But at the same time, I can't imagine that many top guilds would actually object like this unless they implicitly wanted the PvE race to be a matter of how many days you can get your guildies to take off of work.

Putting hardcaps on progress (like the Sunwell gates) draws out the PvE life of the game not just for the handful of guilds participating in it, but also for those (like me) who enjoy spectating. It's been a lot more exciting seeing an instance cleared over 2-3 months in a real competition than to have it cleared in under a month by the same 2-3 guilds who managed to dedicate the most hours at the beginning and pull ahead. I can't speak from personal experience, but I'm inclined to believe that a lot of people in the world-first competition would feel relieved if they could only raid so many hours during the day, so long as everyone else faced the same restrictions. We might even see first boss kills go to different guilds. It'd be like the consumable nerf - there probably are a few people out there who thought that having to farm hundreds of gold were of mats for every progression raid should be a part of being a hardcore raider, but I'm pretty sure that most people were relieved by the change, even if it eroded a competitive advantage for the hardcore crowd.

I mean, haven't there been threads over and over where top-end raiders gripe about how much better TBC's raiding would have been if T6 content were blocked at various points so that they weren't all farming Illidan in July and then sitting around with nothing to do for 8 months except collect Amani War Bears? Granted, only having nothing to do for 6 months wouldn't have been much of an improvement, but it's a step in the right direction.

Dozens of spells have no associated rank. For Druids alone, All forms, Growl, Teleport: Moonglade, Enrage, Feral Charge, Omen of Clarity, Remove Curse, Cure/Abolish Poison, Challenging Roar, Track Humanoids, Feline Grace, Barkskin, Force of Nature, and Cyclone have no listed rank. If it's a "rule" that player spells have a rank listed, it's one with almost as many exceptions as spells that conform.

Some people might find that 4 hours every day for 4 weeks is more stressfull than 12 hours a day for a week. You can at least choose to spend your holidays to collide with that heavy raiding week while those 4 hours will be on top of your normal work all the time, making it 12 hours of (work+wow) for 4 weeks (of course you still got your holiday to spend after this).

I think the gate option is quite close to the ideal. It might not be the perfect solution, but it does give people a relatively good freedom of choice without forcing the kind of extremes that releasing all of Sunwell at once would have been.

This an aura that belongs to the 2 Fel Reaver trash mobs before Kil'jaeden in Sunwell.

All this talk of despawning bosses is retarted.

First, do proponents of this actually remember bosses that despawned? It's the most frustrating thing in the world, for everyone. Vael despawning after 2 attempts sucked hard. Nobody liked it. It got changed. Nef despawning, everyone hated it, it got changed. Rag despawning, everyone hated it, it got changed. Blizzard isn't going to go back and use a system which has already proven to piss people off.

Secondly, They've come up with an even better system, the Sunwell gates. Why use something which people across the board hated when they are now using something people don't seem to mind?

Thirdly, who the hell are you to tell me how much I can play this game? You think it's unfair that I can spend 12 hours a day attempting a boss? Tough Fucking Shit. Just because you don't like how I play doesn't give you the right to limit it. It smacks of jealousy and entitlement.

(Note: I run with a 5 hour raid night, 3d/week raid group, but the point still stands)

I like that bosses are being downed, as it shows that the encounters are doable, and not huge wastes of time to strive towards, like pre-fix Ouro/Cthun.

So what if a guild can put in 5 10-hour days and kill it? It's not hurting any of us.

Where is this sense of overwhelming negativity coming from? I think everyone is more pleased at the quality of boss encounters released in Sunwell than simply wanting to bitch about not being able to be more hardcore.

I'm not exactly sure where you are reading "Im going to quit wotlk/go casual if another raiding becomes gated". That in itself is a silly argument and I personally have not witnessed this "mass" of behaviour you are talking about.

Not everyone hates it, I'd be suprised if the majority hated it. It counters burnout to some extent (Seriously imagine going from twins to Muru to KJ in less than 2 weeks), it gives people who are on the bleeding edge a short deserved break, some time to refine their kill strats, re-stock on consumables, and maybe *gasp* relax for a day or two before going headstrong to the next SIGNIFICANTLY harder and more time consuming boss.

Not to mention on release of expansion you are more than likely going to have Naxx available and then probably the next tier of content ready off release. You can expect Icecrown Citadel (assuming this will be the final tier in wotlk) and possibly a 3rd tier in wotlk before Icecrown Citadel to be patched in at later dates. I'm more concerned about quality content than the speed at which it is released or any attunements/gates in place, (I'll admit the extended wait for Sunwell was worth it entirely, it is by all means a quality zone).

All spells with no foreseeable upgrade. Damaging spells get ranks.

I agree that this despawning talk is a load of rubbish..

First of it only affects about the most hardcore 200 players, out of 5 million that is about 0.004% of the player base - any mechanic designed to address their issues that has a negative impact - however small - on the remaining 99.996% of the population is retarded.

By gating the bosses at release the competition was spread out over phases, with different pushes for each first kill - imagine the Tour De France race being just a "start at the start and cross the line when you are done" type race with no stages, and see how much coverage it gets. The gates are also removed long before any of the less hardcore guilds make it there, essentially drawing a line between hardcore progression and casual progression.

Back to topic, I think the increase in mana of the spells is interesting, especially when you look at the new conjured water restoring 13k mana. The implication here is that mana pools will be at around 16-17k, and the emphasis will be removed from min/max consumables (chain mana pots) and placed instead on timing and bursts. With healers it is easy to see that (burst damage increases, background damage reduced, more effective AoE heals but on longer cool-downs). For DPS this could be 'windows of opportunity' so bosses becoming weak to fire damage for a portion, or people bursting down adds before performing some other functions.

Another interesting change is that all the instances will be tuned for 10 and 25 man content. Other than the obvious I can see this impacting instance design substantially. It is safe to assume that the 10 man bosses will be scaled down versions of the 25 man ones, hitting for less and perhaps missing a few abilities, but not any of the encounter - defining ones. However I can see adds becoming part of it, and the raids having more of a "2*ten-man raids" feel than the current "40-man but with less people" feel.

In order to balance the raids for 10 and 25 people they will be making the same decisions over and over again - how do I make this challenging for 25 people now it is tuned for 10, or how do I make this possible for a 10 man that might not have a death knight / prot pally / 5*resto shammies / whatever.

I think this alone will make the encounters a lot more fun, as the designers are approaching the fights from a different perspective, and need to include a lot more flexibility into the fight. Here's hoping

Wow you are really angry. If you make it despawn after 4-5 hours it wont even affect 99% of guilds that raid "normal" hours. So there is a huge huge difference between 1 hour of Vael and 5 hours of Arthas. Not all bosses have to have a limit: give Kelecgos unlimited tries, but limit Brutallus etc. After a month or so, take the limits off, it's a very flexible system. You could have a combination sunwell gates/despawn.

It has been interesting to watch PvE evolve as a competition from vanilla WoW to TBC. However, having the "#1 guild" get to #1 by taking two weeks off from real life doesn't really promote the game as a "healthy" eSport and takes away from its legitimacy.

If this is true, I think it's pretty cool.

Maybe Blizzard is intentionally trying to shake things up by making the job of dps require more planning. Having to time your abilities to co-incide with elements of the fight that help or hinder your ability to do strong dps would could make the role of dps more dynamic; currently the predictable nature of most fights makes doing good dps a matter of getting the routine right.

Not that people won't still use optimal rotations. But making fights where you need to plan ahead for vulnerable phases or whatnot more common would be fun.

What has this whole despawning thing to do in WotLK thread ? Every sport at its highest level is potentially dangerous, deal with it.

I'm hoping they will do more types of 5-mans, BM and Old Hillsbrad proved to be fun and they could very well add more, also with the addition of vehicles they could move them to more open spaces without breaking the immersion.

With regards to the gate mechanic, one thing that hasn't been commented on was the fact that maybe the had to delay the gates. Why? Perhaps the boss fights weren't ready yet. There wasn't much player testing on the last mobs and people have posted in various places that they were surprised on how tight and well-tuned the encounters are. I may be reading too much into the gates, but I really think that by opening up the gates every 2 weeks and delaying the first real encounters, Blizzard gave themself 2,4, and 6 more weeks to tune each boss.

If this was the case, I don't see this type of limiting factor as a way to keep the high-end guilds on an even playing field in wotlk. Rather, as a disguised way to increase development time without holding back the entire instance or zone.

I'm failing to see how SK spending 12 hours a day on a boss for 4 days to down him actually matters, let alone is a bad thing? Sure, it can skew the numbers a bit as to who is "teh best!1" but as a whole, guilds will raid at the pace they are willing to raid at. Its like Naxx; guilds that were willing to buff to the gills advanced further and faster than those that weren't willing to. I'm glad that they made the alchemy changes so that isn't an issue as much.

Also, all this talk about the wonders of trash brings back very vivid and horrifying memories of the pre C'thun trash.

Re: despawn timers: What was the blue post about this? I think it was Drysc: "I want to enable content for all of my guild, and prevent it for the people just behind me." Only now it's also "and I want to slow down the people just ahead of me".



Having periods of spell vulnerability would be a wonderful addition, especially for mages. I think it's terrible that mages generally spec into one tree and then only use those spells (vanilla: "Lol wut r AMs", BC: "I have blue spells lol?"). For instance, one way to have this is to make the mainstay Arcane spell proc a debuff on the target with a vulnerability to Fire, Frost, or Nature. So if you're in Not Caring mode, you spam your spec's mainstay while chatting on /g or whatnot, and when you need to crank out 10% more dps, you're watching the debuffs like a hawk and weaving spells accordingly.

Arcane spec then becomes a master of debuffing; Fire spec further increases debuffed damage; Frost spec then gets extended control. Now you really want one of each in a 25.

I don't think of PvE as the e-sport part. It's pretty obvious that the e-sport portion is supposed to be the arena, not the raiding aspect.

That said, I'd be more interested in the other idea... the permaberserk. Instead of despawning a boss, you have X amount of real time before he goes into berserk mode, and he will stay that way for X hours of real time. That X hours resets if you go and pester him. E.g. RoboWombat of Doom yells something about limiters being released, and destroying all humans, grows much bigger and starts one-shotting everyone. The trick to this though, is to make sure that you can *tell* he's still in berserker mode by just looking at him (or looking at his buffs). If you annoy him again while he is in berserk mode, his timer resets because the threat is still present. Once you leave him alone long enough, he yells something like "Threat no longer detected, resetting to standby mode" and returns to normal.

However, this alone isn't enough because it's no different than just despawning the boss. Since every raid will be both 10 and 25, that means that they can take more liberties with the content (like having multiple pathways to the ultimate boss of the instance, kind of like Naxx), so if you get stuck on Patchwerk, you can go work on Maexxna or Razuvious, or whatever. This way, you pace the content a bit more with the enraged status of the bosses, and still allow for people to try and do other things.

All this talk of gates, timers, cockblocks is really unfocused. The only real issues are:

1) Should WoW PvE be competitive?
2) How can Blizzard prolong content?

All of this revolves around these two questions. If you want PvE to be more competitive, then you need to have rules. Those rules need to measure playtime, attempts, or something similar. For a pure competition, they could also measure things like consumables, raid competition, and so on. Arena is a competitive environment because it is completely sterile: no consumables, no long cooldowns, theoretically balanced matchups. Pure PvE competition as to "who is better" would have to be the same.

That being said, it's a stupid idea. PvE competition has never been about "fair" competition from EQ to now. There are far too many intangibles that affect PvE competition to regulate or monitor it. Is your guild on a PvE server? No? Okay, well you can't recruit most of the good players. Does your leader(s) have ample free-time and borderline OCD to manage things outside of the raid? No? Well, you are going to be at a disadvantage organizationally in a lot of ways. Can your entire guild take off work for 3 days on demand? No? Well, you can't compete with professional guilds. And so forth.

PvE "skill" is at least 80% logistics. Whether or not a guild gets a first kill has far less to do with the individual ability of their players than things that happen completely outside the raid--effective recruiting/marketing, strategy communication, insider info, flexible schedules, and other things. Trying to make a more regulated or professional competition out of something like this just isn't going to work without some serious rule changes.

The second point is about prolonging content. Sunwell has done this about as reasonably as an instance can while still preserving the integrity of first kills, such as they are. Timers, despawns, and all those things will just end up hurting casual guilds far more than bleeding edge ones. The way it is now, by the time casual guilds kill a boss, they can start working on the next one as much as they want. It seems to be a fairly elegant solution that buys them a few more months of content time while not screwing over anyone in particular.

The exact same angry rhetoric could be used against the gates, however. "We killed Felmyst first it's unfair we have to wait 2 weeks to try Twins, jealousy/entitlement blah blah".

Um, this is a complete mischaracterization of the argument, and is as inane as the "I pay $15/month I should be able to see Kil'Jaeden too!" drivel. Feel free to continue playing the game after the given boss has despawned. The boss isn't being despawned as a personal affront to you, honest.

I suppose that ultimately it does leak into the question of whether PvE should be an e-sport. It's already rather competitive at the top end, why not implement measures that makes the competition more level? The Sunwell Gates (which really need their own thread for discussion) were great for fostering PvE competition, and even if that was unintentional.. I don't see any (legitimate) reason not to push it further. Start with a conservative limit, say 6 hours/day. See what happens.

I'm not sure why there's such a drive to "e-sportize" everything in WoW. I suppose the next step would be to do something like a PvE version of the tournament server, where people can create a max level and max geared character with unlimited consumables for $20 a month or whatever, and have every boss tuned to max difficulty and on a despawn timer. Then whenever Blizzard released new PvE content it would appear maybe a few days earlier on this PvE Tournament Realm (and world 1sts could be awarded cash prizes and such). I guess some people may find that appealing.

You know what, I'd really like to win a gold medal in the 100m sprint at the upcoming china olympics. A normal person like me spends most of my time at work or university so theres no way I can devote nearly as much time to training as an athlete on an Olympic team. They should have a hard cap on the number of hours per day that these athletes can train in the weeks leading up to the Olympic Games because its an unfair advantage over me, Joe Average, right? Thats preposterous. I made the choice not to devote my time to training for an Olympic sport, and in the same way some people choose to play 16 hours of WoW a day. With a ~9 million player base there will always be a handful maybe even a few hundred people who will push to get every advantage they can, play more, farm more. You can't be the best unless you are willing to play the game at that top level of competition.

Lets be a little more serious and on topic and have a hypothetical. Assume there is a 4 hour on 20 hour off respawn cycle. If these guilds really are so hardcore, whats to stop them leveling up (ebaying) an entire second raid force to start on a fresh raid id when they have used up the 4 hours of attempts on their main team? Excessive consumable farming for naxx, raid stacking in BC... as long as these world firsts are important people will (within their own limits) go to their own personal extremes to get them. All you can do is decide the type of game you want to play and play it that way, if you don't have 16 hours a day to devote to wow... then accept you probably won't be getting any world firsts. As long as your ability to play the game isn't diminished by the way others play it then I hate to say it but any complaints about how much more other people choose to play than you is nothing but qqing.

Can we stop the esport and pve competition derail? I don't see anything productive coming from it

Ah, good catch: I was implicitly assuming that you could totally rewrite the trees, but yeah, that's not realistic. Hmm, my back-of-the-envelope says that fire is getting 75% boost over frost, not even counting scorch stacks.

But really, is that the key? If spamming in your spec is X% better than weaving, then weaving should give you X+5%. If I'm in Don't Care mode, then it's not like this boss becomes impossible. But if I do care, then with practice, I'm getting another 5%.

Although a (say) 4 sec buff that grants me +80% fire damage is going to play merry hell with my threat. *thinks* I think I'm okay with that, so long as Blizzard releases a threatmeter. (My thinking is that, for the "don't care" end of the player spectrum, they shouldn't get hosed. Sure, probably none of them are reading these boards, but that doesn't mean that Blizzard can ignore said players, and thus I think it falls on me that my suggestions support the "whatever; just here to push buttons and have fun playing with my grandson" crowd just as much as it supports the EJ end of the spectrum).

Hmm, an Improved Invis talent that both reduces the countdown and the cooldown of Invis? Hmm. That's an interesting way to proved the Easy Mode mage spec while not relegating Arcane into the Gimped Spec. Namely, reduce the countdown and cooldown of Invis via deep arcane, so your "don't care" mage can still spec all-out arcane and be viable. EJ fire mages, only when paired with a deep arcane mage, can start cranking out scary dps and equally scary tps, but really, in my opinion, that's what fire should be all about. Right now, the "don't care" can just pickup -40% threat and be mostly fine, if my understanding is correct (I've heard that 2pc T5, T6 gear, and AB spam are viable, but I haven't been following news closely to know if it's "merely viable" or "beating the ever living heck out of fire spec").

Hrm, I seem to have wandered off into "what WotLK could be" rather than "what alpha news has been leaked".