That's a unique perspective. In general, when people buy computer games or games of other kinds, they expect to be able to complete/win them and see most of what the game has to offer - they don't expect the goals to be set so high that most people will not be able to do so. For anywhere else where you want people to pay you on a monthly basis, the idea would seem to be to provide a succession of achievable goals such that a player always has a reason to come back for more, not unachievable ones.

You are possibly right, but would that really be much of a loss? Those who care about top progression will do so no matter where or whom the top is, those who do not care about how other guilds do but about their own performance will be affected even less by the loss of the previous top. Even trivialized the raiding game would still be challenging to most of the current customers and there seem, though probably I'm overly biased on this, to be a lot more players interested in "seeing all the content while not having to play an awful lot per week or having to be extremely good" than are interested in "competing to see the content before others and preferably progress should be hard and intensely timeconsuming" - and, of course, if a "heroic" version was made for raids, those who wanted to compete could go for the "heroic raids", and be the first to complete Heroic SSC, Heroic TK, &etc.

It is guaranteed that it would lose the game players in the mid/long run, but whether it would lose more from opening content up to the multitudes at the cost of the top players than are lost by content being forever outside the grasp of the former I don't know, but I doubt it is a simple answer.

And yet, three months ago most WoW1.0 players that stayed around for TBC probably had completed all the PvE content they were ever going to see in TBC except Karazhan. Today they are doing Karazhan and heroic versions of the 5 mans (same content, truly minor loot upgrades).

Do remember - you are truly exceptional amongst WoW players and so are many others on these forums. You mention spending 400 hours just raiding from Hydross to Illidan. That is almost 17 days of your life taken out of considerably less than half a year (and add farming time to that).

For anybody considerably less skilled, with less time on their hands, or less dedicated to raiding - and most players are less skilled, or they group up with those who are, or they are worse at organizing - attempting to do the same will take much longer time. With fewer raid days per week and possibly of fewer hours a time per raid, with raid rosters that are more shaky, and with generally being worse players, it'll take them many times the amount of time you put into it to achieve the same - which is why most of them will never, ever, do it. Life is too short.

Even nerfed to something that you would consider a walk in the park it would likely still take most of WoW's players longer time to do what you did already at the current level of difficulty, and that time would be spread out over more calendar time.

...As for your guild, you could farm Truly Heroic Raid Badges and perhaps get a shiny highlevel epic each for every 25-50 Illidan+Vasjh+Kael'thas kills with new badge rewards introduced every few months while waiting for new content to be released.

I hope next one will be some uber feral druid style hero class transforming into some HUGE bear that whacks the shit out of everything in its way

I complete agree with everything you've said, Deliverance.

Blizzard could, as you say, halve the the hit points and damage output of all trash and bosses throughout TBC and it would still be a very challenging for your average raiding guild out there.

The difficulty of the current raiding game is NOT only individual player skill (which is ridiculously demanding right now), but also difficult in the respect that you must find a guild with great organizational skill, being fortunate enough to find a guild where all your members are equally skilled and committed, as well as finding someone that can lead this mass to victory. It's all extremely difficult, extremely time consuming, and just way beyond what the average WoW player is capable of -- despite the fact that that individual may actually have the individual skill and time.

Hopefully the difference is very small. Also Hero classes seem not to upgrades of current classes, like Archmage to mage, but rather something completly different.

The biggest concern I have with new classes, is they will be around in the era of exotic talents, many of the 'normal' classes have quite a few basic and boreing ones plagued throughout their talent trees which in todays age Idoubt they will go back to.

Took their sweet time. Some other fancy stuff:

It is really not that easy. They would have to massively change content to let people who did not even enter SSC (and that seems to be the guys we are talking about, from what I took from various posts here) to beat Illidan. Basically you would have to redesign all fights to a lvl of lurker/gruul.
Otherwise the stuff requires too much planning/organisation. And if guilds don't manage to farm gruul/get a raid going to kill lurker, I seriously doubt they could get past RoS, Archimonde, Mother and Illidan even if all those mobs had 50% hp. You would probably have to reduce their dmg output to a level where people can hardly die any more as well.

I wouldnt be surprised if it was. Hyial wasnt done even if they said it was.
If the current encounter Gruul->KT would have been like they are now at the start, i am sure people would have visit Hyial and see a unfinished instance.

In one of the panels they said Arthas wont be in the game at the beginning of the Expansion, that instance will be patched in with a later content patch.
Lets hope they dont repeat the TBC story with adding many things to slow down raid progression like vials of eternity etc..

I'd like to see those changes, I figured they wouldn't admit they made a poor arena design and remove los obstacles. Would be nice if they removed arm time on traps, making freeze more of an on demand cc rather than hope they don't run away/blow scatter to trap cc. There is an endless list of possible improvements but more to the point, anyone have more specifics on hunter pvp changes?

Well that's one ban. Anyone else want to use this thread to bitch and moan about how hard the game is?

I don't think it's about being hard. WoW is not that complex. It is more about the fun question. I didn't find any encounter to be hard in what I had to do up until now in WoW. It's about learning the rhythm of a fight etc.

It is more about the preparations needed and time spending per week, what bothers many people including me. It's just plain stupid, that instances of a quality like Naxxramas or Black Temple are visited only by a very small amount of players.

I am trying to figure out ideas, how to change this. Perhabs the attunement for the Eye could be defeating Kel'Thuzad and C'Thun and for the Northrend instances Archimonde and Illidan.... So most people would see these encounters at least once even if it is 10 levels late.

Am I the only one seeing current content being too harsh on the dead weight individuals, instead of focusing on consuming the lets say 22 of the best players in guild? Instead the pressure in many encounter is pushed to the remaining 3 players, and just waiting them to make the usual mistake.

Lets say for example Teron fight. Sure, it aint hard to do your job for the adds. But instead of making it dependant on certain individuals, it could be more of cooperative action between -23 persons instead of 1 sinlge player who can be the not so bright part of the raid.

And no, I dont necesarily mean that Teron is too hard fight. It aint, but as an example to present the, in my opinnion, a bit twisted encounterdesign. Focusing on many cases to individual person performance that can lead the rest of the raid wipe 100% sure.

No Im not intentionally pushing the limits on your post Kaubel. Im just presenting other approach for the encounters for being handled (Atleast personally I just love cooperative games where advancing with someone, instead of doing small singleplayer events that can lead into end of raid).

Edit: putting back because I just got quoted

Eh, he said that was just what they were tossing around, but it would be spun as best as possible.

When the guy asked 'how do deathknights fit lore-wise into both factions?' the dude should have just said 'Paladins', shrugged and 'next question pls'. All there is to say lore wise really. It's kinda disapponiting that they apparently do not have the guts (or ability) to give the factions different classes and balance them. Hint: You do not want to give those classes serious buffs, otherwise it should not be that hard, should it?

Also why we are at lore stuff already, Deathknight probably should have been in TBC already and just be the paladin counterpart while palliance could run a shaman like counterpart both on elf/nature basis or on gnome/tech abilities. That would have solved stuff a bit more elegant imo.

The Deathknight academy was more of an reference into the way of them regreting their decision on the dark side instead of actually literally just wondering after graduation party that what the hell is going on. Indeed reasonable approach for the start to advance the reasoning of Deathknights.

How else do you raise the bar? I distinctly remember the 40-man days, and it was far easier and far mroe common to drag 10+ dead weight peopel thorugh an instance. Many guilds did it intentionally to sell them some epics. Raids in TBC are much harsher on allowing sloppy play, either through DPS checks or attrition effects or various other means. The onyl way to emphasize group skill is to make it the entire group's skill(or attention, or however you'd like to gauge the difference between a successful raid and an unsuccessful one) that is being tested. If you allow 3 stupid deaths to have no impact, then you are right back where you started, because if you ARE bringing 25 dedicated people to an instance, it lowers the bar for their performance as a whole.

So how do you emphasize the cooperation between the "good" people without encouraging sloppy play or free-riding? Not to mention, at what point is it ok for there to be tagalongs? You gave 2 and 3 person examples. Why not 4, or 5?

Good concepts. I think a solution is to make SSC and TK and BT Hyjal 10 mans and then have heroic 25 man versions. So there is a parallel progression. This would help out larger raids with recruitment as peopel would be not so far behind gearwise comming from 10 mans to 25 mans.

Keep Kara but with tier 4 only in the heroic version and then stagger it so that SSC drops tier 4 in 10 mans and tier 5 in heroic etc. So the 10 mans are 1 tier behind. Keep the lockouts across 10 and 25 mans so that you can't farm SSC for tier 4 in a 10 man and then the next day do it on a 25 man:/ Just as an example, for future implementation.

Speaking of which. Any info on ZA gear? Will it be 2 or 3 tier 7 drops or more like a ZG set? 3 or 5 piece set, any set?

Thats actually quite interesting idea. It would let everyone see once the old content. Sort of an normal great quest trough old instance. You just need to run trough it once, and experience the great content (Naxx) once was. If well executed, it could work just great as part of the moan between the "casuals" how they never experience certain content. It should be more of a trip.

That would be awful and would lock even more people out of content. Can you imagine trying to level up your bloodelf, and trying to convince 39 other people to go kill cthun so you could get into raids? And you had to convince all those people that they should do it for you and get absolutly no loot, becuase cthun loot(cept the ring) is shit at 70? Really just wouldnt work. Im pretty sure every server has some group going back and doing all the old stuff. If people really wanna see it they can tag along. Even at 70 the truly casuals prolly cant do cthun.

While stuff like that may seem like a good idea on paper.... having to flag for raids always ends up being a pain in the ass when it comes to recruiting new members or getting the full 25 people that are online keyed(damn another raid canceled because we we're 1 healer short and there was a priest online not keyed).


As for the ZA loot, why are people even bothering to complain about loot while they have no clue where it comes from exactly? Those items could be from the "Hard-mode" timed quest in ZA, or the harder optional bosses....Even back Pre-TBC AQ20/ZG dropped loot that was better then alot of stuff in MC and only slightly worse then BWL loot(better then some) and no1 seemed to care alot back then.

I'd say that to really "experience" an instance you need to complete it as the designers intented, at the right level with the right gear, not bruteforcing your way through it with sheer numbers. Doing that you might as well watch a few videos.

I honestly don't think they'll ever revisit/retune old raid content or slow down with the level increase, casual raiders are just screwed in that regard.

No big deal, I heard there's 40 people who all enjoy leveling new chars that can get you to C'thun in no time. :P

But yeah, that won't happen ever. The only that they do is losen up attunement, most definitely not making them harder.