This is amusing to see 2 threads of thought running through the posts here.

1) We've seen everything before. Nothing we see or do now is really difficult, unlike Naxx or something where we spent so much time on 4H, Patchwerk, Gothik, etc. Really it's all too simple now.

2) This game is inaccessible to too many people. It requires too much min/maxing, too difficult, etc.

I find it oddly amusing that both these statements can be true for different sets of people. Which leads me to believe that its impossible to please everyone. Make things too hard and the casual suffer. Make it not hard enough, and the Nihilums of the world blow through it so fast that it isn't a challenge for them.

The content really just wasn't finished. On the 2.1 PTR Hyjal was less polished than BT, despite theoretically having been "in game" since January. From a developer standpoint, they were bugfixing and polishing fundamental things like 5-man instances and outdoor questing in SMV/BE right up to release day. They had to choose between:
1) Prioritizing raid tuning over core leveling content;
2) Pushing back release of an otherwise-polished expansion;
3) Releasing with untuned raid content.

Plus, the TBC changes pretty much completely threw out all of Blizzard's past tuning experience. We went from 40-man to 25-man, we got 10 levels, we got new talents and new abilities, we got shamans/paladins in the same raids, and so forth. There was just too much changing at once for anyone to predict what the end result would be without actually playtesting it at length.

One big change is the movement from a healing focus to a DPS focus, but with a continued emphasis on survivability. In old world, few mobs had an enrage timer, and even the things that did have an enrage timer had very forgiving ones. It was rare that you needed to SIT healers to bring in DPS. And then a lot of the fights were healer fights, not DPS fights. I mean this in the sense that healers had to pay attention and DPS just had to hit buttons without really worrying about movement or gimmicks. Patchwerk is a good example -- the first real cockblock in Naxx -- and it was a healer/tank fight. You needed a certain number of healers to heal the tanks, and they had to be attentive. DPS just had to go balls out hitting numbers.

Now everything seems to be so DPS-centric, even with the enrage timer and elixir nerf in 2.1. You always wanted to bring as few healers as possible to a raid, but you used to be able to have a comfortable healing cushion. Now you REALLY have to bring as few healers as possible. Solarian is comfortably done with 5-6 healers. I can't imagine bringing 1 healer per group to a fight before TBC.

This really strains the survivability of the raid and puts it on the players to keep themselves alive, and DPS, and do whatever movement or coordination the fights require. On top of that, many TBC fights are long and require a pretty good chunk of attention span. Kael is hard because of the survivability required combined with the length. Something like Bloodboil requires coordination and attentiveness all around, but since it's a much shorter fight, it's far easier to master it. Then you have the movement and coordination elements, which are fun and interesting, but are calling on players who have spammed buttons easily for years to suddenly get up to the same attention and player level of the people who are used to moving (like the tanks).

Then you have the occasional ridiculous raid stacking requirement for certain fights. Mother is caster-unfriendly, many fights are melee-unfriendly, why bring a mage to Bloodboil when there's no AE and they're probably going to bite it anyway, but we better have lots for Hyjal to AE the trash. And the fear on Archimonde is just really overdone mechanic (would a 3-4 second duration really trivialize the encounter? It wouldn't necessitate anywhere near the raid stacking).

So a lot of guilds have old players that were quite good at the old game... I wouldn't call them "deadweight" exactly, but maybe they aren't the most skilled or attentive people (not that this game is hard). I think it's sad to tell people that are pretty good at their class but just not consummate players in general that they're going to have to sit all these encounters because if they screw up just a little they wipe the raid and waste the time. You look at a fight like Gorefiend. Healers and tanks/melee dps who are good at their jobs may not know how to play a frost mage.

For really progression-oriented gamers, TBC encounters are interesting and engaging. I think the problem is when you get to the guilds that are sort of about progression and raiding, but also in this to have fun and be rewarded and play with friends. It was a balance I think you could achieve easier in pre-TBC raiding.

Now people in situations like that are confronted with frustration because someone wipes the raid with less-than-perfect-but-still-not-terrible play, or because raid leaders have to sit people to stack raids. It can be a headache sometimes. It's not that the encounters are hard or impossible or frustrating, because high end guilds breeze through the content. The challenge and irritation comes from the next tier of raiders, who were good enough to clear old Naxx but are struggling because of what TBC raiding requires from every single raid member.

Blizzard->Flamewreath was perfectly survivable. If you handled the blizzard properly, you'd be in an area the blizzard had vacated by the time the wreath hit, meaning you could stand still and not take any blizzard damage. Blizzard->AE was even easier, as you could just run to an un-blizzarded area. (Hell, he still does this.)

Sorry to prolong the derail, but this is really a classic example of what Gurg was talking about: 99% of the cases where people complain about randomness are perfectly avoidable. Nobody plays perfectly, but the situations where you can't avoid a wipe through better play are rare in the extreme.

I think this is, at the core, the biggest issue.

Blizzard has seemed to have lost its 'it's done when it's done' mentality when it comes to certain things, and I can see why. Unlike their other games where they can just sit back and let them develop and perfect each little bit, WoW has an active player base which is constantly looking for 'new' content. This aspect of game development is still relatively new to them. Even with 2 years of MMO experience behind them, they're forced to rush balance changes because of the looming threat of loosing their player base. Granted they're much better about this than before, but you still see it happening almost every patch. They make a change, revert the change, put the change back in 3 patches later when it's been tested more.

Frankly they're just jumping the gun too often, though I suppose it's hard to prevent that when you have 9,000,000 people telling you to hurry up.

The best thing blizzard can do is sit down with what they have and figure out what they can do to balance it around their entire community. Fixing things like the entry level raiding zones, making alternative advancement for people who've done everything, etc. etc. etc.

They just need to treat future WoW expansions more like their non-MMO games and put time and effort into ensuring it all works right BEFORE it leaves the office.

Something I miss from WoW vanillia is the lack of real farm status. You know, like when you did bwl while working on naxx, you could play while watching the tv, make mistakes, and it was not a problem because you overgeared so much the zone. Worst thing that could happen is you died and fight goes on. Now there isn't anymore farm raids in TBC. Even with Illidan down and everyone in tier 6, if you miss a cube on mag, if you aggro hydross just after a switch, or whatever, you juste make your raid wipe instantly. Even on trashs, you have to be very carefull of what you do because if you aggro one of those mobs before kael for example, you kill everyone in 5 sec. All those mechanisms increase the difficulty and that seems cool when you do the fights for the first time because you think, heh, I have to be very focused here, if I suck I can make up wipe but 6 months after, you just want to rush through those tier 4 raids but you just can't.

I hear ya dawme. I tried to watch tv while raiding last night. God I hate SSC and Tk now. Anyways, couldn't do it, while doing Al'ar I died at 4% by standing in fire but the MT was fine so I guess I semi did it. You are absolutely correct that farm status does not exist anymore. Our glory days of tank and spank are truely dead.

Yup, we really struggled with Kael'thas meanwhile pre-nerf Gruul worked fine for us, no idea why.(We did NOT bug Gruul like several other guilds did)

That's because BWL was pretty trivial once you got down to it. It was only hard the first time through because nobody knew how to play properly, everyone was still learning the game mechanics.

Think about, say, Twin Emps. I considered that to be a great fight for pre-BC, and it has the exact thing you're talking about. Even 2-3 months in, you could zone out, not run out for a port and just completely wipe your raid. To be honest I enjoy that about many of the TBC fights too, although SSC/TK even with the need for "MAX FOCUS" to avoid fireballing on a Hydross transition (yeah...right) are pretty much autopilot by now, your autopilot just needs to be on a bit higher of a level.

One thing not yet mentioned is the problem of "new" players vs "old" players.

WoW continues to undergo a certain amount of churn -- people get lives, jobs, have kids, whatever, and drop out, while at the same time newbies pick up the TBC box and vow to roll ret paladin to avenge the light or whatever.

For most guilds, even semi-hardcore raiding guilds, that presents a problem, because there's a large outflow of experience, which has to be filled with a large inflow of inexperience.

Even if the new guys are dedicated and excited, it does take about a year to learn your class to the minmaxiest extent, much less learn all the little raid tricks, cooperation with other classes, and so forth. The old guys have seen all of the bosses from pre-TBC, and some of the mechanics/workarounds from those instances are still important lessons in newer TBC encounters -- situational awareness being probably primary.

The 5-mans do a fairly decent job of being a 'how to raid' primer, but they also extend the time required to bring a new raider online ("welcome to the guild! Please run SL 20 times on regular and 20 times on heroic"), and still don't give people veteran-level game understanding.

The net result is that as WoW ages, the average experience level of players will remain about constant, but the hardcore guilds will continue to stay pinned to the top experience level. This will pose balance problems in future expansions.

The real issue with this is the 5mans don't actually teach raid practices. They teach you how to work in a group yes, but the raid practices (keeping CC CC'd, focus firing things, etc. etc.) don't really come until the heroics, which are mostly avoidable.

What TBC is lacking is the UBRS of old, where you have an easy raid instance that teaches you how to work in large groups of players. New raids are coming into kara with little to no raiding experience and with that in mind, kara is a very daunting place, especially for a brand new guild.

What Blizzard needs to do if find the balance of challenging content at the end-game, but leave sufficient ramp up instances to allow for the training of new people (Gruul, Mag, and to some extent Kara do not have much room to 'carry' new players so they can get the hang of things).

Aran wasn't the luck encounter -- it was Malchezzar. Rolling into his room with a raid in half KZ epics, half blues was anywhere from a cakewalk to completely unkillable, depending entirely on where the infernals fell.

A bunch in the back where nobody is standing, and it was a tank and spank, first-attempt-ever kill. A boxed in tank, in a safe area too small for melee and out of range of any safe spots for DPS and heals meant it was game over, especially in crappy gear where a jaunt through the hellfires to get to a safe spot was certain death.

Even with real DPS and enough HP to walk through hellfires completely trivializing the encounter, its pretty ridiculous how differently the fight plays out depending on where the infernals fall.

Yeah, its a moot point -- its not like prince is a problem. But, its still a terrible design.

I think Blizzard has a good idea of which encounters require a lot of time to learn and which do not. For example, Lurker's trash requires an appropriate level of difficulty and time to kill, relative to the 1 to 4 hours it takes to learn him.

Honestly, only the Kael'thas trash sticks out as horrendous. It's not the difficulty (just assign a mage/warlock to chain poly/fear the last adds while you DPS them down). It's that the fight literally requires between 8 and 30 hours of practice to learn, 8 times as long as the simpler fights. That seems like a clear example of a situation where the trash should be on a 4+ hour respawn timer, or maybe even permanently despawn when killed like the C'thun trash.

The other thing that would help is streamlining the start of the fight. If the advisers had their phase one health cut in half or even one third, the difficulty of the fight would be unchanged, but you'd get more attempts per trash clear.

The question really is... "What percent of your progression raid time is actually spent working on the difficult parts of the fight?" For most bosses this is around 50% to 75% of the time, but for Kael'thas it feels like it's around 20%. Similar arguments apply to Hyjal trash waves.

Not quite; you're the one that's forcing it into a "luck" encounter by waiting until the last infernal falls to box you in before trying to move. If you see a box-in starting to happen there's a free spot somewhere else you can slide to and avoid the issue entirely.

I completely agree. DPS'ers having responsability to avoid deaths is one of the main paradigm shifts I find in TBC - it is no longer the healers responsability to keep DPS alives but DPS who have to avoid getting themselves killed, and 95% of the time you can avoid a death with perfect play.

Maybe I just have a savior complex, but I kind of feel cheated as a healer. Most deaths are more about the player's lack of avoiding a deadly situation than about me as the healer failing to save them.

To put it another way, healing feels like busy work. Like bloodboil, people need constant hit point maintaince, or they die. Their bars go down, I fill them up again. Maybe I'm just complaining about nothing, and I'm a primadona who needs to feel important, but it just feels 'wrong' that when someone dies, it wasn't my fault.

Healing changed pretty dramatically in TBC. This is excluding druid healing which of course is massively different if you're a tree(Going from casting healing touch 50 times a fight to zero takes some adjusting).

Pre tbc it was all about casting low rank heals and casting them often, with overheal under 30% ideally. Now for most healers 50% overhealing is typical, and while mana is still an issue, throughput is far more important.

To be honest I'm not really sure which "style" is better from a gameplay standpoint

I feel like my biggest personal development in TBC is maximizing my output, like Beef said. I'm posting overheal numbers that would have been disgraceful pre-BC, most of my effort is focused on getting the most out of every single global cooldown (much like a DPS class). If I refresh Earth Shield, the next 1.5 seconds is spent repositioning as well as I can...same goes for totems. On a number of fights I find myself precasting Chain Heals without knowledge of who's gonna take damage, just because I'll get a jump or two by the time the heal lands and that might save lives. It's all about getting the most volume out into the raid in a sensible manner (i.e. not spamming LHW, paying attention to my assignments before all else). There's nothing to really compare to Patchwerk...in terms of personal performance (and healing being an "art") I haven't experienced anything like that fight in TBC.

Pretty narrow focus I guess, Beef just got me thinking.

This is the most succinct summarisation of TBC raiding I've seen. It's absolutely true. Pre-TBC, your progress was governed by the average ability/gear/commitment of your group. Post-TBC, it looks like you're held back to the level of your worst player. The people at the top won't notice this much, but in the lower echelons it has been absolute carnage as guilds die, people leave, friendships are lost, etc. etc. All because whoever you are, you now need to wind up in a group of people with similar gearing/commitment/skill. Heterogeneous groups, where the strong carry the weak, are out.


Tiresome repetition number X in a series of infinity: it's still as far as "the average raider" ever got. Trivial? Probably true. But for a lot of people it's the absolute maximum they can do.


This is the other elephant in the room. Theorycrafting and exhaustive encounter knowledge We've covered moddability in another thread, so there's no point adding it in here as well, but it kind of fits - all of these factors come down to playing the "meta" game rather than the actual pixels in front of you. In this specific example of the Prince fight, what you're saying is that you can eliminate the random luck factor if you already know in advance all the potential positions an infernal can fall. That is, the encounter only stops being luck-driven once you've seen it 10 or more times and have religiously logged the details - or you've downloaded the strategies from someone who did the same. To the average group, that is indistinguishable from a crapshoot. So while one side says "entirely luck driven" and the other side says "not a shred of luck involved", both sides are right.

TBC has forced the game to new heights of theorycraft/modcraft/encounter-learning/"meta-gaming", and this is beyond the reach of many people. My old group got through MC and BWL - the guy who was our main tank then is only now starting to understand about crush immunity, and still has only a limited clue how the hit table works. Rogue DPS cycles? Whose idea was it that you should *have* to spend hours reverse-engineering mechanics and building a spreadsheet the size of Burma, in order to defeat entry-level encounters? And yes, you do need to go the theorycraft mile in order to perform: the group I'm applying to just took down Hydross with 13 seconds to go on the enrage timer. I'll bet my left nut that if they all read this community they'd shave minutes off that - but should they have to, for one of the first bosses in the first raid zone? Theorycraft isn't just giving you that extra 10% to beat the top end dungeons, it gives you 50, 100% more damage, without which you can't enter the low level dungeons. This forum shouldn't be needed for anyone that's not in Black Temple. [I'm sure there will now be a massed chorus of "well what are you doing here, scrub?" I'm the 1 in 20 exception in the group, that wants to know this sort of stuff.] Actually, my preferred solution would be for the game itself to teach you how to play your class, much more explicitly - I've put my ideas on that elsewhere.

Morogrim can have some bad luck associated with it. It doesn't usually cause a full-blown wipe, but it can cost you an attempt. When you're first doing the encounter (and aren't overgeared for it yet) it's possible for you to take a bad burst on your tank that isn't easily healed through. We've had 3 out of 4 of our tanks get watery graved at the same time (and the remaining tank had his challenging shout on cooldown after using it on a two-tank watery grave). Stuff like that is just dumb luck, but it can happen. You can plan around it a bit, but the solutions often carry their own risk.

Most of the people who read/post here have pretty significant Pre-TBC raiding experience. Facing a redux of things you've seen before is pretty easy. I know I breezed through most of the 5-man versions of raid encounters because the guys I usually grouped with had all faced versions these mechanics before. However, at some point all of us need to replace people who quit the game. Not everyone is going to have the experience you need. A guild can ask that people have experience through Nax, however mid and lower tier guilds generally will have to shoot a bit lower.

In our case, 4-5 of those replacement raiders are lucky if they killed Nef (in fact, a few have asked that we run BWL on one of our off days because they'd like to see it). They're solid players, understand basic mechanics, and can handle a generic tank and spank. However, trying to explain to someone how to avoid Leotheras and deal with aggro resets when they've never done a fight like Sartura before, is a challenge. You can talk them through it, but they really just need to see it and react to it before they fully understand it (2-3 attempts if they're reasonably bright). You have to train your healers how to handle spike damage effects, and if they've never had "the tank must be healed to full as soon as he takes damage" experience like Patchwerk, that's also difficult.

I don't think it's a huge impediment to success, but it does cost you time. I think it's wise to consider that when you look at progression for most guilds. Mid-to-late SSC and TK25 are probably about average progression based on the data found in WoWjutsu or from my own realm's progression thread (ignoring all the grade inflation from Karazhan). Whether that's due to incompetence or inexperience is anyone's guess. It's probably equal measures of both and varies by guild.

To be fair, I was saying BWL was trivial in response to someone who was basically complaining that they couldn't autopilot through SSC/TK like they could with BWL back in the day. No need to take things out of context.

Healing: I actually like TBC healing a lot more, because there's much more individual responsibility. Healers find themselves with very specific jobs, individual players to heal, groups to heal, or whatever, where they aren't just spamming some low rank along with 10 other people doing the same thing. Yes, player death is sometimes their fault and not ours, but really that's not necessarily anything terribly new. We just see it more. Someone who died to a Deep Breath or to Dark Glare died because they screwed up, not because of a healing failure. But I feel like TBC rewards "good healing" and "good healers" better than the old 40-man game did.

Re: Failure, I think that Mother's "randomness" manifests itself in ways that are beyond normal reaction time, ability, spell cooldowns, and so forth. What's the very, very worst thing Archimonde can do? Fear, drop a Doomfire on someone while they're feared, burst them, and then Grip them in midair? You can break the fear, you can use consumables to help survive, you can have a druid who hangs back outside of Air Burst range and races over to heal/decurse people who have that happen, and so forth. You can largely control the path of a Doomfire once it's been dropped. And the list goes on. You're given chances to save yourselves, even if some of these random scenarios make the fight less forgiving and require a higher execution threshold.

With Mother on the other hand, if she uses Wicked Beam enough, you're going to have major, major mana issues, no matter what your raid composition is, or how well-geared you are. I've had attempts where I've been burned down to zero mana when she was at 65% and had to start living on pot/drum/tide cooldowns alone, despite being fairly efficient in my healing. FA is instant and brutal and if the wrong people get teleported to the wrong place at the wrong time, you're in trouble. The simplest case is having three healers ported inside the terrain and dying with no chance of survival. Odds are good that this will wipe you, because unless you bring some retarded number of healers to Shahraz, you probably aren't going to be able to sustain it once you're down 3. Your OTs can avoid multiple Lashes in a row (despite /sit'ing with their backs to her) and get ported right as she Lashes. You can have people ported and hit with a Sinful Beam at the same time. You can have repeated ports land on top of multiple people, whether it's a ranged group or your tank/melee. Even if everyone scatters appropriately and if non-FA'd people move away as well, this can cause an amount of damage, if repeated more than once, that is mathematically impossible to fully repair given a normal number of healers, and additional incoming beam damage, before the next FA port. And if the next FA port is also a "bad" one, you're in trouble. Finally, while a parry->hit/Lash/hit combo is brutal but survivable with proper tank preparation, if you have a hit/Lash/hit combo that also coincides with an FA port onto the tank, that will be an instant death before the tank even has time to shield wall.

That sort of thing.