I would hope not, that's what happened with TBC beta, the stuff got beaten in BETA so they went ahead in live and ramped up the difficulty to a level that was untested. The result was the stupidly high bar set for what should have entry level 25 man raids, I sincerely hope they don't stick some arbitary numbers on this stuff before it goes live. It's supposed to be entry level. If it means it's steamrolled by the top guilds who are left twiddling their thumbs then so be it, they're going to steamroll it no matter how hard it's ramped up anyway.

They been saying they expect top guilds to clear Naxx in a week, which would mean basically every fight is tuned to be beatable in blues. The enrage on Malygos will probably mean a bit of gear farming before he drops, but it won't be terribly long. There are good achievements in place to keep people busy, as well as the holiday season generally takes a lot of people away from raiding. Hopefully right around the time all the T7 stuff reaches easy PuG status, the 3.1 patch will release with Ulduar. The content difficulty in many ways is much less important than the content availablility. Even at that point, the difference will be more in who is wearing "Twilight Vanquisher" and "The Immortal" than just who is in full T7.

Yes. To me a pug has these quality of players. These are real, I can't possibly make up stuff worse that what I've seen.

"I'm signed up for Botanica but don't have a flying mount".

A "tank" with a full rage bar who can't hold aggro on a single target vs a -40% threat arcane explosion.

DPS of several flavors who do worse damage than the tank. (BC of course. 3.0 patch that isn't so weird)

A retadin who pretty much just used white damage. "Judgements are for wimps." He also forgot to pick up the quest widget that makes the fight much easier. I don't think we got any blessings from him either.

A healer who seemed to be AFK half the time and the other half he used his slowest heal, and only on the tank.

A tank that keeps pulling intercept/cleave mobs while some of the raid is dead, and others are freshly raised and at small fractions of their hitpoints. Guess what kept happening to the guys who just got raised? Over and over. For bonus points, he also doesn't wait for the mob that casts fear to get pulled far enough away, so the whole raid repeatedly wipes because he gets feared and the intercept/cleave mobs butcher the DPS clustered around their butt. (that guy was normally competent, he was suffering from "it is just trash"itis)

Somebody who will wipe any raid fight that requires you to not stand near your neighbors or to always run one way or the other in response to events. Over and over.

A group composed of those guys won't be clearing anything in NAX in 5 minutes. They probably won't even kill the trash.

I have also had really excellent players on a LFG pug. One pug 5 man accidently had four BT/Sunwell folks and me doing shattered halls and it was an incredibly fast and fun run even though there were major style differences in how the individuals played. It is a total crapshoot.

[Posted in the wrong thread]

Again, market-wise this is a good change. However, they are walking awfully close on the thin line that balances "hardcore" raiding and "casual" raiding. I have been proponents of these changes because I personally find that even titles such as Twilight Vanquisher feels to be an achievement. However, there are people that still wants to be geared in a much more superior way, and this change will affect their desire to continue playing/raiding when they see people who does "easy mode" wearing exactly same gear as he is.

From arenas, I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard don't want a huge gear discrepency. However, that is arena where skill "should" matter more than gear (and from the array of S2 wearing gladiator in S4, it's possible), while raiding, gear is much more important since the fights are not as ever-changing.

I don't think Blizzard has any intention of just throwing loot at people. Now, they will to a point, but I expect there will come a point when Kael'thas-like fights and Sunwell-like raids will come into play. We know they don't want people to have to have a 35 man roster waiting outside so people can clear through the instance (like Sunwell), but we've only seen the intro raiding on Wrath. Blizzard has made it very clear that they are starting with the intro raiding. It would only make sense for them to ramp up the difficulty. In Ulduar, they will be able to make each fight much harder because they have (re)introduced people to raiding already with T7. Am I off base here?

Now you'll have the 10-man versions of each raid though, going from 5-man to 10-man isn't that huge of a step. Since you can do both simultaneously, I can imagine 25-man guilds rehearsing the 25-man content in the 10-man version. With the Emblems of Valor, this certainly is something that reduce the time spent doing nothing between preparation and raid itself. I mean, a situation with "let's go clear naxx 10man while we wait for players to show up".

A welcome change, all in all.

What you might be seeing is temporary or aura buffs that are stronger than or identical to what's usually considered a "permanent" or long term buff overwriting the longer term buff and then disappearing.

Like an improved 2m battleshout knocking off an unimproved 30 minute blessing of might.

While I agree with the rest of your post - entry level raids really should be relatively easy - I think several of the comments in this thread, as well as some of Blizzards design decisions, show an over-reliance on the bolded statement.

If beating content is so awesome regardless of difficulty, if seeing content is so incredible satisfying, show me how the untold milling masses have gone out of their way to see C'thun, Nefarian, hell, I'll throw in Ragnaros, Drakkisath, all the bosses of Blackrock Depths and Shadow Hunter Vosh'gajin - with virtual cookies for anyone who can remember what instance the last troll resides in without google. Many of these fights are interesting in layout, in dazzling environments with rich lore components. And, as an added bonus, they're now easy to beat because you outlevel them by ten levels.

If virtual sightseeing is such a vital part of the masses' enjoyment of the game, surely the masses have visited these places, frequently and thoroughly? If "being given a chance to see Sunwell content" is so interesting without the challenge - or at least a psychological imprint that the feat is impressive - then people should have been all over the chance of being able to see the other aforementioned rich encounters?

I'm not saying I think all fights should've been left the way they were (nor that it would have been feasible), I'm not saying I think the right choice would've been to spend efforts on fine-tuning rather than slashing, but there's a gaping hole in the argument that Naxxramas being remade is a good thing because "not a lot of people got to see it" and "making things easier makes more people see it". Naxx at 70 as opposed to 60 was no stroll in the park, but if people actually wanted to see it that much, it was right there, ready for the brave explorer and his courageous mates, considerably easier than when it was first introduced. Many, many old world environements are in a similar position, they're there, you can go them, and they are not hard anymore. So why aren't they visited, on a frequent and regular basis? Could half of the people - someone said 95%? - to whom seeing content is so important identify the dungeon the troll I mentioned above resides in?

If the idea of not recieving any useful loot was such a total turn-off that these intrepid explorers of lore and virtual vistas were turned away, then either they aren't a large enough component of the population to raid, or they aren't as in love with "content" as some people make them out to be.


"Seeing content" is a vastly overrated motivator for participating in content. Not an insignificant one, but based on observations of the game during the past three years, I wouldn't rate it above rewards for the content, and certainly not above the sense of accomplishment derived from defeating the challenge the content represents - a psychological one, more than in terms of actual difficulty - for most players.

Or, in not so many words, an easy Sunwell wouldn't be worth shit for anyone's sense of accomplishment - "seeing the content" - unless it had been hard first, and the sense of accomplishment you're 'meant' to feel killing these bosses hadn't been branded into our spines. Again, this is not saying I think they should've just left Sunwell the way it was, just that the results of easy or easier content aren't quite as glorious as occasionally suggested.

True enough, I doubt anyone would have done the Brewfest BRD runs if there was no kodo or epic quality loot dropping from him. Granted, there is no real story for him to be anything else than a loot piñata, but the point is if he would have been a simple quest objective nobody would have gone there.

Though I don't think the loot aspect is the only reason why old world content is effectively "out of date". The old content doesn't tie well to contemporary lore, so new players have little relations to it. Luckily this is different in WoTLK, in the sense that central topics like undeath have always been here and places like Naxxramas, Stratholme and Scholomance have all played a vital part in the story leading up to Arthas.

Sunwell 3.0 isn't the same as level 70s pugging Naxx60 -- guilds that have never been to Sunwell will definitely have to try. You can certainly draw some parallels though, the most direct in my mind being that there is usually enough interest for a particular "old world raid" once every few months. Players want to see the content for fun... once. This nerfed month will give the chance for folks to do just that, but before the rewards are irrelevant. Given that most raiders will be happy to cut down the farm time on Sunwell even shorter, the only people who lose out here are the ones who unfortunately didn't make it to the end in time. But the cutoff has to be somewhere, and it's rather questionable whether you would end up disappointing more guilds working on KJ now or a month from now.

No, the goal wasn't to make people feel good about beating content, they just made it very accessible because they aren't going to try to balance it for 51 point talents at level 70. This whole line of discussion is pretty silly to be honest, there's always going to be an arbitrary point where the change has to be made, and there's going to be guilds that just miss it.

I am not getting your point. Seeing the content physically is indeed just a small motivator. But what people really mean when they say "Seeing content" is beating it in a meaningful way, and being meaningful rewarded for it. If it was only about physically seeing it you could just download a video and watch it (and plenty people are doing exactly that). But that gets old fast, how many movies have you seen more than once? More than twice?

What it is all about is reward vs effort. It's a cliche but it's true. And the rewards are not only physically seeing content. Even loot is, if you think about it, just a minor part of the reward. You got plenty loot during levelling, how much of it do you remember?

It's about sense of accomplishment. It's the anticipation and thrill of killing a boss and seeing the right item drop and then winning the roll for it. It's helping or gaining goodwill with other people. And it's actually enjoying playing the game, or enjoying playing it with other people.

Likewise, the effort is not how hard the fight is. It's how much time and how much frustration it costs. Getting 25 people together to do a hard fight is both time consuming and frustrating (and, if it all works out, rewarding as well).

10 million WoW players means 10 million different opinions on what is a good reward vs effort. All Blizzard is doing is setting the ratio different for the first raid in WotLK. Let more people enjoy doing the content, and let less people being put off by it being too frustrating and time consuming for them to do it. As has been argued in this thread there are plenty good reasons for Blizzard to do it. You may not like it, but there's no pleasing everyone.

Edit: If you're specifically complaining about the patch 3.0 nerf I'm getting it even less. There would have been a cut-off point somewhere anyway. There would always be some people disappointed. They erred on the side of safety, can you blame them for not putting in effort for content which is void in a month? Heck, my guild was on Ragnaros before 2.0. I'd much rather had had a cheap kill, than the no kill we had now. Yes, it's cheap, but at least you finished it.

Actually, I think you got the point quite well, except I wouldn't consider the "cheap kill" a meaningful one. The challenge is what makes it meaningful. Not the graphics, not the lore and - for a fair few people at least - not the loot. The challenge. I'll refrain from going dreamy-eyed and relating awesome kills of my past.

But again, not spending huge amounts of time rebalancing old content and easy entry level raids are both good calls. They're just not good calls because people are overly impressed by seeing places - because people aren't.

As I see it, the last night of BC raiding was October 13th. If you didn't have Sunwell finished by then, sorry to be blunt but your guild failed, you lost, you didn't complete the final raid of BC. It has to end someday, sorry you didn't get it in time.

As far as the nerf, it's easy to complain and always assume the grass would be greener on the other side. If blizzard didn't implement the 30% hp nerf, things would still be a lot easier due to new talents. Last minute raid boss kills would *still* be tainted, because the guilds would be wondering if they really finally got the fight down, or if it was just the new talents that gave them the kill. You would see the exact same threads about how the victory feels hollow because raiding is so much easier with the new talents.

The only other possibility is for blizzard to do nothing, leave BC as it is for the last month, but that would result in a very untested patch on Wrath release, and instead of threads complaining about how hollow the victory felt there would be threads complaining how raiding died because nobody wanted to waste time on raids the last month before the expansion and everything is too hard and so on. And then after wrath is released there would be threads about how hollow the victory felt in Sunwell with level 80 characters. Blizzard can't win.

Whining about the decision to nerf raids is pointless IMO.

Whining about the nerf is pointless, being blunt with terms like "your guild failed, you lost" is, well, pointless, too?

It's painfully obvious Sunwell is a joke. My guild failed by ceasing raiding approximately 2 months ago. We got a raid going last night. We killed Brutallus with nearly 3 minutes left on the timer or something like that. No one cheered. Enough said.

We do want to see the rest of the zone because, well, we want to see it. I'm not sure why there's any point in using language like failed and lost.

As for the patch, it was done for one reason that may be subtle, but should now be obvious. they radically rebuilt WoW. Imagine if this patch had shipped the same day as Wrath while it also included the bugs of new zones and quests, the overwhelming Wrath traffic, etc. By separating out the patch transition from the xpac transition, they buy themselves a lot of technical support / growing pains breathing room. And they give the player base a month to get WoW working again. I, for one, was so frustrated with mod issues the other day I logged on to worldofwarcraft.com to cancel my sub. I eventually cooled off, but my level of frustration was that high. I don't play to be that bogged down in technical issues. If I want that much grief, I can run a Windows Vista IT shop.

Anyway, raids are a joke. We get it. Believe me, I saw it all first hand. Black Temple is downright comical. It would be amusing to roll out a raid in Tier 2 gear and try to clear the place. It'd be amusing to try to 10-12 man it at level 70 at this point. We didn't screenshot Brutallus and we won't screenshot Felmyst, Twins, whatever else we get before Wrath. There's a guild on our server that's running out "Yeah baby, we killed Felmyst". We are laughing at them. Not because they aren't a decent guild but because some of them think they >>did<< something. But we aren't laughing at them in trade and I'm not naming names here. It's not really productive.

Personally I think a lot of this has less to do with specifically the over nerfing of SWP and more to do with people realizing that if the content isn't hard then it also tends to be not fun. With the statements made at Blizzcon still fresh on peoples minds i think it is unsettling to dance through Sunwell, widely accepted as the hardest content ever released in this game, while barely even paying attention after hearing the devs say they never plan on making anything as hard as sunwell again.

What makes this game fun for me and i think for most of the raiding community is the feeling of finally overcoming that difficult obstacle. Killing Kael for the first time after wiping to him repeatedly, finally seeing your half retarded fire tanks actually manage to dodge ALL the eye beams, seeing brut crash to the ground RIGHT as his enrage timer runs out. THESE are the things that keep me playing this game, sure loot is fun to get and the story and lore is entertaining but what it comes down to is overcoming a challenge with your guild. I think a lot of people are afraid that this is going to go away come wrath and the current SWP is like actually watching difficult raid content die front of us.

This must have been hotfixed last night. A guildie of mine has had the quest for yonks, had the Kael vial from before. Two hours ago, he got into an SSC pug and got his Vashj vial. Upon handing it in, he wasn't awarded the title/achievement but he was able to go get his Hyjal rep ring.

Something else to consider is that in preparation for WotLK they may be actually trying to expand their raider base. People who are just looking at WoW as 'level to 70 and that's the whole experience' may take a look at all the increased raiding activity, try it, get hooked, and start proper in WotLK (Where Naxxramas should be more or less the 'same difficulty' as much of the 3.0 TBC content, if Blizzard is doing what they're doing right, Naxxramas being an introductory raid zone)

Not saying that's the reason or one of the reasons the change was implemented aside from all those already suggested in the thread, but that's one possible result.

Whether allowing complete retards to get hooked to raiding is good for the long term game, we'll see... but there definitely has to be good players in all the new people who have picked up the game recently, especially through the RAF system.

If it was hotfixed, it was hotfixed at a very odd time - one of our Priests PUGed Maggy about 7pm UK time and got Champion of the Naaru.

On a positive note, HOLY CRAP at the amount of people simultaneously online and online till insanely late hours. Achievements have really made people play the game a lot more, at least for now. You can go into any zone on any continent and you'll see people there.

I both love and hate achievements on the same time.

The good thing - I always have something to do.
The bad thing - I don't want to play my alts. I was thinking about rolling my priest as a main at 80, but since I have invested so much time into achievements on my rogue I don't want to anymore.

Anyone else feel the same way?