25 man chess event, gogogo!

Some of the ideas from 5 man bosses scaled up would be good too - 25 man version of MurMur would be pretty epic in feel I think (although maybe a bit too much like Rag? Not that that's an amazingly bad thing really).

Maybe something where each class gets an epic weapon, but it's of a completely different nature? Priests get a dagger and shield - on use for shield block/heroic strike. Rogues get a staff which fires fireballs, minimum range of 8 yards to stop them doing anything else. Make it so all the abilities are basically instagib if you aren't using those weapons (an aura or something).

I'm sure there are plenty of ideas out there, it's just that no-one's thought of them yet, and a lot were used on 5 man content.

I have to disagree, pre-nerf Gruul took us 3-4 raid nights, meanwhile Kael'thas took us close to 16, it has been the hardest challange to kill/keep the guild together since 4 Horsemen in my opinion.

There are none except Shahraz and MAYBE Archimonde (but the true "you lose, period" scenarios in Archimonde are vanishingly rare). This is the same mentality that leads to R&D threads about Prince Malchezaar being entirely luck-dependant. Unless you're specifically talking about Shahraz, if everyone actually is playing perfectly, you will win every time. What fight(s) are you thinking of?

Regarding Kael, I actually think he's very well-tuned for his progression point, and yes, he's the hardest tier 5 boss, but guilds that have the other 9 bosses down and are working on him are going to kill him. Particularly with strats and videos out there, and practice. It's a very fun fight, and one of the best in TBC. It does have one problem, which occurs elsewhere, and which people have mentioned:

Encounter length combined with a very easy "phase one." A fight can be long to require consistency and endurance. Twin Emps and Illidari Council are examples of this -- you've seen the whole fight 60 seconds in, but you have to keep doing it for another 10 minutes without messing up. This isn't so bad, because you're learning, improving, and practicing right away. If you wipe after 7 minutes you can get back up and pick up effectively where you left off.

On the other hand, many of the more complex fights give you a warm-up period to help get comfortable with the boss's abilities before you deal with more complex versions later on. Vashj, Kael, and Illidan all do this. Vashj is pretty trivial since phase 1 is so short. But with Kael and Illidan, you can understand that the purpose of those phases is to help you learn. Kael would be much harder if your first exposure to the four councillors was having to deal with all four at once. But once you've learned and mastered the simple elements, those introductory phases just offer a delay. There should be some way to skip them. It's like a console game letting you skip past cutscenes before a boss after you've seen them once. The same issue arises in Hyjal, perhaps on a larger scale. Once you've done the trash waves once, you can do them again. Has anyone actually outright wiped to the waves on a fight they've already learned? Maybe you lose someone to shadowbolt gib or whatever, but outright losing and having to reset before reaching the boss? Nah. So it becomes 20 minutes of easy stuff you have to go through to get to the boss, and which you have to repeat if something goes wrong. If your MT d/c's halfway through Azgalor, oh well, there goes 30 minutes of your life.

I like long encounters, and I like the epic feel of them, but there needs to be a better balance drawn between challenging/engaging length and length that just feels like filler once you've done it once.

I don't know. I honestly think that the raid groups of higher-end guilds are better than they used to be. When you're being selective and exclusive, 25-man means less dead weight than 40-man, and more individual responsibility forces players to improve. At the same time, I'm not sure just how much our old memories have been colored by the passage of time. Thinking back, were there really fights that took us days to learn? Few and far between, and many of them were untuned (stuff like untauntable Firemaw). Nefarian did, but that was only because at the start no one had any clue what the victory condition in p1 was. Did we have to survive for a certain period of time, or what? Once we learned "yeah, kill 40," he died after one more day. Twin Emps took us two full days to get the tank transitions down. I'm not going to count C'Thun/Ouro since they were impossible and then died in one day after, but it's hard to say how long they would've taken us if we had seen the tuned versions from the start. In Naxx, the only bosses that took us more than four hours of wipes were Patchwerk, Gothik, 4H, Sapp, and Kel. In TBC, we've taken >4 hours on pre-nerf Gruul (5), Vashj (5), old Solarian (5), Kael (9), RoS (5), Shahraz (8), and Illidan (7). Oh, and I guess pre-nerf Nightbane.

Videos definitely save a ton of time in terms of just wiping to figure out what stuff does. LR's Kael video probably saved us a solid day of wipes on him because once we had p2 and p3 down solidly, we knew in advance what to expect from p4 so we didn't have to go through hours of "wtf killed the tank? holy shit 50k pyro!" and "wtf there's two phoenixes now?" wipes as we learned what abilities did. It's not like the strats to counter those abilities are so complex, or that we wouldn't have figured them out if not for the video, but yeah, videos let me know what to expect so that we don't have to wipe multiple times to even see what the abilities do. That certainly cheapens the process to an extent, but really, it's been the case most of the way through Naxx. The only difference is that in Naxx it was the #4 or #5 guild to land the kill that would release the video. In TBC it's generally been the #1 or #2 guild. For the vast majority of the raiding populace, though, there's no real difference between those scenarios.

At the end of the day, though, I think we're just more experienced and somewhat jaded. Fights are better-tuned thanks to the elimination of world buffs in particular (learning Sapphiron without world buffs felt impossible, and then we flasked and buffed and went from a 55% wipe to a kill and were just stunned), and we know this. Like you, I expect kills to come quickly and am irritated when they don't. That's not a product of the game becoming easier or whatever -- it's a product of us having raided for 2.5 years now and being harder to impress.

You've never had a shaman/priest getting MC'd on Kael'thas, doing spam purge/dispel on the MT for the first pyro when you're still finishing off adds? One of the most painful wipes I've even been through.

That's pretty bad luck, but it's also a strat and execution choice. You can easily have nothing but Capernian left going into p4 and have enough DPS on Kael from the start to handle the first shock barrier without having to soak the pyro, not to mention having people around to immediately fear/CC the MC'd dispeller. No offense, but to use the original example, if everyone had played "perfectly" that wouldn't have been a wipe. I mean yeah, bad luck happens, but that's nothing new really. It's an exaggeration to say that "bad luck" is ever solely to blame for 99% of wipes you'll see.

One other thing in regards to itemization...

Being a rogue I tend to notice this more than other classes, but with dagger spec scaling poorly in the endgame compared to sword spec, why did Blizzard stack instances with non-sword drops?

For instance:

Karazhan - 2 dagger drops, one sword drop, one mace drop, one fist drop
SSC/TK - 2 dagger drops, one sword drop, one mace drop, oh fist and mh fist
Hyjal - offhand dagger, mh sword
BT - mh dagger, oh sword (Pre-Illidan), oh mace (trash drop), mh mace(supremus)

6 daggers to 4 swords, 4 maces and only 3 fists (that I'm aware of).

It's as if they are trying to push everyone into using an inferior setup. I'm sure it's just bad luck, but we have only had two Talons drop in all the SSC runs we did, but vash drops the dagger every other run it seems. Every rogue in our guild has the vash dagger, and we are sharding the mace oh drops in BT now because all the melee have it as well.

I would have expected the weapon itemization to be a bit more balanced, and the mace dropping off trash in BT is uncommonly good for the effort spent getting it in my opinion.

Between pre-BC and BC I went from being in the server top guild (attempting 4H, currently on RoS) to playing in a more casual guild (Leo down/Al'ar currently), with a main switch between (hunter to restoration druid).

I personally haven't had as much fun as my Naxxramas days from a pure encounter design perspective. The beautiful thing about Naxxramas was the encounters were often obscenely simple in design, yet difficult in execution. Gluth rings a bell; quite simply, adds move towards the boss to heal him. Many different options are presented to the raid to deal with this one simple ability and it made for a difficult and well tuned encounter. Patchwerk was a classic gear check with a few underlying mechanics to make it a bit more three dimensional. A few fights had issues (Thaddius too easy/latency dependent, Loatheb consumable dependent), but for the most part they were highly entertaining, challenging, and interesting encounters.

The only fight I've experienced as difficult so far is Vashj (although not for me personally; fairly simple to heal), but it seems to be difficult by virtue of a number of completely random and independent elements. The nature of these independent elements means a strategy or course of action is prescribed for each, in isolation, and minimal reactivity is required.

From what I've seen, Kael'thas is like this to the power of ten. On a more subtle level, even earlier fights like Maulgar, Magtheridon, or FLK work on a fairly similar basis. All of this seems to be a design intention associated with smaller raids as this allows each individual to play their own role, almost in isolation.

If I had the option I'd certainly raid hardcore again. Playing in a more medium-level guild the main challenge I'm facing is that of playing a new class, rather than the encounters themselves. Once you've raided Naxxramas it's difficult to appreciate the difficulty of anything less. Of course; switching to my current guild I also lost the drama-mongering and gained a good bunch of laid back (and emotionally stable) raiders, I'm having more fun now than I was in Naxxramas. Don't exactly miss the consumable farming either. I suppose it's just more placid fun =)

I do hope whatever Blizzard has in store, it's not more of the same. At this point, everybody is aware that they're chasing the carrot, that this is all arbitrary and pointless, and that what's impressive now will not be impressive tomorrow. It's going to take more and more to impress us.

No, you're right a majority of them aren't entirely luck based, but the luck based parts of most fights can severely screw a raid. Just as an example last night my group died twice to mag simply because we had him do shit like this:

808 Magtheridon's Melee hits Cador for 7428 (282 blocked)
942 Magtheridon's Cleave hits Cador for 10975

and

809 Magtheridon's Cleave hits Cador for 10041 (282 blocked)
074 Blaze's Conflagration dots Cador for 634 Fire damage
299 Magtheridon's Melee hits Cador for 4687 (282 blocked)

Note that our tank has more than enough gear to tank him (15k+ armor, 15k health unbuffed, etc. etc.)

We have him on farm, yet there was absolutely nothing we could do to mitigate the 15,000 damage back to back that we got, which was purely based on luck.

I guess my complaint should be reworded to just touchy encounters in general. The fact that anything going even remotely wrong completely destroys the raid on most fights is what gets to me.

Also, karazhan is full of pure luck fights, which while not a huge issue, does tend to kill early raiding for a lot of people. Admittedly, it IS better since the start of TBC, but having entry level content that required 50% or more luck to beat (original aran, prince, etc.) was not a smart move.

I just think they need to tone down the effect luck has on fights in favor for more execution based checks (difference between say mag's cubes and the princes infernals).

If he is hitting that hard than demo shout fell off.

Get debuff monitor, it makes a huge difference because people can be extremly slack about keeping debuffs up.

Are you sure we are talking about the same Gruul? We first killed Gruul on February 7th and it took about 5 raid nights IIRC. Kael took 2 full raid nights of attempts, and we got it the next day. Nothing else sense has taken more than 1-2 day of attempts.

If you have him on farm, your tank should have gear sufficient to tank that. Our tank stacks shield block for Magtheridon, and still breaks 18k HP ... a 15k hit doesn't kill him. It might make him spike, but that's what healers are for. Bosses hit hard - it's what makes them bosses and not yet another trash mob.

If you have Imp DS, Imp TC, Scorpid Sting, Devotion Aura, GoA, Imp BP, Flask of Fort (or Stoneshield) : all on your tank ... he wouldn't/shouldn't have died. Depends on your tank's AC. It's not luck based, it's raid setup and debuffs.

The only "random luck-based event" in Magtheridon is ceiling cave-in, most especially on your MT. Camera angles being what they are, it's sometimes difficult to see if the cave-in is going to land on your head, and we've had our MT get instagibbed by a 24k cave-in before. Anything besides that, there is clear and identifiable causal chain leading to the wipe. On Mag, it tends to be:

1) Learn to click, you bloody retard.
2) No, seriously ... click the box.
3) Turn autoshot off first. /headsmack
4) Healers ... were you asleep?
5) CLICK THE BOXES CLICK THE BOXES CLICK THE BOXES

Aside from healer screwup (which rarely happens; the description above gives the theoretical worst-case scenario for dmg incoming to the tank, excluding cave-in), the only "luck-based" part of Magtheridon is ... not luck-based at all. It's skill and attention span based. And yes, we still wipe to Magtheridon every other week because some retard hunter doesn't turn off his autoshot, or someone is late leaving the boss to go and click their cube. C'est la vie.

That's not luck, it's the inevitable consequence of fighting a boss with instant specials. The whole POINT of Mag's Cleave is to put burst damage on the tank. Sometimes the auto-attack and Cleave timers will line up and both will land, maybe with another auto-attack from a Parry or something. It's gonna happen, you just heal through it. Honestly considering that NOBODY in the Magtheridon encounter (after Channelers are down) takes consequential damage besides the MT, he could hit even harder and not be much more difficult. Healing the MT through bursts is basic BWL-level stuff.

The biggest change imo from Vanilla to TBC is the distinct reduction in multi-tanking/aggro screwy mobs. Pre-TBC, I had to worry about having 3-4 competent tanks for fights. Vael made you use at least 3 even if you were flawless. Broodlord took 4-5 tanks all not screwing up. Firemaw, etc. were all mobs which relied on multiple tanks working together to make it work.

Pretty much, almost every fight in TBC is substantially less complicated from a tanking perspective. The only boss with an aggro reducer is Void reaver, and he is so easy it doesnt matter. Leotheras wipes aggro, but its really not that big of a deal compared to pre-TBC fights. Pre-TBC, there were a lot more aggro dumping, aggro switching bosses that were specifically designed to create problems. Now, as long as your MT is good, you basically get a free ride. While having good OT's definitely helps a lot, and i'm glad I have a good one, the fact is that the emphasis is now much more squarely on your MT as opposed to your overall tanking body, and that makes it much easier for most of us.

A warrior's auto attack might or might not crit, it sure is about luck too. What exactly makes you think Karazhan is "full of pure luck fights"? Probability of getting Julianne in opera for your dagger?

My guild's starting with Kael right now and I agree with the ridiculous phase 1. The Vashj fight takes my guild 12-13 minutes long, I estimate. The Kael fight, from what I heard is over 20 minutes long. A huge part of that fight simply is the long, boring, easy 7 minutes stage 1. The Vashj easy stage 1, on the other hand, is only around 3 minutes.

As for tuning, my guild has killed Vashj 3 times already but haven't mastered it yet. I think last night's kill took around 4-5 wipes still. Our dps just isn't high enough that 1 dead dps before late stage 2 results in a wipe. I think the earliest we can have a dps die and still manage to pull the fight off is when we're turning in the 3rd tainted elemental core. There is still luck involved in this fight, though not much. I got killed when she put the lightning debuff on me and hit me with multishot the same second I got a tick of damage from it.

Just to point it out... "Sometimes they line up and both will land." <-- This is called LUCK.

Definition:
"a combination of circumstances, events, etc., operating by chance to bring good or ill to a person: She's had nothing but bad luck all year."
luck - Definitions from Dictionary.com

Please don't derail the thread into a discussion of this. Yes, there are random events. Your MT with 30% parry and 30% dodge can fail to avoid 50 attacks in a row. The only point is that in almost all cases, you can plan for and survive the absolute worst-case scenario. Yes, "good luck" will let you get away with mistakes or lapses. Sometimes when healers miss a beat and the MT dips to 10%, he'll parry the next attack and then get the heals he needs. Other times he'll die. That's "luck" but it doesn't mean the circumstances themselves aren't controllable.

Well lets see here.

Originally (which is when I was talking about kara ie. pre 2.1) Aran was a luck based encounter because getting flame wreath while a blizzard is up, or having him AE while a blizzard is up, is very difficult to avoid, and completely random.

The next encounter would be illhoof, which again pre-nerf and without more than one paladin was very difficult given the randomness of the sacrifices, and then of course there is prince which is still mostly luck based. Lastly there is nightbane (pre-nerf) Having him rain of bones a healer who had searing cinders on them was pretty much an instagib for anything other than a paladin.

Like I said before, most of it has been fixed, but that doesn't mean damage to the low end raiding community wasn't done.

As much as I would like to be able to join the bandwagon and sing Blizzard's praises for their work on BC raiding, I have to say that I am ultimately fairly disappointed because everything I see about BC raiding makes me feel that Blizzard is just heavily catering to the few superstar guilds in the world.

I am disappointed to see so many encounters that strongly encourage stacking the raid with particular classes or have rigid requirements on raid composition. I thought the purpose of reducing raid sizes from 40 to 25 was intended on reducing the stress of raid management. Now it's not just about recruiting your 25, but also recruiting enough people who won't mind sitting out on the wait list. I'm sure that Nihilum has tons of people willing to wait on their wait list for weeks on end until that one time emerges that they are needed. For the vast majority of guilds, I'd expect that person to gquit very soon and apply somewhere else.

I am disappointed to see so many encounters that have a very unforgiving "break point," as Axl calls it. The vast majority of encounters require alot of tanks, alot of healing, and balls-to-the-wall dps to get past enrage timers or other dps-check mechanics. For many of these encounters, the loss of even one member can be completely catastrophic to the raid. On paper, it may be fun and interesting to force all players to have to do alot of responsibilities that must be performed at 100% while all sorts of one-shot insta-kill mechanics are just zipping by here and there, the fact is that not everyone is equal, and not everyone can hit that 100%. This is even more true when you consider Internet connections and computer hardware limitations.

If you assume that each player has a 99% chance of doing their job perfectly, the chances of a 25-man raid pulling off that perfect kill is 77.78%. If you assume that a player has a 95% chance of pulling off a perfect run, then the chances of a 25-man raid pulling off that perfect kill falls to 27.74%. Now consider that you have bosses like Kael'thas, which appear to require everyone to survive to the end. Again, I am sure that the top guilds in the world have the resources to systemically weed out people who are not able to hit 100% or to recruit only those with the top-of-the-line computer hardware and the best Internet connections. However, this is not a luxury that many guilds have.

I am disappointed to see that Blizzard has a hard-on for trash in even the 25-man instances. I forgot which developer or CM it was that described trash as a "pacing mechanism" and its respawn as a sign that you are doing something wrong. My guild is currently tackling Kael'thas and I fail to see how the ridiculous trash leading to Kael'thas is justifiable. I can see how respawning trash is an valid "punishment" and sign that you are doing something wrong in a 5-man instance where the bosses are pretty easy. However Kael'thas is arguably one of the hardest fights in the game and definitely requires hours and hours of attempts and learning. As such I am hard-pressed to see what the justification is to punish players over and over again with the respawn of this trash over and over again. This is especially horrible when one considers the length of the Kael'thas fight, which further limits the amount of attempts that you can make on him. I used to have fun trying to learn this fight. But this fight has quickly been soured for me knowing that the trash timer is creeping up behind me and that when that trash timer dings, people are going to magically disappear for various reasons ranging from their dog eating their computer or their computer exploding. The Kael'thas fight seems far more interesting and fun than the Vashj fight, but I had far more fun doing the Vashj fight knowing that I could focus on the boss and have a ticking trash respawn timer in the back of my head.

I just don't understand why Blizzard knew that the challenge of pre-BC raiding bosses in BWL and Naxxramas was the difficult bosses and allowed you to tackle them without respawning trash only to reverse their decision now. At least once you got to Vashj there were no more trash. I'm not sure what sadistic designer conceived of the Kael'thas trash as well as their respawn and I fail to see how this trash is a "pacing mechanism" and not a "time sink" or "sadist punishment." Again, I am sure that the best guilds in the world are able to commit to raiding for huge stretches of time with the flexibility to rotate people in and out for rest and deal with trash respawn after trash respawn. This is, again, a luxury that most guilds do not have.

I guess what bothers me the most about BC raiding is not that so many patches had to come out to "fix" raiding, but that so many heavily flawed ideas even made it past the idea-stage and into the game. Seriously, how big of an idiot do you have to be to have realized that the damage that Gruul's shatter did in pre-nerfed Gruul was obscene? This wasn't even something you had to program out to realize. Just looking at it on paper should have been enough to see that there was something wrong with the damage dealt. I would argue the same for the Magtheridon fight before it was heavily nerfed twice. What goes through the minds of the Blizzard developers when they designed the original adds that you had to down in phase 1? What went through the head of Blizzard developers when they originally placed the cooldown on cube-clicking as far more than the 1 minute it is now (was it 2 minutes or 3? I forget)? Even looking forward to Lady Vashj, what went through the minds of developers when they decided that Vashj, as she was designed prior to the nerfs, could mind-control any member of the raid including the main tank?

So many of these issues I am pointing out are not even issues of balance or something that even needed testing. Alot of these, especially that Vashj mind-control were things that even as you were planning the fight, should have stuck out as a sore thumb as a huge mistake. In light of what I have seen in BC raiding, I just very much question the intent and rationality of Blizzard developer when making the design decisions they do with regards to raiding. I can only infer from what I have seen that Blizzard only designs raid encounters for the very hard-core now. I nearly died of laughter when Tigole came over here and talked about how unacceptable the Four Horsemen fight was and how it was not fun at all for a great majority of people. Tigole, you are a developer: you had some say over the design of that fight. If this fight was unacceptable and was not fun for so many, then why did this encounter make it into the game then, especially since your fellow developers spend so many time on that Blizzcon raid encounter panel on the BC collector's edition DVD talking about how you want people to beat these bosses and see your encounters?

I've been in a variety of guilds before, none of which are the top guilds in the world, but each and every one of which has reached increasingly further into raiding progression. And yet I increasingly feel that Blizzard is stacking the odds further against me and my guilds with their designs and plans, catering to a very small few. I can design a Super Mario Bros game that is so insanely difficult that only a handful of people around the world can beat it. I don't know, however, what would be the point of such a game. By the same logic, I express my disappointment of BC raiding and the direction with which Blizzard has brought it.

There are two errors in the OP, you don't need to do any Heroic mode instances to get attuned for either Karazhan or Black Temple.


I will echo that Kael needs some nerfing. This trash is still overtuned, and while 5 phases is "epic", it needs to be shorted a bit so other guilds can get past this cockblock.

Which was exactly my point. Pre-tbc you had more of a chance to pick yourself back up after a bad string of events, in TBC if you don't recover instantly, it's a wipe. Everyone seems to have completely jumped over the point I was trying to make and decided to just pick apart my examples.

The fact remains that TBC raiding is by far less forgiving in regards to both human error, and just horrible sequences of events. I don't know about you, but having entry level raid content punish you almost instantly for a tiny lapse in execution is not my idea of 'starter' content. Did we get past it? Yes of course, but there is a huge percentage of people who play this game, and who want to raid, that can't simply because unlike pre-tbc, the instances have a huge learning curve.

It's just bad design. There is absolutely no reason to lower the size requirements to allow for smaller guilds to get in, and then make the content so unforgiving as to drive the guilds back out.

If Blizzard has learned anything from TBC then it has to be that they really really need to give out alot more guild invites for their next expansion. The mess that was original SSC and TK could have been mostly avoided if people got to test them the same way Naxxramas, Hyjal and BT were tested. The difference from raiding pre 2.1 and after was huge, almost like playing a different game.