It's wonderfully contrived for SK/Nihilum to complain about how "easy" the game is without offering any definition of "hard." But we all know what "hard" means to them. Arbitrary barriers that drive everyone absolutely crazy except a small, time-casual elite that can't even begin to comprehend the attitudes of "lesser" guilds.

As someone said before, it's like an A+++ student complaining to the teacher how easy the latest test was and how the difficulty should be raised for his exclusive benefit. Indulging the ego is one thing, but cutting off all content just so a handful of elitists can feel even more elitist goes beyond the inane. 'Twould seem the title of World First isn't good enough for SK/Nihilum anymore. Alas, the insatiable pride of man.

This. The vast majority of "casual" raiders are those people with kids, full-time jobs, and obligations in life that prevent them from spending 36 hours/day on the game. Also, not all college kids can indulge in such hardcore mentalities. Believe it or not, there are some intelligent young people out there, as hard as it is to believe.

Furthermore, you will notice that these complaints and nigh all the World Firsts these days come from European Guilds. There is no inherent superiority on either side of the Atlantic (read: please don't start a Europe v. America debate over this paragraph) but on the whole Europeans have much more free time and fewer work hours than those in North America. Meaning more time to play, more time to raid, and more time to consume content.

Ultimately the matter is subjective, but Blizzard has to balance every subjective opinion and appeal to it as best they can. Since the casual outnumber the hardcore by leaps and bounds, Blizzard is right to focus on their needs more than the needs of SK/Nihilum.

The greatest problem with overtuning and extremely difficult raid instances is that they force people to go a certain way. You had to be extremely good at raiding to do pre-nerf Gruul's, Mag, etc., Blizzard has always had very little issue with people voluntarily stressing themselves out and fulfilling arbitrary requirements for the sake of the ego, but they've stated repeatedly they severely dislike forcing people to do one thing or another.

As others have said, the Achievement system is a voluntary way for the hardcore to fulfill their egotistical desires. They provide arbitrary, voluntary objectives with elitist rewards, but they don't force other guilds to spend 30 hours a week farming for consumables, watch 20+ videos of a strat, or wipe 77 times before they finally kill something. Very few people like masochistic challenges. Very few.

There is a very large difference between fights becoming easier because you're progressing in the game (either improving your own player skill, either improving your whole guild teamplay/knowledge of the fight, either improving your gear), and fight becoming easier out of the blue because the boss had his health and damage cut in half. I don't really see how you can put both on the same level.

Note : I don't consider "fixes" as being "nerfs". But there was a lot of nerfs in TBC (many of them direly required, though, which is something I find faulty, as I believe that difficulty should be at the "right" level from the start).

My layman's opinion, which is worth about as much as you're paring for it, is that Blizzard almost got it right in TBC (except for that stupid 40->10->25 thing). Start the place off hard, make it easier over patches. If it starts off so easy as to be like Kara is now then ... what will it be in a year?

Please read the posts of the people that have actually done the place. It is easy now if you are in near the best gear (Sunwell) from the last expansion (let's not forget having done the fights before extensively) and even then you're going to be stressed in the fights near the end of the wings. In a year people should be aoe farming it in under 2 hours, but just like Kara, there will be groups that will take a couple days to clear it even when it is very old content.

[edit] I'll add that this will be a result of you overgearing the content, and not because Blizzard felt sorry for everyone and decided to shave off about 30% of the boss' HP. This [content easier due to gear level] is the kind of "instance nerfing" people welcome.

Get 10 people together and go try it, you will see the reality and not some jaded elite raid group's opinion.

I don't buy this... remember WoW1.X? You started in MC (or ZG) then moved forward to BWL (or AQ20) then AQ40 then Naxx, each of which was a fair bit harder than the last once you got to the midpoint of each successive instance.

Only thing that made MC easier was Dire Maul and ZG gear coming out, BWL was AQ20 gear and more time farming MC, etc.

Having these convoluted and forced content nerfs "Oh, Illidan smoked too much crack and forgot how to use his Shear" is ridiculous and kills the feel of the game on a macro-scale.

Natural progression due to gear accumulation, etc? Fine. All well and good. Drastic direct nerfs of boss abilities with mudflation coming out the yin-yang due to badge gear? It's ridiculous, and leads people to feel like if they'd run Heroic Mech for the 5 months they were working on SSC and Tempest Keep, they would have come out ahead of the game.

Not saying that actually enjoying the raid encounters is no part of my decision to raid, but it's also about a collective skill/potential upgrade across my raid/guild.

Not even going after the lore thing (remember "C'thun is an old god and shouldn't be nerfed and shouldn't be killable!).

From an individual raider's perspective, as well as the perspective of a raiding guild or raiding community like this one... there needs to be something there to advance to. Otherwise? Why waste the time, especially since the advent of Resilience.

There appears to be a minor misconception about the point I was making. To be clear, if you're in a T6+ geared guild I don't think there's any argument that you'll be jumping straight into Naxx. I wasn't trying to claim otherwise.

The point I was making was that the majority of raiders, those without full T6/SWP sets, will likely be hitting up the level 80 instances. The need the gear not only because they don't have T6, but because even with T6 they would, on average, not perform as well as experienced T6 players. It'll depend a fair amount on where exactly they fall on the line between "wipes on the first trash pull" and "one shots Kel'Thuzad blindfolded".

They won't nerf the content if it doesn't need nerfing. The problem with TBC content was that it was tuned to the specifications of the top echelon of raiders abusing the old mechanics for elixirs. When it became obvious that both of those were bad ideas Blizzard made necessary changes. Up until the pre-Wrath patch Blizzard only nerfed encounters as an admission of fault, and nerfs that came with that particular patch were a bandaid solution so they could focus on tuning the expansion content over retuning content people would only be seeing for another month.

It's important the Blizzard sticks to those paradigms because otherwise you undermine a major incentive to raid. If players knew that beyond the shadow of a doubt Blizzard was going to continuously scale back the difficulty of raids a very large number would sit on their hands until they could simply roll over the content. Never underestimate the power of the path of least resistance.

Even if Blizz made Malygos an extremely hard fight, and no tactics were available, SK/Nihilum would still have cleared it this week or the next.

Anyone able to run Naxx right now is a dedicated player, whether they started in gear from Sunwell or from Alterac Valley - simply having reached 80 already means they've spent more time on WOW in the last week than most people do on a full time job. We won't know for a few months whether it works to get more people into the raid game. "Have ten interested people online for two hours at the same time including both tanks and healers that are not saved to another instance" can still be a major hurdle for forming guilds.

Maybe I didn't make the point well enough, let me try again. And you can make it Tier 4 gear, I don't really care. Just hand everyone a "wardrobe worthy of Northrend" so we can stop dumbing the content for people who are in lvl 58-68 greens that sped through Outlands. Because that's what they did. If when you got off the boat at Valiance Keep (insert your preferred alliance/horde destination), you could talk to an NPC that looked at your gear and said "Wow, adventurer, thanks for coming out, but you'll never survive a second in the chaos of Northrend, let me show you what I can offer" and he sold some decent gear that the game designers could assume everyone would have >at least< that quality of, it would make for a much better game.

Otherwise, we have a situation where the first 6 instances are all entirely laughable in everything I'm wearing from Outland.

I never suggested replacing purples with greens, nor was this idea meant to propose this. But if people are running around at lvl 75 in their tier 4 because it's purple, well, they are probably just not paying attention. Because there are definitely greens being offered as quest rewards that are better. Again, that's a digression and not what I'm after.

What I'm after is what Deathknights seemingly come close to having, arrival at Northrend in a decentish gearset. If all classes could be assumed to have one, we wouldn't have a lvl 74 instance being trivially beaten -- and I mean trivially by lvl 71 players -- simply because they showed up in so much better gear than what the game designers baselined the expansion for.

Preparation for raiding in the form of getting your guild to farm 5 mans is one of the "barriers to entry" that Blizzard is looking to remove from entry level raiding. The heroics are still there for you to do in your free time for Frozen Orbs and to temporarily fill gear holes while you are progressing in Naxx and waiting on certian drops. Let's not also forget reputation gains and the dailies related to them.

Are you suggesting that you believe that Blizzard will put in 5-mans for hard-core players to fill gear gaps when they're working on the WLK AQ-40 instance? That'd be nice.

If the heroics aren't supposed to help you gear up to raid... why design them in the first place?

Just as a note on something I'm quite familiar with, every single piece of equipment I started with, bar the Sigil--which just doesn't seem to exist before 80--has been replaced by 73. In every case the replacement was a LARGE upgrade, and in many cases I've since replaced those upgrades. Hell, some of them I replaced in Outland.


I'm not too concerned about the levelling instances. They're easy in good gear. Well, that gear's gonna last you till Naxx, as otherwise we have people replacing their hard-won Sunwell/T6/whatever right off the boat, and nobody likes that either. For someone in my gear, that is to say "The best questing has to offer", they're non-trivial. I wouldn't say "hard", but a boss will splat me if I'm not lucky, tanks have almost no +def, I'm pulling something like 900 DPS and feeling pretty good about it, etc etc. They only exist to familiarise people with them, punch out some quests, maybe a blue here or there, and pass you along to the next so you can come back on heroic.

The level 80 normals are harder, the heroics harder still. It's all good, I'd say. If most people don't have tolerance for repeated wiping in a raid zone, imagine how much less they'd have for an instance at 73, where all the rewards will be obsolete in 7 levels, tops?

I think this is a great point. In addition to rep, frozen orbs, and the odd gear drop there are also emblems. Although I'm not too sure what all the emblem rewards are I'm sure they're still useful in some respect.

My guild had enough people to 80 last night to try 10 man Naxx. About half the group had done the 40 man version and they didn't get very far (only 2 wings cleared in 4 hours - abom and spider). Their group make up wasn't the best - 2 hunters, 1 holy priest, 1 disc priest, 1 restodruid, mage, rogue, feral druid tank, prot warrior, unholy dk but their gear was all pretty much sunwell gear (except the dk). In terms of skill, all of the people in the 10 man had killed KJ pre 3.0.2 nerf.

From the comments they made (I wasn't there - logged in after the group was made) the fights are generally the same with some new mechanic or just a slightly modified one. However there was still a danger of dying due to stupidity be that may pulling too many mobs or standing in a fire. A big issue was our tanks not being defense capped which proved to make some fights more challenging then others.

From these comments I imagine that this is right where Blizz wanted the instance to be. Without the knowledge of the strats beforehand and not having Sunwell epics (although quest rewards and heroics are equivalents) I would speculate it will take a somewhat casual guild (aka < 15 hours a week of raiding) a week or so to progress through each wing. All we can do really is to wait and see if this is the case.

What I'm suggesting is that any content should have rewards to have any repetition value whatsoever. I've seen a lot of gear so far up to 77 (not 80 yet) that has been "Sidegrade" or "only slight downgrade", which suggests to me that a player at 80 through just questing/reps would have a pretty similar gearset, and thus find only minimal upgrades from the heroics as well?

What's the point of even designing the 5-man instances? They're going to be blown through once for laughs, and then ignored by the majority of the populace except for the sake of badges and possibly achievements.

At least at the start of 80, the heroics should have offered clear upgrades to the majority of leveling-blue wearing players (and last-expansion epic players) in a majority of slots.

Of course, it's just my opinion.

If you only go through the 5 man heroics once, I doubt you'll be exalted with all of your reputations or even revered to get your helm enchants. Five man dungeons will serve the same purpose as they did for me (and probably most raiders): somewhere to kill time while boosting reputations and farming for some pertinent badge rewards. Some of the items I used for a majority of the last expansion were from badges that were (originally) only obtained through heroics. After I was exalted with all of them and didn't have any more rewards to obtain, I never went in them again, but a lot of people still did because that is the size of content they wanted to commit to.

Edited in:
Are you suggesting this is different in WotLK or just bringing the philosophy/concept of 5 mans, in general, into question? I'm just trying to get a feel of where you're coming from on this because I don't think their role has changed much, if any, in this expansion.

On Heroic 5 mans, reasons why they exist:

To give the people who genuinely enjoy five man content over raiding in any way shape or form and to keep them paying.
To give the people who really like playing the crafting profession subgame another way to stay involved in the game longer and to keep them paying.
To give the altaholics even more content to do over again and to keep them paying.
To indirectly nerf Naxx10/25 so people see more than entry level content and to keep them paying.
To give the OCD players goals/achievements that won't be attainable until patch 3.x. and to keep them paying.
To give more content to people with minimal development time and to keep people paying.

Seriously, this is a business. If Blizzard can tweak some numbers and repackage something that's already been created, only requires a fraction of the time of staff, and has been generally positively received when they did it before, what exactly is the downside here? It keeps people paying, people like it and Blizzard profits. Win-win.

On gear resets:

If you're in Sunwell gear, especially if you killed anything in Sunwell pre-3.0, you don't just out-gear it, you out-skill it.

Over half my Naxx 10 group never saw Heigan in Classic, and after the first demonstration during the pull got the "The Safety Dance" achievement because, brace yourself for a shock, players that cleared pre-nerf Sunwell like us can pick stuff up quickly, even if the group was coming off maybe 20 hours of sleep over the past 4 days (well that and the Heigan dance is dramatically slower). The gear reset gave people that couldn't clear the pinnacle of raiding Classic for reasons unrelated the opportunity in the Burning Crusade to clear the Sunwell, which outstripped Classic Naxx. Gear is not skill. Leveling the playing field is a great thing for the game.

Now why is that important? It's not e-peen about clearing pre-nerf Sunwell, it's all about the gear reset. The people that were barred from raiding Naxx were too far behind in poor raiding guilds due to the steep gear requirements with no way to catch a break. The heroic emblems are there to infill for when the majority stops running Naxx10 because they will have a progression path to move in lockstep with the 25 man content.

As for the quest blues being "too good" it's practically impossible to find regular instance level groups towards the middle and end of the expansion cycle. Sure it lets the extremely dedicated to jump a little ahead, but it's a fair tradeoff considering the massive amount of people that are not going to go consumable and farm crazy to catch up to their friends/guild. Remember, there's no reason for max-repped players to go inside a regular instance by the time the middle of the expasion rolls around. Heroics are less of a barrier because you get emblems for a mount or for a frozen orb or whatever.

There isn't going to be Kara style badge farming through Icecrown Citadel in massive quantities like Karazhan because people will have other and higher level 10 man badges to farm, which means people need to get gear from somewhere. The heroics will remain as the avenue for the behind the curve people, alts, and reroll mains to be able to simultaneously farm the necessary faction reputations and get some respectable gear from both the instance and the badge vendor so they can go in to the Tier 8+ 10 mans. It's much easier to get 4 other people together to go through a 45 minute instance than it is to get 9 other people to go through a raid instance that they're bored to death with.

On Naxx25 clears:

/yawn

I disagree with this statement. Mainly as a reroll main I can see the need to run instances for gear. I'm not going to claim I'm the best player in the world but I don't expect to run Naxx10 with my current gear at all.

Here is a quick comparison of one of my new main's slots just to give you an idea.

Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

A lot of nice items are in those instances. I wouldn't say my current gear is comparable to T6 either.

I'm not sure this is a good example. Shear had to be removed because of design changes to tanks, not because it was 'too hard' when he used it.

They do. What they don't do is offer upgrades to Naxx-10 gear - which is as it should be.

Fair enough, I mostly used that example because the only other one I could think of was Vashj's MC and that was removed for being extremely buggy, but I really wanted to use the "smoked too much and forgot" line.

Regarding the gear upgrades, I understand with most of you (other than the "Casual players don't use their brains so they need sidegrades!" line).

At the very least... I forgot about reputations, and those do, in fact, offer a good reason to use and reuse the content.

Leveling instances are supposed to be pick-up-and-play, in that they aren't supposed to be major time commitments or require anything in particular. Blizzard has been explicit about that design goal. They want it to take about an hour, tops, to run, and they're aiming low to account for people showing up in, ah, less than ideal gear and leveling specs. They also, frankly, aren't assuming a lot of familiarity with dungeon mechanics. That's also a good thing; anyone new to the game (and they do exist, in pretty large numbers) is going to have a hell of a time running instances before Northrend.

For people who are geared and organized, leveling 5-mans shouldn't provide much of a challenge. Churn and "average" play time in World of Warcraft are just way too high to build everything around experienced players.

Frankly, all the "evidence" we have is the jaded elite raid group clearing all the available content with a thrown together raid of level 78-80 people in a mix of SWP gear and northrend blues. On beta pug's were regularly cleaning out entire wings on Naxx 2.0 in PvP sets.

Tonight, the first guild on our server went Naxx with whomever they had available. The guild in question have killed I think 2 bosses in Naxx right before TBC was released and didn't go beyond Brutallus before 2.0. Most of their members are in some mix of tier 5, tier 6 and badge gear. They're a huge guild (100+ mains) and while they do raid a ton the large memberbase doesn't strike me as very elitist.

They cleared three wings on their first night in.

I don't mind Naxx being easy, but as it is, it doesn't seem a lot different to AoE'ing trash and one-shotting every new dungeon boss on the way to 80. Now of course I haven't been there yet, but I'll see the place next thursday and I'd be highly surprised if we failed to clear it this week. And we're nowhere near an elite guild.