Speaking as a "progression" guild that due to
a)having a bunch of core players simultaneously give up the game and
b)having to rebuild the guild(we were at 3/6 SSC in August, lost people in September, and finally got to 3/6 again in January)
c)being 3-night a week raiders for 3, 3, 4.5 hours each

SSC/TK is still progression to *us*. We got Vashj down on our 3rd night of attempts about 3 weeks ago and in an hour we'll be pulling trash for our 2nd night of Kael attempts. I wouldn't want him to suddenly get nerfed massively. And yes, I know that there was a 10% hp nerf to him and we'll certainly use it, but I'd have tried him without that if that were necessary.

I take the game seriously, and I want to actually beat the content not have it nerfed to triviality because 10 other guilds on our server are going to be clearing to Kil'jaeden.

The two solutions I like are
1) the idea that we could avoid raid resets when trying to learn a boss. We don't really need gear for Kael'thas at this point, so I'd like not to spend 1 of our 3 nights clearing to him(for some reason Al'ar keeps killing people, hopefully this will go away)
2) The "soft" nerfing via badge gear. Badge gear right now is the same quality as T5 loot - which we can all get - but it makes it simpler and faster to get. It's not giving us anything we couldn't get just by farming SSC over and over and over, but it let's us do it on our own time, and at least for the last round, it was appropriate to what we are killing.

I'm really hoping we get KT down before the 2.4 hits and we get the new T6 badge gear, because that starts to feel like we're getting things handed to us more.

So yeah, we're by no means bleeding-edge content consumers, but I'd like to feel like I accomplished something (we did with Vashj - to the best of my knowledge her only nerf was removing MC), and I'll still feel pretty good about Kael (the 10% hp nerf feels like something we could have overcome with raid stacking, and we're trying not to stack)

If Blizzard really feels like something is broken (Solarian requiring 2 tanks dancing in a corner in arcane gear) and wants to change it, fine. I'd just rather not get content nerfed because it's "not progression content".

That said, I don't know what the solution is for letting even more casual raiders eventually kill Illidan - I certainly sympathize - TBC hit before we had more than 2 bosses in Naxx down, and we never pulled C'thun (after Twin Emps we went to Naxx) but I'm not sure how that should be handled.

Just look at in what direction World of Warcraft is going. Everyone is starting to look like clones of eachother, either wearing wellfare epics from pvping or tier sets from the last instances (which afterall, also look the same). Thankfully Blizzard will be introducing more customizable characters & hairstyles in WotLK so we can make our characters unice again!

There's been a lot of talk in the game industry lately about World of Warcraft, The Sims and Peggle-like games totaly dominating and suffocating the PC gaming industry link. Basicly PC's are slowly becoming the platform of casual gamers and with all the piracy going on (can't say I'm not a part of it myself) we're not a very attractive audience for game developers.

So, trying to get back on topic, what we are seing now for every patch is basicly content for the more casual players, content for players that might otherwise enjoy a round of solitaire.

So basicly we're removing big epic one-time-only questlines for the hardcore raiders only to give us "cool, fun" repeatable trash. Since when was doing the same thing over and over again very fun? (And no, AQ bugfarming / wareffort wasn't very fun either.)

How often is it that you see players not wearing epic items nowadays? What happened to those cool class quests that actually demanded you to know something about your class, also known as Benediction, Rok'delar and Qel'serrar, not to mention Thunderfury (which is strangely enough still the best looking item in World of Warcraft). There's nothing Epic about our purple colored items anymore, they might aswell change the name of them to Common.

Again, trying to drift back on the subject.
I once made a ridiculously long post on the offical wow forums about how it was very disappointing that every boss we killed in TBC got nerfed to pieces 2 months later. At the time I thought that content should remain unnerfed for the sake of equal opertunities of progression for everyone, and that everyone should have the right to experience the same content. Eventhough I now realize the problems with not nerfing content, I still believe everyone should have the option to experience old Gruul, Magtheridon, Kael'thas, Vashj and Al'ar, to mention a few, just because they offered an a lot more enjoyable challenge. I'm not suggesting there should be any specific awards for killing bosses in the harder versions, the pride in knowing that you can do what others before you did should be enough. Currently we're basicly being robbed of that chance.

In a perfect world all instances would be nerfed from start and not requireing any further tuning. With TBC for example, you would have hardcore guilds progressing through the easier instances, and probably completing Gruul's, SSC and The Eye within the first month of raiding (asuming they start from green gear), but Hyjal would've been ready, a much harder instance, to slow progress a bit and check if the guild learnt something in the previous instances. After that Black Temple would be waiting, the instasnce that could and should have CRUSHED guilds. Having the same encounters being vastly different depending on when you kill them just doesn't make much sense. "In 2.4 Magtheridon clicks the cubes for you".

I'm basicly talking about that content should get progressively harder in a more steep manner. Casual guilds would be stuck on a boss for a month or so, but learn something in the process, and get a stable core, that they could take with them to the next encounter. With an unnerfed Karazhan for example, the guilds would have had to learn the basic mechanics of pve raiding to progress through, and bring it with them to the harder instances. New guilds are currently hitting brickwalls since they are not actually learning anything from previous encounters.

The problem is tuning is different for different people. While Curse could do 4/5 Hyial and 8/9 Temple within the first (altough easier) version with 22 or 23 players, others took months to complete and others didn't even come close to it. Most "hardcore" guilds downed Vashj and Kael'Thas on the very first day they were killable.

The original Gruul and Magtheridon were at the time before the ilevel of nearly all epic items was raised. If you want that challenge try to down him in blues or with twenty people or with arena talents or, or, or...

There is no "real version" of bosses. There is only a time, that matters to beat a boss and that is the time before the spoilers are out. Once the strategies are leaked it is not really something special or a big achievement to down a boss - it is more of a fun thing. Because of that the competition should be time based. If you want to make things harder - try out something new (like Loatheb five manned on level 60 by Death & Taxes).

I don't really agree with this.

Other than obvious, huge nerfs (e.g. 2.4 Magtheridon vs. version 1 or even version 2 Magtheridon) I feel that a guild downing a boss is always a big achievement for the guild. It's not as if the fight is dramatically easier just because another guild has killed it first nor are bosskiller guides a panacea to learning a fight. At best, guides give you some free wipes where you didn't have to sit around scratching your head, "so, why are people getting Bloodboil again?" Actually executing the kill is still generally just as difficult and as much an accomplishment so long as you are doing it with people who have never done it before.

Perhaps I say this as a guild that, while not on the bleeding edge, still does pretty well and tends to use either slightly or dramatically altered strats than are usually stated on places like wowwiki and bosskillers--many of which I don't feel have very optimal strats for a good number of encounters, especially depending on raid makeup.

This being the case, I'm a strong believer in the process of clearing instances--be it early OR late--as a moment of accomplishment and pride for a guild. Killing Vashj now is still as much of an accomplishment as killing her 6 months ago-- not for the fact that gear is remarkably easier to get now--and that guilds should have an opportunity and be encourage to experience the content in a progressive way.

I believe that bosses should be tuned and not be ridiculous, but most of those adjustments have already happened and happened rather quickly. The post-nerfing of bosses seems a bit silly to me, and takes a lot away from the pride and accomplishment a guild can have in killing them. Kael needed some tweaking (and should have gotten tweaked much earlier) but them nerfing it really trivialized the epic nature of the fight in my opinion. If we had been working on him just prior to the huge nerf patch and he was patched the next week, I'd almost feel kinda cheated in a way by the triviality introduced and the lowered sense of accomplishment.

While I'm perfectly fine with the removal of the attunement quests (they were annoying to begin with, and caused us tons of recruitment woes for a while) the post-nerfing of content beyond the initial tuning phase (e.g. within the first major patch of a boss) seems a bit questionable.

I'm in full agreement I think.

For some context of where I'm coming from. I'm in a casual guild on a casual server: the most progressed guild on either faction just got into BT about 1-2 weeks ago. My own guild is barely into the 25s, clearing gruul and preparing for the others (we were a little overgeared for a guild starting gruul, just because organizing the run was the largest hurdle). We can get the first chest somewhat reliably in ZA (2nd will need some work) and haven't even cleared the place yet. Our core is in agreement that 3, maybe 4 raid nights a week (3-4 hours per raid) is the limit; any more for any individual will become too much for their schedule/etc. Specs aren't enforced (though recruitment is filtered towards what we need and are full on) and the raid schedulers do their best to make sure everyone who involves themselves gets runs, so raid comp is more about fairness to players (after meeting some baseline roles and reqs), and picking person in class A over B type optimizations are verboten. We're just about the model definition of "casual raiders".

And while we're casual, that doesn't mean we aren't capable. I've been a long time lurker of EJ and a lot of theorycraft discussion I see here I also see reflected and equally understood in /g chat. When it comes to raid time we get our act together. We're more erratic schedule wise, have the same 'gear diffusion' problem as mentioned by others, and will do our best to help people out who lag behind or need runs, etc. If a DPSer puts out awful numbers and has junky gear, but is a good person and has the dedication to see it through, we'll help gear them up and work on spec/rotation/etc if need be way way sooner than even considering dropping them and recruiting someone else of their class who performs better. These choices slow us down, and there's many, many many guilds in our same spot.

Sorry, getting away from my points. We want to bust our asses and kill raid bosses the same as hardcore guilds, the difference is how we've chosen to go about it (and i'll admit, we don't really have a competitive drive against other guilds). We know it will take us longer, and by no small factor, and that's acceptable. What's hard to accept is seeing an instance nerfed to speed on the progression. It's not speeding the progression--well, it is, but it's doing more than just that. It's making the encounters easier, lowering the bar, and in the end we're not beating the actual content as designed, we're having a "kiddie pool" version. There's something demeaning in that, and it really spoils things to finally get there, kill boss X, and still know that the boss was an easier version of its former self. We aren't children, we don't need our hands held, and the enjoyment of seeing the content pales in comparison to the enjoyment of beating the content, which is what we are really after. I've got youtube if I really wanted to see some endgame boss fight. That's boring, I want to work at overcoming and killing that boss.

I don't mean to bring a hostile tone, and I hope it's not coming off as such, I'm just trying to emphasize my point. Even in this thread I see the notion that it's perfectly fine to nerf down content so everyone can 'enjoy' it. To give a "in my shoes" parallel, consider if after a world/server first kill of some new boss, they put out a patch the next reset, nerfing the fight down considerably. I'm not talking tweaks like the ones vashj got when everyone discovered what a glitchy random that fight was. I'm talking real, honest nerfs. While nihilum and other bleeding edge guilds can get there first, there's quite a few guilds that aren't far behind and can do it in short order as well. To nerf the fight after the bleeding-edgers have their kill--in order to make it more 'accessible' so that the other guilds "can experience the content too"--would really spoil the fight for a lot of high end guilds, wouldn't it? The point there is those guilds are just as capable of downing the boss in their designed form as nihilum et al. The difference is they just weren't paced as fast as others for it (extra gearing up, getting it learned for everyone, etc). Nerfing the boss will rob them fiercely of a satisfaction that they earned and deserve. My argument is this same principle applies down the line. "casual" raiders for the vast majority don't need or want the bar lowered, our issue is pacing. Prestige for getting there first or early is one thing, and I agree there should be something for it. But there's no prestige for drawing a line that says anyone who hasn't killed boss X by now needs an easier boss.

Now on the other hand, in respect to pacing, I'm *FINE* with speeding up item availability. I really think those sorts of changes are what's needed. Like I laboriously pointed out above, it's not that we can't clear the bar, we just need more time to get there. More badge drops, extra tier token drops, more badge loot, all those are absolutely great in my mind. Our guild loves it, and we're seeing results big time. This accelerates the pacing, but doesn't change the fight mechanics. You can say that we'll be better geared than guilds that came before us, so we had more slack in the fight. That may be true, but what guild doesn't sometimes give pause on a boss until X/Y/Z was geared up a little more? That's just a matter of degree though, and every guild does it, and every guild still needs to have the same baseline levels of coordination and alertness that extra gear won't really solve for you. Unless blizzard starts putting insane quality epics up on 'welfare', all they're doing is speeding the process to gear people up on the content they're beating. And that's exactly what casual raiders need. We'd get there on our own, but the content would be past obsolete at our pacing. The difficulty level isn't the real problem.

Sorry this got lengthy. To summarize, as a casual raider (and there's lots of others in my camp), we don't want to see content getting nerfed, but we do want to see faster gearing up on content that's going to be phased out. We've got more people to gear, we've got less optimized raid compositions, and yeah, we won't be as tight on individual performance. However, when we kill a big raid boss, months and months behind the 'hardcore' raiding guilds, we at least want the satisfaction of knowing we killed the same boss that the big boys had to face.

I can surely understand your opinion on not wanting to kill gimped bosses, but most good raid nerfs are not changing the boss mechanics, but just doing the same which easier/better gear accomplish. like nerfing the aoe requirement on Kael hardly makes him a different boss, it just makes you able to beat him with slightly worse gear.
if thy instead went out and removed his Pyroblast, shield, gravity phase or something , sure you could be pissed, but is it so bad if the nerfs mostly achieve to lower the gear requirement (and thus, allowing for more slack/lack of skill/whatever, for those who are overgeared for it)

Consider that not everyone:

• Has a ~100ms average ping
• Has a powerful enough machine to render a full raid in enough detail to stay out of the X in widescreen (widescreen is an under-rated edge in non-trivial encounters.)
• Is up to speed on UI mods
• Wants to make ideal choices for every slot/talent point, etc.
• Talks about the ideal choice for every slot/talent point, etc. for hours
• Can reliably attend a part-time job worth of raids
• Would boot their best friend out of a raid because he sucks at a given mechanic

Those people need compelling content too. Old raid content with toned down mechanics and mudflated gear is one pretty reasonable solution.

It's worth noting that the place where serious serious nerfage is starting to hit is the waaaay earliest part of the 25-man raid game. Certainly, SSC and TK have seen their share of nerfs already, but I think most people would say that they're still reasonably challenging. Not bleeding edge, for sure, but challenging. Likewise the Magtheridon encounter, up until this nerf that will be going live in 2.4—that change trivializes what was the key coordination challenge of the fight.

If anything, I'd say that this change (along with the Ony bag and gems) is intended to turn Maggie into the PUG 25-man raid of choice. Something to let people who would not ordinarily have any chance of seeing 25-man content at all get their feet wet. Have you got a solid tank, a couple of solid healers, and five people who can click on command? Then you can scrape bottom of the General channel and get some people together to go out and take him down.

And the key thing here is that these are people who have now seen at least a *little* bit of what it's like to raid in a 25-man, and maybe they'll start getting together with the same people regularly and start reading up on how to improve their performance and... what do you know, they're raiding!


When BC launched, I'm not sure there was really room for a "training wheels" raid, which would let people get used to the idea of working with 24 other folks and 25-man style encounters, without making them go all the way and form a guild or alliance with the intent to be raiders. Now that pretty much anybody who's seriously pursuing raiding is in T5 content, though, this encounter makes a great deal of sense as a gentle introduction. The people who experience it now probably won't be hitting T6 or T6+ content before WotLK, no matter what they do—but they will go into WotLK having some idea what 25-man raiding is about.

As for whether WotLK's major raids should assume higher level skills, rather than base-level raiding skills? It's hard to say. On the one hand, Blizzard does need to preserve an entry path to new raiding guilds forming from the aether—and old-world and BC raids really don't fit the bill, unless they backport some of the older raids as they're doing with Naxx to act as introductory raids. On the other hand, there's not going to be the sort of reorganization and re-learning that the transition from 40-man to 25-man raids produced (breaking and re-forming raid guilds, etc.), and that means people are going to come in chomping at the bit to face encounters that are technically challenging right off the bat.

If you make the new raiders jump right in to highly scripted encounters requiring a lot of coordination, they're going to be totally lost. But if you make the old raiders jump through hoops before they're allowed to sit at the big kids table, they're going to be a bit peeved. If anything, I think that having a set of introductory 25-man raids which can act as casual/pug raids in the future is a reasonable way to go—as long as those raids can also be more or less skipped by the serious raiders. Basically, if you're hard-core enough to dive right in without gearing up, you'll get a bit of additional challenge, but still be able to make progress. The gear from the intro raids might help, but could be farmed by the hardcore raiders on a quick one-night sort of basis. The newbie raiders, on the other hand, can face the intro raids that introduce them slowly to increasing levels of coordination, so that when they arrive where the hardcore raiders started, they're not as skilled, but they are better geared than the hardcore folks were when they jumped in, which will let them keep progressing and learning through the more difficult encounters.

In short, arrange the "hardcore entry level" raids to be challenging and doable with good skills without having to gear up from the "training level" raids first. And aim so that by the time the "newbie raiders" make it through the "hardcore entry level" raids, they're at approximately the same gear and skill level as the hardcore raiders, but some months later.

(Note to self: Don't write messages in the wee hours of the morning. Even more likely to turn into a wall of text than normal.)

One thing I'm not sure I understand is the role of 'trash' in a dungeon and how the developers are using this mechanic.

I guess it's supposed to be pacing content consumption, and there have been blizzard developers quoted saying as much. What I don't understand is why when you suddenly deem the pace of content consumption to be too slow, you don't make a change to the mechanic designed with the intent of slowing down content consumption.

I guess maybe there's an assumption here that skill is the issue and not time, but I'm not sure the two are so discrete. More repetitions on the bosses can as easily help a more casual guild (less skilled?) over the hump as nerfing health points and abilities or giving them access to better gear. And you can give the casual player these extra repetitions by either removing some trash or flagging all trash to not respawn or both.

I'm not saying you end there of course. Further steps might need to be taken. I just can't understand why Blizzard isn't starting with changing the trash mechanics.

See, but that's the whole problem.
Karazhan was nerfed several times to reach its current level. Magtheridon was changed multiple times. Same with Gruul. ZA got it's own pack of nerfs already. SSC/TK - the same. Heroics nerf - check...

Currently in Wow there is no such thing as "fighting the same fight as top guilds did". There is progressing non-direct nerfing of the encounters (by making gear more available for all, adding extra gear from other sources, buffing class talents/abilities) and direct nerfing of the game that is engaged everytime it turns out game content is too limited to the most dedicated players.

In case of my guild we have just recently killed Kael. It's not Kael who was killed by top guilds. It's not even Kael that was killed by most of the guilds that are preparing for Sunwell right now - it is Kael specially prepared for latecomers like us. And it didn't felt any less epic to kill him after 3 weeks of attempts (3 nights per week schedule).

Honestly, I'm pretty sure our guild would not be able to kill Magtheridon in it's early versions. Or it would be odd kill every 5-6 wipes. Same with early Al'ar. I remember vividly how painful early Aran was. I don't mind nerfs at all - I don't lose anything - and I save lot of time and stress related to deal with slow-clickers, flame patch deaths and such.

That is exactly the point. A lot of players claim not to want to play nerfed content, but most fights in TBC-Raids are nerfed already at the time they encounter them. They change would be speak this out loudly instead of the semantics Blizzard uses mostly ".. is now working as intended" etc. It would also give the competition and the nerfs a more planable timeframe.

The point however is not just the nerfs, but the time investment. It is one thing to reduce the HP of any boss or to hand out better gear. I think the bosses are actually fine for any group from their complexity of mechanics for the late-comers. The other is stuff like reducing the Hyial Trash waves down to maybe 5 or 6 in some weeks, remove 50% of all trash packs in SSC and TK with 2.4, remove respawn.

See, on that I disagree - not with the feeling part, but the part about validity of "tuning to proper level" claim.

It's not us who decide what is the right level, but Blizzard.

For them, right level of encounter is having for example 30% of the playerbase kill Maghteridon after X time since it was released (number taken from the top of my head ofc). Otherwise, right level of tuning was never achieved, because not enough players have seen content designed for them.

I strongly believe that on the planning stage of PvE such goals are as much important as making encounter stunning visually and suprising it terms of mechanics.

Funnily enough, this "dumbed down" encounters are still leaps and bounds more complicated and harder then old MC/early BWL. It's the same deal as with 5 men instances in TBC - they are much harder then their equivalent in vanilla Wow (that were hard only before itemization was sorted out and main "hard" factor was related to their length). Blizzard is making us better players at lev. 70 then in vanilla - but the start level for raids is higher as well.

Funny I just had put this idea up on Blizzards boards and of course they would rather argue casuals suxxor vs raiders bad over the current lifting of attunements. Anyways this was my idea.

"Blizzard's present model for raiding is to release difficult encounters and then slowly and steadily nerf them as time goes by. Why don't they just have heroic and normal raid instances from the start? Better yet after I read about EJ doing Hakkar without killing the aspects I had this idea - have a 1-10 difficulty scale so people can never say they have done it all. Raid instances are about learning set encounters and maximizing your abilities, WOW pve is about perfecting your execution to the same fight. Maybe loot would be much better going from 1-3 but after that it might just be one extra stat point on the same drop that is more of a trophy item that says you did it. There need to be a least a couple different loot levels but after that its just ego. As long as 1 is about at kara/heroic level a lot more people could actually use this content and keep up with the story lines. As long as 2 is as hard as current raid content it shouldn't be too big a deal to balance the rest. If 3 is the best their testers can do or they think is actually possible then 10 will never be reached and it will always be open ended. Whatever point most hardcore guilds can get to is the norm, going above the norm makes you an elite guild. Right now its a race to clear things as soon as possible right after release and then more and more of a gimme after that. I just find their present mechanic a very odd and clunky way to handle things."

Whatever happens they need to have some kind of normal / heroic system for raiding in the next expansion. You may not think it matters that only a very small percentage of people actually see BT, even after 2.4 this will be the case, but it will eventually catch up with us. The more people that raid the more raiding will matter. Look at pvp. I was checking out how long it would take to get full resilience on my priest and its a bigger hurdle / timesink than getting pve gear to start raiding. I look at mid level rated arena players and they don't have it all, so, it occurs to me there are probably as few people actually trying to win arena as there are trying to kill Illidan. But everyone knows what arena is, they do the same thing, it makes pvp relevent. The general wow population can get arena gear in a similar way as the top 2%. There just aren't that many casual raiders as casual pvpers and that will have an impact on how the game develops.

What sort of surprises me about the item availability "nerfs" that TBC has seen a lot of is the method in which they're obtained.

I think what annoys people the most is the view that for the most part, a lot of this gear is very literal time = gear sort of items.

No matter what they do, there will be some people who have full S1 (and eventually S2) + Vindicator's (or whatever the next equivalent is) wrists,boots,belt from autorunning in BGs. There will be even more who are equipped like that from guarding the critical strategic spot of the road to the north of the Blacksmith. Similarly, there will be a lot of people with latest gladiator season gear without ever winning a match.

As for badge gear, while probably less of a problem, in the extreme case, a group of people could, starting now, do nothing but kill the two mini bosses in Mech or Attumen once a day and have enough badges for some of the best gear in the game by the time 2.4 badge vendor is opened up. Plus, they can just buy a couple of nether vortices and get even more fun stuff.

The resentment over the gear basically comes down to the idea that gaudy purples should be representative of "accomplishments" in game rather than simply due to "time spent."

I think there should be some "time spent" gear available in the game (I think the early version with just 3 BG epics was good), however, it probably is a bit excessive right now.

What kind of surprises me is that, at one point, Blizzard did get it almost right in terms of how to give professor plums to non-raiders or part time raiders -- the tier 0.5 set.

I'm really surprised that nothing has been implemented like this quest chain in TBC. The heroics especially seem to be a really good opportunity for it. When the tier 0.5 set quest chain came out, my guild was about a dozen or so level 60s and most of us had almost our entire dungeon set (for crying out loud, I even killed the freaking mailman for my boots) the quest chain gave us a really good and challenging series of goals. Strat 45 was fantastic as a "teaching" event for getting DPS up and keeping crowd control up while still maintaining mana efficiency. Beating that was one of my best in game experiences. We didn't do it by paying a BWL guild to get us through, we did it in blues with a couple greens even. For most classes, I think, the tier 0.5 was more intelligently point allocated than tier 1 and was generally better. I think that was fair -- I think the tier 0.5 quest chain was legitimately harder than any of the tier 1 dropping bosses.

The heroics was an attempt to have a situation like this, but I think a problem is that you never actually have to finish the heroic to get the badge vendor gear. I remember in the early days that "3 badge heroic mech" runs were very, very popular.

What if when TBC came out, the dungeon set gloves could be upgraded to t4.5 quality loot by badge turn in, the pants and shoulders by finishing, say heroic SL and SV, the chest with SH 55 minutes and for the headpiece there's some quest chain where you have to go into Kara and summon a special boss to kill -- maybe a living Nightbane that's specially tuned or something.

Then, flash forward to now, with 2.4 coming out, the gloves can be upgraded to t5.5 with badges, the shoulders with a timed kara event of some sort, the pants with a special event in, why not, heroic BM, a chest upgrade token in the 3 or 4th timed ZA chest and the headpiece by killing heroic 5 man kael in some special way or whatever.

Obviously, the examples I gave would be subject to tuning or whatever, but it seems that having gear linked to completing specific parts of the game rather than time spent would go a long ways towards alleviating "welfare epic" complaints while at the same time giving people things to work towards and for in a less than 25 man situation.

Esajin, your idea about a selectable raid timer is interesting. But I don't think it would work out well. Everyone, even casuals, want the best loot. I think they would like to have it reset more often rather than wait or find replacements for the organizational difficulty of a multi-week raid. Since iLevel is generally the same until the last boss, they would probably select doing the same first bosses more often.

Eulolia, I believe one of the reasons Kara is so popular besides what Galred said, is because the instance is that much more fun. Zul'Aman is higher level making it more inaccessible, but it is trolls, like ZG, again.

Zul'Aman ist too fast-paced to be popular like Karazhan. Also it has few loot without beating the timed run.

I don't see why not, given the current design movements we've been seeing, that such a set upgrade questline like the 0.5 one would not provide gear that is on par with what we would get from raiding. Otherwise, very interesting idea. As an aside, the 0.5 set was in no way scaled to the difficulty in obtaining it. If something like that came out now, it would certainly be tier 5 or 6 quality, not almost-4.

I'd like to take some 70s to Valthalak to see if he's still as heinous a 10-man boss as he was preBC. Still have that last step to kill him in my log; I've been doing some old-school stuff like killing Gazhranka for the 38th time so that I finally got the tortimorph spell, and undermanning old endgame content can definitely be something worth thinking about.

The masochist that I am, I decided to revisit the T0.5 quest chain during our off-hours, and have reached the step of Lord Val'thalak through largely solo play. While I recognize a great deal of trivialization can be attributed to the level difference, I found much of the quest complexity to be unnecessarily laborious even at 70. I liked the idea of T0.5 in that it gave people an opportunity to have alternative methods of gear acquisition, but this design paradigm of "collect more than 10 of anything on a relatively low drop rate" is really something I wish would be adjusted. The second to last step in the T0.5 line took me - at 70, no less - multiple clears of BRS in order to get the 40 Blackrock Bracers. I know some people get their thrills out of collection quests, but I am simply not one, and areas like this would drastically influence my overall perception.

That having been said, it's interesting how much Val'thalak and Leotheras the Blind parallel one another, with the Inner Demon MC from Leo being substituted for an effective 1-shot on Val. I've known several people who have done this last step multiple times, and even with 5 at level 70, it proved to be engaging and in fact difficult to some degree. (A healer having to kill his "ID" before healing --> damage was put in, in either of the encounters, was an interesting task.)

As a result, I think there are some useful things that people who can't or choose not to raid can do to remain interested. There are some things that raiding alone can make manifest, but many other ideas are scalable, and this is certainly one of them.

Call it nerfing for casuals or call it tuning to get things to a level where the progression hits a sweet spot Blizzard wants. Either way, for those really upset at the nerfs, would you prefer if Blizzard approached their raid encounters from the other direction?

They could, of course, toss out encounters that are initially tuned on the side of being too easy, then make them more difficult as they wait and see who is beating them too quickly that shouldn't be.

I somehow think that the most progressed guilds prefer encounters that err on the side of way too hard, so they have a significant challenge to overcome right off the bat, and to have them tuned down (nerfed) sometime later when they are only going there to farm or as a stepping stone to get to the later bosses.

Has Valthalak been changed? When we killed him (back at 60) the demons/shadows/assassins paralysed their target and had to be killed by everyone else (so more analogous to Illidan's demons - though they didn't move towards their target, it was just a timed channel - than Leo's).

He was certainly a challenging fight. As were some of the other new bosses (Kormok, you bastard).

No, I didn't mean to suggest it was changed, but I and others I know (not having killed Illidan) found the Leotheras parallel reasonably fitting, hence the "ID" in quotes. It was more to indicate that the basic mechanic, namely of eliminating spawned adds that could otherwise wipe the raid, has been an accessible mechanic for quite some time.

This brings up a more general point that experience is something you can hardly quantify in its worth. Our guild is modestly progressed (into Hyjal/BT) and constantly I am reminded of previous encounters, be it raiding or 5-mans, which I try to use as parallels for our long-time raiders. I just know said references are falling on deaf ears to the newer people, but such is life. Regardless, there have been other MMORPGs I have played that have training dungeons right when your character enters the world. They've never been supremely sophisticated, mind you, but we shouldn't be too bold to realize that most of the mechanics in TBC WoW raiding, just as in the Leotheras <--> Val'thalak case, are, as others have recently put it, simply variations on a theme. The sooner that people have that grasp - and it doesn't take a 10, 25, or 40-man raid to teach people the timing associated with "get out of the <death_mechanic>" - the sooner the average raiding guild (much like mine) can wrest confidence in the neverending conflict between attrition and experience.

At least that's my take.

I really liked your initial idea about what an impact time is on raiding, and the reducing of trash mobs.

In my mind, the whole casual/hardcore is ALL about time. All people who play WoW have two attributes which places them in one of four quadrants. Experienced vs inexperienced, and little free time to commit to the game, and tons of free time to commit to the game. I fall into the experienced/little free time quadrant. I've been playing for over a year on different toons, I know how to play my classes, I understand the game mechanics, and I know how to be a team player. Yet, I have a full time career, kids in grade school, and a high maintenace wife .

People will sometimes dismiss the statement, but I pay the same just as everyone else, and I want to experience all the game has to offer, AT the same difficulty level. I am not a fan of nerfing the bosses and reducing the boss complexity.

The problem is time available to commit to an instance. The need to spend 2 hours clearing trash in an instance effectively has limited me to the occasional half kara run, or getting gear through heroics. Most casual players would love to get into BT, but we cant commit to raiding schedules because of the strict time commitments. Any instance/raid should be able to be run in around 2 hours at max, even allowing for a wipe or two. Remember, time in an instance is not what limits the complexity of boss fights, its group size and composition. I'm not saying eliminate all trash. A five pull, or a few beefed up small group trash pulls allows for challenge and story development. Three pull after three pull after three pull is only a waste of time.

IMO, causuals are not inexperienced noobs who need every boss nerfed down, we are fully knowledgable people who know how to play our classes. We just want the same content, but parsed out into shorter time commitments. This could be easily implemented by abandoning the current linear model of Trash->Boss1->trash->Boss2->etc. A better model would be something like fighting all trash once, with no reset timers, to get into a courtyard, and then you can have individual boss fights by going to different wings. There are multiple ways that something like this could be implemented. Blizz just needs to quit waisting our time on trash. As much as I love kara, and i really do, four hours is just too long to spend in there, and sometimes, alot of us just cant commit to two back to back nights of raiding.

Just the .02 of a casual.