So for many people now TBC is "Game Over" in a PvE sense - for now. This is to discuss the thoughts and ideas that went into TBC up to now, how people have reacted to it and what Blizzard did right and wrong with the PvE raiding, itemisation and class balance.

Disclaimer: The majority of things I'm writing in this post are from memory rather than looked up. If there are significant disparities between what actually happened and the events I've outlined, point them out and I'll correct them pretty sharpish. There is also likely to be a fair amount of opinionated comments in here, which I'll try and keep to a minimum.

A Brief History of Raid Instances
To break it down a bit more, in TBC raiding consists of:

Karazhan - 10 man instance, entry level, requires small attunement quest involving level 70 instances. No serious rebalancing done post-release, apart from numerous changes to Nightbane.

Gruuls Lair - 25 man instance, entry level, no attunement. Serious rebalance carried out early on.

Magtheridons Lair - 25 man instance, entry level, no attunement. Serious rebalance carried out early on.

Serpentshrine Cavern - 25 man instance, first "full" raid instance, previously had an attunement involving Gruul and Karazhan, now no attunement. Serious rebalance carried out prior to 2.1 patch.

Tempest Keep: The Eye - 25 man instance, previously had what was considered the hardest attunement (heroics -> magtheridon). Serious rebalance carried out in 2.1.

Mount Hyjal: Hyjal Summit - 25 man instance, attunement involving Vashj and Kael kills.

Black Temple - 25 man instance, attunement involving Shadwomoon Valley, the Arcatraz, The Eye, and Mount Hyjal.

Outdoor bosses fit in somewhere around entry level, but aren't really counted due to the 40+ man "zerg" factor inherent in outdoor encounters.

Post Release
Post release, the game could basically be broken down to Karazhan for everyone, 25 mans for the "hardcore". Gruul was in a state which most people described as a follow on from where Naxx left off (although significantly bugged causing a lot of people to kill him regardless), and was a very hard boss to kill. Magtheridon was basically in the same situation, and even less people were able to kill Magtheridon, who took a massive amount of raid co-ordination to kill, possibly even more so than Gruul.

If people did manage to progress past these two "entry level" bosses, they could look forward to SSC and TK, both of which had trash on 45 minute respawn timers with bosses at the beginning which were just as hard if not worse than those entry level bosses they just killed. Many struggled and guilds started falling apart left right and centre with many crying for nerfs to these entry level encounters, which were far harder than they should have been. Whether the reason for them being so hard was developer error, or if there was actually a plan to slow people down by making the instances over-difficult, Blizzard screwed up and a lot of people were very unhappy about it.

The changes
The changes started flowing in about two months after the first Gruul kills, with originally a change to Shatter which trivialised the encounter in the eyes of the hardcore, but made it truly an entry level boss, and shortly after a change to Magtheridon came in which opened up both bosses to consideration by the majority of the raiding playerbase.

Shortly after these changes were implemented, more calls for changes to SSC started coming in. Those who had been dealing with the trash in both TK and SSC admitted that it was significantly harder than it should have been, and an infamous quote from Tigole naming trash as "Equally interesting but non-epic-dropping non-bosses" didn't really do anything to alleviate the situation. The respawn timer finally was changed from 0.75/1 hour up to 2 hours and the trash itself was nerfed around the same time with a major reduction in health.

Post 2.1 the multitude of changes opened up the "proper" raid instances to many more people, but a lot of people didn't actually seem to be doing them. The fact that SSC and TK both required attunements, TK quite harshly so, was a major deterent, and the attunements for these instances were eventually released, opening up "loot reaver" and other such interesting bosses to a lot more people. With 2.1 came the release of Kael'Thas, Lady Vashj (in a reasonable form), Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.


Raid Instances
Many have expressed concerns about the epic-ness of TBC raid instances. This is due in part to the "smallness" of instances, with SSC and TK being 6 and 4 bosses in length respectively, Gruul and Magtheridon being of the order of Onyxia's Lair and even Hyjal being 5 bosses, with Black Temple being 9; in contrast to this the "epic" Naxxramas spanning 16 bosses in one instance from "vanilla" WoW.

The other major aspect is the scaling down of raids, from 40 man to 25 man. This caused quite a large amount of distress, and an equally large amount of cheering. Many people wanted smaller raids so that they could cut down on the slackers, "loot whores" they only had to have in to fill raids, and other equally interesting members of the community. Others had to suddenly deal with having had a raid base of 40 to build a guild around, suddenly having the actual raid cut to almost half the size with implications on who they could keep and the importance of each individual in the raid. With the first raid instance many stepped into being 10 man, this caused an even bigger heap of problems, from having to have separate sets of people for each instance and then trying to bring together people who had been instancing separately for some time into a cohesive team to face the original "entry level" bosses (untuned Gruul and Mag).

The difficulty of TBC raids has been a concern for many, with some pronouncing it much too hard in all aspects and some pronouncing that although the nerfs to the original encounters were needed, they're actually harder and a better test of players than the current end game encounters. Raid difficulty in TBC is very strange, and many would say (including me) that Kael'Thas is probably the hardest encounter in the game right now when you take into account where it is in progression terms. It's an epic fight and one that is a struggle to beat regardless of gear situation. Once you kill Kael, there are a number of encounters which feel distinctly worse in every way - most of Hyjal feels pretty easy in terms of actual difficulty, with randomness counting for a lot in Archimonde giving him an "artificial" difficulty level causing wipes regardless of how well everyone is playing at the time. The first few encounters in Black Temple feel quite bad in terms of straight up encounter design in the face of Kael too, with Najentus, Supremus and Akama all distinctly below where they "should" be in terms of progression compared to Kael. The middle of Black Temple is where raiding in TBC picks back up from the end of SSC/TK, and Bloodboil and Reliquary of Souls both feel like they're a significant challenge rather than the "lol i had pet bars hidden, whoops" difficulty of Teron.

The Good
The whole design of Black Temple is very cool, from entering through a sewer passageway having just helped Akama and Maeiv into the stronghold all the way through to walking on to the top platform and encountering the demon-warped form of Illidan clutching the Skull of Gul'dan. The trash is good, the encounter design is innovative, if lacking actual "difficulty" in places, theres reputation which doesn't requires months of farming to give some reward, and the music really makes it feel like serious business. Hyjal is interesting in character, and gives some serious lore-background-style stuff to the end-game, but lacks significant difficulty from an encounter standpoint.

Black Temple is of a quality to match Naxx, if lacking the exact balance that managed to make Naxx good - although I'm still reserved on Naxx, they basically got 4 chances to check difficulty, and it's only because it was in a 4 wing system that it seemed so well balanced. If the instance had started with Patchwerk, then Anub, Raz, Noth in order, would so many guilds have attained progress? It's certainly something to think about, and I don't like to knock Naxx - in fact it was one of the better aspects. If they were to do away with the "fixed" week cooldown and made more winged instances where even if they did screw up the exact difficulty, it would sort itself out in the long run (which they did sort of do with TK/SSC - there's no designated "kill this first" sign) then it might benefit raiding more.

The Bad
Although I think raiding in TBC is good, and the encounter design is varied and requires some quite different aspects of play, there are some bad encounters.

The first I can think of is actually the one that seems to be a serious progression block to a lot of guilds - Kael'Thas. I know many people will be thinking "WTF, it's an amazing encounter!". Although I like the encounter design in principle, the actual encounter, and the trash leading up to it, is quite brain numbing and draining. Having trash that can instagib you when you aren't paying attention for a second, and can easily wipe the raid without anyone specifically doing anything wrong is pretty demoralising. Having to then sit through 20 minutes of encounter before you find your MT managed to not click the shield at the right time and wipe is quite horrific (and it's even more fun when your Sanguinar tank disconnects when Sanguinar is on 50% in P3, 15 seconds before P4 starts). It's a good, epic encounter, but it doesn't belong where it is in the game right now. If they removed the Kael vial from the Hyjal attunement and had it purely as Vashj, it would be in a much better position (and maybe they'd stick a better ilvl on his loot to encourage people to do the fight). As it is, we've killed it less times than Shahraz now just because it's such a draining fight and people really can't be bothered with it. We've also been lacking time because BT/Hyjal >>> SSC/TK in terms of progression raiding.

The second really dire encounter is Archimonde - an encounter that should be hard for what it is, but made significant because of the amount of things that can go wrong even when you do everything right. The fight requires the utmost amount of concentration from everyone in the raid, and encourages raid stacking of quite a ridiculous amount towards fear-breaking classes/races/whatever. It's a good encounter in principle, but it just takes the whole concept slightly too far in practice.

And the third encounter is the resist fight which everyone loves - Mother Shahraz. If only you could answer with "Pleasure thanks!" when you engage her it would be a much more fun fight. Shadow res is the name of the game, with a distinct aspect of randomness thrown in. Having done the encounter multiple times, there's a limit to how much randomness there is. Again, it's a case of a good encounter in principle, but it's just taken slightly too far. It's another case of Loatheb - no-one really wants to do the fight, but it's got to be done to get past it. Loatheb even had the advantage of "LOL PRETTY NUMBERS, SO MANY PRETTY NUMBERS" but Shahraz just screws over everyone with resistance gear and then piles Prismatic Shield on the casters, and to top it off mana drains too, while having a number of instagib mechanisms all of which proceed to wipe the raid before you actually realise what's causing it and an figure out a solution - some of which you just end up putting up with because it's a low chance in comparison to something else. Combine this with one of the highest tank DPS mechanics, and you get a fight that's a complete bitch.


Itemisation
Post-release itemisation was a bit strange. There were many items that were damned good, and many rare items that were basically irreplaceble even though many other epic items existed for the same slot. Blizzard appeared to have the right idea, without actually having re-evaluated and capitalised on it to make progression in items make sense. When itemisation finally got fixed in the 2.1 patch, many people gained ridiculous stats in the face of what they originally had - rogues with mostly epic equipment gaining 150 AP, 2% hit and 2% crit just from the changes were pretty common, with other classes experiencing similar gains.

This is not to say there weren't, and still aren't, anomalies in the itemisation system - spellfire and, especially, frozen shadoweave are two major examples, with people using both all the way through to killing Illidan in many cases. Blizzard seem to have realised this much too late, with a nerf proposed and then taken back after the outcry from many players. Lack of caster weapons from PvE is another issue, with large numbers of 2h melee weapons all over the place just to annoy them.

Regardless of this, itemisation is better now than it ever was pre-TBC. Tier 3 really started to take hold of itemisation and push for the stats that were actually optimal for classes rather than sticking a load of agility onto a leather item, and then stuffing some other random crap on it and passing it off as a rogue set (like dodge on bloodfang, for example). This really annoyed those people who were members of the "minority groups" of their class - the "offspecs". Those who didn't play as the majority specs (non-holy priests, non-resto druids, etc) were left out almost entirely in Naxx, and definitely had the short end of the stick before that point. All hybrids can now retrieve tier sets specialised (in some cases better than others) towards their specs, although there is still a lack of specifically itemised items for some specs in particular, with enhancement shamans using rogue and hunter gear in places, feral druids using rogue gear, and elemental and moonkin druids looking at cloth items for some gear slots.

Classes and Specs
Following on from itemisation, classes and specs were revamped with the coming of TBC and opened up many different avenues for classes and specs which were neglected pre-TBC. Hybrid classes have probably seen the largest surge in numbers, with people now playing enhancement and elemental shamans alongside resto, feral druids and (less common) moonkin druids alongside resto, and shadow priests along with holy. Paladins seem to have been left out slightly, with both protection and retribution staying as minority specs in end-game, and moonkin druids have suffered a similar situation (although I feel that's partly because of the stigma attached from pre-TBC and the fact it's still a fluffball).

Classes feel better balanced, although some have maybe been left out slightly in terms of performance, and WWS has been an invaluable tool in working out what specs work, what don't, and how to optimise player performance even more than it has been previously. I'm pretty sure that it's possible, if slightly sub-optimal, to run a raid with one of every spec (minus two non-tank/non-healers because of size limit) and still "beat the game". Some offspecs are much better received recently, with Feral Druids, Shadow Priests and Enhancement/Elemental Shamans being staple parts of most raids.


Conclusion
The upshot of all of this is that the game is in a PvE sense, completely different in nature from "vanilla" WoW. Raid sizes have changed, attitudes are different and itemisation is a whole heap better than it used to be. There has been a significant cost to the community in terms of attrition due to PvP finally getting a decent system and the difficulty of TBC release content, but Blizzard have ended up with a game that is better in all aspects than the original.

Blizzard have certainly got a few things right - consumable changes were spot on, attunements were good in principle but maybe slightly over the level of difficulty that should have been required post-nerf, and the raid instance tuning, which many said should have been right in the first place after how good Naxx was, was definitely a good point too.

The post-2.1 game is how TBC should have been released, but that isn't to say there aren't still improvements. Better progression setups (Kael being harder than many bosses after isn't right), more spot on itemisation (frozen shadoweave, off-spec stuff), and some class reviews are needed to add more polish to the game, along with the raid developers actually thinking about encounters and not coming up with things similar to those I listed above.

Hopefully Blizzcon will shed light on some of the things that are coming up, either in terms of a new expansion or major content releases. I can only say that regardless of what they do with the game, the last 2 years has been quite a lot of fun.

One thing in my opinion that people overlook and you touched on a little is how the dungeons seem small. Saying that SSC with 6 mobs and TK with 4 make them small is sort of silly. Combined they offer T5 loot and relatively similar difficulty and combined they are 10 bosses, which is a good bit of raiding. I don't remember how many bosses were in AQ40 but I'm sure it was pretty close to that many. Same deal with Hyjal + BT, 5 bosses and 9 bosses which ends up being pretty close to the same number in Naxx.

So anyways, I think people write off the "epicness" of the raiding scene just because Bliz split it into different zones. Speaking as a player that's in a guild still progressing in SSC / TK I'm pretty happy with raiding so far, though I don't think anyone would argue that the original design wasn't well thought out with 45 minute trash and horribly unbalanced bosses.

My only hope is that Blizzard has learned a lot from this expansion and the next one will have this stuff fixed before the release. If not you can expect to hear a huge outcry from raiders.

Agree with alot of what you have posted, but I do not agree with the Kael stuff. He is a different kind of fight and saying that the monsters after him should be harder isn't neccessarily true. They are different kinds of encounters. Kael is the ruler of the blood elves, vs some high warlord naga or some random ice fire golem of doom? The situations you described of wiping is bad play and bad connections.

Kael is by far the most rewarding kill in TBC that I have seen, so far up to RoS.

Archimonde kill was like "meh, I hope we never come back here" or "Christ we have to repeat this again next week? damn".

They are different fights, and while I agree that the trash before KT sucks, he is fine for what he is.

The raid instances are a bit on the small side compared to pre-TBC raids in some cases, but I don't see that as a problem in the scheme of things. Raiding is a performance-centric scenario, where the challenge and attraction should revolve around your team's ability to execute. I would consider the relatively restrictive, linear nature of *every* TBC 5-man to be a more significant issue. This is the only opportunity that WoW really has to include the group-based adventuring aspect that traditionally has been a selling point of multiplayer RPG's, and in that regard, there's basically no exploration at all to be done in TBC, just rails to travel along.

It's my feeling that raiding should be predominantly be about getting the bosses down, whereas a much larger proportion of 5-man instances should be about laying down the atmosphere.

It's not so much that the entry-level bosses for Hyjal/BT should be harder, but that KT shouldn't be a gatekeeper cockblock for them. E-peens and the "we did it when it was hard so you should have to too" mentality aside, I think raiding progression would make a lot more sense and be better as a whole if you just had to kill Vashj/Al'ar to get into Hyjal and BT, and just make KT's loot good enough that he's worth the trouble.

The biggest thing they could do for raiding right now would to be to fix the class tokens.

While a great idea, the T4 and T5 tokens have the wrong class balances on them (Warrior, Druid, Priest... way to put half the raid on one token >_<) They really ought to go back and switch the T4 and T5 tokens to the class requirements on the T6 tokens.

Also, I really wish blizzard would quit it with the tiny hallways. I play with a horde raiding community with 3 Tauren tanks (as well as numerous other Tauren) and it makes doing anything really hard without deviate delights. Places that come to mind would be the pre-opera house trash hallway and the first 2 or 3 pulls in TK. While they're certainly doable, it makes for some frustrating camera angles and annoying pulls.

One thing they did backwards was to release BT before ZA. While I understand the idea was to cater to guilds like Nihilium and others who were blowing through content, a very small percentage of the player base is even attuned for them, let alone downing Illidan. The smart move would have been to introduce Zul'Aman first as to allow for an easier transition into 25 mans (having 2 10 man raids to gear up in would have made it much easier for my raiding group, that's for sure).

As far as size goes, I'm all for the smaller zones. Personally, I'd rather multiple low boss count instances with interesting mechanics, than suffer through the same 2 or 3 strategies over and over again.

What they really need to start doing is applying everything they've learned from both pre-tbc raiding and tbc raiding as a whole. They need to take the ZA/Naxx 'choose your path' style raiding and mix it with the interesting strategies of Gruul/Mag/etc. and top it off with the 'importance' factor that BT has. Quite frankly they need to just diversify the end-game more. They need to take what they have now and call it their 'core' and then offshoot stuff from it (like they did with ZG/AQ20/AQ40). They need to put out equal level instances (both in difficulty and loot) but without the boring linear progression and get back to the unique 'fun' bosses and items that made ZG and the AQs so fun in the first place.

Think it is fine when the first bt bosses are easier than kt but kt should drop better loot then.
Also some items in bt are just useless, all the non set items are not needed. Better give more weapons/trinkets/rings/necks etc. I am a priest and still using shard of scale/reju gem with ros down. Some things are just a minor upgrade or they dont drop

I really enjoyed SSC/TK, sadly we haven't ventured inside in 2 weeks, and even before then only did to attune someone.

I'll definitely chip in more later (next posts topics: Epicness of fights and learning involved), but the big thing for me, as a tank, is I just don't find the TBC encounters nearly as involved or challenging as those in Naxx (and even some before) In my opinion most fights come down to a simple "do this and you win, mess up and you lose" fight where there's very little thinking on your feet, very little reacting, and very little to do outside of not screwing up something that's easy.

The flip side is that TBC is much less forgiving, if you miss a Shear on Illidan you're probably going to wipe versus if you get slapped by C'thun's dark glare you can get rezzed and go back to the fiht.

I'm not positive what's causing it, but most fights in TBC to me seem very technical, you hit a certain button at the right time and the mob falls over, you miss the button, you fall over. Personally I'm thinking it's the low level of mobility that's required from the tank in most fights, but that still requires some justification about "oh well that movement is minimal" about TBC fights.

But really in the end from a tanking perspective, everything in TBC feels... easier I guess. Maybe I've gotten better, but I wouldn't dream of watching cartoons on winamp while playing in windowed mode during Naxx, but I've done it for every fight in Hyjal except Azgalor (and that's only cause I don't want to have 4fps and not notice I'm at low hp with a ROF on me) and 4 fights in BT (Naj'entus, Supremus, Gorefiend, Mother Shahraz) Even reliquary, Azgalor, Bloodboil, Akama, and Council it's more a concern over low FPS making it hard to react to certain things quick enough than needing to pay that much attention. I suppose Council I would still prefer not to because of reflecting the judgement, and I wouldn't on Illidan because of Shear requiring enough attention as is, but wow, 2 fights total that I'm concerned about paying attention to?

Kael can be made significantly easier and much more accessable to the rest of the game by simply giving a few more seconds here and there on the phases. For example, giving players 30 more seconds on weapons, and 30 more seconds on advisors before phase 4 could make the encounter far less punishing to guilds looking for their first kill. 90% of the difficulty in the kael fight is the transitions. Are you ready to put your dps on kael to kill shock barriers, are you ready to put your dps on phoenix eggs to prevent your raid from getting overhwhelmed. Kael himself, without his advisors, and a clean start into phase 4 with no other distractions, would make him a fairly easy boss. Probably easier than Vashj. (I'm not advocating this, I'm just suggesting that a little more time to make a smoother transition would make kael a far more accessable kill).

Another big thing they really did wrong was all of the luck based encounters. I don't know about other people, but I'm sure as hell sick of doing everything perfectly, and having everyone on the top of their game, only to be wiped by something completely unavoidable.

Kael-

Kael's trash is awful. Six packs of mobs where four of them have an almost death-touch ability just sucks. As for Kael himself, the fight is arguably too complicated. The fight has THIRTEEN different adds all with different abilities, plus the actual boss (who has two different phases). We're working on the fight, and haven't even bothered to explain phase four or phase five yet despite getting comfortably into phase three. I'm not saying the fight itself is too difficult, as we've barely spent two days on him. I am saying that compared to any other encounter in TBC before him and vanilla WoW, Kael is the most complicated boss. Also, phase one is annoying to deal with. It's an "Are you awake" check with the added bonus of being long and boring. On the plus side our rogues have maxed out their ranged weapon skill!


Items-

I think the token system needs to be extended to the three other slots and weapons. There are some really bad itemization holes, such as one cloth DPS wrist in SSC/TK vs three cloth DPS shoulders (one of which is an almost guranteed drop). Tokens don't need to be the best item for that slot, but it would help fill out the holes in rare classes/specs without clogging up the loot tables.

SSC trash pre 2.1 (the, "lol trash is back already?" timer) really jaded me from zone in general. Even still, Vashj, and Leo were very fun fights. I still think the zone can do with half the trash it currently has. They really nailed trash down right with BT, and I enjoy Hyjal for what it's worth. In my opinion, tbc feels like it moved at a much faster pace in terms of progression, than wow vanilla.

That's true, the issue becomes for a tank who knows how to maximize threat, it's become almost mechanical, I watch my rage bar and stop certain attacks in a set cycle if I drop low, that's about it.




Since this thread seems like it will be pretty popular, I'm going to fit out what else I had to say quickly here before it gets lost on page 10.


Fight Complexity/learning required: TBC fights in general to me feel easier to learn, it's entirely possible that the raid is getting better, and we understand things faster, but for the most part, you see an ability once or twice and you know how to deal with it, there's very little room for "hey you know what, we were close, and I just realized if we did this instead it would counteract this mechanic" Part of it is the community ruining every fight by releasing a video at the first opportunity, part of it is that everything is fairly straight forward. Kael and RoS had a few moments I admit that were "hrm now what is the best way to handle this" but mostly a wipe is caused by "Okay someone screwed up, nice job" not "hrm how can we improve this so we don't have that situation.

Unfortunately I do think a good part of this is our experience at the game, but it's annoying when you wipe on a fight for a full day and feel that you took too long on it because it wasn't dead in 4 hours.

To add to this real quick, the change in the perspective of the raiding games makes Shahraz arguably the most difficult boss because you have to play well to live. The reason people hate the fight is that it's so tightly tuned that it's hard, and random, and one death can be a wipe.



Epicness: It's been touched on, but I just feel a lot of stuff is missing on the "Wow, that's impressive" moments, Kael'thas certainly has it when you go "Uhh, he just Pyroblasted me for 4k more HP than I have" and when he blows up the room, Illidan is pretty good for that, Archimonde is okay, but there were more fights in Naxx alone that had that epic feel than in all of TBC. Again, something I can't place my finger on for why, but fighting Nefarian certainly felt more epic to me than Lady Vashj, or any of Hyjal.





There are good parts of TBC, and I think Dukes touched on a lot of them, but the raid game to me feels lacking in comparison to what I got used to, with end bosses that made you think "Wow, I can't believe we killed that." and fights that you were always learning something new about.

SSC feels akin to the BWL of old, with the exception of the final boss being a tard harder than Nef, you dont need any significant setup where hybrids cant atleast step in. Its a raid zone that can easily be done with 50-75% focus most of the time once you have it on 'farm'.

TK has the potential to be really quick but lack of focus will wipe you, more-so on trash than not, and the pre-Kael trash is horrible. We ceremonially wipe to it each week on the first pull, or atleast have a train of corpse runners getting back into the fight, sometimes I'ld consider the first pull on par with P2/P3 if you happen to get the patrol too...

Hyjal needs to be re-worked in some way, its a fundamental concept thats flawed with the zone which needs to be addressed, even making it so you need to start the boss with a dialog on Jania/Thrall will help notably imo. I'll for-go passing judgement on Archimonde here.

BT for the most part is really cool however the fact you need to change your raid group for every other boss is somewhat annoying.

I had a friend over watching me play when we killed Illidan, Gruul, and did a full Hyjal kill. It was pretty telling that in Hyjal he made the comment "So you just stand there and DPS?" This was up to Azgalor so obviously it was a bit different for Archimonde but still. Hyjal bosses are largely tank and spank with just a few minor wrinkles thrown in.

This leads to my question though -- just how DO you challenge a raid today? Remember how when everyone experienced C'thun they were blown away by the complexity and challenge and how it was fun at the same time? It's because you simply hadn't seen anything like it before. These days, we've pretty much seen it all. It's really, really hard to come up with something innovative and new that would challenge us. At some point in the past, we've seen it or something fairly similiar to it, and we're a lot smarter than we were back then too. That's why Illidan is pretty much free loot after you've experienced all the phases -- you've seen it all before in the past. Leotheras, anyone? It still had somewhat of an epic feel to it though, simply because it was Illidan. Illidari Council is a fun technical fight that runs fairly long in length. I think we've seen you before, Twin Emps. It certainly doesn't mean that Council is a bad fight, nor is it too easy per se -- it's just a combination of being similiar to the Twin Emps and by that stage in the game you're obviously very good at raiding.

There's very few curveballs that can be thrown. Shahraz actually would be a challenging fight if they just fixed a few of the outlying issues. FA is wickedly cool -- just give a short grace period at the start. Prismatic shield is fine in forcing your casters to coordinate schools of magic -- just don't make it a liability to bring them in the first place. One shotting tanks from knockback+Saber Lash has to go.

Finally regarding Kael'Thas, I think he's one of the harder fights, and I think it's one of the most enjoyable. IMHO, an end boss and/or "lore" boss always has the right to be more difficult. That's why I don't think Archimonde is bad at all, although I'm distinctly in the minority when I say I love that fight anyways. Gruul/Mag were exceptions to that rule, since they were basically the introduction to 25 man raiding in TBC. The old Gruul/Mag certainly would be challenging fights today, it was just the height of stupidity to have them be the first raiding encounters in TBC. Hopefully Blizzard has learned a lot from this. Keep in mind they'd never released this much raiding content at the same time. It was always one zone at a time pre-TBC.

I really don't have a problem with the fights that require precise timing and execution and would like to see encounters in general be harder. The thing I don't like is having more and more fights be a "retard check". One per tier of dungeons is more than enough for my taste. Why couldn't they have made Teron Gorefiend place Shadow of Death on the raid member furthest from him, so that players could choose who gets it, then just make the ghost control more difficult (more abilities you have to use, more mob hp, weaker snare, whatever) or reduce the cooldown on Shadow of Death until difficulty is right. I am a fan of encounters that have a few (5-15) hard jobs where you get to pick who performs the task. I loved doing Razuvius mind controls and Razorgore orb controlling. Vashj is pretty good as well with elemental killing, strider kiter, tainted throwing. I wouldn't want things to go so far that you could beat everything with 10 outstanding players and 15 terrible "filler" raiders, but having every encounter demand 100% from 100% of the raid is too much, and that's direction things seem to be heading sometimes.

Epicness: The one and only fight in TBC that had an "epic" feel was killing pre-nerf'd Al'ar. Something about being world buffed out the ass brings back the feelings of doing Loatheb -> KT and knowing there is SO much on the line if you wipe, it was truly epic when he flopped over and watching our druids literally tank 20 birds each as the raid proceeded to wipe. I'd say killing the original Gruul was also a huge achievement, I think that was the fight we spent the most time on of anything in TBC.

Getting Warcheif's Blessing (lol):

Axl, that's precisely my problem with Hyjal, essentially the train of thought is "The bosses are easy because the trash sucks." After that, why do you want to play it?

Snowy, you're posting exactly what I think the problem is, the biggest problem now comes from stupid stuff like unstable connections (hi2u can't stop Shear/chain die to FA) or just someone zoning out, not to figuring out how something works. If Blizzard can continue to make me have to figure out new things, I'll be glad to keep raiding hardcore for a long time to come, but the question is can they do that? Or do we now understand the game so well that we'd just plow through everthing super fast.

To be honest, I think the only way to keep the challenge up is to introduce something new that people have never seen before, and that may require completely new mechanics, and things that would never be expected. (just as an example, though not a good one because it probably wouldn't be fun, but the concept of things this outlandish, imagine a fight where certain abilities reacted differently to the boss, sunders reduced your threat, shield bash had a 10x modifier, Eviscerate gave a huge threat drop, but your white damage had huge modifiers) Something like that would take guilds a while to figure out. I really don't think the idea that I just listed would make for a good fight, but something like that that no one has seen before would be fun in my opnion.


Edit: Zerix, I'd definitely agree about some of the pre nerfed bosses, I think with that level of difficulty, but without the stupid stacking/consumables requirements, you'd have pretty solid/epic fights. I liked Gruul 1.0 other than the fact I had to be max buffed to get a raid spot because otherwise the kill was impossible.

Fair points on tier sets, its horrible that the majority of 'varied itemization' is in those slots, with the exception of items in BT which have poor stats and spell haste being the only other option for the non-tier slots.

Take for example the Prince cloak in Kara, I pity Paladins and Shamans who will have to use that untill *maybe* the next raid zone beyond BT.

One odd thing about itemization is that literally every slot that is covered by set pieces has at least one non-set alternative, if not more, whereas in 1.0 it was typically 0 or 1. Karazhan has non-set dps cloth in glove, shoulder, leg, head, and chest slots, plus an extra set of gloves at the t4 level from Magtheridon. The t5 raids have it in glove, shoulder (x2), leg, head, and chest (x2) slots as well. For comparison, BWL had wrist, shoulder, belt (x2), head, and glove (shadow-only). This is conceivably justifiable since cloth dps gear can be put to use by several classes, but oddly enough Karazhan even has 5 pieces of non-set tanking plate as well. I guess it's a good thing though considering how bad many of the tiered sets are, but it just seems odd, further downplaying the already-shrunken tiered raid sets. Not to mention all the off-set items being palette swaps of the raid sets.

One thing that hasn't been commented on is that there is a lot more stress now on the individual's raider ability to keep themselves alive. It used to be that on a lot of fights DPS were challenged from a point of view of giving out maximum damage, or a few DPS had tough tasks about killing targets quickly, but TBC went really really nuts with a lot of raids where everyone is expected to put out a lot of damage and there are a lot of opportunities for dumb DPS to get themselves killed.

I am kinda partial to the model where you can assign people to specific roles and they have to perform that role, so you can put someone intelligent in charge of a role with a lot of responsability, but fights where potentially anyone can wipe the raid or get themselves killed through incompetence are fairly stressing and can lead to a degree of hostility.

More or less everyone can eventually learn to do any of the simple tasks that WoW requires you with a very low error rate, but the amount of repetitions that it takes for different players varies wildly, but that just might be frustration on my side as a raid leader.

One thing that the 25 main raid size emphasis a lot more is raid stacking, there is a lot less flexibility for raid make up now compared to pre-TBC, expecially given the increase in synergic group abilities. I thought I'd enjoy 25 man raiding a lot more than I am I must admit.