I'll be putting a "part 3" together this weekend to help clarify certain questions that have arisen. There are no new revolutionary facts to be found, but I thought I'd help answer some more or less important questions like:

Q: Any mention of the earlier stated legendary bow?
A: That would be a "no".

Q: Any mention of new badge rewards?
A: Again, that would be a "no"

Q: Any mention of the fact that the Sunwell is deep in Horde territory, and might be a concern for Alliance on PvP servers?
A: Yes, [insert clarification based on the interview]


I'll skim this thread to base the new part on, as well as a few other places. If you have any questions, or even feel like compiling some (), post here or here.


Disclaimer:
I can of course only do his within the bounds of the actual interview, I'm no oracle

I think and I hope that Sunwell will be demanding and really hard for the guilds who weren't farming the content for 5 months but were farming it for a few weeks now.But then again I don't see how can they tune an instance for a guild with 6 warglaives and a newly Illidan farming guild. It is; after all T6 level.

I totally agree, I wouldn't hesitate ninjaing players who are still stuck on Kael due to their comrades not being as good as they are to my guild if needed be.And I think raids who haven't done Vashj and Kael won't ever have an easy time as the ones who did pre-nerfs on MH/BT and of course Sunwell.

And yes, It would be lovely to see Brutalicus as the new Patchwerk at the instance entrance, there you go, gear check.

What you missed was the fact our low hp players used greens/arena gear to get their stats up. ZA/badge/arena loot is roughly on par with tier 5 loot.

All the other fights you listed require movement and some sort of coordination between members. Najentus does not require any movement beyond click the spine. You stand still and shoot/heal unless you need to click the spine. One tank sits there and smacks him. He is by far easier than all of SSC/TK in terms of strategy. Hell, he is easier than High King Maulgar along those same lines.

Najentus is purely a retard check, can you wait with the spine till your fellow players have over 8500hp, yes or no? Do you have the ability to click this item and throw it at the big Lady Vashj lover who is currently in a bubble in the center of the room when all fellow players are 8500+, yes or no? You learn collecting items at Vashj and using them during an encounter which helps for Kael, if you done it in those fights, Naj seems like childs play, just like if you did Buru/Thaladred, Patchwerk/Gruul for Supremus, your mind is ready for what you must do, and execute it easily. Earlier fights prepare you for these encounters to make them childs play. That is why if you allow players a passage to skip content they could face hardships more so than guilds who have did Vashj/Kael.

I don't know if I agree with that recruitment methodology. Sure, it would work in a desperate shortage, but once Sunwell comes out, would you really want to run Hyj/BT to get a few recruits geared up to the T6 level? Even if it only takes 2-3 clears, it would still feel like a waste of time that could go to progress. My guild faces minor attrition on a regular basis, but it's not enough to make our officers want to take nonattuned players. I think most higher end guilds will be so sick of T6 by then that they'll want to jump directly into Sunwell and at least try to clear the first 3 non-rep tied bosses before going back to BT, if only for a shot at glaives. I don't see us ever going back to Hyjal unless we get really bored.

Also, I think some people are underestimating the difficulty of some of BT when you walk in. It feels easy as all hell now because everyone is decked out in T6, but even Teron is sort of a gear check for your MT and your healers. One of the problems more casual guilds have had that I've been in is gear being spread out among more raiders and especially for an MT, since they often won't use MT gear defaulting and things like that. As mentioned, Bloodboil is the next gear check which checks another tank as well as a harder fight for your healers. RoS has arguably more personal responsibility and execution requirements than anything before it, and the DPS race in phase 3 was pretty intense the first few kills.

I really see no downsides to opening up Hyjal attunement once Sunwell hits. People will always change guilds even when Blizzard doesn't change things. The gear people get from badges and ZA is excellent, but I really don't see casual guilds plowing through T6 any faster than we could 4 months ago if they still have a hard time with Kael, whether due to execution or gear.

Unless that waste of time happens to be the only way to obtain the epic gems . . . not to mention the other half of the 'glaive set for Kamien. I, for one, will be extremely frustrated if SWP doesn't drop the epic gems(or something better?), but honestly, it wouldn't be out of character for them to force us to run BT to continue getting Crimson Spinels.

I fully anticipate this new faction, and possibly trash drops, will additionally give us access to the mysteriously missing JC-only recipes, such as 12 Agi and the like.

How so? Yes, your SSC/TK guilds can go farm epic gems. So what? They could farm trash purples in Naxxramas, too.

This is also true for Zul Aman and i cant remember any alliance raid having problems with the hordeplayers that get beaten to death by the neutral guards after they tryed to make some quick honor

Sounds like Sunwell's difficulty compared to BT should be comparable to AQ40 relative to BWL.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes about as long to clear as AQ40 would have if it had gone live with the nerfed C'Thun/Ouro. Which may not have been very long, but still challenging for most guilds out there.

It does raise interesting questions, though - as does every new raid release now - about how much Blizzard should look to challenge the elite guilds like Nihilum, DnT, etc. versus the more ordinary "hardcore" raiders. Naxx was rather unique in having unbugged bosses that actually took time for guilds to get world firsts on, and unfortunately seems to be the exception to the rule... so we'll probably see firsts based largely on how quickly the content is unlocked. Is this really a terrible thing? Is appeasing the uberguilds really important to WoW's success? I'm not sure.

To an extent, ya. It affects a good portion of raiders when they see content get dropped so fast. Speaking from my own experience, we zoned in Black Temple in July and cleared it in October. 3 months is not bad as far as time spent in a single tier. Was a good challenge, few bugs and frustrations, and lasted a good while. But it makes a different when you zone in BT knowing it had already been cleared 4 times by a few guilds worldwide as opposed to zoning in there knowing the instance is still "live" and is still uncleared. That's why you heard everyone complain about BT being too easy or Illidan being a pushover when Nihilum killed him 2 weeks from BT release, even though almost all those people that complained about it were not able to kill Illidan until August or later.

Nobody should underestimate how much your DPS improves as you begin to farm BT. When I look back on our first Teron parses, we were around 15-16k RDPS. These days, we're around 26k. That's a SIGNIFICANT improvement. I remember our first few weeks after killing RoS, we'd usually not get through phase 2 before our mana was set at 0, and that was only if we didn't miss Deadens. These days, we could miss every single Deaden, and still have him dead before mana is zeroed. As others mentioned, certain bosses are tank checks, like Teron and Gurtogg. Teron can still have some fairly scary bursts when he wants. So I'm pretty sure a VR killing guild, even if Hyjal/BT attunement was lifted, would not be going too far in either zone due to the gear difference.

Not direct 2.4 news, but it seems after 2.3.2 there's going to be a 2.3.3, so we'll have to wait on 2.4 a little longer.

From the UI forums.

WoW Forums -> Interface action failed because of an AddOn

Did the interview go over any mistakes the developers felt they made? Like talking aboiut attunements in 2.0 vs attunements in 2.3, making heroics easier, etc. And WHY they felt those were mistakes?

Agreed I happened to switch between two guilds at the time and from the very first time I saw Razorgore till when he died was a passage of six months. Now obviously we weren't going at him non stop every week but he was still a massive challenge for most guilds coming from the MC days.

Razorgore was certainly hard, but he also had a number of bug fixes and iterations. Once they settled in on that 2-3 weeks was reasonable for a good guild (not even a great one).
Razorgore was definitely outside the box, but players with solid raid experience, especially in other MMO's (well really EQ), were probably not too put off by it. Razorgore's difficulty also largely stemmed from strategy not being readily available. Remember even in WoW strats were not immediately released in the BWL era - Razorgore started going down fast once NA launched their little video. In EQ videos were unheard of, strategies were unique and almost never shared.

Coming up with a novel strategy is a huge part to some encounters, and the fact is the vast majority of guilds cannot do so very well. People underestimate just what a big deal it is to their progression to know how to kill a boss without ever having to have thought about it. Reliquary and Kael come to mind as bosses that would take guilds MUCH longer without outside help.

Razorgore had quite a few different versions, as well as Vael and probably most of BWL. I remember literally killing Razorgore like 3 times in the first 2 days of BWL. I can't remember how long it took us to finally learn and kill the final version. All I remember was us trying to use Mind Control. That should have been the intended strat.

The other possibility with Dragonbane was that it prevented certain strategies; it makes Razorgore a lot more fragile. Without that ability, you could have him tank the entire room with Fireball Volley for significantly longer, and use Rogues vanishing to keep the MC Orb going. As it stood, you couldn't keep that up for very long because the legionnaires did so much damage to him.

It's tough to believe a 66% improvement from a single tier of gear. When you initially hit Teron, were you in full tier 5, or a mix of tier 5/kara pieces? Also have you dropped a healer from some fights to bring in extra DPS?

That's because of the bug on Razorgore 1.0... you wiped by letting him die to the hordes of mobs, the eggs despawned, you soulstone ressed and then killed Razorgore as a straightforward tank 'n spank. Oh and the instance didn't save, nor did the gate to Vaelastrasz open.

Another trick was the classic "DI the orb controller" bug where you DI'd the orb controller... Res, tank 'n spank. This bug stuck around for quite a while.

The whole BWL clusterfuck was the reason that all subsequent raid dungeons got put on the PTR... between the RG bugs/balance issues (anyone remember attempts where the room filled up with Dragonkin?), the Broodlord kite, the Broodlord full aggro wipe knockback, the unkillable-by-Horde Firemaw, the untauntable Ebonroc, the Chromaggus stacking Ignite Flesh of doom balance issue, etc, well, there must have been a lot of burned out programmers after the first month of BWL.

Dragonbane was there so that allowing Razorgore to tank the legions of mobs was not a viable strat. I mean, the legionaires hit for, like, 900 damage on cloth... versus RG, it'd be more like 600, so you'd probably be able to make RG AoE tank and keep him up with healers. Particularly for the Alliance with their quarter-threat pally heals and BoS.

It's pretty much spot on. If people screw up on constructs now we can pretty much brute force through it no problems. In the past, one leak would usually mean a wipe.

We actually run with 8 healers now for every fight even though stuff is on farm status. We used to swap for fights and have less healing for more DPS. Teron we've always had 8. I doubt it's that they bring less healing, the gear has changed things up for classes.

Warlocks with haste gear now chain bolts and push 2k+ DPS. iLvl boosts weren't really the only cause, but Spell Haste etc changed how some classes play.

In fairness, being able to drop a healer is part of the benefit of having geared up your healers and tanks. So it's not like you're cheating by counting that change as part of the increased dps from having full tier 6 vs none. The gap is a lot higher than i'd expected, but hey, my class sucks at scaling, so i'm in a bad position to judge.

Razorgore in particular could have a lot of variation on how you beat the encounter, and it varied more with class makeup of your raid than with your guild's particular strategic preference. My guild still had trouble with him for months after we killed him, and we ended up going through at least three different strategies (shamans kite the legionarres, MCer kite the nondragonkin, kill the dragonkin in the corners) with the last one becoming available by a combination of class makeup and late-BWL gear on our DPS. You could spend a hell of a lot of time wiping to him if you found a leet stratz on the intarwebs that didn't fit your group without realizing there were alternatives. However, it also means that it's more forgiving to not looking up strats anyways, so long as you realize there's an MC orb.

ANYWAYS back to 2.4: What is it about TBC that made the world-firsts come so much faster than BWL or naxx? Average guilds aside, D&T were raiding back in vanilla WoW but they didn't clear naxx in three weeks. Is it just the smaller, tighter raid groups, or is it a design principle that made the encounters honestly more difficult (or one causing the other)? And if it is a design principle, can it be brought back for sunwell?