Dawme

Off course we are bored. We raid 2 days a week and then, see ya next week ...

The main problem, in my opinion, is that Tier 6 was absolutely too easy. The encounters themselves were pretty good but the huge difference between naxx and t6 raid zones is that reclear is so short. You're wiping at 10% on archimonde the tuesday night (or monday for you US people) ? No problem, you're back on him after raid reset in a couple of hours. When you stopped trying sapph, or KT, you knew you had a VERY long and difficult reclear to come. This was the real stop point for many guilds. So that's a point : short instances aren't good. They're too easy, not so epic, not so fun.
Now on the encounters specifically, tier 6 (and arguably parts of tier 5) were absolutely too easy. Half of Black temple is free epics, same goes for Hyjal. So what, you have azgalor, archimonde, gurtogg, ros, shahraz, illidan who can be considered tier 6 encounters. Everything else is too easy for tier 6, and even for tier 5 sometimes (akama ? supremus ? Wtf).
Obviously, 6 boss remotely challenging is very low for a full raiding tier which is supposed to last 6 to 12 months in wow.

Another consequence of this is that guilds do not farm previous tiers now. They don't NEED to. I remember back in naxx days, we still did aq and even BWL sometimes. Not because we loved it. Because we knew c'thun stuff would help us for patchwerk and every dps check in naxx, same for nef loot, and so on. Now, everything is so easy in tier 6, you don't need and don't want to farm old epics. And honnestly, we do farm t6 right now because, well, there's nothing else to do but I'm almost sure that we could stop raiding now and it would not matter for Sunwell at all.

There's a severe lack of progression checks, gear checks, in current BT end game. I'm sure a guild could clear Hyjal/BT without a single T5 loot. They could kill Illidan without a single T5/T6 loot even. That's just wrong. I love to feel outgeared by mobs. I love to come back months later and own the mob because my guild worked in previous tier and finally managed to be ... prepared (!).

To be honest, these days I'm afraid that my guild might loose many members if Sunwell doesn't come before january or even later. We "only" farm t6 since 2.5 months and it already feels very very old.

 

• Playered

If they add in gear checks (endurance/output) then guilds will simply hybridise and optimize their raid setup in order to thwart it and state:
"its too hard without stacking" and wait for it to get nerfed.

They have simply added too many variables into the equation in order to pull it off like Patchwerk did.

 

Dawme

Well, don't nerf it then. If it's possible, it will be done. See, even original lady vashj was killed legit, and twice, by Method. There's so many guilds on WoW, it's not a problem. Obviously lady vashj was a joke but I'm sure they could produce encounters where you need to gear up without making them absolutely stupid.
Patchwerk is, in my opinion, the best example of a gear check well done. You could not do it without a solid BWL/AQ experience in your raid. You just didn't have the tanks and dps required. It was a real gateway mob, you had the guilds after and before him. And i'm sure it felt very rewarding for guilds to finally kill him after weeks or months of gearing up. We don't need all encounters to be like that, but at least one or two in each tier to check that your gear is ok is good. Lady vashj is a bit like that, kael'thas is a bit like that, but there's none in tier 6.

 

RK

Bliazzard's pacing on all this stuff was severely screwed up by two things:

1) Screwing up the early tuning of Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK. They expected FASTER progression on that.

2) Patch 2.2 delayed forever by sound programming issues.

And to a lesser extent, the 3rd thing- they expected an artificial slowing factor in consumable farming. They misread the mood and thought the raiding population would continue to go for that. So Hyjal/BT progression ended up being faster than they expected. I also supect that they really did want Illidan to take longer than he did but simply mistuned a bit (hence the recent enrage timer issue).

I think they honestly internally planned around a 12-month cycle whereby people were ready for Hyjal/Black Temple by April, ready for a Sunwell/Z'A release in September, and ready for WOTLK in January or February 2008. Obviously, the plan has not worked and their pacing is off, but that's what they were probably going for. A new tier of raid every 4 months, giving 4 months for cutting edge people to beat the new tier and farm it for a bit and maybe rest up a couple of weeks.

 

• Playered

The other thing here is pre-Naxx nothing was really min/maxed.
The reason why those gear checks existed was because there was a real difference in the level/quality of gear before you got to that point.

Nowdays going up a full tier you gain virtually nothing in comparison to what you did then, thus a gear check fails.

 

RK

What if the Nihilums of this world are forced to kill Vashj 5-6 times to move on, but once the bulk of guilds start getting there they nerf it to allow people to attune off 1 kill. This is the philosophy they did with blood off Drakkisath, for example, and to a lesser extent by removing SSC and TK attunements (although I don't see how the SSC attunement was much of a barrier, surely everyone going into SSC has killed Gruul and Nightbane!). They just removed it from Hyjal attunement really quickly for some reason.

I wonder whatever happened to the "Onyxia-scale cloak" school of limiting progression?

 

Sando

I have to echo the sentiment of making the last boss of a zone an actual 'last boss'. At the moment my guild is working on killing Vashj, but straight after we kill her, i know we'll be working on killing Kael, no break, and since he's the 'last boss' of TK, where is the achievement? Yes i'll be happy and all that, but there wont be that real sense of achievement that you should have when killing the last boss of an instance.

Pre-BC i was in the top guild on my server, and back then we actually had progression on our server comparitively to the top guilds worldwide. We killed C'thun pre-Naxx obviously, and that was a huge sense of achievement, but imagine killing C'thun when you're working on 4HM in Naxx, would there the same sense of achievement? 'Yay i killed the last boss of an instance easier the one that i'm 80% of the way through anyway'.

The only way i can really see this happening is to stop progression for a period at that boss, through gear/attunements, or through just not releasing the next dungeon for a month or two. Or you can actually make the bosses in the next zone harder than the 'last boss' so that you dont have the situation that alot of guilds have now of being up to the last boss in 2 raids at the same time. Naxx did this to a reasonable degree, none of the guilds on my server that hadn't killed C'thun killed Patchwerk, i think some cleared spider (i think this only happened after the HOT buff), they got Noth and Instructor, but that was about it.

 

Ngita

Actually I dont think that is true, Based on Proudmoore the vast majority of guilds that clears Karazhan tries to jump to 25 man or folds in the process. People talk about the ennui of farming illidan for 6 months. Now imagine farming Karazhan for 6 months. I have been following both wowjutsu and keeping a eye on who is recruiting on Proudmoore for months. The breakdown is something like this 4 Guilds in BT, 6 Guilds making good progress through t5 ie more than 1 new boss a month. Eighty! Guiilds attempting or who have attempted to make some sort of progress through 25 man raids , 40 guilds still in Karazhan of who only about 10 have finished and farmed Karazhan.

Someone posted earlier that SSC and TK is too hard, they arent, What is hard is having a 35 man raid force of commited and good raiders who are geared appropriately.Anybody who has that moved through the content quickly

 

Tuhalu

From what I've heard in interviews with the developers, they actually planned to release more raids for TBC than they actually have. They were going to release a bunch of zones/worlds that could be reached through portals from Outland. Unfortunately, they massively underestimated the time it would take them. Black Temple being months late was just a symptom of that, but it forced them to strip out all these cool worlds and reduce it all down to the Sunwell so that they could crank out WotLK on schedule. So instead of 4 25-mans on release and maybe 4-6 new zones over a year, they had 3 25-mans on release and 2 new zones over a year. They just fell well short of their plans to release new zones and the fallout from that is being felt now. With this experience, we can hope that they have a better idea of their own capabilities and how to get more new zones out the door outside of the initial expansion release with WotLK.

 

Cwealm

We are still working our way through SSC and TK - we only raid 4 nights a week for a 2-4 houras a night (lot of older folks, lot of us work early, etc.), and I don't think we as a group feel overwhelmed by the amount of content. Maybe if the expansion was right around the corner, but we will get to it when we get to it and too much to do is not a concern.

Additionally, with the length of the arena seasons, we are not going into BG getting massacred by players from the uber guilds that already have BT on farm. You can pick up a solid bit of stam/resilience gear. I never even did arena in season one till the last few weeks, have only been on a 1800 rated team for a week (it fell apart the week we hit 1800) and have spent the whole time at 1550 rated teams playing with friends casually and have managed to put together 380 resilience, 10khp, so I can hold my own. I even have 65k honor banked on my mage and 35 on my pally, so things are looking good as soon as season 3 starts.

In short, while it sucks for those of you in the really advanced guilds who have everything on farm already, things are pretty good for those of us in average guilds. We still have lots to do, lots of new encounters to learn, lots of loot to look forward to do, and a new instance to do in ten mans on the weekends (ZA) right around the corner as well as much desired class buffs. I am betting that is not a mistake or a coincidence or a design flaw.

 

Oaklin

This issue ties into so many other sticky problems that even with hindsight, its hard to see what a good solution would have been. I don't envy the WOW designer/s. Its not that they didn't want to pace the content - theres a ton of evidence against that. It was just really hard to find a good way to do so.

Back in late '06, they had to announce as much content as possible for TBC to satisfy customers/management/sales. Taking so long for the first expansion (2 years+) also meant it needed more meat to justify it. And they've been criticised for releasing with incomplete content before (ie. WOW releasing with no playable raid zones)

So they chose to slow raiders down. The best way to do this traditionally is via gear checks, forcing you to farm lower tier zones for months, but they decided against this to maintain PvP equality, hence the marginal PvE upgrades. Instead, they made the terrible mistake of slowing raiders down by making the encounters super-hard, requiring raiders to have some combination of the following - uniformly high skill (have fun kicking the 2 year old member whose reflexes just dont cut it), consumable abuse and raid stacking. They also tried annoying attunements (Trials, Kael/Vashj having only 4 vials). All of these were eventually reversed to different degrees after much outrage (and probably subscription losses).

Going forward, I'm sure they'll come up with new(old?) and hopefully better ways to pace the content, learning from the lessons of TBC. Maybe guild-level attunements (or BOE types eg Onyxia cloak) or raid zones that require time-consuming world events (AQ40) to open. Or maybe just up the gear gap back again, and have shorter arena seasons to compensate.

 

Namaste

Perhaps I'm strange in the fact that I raid and play this game because I truly enjoy it. I have no issue at all with spending an evening in a zone where I know I have zero upgrades I could bring from the clear, and I still log in almost every day simply to see if anything is going on. I raid for the encounters we have planned to hit up on any given raid night, not necessarily for the loot that is to be had from them. Sure upgrades are nice, but so is 15-20manning BWL and 5-10manning ZG and MC for a change of pace.

I've always been a fan of doing old farmed content just for the sake of doing it, especially if a raid week ends early and we have 3-5 days available but nothing planned. I enjoyed going back to BWL and even MC whether it was a PUG or guild run back in the Naxx days, and I would've enjoyed AQ40 as well but too many guildmates refused to set foot in there so we never really went back more than maybe once or twice after Naxx was out despite all the nice upgrades that were available. I now have nothing to gain from Karazhan but still for some reason I look forward to kicking back with a few beers and running it on Friday or Saturday nights if I'm home and my wife has nothing planned.

I do however think I'm not in the majority with the way I view old content, atleast not within my own guild. In the last month we've gone back to kill Kael'Thas one weekend and this last weekend did a full SSC clear. While many people openly expressed their lack of interest I know it felt good to do something outside the normal Hyjal and BT clear (which I also enjoy, save for a few of the Hyjal waves with mobs spawning at all ends of the area that seem to take forever).

I do think that part of the reason Kael'Thas seems so bland in comparison to Illidan is indeed the fact that everything was rushed in so everyone went straight from their 2nd or 3rd KT/Vashj kill to fulltime BT and Hyjal farming. For us we killed both twice then we didn't go back until a couple weeks ago, but we have the luxury of being what I consider a small but high-attendance guild with very little turnover.

Now we're at the point of people wanting tier5 for their alts, tier6 for alts or secondary mains, and some people saying there's no reason to really login until the next 25man raid is released. I know I personally have almost a full set of healing gear from tier6 zones and I haven't been specced anything but shadow since early February (nearly a full set of druid weapons as well, perhaps it's time to start thinking of secondary enchants). Had things been paced a little better we could've been "finished with content" for a month or two before Hyjal and BT opened up and just now we'd start fulltime farming of both zones. This perhaps would've been better to me because I enjoy some encounters such as Al'ar and KT that we just never experience anymore, maybe a month or two of farming would've worn off the fun factor of some encounters and I'd be content with sticking to only BT and Hyjal and not going back. While I like having long weekends (my wife definitely loves the 3day raid week!) I certainly hope we don't end up with what we had back in the Naxx days where raids must be called or cut short due to attendance issues or little interest because of a lack of upgrades or the upcoming release of new content or a new expansion.

 

Tpyo

From what I'm seeing with my guild:

A combination of players that prioritize spending more time on RL than WoW due to the extended period of time without progression(reasonable of them) and the players who have gotten all their loot or most of it from T6 so they're not as driven to help gear up the rest are making raiding difficult.

A lot of us, like myself like to raid at least T6 just to raid.. not so much for the loot, however since not 25 of us are like this.. filling a raid is becoming difficult on some days and thus making it miserable for everyone.

For arena.. it's just been dull ever since S2 started or a few weeks into it. All the competition on our BG died when S1 ended and arena has lost it's appeal.. at least to me.

I don't have high hopes for Sunwell either, as it seems the top 50 or so guilds in the world will either plow through it within 3-4 weeks or it'll be bugged and be a cockblock(see C'thun 1.0). Raid groups just seem too strong and filled with experienced players that it seems like it'd be difficult to come up with "difficult" fights anymore.. not to mention the quick releases of videos as soon as a boss is downed, which I think is just used as advertisement for a guild and/or to discredit the kills that follow.

 

Metrosexuelf

I think the frontloading of raid content was a huge mistake. Moreover, although all of the BC 25-man raid zones are well done from a story and ambiance perspective, I'm not a fan of the 'bifurcated' Tier zone progression. Ping-ponging back and forth from SSC to TK and Hyjal to BT got annoying at times. There should have been a longer gap between Tier 5 and Tier 6 content if only to set up an artificial pacing mechanism. Perhaps that would have given them time to release Zul'Aman prior to or concurrent with Tier 6 content which would have made more sense in the grand scheme of things.

All of that aside, I don't believe the gap between Tier 6 and Sunwell will be that large. Although many guilds cleared Tier 6 content before, I'm going to go with September as the month a sizeable amount of guilds managed this feat. Personally I don't think 2.3 will be up on the PTR for that long and will be going live early November. I'm sure development on Sunwell is already under way and wouldn't be surprised to see 2.4 (with Sunwell) on the PTR by Christmas. I don't remember, but I don't believe 2.1 was on the PTR nearly as long as 2.2 was and I'd be surprised if we saw more than 3-4 weeks of Sunwell testing. So, while the gap appears to be a bit longer than it was in Classic WoW, it doesn't strike me as being too far off the mark.

For the future, I hope WotLK returns us to the one instance per Tier model. I think this will go a long way to stagger out the pace at which they release content.

Edit: And, of course, there is the obvious point that Tier 6 content is a let down in terms of challenge after Kael. It doesn't help pacing when you can walk in and kill the first half dozen or so Tier 6 bosses with as little as a few hours learning.

 

Renew

I think everyone brought this up when Illidan died a loooooooong time ago to Nihilum.

There was a major factor that I and many others did mention back then, Black Temple was tuned a bit lower ilvl because of the late item upgrades 2.1 brought. Due to Blizzard tuning the content of 2.1 for the old poorly designed items of pre 2.1, we had Nihilum and many other guilds plow through Black Temple in tier 4 (minimal tier 5).

After re-itemizing tier 4 and 5, Blizzard should have pretty much put Black Temple on hold (release Hyjal since 'it was in and ready since day 1') and tune it for the new ilvl boosts everyone who did 10 or 25 person content were going to receive. That way we could have had Tier 4,5 and Hyjal to work on, then at the end of the summer have a Black Temple that was challenging enough to hold us off until Sunwell.

As one of the month behind Illidan killing guilds I already laid it out plain and simply to my guild that we will be farming this content for a while, Christmas at earliest I am guessing. Till the day Sunwell is released to make sure we have stress free nights we will continue to raid stack etc to avoid the inevitable burnout.

I think that pre-BC this lesson (content pacing) should have already been learned by Blizzard. Black Temple hopefully was just an accident due to the late re-itemization 2.1 brought up and was possibly supposed to last longer.

Even so, having the content ready and working on live servers with the new non cockblock (well sorta) design mentality, guilds like Nihilum will kill the stuff. Raid stacking etc can overcome a lot of gear requirements. So straight up leaving it off of live servers is probably the best way they can pace things.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

• Playered

Well two instances instead of one is a logical way of making the content more accessable to more players to be honest;
BWL was 8 bosses - TK (4) + SC (6) = 10 bosses, technically more atm
AQ was 9 - MH (5) + BT (9) = 14 bosses, granted upto 4-5 of these can be considered trash.

Naxx vs Sunwell breaks things abit, however if you include the extra bosses in BT then I spose it evens out.
The difference now is you have an extra 'final boss' per tier, and a different area/theme.

They did say that they wanted to allow more people to enter the raid side of the game by making it more accessable, and broken down it is easier.
And before experiencing it you would have to say it would look good on paper to do it how it was done.

Personally I prefered the mammoth instances rather than the multiple small ones.


Could you imagen how things would of been if you had Naxx broken in half?
Spider + Plague + Saph = Naxxramas "The Lower Chambers"
Death Knight + Abomination + Kel'Thuzad = Naxxramas "The Necropolis"

Would Naxx be diminished by breaking it thus so? its not a great example as it was winged in the first place, but you get the idea.
Split BWL or AQ then throw in an extra final boss to even it out.


Taking BWL for example, Vael was an annoying cock-block for alot of newbie guilds, if BWL was broken in half then the other instance could be worked on instead, allowing them to go from 1/8 to 1/4 & 3/5 or something instead of just being stumped for quite awhile.

 

Lodekim

While I agree in theory with what you say there Renew, it's important to keep in mind how bad Hyjal is comparatively to BT. I can give you a pretty good guess that if they had released Hyjal and not BT I would have just quit the game, and probably a lot of other people would have too because the zone is terrible (at least a lot of people think so) And with the initial 12 waves of trash even worse.

Yeah it didn't help blizzard that content got cleared faster than they probably planned, and nerfing consumables and buffing t4/t5 made it even faster to progress, so it makes it tougher, but I'm hoping they learn from their mistakes in WoTLK and give us well paced content with a solid upgrade path.

 

algo

The other question which needs addressing is, who is Sunwell going to cater for ? The guild which has Illidan on farm for 5-6 months and has every player geared as well as is possible, or the guild which just killed him 2-3 weeks ago and is not as well geared overall ?

 

JamesVZ

I remember there being quite a hell of a lot of bitching about the pacing of content when all of the game's 'end game' raids were cleared in a hair under 3 hours, actually, especially with no real PvP system in place. Likewise, I think the only reason people didn't bitch about no new content, per se, from AQ40->Naxx was because C'Thun was unkillable for so long, and I remember quite a few posts regarding the morale in that situation. BWL to AQ40 wasn't bad because there was so many awesome things about BWL that made going back not quite a chore. Mainly the loot, though.

I remember hating the release of raid content like it was pre-BC, but I can't say I much prefer the system as it is now. If it were up to me, expansions would be damn expansions, and they WOULD come out once a year, and they wouldn't all try to raise the level cap and make it WoW+1. Maybe once every 2 or 3 expansions raise the level caps, otherwise interweave the raids such that you fill in missing gaps in content/gear between each expansion, while not trivializing the content 'ahead' of it in design. But I guess it's not up to me :/.

As far as the middle of the road guilds go, lack of content or excess of content is simply not an issue for us. At all. I can see those who break into Hyjal/BT getting a fresh boost of morale, but for the ones still on Vashj/Kael, *shrug*. I think many of us are hanging on for 2.3, feeling that it will give us the extra 'oomph' to push through those last two encounters to get to the good stuff.

 

Danther

Karazhan, in its original form, was a serious choke point for a lot of less than hardcore raiding guilds. Many pretty firmly established old-world guilds fell apart while trying to funnel 30-50 people through a 10-person zone with fairly strict requirements.

As for the original topic, my own guild is starting to get into the swing of the raiding thing. We're 4/6 and 1/4. With Black Temple and Hyjal actually appearing on our radar in the hopefully not too distant future, our raid game has really started to come together.

We spent a long time pre-2.1 in Gruul's Lair while trying to make our way through Karazhan without imploding. It seems that only with the lifting of SSC and TK attunements did raiding truly begin for about 95% of raiding guilds.

So, I think the bigger error on Blizzard's part was not the pacing of content, but the way they funneled people through Karazhan and Heroics in order to even see anything beyond Gruul or Magtheridon.

 

Metrosexuelf

As others have mentioned: Unless there are some pretty stringent gear checks/DPS races it probably won't matter (other than the obvious fact that guilds with Illidan on farm longer are just better overall at execution and organization).

 

Redux

Of course, you'll have to kill Illidan for your 4 vials a week. 7 weeks later you'll be able to zone into Sunwell, which will undoubtably have at least 2 of the following: A broken gate/door, A gear cockblock with no itemization for the gear needed, a slot machine random encounter, an encounter that lags out the zone, and the obligitory overtuned boss that makes the instance futile. Of course, once you kill the boss, he won't have any loot because the death cinematic started as your raid wiped...


Best of Luck in Sunwell to all of you!

 

◊ Quigon

The problem is: either due to 25 mans, or due to a brain drain, the developers are no longer capable of making difficult encounters that are not some combination of: unfair, random, or unfun.

Their ability to make execution based fights like Kael'thas are 1 for 40, and therefore fights become overly simple. 1-2 nights per boss, including end-bosses is a norm. The hardest part is dealing with untuned bosses on the way for bleeding-edge guilds. And most difficulty stems from random issues.

Therefore we consume content even faster than before. And we become angrier at the cockblocks along the way.

Remember Naxxramas lasted us a LONG time. It took a long time to beat, and required almost no retuning to get us from point A to B.


Also, the entire pacing of TBC content has been fubar - from 2.1 "fixes" to BT release coinciding absolutely.

I mean, we blew past tier 5 content because of it, and there was no middle-farm period to break up the inevitable gap.

Plus the next instance coming up is a 10-man (ZA), which will likely be trashed in 1 night, and we'll wait another 2-3 months for the next 25 man.

I think part of this has to do with the simplicity of 25 mans, but more to do with the incompetence of the raid developers to develop something challenging that is also fun. I know people won't agree with that (regarding 25 mans), but the point remains that as you remove more and more players the difficulty ramp-up tends to be artificial, since this game isn't hard to begin with.

 

Antoine

Part of the "ease" of encounters, I believe, is due to paid transfers being available. The concentration of talent is much better than it was pre-BC, so those top guilds will advance all the faster.

 

sovelis41

I would have definitely preferred a more staggered raid release schedule if only for the sense of "catching up" to the front.

That being said, if the raid content was released in such a way as others described above, I doubt my guild would be that much further along. Does that anger me? No, not at all. We raid a strict 4 days a week, 7:30-12. We're the only 6/6, 2+/4 guild that raids less than 5 days a week (had to kill vashj, not enough time for the new Sololarian this week). As long as we're progressing at a steady pace, and having fun doing so, we're all happy campers.

Not to try to poke at anyone here, but the prospect of Sunwell not being released any time soon is really encouraging to me. It means that, barring extremely bad circumstances, we'll be well into T6 content by that time.

Where many people working in SSC/TK (mainly 5+/6, 2+/4 guilds) think they are really far behind, I tend to see it as being ahead of the majority. Obviously we're not killing Illidan (or even in HS/BT), but really, to say that all of T5 content minus KT is too easy is over-exaggeration. Vashj was a very fun, very challenging, rewarding fight. After 2.3 I think you'll see bosses on your server dieing a little more rapidly as everyone gets their minor buffs (and i'm sure there will be some 'tuning' in there as well).

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.