As of 11/15, all of the current PvE raid content in Wrath has been cleared by TwentyFifthNovember. Of course congratulations are in order, because that seems like a gargantuan task a little over 3 days after the expansion was released.

They put this post on their homepage:
This leaves me with a few questions:

• Is this rapid clearing of progression a good or bad thing? Does it mean, as the post posits, that Blizzard planned poorly or does it mean that Blizzard did their due diligence testing and tuning these encounters?
  
• Beta went live in July. Even so, that is 3-4 months of time in which encounters, talent builds, leveling strategies, and raid compositions could be tested and re-tested. Would this achievement be possible without Beta?
  
• Is Wrath catering to casuals, or is it well-tuned? If you look at Dukes' analysis of BC raid content(posted before Sunwell was live), you can see a common theme: overtuning. (45m trash respawns?!). Many players complained that BC was merely an open beta due to how many changes were made or needed at any point since its release. It seems (so far) that Blizzard did not make the same mistakes this time around.
  
• Is it possible that the pendulum has swung too far towards the casual base? How many people would rather have it the way BC was, with some (initially) nigh-impossible raid encounters? Or with artificial progress barriers a la Sunwell gates?

They have said multiple times that Naxx v2.0 was supposed to be fairly easy, as it is an intro raid. It doesn't really surprise me that a group of people who have already blown through the leveling content of the expansion would tear through that raid. I personally don't mind raid content being tuned like that at first either, as it gives something for everyone to do.

The people in that end of the spectrum are never going to be completely happy with anything, because they will either rush through it all and say it was too easy, or bang their heads into a brick wall when something is just ridiculously tuned.

First of all: Congratulations to those guilds. However, I think all the hype is really just over nothing. The news sites have really taken their accomplishment out of context.

It's been established various times that Blizzard wanted the entry level raiding content to be more entry-level friendly. Something easy for newer guilds with less-than-spectacular players. So should it be any surprise that two of the best guilds in the world: with vast resources, experience, player skill and guild organisation - have walked all over it so fast? No.

This content was not created to really challenge guilds like that. So we shouldn't treat or discuss it as if it were. Your bullet point questions are somewhat comparing apples and oranges. Its like asking whether we should be shocked/surprised an English teacher wins a spelling competition aimed at Grade 5's. It is a triumph/failure? Not really, the content wasn't aimed at them to be challenging. The said raid content really is for your average guild to get a grasp of raiding and a soft, safe entrance.

The sorts of questions you ask would be great for analyzing Uldular and Icecrown, should a similar fast-clear scenario happen again when those instances are released. But for this entry level stuff, its really just much ado about nothing.

Good point

This thread has the potential to be a horrible trainwreck.

That said, one idle observation: I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any screenshots of Kungen riding a Black Drake from Sartharion, so perhaps their announcement is a bit premature?

Their accomplishment is that they leveled. Anyone who is in any way surprised by any of the rest of this has been living under a rock for months. Content that was regularly steamrolled on the beta servers get steamrolled on the live servers too? Color me surprised.

A Black or a Twilight Drake at the moment would be an indication that something is wrong, yes. I'm waiting.

Thanks to Gurg for preventing me from having to type the above, although I had to type the thanks, but it's time better spent than commenting on this.


No one will ever be satisfied. SSC/TK were available at TBC Launch and everyone thought it was a mistake in retrospect. The fact that the two top guilds in a unified effort cleared the ENTRY LEVEL RAIDS, once they hit 80, shouldn't be a shock to anyone.

Their insinuation that this is a failure is pathetic. Lich King is not about hardcore end-game raiding, and never really has been; all the changes made have reinforced quite the opposite. This used to be their (SK/Nih) niche, and Blizzard toned it down. I'll worry more about difficulty when we get past the Karazhan of LK. In fact, I'd be more worried if this took longer than 7 days.

This strikes me just as significant as Risen's QQ departure. (By the way, they came back)

It seems like there's fairly wide agreement that Blizzard made two key mistakes in TBC. 1) The initial content was too hard. 2) The release schedule was completely mangled, causing a range of issues.

It's been clear for quite a while that Blizzard is trying to correct both these issues in Wrath. As such the initial raid content is intended to be very easy, and there isn't much of it yet, as they intend to dribble it out steadily over time. We've known what Blizzard is doing for quite a while now, so it's been obvious that the first couple of raid instances would get cleared a few days after launch.

This has now happened. I'd rank the newsworthiness as being a little above "the sun rose today", but not much above. (In an odd way, I kind of feel sorry for them. All that insane leveling, just to steamroll what's effectively the Wrath version of UBRS... Seems a bit wasteful, since it won't really help them on the next tier of raids.)

One way I'm happy. A computer-game shouldn't be about elitism. Everyone pays the same monthly payment, the same amount for the expansions. Why should I need to spend ridiculous amounts of time to achieve something in a game. Its not normal. Playing should be entertaining, worthwhile and not time-consuming.

On the other side it feels like PvE doesn't matter anymore. PvP is what needs a lot more effort now in order to accomplish something. They might have been entry level raids, but lets not lie to ourselves and say that we are not worried about the next raids.

This.

Aside from the fact that this is a rehashed zone the mechanics and systems of which had not a single person doubting about them anymore, this zone was also on the test realm (twice, actually) long enough for any ultrahardcore guild to go out and master it before it would ever find its way to the live servers. No big surprise then that they beat it on their first raid night.

Other than that, I also agree with the sentiment that pandering to hardcore guilds is best done by including interesting achievements for them. I was recently forced to retire from being GM of my precious and meticulously cultivated raiding guild to being a grunt in the place where my RL friends dwell and after being here for a few weeks I've mainly found myself surrounded with a lot of mediocre players at best. So I'm actually quite happy with the prospect of still having the option of being able to experience and see all the content WotLK has to offer if I wanted to, despite having only lackluster raids without any real muscle (or brain, for that matter) available to me at best.

You have to remember that these guys are the top 0.01% of Warcrafts raiding population. Just ~25 guys out of 11 million subscribers. No matter how hard or easy Blizzard tunes the content there will always be a group at the bleeding edge that will steamroll the new content. The vast majority of players are still in the 71-75 level range and going at a more normal pace, what interests me far more is the good guilds that were in Sunwell before wrath but weren't world-first-getting material. These guilds were still at the top of the game but make up a larger % of the player base than the top hardcore elite players like nihilum and SK. If these guilds are clearing endgame in their sleep then there might be a problem.

Lets not forget that this is complete entry level stuff too. It's content they've all seen before, Naxx in vanilla and the wrath stuff on beta. I'll wait and see how people handle the upcoming raids before i pass judgement on the difficulty curve.

I'm a little surprised there wasn't something in here for the bleeding edge guilds to play with while waiting for 3.1. It could have been a 1 boss encounter similar to Magtheridon that was tuned to require full T7 to kill. Something that would have been impossible to kill until after several Naxx clears, through gear requirements, or maybe quest completions, or item accumulation. Congrats to those guys, but I don't envy them the months of waiting they'll have until there is new content.

zyklone, what kind of gear did you expect to be required for entry level raiding? Does it really count as entry-level raiding if you have to epic out in heroics for a few weeks first? Should not really come as a surprise that entry level raiding doesn't require you to fully max out your equipment, especially when you've done these encounters a few times on the beta servers already.

Rest assured that third and fourth rate guilds will wipe in these raid instances at least a few times :-)

You appear to be on the wrong forums. People raid for many reasons, ranging from gear to friends but also including e-peen and the subsequent elitism that it entails. Even for the most casual of people, if everyone had equal access to all gear because it was so easy that a 5 year old could do it, then there would be no point to beating the content.

WoW is a game that caters to the American "me first" mindset (nothing wrong with it, I enjoy the mindset myself), not some communist "everyone is equal" ideal.

Next thing you know, someone will Godwin the thread...

I really hope so.
I expected some heroic runs to be required, not weeks. I found the whole 'I'm 70! Now I have to get gear, enchants and gems so I can take on Karazhan.' part of TBC to be very fun. I was hoping for the same thing. H
aving the heroics start out as a place to get badges when you're already saved in Naxx does not sound like fun. These instances look so good they deserve better.

Well, we'll see in the next few days what happens. Right now the thing stopping most guilds is that they don't have enough people at 80. The next few days will answer this threads question.

Tuning the entry level raid instance so that it can be pugged with quest blues sounds... just about right actually. I mean, people new to the raid game will need to learn raiding somewhere. What's the problem?

I guess you could make the case that the gear curve should have been a bit steeper, so that SWP gear gets replaced in the mid to late 70s rather than being equivalent to Heroic / Naxx10 gear. Judgement call, and I think there would have been complaints either way round.

Anyway, as Gurg says, it's not like this uber guild have completed the game yet. "Their" content is the hard-mode achievements, and so far as I can see they've not even started working on them yet. I wish them the best of luck as they do get stuck in to it.

Just because the top guild in the world didn't need to do that to clear it doesn't mean that your guild won't. If they need heroic gear to clear it then it will be way to hard then it should be.

People seem to want it boith ways, make it so top level guilds can't waltz over it, but don't overtune it. How do you think they make it hard for those levelof guilds? By requiring perfection.

Why is this even worthy of discussion? Everyone *knows* what happened last time when Blizzard tuned entry level raid content for professional players/beta testers who commented "too easy, buff." It was probably the worst systemic failure of raid design WoW has ever experienced, and led directly to massive guild failures, recruiting failures, tremendous burnout, and some massive design changes i.e. the consumables nerf.

Setting aside that it doesn't make economic sense to design any but a small amount of content for the SK's of the world - and it arguably doesn't make sense to design anything for them (Blizzard wasn't happy with M'uru - this approach has already been tried and failed. Absent a hard gear check in Naxx with the gear necessary to do it widely available at - but only available at - 80, you can't prevent this sort of thing because you cannot make entry level raid content as hard as Sunwell, for crying out loud. There's nothing else to say.

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And there's nothing particular to be proud of about sitting in front of your computer for three days straight and living off Red Bull and other energy spikes. That's a time and health commitment, nothing else.

The model that was used in vanilla wow, and seems to be the case for wotlk, is vastly superior, in terms of fun, motivation, continuity, etc. than the one used in tBC.

That is, easy entry level raids, and harder content added in later patches without significantly nerfing the previous content. As someone who was "hardcore" for a while, and then pretty much a casual, tBC raids were fun when you were competing for server firsts or to "beat the nerf," but quite demoralizing as a casual trying to keep going, and keep other people going, against content that you know will be nerfed quite soon.

It is unfortunate that TwentyFifthNovember decided to throw in a few shots at blizzard at the end of their message. If there was one thing that I know most hardcore players wanted was that wotlk not have as significant gear reset as tBC. Because of that , t6 gear can last until lvl 80 again, and every raider thought it was a good thing. With the gear check out of the way, levelling was the only thing stopping them from clearing content they saw in beta.

We will only know if these early raids are properly tuned when people who just hit 80 and had not raided in tBC are adequately challenged in them. Those are the people blizzard should be tuning early content for.

Entry level raid content in TBC was way too hard for Joe the Player. Thus more Joes than Blizzard might like quit the game after they ran out of heroics at level 80. Entry level content in Wrath is thus tuned to Joe the Player. Are we really stupid enough to act all surprised about this?

Also just because they like to say they "cleared all of Wrath" doesn't mean they actually did, as noted above.

The ideal progression from here would be for Ulduar to be around Tier 6 level, with the last 1-2 bosses ramping up in difficulty to give the hardcore something to chew on, Azjol-Nerub 25 to be harder, and Icecrown to be harder still, perhaps with the last few bosses on 25 (not 10) being Sunwell level and then nerfed down as is Blizzard's wont.

Shrug, I think people are going to be surprised at the raid instance difficulty from hereon in. It's going to be on the easier side to appeal to a larger amount of people. It should be on the easier side to appeal to the larger amount of people. Where the content will be difficult is in the achievements and their rewards. ZA's design is a brilliant one, and as we have seen with Sartharion, Blizzard is going in that direction. Blizzard should go in that direction.

SK's and Nihilum's whining about beating content not even aimed at them is unwarranted. As has been said before in this thread, they haven't beaten the content aimed at them.

When I see the Kara guilds on our server riding around on Twilight Drakes, I might get worried, but probably not. I would rather content be on the easy side so that I don't lose people just because a raid boss needed X Class for every attempt.

Grats to them on leveling and clearing an instance they cleared 2 years ago, I guess.