There are some fights that are simply too unforgiving and too well-tuned to be considered "fun" by anyone other than the most hardcore.

M'uru is a fun fight, but it is unforgiving beyond all measure, which easily overrides the "fun factor" after several hours of working on him. Working on it for 6-7 weeks is not fun. Sorry. It simply isn't. What this game comes down to is people having fun. Spending 6-7 weeks on one boss wiping for stupid reasons like lag hit a tank or the RNG screwed a DPS over is not fun for a rational person.

Apologies, but most guilds have a limit. Most guilds have intervening things. Most guilds don't have 40 hours a week to devote to this, in either their hearts or their schedules.

It does not come down to a "guilds have to want it" mentality. That's a self-serving simplification. I can guarantee you most guilds "want" to kill M'uru, but humans "want" many things. What matters is if the price for something is worth it in a person's mind. They can "want" something all day long, but if it's not worth it to them they simply won't put in the effort needed.

M'uru is a lot of pain for little gain in return. It just isn't worth it for most players to kill themselves to kill a boss. If PVP'ing with their hunters in AB is infinitely more fun than beating their heads against M'uru for another four hours, eventually they're just going to screw the latter, no matter how much they want to see Kil'Jaeden.

Well said.

M'uru would of been more fun as an optional boss. Something you can do when you do have the right group, but not get cockblocked when your enhancement shaman doesn't show up or your elemental shaman goes on vacation for two weeks and you're down two shamans.

You know, something more akin to Viscidious where you could go attempt Viscidious when you had your armada of Mages, and 1.3 wand wielding Warlock/Priests (and Shamans), but not impede your guild killing C'thun (or Ouro) for that timer/at all.

Not a bad idea, but I think the fact the instance only had 6 bosses, and it had to last 8 months kind of destroyed any chance of having an optional boss in there.

If you took M'uru out, you'd almost have a TK-like instance, which would've been great in the middle of the TBC life-cycle.

But I guess WOTLK took longer than they anticipated, and SWP simply wasn't as juicy as Naxxramas (which only had to hold players for about 6 months, if I recall? Most middling guilds didn't even have time to clear more than half of Naxx!), so SWP had to contain some kind of cockblocking, just to draw it out.

And just like C'thun cockblocking, we've seen a slew of guilds disband over it.

I just hope we see some larger instances in WOTLK. They keep hinting that they like winged instances (sure, 5-man...), but they obviously like Naxx a lot... so here's hoping!

Personally, we stopped raiding because I became tired of leading raids on old content, in particular to gear/test new apps. We ended up losing something like six, or eight people during August. I was struggling to find competant people at this stage of the game - with the expansion looming, less people are willing to transfer, or what have you, for a raid spot, and even more so with the prospect of more progressed guilds on the server.

While I was able to find a niche of people to continually regear and prepare for Sunwell, they were all just so...lackluster? It seemed like, at least, the available talent was already tapped. The influx of people without the ability to understand and react to environmental things was too much. This includes anything from people reacting slowly on Felmyst, missing portals on Kalecgos, or even simply dodging Doomfire. The officers ended up getting together and talking, and we made a few observations. Since the beginning of the year, we had outfitted 28 applicants, which subsequently had quit for either school, or gone casual until Wrath - with a few exceptions, of course.

Anyway, with all that in mind, we decided to simply call things until Wrath. Nearly all of our members still play, however, most simply play quite casually in their endeavors to prepare for the expansion.

All that being said though, I really don't think that I was broadsided by this - I was prepared for it after seeing the burnout from Naxx November before last, and end-TK/SSC(?) last summer. Am I the only one? It seems very much related to school, but I think at least that this year, with the prospect of the expansion upcoming, and all the changes that it brings (gear recent probably being the chief of all of the above), people seem to start feeling malaise.

Let's not confuse the issue-- you're referring to Mu'ru as some kind of intentional cockblock, which I don't think is the case. We've seen actual blocks to progress inserted in the game, unintentionally (C'thun was actually physically unbeatable at first) and intentionally (Vashj/Kael only dropping 3 vials per kill so you couldn't get into the supposedly-complete-at-release Mt. Hyjal). Guilds that disbanded over C'thun did so because they couldn't get 40 people who could run in a circle together. (My first guild back on Terenas did exactly this).

Mu'ru is just hard-- the hardest fight that we've seen in the game, for one reason or another. Sure, they want to prolong the life of their content. That's why we saw the SWP gate mechanism. Mu'ru is hard because it's one of the final bosses of the expansion, and I expect to see similarly difficult fights in Icecrown Citadel (though difficult in the fun way, like Sebudai said).

I think it's more than fair to consider M'uru a cockblock to the progress of guilds. Much like Gothik was (he was just 'damn hard'), or the way 4HM tested logistical abilities of a guild.

Sure, he's not broken. He's just highly tuned!

Undoubtedly M'uru was intended to be incredibly hard though. Many guilds expected Blizzard to nerf him, because he was so hard... and they did. But he's still a monumental cockblock, taking weeks of attempts, rather than nights. It just shows Blizzard are not afraid of blocking off some content from the masses.

I hope for some difficult stuff in the Icecrown Citadel too... but you have to remember that you can only make encounters hard in a handful of ways, in an MMO. The two most apparent are: 1) Making it a long fight of endurance, like Kael'thas, C'thun, Kil'jaeden, or 2) Making it an execution spectacular like M'uru.

I'd love an instance full of 10+ minute boss fights, but something tells me we're not going to see those regularly :(

Everyone is talking about how M'uru is the cockblock, and indeed, our experience has been brutal on her, but I think it is only because of the cheese reverse tactic for Eredar Twins. Had pillar hugging not been viable, most guilds would have been stuck on them rather than stuck on M'uru. Does anyone in the world do this fight the 'right' way, or does everyone just pillar hug?

At any rate, Sunwell is *hard*. Our guild hit BT right when 2.4 came out, and now we're 4/6 with a very good chance of killing M'uru this week (and wow, it sure would be sweet to pull it off before 3.0). We're the #2 guild on our server, so recruiting hasn't been too difficult. The key has been constant recruiting. People come and go, but you should always be recruiting. Having 1-2 tanks, 1-2 healers, and 4-5 DPS sitting out of raids ready to replace people who don't do well does wonders for making people play like pro's. 3.0/WotLK will make this easier with tanks being almost interchangeable. You have to make sure everyone gets fair play time, etc, but usually people are willing to sit who don't have loot priority anyway.

Never stop recruiting.

One of my peeves with M'uru was loot. The Twins rewarded you with FIVE epics AND 4 sunmotes, Kil'jaeden rewards 4 epics, and more 100% sunmotes. While M'uru only drops 3 epics and no 100% sunmote. Pre-nerf M'uru was without a doubt the hardest boss in the game, yet gave the least amount of rewards of any boss in Sunwell.

Now this part might belong in the design thread, but what really bugs me alot about M'uru is the feel of the fight, it's an add wave fight, with a wind chime in the middle of the room for your shadow priests to mindflay for 5-6 minutes. When I first heard we were going to have a Dark Naaru fight in Sunwell, I imagined something more... spectacular to say the least. The fight doesn't even have any voice overs whatsoever, any emotes at all. I expected M'uru to have some creepy C'thun style whispers, as the game states when you talk with other Naaru they are speaking directly into your mind. The fight itself was a lifeless battle that was created simply to be the hardest fight in the game. It just feels like it was made to crush peoples spirits especially with the Dark Feinds, one going off is a wipe, but it's not instant. You live for about 3 more seconds knowing your going to die to the dot, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. It's an absolutely terrible feeling that just sucks the morale out of people.

As for the rest of Sunwell, it's first 3 bosses were excellent, testing your guilds skills in progressively difficult fights, while still allowing a single mistake or two on kills. Twins had the potential to be a truly interesting fight, but it ended up just being "Fling more aoe healers at it", if the raid damage had been toned done, but the effects of Dark and Flame touched increased, actually requiring you to move near the other twin or actually jump into the fire, it would have been a very good fight as well in my opinion. As for KJ himself, he's a very good end boss, both in challenge and lore, for the instance and the expansion.

Uh... you do have to?

So many people disliking M'uru... For me, it was the best fight I've done, ever. It required an excellent tank, excellent DPS in every front (at least while learning it), alert healers, coordination, communication... everything. To me, it felt much more 'epic' than KJ ever did.

Guess different guilds experience the same fights in different ways. We failed on Twins a lot longer than we did at M'uru, which doesn't seem to be the case for most guilds out there.

I think DPS is too important in Sunwell, especially for M'uru/ KJ. You can overcome low dps by gearing up or grinding more to get obscure buffs like demonslaying, demonic runes or just fishing up scrolls but I'd rather have content tuned around the basic flasks/ foods/ oils/ elixirs/ potions and make the unfarmable buffs / things from much lower level zones just not work in raids.
Razorhide was changed shortly after Sunwell went live, it would have been so easy to do the same thing with demonslaying elixirs and adjust boss hp accordingly.

I don't want to whine too much about RNG, we've had a lot of discussion in threads but the legendary system needs to be improved and I also strongly feel that if the final instance is more a test of dps than anything there has to be a change in how loot tables are split up.
Introducing more quests from bosses makes sense- imagine if The Skull of Gul'dan and Cursed Vision were both objects of a quest drop from Illidan- it would be much fairer in the long run and fewer guilds would hit an absolute brick wall in terms of just not having high enough dps and waiting a long time for a few key drops. From about 48 kills we didn't get a main hand glaive and looted just 3 skulls, now almost a year after killing Illidan it feels like we're undergeared for KJ.

I didn't like the C'thun fight for the same reason I don't like KJ- it is an interesting fight but gets so much simpler with extra dps. My previous guild just couldn't kill C'thun then after months of frustration we got him down in a raid with many casters just throwing gold at the encounter and stacking up on flasks and elixirs. Those types of fights aren't "The right kind of hard", they feel more like are won/ lost based on the amount of time your raid can grind/ gather low level mats.

It seems that a lot of people in this thread have either forgotten, or do not understand, what a cockblock is. A cockblock is not a hard fight, or a fight that is difficult to master. A cockblock is an obstacle purposefully emplaced to artificially limit the speed of progress through content. Until the condition of the cockblock is met, you cannot progress no matter how skilled you are or how powerful you are. However, once that condition is met progress is inevitable and easy.

The original Hyjal attunement, back when Kael and Vashj dropped three Vials each, was a cockblock. If your guild comprised 25 raiders each of whom was geared in best-in-slot for the tier and capable of killing the two bosses on every reset, no matter what you did you still could not get a full raid attuned to Hyjal in less than nine weeks.

Mother Shahraz is a cockblock. The sheer level of shadow damage being thrown around is so huge that it isn't realistic or sane to take her on without a certain level of shadow resistance in the raid. But, to acquire that gear takes Hearts of Darkness that are available only in limited supply. Whether or not you choose to grind them out on trash or wait for them to come naturally, a certain amount of raid time has to be invested before she can be downed.

C'thun was not a cockblock. Certainly a boss being impossible to defeat for a certain period of time would normally qualify as a cockblock, just as the Opening of the Sunwell Gates was a cockblock (and a pretty damn obvious one, in its original incarnation). However, he's the end boss of his instance and his death has never been required for attunement to any other instance. By the time you got to him you had access to all content in the game. (OK, until they fixed the unintended issue that made him unkillable you couldn't claim to have cleared AQ40, but the only thing you missed out on there was bragging rights.)

And M'uru is not a cockblock. If he hadn't been downed before the nerf I would think differently; an impossible M'uru would have stopped you seeing KJ. But he was downed beforehand, with no need for special gear, limited supply items or any more gear than was required to pass Brutallus. All the nerf did was lower the bar. At no point was anything preventing any guild from passing beyond M'uru except for their having insufficient skill to do so.

BT is the first endgame content that was beaten by "lesser guilds" before new content was released. A lot of guilds felt when they cleared BT that they are on par with the top ones. Sunwell was a tough wake up call.
Of course some of the members either
a) can't accept that they aren't as good as they thought they were
b) can't be bothered with running lower instances to gear up new recruits because they "deserve" sunwell progress
In both cases the easy solution is to look for a better progressed guild (which are happily recruiting due to the summer turnovers).
And at this point if you aren't blessed with a good recruitment pool it's "bye bye guild".

What Malleus said was my original point. Just because a fight is hard doesn't mean it's an intentional brick wall designed by Blizzard's to stop guilds' progress. I'm sure it can act as one for some guilds on an individual basis, but this is a consequence of it being hard, not some artificial barrier or malicious design.

The semantics of what constitutes a cockblock aside, I think the BlizzCon quote should be encouraging to most people. I hope, at the very least, that requiring mana management to become an issue again should resolve one of the larger issues in SWP and BC in general-- healing difficulty being limited to OH-SHIT-EVERYONES-TAKING-DAMAGE. I played a resto druid in vanilla, and mana management was what made the difficulty of those old endurance fights possible. This all but disappeared in BC raids.

I really don't think this is the case and don't see any evidence to justify this kind of conspiracy-mongering. Blizzard made no attempt to hide that they wished to prevent guilds from clearing the zone in the space of a couple of weeks and put the gate system in place to achieve this. Had they wanted to further postpone a KJ kill and thus artifically extend the initial lifespan of the zone they could have kept the final gate up an extra week or two. They could also have made Kil'jaeden impossible to kill and tuned him downwards as the top guilds threw themselves at him but they chose not to. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the original version of M'uru (when Dark Energy still caused pushback, not the pre-10% nerf version) was actually fully killable, unlike C'thun 1.0. It was definitely not a 'cockblock' fight - it just took an extremely skilled and dedicated guild to get him down. If anything, the initial change to Dark Energy and the 10% nerf in July was a recognition that the boss was perhaps overtuned, which runs counter to your argument.

Can we distill this thread down to:

- Class stacking requirements bad (and being fixed in Wrath)
- Sunwell was too hard for many guilds (and that Blizzcon quote seems to indicate Blizzard noticed)

The point about mana and healing is a good one. I very keenly recall hitting a point near the end of t5 where I stopped caring about mana, and after that reaction times were more or less all that mattered. Twins (absolutely massive damage to everyone!) and M'uru (huge incoming damage and a DPS requirement that requires a bare minimum of healers) are simply the final extension of attempting to make encounters challenging to heal when healers have all but limitless mana.

I think he means you as a player actually having to do something to get the opposite damage. As it stands, you just pillarhump and the fire/shadow damage comes to you.

Indeed, and thus far a lot of people have been arguing just that. However, if you look at the argument in terms of other, genuine cockblocks you'll see how poor an argument it is:

"MH attunement is such a cockblock ... my guild had to spend 8 resets farming Vashj and Kael for Vials before we could move onto Rage."

"Mother is such a cockblock ... my guild had to spend 8 resets farming BT for Hearts before we could move onto Council."

"M'uru is such a cockblock ... my guild had to spend 8 resets learning to play better before we could move onto KJ."

Doesn't exactly fly, does it?

I do think that M'uru was overtuned on release, but not deliberately so. Blizzard didn't need to make him excessively hard to slow progress to the pace they wanted - they had complete control over the pace of Sunwell progress by way of the gates that would only open when they chose. Their intent is clear: they wanted Sunwell to be the ultimate lvl70 challenge, something for the best of the best to enjoy. On M'uru they misjudged a bit and had to dial back.

I think the biggest difference between Naxx and SWP when it comes to be a guild killer, is the fact that at least in Naxx there was the possibility of killing bosses even without being extremely hardcore or super dedicated. Even the lesser guilds in our server managed to at least do bosses like Instructor or clear the spider wing, those guilds will most likely never be able to take out Kalec for example.

I think the sheer size of Naxx made it more compelling and perhaps more enjoyable in the long run. Even if the latest parts raid composition was as harsh as SWP is, having 9 healers on Loatheb and then 16 on Patchwrek, or 8 tanks (Which in vanilla WoW were all warriors) on 4H or the amount of Priests for Gothik and Sapphiron was a bit overboard. But you still have enough content prior to this that allowed you to have a simple farm night with the same raid composition for the early bosses.

In the end of the day the problem with raiding in TBC is well documented and I find it astonishing how many encounters in the expansion can potentially be called guild killers (From Gruul and beyond). But that's a subject for another thread.

Well, if they killed Alythess first they'd have to do just what he described. The option to "dive into the fire" is already implemented.

Our first two kills were Alythess first. It's not much different in stage 1.

I'm going to agree with posters saying SWP itself isn't a Destroyer of Guilds. The problem was that T6 raid tier was tuned too easy and had too long farm period, this set expectations of many "full BT" guilds too high, they were expecting another free ride in Sunwell but were Not Prepared(tm).

I've been raid leading a guild progressing through full T6, and the only really hard boss was Archimonde because 2/3 of raid were genuine scrubs repeatedly cratering and dying in a fire while 5-10 players never did a mistake. Mother Shahraz died on 5th pull ever with 2/3 of raid dead to Fatal Attraction. Hadn't I quit, they would be probably attempting Twins by now. I'm sure about this because I know several semi-casual guilds with good leadership that set correct goals for the people, and they are happily progressing in Sunwell right now, some just trying Kalecgos, some killed Twins this month - they are not destroyed by SWP.

Sebudai, you have a personal reason to hate M'uru and call him not right, but you were in somewhat unique position, severely handicapped as PvE Horde with almost non-existant recruit pool. Had you played on Mal'ganis since 2004, your perspective would be different. Yes, M'uru is hard. But this is what I like about this boss. Remember, M'uru and KJ are two last bosses of almost 2 year long game. There must be something really hard in the game as big as WoW. If anyone can beat the game, really good players will call such game "too easy" and leave to other game where their skill will be recognized.

You know, BT is much harder when you're doing it in T4/crafted. (Or mostly T4). It's easy to call BT easy when you have people rolling in S3-S4 and ilvl 141 Badge Epics.

That said, if we take S1 S2 S3 S4 and ilvl 128/141 badge loot out of the equation, completely, I promise T6 fights in Black Temple will be more challenging. Seriously, try Najentus in nothing but T4/T5, or Bloodboil. Or RoS.