With the changes, Kael is certainly not the hardest boss in the game. And I'm not convinced he ever was - a big part of the "cockblock" of Kael had to do with the rate of trash respawn and the length of attempts rather than the actual difficulty of the encounter. And Firemaw was DRASTICALLY harder than Ebonroc/Flamegor - nearly every kill post I remember had all three drakes dying in one night.

Once again the key word in that is choice. Why is Blizzard obligated to nerf the encounters in order that you might beat them when you clearly ignore the choices necessary to win even though you acknowledge that they exist. If your goal is to enjoy family and friends, etc why does it matter whether it's in BT Lite or in Naxxramas.

Main thing I got from this thread: There are so many varied opinions on the subject, no matter what Blizzard eventually decides to do - there will always be some people who are not happy.

Because we paid for BT already. Why should we have to wait until we pay for Naxx2 to raid BT?

Following with that, why should we have to give up being in a guild with friends and family just to see content that we've all paid for?

I'm not ignoring them, and I don't disagree. I think you're just condemning a lot of people in a sweeping fashion that doesn't really account for the source of the problem.

The point to this conversation is to establish whether or not raid-dungeon difficulty should progress in a linear fashion from one expansion pack to the next, or whether there should be a more exponential curve, but starting at a lower overall point. Given that so many people cannot reasonably complete Hyjal/BT as it stands, it would seem fairly obvious to choose to incorporate a much larger spectrum of difficulty in WotLK raiding - which, as pointed out early in the thread, they've already elected to do with Naxx 2.0 (2.5 Horsemen -_-).

There's always going to be top-end, nigh-impossible content, and we'll be among the hundreds of guilds that ever touch it, but that doesn't predicate a total dearth of options for other people. In TBC raiding, there are 27 25-man bosses right now, and we're looking forward to a new total of 33. Why can't six, or 10, or even twenty of those encounters be of a moderate difficulty level, attainable to Joe Mouth-Breathing Keyboard-Turner that DOES stand in the fire? No, it's not going to present a challenge for current BT guilds - so what?

By your logic we should all log in tomorrow to full T6 and all non-set peices in our mailbox, with maxed skills/reps and 2k+ arena teams.

You're just blatantly trolling at this point.

Games in general don't work like that. Your purchase of a game of any type gets you the ability to see it's content, but whether you can actually see all the content has always been based on the amount of effort you can put in. The only real difference between a multiplayer game and a singleplayer game in that respect is that the former will punish you for cheating while the latter generally won't.

How many times have you run Naxx? AQ40? Etc. You paid for those too. Go have fun.

Maulgar, Gruul, Magtheridon, 5 in SSC, 3 in TK. That makes 11 bosses by my count that can be done by complete and utter mouthbreathers. If you can put just a touch of effort into the game, you can tack on nearly 10 more bosses, within a few weeks, Vashj/Kael, 3 in BT, 3 in Hyjal, can all be done in the same week. Now you're looking at 11 bosses for people who like fires, and 8 more for people with only mild pyromaniac tendencies. And of course you've excluded all of pre-BC content, which btw still is raiding, and said mouthbreather's probably have not experience so it should be new and exciting to them.

How do you make 20 different encounters that are so forgiving of people who do stand in the fire? What you want is 20 Golemaggs with different models.

Sure, they can release 'Frozen Core', recolor all the MC models from red to blue, and wrap it in a new package.

Besides, you have Void Reaver, Solarian, Lurker, and Tidewalker,which are all pretty simple fights.

There's a fallacy in your logic. You seem to think you deserve content to be given to you with the fee you pay monthly. The fee is not there to represent ownership in anyway -- as a matter of fact, the EULA you agreed to says you indeed own nothing on the game at all. You pay a fee to have Blizzard provide you an experience, and you invest time in that game to enhance your experience. You do this through character advancement (of Blizzard's character that they are allowing you to use during your time) with item achievement (Blizzard's items that are randomly generated through a fairly intricate system to allow limited variance and provide a mostly consistent experience) and zone advancement.

However, you will notice that the idea here is to keep you paying that monthly fee. You either agree with it, or you don't. If, at any point, you feel you are obligated to be given something for your fee other than the rental of your character, you are incorrect in your stance. You have already agreed that your fee is to allow you to do what you want in the game as Blizzard defined it, and nothing takes that away from you.

You make a choice: do you live with the one you love or do you love the one you're with?

The progression path should not be strictly linear, but the fluctuations should not me as abrupt. Heck, our first Shade of Akama kill wasnt even supposed to be an actual progression night. Most of our core raiding team was away for carnival (we are from Brazil) and one of our officers gathered whoever was left to farm trash in BT, and in our 2nd or 3rd try he was dead, despite not having our main tanks and a good chunk of our meleee dps in the fight...

If the bosses immediately before and after Kael were harder, and Kael was in the stage he currently is from the beginning, there would be a lot less complaints about him, and a lot less complaints about possibly removing the attunements. Having a slightly easier boss after a hard one is ok. Having a cakewalk through 2 instances after the hardest boss in the game only leads to what we have now: several guilds breaking up on Kael because it takes them a month or two there, so people start leaving for other guilds because they see how easy things are after him. The 2nd and 3rd horde most progressed horde guilds in my server broke up over either kael or the following attunements.

Edit:

And just as a reminder, I do think that the current version of the difficulty path is mostly fine, and that it is the way it should have been at the start. I also disagree with blizzard's model of constantly nerfing content. I just think that there is a part of the current difficulty progression that should be a tad smoother.

This is a collossaly bad argument. The seven footer playing in the basketball gym doesn't pay extra because he can dunk the ball compared to a five footer.

You can't get to stage 2 on Mario without beating stage 1. I don't see why WoW should be different just because it's an MMO.

And, ugh, this thread started as promising, only to get derailed by the stupid, "I pay, therefore I should see all content." argument yet again.

Believe it or not this is the majority of the fights. There are actually very few fights that losing 1 person means a wipe (even on progression boss attempts).

A skilled player who lacks the time to do progression raiding then they should join a progression raiding guild as "Friends" status so they can experience content without having to spend the time/effort of going through the wipes learning it. Our guild has this policy, and just last night we completed the BT attunement of 7 more non-raiding members. Over the next several months these non-raiding members will get to see Hyjal/BT content at a fraction of the time investment that the raiding members of the guild put in. Player like me have probably raided something like 1000 hours to get the guild to Illidan. These non-raiding members will get to see the very same Illidan with a total TBC raid time investment of less then 100 Hours.

Granted they are seeing the content for the first time 6 months after the rest of us, but thats the price they pay for not being able to commit to even the most basic of raiding schedules or lack the skill to be in on progression raids.

Why do you assume that the development of 25 man raid content takes up any more time then any other aspect of the game? Why do you think Tempest Keep took 8 times as long to develope as Mech, Bot, and Arc combined? Why did Karazhan take significantly less development resources then Gruul's Lair? Is the HKM encounters that much more complex then Moroes?

I don't PVP, I hate Arena, I'm not a big fan of 5 mans, 10 mans were a means to an end, I don't do daily quests, I don't have time to grind the daily hub for rep, I don't have a single piece of Heroic badge loot, I have no desire for a "Bear Mount".

I spend about 20 hours a week using 2 instances and disenchant greens on the AH as a source of gold. Can I get my subscription fee reduced now?

Perhaps not directly, but I think many guilds underestimate the impact that optimizing their DPS/TPS/HPS would have even on retard-check fights. Putting it simply, the faster the boss dies, the less opportunities people have to autoincinerate.

Nevermind the fact that standing there spamming spellsteal is pretty fundamentall easy, why would you put an idiot on that job. That would be like saying, nerf 5 mans so anyone can tank, because our tank is too stupid to build threat and just spams rend.



You realize Lucifron in addition to having a Curse and a Magic that needed to be cleansed had 2 adds that hit for a moderate amount and mind controlled people. If a 'strong' healer got MC'd on Lucifron, did you call a wipe?

Honestly, I think you would be surprised at how many people would be thrilled if tanks weren't a necessity in 5-man dungeons. The model that Blizzard used for Diablo II was hugely popular, in that you didn't "need" anyone, specifically. There was min/maxing, and there will people trying to push retarded choices (Shout Warriors, Hammerdins, etc.), but the absence of tanks and healers made the game very casual-friendly.

No, I never did MC, are you serious? /sarcasm.

The difference was, if 10 people - or even 20 people - died to the debuffs on Lucifron, it was still entirely possible to finish the fight. Obviously, there were flaws at the time - OOC rez cycles being my personal favorite - but the absence of soft enrage/hard berserk timers, amongst other things, made fights of this level eminently more attainable for a broad audience of players. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who played pre-BC and wanted to raid that didn't see (or clear!) MC, but I doubt you could say the same of SSC (which is arguably the closest comparison we have, for lack of a real, entry-level 25-man dungeon).

Not every fight needs to test the ceiling of limitations on throughput and sustainability, especially if it's being targeted - as it should be - at a less adept audience. I don't believe in a 'Heroic Mode' for raiding, nor do I think the fights should be any easier than they are - answers like the ZA timer have proven that Blizzard can balance content for a broad spectrum of talent, and I would imagine that an overall increase to the physical amount of raid content available would allow them to soften the learning curve.

I think I'd be surprised at how many people would be thrilled if a vendor spawned in Shattrath that let you choose any items you wanted in the game off of it. (Actually I wouldn't because I've been on PTR and I never underestimate the wants and desires of morons aka this is a stupid point).



Karazhan was substituted in its place as a training ground because people had expressed a desire to have smaller more personal raids, so the training mode was shifted out of 25mans to 5man heroics, and 10 mans. Once again the intelligence of said design choice is really neither here nor there. The fact is that it does exist. Also, you can easily do the Maulgar fight if half of your idiot raid dies, ask me how I know.

How many encounters become prohibitively difficult if you lose key people? Just about all of them, I'd say, if the rest of your squad is that bad.

I agree that every expansion could use a Lucifron, but I don't agree with your statement that we need 6, 10, or 20 of them.

If you can simply stand in the fire, it might as well not be there. And if you can't move out of the fire, you probably can't deal with mind controlled people, or kite Thaladred, or heal the tank to full before a Silence, or even banish the Felhunter on Maulgar.

My point is that if Joe Mouth-Breathing Keyboard-Turner is only capable of a tank and spank, 1 or 2 tank and spanks is enough. And MC is still open; they already exist in the game.

I think most of us, and Blizzard admitted as such, recognize that the lack of an entry-level 25-man in TBC is a mistake. It doesn't need to be as easy as MC was but even MC was pretty difficult at the start. Naxxramas is going to be an entry level raid in WotLK and to me, that's all that's needed. All these other suggestions like heroic mode, easy mode, whatever are just too outlandish and would open a can of worms.

I like the idea of recycled raids, actually. Naxxramas for WotLK, maybe Black Temple for the next xpac would be good. Not much resources needed to pull off and it would give new content to move out of the fire challenged people.

I have a pretty good guess, but it sounds like a good story.

I think the 10/25-man dichotomy has created a pretty strong division between two very different kinds of players, and it annoys me to some extent - people choose the 'easy' road, diluting the pool of players who could arguably do very well in real raids, given some breathing room (coaching, flexibility of scheduling, etc.). I don't believe that parallel progression should exist in two totally separate flavors of raiding - as much as I hated the linear Kara -> 25-man nonsense, I would vastly prefer that to devoting my daily WoW time to convincing people that 25-mans are more fun, despite being more difficult, requiring more coordination, and giving them a smaller time:reward ratio personally (hence the rabid success of Arenas).

Trying to avoid the whining session this could be, sorry…

My guild Pre-TBC, was up to C'thun. I never got to go to AQ40 Pre-TBC. I got to BWL, yay. Just before TBC most of our 'core' raiders left for another guild. Yay void of people who had proven themselves in raids, you know, people who think of things like 'get out of the fire'.

Expansion comes out and we piece ourselves together somewhat, and wait to get enough people leveled and attuned to tackle something as simple as Karazhan. It took forever, we ran into blocks because people had to make this logic / perspective switch from '4 minute bosses in a 5-man' to '10 minutes in a 10-man'. For the new people we picked up after our guild split, this was a nightmare. The old people were complaining about lack of progress, new people complaining about lack of progress, etc.

There was a very obvious learning curve for the people NEW TO RAIDING. The jump to 25-man raiding was extremely painful because of the issue. It went into how can you handle an encounter that requires 25 people to pay attention instead of 10. Mobs work better for the military, then civilians. One’s trained, one isn’t.

So many of you on here talk about high end guilds who are doing these instances, guilds that most likely have a stable core of people that are used to tackling new material and content, used to figuring out strategies, used to being prepared with something as simple as cooking mats.

New guilds don't have that. New players who don't join a high end raiding team will NOT get that initial 'training' or 'adjustment' to the raiding mindset needed to progress in a quick manor. They have to build it with a guild that may not be a good environment.

The end result on any learning curve should center on how many new people need to be brought into raiding content. Blizzards main beef, like any creator, is they want people to experience what they’ve put so much work into. I think that’s the main reason that bosses progress the way they do. After all, why create content that (According to the figures of 9% being in BT and Hyj) that 91% of the people won’t see? This game is a Business, it caters to the crowd, not the top 10%.

They need to provide a curve that allows people to progress through the content. I think *where* TBC started was fine. I think the *how* the curve progressed, is crap.

Because your attitutde towards human resources management barely works in professions where people are paid six figures to work abusive and long hours and risk termination for mistakes. I say barely because the attrition and destructive personal habit rates are extreme despite the $160K base salary, bonuses, benefits, and status.

It only works in WoW for guilds that really *are* that elite and recruit that rarely that they have an infinite supply of competent, dedicated players of whatever class they need. With server transfers, there will always be more people throwing themselves at elite guilds than there are spots. Mobility is high and recruitment and retention costs are, by any RL scale, absent.

It is a weird economic ineffeciency, but it absolutely does not translate down to guilds that aren't elite. Turnover and poaching by guilds a tier higher is a big, big problem for them, and they have no choice but to recruit new people who are probably not a caliber of player that would ever be seriously considered for spots in a guild like DnT. Or they deplete down to nothing and /gdisband. Could any normal guild ever have recruitment policies as selective as DnT and Elitist Jerks? Of course not.

The game, even raiding, for most people is a game, not a job. You can't build content progression around everyone being in guilds that are run like high-end jobs.