As proved by numerous other posts elsewhere on EJ and internet, the raiding community is tiny. The bleeding edge raiding community is a small minority in a small minority. I really don't see Blizzard taking this into much consideration when deciding when WotLK will be launched. It'll be launched when it's done, which is probably a far way off still as we've yet to see any more info than a few screenshots (with absolutely no mobs in them, mind you).

Interestingly enough your view seems to be almost the exact opposite of many posters here. The main problem with the BT/Hyjal attunements is that they require raiding to do. If you have a few people who are away when you first start killing Kael, or have to take in some new recruits, you have to get an entire 25-man raid to go and attune them, taking up a full raid-days worth of possible progress time. My guild has been in Hyjal for ~4 weeks, BT for 2, and we finally got everyone (bar 2-3 mostly inactives) attuned this week. We can't and won't take the time to attune any more, unless it gets the point where we cannot fill raids properly for whatever reason, and have to recruit new players. Sure, SSC and TK aren't hard, but (for us) they're still fairly time consuming, and it's hard to get people together to do them - most of our raiders are sick to death of T5 content.

By contrast, attunement that requires doing 5-man heroics is easily manageable by just the people who need it. Telling 3-4 new recruits to spend an evening or two running SH, Arcatraz, SV and SL heroic is fine, they can sort it out themselves with maybe a few guildies helping out, but doesn't require much in the way of organization or logistics. Also, even BETTER, is the fact that applicants can key themselves before joining the guild. If people are keyed for BT and Hyjal, chances are they're still in a raiding guild. People who are applying to join raiding guilds generally aren't attuned, and it places the burden of attunement on the guild, not the player.

I completely support the idea of attunement scrolls dropping in BT and Hyjal; when my guild is into T6 I don't relish the idea of having to endlessly come back to T5 either.

No, what you just posted is the exact opposite of the feelings here. People absolutely despised having to run 5 and 10man raids in order to get keyed for SSC and TK, and that's why Blizzard removed those. There should probably be a way to backflag people as always (no idea why they didn't put that on Illidan/archimonde) but what you're suggesting would be a direct return to a system that resulted in a lot of very angry posts here and on the official boards.

Managing 5man heroic keying for TK was massive pain in the ass and I'm sure that many members of the community here would be glad to weigh in on how much of a hassle that was. (Paging Xi to the thread!)

There are sides to each approach to attuning people, but to be honest, you don't really want to rely on people who can't handle the Kael, Vashj or even Hydross fights to kill constructs and save the raid. Basically, if Rage could drop a scroll that saves your raid to a pair of 5/6 3/4 cleared raid IDs, you could still clear both Kael and Vashj for your apps in a single night, and maybe still have time to clear Najentus and Supremus afterwards.

Eh, not being Hyjal/BT attuned doesn't mean *you* couldn't handle a particular boss, it means for whatever reason your raid as a whole could not. At that point it's really up to your guild's application process to determine the reason the person isn't attuned, and whether they can handle T6 bosses. But this is getting really off-topic.

Trials of the Naaru anyone? Raise your hand if you were a tank and sick and tired of having to go to every single attunement run. TK attunement was a pain in the ass -- SSC less so, since you're going to have to kill Gruul anyways and it's fairly likely you're running a few Karazhans. But the last thing a tank wanted to see from a tell is "can you plz tank heroic Arc for me plzzzzz???" for the 10th time that month.

Actually at the time I thought when you got to Mag, that was the easy step. We ran Mag into at least June, since there were T4 chests and several quality drops on his loot table, including the head.

You're not thinking about the logistics involved here. You can only run the same heroic once per day. You may only have between 3-5 people actually capable of tanking those instances, but have 50-some-odd people that need to be run through them, and before all the heroic nerfs you also need some decently good CC/healers. Those things combined meant that you really had maybe 3 groups with 1-2 slots that could be filled with ankle-hangers that you were dragging through for their keys, and that means that maybe 6-8 people per day could complete one step of the trials. (Assuming that you're doing it entirely within the guild with no pugs) Getting an entire guild attuned, while people were still leveling, still completing rep requirements, was a lengthy and frustrating process.

To put into perspective exactly how obnoxtious the orginial keying could get for tanks.
Blizzard took the keying out two weeks after our first SSC raid, at which point we had some.. 10-15 or so people who could zone into tempest keep, and a bunch more who were partially trough the chain. And I had tanked every single one of those runs, leaving me with every single piece of badge gear a druid could want, a stack of well over 200 badges, and a strong urge to disembowel every one of our warriors. I'd most likely have /gquit after having spent my entire wow "carrer" with the same raid group if the keys had stayed as they were.

As Malan already alluded to, there was also the revered rep requirement for heroics. So you had tanks that were in T4 level gear doing (at the time) very challenging heroics rotating guild members through, while at the same time having to do normal runs to get people rep to do the heroic runs. We only had about 20 or so keyed in my last guild before attunements were lifted, and we already had some serious tank/healer burnout starting. Regardless, the fact everyone hated the system of going 10 -> 25 -> 5 -> 25 for attunements is undisputed and really doesn't need to be rehashed any further.

I agree with you on logistics, but I have come to a different conclusion. I don't think it was the idea that was flawed, I think it was the instances that were flawed.

We had the same problem... we had 15 healers, 2-3 prot/geared warriors, 1-2 feral druids (and at the time, 0 paladin tanks). The issue is 5 tanks for 15 healers.

I think the heroic shouldn't of been so demanding on the tanks, or designed to perhaps incorporate less cc or more healers or some such. I mean, even at is... let us take Magtheridon for example, I would say on average you would use 4 tanks and 8 healers, thats a 1:2 ratio, why don't we see the samething happening in 5 mans? Maybe it is the raid instances that are flawed then... 25 people is obviously 5 x 5, so maybe they should of been designed for 5 tanks, 5 healers and 15 dpsers? I don't know of a fight in the game where you would get away with that currently (except maybe Akama) assuming you weren't overgeared for the fight.

The idea of 5 man -> 10 man -> 25 man I thought was good, but the implementation and design I thought was flawed. The requirements were just far to harsh on group composition. Anyone remember rogues never getting invites to heroics? That's not a flaw of the quest-line, that's a flaw of the instance design or rogue class itself. Back when my guild was running Shattered Halls, I had to respec Shadow to get a group, people didn't terribly want priest healers for it. Paladins were all the rage, and a shadow priest powering the paladin was even better.

The entire TBC talent tree was leaked a few days before it was officially announced. When the official talents were announcned on the WoW website, the leaked version turned out to be 95% correct.

Remember that TBC release heroics are not 100% comparable to current heroics.

Many people simply didnt want to do heroics (Hi Shadow labs, shattered halls) because the loot was unimpressive or plain unwanted. Their was no extra incentive like Daily quest rewards either.

Id be in favour of a trial of the naaru like attunement process again - if blizzard can make sure people have a great incentive to do heroics rather than just the dreaded, "I just gota do it once to get attuned, then never again" type attitude many of us had for shalls/slabs. If you could tell a new recruit in WOTLK to complete their trial-type quests and it actually was a reasonably pleasant/easy for them to find a group to do it , because people wanted to do it - thatd be great.

No. It would have been good in pre-TBC WoW, since it mirrors the process of building up a raid group from scratch. That's not the situation we have now, and never will be again. People buy the expansion, level up to the cap, and want (not unreasonably)) to start raiding. They already have a large group of people wanting to play together as a single cohesive group, and it is just not right to expect them to shatter into smaller units and then coalesce back together again for the larger instances.

It was a major annoyance even for the front running guilds. Most if not all the more casual guilds simply broke up. On my server, the half a dozen groups that managed to get into Naxx have just about managed to hold it together and stay raiding. Of the next-tier groups, the ones in AQ40 and/or late BWL, maybe 1 in 10 still exists. Of the true casual groups that weren't raiding beyond MC, ZG and AQ20, not a single one still exists.

If they do the same in the next expansion, and make the 25-man attunements pass through the 5 -> 10 -> 25 mangle, then the exact same thing will happen again.

I think the big reason why MC/BWL (and to a lesser extent, ony) attunements were not an issue, while trials were, is because of the length of the attunement. With MC/BWL, all you did was pick up a quest and go clear BRD/UBRS once (and you didn't even have to clear very much of BRD, since there was a shortcut after incendius). The horde onyxia chain was more of a pain, but even that only required 4 instance runs, one which could be done before 60, another two didn't even have to be complete runs, and the fourth could be done at the same time as BWL attunement. Every aspect of the attunements could be done by the average pug (though there might have been some pain involved in killing general drak and finding a group for test of skulls)

By contrast, Trials of the Naaru required a ton of instance runs just to get the reputation to do the heroics you needed. And 3 of the heroics had an additional challenge attached to them, making SL the only one that you could realistically get done in a random pug. Then, to top it off, you had to go beat the most difficult t4 raid encounter. Everything about the chain was a time-consuming nightmare that could only be completed by somebody with access to all the resources of a solid raiding guild.

Basically, MC/BWL/Ony attunements could easily be made a requirement for application to any raid guild, because anyone could easily get them. TK/SSC attunements (and now BT/Hyjal attunements) could only reasonably be made a requirement by the cutting-edge guilds, everyone else had to spend the time to attune their recruits by running old content.

In retrospect I like the idea that 25-man attunements are tied to 5-man content; however, the 5-man content needs to be 1) readily accessible, 2) rewarding in and of itself, and 3) balanced such that group composition is not accutely limiting. In 2.0 all of these were problems. Reputation limits made the 5-mans inaccessible. The lack of quality badge gear or equivalent itemization between normal and heroic meant that the heroics were not particularly rewarding. The scaling of mob abilities highly favored groups with very balanced compositions.

It is a rare day when someone complains about Karazhan keying, and I would certainly be content for Blizzard to continue the trend in WotLK. As long as the requirements can be reasonably met during the leveling and initial gearing process, key requirements are a reasonable way to push people to consume other content.

There was crying about Karazhan keying the first weeks, mainly because people found Black Morass insanely difficult for some reason.

Granted, I've run that place with a scrub group and stood in awe at the slow DPS, and watching portals open and the group fall behind, but again that had to do with the fact I was grouped with horrible players, and not the instance itself.

Naxx had 16 bosses, SW has 6. If Sunwell is out 4 months before WoTLK, that's almost twice as long as Naxx was out before TBC, on a time-taken-to-learn-each-boss basis.

Think you're seeing it in wrong way ...Naxx had lots of bosses but most of them were killed by guilds in a few days. Naxxramas's cocklock for one month was the Four Horseman, all the rest died in a few days, most of them in a night or two - especially since it was tested on PTR.

Likewise, Black Temple has nine bosses but it was cleared in one reset. Tempest Keep (because of original attunement and pre-2.1 A'lar/Solarian and impossible Kael'thas) took much longer.

It's all about the tuning of the bosses. If Sunwell has either very high tuned bosses (like 4H or even Vashj pre-2.1) or impossible bosses (like pre-2.1 Kael & C'Thun 1.0) it should hold guilds for a while and make the zone more attractive to those many raiders seeking a real challenge.


The problem I see is that PTR testing will give the novelty away.

Don't mix up the lack of screenshots with the completion percentage of the current WotlK build. Blizzard has been hoarding a huge amount of content that they could show us any of "never seen before" Wotlk stuff if they wanted to.

Back in August I could test play a bit their build at Games Convention in Leipzig. From the latency and the login credentials I am certain that it was 100% the same version they had some weeks before at Blizzcon. So a mostly already outdated build than current internal build (played on some US realms)

I got lucky that the char I chose to play was not reset correctly. Unlike everyone else, I did not start at some dock and had to wait for a ship to transport me to Northrend, instead the char was logged out in Utgarde Keep and I ventured forth from there.

There was no map in the game, neither minimap nor big map. There were also no Zonetexts which made orientation a bit hard. But I'm rather convinced that I passed through at least two more zones. I've seen lots of things that haven't been shown on any official screenshot.

For example, a huge cliff mining area with elevators and construction buildings.

I saw a massive armada of ships from another other cliff. (I travelled along the coast/cliffline since orientation was really difficult without maps in this unknown zone(s))

I saw lots of ice floats somewhere else.

Something I'd describe as a ghost ship.

Beautiful sceneries in the nordic style of which there were some screenshots.

And more.

And that was back in August and was probably an already outdated version. Blizzard could at any time give us new screenshots. They don't want to for any reason. But stuff is there. Lot's of stuff. For what's worth, they could actually be almost finished with Wotlk for beta testing even before they give us 2.4. It's probably not the case but all I am saying is that they have quite a lot more than they are willing to reveal publicly at the moment. I wouldn't be too surprised if Wotlk FFA starts with 2.4 PTR testing and a possible closed beta when 2.4 goes live. But that is of course pure speculation.

I think one of the things that is not being mentioned is just how epic WoW feels to the new subscribers. Most of the things that people are bitching about here are things that would irritate you later on in your playing experience, as you approach end game.

Try to remember what it felt like when you first bought the game. I will never forget how I felt leaving Teldrasil for Darkshore- "Can I get back? Am I going to be lost? Will the monsters be too hard?" (as a side note, I died falling off the tree, and spent the solid part of an hour trying to figure out how to get my corpse back at level 12. I had never used a spirit rez before). Everything was new and big and exciting and, well, epic.

In the same vein, I felt the same way the first time I killed Rag, for the AQ event, for the scourge invasion, and most definitely for the dark portal opening. I remember all of us saying "Look at the skys!" as we zoned in to Outland for the first time.

So, yeah, Gruul tuning sucked, and there was no BT at first, and they had a lot of tuning and bug fixes. That doesn't change how good, how big, how epic the game feels and it doesn't change why people keep coming back, and will again for WOTLK.

Yep that's often the case with making things go public, they do it bit by bit, to act as a teasing, and they also don't want to release stuff they're not 100% sure will make it in the game, else hordes of people will moan and whine about the changes/lack of something(like if they were to show a place and in the end it's just totally scrapped because they feel it doesn't fit anymore).

During BC alpha and beta, they didn't release much info at all, and they started doing the talents preview when people started leaking info, but you have to remember also that it was patched before the whole BC thing. I remember reading countless of threads in here about speculation about BC, when I was already in alpha playing something that was rather close to the final version. They redid most of the early hellfire quests, and bem/netherstorm/smv weren't in, but zangarmarsh, nagrand and terrokar minus bone wastes didn't change much from alpha until release. The zones themselves were already ingame, just not populated.

At this point of time, it's hard to guess, unless you have insider info, where they are with developpement for sunwell and wotlk. My guess is half of wotlk if not more is already done, and they'll start alpha soon(or might have already), and sunwell should be rather close to PTR. They'll PTR sunwell and once it's been tested for a few weeks and not in dire need of big changes, start wotlk beta.