In which country do you live? Russia does not support communism any more, I heard. There is not that many systems that advertise rewarding for failure these days. y/k. :P

What a bizarre analogy.

Not being in a guild large enough to field a 25-man raid is a failure?

Very smart remark. I'm sure Zul'Aman will be huge success if it sports loot of the same quality as Karazhan or better by 1-2 points of STA/INT...

Of course it will have loot at least comparable to tier 5. Just like Zul'Gurub had loot comparable and better then MC one. Blizzard only once had fall in a trap of not giving people significant upgrades (TBC raids before 2.1) and I'm pretty sure they have learn their lesson. Mayority of the people around won't be wiping on bosses if loot won't present significant upgrade to them. Accept it.

He didn't say that alternatives didn't exist, he said that it is the best feral weapon in the game.

He's right, by the way, at least for DPS purposes. Pillar of Ferocity is arguably a sidegrade from the Stranglestaff. How many rogues/ warriors/ shamans say that they don't have a TRUE upgrade for DPS after Karazhan, barring an Arena weapon?

Anyways, to be back on topic, it looks like Hybrids are getting buffed (or fixed) in many areas, with Enhancement Shaman's Parry going to -20% threat (trying to get a SS to confirm), and Bliz recognizing Ret Paladin's issues. I appreciate the fact that they are at least acknowledging some of this.

I really just don't quite understand the point of restricting weapons to ranking. I'm not saying that I don't see the intention but without some mechanical changes it will be completely trivial to swap people in and out of a ranked team to get what you want.

I'm not sure that it is a great idea anyhow though. Our PvE guild fields a few 5-mans, some competitive but most completely random PvE specced guildies that play 10-20 games a week for fun and to fill odd slots like offhand weapons and the like. Hell, a lot of the teams are half alts at that. Now, I don't know that the risk v reward is inline or anything but I do know that we provide activity for other arena teams and that's not such a bad thing. We tend to be reasonably organized but with horrible team class composition and lousy spec selections. Team Random certainly is not steamrolling other teams due to some mythical PvE gear advantage.

Interestingly enough, one of the systems where it does pay off big time to reward failure, lack of skill, or indeed, merely existing without accomplishments, is the system where you, the provider, provide entertainment in return for a monthly fee such as an MMORPG, and not only that, games in general. That's why most games have difficulty settings - to allow everybody but the clinically braindead to succeed.... Yes, I know you were kidding but this must be remembered whenever the "I had to work so hard/had to be so skilled/had to do whatever to gain X so you must too" line of argumentation rears its ugly head.


In fact - a bit thought provoking, TBC raiding would probably have been even better for more players if every single raiding trashmob and boss had its health and damage halved, bosses had some of their more retarded/interesting/deadly (take your pick depending on mood ) abilities removed, and then introducing a heroic mode for raid dungeons which is identical to the current or perhaps slightly tougher with, say, a Truly Heroic Badge from the end boss of each raid instance that could be used to buy Slightly Better Epics from a Truly Heroic Badge Vendor... Cutting edge guilds would probably hate the easy-mode raiding on normal mode and find doing the same raids in heroic mode not all that rewarding since most of the loot would be the same as normal but overall more players would see all the content in the expansion and those who did complete the content and got stuck in Truly Heroic Badge grinding would not be worse off than the many who are currently stuck in Badge of Justice farming.

...Perhaps that's going a bit far, but seriously, if raids are going to hinge as much on individual responsibility with minimal tolerance for errors in the next expansion as they do in TBC I would absolutely love to have "easy-mode" raiding for those who bring deadweight, passengers, poor-reactive-but-good-active, or simply less skilled players along, and the ability to play the same content on a harder difficulty for those who can hack it.


EDIT: But I digress. It does raise a question directly related to Blizzcon, however:

As a serious question - I may have overlooked it in the wowinsider liveblog - did the Blizzard representatives state anything about the difficulty level of the TBC raid content vs. intended Northrend raid content?

Muffinfactory / Water tap incoming for mages! Nice for them.

EDIT: Ret buffs inc, most likely like the new shaman talents. Ret pallies stealing warrior gear.

And shaman buffs, including mana spring buff.

what i should say that I hate giga2

I don't mind karaz and future 10 men having loot that is better then it should be if you make a raid progression chart. The way Deliverance posted it is a bit one sided.
Sure, not everyone has the time/guild/whatever to raid 25 men instances.
What is easily forgotten is that the people who DO put in the time/effort to go there get properly fucked, reducing the raiding basically to a sightseeing tour.
A guy in my guild calculated how much time we spend raiding 25 men from first hydross attempt to a dead illidan. 400 hours. That is 400 hours per person. And tbh I think the average is higher, we 'only' raid five days per week and five hours per raid. I know plenty of guilds that raid six days and do a much longer raid on sundays.

By making the loot kinda meaningless that those raiding guilds gathered through the investment of quite some time (it's not like just the raiding hours is enough, I guess you can easily add either 20% of that time to farm stuff or buy gold online.) is a bit disappointing.

But tbh I don't see a better solution either. The amount of guys doing 10 mens compared to those doing 25 men raids is very, very high and casual gamers did not really get their share since TBC. There is not enough stuff to do. I don't really understand why they don't make more five men instances personally. Every release like Hyjal and BT should bring 1-3 5 mens with it. It can't be that hard to code those up and no one expects spectacular stuff there. Just something to do with 3-4 bosses and some cool items.

It seems to me they don't cater enough to the non-big raid group players and then suddenly go 'oh fuck did not do enough for them again. let's do zg/aq20/karaz/za to make them happy for a while.'. And then a few months after they just do that again. Instead of continually releasing stuff that keeps people entertained.

Anyway, just wanted to bring up the ponit of the guys raiding hundreds of hours to then replace their hard earned epics with items from a 10 men that can be cleared within a few hours ...

edit:
You should not underestimate the effect that the high end raiding guilds have on the game and especially in keeping things going. Why do you think Blizzard is paying money for warcraft, starcraft and now wow pvp tournaments? Kindness at heart is surely not the reason. A competitive scene keeps the game going. Nihilum and Curse ddid not get a sponsor for nothing. People click their page. They got more fanboys then you would probably think.
A good model for that is the card game magic the gathering. That company spits out well over a million usd in prize money every year. Without any sponsoring. They want the competitive scene to live on. Even though they make only a ridiculous small amount of their income off those guys.
But without the tournament scene the casual gaming would sooner or later crash. Just like all the other card games that tried to copy the success.

Games need goals to achieve. Even if most people can't reach them. Trivializing pve content would mean the extinct of raiding guilds like nihi, they would just move on to the next game. If there is no challenge,why infest that much time and try to be first?
I'm pretty sure getting to that point would be very bad for the overall customer numbers of wow in the mid/long run. At least 80%+ of my guild would not have an active wow account if we had cleared all PvE content three months ago.

SSC and TK can both be cleared in a couple hours as well. SSC has 6 bosses, so does Zul'Aman. We haven't played Zul'Aman yet, so making guesses as to the difficulty of it isn't fair. In addition, we already know that more "hardcore" guilds will be able to speed run it for better loot.

Top guild on my server clears both SSC/TK on Tuesday night in about 4 hours?

So yeah it's possible. Problem is your normal raiding guild doesn't have 25 people that are that focused on the prize. I think we field about 10-15 people weekly who are hardcore, ready to go, ready every trash pull, consumables, know what to do, don't fail, etc, then we have 10 extras, who slack on buffs, go afk randomly, don't understand fights, die repeatedly, and we have to put them in lower responsibility roles, or just avoid letting them do anything important so we can progress.

Dare I say that when ZA comes out if I picked my top 10 raiders and formed a raid I'd see the loot that's equivalent to Kael/Vashj drops, no problem on a regular 3 day basis.

Killing Kael'thas? That's another story. I'm not sure I'll see Illidan before WotLK comes out, because I can't find 25 consistent players like my elite 10-15.

It isn't ideal, but I think overall they have done a good job. Giga is an eSports site so it isn't any wonder that they focus on the tournaments more than anything else. As a service that is free and without many ads (just the sponsor logos when you load up) I think it has been great.

Well looking at the server data:

US Realm Stats - WarcraftRealms.com

You play on a fairly large server. A big part of the problem with raiding is that everyone's perspective is incredibly skewed because of varying server sizes. One guy might play on a server with 15k, or 20k people in his or her faction. For them, they might have Illidan on farm status and want more. A lot of others are on smaller servers, maybe 4k-6k for their faction, and they might not have anyone in SSK yet. Its one of those things we hope they address in this xpac. If they can't fix this, then maybe they should just scale back on the raiding content. Maybe 3-4 less dungeons. Instead, use that design time to create other non-raiding content, which could be the PVP battleground zone. I'm more interested to see how that plays out than hearing about raid class balance.

Why isn't there a wowinsider liveblog from the class panel? Is there a liveblog anywhere else?

Oh, I agree that there is nothing wrong with them showing the SC and WC3 tourneys and the player interviews before and after, but I see no reason to not go to the panels that are in progress.

The class panel was not very insightful, no revelations were revealed nor interesting facts spoken. They seemed to spend most of the time talking about... old information and oversimplified analysis, not to mention again most of the questions were about old things that have been answered many times... "Why is Tactical Mastery...".

I believe there seemed to be more interesting knowledge coming from the Itemization panel.

The live stream from Giga. Straight from a Devs mouth.

It popped on the stream between the SC matches. Q&A session from the class panel I'd guess.

EDIT: Savior is awesome, while both of them are CRAZY, he's NUTS.

I think an interesting thing that would be fun to speculate is what kind of other hero classes would it be possible to come up with.

Death Knight to start off with, maybe Chieftan as a second, or something similiar?

I'm rather pissed that, from what I can find, this wasn't even addressed. I am really interesting in hearing if the developers truly believe that making TBC raid content this absurdly difficult was intentional. And I especially would like to know if Wrath of the Lich King will follow the same philosophy so I can cancel my sub right now.

Warmage. Instant Fears and Sheeps. you heard it hear first.

They said Hero classes... become one of your favorite War3 Heros.... so you have 4 per 4 races = 16 potential Hero Classes, granted half are already incorporated into the current classes.

Not to mention Tavern heros which could be quite interesting, however they stated Beastmaster wouldn't work.

Things like Dreadlords seem abit far fetched, aswell as Crypt Lords etc, others seem too lore driven (PoTM for eg) to be allowed for cross faction classes.