The IGN preview seems interesting, it appears to indicate that Blizzard is focusing on making the actual trash in the instance a bit more interesting and involving more 'boss-like' mechanics as well. Of course, the killer in trash tends to be it's repetition, which is kind of hard to infer from a preview.

They actually aren't. Our server progression: 26 full clears of Kara, 28 gruul kills (seems some people killed it BEFORE they fully cleared kara - although that includes netherspite which a lot of people seem to have skipped), 13 mag kills, 8 guilds killed a boss in SSC (5 fully cleared) and 11 in TK (1 fully cleared).

The issue is that Nightbane/Prince don't have any constituteable enrage timer, and there's not a serious issue of "click freeze" that happens on Mag. If they were to reduce it to a single cube in the middle that anyone could click with no debuff timers the difficulty of Mag would be considerably less, aswell as changing it so that he releases after 5 adds die rather than a static 2 minutes. This means that these mechanics are "new". I still don't see how gruul is harder than Maulgar with the changes to Shatter - the only issue now is the enrage timer which (understandably) a lot of guilds have a problem with.

If you look at the WWS thread, the way some players play is pretty shocking really. I hate to say "l2p and you'll kill him" but in some cases it is that simple. There's a guild on our server which some of our guild have alts in, and on one of their karazhan runs a shadow priest (the guild leader no less) wasn't using VT. When asked why, he said because it wasn't worth the prohibitive mana cost. Simple things like understanding exactly why VT is good to use, knowing that fireball > scorch once you have the scorch debuffs up (and only needing to use scorch once per ~7 fireballs to keep the debuff running) and simple mechanics like this seem to up the RDPS considerably and means that instead of people complaining the MT doesn't have the gear and that they need to farm Kara some more, they suddenly do have the gear because they don't have to tank a 15 growth Gruul and risk getting one-shot.


Anyway, that's a bit of a derail. Zul'aman certainly looks interesting from the previews. I think it may be finished well before you think Ghorthor - it sounds like everything is in bar animations. It may be that Blizz used the excuse to not show off the other 2 bosses so they definitely have something to show at Blizzcon/trailer movies.

Both Gruul and Mag require a lot more execution than any fight in Kara (maybe bar netherspite). You are also required to bring a very nice balanced 25man raid to them.

A 25man Kara would be something which guilds could do with much less rigid setups, and prepare themsevles for Gruul and Mag. Every week on my server multiple guilds either die due to never getting past Kara (recruitment = attrition) or they merge with other guilds to try and get the balanced numbers.

A 20man Kara might make more sense then. I am sure the people stating this is pointless have never been in this situation, so let me elaborate for you.

My old guild, Loyalty, was the 4th guild server wide to take down the curator. We still struggled to recruit healers though due to them either"sticking with their mates" or the larger guilds just mass recruiting them. After some time we often had 20 players online with maybe 5 healers among them. We once had 24 online, still only 5 healers. We tried Gruul but Maulgar was just too taxing for our 5 healers and it rapidly became pointless. So after weeks of farming Kara with a single group (We tried two groups but we ended up meaning we couldn't even clear Kara with 1 group due to lacking numbers and people being locked out from the other folks Kara) we finally got a break and managed to recruit a few extra healers. Just as we did one of our main healers server transferred due to the lack of progress we were making. From then on for every person we recruited, we lost someone else. We in the end just disbanded because there was simply no way out for us.

Now add a 20man Kara like instance and every guild in this situation has something to aim for that is easier tor each than the 25man SSC/Gruul/Mag raids. A lot of people already forgot how the 40man raid guilds fragmented, unfortunately too many fragmented into too small groups. MANY guilds on my server suffer from this. All of my friends on the server (except those in the top 3 guilds) seem to be changing their guild tag every 2-3months. Usually due to their guild merging thanks to lack of raiders.

Basically you start raiding with 10 people, and you need to add another 15 active raiders who will not be able to raid much until you get 25, or 2 balanced groups of 10. Add in an extra 20 or 15man instance and you can make the jump a lot easier.

p.s. my new guild does not have this problem, we merged =). Hopefully a new 10man instance will be a fix. That way you split your uneven groups into two seperate raid instances, and if necessary, one night your Kara raid borrows a healer from the Zul raid group so they can down prince and nightbane, on the other night the Zul group borrows a few rogues from the Kara raid etc. Currently, unless you can field 20 active raiders into two balanced groups, you risk locking yourswelf out of Kara and not even being able to take a farm boss down because a single priest got a new girlfriend and took her out leaving you with 2 healers on a fight where you need 3, and no option tob orrow from the other raid group as they have their own instance id.

These problems you describe are problems with guild/raid leadership, I cant comment on anyones leadership but our guild is made up of players that were in one of those 40 man guilds that went through 100+ members in the run upto tbc, in tbc with some solid leadership we flourished.

Now why should new content be a step backwards? Losing members due to lack of progression isnt blizzards fault its something wrong with the guild as every single 'no attunement' instance has atleast one encounter that is possible for guilds who have karazhan down.

Anyway, heres hoping the new 10man is atleast a step forward when it comes to complexity (by the sounds it is) so people can stop blaiming group size on thier lack of success.

This is a key problem for many guilds. I left my recent guild because there was no sign for any more improvements. Together with a core of 5 people we tried every single option to built a viable 25 roster. We tried to pull the slackers through Karazhan and lost people there. We tried to partner with another guild and it did not work out. We even tried to grab anyone who wanted to raid hoping the player was geared enough. Nothing worked. 2 Month wiping to Gruul. As part of the leadership of those raids we gave up, i gave up.

You get people with PvP specs showing up. You get people with totally undergeared off-specs. People showing up minutes before the raid changing talents, you have to work with feral tanks only, with gazillions of holy priests and so on.

I went unguilded with a another guild into SSC, one of only 3 SSC alliance guilds of this server. It is just another world. A pretty solid class setup, with people being properly geared and speced with knowledge about game mechanics and encounters for every single member of the raid. We brought down Morogrim to 24% in the first four tries those people ever experienced and called it a night.

It's not only too demanding encounters or too sensible setups. It's everything coming together wich makes it hard to succeed for the majority of guilds trying to enter the raid game of this expansion.

No its not guild or raid leadership.

Its a matter of server make-up. I was in a successful 40man raid guild. TBC is released. People see we need to downsize 15 people. The leadership NEVER had any intention of removing people, but folks got scared. Some joined friends guilds others decided to join brand new guilds.

In the end this guild died due to too many people leaving to play alts, got bored with WoW etc etc. I joined a friends start-up TBC guild. Leadership was superb, raids were great. We all had done Naxx to at least see K'T. We all had great experience, but were too few. But it was just impossible to recruit the numbers we needed. Nothing to do with raids, leadership or lack of effort (our GM spent HOURS in org trying to get people willing to raid, we had NO gear requirements. We can change your gear, but not the ffort you put in to playing). We simply could not combat attrition. People got bored of Kara. People got bored of not even getting to SEE kara. We formed 2 groups and it was fatal. A priests topped playing, and one kara group couldn't raid as the other priests were in the other Kara. Then their MT found a new woman, and he stopped playing. 3 people left, we recruited 1.

Before you comment and state this isn't happening understand that 1) maybe your server is somehow exempt from this, I agree that could happen even if its unlikely. or 2) Maybe you are already in in SSC or TK and got there easily, in which case congratulations. But that does not mean this is a non issue.

And your progression is not stunted. If we could have replicated outselves 3 times each we would be easily up there with the top guilds server wide. Sadly, we had to recrited from what was left, and a LOT of new guilds sprung up just to do Kara, and not care about much more (at least when created). The pool of unguilded playerswho are skilled is miniscule on my server. My current guild is merging.

It is a very very real issue for small guilds to make the jump from 10 to 25man raiding instance. Just take the time to see it from their perspective.

Lots of people are comparing it with Karazhan but it seems to me that it will be the next step up from the existing Heroic dungeons rather than something inserted directly into a raiding guild's lineup.

And along those lines, I wonder why Blizz doesn't offer a heroic mode for this as well, so it could cater to those farther along in WoW raiding (and better geared) as well as those farther back without having to dumb it down or keep it too hard and out of the hands of most players.

That's taken directly from our realm-forum progression thread as WoWjutsu hasn't finished parsing the EU realms yet. We have one BT guild (us - everything cleared) and 2-3 now on Kael with Vashj down, with the majority of guilds after that having killed VR/Gruul/Mag and not much else.

Pre-TBC we had one alliance guild to Saph, one alliance and one horde guild to Gothik (us - limited by people who left (link to list)) and then 2-3 guilds which had 2-3 bosses down in Naxx, 1 guild with a C'thun kill other than those on 4+ naxx bosses.

The majority of guilds in TBC are re-hashes of guilds from pre-TBC, but there are a few that are mergers of the better people from those with BWL down/3 AQ down or similar. There are certainly more guilds raiding now than pre-TBC anyway.

It's interesting you mention the lock-out timer though, as I hadn't even considered that. Onyxia was on a 5 day (and still is i assume), ZG and AQ20 on 3 day timers. Everything in TBC is 7 day or 1 day (heroics). A 10 man instance with 6 bosses with a 3 day lockout would provide more bosses in a week period than Kara currently does, which is quite nice.

I believe that it's important not to conflate Maulgar and Gruul; the fights are amazingly different in difficulty in their current incarnations.

To use my (very casual) guild as an example, we downed Maulgar on April 2nd, Aran April 6th, Prince April 13th, Illhoof May 5th, Nightbane May 25th, Netherspite June 1st, and Gruul on July 2nd. Yes, we downed Maulgar (easily, on our first night of attempts) before Aran, and then spent three months stuck on Gruul. Yeah, that was kinda depressing.

We might be an extreme case, but I still think that overall, Maulgar is, frankly, easy. No enrage timer or instawipe ability (hi Mag!) means there's little emphasis on execution. DPS warrior tanking the priest? No problem. DPS warrior dying to the priest? Just evasion tank him. Shadow priest healing the shaman tanks? That works. Half your rogues dying to whirlwind? No biggie. One good MT, a decent OT, and enough healers stacked on the tanks = win.

Gruul also isn't hard - really no harder than Nightbane or Prince, in my view - but he requires 25 solid people. My guild has been running 2 Karazhan raids for a while, and has a hard core of perhaps 15-20 dedicated raiders - but versus Gruul, having 5 DPS slots filled with casuals can be death for a guild trying to learn the fight. So yes, I'd say the biggest problem for guilds trying to progress past Karazhan isn't the difficulty, but the 25 man cap. We could have fielded a 10 man raid with the gear and skill to down a 10-man version of Gruul fairly easily a while ago. We could probably have fielded TWO 10 man raids. A 25 man raid took longer.

More generally, I don't think there's any need for an easier 25 man raid. Maulgar is already extremely easy, and Gruul himself really isn't that hard, nor does he need some weird class configuration. What he does need is 25 solid raiders. On our second Gruul kill, we had two DPS classes doing under 400 DPS. A couple weeks before that we had 5 people doing under 400 DPS, and couldn't down Gruul. So, no, I don't don't see people getting stuck on Gruul being a difficulty issue, it's a "unable to field 25 solid players" issue.

Raid progression theories aside, its clear from the previews what Blizzards intentions are - Zul'Aman is a casual dungeon intended to be cleared in 1 nite, slightly above Karazhan in difficulty and itemization, and with parameters for high replayability (escorts, difficulty permutations, etc). Its not going to suddenly change into a 25 man zone nor will they add more than the 6 listed bosses, so arguing or hoping for those things does not seem productive.

I do hope they put it on a 3 day lockout timer, with a 1 day clear and lore-ties to ZG that would hopefully make sense.

Zul'Aman and something I think called the Sun Temple were both originally intended for release in TBC. Zul'Aman will be released 9-10 months later, and I assume fits the original design intent (Karazhan stepping stone). I wonder what their next instance is, assuming there is even going to be one before the next expansion, and whether it'll be 5, 10, or 25 man.

If current trends continue the instance will be identical to ZG just recolored.

I wonder if they put ZA on a quite ridiculous 7 day timer like Kara.

Also I think 10 mans are mistake. All raids should be same size because 10 mans are currently considered as "lesser" raids with no dkp involved etc. On the other side there is not a lot 25 man content, 1 day can be Gruul + Mag + Lootreaver, 2 day SSC up to Leo/Vash and then just wipefest for rest of week which cause problems with rotations as you want same squad for wiping days. So people get unhappy as often some raid 1-2 days a week because of that while other raid 3-4 (yes mostly wipes but still better than idling in Shatt).

I for one had a love/hate relationship with ZG, and I hope this instance takes what I loved about ZG and throws out what I hated.

I did ZG (probably like the vast majority of you) right when it came out. What really sucked about the place was the amount of trash, and the rep you got from it - it was paltry. I LOVED (and still do) the ambience of the place, I can even picture it in my mind's eye right now. With all your graphical settings turned up, it's one of the most beautiful places in WoW, along with DM West (soft, hazy edges on everything), Feralas, and Alterac Mountains (the Uplands specifically). But it was just the trash, all that trash.

They really stepped it up in AQ20, which to me makes it a much better instance - the trash is minimal, and while some of it was brutal (Obsidians before Ossirian, the scorpion area that everyone quickly learned to go around, the bugs near the front that could nearly 1 shot a caster in lvl 60 gear, etc.), at least there wasn't much of it to speak of. And the bosses were I think more interesting on the whole. I loved Moam - because it placed the burden on the DPS to get the job done, not the tanks. And of course there is no fight like Ossirian anywhere.

ZG was just really marred for me in my experience because we hit it RIGHT when it came out when trash stopped giving rep after halfway through Friendly, the shoulder enchants were pretty taxing to get (although still preferable to when it went to Idols imho), it was brutal to get to Exalted, the drop rate for Coins/Bijous was laughable (in the first iteration, they were 1/3 to 1/4 as likely to drop as now), and the sets weren't updated yet (and Jin'Do was actually pretty hard back then - very unforgiving).

I look forward to a Troll instance again (I don't mind how many there are) and the Gamespy photos especially have me hoping that it will be a more "sunny" locale like ZG as opposed to the rest of the Ghostlands, which had me apprehensive from the beginning.

I do second what someone said earlier - it's going to be really silly for Alliance to get there without a teleporter or some-such. Eversong Woods / Ghostlands is a separate instance. It's "trivial" for Horde to get there with a port to Silvermoon, but the typical Alliance would have to port to IF, fly to EPL, ride up through the "instance portal", and then you're there. If it's going to be that way, expect more hearths to be set at LHC - again.

I think everyone (including Blizzard, they did reduce it after all) agrees that the amount of trash in ZG was over the top when it first came out. I think Blizzard learned some from it - AQ20 trash as you say was much better - and I haven't yet personally seen any really bad trash in SSC or TK (though I of course never saw any of the early broken stuff).

Karazhan is a little too long and some areas I think could use a slight trimming when it comes to trash, but it sounds like Zul'Aman is meant to be faster which hopefully also (*crossing fingers and praying and all that*) means less trash.

Reading the previews, I find myself excited by ZA. We never made it to Naxx before TBC came out, so the best times I had raiding were in ZG and AQ20 (AQ to a lesser extent - fun boss fights, but some of the trash was extremely annoying). I have no serious worries about it being ZG2 - yes, it has trolls, yes the trolls worship primal gods, etc., but these are things we were already pretty familiar with. ZG was excellent enough that Blizzard could stand to do a lot worse than to emulate that formula.

I really like the attention to immersive details - the troll alarms, for instance. This is a troll city/fortress, being used to launch raids against Silvermoon and the surrounding territories. It'll be nice to come in and NOT see a bunch of trolls just standing around chatting in little groups (I mean, we will undoubtedly see that anyway, but ...). If it can capture a feeling of invasion and assault, I think that will be a majorly fun aspect to the instance.

If I have a concern, it's that I am hoping they do something interesting with Zul'jin. I can imagine him not being very happy with the Horde - after the Second War, the Forest Trolls were kinda left high and dry, and now the Horde is helping the Blood Elves reclaim the same contested lands that the Alliance helped the High Elves drive them out of. All the same, it'd be nice to have some feel for why he's a priority target for both factions - major troll invasion world event? :oP

Also - as a Druid, I MUST HAVE a Bear Mount.

#Possible Spoiler#

From what I'm gathering from various articles, Zul'jin will basically use the powers of the primal gods that the 4 aspects had to shift form, dramatically altering how you fight him depending on his current form.

Not much of a spoiler if both articles mention it. Just hope it's more along the lines of ZG and not AQ20.

10 mans are not a mistake. Some people don't view 10 mans as "lesser" raids, don't like dkp, and prefer their small guilds with friends or coworkers. That crowd is a much larger number than people in 25 man guilds currently in SSC/TK and beyond. Blizz makes a lot of 25 man content for the raiders, a small percentage of their playing population. I think I counted 29 bosses including the 2 world bosses. According to wowjutsu, there's only 2 guilds in the US done with those 29. You say that you feel there isn't enough 25 man content, but it seems like most of the country hasn't finished it. People that spend a day or 2 wiping just aren't executing (or don't have the gear, though I suspect that's not really the issue for a guild on Vashj). Adding more content for them to wipe on, or easier content for them to farm, isn't really going to solve anything.

Hence the use of the word 'possible'. It was more for people who didn't read the article and were just browsing this thread :P

(Moved this from the speculation thread as this is a more appropriate place, sorry for cross-thread quoting)

I can understand them putting "worse" in the game.

At the moment there is a massive *massive* jump from the 5 man content to Karazhan in difficulty. There's nothing like the UBRS of the old level 60 capped WoW. I really enjoyed doing UBRS runs with my alts. Most of it was accessible to green geared players and even with well geared players the last few pulls and Drakisath required good coordination of a few key individuals, and blue or better gear of the majority.

There's nothing equivalent to that "get yourself a PuG and have a decent 10 man raid for a couple of hours" in TBC. I personally think it's a huge hole in the TBC content.

Bear in mind that ZG was only barely accessible to PuGs, and it was only towards the end of the 60 cap era that PuGs were really viable in it. The old world had roughly this level of progression:

* BRD
* Dire Maul
* LBRS
* Strat
* UBRS <----
* ZG
* AQ20
* MC
* BWL
* AQ40
* Naxx

At the moment there's nothing that fills that UBRS slot. There are heroics, granted, but that's 5 man. There's no "easy" 10 man raid in TBC, and I really miss that. UBRS could be tackled with a few pre-60s. I doubt you could do that with Karazhan, and certainly not in Heroics.

Quite frankly I'd be a little disappointed if it were ZG equivalent difficulty because that was totally inaccessible to casual players. Finding 14 other casuals who didn't sucks was rare. It was also relatively pointless for non-casuals as they could farm harder instances with better drops. It was pretty much somewhere you went with guild mates on alts in the end, or for totally hardcore raiders with too much spare time to farm rep with to get a single shoulder enchant.

Well one of the previews there was saying that the loot was better than Kara and was the next progression to it. So if that report is true than the ZA loot is better than Kara loot. I guess an instance doesn't have to be harder than another instance to have better loot. ZG certainly isn't harder than MC, but for some classes the class sets and drops there were a bit better.

When you say 5 man content do you just mean from the normal level 70 instances or are you including heroics as well?

If you aren't including heroics then there's the stepping stone between the two levels of content and if you were including heroics then I just don't see how you can call it a big jump to karazhan.