Kael'thas was an awesome first kill indeed, but I wouldnt feel cheapened if they nerfed him because in the end we still beat him. It doesnt diminish our accomplishment in any way and you know they have to open the flood gates before Sunwell is released anyway. If they just remove the attunement they would be doing a huge mistake since everyone would rush into BT/MH undergeared and get crushed.

My bet is that Kael and Vashj will get nerfed in 2.3 or some minor patch a couple months before 2.4.

Enrages are nice and fun if executed well. There are very few Enrages that are part of the encounter and that are badly executed imo.

Prime example of a well executed 'Enrage' is Kel'Thuzad - 40% hits and chaos ensues. Kill him before he kills you. The first time you start nuking and you see you will make it is awesome with a burst of shouting and joy on Ventrilo. I really enjoy things like that. Another good one would be Vashj phase2. You can't keep that up forever, at one point attrition will kick in and you will start lagging behind and inevitably wipe. Teron Gorefiend is another totally different kind of 'Enrage' - take too long and you will have lost to many people to Shadows of Death and thus wipe. Reliquary phase 2 is another very original 'Enrage'. It doesn't feel like an enrage, but it most definitely is one - Go OOM and you can kiss your ass goodbye, you will wipe eventually... you can LoH maybe once or twice, then Last Stand or whatever but eventually if you take too long after that point you WILL die. Illidan with the castable Enrage is very nice too, having to pull him in a trap to remove the enrage, the same principle was in place with Faerlina. I honestly thought that was one of the better Enrages in the game, just because of the freedom you had. Healer heavy? No problem, just silence her just as she enrages, because you can heal through the Poison damage. DPS heavy? No problem again, just silence her pre-emptively and remove the Poison damage from the fight. However, if poorly executed you will run out of NPCs to silence her with and you will wipe. Also Phase 1 reliquary has the same castable Enrage again, having to survive it for a few seconds and then go back to the old routine.

Those are a few examples of really nicely done timers. Then you have bad ones, but those are mostly Berserks. I don't think there's a single Berserk in the game that I thought was fun, but in all honesty most of them were necessary. I most definitely remember fights such as Ouro, Twins and Sapphiron taking forever because of losing too many people in the start - then we got swung at by the Berserk. It was deserved, you shouldn't be able to still kill a boss with half your raid dead. That's why I think Illidan is lacking something, honestly. I think that you shouldn't be allowed to lose half your raid to poor play but still kill him. A few weeks back we killed Illidan after losing 11 people. I don't think that's right.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a "You lose"-situation, just for example in the Illidan fight you have Akama downstairs fighting off adds. It happens sometime in Phase 1 (Can't even remember what %) but as soon as he goes down there, have a timer start. After 15 minutes, Akama loses his upper hand and he has to retreat upstairs. You have to go help him out to support him. Your tanks for in phase 2 can actually do something useful and you have a few choices - do you want to prolong how long it lasts and add DPS to the adds that are being tanked or do you just offtank and nuke Illidan? After 20 minutes, more and more adds will come and at a faster pace... Eventually making you lose control on the situation no matter what. Adds run loose and you lose. In my opinion that would be a perfect addition to the fight and in all honesty would make it feel epic. Just like Kel'Thuzad used to feel.

Doubt that. With all buffs to classes and new gear, guilds that lack dps will kill them both. There is no need for further nerfs. If they lack coordination, have idiots in raids or bad raid leader i dont think they deserve end game.

"How do I beat this fight with the people I have" and "how do I maximise my personal DPS" are completely different questions to answer than "what should our policy be for time off" and "how big of a jerk can we tolerate in order to fill our shaman spot". It's not just semantics, if you don't see any real difference between the two then there's not really any point in trying to discuss anything.

It doesn't make for meaningful interaction with anyone in the thousands of players per server outside of that small group, hence does not contribute to the "Massively Multiplayer" part of the game.

It's still no different than a sports team. I was a rower throughout high school and college, and I was perfectly happy to have someone I wouldn't choose to hang out with in the boat if they fit better in that position(and it happened often enough). To give an extreme example, my coach actually rowed with a pair of guys one of whom had cheated with the other's girlfriend. They hated each other, but could still row well together. In a competitive group activity, ability is more important than personality until personality interferes with the activity itself. Perhaps you view the game differently, but to me WoW is a competitive group activity, only removed from sport by the fact that it is not a physical activity.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. It seems as if you're implying that unless you're doing your damndest to interact with the greatest number of people possible, you're not encouraging massive multiplayer ideals. Or that unless you're making it possible for everyone to interact with groups of other people? I'm a bit confused.

And what sense did removing the attunement for SSC and TK make? If people cant get the coordination to kill Magtheridon they dont deserve to go to TK, right?

Blizzard doesnt care about that, they are deliberately slowing down content, once the Sunwell is ready it means the hardcore guilds can move on to that and you can open up BT/MH for the guilds that are stuck on Kael & Vashj.

I'll be very surprised if they leave it the way it is.

Uh, even if this game was only 5 man instances, I'd do most of it with the guildmates/people I know are good. It would hardly make me interact more with other people. In fact, before I knew what raiding was or had a guild, I'd make a list of people I had grouped with who were competent and tried to only group with them / people they knew.

If KT gets nerfed now that we are learning him i would definitely feel cheated. Would actually piss me off quite substantialy. Nerfing him after our kill would probably annoy me as well since it would mean lesser guilds getting easier into hyjal/bt.

They already buffed t5 content with the last patch (more loot) and with all the 2.3 class changes, it should make kt more doable.
I wouldnt mind if they remove the kt trash at all.

Indeed, thats potentially the only 'nerf' to him which would help significantly without reducing the encounter to a 'lesser standard', not much deal for guilds who have killed him but its sure as hell going to help guilds who haven't, they should also nerf that trash to hell aswell.

Was anyone else annoyed that they removed the 1 hour Vael cockblock after downing him with it in place?

Aw... kiting them was more fun.

Yes. Though he was such an excruciating kick-in-the-nuts fight as a Horde guild, it had to be done. The original Vael and Broodlord fights were so unfair to Horde that it still makes me angry. Implementing suicide rotations on Broodlord because a single tank death made the threat situation untenable down the road was such BS.

I remember watching videos at that time of Horde Mages primarily casting Arcane Missiles because of the threat issues.

I really felt for you guys.

Well, pushback from Vael's Fire Nova and the 8-debuff limit made caster DPS generally pretty terrible for that fight...but yeah, Arcane Missiles was the basic Mage spell for all of BWL, and Warlocks were a huge liability unless they specced MD/Ruin for threat reduction. 8/8 Nemesis was also amazing.

edit: Man, this thread is derailed. I'm still enjoying it.

Amen (I was a horde mage back then).

Berserk is still a copout mechanic if the mob simply kills you after X minutes have passed. Mechanics like Loatheb, Huhuran, Maexxna, Reliquary of Souls and the like are the closest to "berserk" mechanics that should be used. The rest just feel cheap.

My guild freuently runs 7-8 healers on Void Reaver and while we have some very good dps-ers, I doubt there has been a kill without 1-2 of the DPS (minimum) being truly awful.

We beat the enrage timer by about a full minute.

So it's hard to believe you had no deaths and flawless execution.

I also run with another group that fails to beat the timer and generally has what I can only call "very substandard dps".

I'm not persuaded that given VR's location his "timer" is even slightly unreasonable. In fact, I can't imagine how a guild that can kill Al'ar (who while bypassable is clearly the first boss in TK) would have any trouble with VR's timer. So I'd say that timer works as intended.

Oh btw, tell your old guild's priests to all keep up SW:Pain and the druids to spam an occasional moonifre. If you were executed flawlessly otherwise, that would doubtless have been the extra dps you needed.

In fact, I'm a little confused what the rage is here about the similar timers. Yes, it's an artifical mechanic, but it's pretty obvious why it's in there:

"Dear Guild, you will require xxxx dps to move forward. If you don't have it, go back and try again. Love, Blizzard."

Seems like this is an awful lot better than the synthetic mechanism on say Huhuran: "Hang out for a few mins doing nothing and then kill the bug in a few seconds without losing anyone or try again." Vael, Twin Emps, Patchwerk's were measures of your guild's then-current abilty to output enough dps -- which included having the healers to keep that dps alive -- to move on.

TBC has relatively speaking much less strict dps checks. And they really don't seem onerous at all. Gruul? Leotheras? Reaver? Al'ar? If anything, it sounds like they are less onerous in Hyjal / BT relatively speaking as there has been talk of beating those instances being doable in Tier 4 gear.

Pre-nerf, gruul, mag, hydross and leo had pretty high dps requirement.
It was challenging but the pot usage was imense.

For example Supremus, change his enrage to 6-8min instead of 15.
If you do him flawless, its fine but when i look at some of our kills where half raid dead because of slacking then you shouldnt get the kill.
Same with najentus, if you lose to many people or the bubble is up too long and he heals for too much then gg try again.

There are few really challenging DPS checks remaining in TBC raid content. This largely, I think, due to player complaints when there were a lot of challenging DPS checks that were simply too hard. Gruul v1, Mag v2 (Mag v1 was impossible, I don't recall anyone ever beating it), Hydross v1, Leotheras v1...all of these were very challenging even for top raiding guilds. It was rewarding to beat them and to a certain extent I miss the intensity of those DPS races, though I acknowledge they were way too hard for their place in progression.

Right now, the T5 DPS checks are Kael Phase 2/3 and Vashj Phase 2...both of which are more about coordination and efficiency than pure DPS or raid-stacking.

I'm pretty sure Mag v1 was pretty much the same as Mag v2, except that if you let the Channelers get a heal off at all you were completely screwed. Nihilum was getting all the channelers down on the original Mag before he received the very small initial nerf, and it wasn't really the nerf that made their kill possible.

I think part of the lack of "true" DPS-race encounters is that in the end they simply encourage raid-stacking, which Blizzard has come out publicly against (4H discussion at BlizzCon).

If you watch the Nihilum kill video of Leotheras v1, they have no melee DPS at all, save for Druids in cat form when they're not tanking. One could make a good argument this was made necessary by the design of the encounter before v2.

The flip side would be Kaz'Rogal, where ranged DPS are all mana-users, and therefore a potential liability, whereas the melee can go hog-wild on a stationary target without fear of the Mark. Rogues/Fury Wars are also top single-target DPS anyway.