That's because the second boss was pretty brutal for people in a mix of blues and greens. He has a -10% healing debuff that could stack to -100% (this was changed in 2.2). You can't just heal through that. You have to know how you're going to deal with it BEFORE you get to him. And if you wipe? Good going, enjoy redoing the ENTIRE EVENT for another shot at him.

Without fail, every time I do a BM pug someone will say they hope we can finish it this time because their last <x> groups couldn't.

---

I think the old SSC/TK quest lines could be made mandatory today without making tanks swan-dive off of cliffs in despair. They SHOULDN'T, but they COULD. Heroics aren't as hard as they used to be, it's easier than ever to find geared people thanks to trickle-down from SSC/TK/MH/BT recipes, PvP welfare epics, heroic badge gear, and upgraded heroic gear, and it's easier than ever to find people key'd for heroics because the bar is so low. Due to all of those factors, I don't really stress out about CC as long as I can get at least one. The only exceptions are Slabs and Shattered Halls. I refuse to run them on Heroic without two reliable CC'ers. Sethekk Halls has a few pulls towards the end that are kinda tricky without two, but since druids, hunters, rogues, priests, and mages can function as CC, I've never NOT had two CC around.

To be fair, a lot of those people who run BM a billion times never learn that Temporus's haste buff can be dispelled, largely trivializing his damage and the extent to which the debuff stacks. Or you can have a Rogue pull aggro when the tank's debuff stacks and bring it down. Truly clueless PUG players aren't what the game is designed around. I'd say some things in Karazhan were slightly overdone, but BM?

I would never underestimate the stupidity of a PuG group, or your average WoW player for that matter.

Temporus was a little monster, but unless you're completely brain dead you could deal with him, even with the 100% Mortal Wound Debuff, it can be dodge/parried/miss, you can make distance between yourself and him when it's low enough by gradually backing up or immediately after a knock-back 9 times out of 10. To your typical PuG I guess "Hit stuff until it dies" gets complex when you throw other abilities into the loop, and they can't handle it, most nerfs I've seen to the 5-man PvE side of things makes it so "hit stuff until it dies" prevails even if you never move.

From a German CM [translated on World of Raids]

While most is previously known, unless the first 3 bosses (MT) share a loot table, then thats ALOT of new items they are going to be throwing in.
No doubt it will have Haste and Armour Penetration to make the already semi min/maxed gear different from its Kara equivilent.

Black Morass in general was miserable on pugs, leveling specs and weird group compositions before gear improved. Add in a long list of absolutely miserable, fatal bugs and you have an instance that made people's skin crawl.

The difficulty was mostly fair considering the instance placement, as opposed to some questionable design decisions for leveling instances built around leveling specs, no gearing, and 1-70 new players when BC launched, such as Rokmar. The bugs in Black Morass were just flat out unacceptable and complaining about them was absolutely deserved. When a whelp evades while draining Medivh or you got an unfixable portal script break or you got multiple portals dropped on you at once, it just makes you want to break your keyboard.

I never experienced a Thrall bug in Old Hillsbred, but oh my, did Black Morass hate me.

Its not exactly weird we havent seen lots of Wotlk info. Right now they can ride on the 2.4 PR.
Releasing both Sunwell and Woltk info at the same time would be silly from their point of view (e.g. keeping the hype up, always make people feel that the next big thing is around the corner, for as long as they can keep it up).
They'll release something, and wait until the hype dies down and release more.

Ill be surprised if most of the outdoor zone art isnt done already. The last 1½ year of patche hasnt eaxtly required much environment art work. Whereas lots of non-art developer ressources wont be released for working on Wotlk before 2.4 is out. Even ZA art was mostly done before TBC release.
Still, even if Im right and most zones are done, it says nothing about wotlks overall progress.

At least I bet we will start to see more info shortly after 2.4 goes live, and new hype is needed to build up.
I doubt they time the start of FF Alpha according to patch releases though. It should mean nothing whether 2.4 is out or not. However, the extra devs released for Wotlk work after 2.4 might be a reason for starting up the FFA at that time of course, but those people should be free already, assuming 2.4 is done and ready for testing.

Whats really weird is the lack of Sunwell information :/
If they internally expect this to be the last major patch before wotlk (Guess we will get a Season 4 patch at some point of course) it could contain some interesting stuff we havent heard yabot yet for bugfixes and minor changes toward the expansion.

Eh. I'm hard pressed to believe that. Thing is, it could make sense in certain contexts. Like if they really want to go through with a change to silence / interrupt effects, their key issues also concern "Earth Shock". The most reliable and consistent interrupt, but it scales terribly with its silence counterpart, due to GCD.

Maybe a change to GCD depending upon rank, but overall, I can't see why they would alter such a fundamental game mechanic.




As far as 2.4 is concerned, I expect that information is just around the corner at this point. Especially with things beginning to leak. Thing is, the items that they have released, still need some significant tweaking, pre-PTR. I imagine that will be part of the mass effort over the next week and a half or so, and then we can probably see it on PTR by mid February. I'm really curious to see when WotLK would come out. To me, that is the most key part of whether or not I continue to play.

It likely isn't a GCD lowering, again, just a guess. A change is coming for instants though.

Attunements:

I've got mixed feelings about attunements to T6 zones. My (very casual) guild is 2/4 in TK, 4/6 in SSC, with our best try on Leo being 7% after one full night of attempts. Our goal is to at least get into T6 content before the next expansion hits. Removing attunements entirely would devalue that acheivment - sort of a "well, we sucked too much to do it ourselves, so Bliz gave it to us". Bleh. Of course, that assumes that we would otherwise get into T6 at all, and well...we are pretty casual. My guild missed seeing Naxx pre-TBC, and we'd really like to not miss seeing T6 pre-WotLK. So...like I said, mixed feelings, but on balance, I think the attunements should stay.

Back flagging is, however, a whole different story. Anyone who's raided in TBC will understand the problems that arise from a limited raid schedule and the huge number of raid locations at any given progression level. You simply cannot kill every 25 man boss you have on farm and still progress. And if you get a recruit without either vial? Get ready to devote your entire week of raiding to get one person attuned. Want to sub an alt in on one fight to get optimal class balance? Good luck with that! So yes, we need a back flagging solution, but removing all attunements isn't it. My vote would be for a system that lets a maximum of 2-3 non-attuned people zone into a T6 instance if everyone else in the raid is attuned, combined with BoP drops from T6 bosses that permanently attune people. The idea being, a raid of BT keyed people drag a new recruit through BT, down some bosses, and the recruit gets attuned. That doesn't seem too abusable.

The T5 attunements, as others have said, were even worse than T6 - not too hard for backflagging, but really insane for initial flagging. A friend of mine was in one of the most bleeding edge guilds in the EU which actually FELL APART trying to get people T5 flagged. Literally. That's an extreme example, but trying to funnel a ~30 raid team through 5 and 10 man instances sucked for a range of reasons - not least being that as raid size scales up, the % of different specs you need doesn't scale evenly. And it gets worse when you think back to the initial tuning of the needed heroics (hard), the initial rewards (pathetic), and the initial gear level of the average group (also pathetic).

In short: T5 attunements were a bad idea. T6 attunements are a good idea, but we need a backflagging solution. I'd also support them removing about half the trash in SSC and TK...

Discussing the Attunements is silly, and should be in the Keying and Attunement thread. With that said, its mostly useless to ask people about their oppinions regarding attunements, the hardcore guild will say its fair, the Mid-level guild asks for easyier backflagging opportunities. And the Casual guild simply hates them and wants them removed.

Granted being the Guild/Raid leader of a guild that had to clear the dungeons back in the days when we still had to run the Trials of the Naaru, i simply hated it as well. But thinking back Attunements are a good thing. Looking at it from a objective perspective anyway. It is blizzard holding you by the hand. Telling you exactly when you are ready for a certain dungeon. I also find it quite silly that The Sunwell Plateau wont have any attunement quest either outside the daily server quests attuning process. Gear checks can be Circumvented.

Conclusion, its silly asking people for the oppinions regarding attunements everyone will think something else. And in the end all we can do is hope blizzard reads some of these posts and form there conclusion from it. However there are those who approve of attunements and those who disapprove. So in the end its a lose lose situation regardless of what changes might be implemented.

By the way. Hyjal/Black temple attunements wont be removed. Everyone and there mothers will be able to clear the first 3-4 MH bosses and first 3 BT bosses. Which is quite silly. And the reason there are so easy is due to the fact that they are reward bosses for granting your raid access to them.

I would like to see regalia/arnament type drops in sunwell like we had in AQ40. Would solve some problems with getting the 10th dagger in a row.

As far as I understood some quotes from Blizzard employees at BlizzCon the randomness of dropps is just what Blzzard wants in order to keep the loot be surprising.

While I also liked the token-system for weapons of AQ and of the armor-pieces throughout BC, I honestly don't think we'll ever see it for weapons again. Drops need to be exciting and surprising. We all had our share of wtf-is-this-crap-loot from bosses, dropping loot for classes you don't have on your raid roster so often that everyone who could even remotely use it got it for free as 3rd-spec-equip. But if it gets too predictable what loot you will see on certtain bosses, it somehow removes the exciting part of "what did he drop" out of killing a boss.

Besides, even wih tokens you'll never be able to remove randomness from the equation, you'll only delay the "oh no not again this..." effect for a while, depending on token-distribution among classes/roles.

BTW: not beeing able to claim the weapon until the end of the instance is what i hated most about the weapon-token-system of AQ40. Getting a Imperial Qiraji Armament or Regalia from Skeram and then waiting months to be able to pass the twins and get your weapon is hardly rewarding, its extremely annoying. Imagine a token drops from Naj'entus and you can only trade it in for an item when you reach an area past Mother Shahraz ... who would spend dkp on such an item when you can only use it in few months?

Are only weapons exciting and surprising? With the availability of Arena weapons, there are no weapon drops I'd find exciting...yay more voids. Of course I got started late to the raid game, but the S2 swords are available to anyone and as good as anything until the end of T5 (heck, the offhand is good until Mother in BT I think...but that's an itemization problem). And they have been available and without an arena rating for months and months.

With arena gear allowing people to fill in gaps from drops...it does make me wonder what the point of drops are sometimes. Sure, I'm not an end-game raider, I do kara and hope to get into ZA. And I find it tough sometimes just to make sure we have 10 people together, getting 25 together must be a real pain. But it really bites when drops get sharded over and over again...that's not exciting, though I suppose that's what keeps the price of void crystals on the AH so low.

I imagine this is more of a problem for 10 mans, since in 25 mans you must have all classes covered...but it bites not having a hunter or shammy and seeing a lot of mail pieces drop. I got started way late on raiding (started kara only a month or so before badges were added), but if it weren't for badges I'd find it hard to go back week after week. Yay, more drops we shard over and over. Maybe...maybe we could continue to have drops as we do, but the drops can be turned in to a vendor somewhere for a token, and that token used to buy instance-specific loot. Not on a 1 to 1 basis, but maybe 10 to 1. But...then void crystals become non-existent or very pricey.

Heh, I guess that's a planned part of the random drop system...you need to have lots of random drops that get sharded to everyone has access to enchanting mats. Though maybe all bosses should have badges (and have different levels of badges for higher-tier instances), with different badge vendors. Fill the badge vendors with similar but slightly lower ilvl items to what's in that tier. That way you can fill in slots that just won't drop for you with stop-gap gear that's good enough. That way there's still excitement over drops, but you get a backup plan for when the RNG hates you.

On a related note, ye olde completely-unverifiable-yet-often-reliable grapevine says that 2.4 will probably hit the PTR during the second week of February. Part of the delay is supposedly due to indecision about whether or not to push a fourth arena season along with Sunwell. On a side note, it's somewhat sad that a full two months after we were originally supposed to see Sunwell, the only 2.4-related things left to discuss here stem from NDA breaches, hearsay, speculation, and various works of fakery.

That sounds quite reliable. As I see it, the only reason 2.4 isnt on PTR right now, is because they are trying to time the patch according to Wotlk release. E.g. release it as late as possible. A fourth arena season could play into this, although they have stated before Arena seasons doesnt have to be reset at the same time as major patches. Throwing in upgraded arena sets etc. is probably pretty easy (just up the already existing stats according to the new ilvl pretty much).
A season 4 could be a good lead up to the Woltk release, in the same way they added new pvp system before TBC.
Personally I would expect them to wait a few months after 2.4 to release season 4 though, that will keep people interested for a longer time.

Also, if Blizz should keep up with the normal raid progression strategy, of nerfing old end game content to make it more accessible over time, 2.4 should logically be the BT/Hyjal nerf patch.

Well, unleashing S4 gear would also effectively be nerfing BT/Hyjal, as everyone would have quick access to Illidan or Sunwell-level epics. The gear inflation is getting pretty out of control, it's going to be interesting to see the base stats on items when WotLK rolls around.

I have also heard things about instants, more specificly HoTs and DoTs, so my best quess is that they finally found out that crit and haste doesnt do much for say an affliction lock so either some conversion of haste/crit to +dmg as maybe a deep affliction talent or DoTs ticking quicker.

This would also be a giant buff for healing druids who probably scale the least well with haste of almost any class.

I don't think they will share a loot table in it's wholeness. This would most likely result in quite some frustration while farming certain items. Two Drops for each boss would sound more reasonable (if it is really a step up in difficulty from actual 70 level dungeons), especially if they are still only iLevel 115 blues. Or a splitted table like the opera event, with certain parts shared and certain parts boss-specific. Either way, it sounds like a nice possibility to increase the availability of off-spec items (the actual 5 slot tables for most 5 man instances are quite small).

How would S4 gear nerf BT/Hyjal? Most pvp gear isnt well suited for raiding anyway. Its hardly the gear that stop people from progressing into BT/Hyjal.

The gear may not be optimal (I don't think anyone said it is, except for a few oddballs (sup feral itemization)), but little bonuses everywhere tend to add up. Raids aren't black and white in their ability to clear content. Any small benefit thrown out into the ocean of players just means that that many more raid-wiping instances instead get turned into a close shave by the sheer law of averages.

Edit: And weapons. Those are absolute kick-ass almost universally across the board. Even the people who can't hit 1850 will be getting upgrades in the form of S3 weapons instead of being limited to S2 weapons as it is now.

True enough, Im still running around with S2 weapon (/blame RNG drops).
Still, adding S4 seems like more of a help for those still struggling in SSC/TK than those struggling in early BT/Hyjal, but I guess it might help a bit.
Ill be surprised if the patch isnt containing actual nerfs to bosses in BT/Hyjal though, maybe even more nerfs to Kael.