I disagree, because arena gear has an excess of 'wasted' points on stamina and resillence. Merciless gladiator healing gear doesn't have the regeneration, while merciless gladiator caster gear doesn't have the spell hit (and to a lesser extent spell damage) compared to tier 5 quality PvE loot. Obviously, PvP weapons and certain other items are going to be superior.

I think your criteria is theoratically possible, but the do-this-much-DPS-and-have-this-much-HPS checks have to be extremely strict and offer little to no leniency for player error. You're pretty much threading a needle here.

I think the only way they can tune Sunwell now is to assume all 25 players have all Kael/Vashj/t6 loot in every item slot and work from there.

The problem with this is guilds who kill Illidan tomorrow won't be able to succeed under this criteria for a couple months, and now you're looking at the same problem as Naxx: too few people experiencing the content before the next expansion.

And now i'm starting to fear casuals are getting to the point of asking themselves what gain there is to try to join a high-end pve guild themselves. Previously you joined PvE to:

1) Be superior to others in PvP
2) Get unique looking gear and items
3) Experience unique content


Mid season 1/2 #1 was replaced by resilience gear and s3 further hampered that by much more available gear, with s3 #2 is mostly gone with t6 gear being used straight into s3. That leaves #3, which we'll see if it continues to be enough to hook people.

As for solutions in the mean-time:
1) All major visible arena gear purchasable requiring personal rating. It's funny seeing a warlock with s1 helm s3 robes and not knowing if he'll have 7000 hp or 14000.
2) Do NOT take models directly from equivalent deep PvE instances and remodel it for pvp. This is absolutely lazy and continues to piss me off. Don't tell me a company reaping in the dough has to resort to recoloring, 2.3 took 4 months to make for christ's sake. Either develop a program that auto-generates something random, or something themed, then edit it from there, or something, but this is getting stupid.
3) Another idea i was tossing around was requiring a step-up system for Vindicator's. I ground out honor cap s1 on my alt warlock, i don't know when/if i'll change over to seriously arenaing/pvping with him, but if the current system continues will i have been better off buying the vindicator armor now, or waiting for 2.4 for cheaper vindicator/new sets, or 3.0 and beyond for when i finally decide to play him?

This is along the lines of what I've been thinking about from time to time. What I think would be logical to do would be to introduce a stat that counteracts resilience.

What stats should be removed to add a counter-resilience stat? Resilience alone is bad enough, hopefully it will be gone in WotLK. Because as the above poster said, I started raiding to have the slight upper hand in pvp, scenery and fun. Early SSC removed the fun, resilience removed the pvp factor. So now I dont raid that much.

Just do not do the mistake of having very high expectations for Sunwell. Naxxramas will never be back ...it was a different world back then. A 15-boss dungeon, 40-man setting, world buffs, very demanding in farming pre-consumable nerf. Four Horsemen was the fight that defined Naxx because it had the whole world stuck on for more than a month. A fight that depends so much on the availability of a certain class isn't going to happen anymore. The rest of the bosses were all cleared very fast including Kel'thuzad. Sunwell is only a 6-boss dungeon, 25-man setting, no world buffs and not demanding on farming since consumables are so easy and fast to get. That alone will make it "feel" significantly easier, just like Black Temple felt significantly easier. Some fights are very well designed (Kael'thas, Illidan, RoS, Vashj) but just feel easier because the "hardcore raider" is used to a much more difficult raiding environment that existed before TBC.

What my hope is for Sunwell is that the six fights offer a very good challenge despite the change in the nature of raiding. The type of bosses seem good: Eredar Twins, Dark Naaru, two Dragons and Kil'Jaedan himself? We should be up to some very original, unique fights. If the bosses offer original (new = always feels hard at first = good) mechanics, Sunwell could be the pinnacle of TBC raiding - not comparable to previous vanilla experiences perhaps - but still up there among the legendary fights of the past. So far, only pre-nerf Kael'thas and perhaps Illidan deserve that status in TBC.

There are several issues towards Blizzard being "incompetent" in terms of providing raiders with content.

1 - RAIDERS vs. CASUALS
If we consider the group of players who actually do progressive raiding along with those who attempt to progress, we have a very little group of players considering the numbers who play the game. Of the 2 million players registered at WoWJutsu, about 30% is in SSC/TK and only 5% are MH/BT. These numbers havn't really changed much the last 6 months; only 1-2% have progressed from SSC/TK towards MH/BT. Holding this up against Zul'Aman, which only is being raiding by 50%, it is fair to assume, that only about 50% of the registered guilds actually do raid on a regular basis, and of them only 10% are able to progress. So there is little if any reason for Blizzard to provide new instances for a group of 40,000 players world wide, when the remaining 6 million+ still have alot of left to explore.

2 - NEW WORLD
Another issue is, that China has been added, hence a significant group of new progressive raiders have been added, and while a few of them already have BT on farm, the remaining still have to come thru SSC/TK. Again, why provide new raiding instances, when so many still have so much to explore.

However, be that as it may, Blizzard does appear to be "incompetent". Looking at MH and BT, it demonstrates a significant lack of understanding of raiders and their skills. For those who killed Kael'Thas pre-nerf(s), they came from the technical most difficult fight in the game, hence their skills and ability to adjust/adapt was extremely high, and entered an instance, where bosses were on par with Karazhan. The first four bosses in MH is basically the same boss, which really isn't more than Tank'n'Spank with a twist - Anetheron spawns infernals, so does Azgalor, Rage does Death and Decay, Azgalor does Rain of Fire - and Archimonde was a finely tuned execution boss. No wonder than most guilds entering MH downs the 3-4 first bosses on the first night, and then are stuck on Archimonde for 1-2 weeks. In terms of instance design, MH shows Blizzard as very incompetent. BT is a little better, despite the first three bosses being a joke, you do get good bosses from Teron onward.

In regards to Sunwell, 6-9 months wait is far to long a wait, regardless of what has happend in the real world around WoW and Blizzard. The "logic" behind not providing any content for the top 5% is invalid. The majority of the remaining guilds are still stuck in TK (even on Void Reaver, how sad that may be), so removing attunement for MH/BT wouldn't give those guilds more "fun".

Therefor I fail to see the logic behind Sunwell now. What point is there not to have attunement for the instance? Why allow guilds, who cannot down Void Reaver access to an instance harder than BT? Does Blizzard really think, that guilds who are unable to get past Void Reaver will be able to progress in Sunwell? If so, they fail.

Also they now demonstrate incompetence in terms of acting counterproductive to their efforts in balancing realms. For several months Blizzard has attempted to move players from high-pop realms to low-pop, making free transfers, advicing players to enter low-pop rather than high-pop, etc, only to create an instance, where high-pop realms with many endgame raiding guilds will have a significant advantage over low-pop realms in unlocking boss 4 and onward, as they are unlocked at a certain number of daily quests being made.

I cannot see it is being childish to say that Blizzard has demonstrated incompetence in both designing and giving us Sunwell. However, we will have to wait until March it seems, before we actually can say anything about how hard the instance will be. But considering, that the developers of Naxx all have left Blizzard, and the current developers fail to understand the skill the 5% have in terms of progression, we might end up with Sunwell being either designed too hard or being on farm after two weeks.

How true. I remember when I raided to get pvp gear (and t3 was some bitchin' pvp gear). Now there's very little point to raid for that purpose outside of a few misc. items and gems if you lack a supplier. I loathed every minute of t5 content except Leotheras, so now I just do my bg daily and arena on the weekends. Granted, I'm still paying $15 a month to be a rotten casual, so I doubt they'll care.

I think WoW gets problems once the subscribers get older. At the moment I would guess that the average wow player is about 22 years old. Give it some more years, a new job, relationships etc... Once many are finished witch college or university they will give up playing, as it is too time consuming.

Big question is if the developers find a way to keep WoW fun, once you have only two to four hours per week for playing. Other MMOs with less grinding and less repetition could be way more fun. If you start become older it's no fun to play against others, that have tons of advantages because they spend more time or only to be able to see half the content.

I just can't see myself grinding AV or reputations or spending more than three hours raiding on the same evening. So I guess a game focussing more on the needs of players that are 25+ could take away lots of wows playerbase in some years.

Maybe the goal was to have a few easy bosses to allow everyone to get a foothold into the new instances, rather than staying back in the same old SSC/TK.
Also, because of the Hyjal trash, MH could have been insanely annoying for mid-progress guilds, clearing trash countless times. Gauntlet type bosses usually are easier.
Having both easy and difficult bosses in an instance seems like a good way to spread content. That said, early BT/MH bosses certainly could have been more interesting (Uhm... Supremus), but not necessarily more difficult.

If they cant progress there anyway, what would the point be in an attunement?
No attunement is obviosuly a way to let anyone who wants to go in there. Some will fail, others wont. But at least anyone will be able to give it a go. The attunement for Naxx was pretty much non-existent too, which made it possible for sub par guilds like the one I was in back then, to get in there, kill some of the first bosses and get stuck on the more difficult ones. Which was great fun, even if we did fail.

As mentioned in the progression thread, Sunwell isnt really coming out too late, Hyjal/BT came "too early". If BT was released in August/September or so, the wait till Sunwell wouldnt have been that long.
Some would probably have complained about the small waits between each instance, and the boring farming of SSC/TK/Hyjal instead, but everyone will never be happy.
Releasing all instances at once with TBC (and Hyjal coming out a bit later, which wasnt even the original goal) was surely a bad choice. Hardly an incompetent choice though.
It remains to be seen if Blizz learned from it or not.

For Sunwell, I definitely hope they make it doable to take the first bosses, for people who just killed Illidan the day before (or didnt kill him yet, but at least is pretty close). Making it closed for everyone except those who farmed Illidan for 3+ months would be real incompetence, by making the Naxx mistake once again.
A decent amount of raiders should be able to get into Sunwell before Wotlk hits.

The very best guilds in the world probably just have to come to term with the reality of most bosses not offering them more than a few days of tries or less.
Unless Blizz starts to add some over-the-top "heroic" raid boss somewhere (think Cthun 1.0), which the very best can struggle to kill first for months, for the fame only (e.g. "bragging loot" rather than better loot, and not being a part of the storyline etc). That would be the solution I prefer, not requiring too much Dev work, and not taking the storyline-progress away from normal raiders.

In many ways what happened to EQ too I guess. Its playerbase grew away from waking up at night to kill a freshly spawned boss in the outdoor world before everyone else.
And in WoW most will probably also "grow" (through age or just boredom) away from 5h 5-7 days raiding too.
I feel pretty sure Blizz will adjust raiding in that direction too, making it less time consuming, less restrictive. Hopefully they can accomplish that, without making it "too easy", but it will be a challenge to get it right.
10 mans is a step in that easier direction, but to be honest, 10 mans will never feel like a real raid imo.

Personally I would just like to see trash cutted down to a minimum in all raid instances, since its usually the boring and time-consuming part of it, and also not what makes it challenging (although less trash obviously makes it possible for "crappy" guilds to get more tries in on a boss). Have interesting trash around, but why have 5-10 of the same pull, when 2 of them would have showed you the strategy hints toward next boss, and the theme of the instance. Hell, maybe throw in more trash with "neutral" status, if they should be there for flavour.
Not that it will ever happen. Blizz loves the trash!

They already made a huge step in that direction relative to pre-tbc: all the dungeons are shorter, and you can reach the end boss without having to clear the whole tier. That was specifically so guilds could raid fewer hours a week but still progress (albeit more slowly) through the content.


EQ was very different in that you *could not compete* unless you were willing to race spawns or be so far behind that you were irrelevent because there was only one of each boss. WoW doesn't have that issue, so I don't see how WoW has as much pressure to adapt to some extremely short raiding schedule for everyone as you say it will.

There's no requirement in WoW in TBC to raid for 25-35 hours, people are just choosing to (I was recently in a 15-hour 5/5 5/9 guild that continues to progress quite nicely. There's 12 hour guilds out there. 10 might be pushing it because of the length of SSC but who knows.)

And that's just looking at the 25-mans.


On my old server (Zul'jin) there's a guild raiding ~25 hours a week. They're raiding until 2:30am. They raided the week in between Christmas and New Year's. They *really* want to complete the content so they can epeen in front of everyone and, unsurprisingly, are moving rapidly ahead of guilds raiding fewer hours. Good for them! It makes 'em happy (and by and large, they're the younger raiders, at least relative to my old guild's ages.)

That's fine, there's no mandate there to Blizzard to force them to slow down to a more casual schedule. And it doesn't, in any way, impact my old guild (15 hours a week) from progressing on a slower schedule like it did in the EQ days.


The big question out there is, as said, pacing, and that's thoroughly discussed in the other thread.

Was there ever proof to the claim that the designers of the be all and end all of instances which was Naxxramas have actually left the company?

Or maybe they want to ease the burden of recruiting on raid guilds and not have to drag potential apps through Vashj/Kael and then potentially Illidan/Archimonde.

I don't classify that as 'incompetence.' At the end of the day, who is this going to effect? The top 20-30 or so raiding guilds vying for a world/regional first? Hate to break it to you but, as I said in a prior post in this thread, it is completely irrelevant to Blizzard's marketing purposes whether Death and Taxes or Blood Legion or Nihilium or whoever finish first. They just need a group of guilds... any guilds... jockeying for the top spot and displaying those stick-bound carrots to the other raiders and players. The top guilds don't have 'fans' or 'groupies.' No one, outside of the guild members themselves, like those guilds because of their colorful antics or hometown loyalty or any jazz like that. If Nihilum or D&T left for Age of Conan or Warhammer or whatever then chances are 95% or more of the WoW population wouldn't bat an eye. They would simply look to the other two dozen or so guilds that will take their place at the top for the latest information on drops and raid zones, etc.

So, yes, while it is a bit unfortunate that higher population realms will have a certain advantage if things aren't done a proportional basis the vast majority of players will simply appreciate it as a cool world event. At the end of the day when Blizzard opened the can of worms that is paid character transfer, there isn't much they can do to control the movement of players and populations of realms.

It's not childish, just absurd. Call it semantics, too, if you wish. We should all display such 'incompetence' in various aspects of our lives as to achieve market dominance and basically put what was before a niche genre in gaming on the map of more popular/mainstream leisure activity.

Bingo. People keep decrying the 'casuals' but eventually most of us will either:

A) End of casual, or

B) Stop playing WoW altogether.

While people might argue that younger players will replace the 'aging' raiders you have to keep in mind none of those younger players have the 'EQ ethic' of raiding -- they are all being brought up on WoW.

For my guild, the only reason we have spent the last six months farming BT/Hyjal at all has been to prepare for Sunwell. We have everything. Every attuned character in the guild has full tier 6. A bunch of people don't need any items at all; 95% of our regular raiders are only one or two pieces away from "perfect" gear. People are stockpiling consumables. I have a bank alt with a thousand mana potions. Five hundred fish. That sort of thing. We are looking forward to a challenge. This instance only has six bosses, and my hope is that it's going to take the top guilds in the world (us) more than a month to finish it. The only way to do this is to make the zone hard. A 15-minute Illidan kill should be required to even set foot in the place. Gear checks are a must. A resistance fight that requires difficult-to-accumulate resistance gear is a must. As many encounters as possible should be obnoxiously overtuned - at least to start with. I want a reason to come to these very boards and see people talk about how consumable-dependent encounter X is and how there are too many random factors in encounter Y and hey, is encounter Z even beatable at all?

But, what if they push it a little to far and stick us with another Cthun 1.0? Fine, sure, whatever, we don't have anything else to do while we wait for level 80. This zone is the end of a story arc, the pinnacle of the game, and it should feel like it. What about the casual players? The mid-range raiders? Fuck 'em. They can venture in at level 80 and talk about how cool the architecture is. I want a challenge. Competitive raiding needs a shot in the arm. If KJ dies on the PTR - if that guild that's working on Illidan decides to go to Sunwell, because, hey guys, those first few bosses are free epics - then why the hell have we been farming BT and Hyjal for the past six months?

A nice compromise I'd like is tune Sunwell extremely hard while at the same time dropping attunement to Hyjal. (BT attunement is a formality after that anyways, and everyone should see that questline anyways) I don't want to see "free epic" bosses in a 6 boss end-of-TBC zone. KJ should be tuned extemely difficult. Something like Mag or Gruul or Al'ar original versions wouldn't be too far off here, come to think of it. :P

I will be disappointed if the Sunwell encounters are not extremely difficult. In my opinion Blizzard has really dropped the ball as of late. We've mentioned it a few times already, but it's been close to 8 months since we've received new endgame raiding content, and my guess is at least 10 months will have passed by the time Sunwell goes live. That is a complete and total failure on Blizzards part as far as I'm concerned. In addition to the lull in raiding content, the itemization in TBC is insultingly awful compared to the itemization in Naxxramas. It really does seem like whoever was responsible for Naxx is no longer involved anymore.

As the game grows older, new content should be coming out faster, not much slower. I am not burned out on the game at all. I still love playing and my guild has been fortunate enough to have basically zero turnover during this whole situation. However, I will not wait this long for new content again, and I'm sure there are others that feel the same way I do. I'm not saying this as a lame threat or anything. I understand that sometimes Blizzard has to please certain types of players over others.

Anyway, I agree they should remove the BT/Hyjal attunement requirements and make at least most of the Sunwell encounters extremely challenging and keep it that way for at least a few months.

Fine with me as long as the zones have enough bosses. Also, it should have been SSC and TK simultaneously, then Hyjal and BT simultaneously about 3 or 4 months later. There is no reason to stagger them the way you suggest. SSC and TK are clearly designed to go together. They have a grand total of 10 bosses. Naxxramas had 15.

My main point is they've somehow managed to become worse at developing new content. This should not happen as a game gets simultaneously older and more popular.

Obviously the pacing was bad. As far as easier goes: easier is not necessarily 'worse.' The more popular this game becomes the easier the content is going to get. That is, I think, inevitable. However, Kaplan did mention in one interview that they were looking at ways to boost 'competition' amongst end game raiders in WotLK. How they will do that remains to be seen.

The tried and true method of making content hard at first and then nerfing it later is fine by me. There was no reason for the first few bosses in BT and Hyjal to be as easy as they were upon release.

Heroic mode for 25 mans would add an interesting twist, Heroics for 5 mans worked out quite fine in the end. The bonus is you can wait to tune the heroics until after all the regular content has been defeated, allowing you to adjust numbers and abilities appropriately. Imagine a heroic Gruul/Mag that were as difficult as first encountered. (obviously they'd need to be tuned even harder now, but that's no problem by adjusting hps and whatnot)

[e:] What I also like about this is it doesn't necessarily lock lesser guilds out of experiencing all the content. Lets take the TBC parallel -- you'd have a lot of guilds be able to kill Illidan, but a lot less would be able to do it on Heroic, which would have better gear drops to compensate. All the ridiculous stuff that got nerfed would be fair game in a Heroic.

I did have something like that in the back of my head but ultimately it just presents another subset of content that people will gripe about not being able to see.

Perhaps something along the lines of blatently keeping bosses in relatively new content overtuned and difficult but giving them additional items on their loot table and/or a title or whatever guild benefit for killing them during that time. Eventually at a certain point -- be it a set number of weeks/months, worldwide kills, or server kills -- the bosses will 'devolve' into their 'normal' status and no longer yield the afformentioned perks.

Granted that might lead to the same caste system complaints but it seems a bit different in that once you cross the point where the bosses are on 'normal' the spectre of their 'heroic' mode is no longer looming above the general populace. It was available for a certain time and those who pushed forward with skill and/or hours played got their perks.

To expand on this I think is one of the best ways to please as many people as you can. The hardcore get their hardcore content to plow through to start that is exclusive to them because of the demands it put on players. The casuals can still see the content, and stay happy because nothing is never out of reach just it will come later. Its just a matter what extent the difference is.
If Blizz came right out and said its hard at first, then we nerf it after a certain amount of time (say about when the next major raid is released) do you think people that came later would be unhappy they never saw the 'hard' versions, or would they just plow through it to get to whatever is 'hard' now? To take it another step further, what if they moved gear similar to what happened in MC. People had T2 from MC, then it got moved to BWL, so those people had a slight headstart gearwise, which I am conflicted about. But unique titles, mounts, models might be better. Those who killed Illidan first get something unique to show that they arent casual guild #353 after it gets nerfed, but since its actual stats arent different from what anyone else can get I dont think many would complain. Of course this depends on the hard stuff being killable and not brick walls.