Valen

TBC encounters have one major difference compared to pre TBC ecnounters. Majority of encounters in TBC are not hard by their' nature, but because of the random factors that can happen during the fights. In TBC, a raid group can play near perfectly on 90% of encounters and still wipe, pre-TBC you could play near perfectly on 90% of encounters and have a 100% chance to beat them. How many times did you all see yourself calling "bad luck" after a wipe recently?

That's exactly the issue here and the source of difference you see between Naxx and let's say BT. In BT/MH, you got no gear checks, no consumable checks, but you got random factors thrown at you, called retard checks. I don't know why blizzard likes all the random factors nowadays. Start it with Prince or Aran, It's not always fun. Pre-TBC, you could learn an encounter (well c'thun & co. aside), execuse it perfectly, practice it 1-2 more times and then 1-shot it every week after that. Now, most guilds can still potentially wipe on vashj if the RNG decides to screw them up.

Basically, most encounters got the "c'thun element" in them, more or less. Not only it makes the life harder for the average guild (even on farm nights), it also makes it too easy for top guilds, because they do have the players that can adept to random factors easier.

TBC encounters are too easy for top guilds for the reason mentioned above, and are at the same time are hard for the average guild for the very same reason, because they still don't have the luxury of 25 aware players to kill vashj. I don't know about other servers, but the list of guilds on my server that still try to get vashj and kael'thas after months of trying is long.


PS: I also think that to some degree the weaknesses of blizzard's raid design team are shown when considering the randomness of fights as the major difficulty measure. A potent team can make encounters that are hard enough without all the randomness taken to the extrem (of course nobody denies that random factors are needed 'till a *certain* degree).

 

Hate Monkey

I wish I could find the Blizzard post saying that there wont be any highly available overpowered tailoring items like TBC has in WotLK. That alone fixes raid content so easily.

In regard to the 4HM and guilds not having enough geared tanks to do the encounter, the sole problem with that was the release of TBC. If we would of had another 4-5 months delay on TBC, a shit load more guilds would have completed Naxx, guilds wouldn't of broken up because their MT left and so forth.

 

Liebestod

I don't think Blizzard likes random factors in and of themselves. Like you said, they're retard checks. They're really the only way to make an encounter more interesting than executing a pre-conceived PvE dance in the right manner.

I agree that it can be a problem when the randomness is overly unforgiving and can lead to near-inevitable deaths, but Blizzard has even done a decent job of addressing this. Aran won't use Flame Wreath during a Blizzard or whatever was the problem originally. Prince really isn't that bad unless you lack DPS or if you don't bother to move the tank to where he'll be safest as opposed to just strafing out of the infernal AoE, which I'm pretty sure is what most guilds do, and then subsequently complain when they find that they've boxed themselves in.

Personally, I think randomness is great as long as it's not unforgiving. Gruul's knockback is pretty random, but you generally have to really fuck up to have it kill you. Imagine how boring the fight would be if you could plan where to get knocked back to.

Whenever we wiped to a random "farm" encounter like Aran, it's easy to look and point out how terribly we did - stood in Blizzards, didn't interrupt things, whatever. It's never "omg he hit me with 2 fireballs in a row that's so unfair fuck Blizzard."

 

Valerian

The randomness factor is compounded by the smaller raid size. Losing a single person to a "random" factor (be it truly random or the person being a moron) can mean a wipe with only 25 people in the raid. It was rare in a 40 man raid that losing a single person meant a wipe.

 

Hate Monkey

Must be why Mother Shahraz and Illidari Council are really that random. Sure they've fixed a lot of Mother Shahraz's problems, and made the encounter a complete joke now, but the Illidari Council still has many many many ways for a person to just fall over on. You can go weeks without seeing an Insta-Gib effect happen on IC, but then on one fight lose 5 people to it, and end up wiping. When I first brought up IC as being random as shit for bad luck, no one really believed me, but guess what, if you don't admit that now, you haven't seen the fight enough.

There are random factors in which the raid needs to adapt to, and random factors in which people die. Gurtogg is an example of a random factor in which Fel Rage is random, and is very hard for clothies to stay alive during it, while a rogue getting it not only makes his dps sky rocket, but he can pop evasion on the right time, take barely any damage. Teron Gorefiend and his Shadow of Death, marks a dps, keep going, but marks a healer, need to adapt and cover that healers position for a bit.

 

Illundai

It's not like randomness is new in TBC? Naxx was filled with bosses spamming RSTS abilities...

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Liebestod

I haven't done any of the BT encounters, but the key concept here is the variance of randomness over the length of an encounter. If 10 people get Fel Rage during a normal kill (I don't know), then it's pretty much sure enough that a clothie will get the debuff that the luck factor should be minimized, since you can't reliably kill him with the thought "we wipe if a clothie gets it." I could speak for Leotharas here - the chance for any given person to get his debuff during the fight is high enough that I wouldn't call it heavily luck-based, at least not insofar as the fact that a tank on some encounters could hypothetically dodge 100% of a boss' attacks so you can raid with no healers makes an encounter luck-based as well.

The obvious example of a high-variance luck-based fight would be Chromaggus, where you got two colors per week and you were expected to deal regardless of whether it was considered one of the "hard" or "easy" combinations. And, of course, it would be relatively simple for Blizzard to restrict the luck-based factors to avoid the extreme outcomes: ie. Say that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of Fel Rages will be on cloth classes. Random enough to be generally unpredictable, but it avoids the "easy" case of only Rogues getting the debuff or something.

 

Hate Monkey

Theres randomness in which is ok, but the randomness which leads to deaths which are not intended, is not ok.

When you're first learning Bloodboil, you may go through 3-4-5 Fel Rages, and getting a clothie at that point is horrible. It usually does mean a wipe when you're first learning. But when you're farming him for months, 2 Fel Rages, sometimes a third is normal, but the problem is not the Fel Rage itself, its the splash damage when he does Fel Rage, the Bloodboil DoT, and the stacking buff Gurtogg gets.

Chromaggus was not properly tuned till a year after his initial release, so can't even compare that at all.

 

rozakk

The timed event from ZA was well received by the hardcore crowd, this might be a more enjoyable mechanic to develop than adding 'heroic raids', which at best are somewhat boring simple mechanics changes and at worst another nightmare of testing and balancing from blizzard's pov. Not just in the sense of a 'timed event' for every scenario, but basically any available route that yields better rewards from those who try to squeeze the most out of their character and their raids (a lot of people at these forums).

For example a boss in sunwell might drop its standard loot, but if certain objectives are met during the fight (like saving prisoners while fighting, as a low creativity example), better/more loot results. This alternate objective might require full tier6 and exceptional raid skill and possibly scale several to several levels of difficulty and loot rewards depending on how well it is performed. This simple concept can be redone in multiple, better ways to allow for various raid fights that everyone gets to experience as far as the level of challenge (everything in BT for example), but with the added flexibility of better rewards for going the extra mile.

 

Lookit

Deaths which are not intended? Meaning, every single PVE death you've ever experienced?

Randomness is important to encounters, because it is what prevents each week from being an utterly rote repitition of the previous week.

However, with all this discussion of randomness, it become important to construct a good working definition of what "negative" randomness is. I would suggest that randomness becomes negative when a raid executes a workable strategy without a single error but still wipes due to a random variable outside of their control.

Obviously not a watertight definition, but much better than an endless bunch of Group A clamoring that "Randomness is important!" and Group B shouting frothily "Randomness is bad!"

 

Hate Monkey

No, I mean the deaths, in which are not an intended part of the encounter to which healers had ZERO chance of saving you. On IC if the rogue lands melee hit on you for 15k when he goes to envenom, thats not right. Why do you think Al'ars swing timer resets when she charges? Because people were getting insta-gibbed all over the place by an auto attack.

 

Illundai

Same principle back in Naxx really.

Faerlina: Spamming RoF on your melee, paired with heavy poison bolt damage on them. Eventually one of them was gonna die.
Maexxna: Web Wraps ending up on your Web DPS (if you used it, I guess you could counter it with tactic) meaning they wouldn't come down in time before Spray.
Heigan: Putting 3 healers inside the Stalk tunnel. Putting 3 people in the tunnel just before the Dance. Guaranteed death unless you were a paladin.
Gothik adds, they loved to spam that cleave on one of your tanks, essentially making him useless. Not to mention if you got FN + Shackle resists on the living side one of the Deathknights would charge off, whirlwind a bunch of casters. If they didn't die from that, the Rider would add in a nasty shadowbolt which surely would get them killed.
Four Horsemen, taunt resists. Although I don't really think it was all that bad, a lot of people did seem to think so. Invisible Void Zones. Unlucky Void Zones.
Sapphiron: all Ice Blocks on one side (counterable by tactic, though).
Kel'Thuzad: Frost Blast on your MT/Melee paired with a Void Zone spam in melee range.

So they did use this kind of randomness before, maybe they just didn't spam us with it. And we bloody didn't notice it as much either, since the randomness was only a small portion of the fight.

PS: I'm not disagreeing with you, just notifying :P.

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

◊ Kyth

I agree with this. There's an obsession amongst wow players, probably due to the warcraft background, of seeing "rapid button pressing" as the only "skill" that can be applied in a video game and thereby declaring pve a totally skill-less environment.

I see it was one of many, and things like rapid correct decision making, situational awareness, being able to switch roles, etc. as just as important "skills". I think the random elements that are mentioned in the posts between this one and my post are part of Blizzard's (rough, still very much a work in progress) attempts to introduce skill elements by forcing decision making and compensating for things not going like you planned.


Some of us are more impressed by people who consistently make the right decisions in a "noisy" environment than by those who simply hit a series of buttons really quickly .

Also, as much-maligned as it is, guild organization is another relevant skill. Just because it doesn't happen on the raid doesn't mean it's not a skill or a distinguisher between people/guilds.

 

Jebraltar

Quite simply: By being in a guild that was literally completely average for pre-BC. Most guilds pre-BC had killed Nefarian, possibly a boss or two in Naxxramas, and was perhaps working on / past Huhuran. Ours was a little behind in AQ40, but otherwise completely normal. In Burning Crusade, every single boss encounter is at least somewhat interesting. Pre-BC, raiding was a matter of head counts more than interesting mechanics and personal responsibility until Sartura in AQ40 and a few of the Nax bosses. (I am aware that BWL was stressful for healers and tanks, in case anyone wants to interject that into there.)

The first three 25-man encounters in Burning Crusade are High King Maulgar, Gruul, and Magtheridon. Maulgar has 20% of your raid force tanking, some positioning woes, and reasonable DPS requirements. Gruul 2.0 was reasonable encounter that stressed tanks, healing, and DPS, whilst also requiring decent response to the random elements of Shatter and Ground Slam/Shatter. Magtheridon was a literal DPS race for two minutes followed by a fairly easy fight with, again, movement required on everybody's part and a co-ordination test.

Do they match up against the greatest encounters pre-BC? No. On the other hand, what encounters are these taking the place of? Well, the first three 40-man bosses are Lucifron, Magmadar, and Gehennas. You're tanking at most two adds, they're being tanked by Warriors, DPS requirements are an absolute joke, fight mechanics are tank and spank with mind control / fear / rain of fire. I could explain each one to someone well enough in thirty seconds that they could do the fight and would be aware of all of the elements.

For the vast, vast majority of raiders, raiding has gotten much better since the Burning Crusade was released. It sure does suck for bleeding-edge guilds. On the other hand, how awesome is it when you hear that you're only ever going to see a fight that doesn't suck if you both ditch the friends you've been playing with for six months and start preparing for mass consumable farming, idiotic delays imposed by world buffs, etc? I'd go with "Not awesome."

That's absolutely true. Now think about how MC/BWL compare to T4/T5 encounters.

At the same time, the penalty for death is that you have to keep doing what you were working on in almost every game - you lose gold, you lose time. In raiding, the penalty for choosing to do it is that you need to waste a great deal of time preparing by doing something completely unrelated. Why?

Kael'thas did. Leotheras did. Perhaps it takes the potential of having wasted a completely uninteresting hour for you to be interested, but I'd rather just sacrifice the "excitement" of a boring half hour to hour wasted preparing world buffs in the middle of a raid.

This is true. Naxxramas got a lot of prestige because it had some painful decisions made in terms of tuning. It was fantastic for the people in there, but it was horrible for everyone on the other side.

How is it arguable that it is a mistake to make content more accessible? Difficulty has been scaling up, just more slowly than pre-BC - and it starts a considerably more difficult level than pre-BC. No one liked BWL better because it had garbage for tuning at release. Why are people trying to say that BT would have been better if it were ludicrously difficult when it was released, then tuned down, boss by boss, over the course of six months of frustrating head-banging for guilds not in the top 100-200 worldwide?

 

Hate Monkey

Countered by the correct tactic to minimize the fight time, and the adjustment of how AoE effects worked.

Never really experienced that unless the web dps didn't turn around to clear the webs.

Problem with this was the time between the ports, and the time till initial port. But I guess no more fearing didn't warrant this to be fixed.

The skill and luck level on this fight were so high anyways, no one was really bothered about it.

Idiot proofing? Only people I saw die to "invisable" void zones were the same players, every single time. Countered by watching the timers.

There still are the numbers out there that showed the percentage chance for that to happen, around 2%, so a few strategies worked around it.

Those timers could never over lap like that I believe, plus Spell Detail was what killed more people on that fight.

I know puesdo-randomness is what the dev's go for when creating an encounter, so the fight isn't the same week to week, but it can be, but when true unavoidable insta-gibbing happens, the only way to avoid that is to change the encounter so it wont happen, which changes the other aspects of the fight. Saber Lash on the tossed MT on Mother Shahraz, unintended from the start, and mostly fixed now.

 

Shadout

While you didnt really have to farm it, having done it is obviously a way to make the first bosses in Sunwell easier than they will be without full T6. No matter the base difficulty.
That said, the reason you will kill first Sunwell bosses before 99% of the raiders is probably not because of your 6 months of farming, but because of your better raiding-skills. No matter how those bosses will be tuned.
Sounds fair that you can progress easier by killing Illidan 500 times. If you dont want it easier, dont farm him, but obviously, most will pick the easier way if its available.

I can only agree about seeing a 'Cthun 1.0 boss' would be nice for competition between the very best players. Imo, it should just be kept outside of the normal raid instances. Whether that means heroics, or small "onyxia-style" instances with a super hard boss in it. Not all content needs to be available for everyone... I just believe the main story arcs should be available, over time, for a majority of the average 25-man raiders (No one have to come up with examples of people wiping on VR or similar), before the content is made obsolete by a new expansion.

Not to sound like an arse, but really, saying less consumable grind etc. diminish the game for raiders is over the top. Only those who want the end-game kept very exclusive, even at the cost of worse raid experience for everyone, can say the consumable grind was good, Imo. The consumable issue represented lots of problems for raiding.

Ill never understand the idea that you got no reasons to raid without 'epixxx'... Why not raid because you like it? Because you find it fun to kill bosses before others, to figure out new strategies, the joy of watching a big boss fall after days or hours of hard work and painful fine tuning your strategy? Loot and such is maybe extra flavour, but why does it have to be the main reason for people to raid?
All those who have said they raided to get items for "owning" in pvp, should be happy they can now get their pvp gear through the pvp instead. Again it seems less about peoples personal experience and fun in the game, and more about the exclusitivity of their fun.


Hopefully you enjoyed killing Illidan many months ago, I know I certainly would have. I would probably also have stopped farming him long ago too, but thats more a guild decision than an indivdual choice of course (Im sure Ill have to help my guild farming him until 2.4 too, even if I personally would rather enjoy the break Cant even imagine doing it for 6 months. Thats pointing back at the content pacing issue though, which really shouldnt affect how Sunwell turns out. Past mistakes should be kept in the past)

There is quite a difference between making it easy at release, and not making it tuned for the top 10 guilds.
Making it available for everyone through later patches generally works great... Except for Sunwell, since there wont be more raid content before the expansion resets its all. Sunwell should allow more people to get thorugh, allow more people to get further in, and allow more people to just give it a try or two. E.g. allow more people to experience Sunwell on different levels. Naxx did allow most people to enter, but the size and tuning still made it quite exclusive because of TBC hitting "shortly" after.
Sure, they coud make Kiljaeden super hard for Top 10 and then nerf it 1 month later, but who believe Blizz would do this? Usually the nerfs only arrive when new content for the top raiders are released (except bugged enconters or clearly overtuned ones like Vasj1.0).

In the end raid bosses today probably arent much worse than Naxx (except the pacing). Peoples expectations after Naxx are just so much higher, the top raiders skills so much better, that nothing will really make the old feeling of your first times in Naxx come back.
Not even an over-tuned boss X.

That hits it fairly accurate. When many raiders say they want harder encounters, what they seem to want is more exclusive encounters. Which is a bit sad.
For both Blizzard and the players the goal should be to have as many players as posible have as much fun as possible. At some point one groups fun will obviously interfer with others chance to have fun (Having all raids at Kara difficulty might be fun for some, but terrible for pretty much all raiders etc.).
Releasing difficult raid encounters, then slowly nerfing them is a damn good way to give everyone more "fun", something most people seem to agree about in this thread. But this doesnt really work for Naxx, Sunwell etc. given the short life-time they will have.
For that reason, tuning all of Sunwell for 4-6 months of Illidan faming would be ridicoulous. Tuning the last boss for this might be fine, since gear will be gained in Sunwell, but some people seems to wish for a brickwall boss at the front door, to make it exclusive.

An issue many has been around is gear checks. One thing to remember for TBC is probably the whole issue of retuning gear with more stamina added, stats scaling with lvls, sockets, the whole PvE/PvP split etc. Most agreed item scaled quite terrible in the months after TBC was out (Blizzards early tries to permanently close the gaps between PvP and PvE gear I assume), until it was partly improved through patches. I bet we might see better boss progression for this reason alone in Woltk, where, as far as we know right now, we wont se the same amount of changes to the itemization.

Timed events could work damn well in all instances. I hope Blizz realizes this.
Hardcore versions of raid instances is something I fear a bit. It could end up separating people a lot. For instance, in "Hardcore only!" vs. "Normal" raid guilds etc.
Imo such a heroic mode should be for selected bosses only, if anything. I bet most would rather have a greatly tuned Illidan-heroic version, rather than BT heroic mode at the slightly silly level we see current 5 mans. Quality over Quantity. Those one shot Onyxia-style encounters wouldnt have potential to split up the playerbase, since the hardcore versions of single bosses wouldnt be enough to build a totally independent playstyle upon.
The example for all game devs to avoid, can be seen in Hellgate: London, with its separation of the playerbase in Normal and Elite modes (and Hardcore, but that's slightly different). Don't go there!

The issue might be valuing the size rather than the individual boss design.
Naxx would still have been great if you had picked out the 8 best of these bosses for a smaller instance, right?
You could then throw the other great ones into another instance somewhere, in another time.
Naxx was probably overkill for everyone not in the top of the food chain, so shortly before TBC. The size of Sunwell seems a lot more fitting for its timeframe. It still need to have 6 great bosses to be good, which might not happen, but having an instance with 15 great bosses at once is not necessarily better than having an instance with 6 just as great bosses. Not if ½ the bosses is not getting experienced byt the majority anyway.

 

◊ Quigon

You guys are out of your minds if you think the randomness in Naxx was even in the same ballpark as TBC. The examples listed above don't even make sense as all are counter-able with repeatable strategies. Read: TBC is more random.

The only frustrating RNG in naxx was the mind control - and that drew a lot of complaints as it should have.

Illdari Council is the 4 Horsemen of TBC:
Too easy/simple, bordering on impossible with 1 tweak due to boring and mishmashed mechanics.
Taking multiple bosses and mashing it into 1 less interesting boss.
Doesn't even compare to 4H in terms of execution or excitement, or difficulty, or innovation. There is none of that in fact in this fight.
Terrible, non progressing itemization.
Instagib RNG based possibilities - with some element of unforgivability.
And of course they went with a hard berserk instead of the soft enrage of the 4H. Which incidentally was at 20 minutes. What is so wrong with taking a while to complete a fight? Is design so terrible that the only counter to healer stacking is a berserk timer?

 

Trippy

From what I'm assuming with the split in Sunwell bosses (3 being instantly available and 3 having to be "summoned) Blizzard may be trying to make the first 1 or 2 bosses only a small jump up in difficulty with the final 3 being very hard and very unique.

Personally, I'd rather have 1 really fun encounter then 3 bland ones, so perhaps if the fights are special and dynamic it will make up for the smaller amount of bosses.

 

Hate Monkey

I hope I didn't come across like that. I knew that every fight in Naxx was repeatable, 1-shotable after you learned them. With TBC, I still see parses from EJ, other Euro guilds, and even my guild will wipe on a boss because of an uncontrollable effect.

This however is a nice gem from this week on IC:


Yes, thats right, High Nethermancer Zerevor stole Dampen Magic back, was a very interesting way to wipe.

 

◊ Quigon

Yeah this is what I'm saying, perhaps I worded my sentence incorrectly. I'm saying clearly that TBC is much more random than Naxx, or any 40 man raid prior to the TBC set.

I think your attempt to explain much of the examples of randomness in Naxx were fine, but some show key missing points.

For instance: The heigan tunnel is timed and designed purposely to kill off your raid. It is the soft-enrage mechanism, guaranteeing deaths for taking too long. Porting 3 of 15 or so healers was not going to wipe you, but if 9 other healers had already died? maybe. I think we did that fight once with 2 healers left up though.

Honestly if we're just talking about how randomness always existed - well the first mob you attacked in whatever-land probably had random values for damage... the point is the randomness that often occludes a reasonable chance to survive based on skill. Or perhaps the fight that in attempt 1 is almost 10 times easier than in attempt 2.

AFAIK, this is a combat log bug. This didn't actually happen.

 

Illundai

I was merely reinforcing that what I said, randomness isn't new. I never even came close to saying that it was the same randomness that we have now in TBC raiding. But honestly, Randomness has been in the game since day 1 as far back as resistance fights go. A lot of the Pre-TBC praisers seem to not even realise that. Have people forgotten Ouro e.g? 1,5 minute uptime vs 3 minute. Day and night.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to prove that randomness is good and all that and I did like raiding a lot more pre-TBC, but honestly with the current boss-abilities, how can you make it less random then what we have now? The real frustration for me was the bugged shit (Hi "Couch of Death" on Mother) -- not the random nature of the fights.

I never actually got to see their enrage, I knew there was one but we either didn't last that long on the wipes or we killed them well before it. Think our first kill was with 72 Marks or so? What did they actually do? :P

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Hate Monkey

It's a nice bug then, gives a nice "Hey they're coding the npc's to be smart now" feel. Still a fast wipe.

But the problem with that type of fight starting is that no matter how well executed, 1 resist at the beginning is a wipe if the server is lagging the slightest. Get ride of that resistible part on the first steal, IC becomes much much more repeatable.

Heres to hoping no spell stealing fights in Sunwell.

At 92(?) Marks or last one standing, they started to spam their abilities.

 

◊ Quigon

They casted faster.
It was scary for Blameux, and just tricky on healers for Zeliak. Thane - well I've heard of guilds talking about an enraged Thane but they basically claimed death.

Void zones all over the place, but people still pulling out kills through feats of skill...

We probably killed 4H about a dozen times? Maybe way more, I don't know... but all but perhaps 2 attempts they enraged for us. We were extremely slow in our execution of the fight, very meticulous and paced in who went where. So zeliak always enraged.
We only had Blameux enrage once or twice, and never survived it. Other guilds have though.

 

Illundai

I'm pretty sure the last mob standing enraged regardless of what mark you were on. We killed the last 2 at the same time just in case, anyhow.

100 Marks I believe, 20 minutes (12x100 = 1200 Sec = 20 Min).

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Valen

Yes, there were random factors pre-TBC, but majority of them were 1) avoidable 2) recoverable. What can you do if morogrim decides to grave all your MT healers? Shaman at karathress literally one-shots your tank? Archimonde throws 3 different people into doomfire at the same time? Gurtogg 2 shots the mages? Sanguinar tank gets gaze 3 times in row and then he decides to fear the entire centeral area at that same time? Let's go 1 year back: Prince, actually sometimes manages to completly corner you with NO way to move.

There are more examples like that, but the common factor there is 1 thing: Those random factors cause a chain effect in 25 man raids that are NOT recoverable in most situations, unless you actually get lucky, which is a random factor itself.

The another issue that makes random factors worse now is that in most TBC encounters you can't afford to lose anyone, because they can happen to be your key guy 90% of the time. There is no real difference between archimonde soul charge and some one dying during pre-nerf kael phase 2-3 really, as both can potentialy have the same effect in the end, especially for a guild that is learning those encounters.