Eh, I don't entirely buy this. Kael is great of course. I think RoS is great. I think a number of the pre-nerf SSC fights were fun and challenging without being random or unfair -- the only problem with them was the consumables issues, and of course the fact that they were out of place for their role in the raid progression at the time. But Leo v1.0 or Hydross v1.0 (with an unflasked raid) were actually really fun and hard. I liked all the old SSC boss fights but hated the trash. I freely concede that the boss fights needed to be nerfed, but they actually were challenging in their time.

I think this is a myth.

Razuvious, Faerlina, Noth, Anub'Rekhan died on the PTR and/or within days of Naxx going live.
Maexxna died very shortly thereafter.
Patchwerk went from "wtf this is impossible what's the gimmick" to dead within a week and many guilds followed with kills thereafter.
Basically within 3 weeks of the zone opening up, the remaining bosses were Loatheb, 4H, and Sapp/Kel.

Loatheb took a while because he was an asshole and people preferred to beat their heads against any other boss (Gothik, 4H, whatever) rather than throw gold at Loatheb. When people realized that 4H weren't dying any time soon, and turned to Loatheb, he died. And of course everyone knows the story with 4H.

Naxxramas had 15 bosses. 11 of the 15 (an entire tier of content, like SSC+TK) were defeated in 3-4 weeks. Remind me how that's so different from TBC raiding?

I've got to say I agree with Quigon on this one.

Antoine, that helped to some extent, but there's a lot of talent that just isn't raiding now with arenas, it really feels like an average recruit in the Naxx days would have been great now. Yeah, people have a better understanding of their class due to forums like these now, but that's also more because fights are about the numbers now not the execution (as an example, we would routinely have people specced MS and tanking etc which wouldn't even be considered on farm content now, a good portion of our tanks weren't even defense capped for some stuff etc)

The result is what Quigon said, all the difficulty pretty much feels forced. Personally, I love Illidan, it's a lot like old WoW fights, though a little easier not to die. The "difficulty" in new fights isn't in figuring out how to overcome something, and then figuring out the best way to do it, but in "Okay, here's how we do it, that's obvious, no one die or mess up or else we lose" Look at some of the better Naxx fights and think how complicated some of the strategies are compared to what we've got now.

There's 2 reasons for that though, one is the smaller raid sizes makes expectations about stacking and composition more limited, how many fights with aggro swaps are there now, 2? Versus every boss in BWL had some sort of aggro swap (minus Nefarian if you were alliance or Chromaggus if you didn't get time lapse) 7 out of 10 in AQ (and with multiple tentacles on C'thun and multiple tanks for multiple mobs on bug trio, leaving only Viscidus with no multiple tanks) only 4 in Naxx but that was designed for 25 and then altered for 40, with multiple things to be taken care of by other tanks in other areas.

The second is the "seen it all before" factor, and while yeah, I'm sure there's only a certain number of things you can do to people in a raid, I'd really hope that Blizzard hasn't run out of ideas and is just throwing together abilities now. I don't think there's been a single boss in TBC yet that inspired the amount of confusion that were Patchwerk and Four Horsemen. The difficulty now is not having people die and have a domino effect, not in "hrm, that's an interesting ability, how do we handle that?"


edit: Gurgthock has a point about it being a bit of a clouded memory, and yes, most bosses were cleared pretty quickly, but every dungeon had a boss that was a stopper for most guilds getting there. Currently there's what, Kael? Cockblocks or not, bosses like Vael, Twin emps, and 4 Horsemen don't exist outside of Kael. There is no "guild killer" as people call it now, that really tests people before they move on, that's what I personally miss the most, there haven't been any bosses that took us particularly long, or that we hear of guilds taking particularly long on outside of a guild just going "durr stupid us" afterwords for making a mistake and not adjusting.

Not to say I want to see guilds dieing to a boss, but there is no real "stop" in progression right now that is widespread. Most guilds kill every boss they see the reset they find them, if not the night they find them. Then again, maybe this is just looking back through foggy glasses and seeing things differently than they were again. To me though, just a few of those "man what the hell" bosses would be great.

Patchwerk was ninja-hotfixed, I specifically remember that first raiding week on Patchwerk attempts where he would Hateful Strike over and over in the span of a second if the attack was miss/dodged/parried.

Later on, having your HS tanks dodge/parry/miss bought you time.

That's not a design problem. The player community is really nearing a state of perfect information with regard to some of these encounters. Patchwerk really wasn't complicated. The mechanics were just not instantly obvious and a lot of people who fully understood them didn't immediately come out and share their knowledge. I think RoS phase 1 probably most approaches what you're describing, and I'll admit we had an awful couple of hours on him because we really didn't understand how the targeting worked. Once that light bulb went off, it was cake from then on. If you have someone tell you the details beforehand, then it's really pretty simplistic when you think about it.

Edit:
Er, tell that to the dozens of guilds that literally have been killed by Kael. Lots of guilds simply hit a DPS wall on Vashj phase 2. They can't organize and kill things fast enough. 5/6 SSC is a common point to be for a reason.

Part of it is that we, the "top" guilds, are simply strictly better than we used to be. But even then, we killed hardcore Vaelastrasz (the one that could BA your tanks at any time) in week 2 of BWL after he despawned following our one-hour of wipes during week 1. We killed Twin Emps after six or so hours of wipes. And so did a lot of guilds.

The only exception in the history of the game, aside from bugged/untuned bosses (Ignite-every-30sec-Chromaggus or C'Thun v1.0) is 4H. And 4H took so long because no one seriously tried with 8 tanks at first, and because many good guilds decided the fight was another C'Thun-style cockblock given Blizzard's track record of such things at the time, and simply stopped trying. Once word got out that you really wanted 8 tanks for 4H, it was just a matter of time.

Bullshit, we got him to 50% on the PTR without much consumable prep (except for flasked tanks) and the fight didn't change at all from the PTR to live.

Being in a guild that is far away from the end [SSC and TK both on 4/5], i wonder if it would make any difference to the top guilds if Blizz would add a time factor once you have cleared an instance for the first time, (i believe ZulAman goes in that direction already)

What i mean is speeding things up for rewards, (even if it is only a token (were you need lets say 4 of those) that will permanently upgrade your weapon by 1 dps, i could imagine many raiders would go there with some more enthusiasm and the fun for the top guilds would somewhat return, while waiting for new content?

Similar i could imagine that a Top Ten List of the fastest time a guild has cleared an instance an posted on the official Arsenal site would get some passion back by the likes of Nihilum and Co?

The difference between the vials being a timesink and Blizzard simply not releasing content because enough people haven't burned through the current tier is huge however. The vials creates a 6-8 week attuning period for every guild that wants to progress. The waiting to release content forces the guilds that cleared it first to farm it for a while, and letting the others sort of catch up. This intermediate catch up phase that was so common in vanilla kept the raid scene alive for a lot of guilds, including my own.

I remember killing Nefarian, and thinking ok guys, AQ isn't out yet, we're caught up with EJ and Aeternus progression wise, they out gear us by a lot but when (they) open the gates we can try and progress at the same pace as them.

The AQ event had terrible issues, and while not proud of it I'll admit that we spent more time farming MC and BWL than helping with the AQ gates. But psychologically it gave us the motivation to get better and prep for whatever was next, and while really not true - giving us the idea that we're on equal footing with all the top guilds the day AQ opened.

Speaking of AQ gates, you owe us an Azuregos Gurg

The "problem" here is that in order to make the game accessible so that 50% of raiding guilds (80%?) farm the crap out of Illi and beat the Sunwell before Lich King it's going to be easy for Nihilum, EJ and the rest of you.

"Us" -- the huddled masses -- have trouble getting 25 non-noobs in a raid, raid 3 times per week, and are 5SSC/1TK right now. You -- through your skill and such -- have given us the tools (strats, videos) to have a chance at Kael and Vashj, but we're going to suffer a lot over the next 60 days getting there. Once we do? I'm all but certain we are going to dump both instances like a hot potato. With just 3 nights, we're not going to worry about Kael neckpieces and pray for Tsunamis any more than we go back for DSTs (altho I wish we would!).

If -- for argument's sake -- we down Kael and Vash by the end of November, we'll be in Hyjal/BT for December, get screwed by holiday, and maybe beat Illidan in January. We'll farm the crap out of the instance through March, hopefully starting Sunwell somewhere in that mix, and at least beating Sunwell once or twice before the expansion ships next spring.

I have to say I'd prefer beat --> farm --> beat the new one --> farm it like in the old days. In that regard Tojara is completely correct, imo. The game was less overwhelming and you could move on from an instance having gotten most people most of the gear from it -- their "badge" of honor.

I'm not sure a 3-night guild like ours is destined to do what I set out above here, but I'd like to believe we can just barely do it. That said, I'm confident that many guiilds will take down Black Temple completely and farm it to death before Lich King. And I suspect that Sunwell "defeaters" will outnumber Naxx defeaters by a factor of 10:1 or better.

So they are doing something right. Despite screwing up royally along the way. (eg Gruul 1.0). And yes, the best of you are basically destined to mash through content so that others can get through it. There is no fix there. They could indeed give you more loot for a faster complete, slightly better loot, etc. But once they have another tier of content, that incentive won't mean a thing to you anyway.

I am in a guild that has killed Illidan for two months now. We still clear ssc/tk weekly for the rare drops that are actually good (perhaps only tsunami talisman and healing mace from vashj in ssc). I will admit that I enjoy vashj and kael but the loot tables make the raids almost worthless.

There are items off of leotheras (tsunami talisman) and off of bosses like VR (tanking bracers) that we have never seen drop a single time. There are also items we have seen drop only once. We have been killing these bosses for many months now. Clearing TK is justified for the Kael neck piece and perhaps to attune a few applicants. The same can not really said about ssc. With the way that loot seems to drop its a frustrating experience every week.

I have found myself looking forward to ZA hoping that it adds some content that is new and exciting because the current raiding game is growing old fast.

I would believe that blizzard expected the players to pace themselves but as usual they underestimate their players. This coupled with the fact that it is insanely easier to gather 25 people together and that the current raid zones sizes are laughable compared to fiasco that naxx was.

Some people finish the test in 10 minutes, other take 2 hours.

Obviously it's gross speculation on my part, but does anyone else feel like Sunwell is an afterthought? Sure... lore-wise it makes sense that Kil'jaeden (even a half-formed or whatever Kil'jaeden) would be a 'harder' boss than Illidan. However, Illidan was seemingly billed as the boss of Burning Crusade just as Arthas is being billed as the boss of WotLK.

It would be pretty surprising to me if there were a boss after Arthas in the next expansion which makes me wonder if the developers actually had Sunwell planned from the getgo. Now I don't know squat about game design so I don't really know how long it takes to crank out a raid zone from conception to beta product, but it just strikes me as if the 25 man Sunwell raid might have been a proactive response to how fast some raiders were advancing through Tier 5 and Tier 6 content.

I'm not so sure, Having seen the Kael'Thas encounter and everything afterwards in Shattrath lets me believe Sunwell was something in the plans for a very long time.

As I understand it, there were plans to branch out raiding instances but they were scrapped/scaled back in response to how long it took to get the current content "right". In that scenario Sunwell could have been the first of those branches planned and therefore already down conceptually and the bare bones in place before the decision was made to scale back. That's just one possibility.

I think a more viable concept involves the proposed "yearly" expansion and the realization that- not only wasn't Wrath going to come out a year after TBC, but that it was going to be a large enough gap to necessitate a filler instance. They nailed about a year of content surprisingly well. By next Feb most guilds could be in or done with Black Temple and would be just about ready for a new dose of material. I don't think the top 20 guilds are looking at Wrath as a solution due in late winter anymore though. Dropping one more instance buys them another 4-6 months of breathing room before players begin to demand the expansion- softening the blow of the longer wait.

Can you imagine the hair pulling and angst if there wasn't another instance scheduled and Blizzard didn't have an open beta for Wrath going into the holidays? It's a little early still for most folks to realize that the beta hasn't dropped yet. Alpha leaks aren't happening. Blues aren't giving us the tidbits they did last Halloween. 2.3 with Zul'aman (fodder for the more casual population, and I'll take it happily thanks) is just going onto the PTRs this week and we're scheduled for at least one more patch with a major instance in it. If we have an open beta before Chrismas I'd be shocked although I'd hope it starts shortly after the new year or content might start to run out again in the long beta period =/

An afterthought, perhaps. Certain a convenient solution to a "late" (remember no promises were made) releasing expansion.

I think most people are exaggerating how outrageous the time is between getting an instance on farm, and the release of a new raid instance. Elitist Jerks downed Illidan July 28th, ZA is hitting the PTRs this week. About 2 months from a farmed instance to the release of a new one.

Really though, I don't understand how you work towards beating the game, then complaining there's no more content when you do. =P I'm positive the same thing must have happened to you when you finished Naxx.

That's a better way to describe my feeling on Sunwell. If they were able to stick to the one year plan then stopping at BT/Hyjal and the overall pacing would have a much better feel to it. Sunwell just sticks out like a sore thumb. There was a symmetry to Gruul/Mag, SSC/TK, and BT/Hyjal. Sunwell just seems like a bone being thrown out because WotLK fell behind in its production schedule.

And Zul'Aman... its timing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Difference being that Zul'Aman holds little to no interest for 25 man raid guilds that are already farming BT/Hyjal. At best the gear will be approaching Tier 5 level. Most high end raid guilds will probably run it once or twice for fun and then quickly abandon it unless there are more than a few itemization gap fillers to be had. As I said: Zul'Aman is probably the most poorly timed of all TBC instances and should have been available at least with 2.2 if not 2.1.

Maybe is pointed out but I will point out boss downing schedule and you will notice difference very easy:

• July 2005: BWL is released.
• September 2005: Nefarian is defeated for the first time
2 months

• January 2006: Ahn'Qiraj events; first guilds get into Ahn'Qiraj
• February 2006: Most servers get into Ahn'Qiraj and are quickly stumped by C'Thun/Ouro
• April 2006: After retuning, C'Thun and Ouro are defeated.
3-4 months

• Late June 2006: Naxx hits the live servers
• September 2006: Kel'Thuzad is defeated by Nihilum
3 months

• May 2007: Kael'Thas still undefeated, no one has yet seen Hyjal, and BT is released.
• June 2007: Illidan and Archimonde are defeated by Nihilum
1 month for 3 "main" bosses

With simple overlook at this timeplan you can see that most of the "old" raid content took 2-3 month on average for guilds to finish/beat the content. Having 3 main raid bosses beaten in one month actually made that gap

I killed KT in december (and was very happy) but got very disillusioned with TBC raiding in the first months after release due to severeal factors (i posted several times in another thread on EJ that got some heavy bashing for being too whiny). As of that I stepped down from raiding and have just recently started to play the game a bit more serious again.

I sincerely hope that Blizzard has learned from TBC when they release Sunwell as well as the next expansion. I would summarize the key learnings as something like this (very much in line with what other people have said in this thread);

1) Space out release of raid tiers over the course of the expansion. This will serve two purposes: a) Sense of achievement as more players will get the feeling of having beaten the game. An end-boss will actually mean something since there is nothing more to do when he/she is down. b) Give breathers to raiders. A few hectic weeks are swapped into weeks where you can be more relaxed.

This means that you get more satisfaction in the player base with the same amount of development work from Blizzard (more satisfaction equals more happy customers). At the same time you will allow players with more different RL situations to stay competetive in the game (broader player/customer base on the raiding scene).

I also think that this allows more tuning of content and hence hopefully more interesting fights. Even designers must feel flooded when they need to fill in 3 tiers of bosses in a short time - some of them will turn out as a bit boring. Instead they can focus on one tier at a time.

2) Revival of the casual raiding guild. Why not implement that RaidIDs can be changed every week (as now) or every two weeks (at the discretion of the player)? It will mean that the most serious of raiding guilds will kill content slightly faster but I am not sure much can be done about that given the pace they have killed content as it stands.

3) Do not mix the 5/10 man scene with the 25-man scene. The social life of guilds is stressful as it is. The mixing of these two systems together with the vast amount of content stressed/burned out alot of competetive people for no clear design reason at all as I see it.

4) (Maybe Blizzard is already doing this with Zul'Aman). Have 5/10 man progression work slightly behind the 25-man progression so that someone who has done the 5/10-man content is undergeared but recruitable for the 25-man guilds. I hope that someone who has Kara+Zul'Aman loot will actually be able to join a 25-man raiding guild for Sunwell (not as well geared as the best MT/BT decked out players but not so far behind it is like mixing oil with water).

I play in a guild which has never raided more than 3 days a week and I personally absolutely love this gap that Blizzard has created. We never finished Naxxramas (and a lot of us still feel we missed something), dropped T5 a soon as we had enough people attuned for T6 and for the first time in what feels like years, it appears we will actually be able to farm an instance for at least a few weeks before Blizzard releases the next content (working on RoS right now, Hyal is cleared). And I actually consider us to be far progressed in comparison to the vast mayority of WoW players.

Would have to disgaree with this very strongly. One of the major failings of TBC has been how poor the lore is for it's raid instances (at least up to the tier 6 level).

SSC : Why is Vashj collecting water again? She mumbles something about "he who controls the spice controls all" when you pull her, but other than that it makes no sense. Would also like some explanations of how there are murlocs in there with her, when we have just introduced them to outlands in an earlier quest in that zone. Why is there a sea-giant there?

TK : Worse designed raid zone in the game, hands down. No lore, bosses that are ridiculously badly tuned, and a grpahical layout that makes me think of fisher price. How the same designers could have made Arcatraz and Botanica, and then made The Eye such a dull, airport hangar design is beyond me. Kael is the one redeeming point - although adding such awful trash was a genius idea.

We're just hoping that what Quigon and others have said is correct - Hyjal and BT are significantly better designed zones, with better trash, and better fights.

Regarding the pacing - I absolutely agree that the pacing for this has been wrong. Due to the PvP / PvE crossover, we can't have split tiers of gear like it was possible in vanilla WoW, or back in EQ. The gaps between tiers of gear in PvE is never going to be big enough to force people to farm early zones. You either need an artificial gear block (Onyxia cloaks), an artifical attunement block (4 Vashj vails per killl / AQ40 gate opening event), or you just stagger the release of content better.
Black Temple was released too early. Guilds weren't prepared for it - but thanks to the gear gap no longer really existing, they could beat it anyway. The fact that Vashj and Kael, two superb fights that both show off how good WoW raiding can be, are only done 6 times or so by any guilds shows there's a major flaw in the content release schedule.

I somewhat dimly remember talks about a possible "sunwell" instance during the first few tidbits of information when they started to release information about the TBC expansion over a year ago.

So I guess in a form or other it was always in planning and not just coming now to appease those who have downed Illidan countless times. At least that's the hidden insinuation which I read out of your quote (sorry if that's wrong).

I do have here a text file with a list of zones and possible expansions far into the level 100 area (you might have seen that from other places). It may be a good fake or it may be actually authentic. It claims to have been in existence ever since the original game's beta. If it really is authentic, then Blizzard has planned their lores and quite possibly instances far far ahead.

And at least it is known that the Emerald dream was once in the game just as the former AQ was. And Naxxramas was ever planned as hinted by the Eyes of Naxxramas in Stratholme, yet at the time where MC was offlimits for most people, no one could have known what exactly Naxxramas was to be.

But as for the topic of the thread, now nearing the end of the game (5/9 BT) I truly hope that in the future, there arent that many raid instances available all at once. I look forward at going at a more leisurly pace, but I do understand that if you do the leisurly pace for 2 months now, it gets old. I don't have a problem with a new big 25 instance, a new 10 man instance and a new small 25er onyxia instance. But please please not 4 25 man instances and 2 25 man onyxia style available or at least "known" right from the start of the next expansion. It makes lack of progression feel that much more painful, you always feel like you have to hurry up or miss out big time if you're not in a top raidguild and can't really enjoy an instance once you cleared it but have to hurry along to the next one.

I agree with Gurgs general argument that the spacing of the release of the instances is a bit out of balance.

Kael/Vashj are still pretty strong blocks for most guilds. I can see at least one Horde raid on our realm that is pretty much condemned to kill him within 2 weeks otherwise it will probably split up. Which is probably not a very unique thing to happen. On the other hand once you are in BT/Hyal you experience once again a pretty smooth, perhaps a too smooth progression (at least until you work on ROS which we started yesterday after finally killing Archi).

For us the way the content is released is probably almost perfect since we will probably be able to kill Illidan before Sunwell hits and even have to be able to go to farming mode for a while which is probably a nice change for a guild that constantly works on encounters since march 07. I'm really looking forward to a temporary reduction of raiding days.

Nevertheless the way the content is paced you have quite interesting phenomenons: most raids don't really farm Kael/Vashj because of the carrot that is T6 content + loot and also because most of them will have cleared the bosses before them quite often which leads to pretty large piles of loot letting left to rot (especially if you assume that you won't see an average lootdistribution). Even though most folks agree that Vashj and Kael are in fact fun.
Another irony that just occurs me: I remember how everybody cried out when Vashj only dropped 3-4 vials when Nihilum killed her the first time. I believe that with this pacing mechanism the progression would've been smoothed at least for the top guilds (I don't think though that it was a good pacing mechanism because it widens the gap between those real hardcore raids sporting 30-32 raiders compared to those who are a little less hardcore and have to attune 40 players). Delaying the release of new content would have had the same effect as a reduction of players attuned to the next instance after a kill.

Conclusion: if we agree on the sentiment that frontloading content as it has happened in BC is a bad thing we should also consider whether it would be a better move to tie the progression closer to ingame mechanics rather than to pretty unreliable release dates.

Part of the problem here is that these forums, and other high end raiding forums, werent as popular or as well used as they are now, when Ragnaros for example was being first killed.

Forums like EJ show a very distorted view of peoples attitude to the game, and its easy to get "wrapped up" in the general consensus of the forum. I suspect that people were bitching about the gap between BWL/AQ40/Naxx, but they werent as vocal about it because they had no outlet to do so. Now that these forums have such high traffic (and its mainly the disillusioned people that are the most vocal) its easy to get the idea that everyone who plays WoW is unhappy with the status quo, but obviously its not the case.

My guild is 5/5 Hyjal 3 dead in BT, and we're steaming full ahead and i think for the most part enjoying it, for whatever reason the malaise hasnt spread to us, but i can easily see how it might be effecting those at the top who have had more time "stew" after killing Illidan.

Probably the best way to get some motivation back is to get your head out of the forums for a couple of days and actually form your own opinion about the game. Im not knocking these forums, they are really interesting and useful and i love them, but i try not to get too 'invested' or get swept along by the opinions voiced on here, because they dont really reflect how most people feel.