Yeah, you're hardcore. Plenty of people still farm flasks, Marks of the Illidari don't quite rain from the sky. A quick AH search shows that a Fel Lotus will cost me 30g, so they're clearly going somewhere.

I'm sure there will be a Gruul-style Sunwell flask, though it'll probably require a very high SSO rep. At any rate this conversation is a tad pointless.

The problem with that idea is that the Scourge/Legion mobs themselves are dropping the marks, and not mobs of the Infinite Dragonflight.

I've always believed that the Mount Hyjal debacle was an issue of causality.

Start a little pulse of something in the timestream to lure make Nozdormu/Soridormi believe that some bad stuff is going down and sends heroes to investigate.

Heroes come in, only to find that there's nothing there, except they now have to participate in the battle and make sure it reaches the correct conclusion, else they will be trapped there.

Or! we find out one of the defeated bosses in Mount Hyjal is resurrected as an agent of the Infinite Dragonflight. But yes, it is very disappointing to see the Infinite Dragonflight story just die-out. Why are we in Hyjal at all? Didn't Jaina, Thrall and their armies stall long enough? Didn't Malfurion destroy Archimonde without us?

The one cool thing... the Archimonde fight does show us that Elune is present to some degree. Elune's Protection was a very nice touch.

I think the reasoning was that you are there because you were supposed to find the phylactery from Rage Winterchill, you just decided to tag along till the end.

Me and my guild have been farming Illidan since August. For months now we have looked at patch 2.4 as the new holy Grail for World of Warcraft PvE Raiding. But personally i have already embraced the fact that it will be a huge dissapointment. Sure the instance will most likely be well designed and very epic in feeling. But the first 3 bosses will die on the day this instance is released on Live. Since most raiding guilds with Illidan down will go on the PTR and learn these bosses for 'free'. Depending on the release of the last 3 bosses. I might just go as far as to say that the Sunwell might even be cleared on the PTR. As long as Kil'Jaeden doesnt turn out to be C'thun 2.0.

Sure it will be refreshing to kill 6 new bosses every week. Since Black Temple and Especially Mount Hyjal farming is boring members out. But now that the Average Joe managed to be as well geared as the Nihilums and Forte's the 'Race' for the sunwell might as well turn out to be a huge dissapointment. Heck if i got 4 sets of Full Tier6 and all random slot epics to go with it. Most Post-November-December Illidan killing guilds will be Fully Tier6 mainspec geared as well.

I dont really feel bitter though, i just want to go into this content with my guild and have something else to do. But clearing Illidan as a Alliance first on my current server makes me wanting more. And the elitist in me knows that i might just be in for a surprise. The Player and Guildmaster in me however will just be happy we got new fresh content. Which will however most likely be cleared by anyone who puts the effort into it on the PTR.

Hi Solidus, long time no see!

Yer I certainly feel they've had issues in TBC making bosses sufficently hard enough, the speed at which some have fallen is crazy compared to pre TBC. Whether this is an issue of 25 man raids or just the fact we've seen pretty much everything they can throw at us now is up for debate.

I do feel however that the unlocking of bosses 4 through 6 will serve as a cockblock that Blizzard can manipulate from behind the scenes. That is theres nothing to stop them altering the daily quest completed requirements once they get an idea of how many are being completed a day, to last them a long time. I get the feeling they may do this so it will be soemthing like we clear the first three bosses on the first reset, and then farm those 3 bosses for the next 4-6 wekes before getting access to the last three which are cleared in the next couple of resets. I can't blame them I guess, it splits the release into two sections I guess, that can be altered based on their progress on getting WotLK ready to ship. I know a few of my guild have half jokingly started leveling new characters in what would have been progression raid time to accomplish more daily quests per day but I don't know, I just get the feeling that it isn't going to matter as much as the AQ40 one did. I guess we'll find out depending on the transparency of the quests, if its a hidden counter its easier to mess with than say something like the war effort which really was servers competing against each other and you could get an update from npcs as to how the war effort was going.

They really can go to town with the Infinite Dragonflight and CoT. It alleviates a lot of pressure on the designers (reuse CoT as the zone, reuse story and battles from lore and lastly reuse a current zone with a makeover should they choose something like Old Hillsbrad). I too was dissappointed that they dropped the flight from MH, it seemed to me more like a rush job than anything and that they possibly could have been intending to add one if they'd had more time. After all you could fight a dragon flying down from the sky or coming out of a portal at any part, most likely at the orc camp after Azlagor. All lore I've seen points to the Bronze Dragonflight taking time travel very seriously, they certainly wouldn't send you back in time to MH "for the lulz" as it were. I'm hoping in the WotLK CoT instace that for whatever reason the Infinite Dragonflight have gone back to stop Arthas destroying his ships (perhaps to prevent the formation of the entity now known as the Lich King, without the help of his men he probably wouldn't have found Frostmourne) rather than just us interfering again.

Well, you call 2.2% of the raiding population (source:WoWJutsu) who killed Illidan 'Average Joe'? The guilds who are killing him in 2008 are still raiding the exact same content as six months ago bar Kael'Thas. Average Joe would be the guy filled with pvp epics and having below 2200 in arena rating ; or the guy still raiding Karazhan. So I wouldn't do the mistake of thinking "undeserving" people are killing Illidan, still a very low percentage got there and the community has almost a year to do it. 2.2% is still a lot more than the number who killed Kel'Thuzad of course, so you might argue that content is 'easier', and it is undoubtedly compared to the old days of pre-Marks, pre-summoning stones, 40 mans and so on. Some are fast, some are slow. But there are 97.8% people out there who won't be seeing end-game...

You are right though that due to the server event, PTR, the low amount of bosses and everyone being decked out in perfect T6 gear, the "Race" won't be as exciting as before.

Getting 25 who have L2P is easier than 40. Gear upgrades between tiers isn't as large.

The result is that gear isn't as big a block. Law of averages means that fewer people to make mistakes isn't as big a block.

The encounters on an individual basis are probably significantly harder than before - compare Mother's Fatal Attraction to Geddon's bomb, for instance. Once you have a raider of some level of competency, however, you're well on your way.

The difference, I think, comes in some part from the level of coverable encounters (term made up on the spot). With 40 people, you were going to have more mistakes, but you had more people to cover for those who made mistakes. This allowed for lesser raiders (the people making mistakes) and greater raiders (the people who covered them). The result is that you had guilds who were able to field a team that included stars and morons, and still get bosses down. Lord knows we had some !#@$ing retards that tried their best to wipe us on C'thun, but we killed him weekly in spite of their best attempts :p

Most top tier raiding guilds these days are much higher on the star to moron ratio because fucking up in an enounter now means 4% of your raid is gone instead of 2.5%. What's more, much of the time, every person in your raid can have a critical role in a TBC encounter, compared pre-TBC where most of the time you got to choose which people had to perform well (notable exceptions both ways exist, of course - in TBC you get to choose your cube clickers, in Vanilla WoW, you couldn't control who was going to be ported to c'thun's stomach).

It's an odd scenario, in my mind, where you can have encounters be harder, in absolute terms, but have it eaten through more quickly (by more guilds) because the raid size cap and encounter design has introduced incentives which did not exist before. Blizzard has chosen that the game would evolve this way. If they know that most encounters don't have the coverable aspect that the did before, they must know that guilds are not going to raid with dead weight, and resultantly more competent guilds are going to fly through content.

Anecdotally, the beauty of TBC encounters isn't just "WoW he's a good Druid." - its "Wow he's just a damn good player." in regards to many of the encounters - stuff like Illidan's Parasites, Archimonde, Teron Ghosts, and others require a good degree of situational awareness, not just being a good _________.

Really overall the game has taken a small step back from having the best at a certain class, to having the best overall players you want in your raid. I enjoy encounters alot more now, although I do miss some of the naxx fights (Gothik tuned for T6 would be a blast), and you can also see where the Blizzard raid design philosophy changed - pretty much starting with C'thun.

1) What part of "enjoys raiding" implies "enjoys blowing hundreds of gold a week on Fel Lotus"? (Or for those with herbalist alts, "enjoys blowing hundreds of gold worth of herbs".) Being on EJ usually implies the first, but not the second.

2) Given the low drop rate of marks, I doubt my guild is alone in using them faster than they drop. That means everyone needs to obtain flasks the "old fashion way" anyhow.

3) Given points 1 and 2, I'm surprised to see anyone who wouldn't grumble about Sunwell not having some form of flask help. We're basically discussing whether Bliz is going to make me and thousands of other raiders spend a non-zero number of hours a week on a completely pointless and boring activity. I don't think it's strange to hope they opt for not doing so.


Solarian is probably an even better example of your point, I think. Compare and contrast the two.

Geddon:

• Bomb mechanic, plenty of time to move, sometimes survivable if someone didn't.
• Periodic "melee run away" mechanic, survivable if someone was slow.
• Mass magic debuff to dispell

Solarian:

• Bomb mechanic, zero time to move, not survivable if someone is slow
• Period healer add phase
• Periodic AoE phase

Solarian's bomb mechanic is much less forgiving than Geddon's. The healer adds in Solarian need to be picked up and interupted, which usually gives all your spare tanks and rogues something to do. The comparable ability on Geddon just made them turn and run - obviously trivial. Finally, while the third abilities aren't directly comparable, I'm pretty sure we can agree that the Agent zerg is a lot more dangerous than Geddon's debuff spam. Solarian is, straight up, harder, less forgiving, and much more complex.

The funny thing is, Solarian is an easy fight; probably the easiest fight in the entire T5 tier right now - certainly easier than VR. It realy underlines just how far the "baseline" has risen since the MC days.

I want to push my guild to not use Marks anymore to save up for Sunwell once it hits PTR. I'd much rather just suffer a few extra seconds per boss, or using 1 more mana pot, vs flasking for most of a night. 25 Marks a night in BT a week adds up, and just skipping 4 weeks of flasking would enable us to run at least 1 week in Sunwell using flasks. Hopefully by then (worst case scenario) they will have added marks to the drop table in Sunwell. (This is all assuming we can even use marks.. we are currently using guild funds to purchase Fel Lotus by the boatload, again just in case.)

I know this was briefly discussed and then dismissed last week, but something interesting just came up on MMO-Champion.com. Last week the leaked Sunwell items floating about the net were claimed as fake, but the guy who authors the site has said some recent information he has come across has now changed his mind that the items are 95% likely to be from an early internal test run of the Sunwell.

Items can be seen here:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...well_loots.jpg

[e] Should have said that last week the guy was pretty adamant that these were fake, so he must have seen something pretty convincing to pull such a 180 on the matter. Quite interesting if they are real, 3 melee daggers though, sigh.

Maybe, but I'm willing to bet that people will be asking how long it will take Nihilum to clear it first...if they manage to do so first, that is (and they've done a damned good job at taking out all the big-names so far, so...).

I'm a little curious, though - I'm probably not going to Sunwell before WotLK, if even then, but still - have they said how the unlocking is supposed to work? I'm guessing one of five things: 1)Quests, 2)Reputation, 3)Boss kills, 4)Timed events, or 5)Something like the Domo fight in MC, the dousing of runes with the water - something similar to that.

They still seem very real to me, regardless of the fake claims. They just seem itemised too well all round to be dismissed. It really does seem like they were from a private/leaked build of WOW that someone mustve got access to (can only imagine a employee?) and itemnumber-lootlinked them while in Goldshire (hence the original screenshot)

I don't think gear will be the deciding factor, it will be time spent. Probably the top 300 guilds or so worldwide will have almost all their players in full T6, so it's pretty much a wash. Pretty much all the top guilds will raid 6-7 days a week, but the question is how long will they raid each day. Will Nihilum players take time off their jobs (if they have real jobs) to play 24/7 ? Perhaps the daily quest requirement and daily limit will create sort of an artificial "cockblock" in that playing 24 hours a day will only net you the same benefit as playing 6 hours a day.

They could change one of those melee daggers into something a protection paladin might want. I could appreciate that.

Those top 300 guilds should be at least top 600 US+EU only. Add the Asian guilds and we could easily look at 1000+ guilds world wide who will be almost full T6, come Sunwell.

I just don't see loot and upgraded gear being the focus of Sunwell Isle. For game devs, it seems more about enhancing game storyline/lore (scryer-aldor alliance) and introducing new concepts into the game (server-wide reputation gains)before WoLK is released. I would expect people walking into SPlat in full BT will come out with only a few true upgrades. And that makes sense to me, especially with the expansion coming soon (at least by the time 2.4 is released it will probably be soon) and the "gear reset" inevitable.

Hmm. Actually, this figure is more or less calculable. T6 chests should be the limiting factor for collecting the full set. At the very minimum - 25 people and zero wastage - your guild needs to kill Illidan 13 times to be in "full T6". Realistically, with a raising roster of 35 (1 spare for each class +1) and at least some wastage of tokens towards the end, you're looking at ~5 months of farming Illidan.

In this post before the thread drifted too far towards raider/casual argument and got locked, there was a graph of the number of guilds killing Illidan over time. So we can guesstimate as follows:

If Sunwell comes out at the start of March, there will be ~350 guilds in US/EU with full T6
If it's out at the start of April, that's ~450 guilds
If it's the start of May, that's ~550 guilds
... and so on.

The number of new guilds killing Illidan per month seems to be levelling out at around 100-125, but there's no signs of it levelling off yet.

Those numbers are across ~450 servers, so it's reasonable to say that on average there will be about one guild per server that's completely farmed out the existing content and is thus primed for the race through Sunwell. Even if the opening process does hold things up on some servers, there can still be a meaningful competition based on the time from the Sunwell gates opening on your own server to the killing of the final boss.

I shall have fun watching from the sidelines :-)

Well, I was skeptical about the items' authenticity for exactly that reason; however, if these are by any chance real, they do feel a bit out of touch with the current class demands.
However, this leads me to the recent patch that added some more raid viability to Retribution and Protection paladins, some damage boosts to dagger rogues, and the recent class feedback requests from Blizzard. And the itemization on these daggers is simply beautiful; no longer does haste result in lots of stamina and no crit, due to agility and red sockets being paired with haste, on both the daggers and the mean 2 hander. It would, indeed be a pity for these items to be wasted on a virtually extinct raiding spec, but I'd like to see the patch notes as well as some of these items on the PTR before planning around them.

As for daggers dropping off the last boss, I'd say only the Crux is likely to be a Kil'jaden drop, seeing as it's higher ilevel than the Fang and Shiv

EDIT:
Yes and no; having to rely on a number of dailies to get done may indeed slow progress on some low population realms. However, there are a few things to note:

Unlike the AQ war effort, however, where you usually got a green item and quasi useless city rep for turning in stuff, we know the dailies will reward gold, (and at a 25 quest cap per day, 250 gold a day is quite tempting) and reputation to a faction that probably rewards you more substantially than, say Stormwind. And, judging by the reputation rewards so far, I'm sure a lot of non raiding people would like a shot at an epic item or two they can grind their way to, so casuals or alts will actually have an incentive to do these quests. Given a reasonable amount of things needed to be done before unlocking, I'd say most realms of similar population will open the end bosses in a similar amount of time.

Also, big guilds, with solid infrastructures and extremely active players will no longer be able to stockpile on goods to massively turn in, cutting down some of the progress of really advanced realms. BUT, everyone with an alt can do the quests a second, or third time a day, speeding up unlocking progress. What alts contribution really comes down to is if the alts of people who farmed Illidan for 6 months account for more than the alts of the casual people who are just happy to get a second or third alt to 70 once they got their "welfare" epics (damn, I hate that term). Personally, I'd say this time the casuals are the ones that account for more, but we'll juts have to see...

Clearing the instance will depend solely on server activity to unlock the later bosses. I expect the first three will be known very well by the time the instance goes live and a dozen guilds to down them within the first evening. So... not really anything here to look forward to.


I theory-crafted a sword for my character a while ago based on Sunwell end boss item level. Not that far off, just need to use stats effectively and Blizzard mostly doesn't. Of course, everything in that screenshot, if it is real, is subject to change. I think they might change one of those daggers to mace/axe/fist, but we'll see about that fairly soon anyway.

Unless he's holding more info back, his reasoning is outlined in the post and revolves mainly around the fact that the items in the screenshot appear to be of appropriate ilvl for what we think Sunwell will have. As was mentioned here before, it wouldn't be hard for someone to fake some item stats with a good guess-timate of the ilvls.