercepted the priest as his other shackle broke and then everything went to hell.") but that's a different story. Gothik was pretty repeatable for us unless we had lots of new people or fewer priests than we needed.

Same deal with 4H. We revised our strat for them so goddamned many times. It's not that our execution improved, it's that we were making up a strat as we went, to account for holes in our prior plans. If you handed me our final strat on day one, they'd have died within a day or two. One of the hardest parts of both fights, especially as a raid leader, was figuring out whether our wipes were due to execution errors with the right strat, or resulted from flaws in the strat itself. Were the rogues who kept dying while running out away from Korth'azz just mentally deficient, or did we have inadequate healing coverage for the DPS there to make sure they could survive a 3k mark if they caught one before getting out of range? And so forth.

Well, I guess it depends on what you consider stacking. I guess we always run with ~2 shadow priests, for everything from Gruul and Mag 4 months ago to Archimonde this week. For me, the key is that we can do basically everything with the same raid group. If I swap people it's for convenience -- maybe drop a healer for Supremus and Shade to speed things up, but not because we have to, and then bring him back in for Teron and Gurtogg. That sort of thing. But not having 4 protection warriors for Patchwerk and then telling 3 of them to get the hell out so you can kill Loatheb. In Naxx, there would be nights where we literally could not do farm boss X because we were short a couple of key people. That has never happened in TBC.

I will echo that since attunements were lifted, there are more people interesting in raiding and trying out TK/SSC. However, there is still gear checks but the new PvP/S2 Arena gear that are good for raiding with the right gems and Kara is still there.


For improvements, I love the idea of a spectator mode for people on the bench while raiding, or possibily for some causal player that wants to see what raiding is like.

The devs are testing spectators for Arenas in Germany, I hope it works out.

I'm one of the few who is enjoying the TBC raiding scene as well. As a raid leader, the consumable change lifted a huge weight off my back. No longer must I worry who didn't bring flasks and concentrate on more important things. I hated encounters being designed around 25 people with 150g worth of consumables each, because there was always a few people who refused to go the extra mile. I think the change was a necessary one, it helped breathe life back into raids (we stopped progressing entirely pre-flask change). Ultimately though, I think this is what lead to most encounters seeming "easy".

Even now, the sheer amount of content to complete each week is overwhelming. You're going to spend the better part of 3 days clearing SSC/TK/Mag/Gruul, so that leaves you with 1-2 days of progression each week on BT/Hyjal if you raid 4-5 days a week. It's hard enough for us to manage 1 day clears of SSC and TK, I can't really expect casual guilds to do it.

There's plenty of content to go around -- I don't see what the fuss is about. Zul'Aman SHOULD close the gap between Kara -> Gruul and everyone should be happy.

I remember raiding 6-7 days a week during NAXX to stay ahead of the pack.. and I hated it. I don't know about other guilds, but MINE now needs off-days. I don't want to be required to raid every day just to progress.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy difficult encounters as well. I wish every zone had encounters as hard as Sapphiron, Kel'Thuzad, and the Four Horsemen. But not more than 1. Even after clearing NAXX multiple times, we often wiped on some of the more difficult bosses quite a few times. I remember wiping on 4HM on our 15th or so kill for some 5 odd hours after introducing 4-5 new people to the encounter. This was not my idea of fun. People burnt out, raids got worse, and we had to re-progress people every week.

Are the bosses easier now? Sure. Isn't the game a whole hell of a lot funner though?