3-4 months from entering Naxx to having a guild defeat Naxx. It was one month from the defeat of Kael to the clearing of Hyjal/BT.... I don't know if the problem is so much the lack of content as opposed to the lack of challenging content. Generally fights now either fall into three catagories; "Easy" "Doable with execution" and "Depends on Luck".

The luck type is a dumb artificial way of creating difficulty, which results in people complaining and the fight eventually getting changed. The problem with the first two types is that for cutting edge guilds it will only take them a few hours at max to learn. Once the fight is done by a few of these guilds, all the information necessary to beat the fight goes to the masses. At this point, any fight that falls into the first two catagories is once again beaten really quickly by skilled and semi-skilled players who have the strategies.

Right now the only things holding people up are farming, attuning, and Kael'Thas. Farming isn't even so much of an issue as we're not farming the crazy consumables that were used in the patch, fights are balanced around this now which makes them statistically alot more managable without all the preperation. Blizzard is just stuck, they don't know how to make enough content that is generally challenging without being cheap and frusterating.

The whole thing is a double edge sword. They've stretched us all they can to beat some of these fights to the points where alot of them we are playing near perfectly. The problem is we are becoming used to playing in that manner now; theres really no more devices Blizzard has to make the fights harder aside from gear, consumables, timesinks, and luck. They need some new tricks to get people stumped on fights.

Theres also the "Broken" catagory, which Blizzard has gotten much faster at fixing. The moment it leaves the "broken" catagory, it is usually beaten relatively quickly.

Well to be fair 2.2 was a lackluster patch for every demographic. 2.2 took a long time and brought no new content.

My concern with this content lag is in the tuning of sunwell when that time comes. How many weeks of Hyjal/BT farming will be calculated into the gear requirements for this zone? If 2.4 ships at the end of November we will be sitting around 15 illidan kills. Will sunwell be tuned too easy for us? If it is tuned for us (which I doubt) it would be complete unapproachable for guilds just getting wet in BT now.

Guess we will have to see. I just hope the 10 man is fun.

The only bottleneck in Naxx was the Four Horseman. Everything before and after it was defeated within a week after it was first seen. If 4H hadn't required the sort of raid-stacking and exhaustive analysis it did for the first guilds to figure out and beat the encounter, Naxx would have been cleared in 2 months, tops.

We killed Illidan in early August, and we're still enjoying the 2-3 night raid weeks. We did not finish Nax in classic due to attrition (decided against recruiting in light of 25 man raids), so the "vacation" from progression is a welcome break. I see this as a great time to completely equip our players in both primary and secondary gear sets and build the guild bankroll for whatever the Sunwell may bring. But you're right--the Sunwell is probably a long ways away and our attention spans will begin to wane very soon.

I hope that Zul'Aman adds some life to PVE, but I think its attractiveness will be very limited to Illidan farming guilds. Remember that Zul'Aman is designed to be completed in a single night and will have a 3-day reset, so I don't think its progression will be much more than a speed bump. It will probably turn into an alt-fest after a couple weeks. Carefully filled itemization holes, single-loot quest pieces (ala ZG trinket), and quality rewards for the timed events will be needed to keep us interested.

In the meantime, our guild is hoping for AV re-balancing and group queueing. We're not a heavily focused PVP guild, so occasionally dragging everyone out together in the BGs can be a lot of fun. We will also have a lot of holidays in the coming months (including Halloween landing on Wednesday, a normal raid night), so we will probably take a few nights or weeks off from PVE before the end of the year.

To answer the second question--I do think it would have been better for the content to be better paced. Like many other guilds, we killed Vashj and Kael a enough times to get keyed and have since mostly ignored the T5 instances. I would have been happy to kill Kael'thas more than twice and see more guildies get their T5 BP or Kael quest pieces. Delaying the release of Hyjal & BT another month or two would have been ideal.

We have gone back to the SSC/TK in the past weeks and realized a couple things. They have finally debugged and balanced the instances to the point of being mostly fun and enjoyable. However, our initial experiences with the trash and bugged encounters left such painful scars in our memories that we hated being back there anyways. I would never want to spend more time in the SSC/TK of the past, even if it meant that the content was better paced. I really hope Blizzard tunes this content correctly the next time around.

Well then I suppose nothing has changed, Blizzard is just balancing and fixing stuff better/faster is all. When the game works right, very few things are actually difficult. Just shows the only things holding up people before were the errors, bugs, artificial timesinks, and bad tuning. Without all that, they can't keep up with the rate that players beat stuff...

People are also used to stacking stuff now, and while not required it certainly makes some fights easier. We've adapted to their "tricks" and they've stopped holding us up with broken fights for months on end.

Better pacing would be nice, they just have to cut the head off the progression guilds and make them wait. If 4% of the population is getting past Kael'Thas, theres no reason to open up anything past him yet.... You risk a small number of players leaving in order to keep a large number of people on the edge of their seats. Who knows what they are thinking, probably trying to make everyone happy by making sure there are no gaps. Unfortunately by speeding up the content releases, they are running out of content for the expansion too fast.

I've been saying that for a while - it's an unprecedented gap. Hellgate is out in a month, and I believe Warhammer is scheduled for about the same time as 2.3. They better knock that one out of the park - after such a delay expectations will be sky high, and they can't count on the competition to be LotR and Vanguard-esque disappointments forever.

For pacing, in my opinion, they should have put SSC into T4 and moved Mag to T5. That would have allowed them to release with only T4, and push T5 to early summer, and T6 to the fall.

Alternatively, the pacing they chose to go with would make much more sense if they actually were going to follow through with yearly expansions - would you guys feel the same malaise if you were playing a guild invite to the WotLK beta, which would be dropping in January or February?

I don't think the drakes are the hold up. You could do a different vanity mount for each season. I think it's that they are trying to rein in mudflation compared to PvE gear.

Not really. Shit happens sometimes (look at 2.2), but they made a conscious design decision to try and frontload (almost) all of the raid content in TBC (was BT supposed to be in at release, anybody know?). There is no evidence that they are more then a month or so behind right now. The question is what are the implications of that choice.

Why dont they use Normal/heroic modes for raiding instances also? It would solve the problem with only ~4% of people seeing Illidan etc. Normal mode would be rather casual, and heroic mode what we now consider hardcore raiding. Maybe heroic could be even more challenging since you gain certain gear level from normal mode. And if thats not enough to give time for next expansion, maybe add built in competitive raiding system like they added to zul aman "speed runs".

Go back in time to April when guilds were in an absolute uproar. Nobody could raid TK/SSC because they were too hard, consumable use was rampant and getting quite ridiculous, and quite frankly a lot of good raiders and guilds called it quits.

When we saw 2.1 coming out, my first reaction was, "Why the hell are they bringing out two new raiding instances when the 2 current ones are completely fucked?"

Sure after 2.1 SSC and TK were pretty good as well, but it felt to me like they were forcing content out faster than players were ready to absorb it.

We dropped kael/vashj in June and never really farmed them, simply killed them for attunement and moved on. I don't think it was a good system at all. They had excellent loot tables but there was already a more desireable place to be spending raid hours, which instantly obsoleted "new" content (kael/vashj).

BT/Hyjal should not have gone in until 2.2 -- which should have been without voice chat and happened in July or August. This would have allowed guilds to gear up in T5 content and get ready for the next big thing.

Honestly, my first reaction when I saw Nihilum had downed Illidan back in June was, "I'm glad I am not them.. they are going to be bored for quite some time now.", because I knew it would be a LONG time before any new content would be coming out. There was no carrot on the end of the stick until 2 months later when sunwell was announced.

With the 2.2 changes to SSC/TK it makes it seem like Blizzard is acknowledging the mistake they made with SSC/TK (making it undesireable to ever run after attunement). By putting some drops there that are best of slot, or damn near it until you are wielding Illidan/Archi loot, they give a much better reason for people to go back. That coupled with the trash tone downs should make quicker, more enjoyable zone farming overall.

I hope Blizzard learns from their mistake. A year ago if you asked me what system I'd prefer, a ton of content up front versus raid content that was trickled out every few months, I would have said give me all the content at once! My viewpoint on the issue has greatly changed as my guild Farms Illidan for 7 months (30+ times) before the next raid zone.

I think 1 new Tier of raiding every 6 months with an expected 2-3 month progression period + 2-3 month farming period would be absolutely fantastic.

The fact that the time from TBC release to the 2.1 patch release was 5 months seems like the biggest mistake Blizzard has made since some of the server performance issues from original release. Some of the raid tuning issues and the slow response to them hurt too. A few other factors would be the lack of PTR time spent on Serpentshrine, Tempest Keep; the big swings in difficulty gruul took; and a general distaste from players for keying or more aptly rep grind keying.

A staggered, well thought out raid zone release schedule would be nifty but the logistics of it are fairly unenviable. The way patches have been released since TBC hit the streets is pretty poor. Holding up a lot of fixes to wait on Sound changes, VOIP, raid zones, is not wise. The increase in hot fixes between patches are keep things afloat but there is still room for a good bit of honest dissatisfaction, beyond the usual complaining/stupidity.

The steadier pacing would be nice for guilds that want to be competitive but don't want to raid 6 days a week. When we had to do sepentshrine and tempest keep in a given week before we could start clearing black temple to work on a new boss, there's a huge different in the amount of "progression time" between a guild that raids 4 nights a week and 6 nights a week. Essentially the 6 night a week guild works on new bosses for 3 days.

Pre-tbc we would be one of the first guilds to clear MC, BWL etc despite shorter raiding schedules. That was nice.

People complained about the release of content in Wow 1.0 (it's too slow!), so it is hard to make everyone happy.


More communication would be great.

There are a lot of implications to the fast paced release of raid content even beyond the major gaps for the top guilds. One of the most significant, I think, is the feeling that less progressed guilds have of being so far behind. Back in the pre-TBC days, it was rare that an established guild was ever THAT far behind the top guilds. We raided 4 nights a week, 4-5 hours a night, and were a top 10-20 worldwide guild in part because it was impossible to fall that far behind.

The flood of content in TBC gave marginal value to almost every additional raid hour, which gives the super hardcore guilds out there a huge edge over their semi-casual counterparts. Nihilum cleared black temple before the VAST majority of guilds could even zone in. For people of a competitive bent who can't raid 6-7 days a week, that's discouraging. I know one of the proverbial straws for a lot of people from LA who quit was the fact that they no longer felt competitive. Back then we still had strong raiders and we were raiding on the same schedule that had gotten us world top 10 kills pre-TBC, and yet were were a full zone behind, because without the "farming" window of staggered content, we had no chance to really catch up in pure progression. I'm positive that the fact LA no longer exists as a raiding guild is due at least in part to this.

Sadly, they have a need to show the expansion pack as the product, not the patches (which we pay for monthly) we get after that provides the content.

WoW there was no raid game really so they started off with nothing and dribbled it in.
With TBC from a business pov what are they giving us? a new continent and a few more levels, oh and 50% more stamina. They couldn't let it go as just that so they 'aparently' shoved all* their raid content in at once.

This ment there were no artifical gaps between progress to keep things at a steady pace but a frontload of (unfinished, untested) content for players to just delve into.

The only way to really solve it is to go back to WoW style:
Continent + 1st level of raiding on release.
Every 3 months or so implement the next tier of content (meaning test 1 month before~).

Example
Jan 09 - Release WoTLK (T7)
April 09 - Release T8 content (Old God)
June 09 - Release 10man v2
July 09 - Releae T9 content (Malygos)
Sep 09 - Release 10man v3
Oct 09 - Release T10 content (Arthas)

If they intend to do 2 instances per Tier of content then things get ikky, fair enough technically its better to have 2 short instances than 1 long one, perhaps having one slightly harder (so T8, then T8.5) being released 1 month later would also help pad things out.


However to announce a new content as the EXP-Pack, and then say that half the instances aren't implemented yet is bad for PR, then again saying they are ready and being left with what we had to deal with obviously isn't good.

Biting the bullet and stating "Look at these cool zones we have for you, you wont get them right away but this is what we have planned and will release in our content patches" is what we will get either way, they should admit it and be honest upfront. This would also mean they could make sure as each thing is released its tested and tuned alot better than how things were in TBC, almost everything at once, and all of it overtuned or broken.

As far as this question goes, I would have much preferred it be spaced out than front-loaded. One of the things that I think burned out a lot of people back in the early SSC days was that there was so much content in front of us. The thought of getting all the way through SSC and TK (at that early 2.0 time, very hard) only to be faced with 2 new instances immediately afterward which might be even tougher and time consuming caused a lot of stress on progression-minded folks who perhaps began to feel it was too much to commit to.

Now what we have is a situation where all of the content is complete and nothing new is coming for a good while, perhaps leading to more burnout/lack of fun. My guild raids 4 days a week and we really didn't spend much time at all in SSC and TK to farm it the way we did with MC, BWL, AQ, Naxx. We basically completely SSC and TK, killed the end bosses a few extra times for loots and attunements, and then hit Hyjal and BT without looking back. While at the time I was happy to get out of there and move on to bigger and better things, I look back and think we could have spent a lot more time in those instances and been OK with it since we were gearing up for 2 new instances to come. We also didn't kill Gruul and Magtheridon that many times in the grand scheme of things, because we wanted to move on the next content and continue progressing, which is great, but we've now sped through all of it fast enough to have quite a break ahead of us. I'm fine with them obsoleting content, but it definitely should be paced a bit more than it has, in my opinion.

Also of note is that as much as we all lauded the change from the 1 tier token system in the early 2.0 days to 2 tokens, it causes us to gear up extremely fast, especially when you have such small (5 pc) sets. Its kind of nice to be able to pick up offset stuff once everyone has their gear, but at the same time one of the things that keeps people interested after everything is on farm is to continue gearing up their character - not because loot is the focus, but because they want to be as prepared as possible for the next challenge. If you gear up too fast, you might lose that interest much quicker than normal.

I can only imagine how a guild like Nihilum or even EJ feels, as we've only just killed Illidan this week. Although, I will admit, I'm looking forward to taking it easy for a while and not raiding as much. But I imagine in a month's time, even if ZA is close to launch, I'll be dying for Sunwell get pushed out.

We were US 5th on Illidan, and perhaps some malaise is beginning to creep in. It seems inevitable that unrest will increase as we wait for more content. Two or three days of Hyjal and BT is all we do now, and will probably be all we do until the Sunwell is released. Regarding the gap: yes, it almost certainly would have helped if instances were staggered a little better. More content, tuned better and released faster, would be great. These points are both obvious and moot. I really don't see Blizzard changing the way the develop things (ie: slowly, and in a way that makes long-term pre-planning of things like smooth instance staggering impossible). I also don't see them diverting any more resources towards an endgame that such a small proportion of the raid game gets to experience.

Just about the only way I see them removing gaps like we're in now is to introduce some mechanism to recycle or extend existing raid content. Heroics worked wonders for 5-mans. There are any number of ways that similar concepts could be applied to 25-mans to fill in the gaps between new instance releases. Something like this - limited re-use of legacy content, for example - would require less development time and hopefully serve to hold players' interest during dry spells in content.

Barring something like that, the only way to eliminate the gaps is for Blizzard to release a never-ending cascade of perfectly-timed and perfectly-tuned instances. The game is made by human beings, not by superhuman coding machines, though, so you can expect to continue to see both tuning errors and release delays. The raid game undoubtedly gets a lot of development dollars, but it's certainly not an infinite supply. Immutable rule of production - you can get it done fast, you can get it done cheap, and you can get it done right, but you can't have all three.

At some level I like the time off -- it's let me get more into PvP and playing games other than WoW, which I couldn't do much of when we were working on new content.

That said, I would have much rather they spread out content like Gurg suggested. Having a month or two of progression plus a month or two of farming makes for a nice balance, and lets mid-tier guilds catch up to top-tier guilds. And as others have said, having a glut of content is far more beneficial for hardcore guilds because they can both farm and progress. More casual raiding guilds have to generally choose -- farm or progress.

At this point I still genuinely like raiding, but I can feel the disinterest from some of the rest of the guild. We rarely have >10 on outside of raidtimes and a bunch of people seem far more excited about playing DotA than raiding, especially Hyjal. At least we're firstpulling just about everything at this point....assuming we have enough/the right people online.

With small, high-attendance guilds like DV, the sharding happens surprisingly quickly. We've gotten TONS of rogue/mage/druid tokens, and I think myself and our other druid have full sets of T6 chests and I've 5/5 T6 balance gear. It's pretty ridiculous when you consider how many more times we're going to farm these bosses before any new meaningful content is released.

We are just doing the content on our own pace. It kinda feels good that there are plenty of time to catch up to the guilds who had done it all.

There was probably another factor with the release of BT/Hyjal. They seriously fucked up SSC/TK. I think the timing of BT and Hyjal was good if only to placate the raiding community.

I seem to recall Naxx coming out fairly expeditiously (sinking feeling I used that word incorrectly) after AQ40. For my guild at the time, we got our first Viscidus kill (as the last boss in the zone to be attempted) the very Monday night before Naxx went live, so there was never even a break in progression. I don't recall a feeling that content was released too slowly, except maybe for the absolute top guilds who ideally would have progression content available at all times (not realistic at all).

Regarding an earlier comment about "10-man raiding guilds," I think that term describes something the designers did not intend. 10-mans (like 20-mans in vanilla WoW) are intended to be a stepping stone to higher accomplishments, by training and gearing players in a lower-stakes environment. Stopping in Karazhan is like doing 5-mans only and expecting content to be released periodically with higher-item-level blues to replace your old blues.

Arena Season 2 has gone on for a LONG time and will continue to go until 2.3 crawls its way off the PTRs. I know they're trying to release Arena gear to go along with PvE gear...but it's not like releasing it in 2.3 will sync it up. Tier 6 gear has been available for a long time, so what's the problem with releasing its equivalent now? Maybe it's just the lingering dust of the train wreck that was the 2.2 PTR, but I'm really irritated with Blizzard's patching these days. Things you want/need get held up for weeks or months because they're inextricably bundled with things you don't give a crap about. As a result, it's hard to get excited for any new content because it is tested and released at such a glacial pace.

I'm content to keep raiding 7 hours a week and I'm not going to quit the game any time soon, but I am really bored with WoW right now. Raiding is fun, even if it's trivial farming. I do some dailies, I play 10 Arena games a week for points...hell, I can't even play my favorite bracket (2s) because the SR changes made Warlock teams unbeatable for my composition and we have Gladiator locked down. If you aren't into levelling alts, there's really nothing compelling to do. Thank God the TF2 beta came along when it did.

I don't know about "did not intend" but I'd say rather "did not foresee." Karazhan was an experiment and at TBC release time the official answer was that they had no additional 10-man dungeons planned.

Now, moving ahead to WotLK, my understanding is that they're planning on a real 10-man progression in parallel to the 25-man raids, leaving four progression tracks: PvP, 5-man/heroics, 10-mans, and 25-mans, with 25-mans offering the best PvE rewards but not being the only path with a clear progression any more.

The larger concern for the casual raiding guild is always being behind. We never cleared Naxx, and that meant that in tBC we had to farm the new dungeons to gear for Karazhan, while other guilds cleared Karazhan wearing T3.

I have to really chivvy the guild along, not let them go to Gruul to get a DST drop, and keep pushing new bosses constantly in order to have the gear to see the new content. The prospect of the large gap for the large amount of introduced content is nice, since maybe we can catch up.

Though I think that the spacing/gear requirements should allow for middle-end guilds to see the latest content, and get enough drops for the next zone. (That doesn't mean full T6 for my entire guild, it means 4/5 T6 for the tanks, 2/5 T6 for most other people.)

As the raid leader for a guild that's 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK, I can tell you that having a vast amount of content ahead of us is really encouraging. We didn't enter SSC/TK until 2.1 and we've basically made progress at a snail's pace, but it's easier to be fine with this knowing that there is a definite end that is going to change in 2 months time. We're not going to be stuck struggling through SSC/TK when Sunwell is released and then stuck in BT/Hyjal when the expansion is released.

This was the case for us with pre-BC content. We'd just make it through BWL and be entering AQ40 and then Naxx would come out and it was always somewhat discouraging to know that you were so far behind and that you'd probably never catch up. With this style there is some glimmer of hope that we may reach near the end before that end gets pushed farther ahead.