This sounds like an interesting idea. Since the debate is caught between the two extremes; a person in outland greens and the infinitely good Nihilum/SK. The latter is not really interesting at all anymore since it's been proven several times by now that it's not only Nihilum/SK that found the available raiding to give low or zero challenge.

Then its the argument about tuning based on the outland greenie. Which apparently is very relevant since there are blue posts refering to this guy on the matter of tuning. Very early after arrival giving everyone a certain standard, choose a way that corresponds with your feeling for the game, would solve this problem.

Then Blizzard could've tuned the difficulty a bit harder, and made it more challenging all the way up to the entry level raids. And with harder here i'm not talking complexity of the encounters as much as i'm refering to a certain gear level needed to be able to clear it. A gear level that would not only be available for hardcore raiders since it could be gotten from level 80 normals and heroics and make them more relevant upgrade wise again for everybody.

I think it's a bit overlooked here as well that people in general are far better geared from bc --> wotlk than it was from vanilla --> bc. Then it was only the long questchain to upgrade the dungeon set that could give a few epics for the non raider. Now it was tons of badge gear out there on t6-level and arena gear as well. And not forgetting the AV-grindable season 2 gear that noone could avoid getting after a certain amount of time.

But as it has been said before in the thread this is also a very subjective matter regarding if the tuning is right or wrong. Can easy content be fun? For me, to some extent yes. But harder content is even more fun, even if it means that i will not defeat it without struggling. But of course there are limits. Brick walls are not especially amusing, but mostly we are talking about tuning on near pug level here.

The problem with tuning 5-mans to be tough at all is that they're leveling dungeons. If a instance is difficult at the required level, you just skip it and come back when it's not difficult. Or just skip it and continue leveling where it's not painful. I like the fact that I can spec Ret for solo play, slap on my SW tanking gear, and instance with my friends in a dungeon my level or just above.

They've already tuned the 5-mans to a difficult level for those that enjoy a challenge. They're called Heroics. Leave those of us that enjoy the stupid, easy, leveling content to our fun. If you want a challenge, it's not difficult to just jump up to a much harder tier of dungeons than your "appropriate level."

Translation: A guild that cleared BT and killed Kalecgos pre-3.0 had a fairly easy time with the new Karazhan.

This is surprising to whom exactly?

Find me raid groups that couldn't beat Malacrass, ever, and who skipped Netherspite for a year because he was too complicated, and show me how they're doing in Naxx. That's the target audience.

I'm not sure I understand why there should necessarily be a "barrier" to entry-level raiding? Everyone seems to be complaining that there is little need to do the entry-level 80 dungeons and even Heroics to an extent.

Why should people who have the skill to beat entry level content be forced to go through some arbitrary gear requirement before they begin raiding at 80? If I've cleared Sunwell do you really want me to have to gear up in quest and dungeon blues and/or heroic loot just so I can blow through a raid I would have blown through anyways?

Why should there be further barrier for the target audience to enter the raiding scene? As Praetorian just put it, Naxx is aimed at the sort of people who weren't even clearing ZA after months. For them, this will not be an easy instance by any stretch of the imagination but at the same time it will not be impossible. It comes down to this: if Blizzard wants more people raiding the instances they release in the next 2 years than the ones they've released in the past two years, they need to get the population that didn't raid in TBC much/at all into the raiding scene early. They've failed at that in the past two iterations of the game (Vanilla, where the necessity of having 40 people was the major problem; TBC, where Karazhan was completely overtuned for months after release). They tried to make up for this in the last expansion by adding in badge gear, but the impetus among the community was just not to raid seriously if they had never been "raiders", even with badge sets almost comparable to raid gear of the same tier. In Wrath Blizzard wants to get a lot of people raiding early on, and then once they're locked in they can begin to ramp up the difficulty. An easy Naxx is the way to do that.

Secondly I don't see the need to "even" out gear by essentially giving out a bag of goodies when new players reach Northrend. That's the *point* of expansions: to even out gear. If there was still a massive gear gap at 80 between players in Sunwell gear and new people leveling up, then there would be an issue. But there isn't. Most of the dungeon blues are comparable/better than T6 & Sunwell gear (the BT gear gets replaced by level-up dungeon blues even), and it seems the difference between a player decked out in Sunwell gear and 80 blues is pretty negligible. If people are having an easier time leveling up to 80 because they have some T6 (even though that advantage deteriorates as others catch up in gear), then so be it. Gear is evened out in the end.

Now let's just examine some consequences if Blizzard does succeed in getting more of the player base to "raid." I think this would be great on two hands for established guilds: first, it would most certainly aid recruitment, and second (and perhaps even more importantly to us) it would allow more development to be spent on raid instances (and generally PvE related things). Yeah, Blizzard has been pouring money into designing raids, but it's far from the "exclusive development items" that raids were in Vanilla, because it didn't make business sense to continue making raids and much, much less of everything else. The AQ Gates event clearly took a lot of Blizzard's time and effort (as well as AQ itself of course), but let's compare that to the Shattered Sun Offensive event of TBC: everything in the former had to do with raiding (the scepter quest, the raids themselves, the REALLY hardcore Cenarion Circle rep grind...) and all the casual got was to sell off their runecloth to Raid Guild X. In the latter example, Blizzard created a 5-man, a world event based around dailies and a T6 gear-level badge vendor in addition to the raid. It's clear that more development time went into other aspects of the game besides raiding than in the AQ event. If it turns out that more people end up raiding in Wrath, Blizzard as a smart business will concentrate more on raid instances.

In conclusion, I think Blizzard has done a good job with Naxx. The hardcore raiding community might end up reaping some benefits from this new approach in the end, too (see the previous paragraph).

I think the question is why people would bother with 5-mans if the 10-mans are only marginally more difficult and offer vastly-better rewards while requiring a similar level of gear. While I wouldn't like to see a 5-man -> Heroic 5-man -> Raids progression being necessary, at the same time I think there's a risk that Blizzard will make visiting these instances undesirable to anyone who can find a raid group, or even a decent PUG.

Personally, I thought it was a mistake when Blizzard upgraded Kara gear back back before 2.1. Clearing the early parts of Kara wasn't really more of an achievement than clearing many of the old Heroics... but I guess the problem in those days was that the heroics were too difficult.

Regarding 5 mans: some people don't/can't/won't raid. At all. Some people can only raid once every week or two. Some people belong to guilds based on knowing and liking the people in the guild. Blizzard is finally releasing a lot of fun and interesting content that is accessible to those people.

It is a huge relief to know that even though I spend 12 hours a day at work, like hanging out with my wife, and am in a guild I chose because I like hanging out with my guildies I can still look forward to lots of fun content and a genuine path of progression. For too long Blizzard's response to people like me was "Make a video game a huge time priority or you won't have fun and progress."

Heroics and easy mode Naxx will give me a way to progress that doesn't involve getting a divorce, quitting my job, or sleeping 2 hours a night. And I love that. The gear won't be as good, but that's the reward for being more dedicated than I am.

Edit: I think people underestimate the sheer time commitment required to raid seriously. Start with a flat 5-7 days played (120-168 hours) to get to 80. A raid schedule of let's say either 4 nights a week @ 5 hours a night (or 5 nights @ 4 hours) is 20 hours. Add in an hour a night to farm rep/consumables/level professions/do dailies/grind badges etc for 25 hours. And you know you'll be on a good bit more over the weekend: let's say 5 hours a night for 35 hours. Addin the time reading strats, browsing wowhead or ej etc and you're at 40 easily. So after spending between 1 and 2 hundred hours just to get level capped (probably more, but assuming powerleveling to some extent) you need to spend just as much time each week playing a video game as you do at work, for months at a time, to be able to raid seriously. To suggest that this is "Too easy" and the game needs even more arbitrary time drain roadblocks to progression is just ridiculous.

To put it a different way, if a raider allocated his WoW time to, say, learning a foreign language, then he would speak it fluently by the time he cleared BT. Spend it running and working out and he could do a marathon. At this point, if you started in vanilla you could've earned a freaking bachelor's degree if you'd been taking classes instead of playing! Demanding people sink that much time into a source of entertainment in order to be able to participate in it in a significant way is absurd.

Because some people can't even find a raid, don't have to time to raid even if they could, or plain don't enjoy raiding, but do appreciate the brevity of a good 5-man.

I think Azjol-Nerub exemplifies this beautifully. You have a total of five trash pulls in the entire 15 minute instance, which is perfect for a quick little "Hey guys lets jump in and grab some easy badges before I go to work" two months down the line.

But is there any contradiction here? I can't see why it shouldn't be possible to serve both purposes.

I think you summarized this thread up well from what I can tell.

One of the things I ponder is why many people seem to think casual means easy (perhaps they don't). For a long while at the beginning of TBC I was in a small guild, with good players who enjoyed a good challenge. The members enjoyed playing different classes, talking and learning about how to best play their classes. There was a certain complexity to it which was enjoyable. What was also enjoyable for us was learning encounters and figuring out how to beat them--if it was easy, it was boring. What made the guild casual was the lack of desire to put in the time to get 25 people together on set nights, or farming for consumables over and over instead of spending money on alts.

While I can appreciate all of the interest for people to see everything made available for little, or less time committment, making it a goal to expand all content for everyone seems to perhaps have a tragic effect of dumbing the game down. I like Xbox and other FPS as much as anyone; they seldom hold my interest for more than a day or two. What I have enjoyed about WoW was the complexity, which made things a bit of a challenge and a mainstay.

I am curious to see how this will turn out, how the rest of this expansion will play out, and whether I enjoy the game more this way, or not. If it works, that's awesome.

Perhaps I am just getting too old.

Well, first of all, I do think entry level raids should be easy. There is nothing, as far as I can see, wrong with the design of the content here, and as someone said, this is arguably one of the most - and if include sales numbers, the most - succesful MMORPG expansion pack launch, ever. I personally love it in a way that I was nowhere close to with TBC.

Having said that though, you've neatly illuminated one of the things that I've been pondering on for a while; Entry level raids, is entry level raids. Yes, they should be easy. But then - as far as I've understood the current design philosphy anyway - they're going to get progressively more difficult. They're going to have a progression. Is getting ten people with a clue together easier than getting 25 people with a clue togheter? Sure.

But unless you've been doing raid preparation for anyone but yourself, reading strategy guids for anyone but yourself, those time sinks are still going to be there. In fact, most of the time saved on ten mans as opposed to 25 mans - assuming a scaling difficulty and non-free epics - is going to be purely administrative (Raid setup, guild recruiting etcetc). While this is certainly commendable for some people, most people, whether they have one or five hours a day to spend on this game, weren't doing that level of administrative play anyway. Once the entry level raids get out of the way and the design dwelves deeper into "challenge" as opposed to "accessibility" (again, based on my understanding of the design philosophy for WotlK), the out-of-raid timesinks are going to return. As are the in-raid timesinks that the majority of the playerbase gets to experience thanks to their less-than-ideal raid mates ("If that druid doesn't get his HoTs of before the raid wide stun one more time try I'm gonna...").


In short; Saying that the game sucks and has been dumbed down based on entry level raids is ridicolously inaccurate - doubly so when taking the achivements into account. But saying that this is the ultimate triumph of a "casual playstyle" who will now always see the same content as the people with time, well, they're going to be a tad disappointed.

(I'm also somewhat perplexed as to why you see raiding as the only significant way to play the game - surely the objective of the game is to have fun? - but that's not really within the scope of this thread)

It is not particularly interesting that these guys beat Naxx. It has been known for months that Naxx would fall and it was mostly a race to get enough raiders as soon as possible to beat the other guys that were going for a first kill. The pace they did this is impressive however.

But now comes the delicate issue of the next instance. One that is supposed to be a challenge and not only the top guilds will wait for but a huge amount of guilds. Open beta has turned into the venue where the bleeding edge guilds learn fights. So they are as ready as they ever will be come patch day. They rush in and kill the content. While having top guilds involved in testing may result in better fights, it also devaluates the concept of first kills and rankings. Perhaps having no open beta and early gear checks will ensure tough content for top guilds? But how will all the other guilds who also have waited months for the new content react?

I think ultimately with the experience, addons and skill of guilds like this - there is no way Blizzard can realistically keep them back outside demanding the impossible. They are too good at figuring out what a fight is about and then they are able to execute very close to perfection. I think the best way to keep them entertained would be implementing a good system of achievements and 25-man versions of the chests in ZA. Exclusive stuff for the very best but not designing content around these guys. That doesn't mean bosses should be pushovers of course. I think Blizzard learned a lot about how to push raids with Sunwell.

I think they learned their lesson regarding open beta with raid dungeons when they tried to release blackwing lair (BWL) in vanilla wow without openly testing it. It was horrible! Every single fight was bugged and got hotfixed. That also devaluates first kills because guilds start accusing each that they killed the "bugged" version of boss X. The only way to ensure good content (meaning: quality not difficulty) for 99% of the players is by having open test phases where a LOT of people test Blizzard's content.

In my opinion I think Blizzard have managed to make the game more fun for me personally. I have a family and a kid and I have a full time job and I love raiding. I have been in casual guilds since summer of 2005 and have seen MC, BWL, AQ40 (got stuck on twins) and parts of Naxx pre-TBC. The guild I am a member and GM of is made up mostly of people in my own situation that can't raid more than 2-3 nights a week which makes it awfully hard to progress with a system as the one we had in the start of TBC with endless attunements, heroics for gear etc. I applaud that Blizzard is making content available for everyone.

Our biggest problem always was that we have approximately 15 people that are very skilled and that could be raiding with higher level guilds if they had the time. The rest we have always had to fill with friends and family who have less skill/dedication. Despite that we killed SSC (not Vashj), TK (not KT), 2/5 MH and 1/9 BT pre nerf. After the nerf we steam rolled BT up to Illidan and spent countless wipes on him before killing him the night before the last reset in TBC. Even though the content was heavily nerfed we were really happy to have seen all of BT.

We only have one level 80 in the guild atm but more are getting closer and as soon as we have enough ppl with the right classes we will go into Naxx. For me that is a relief as we can do what we think is the most fun part of the game, raid.

Being in a casual guild during TBC was more work than fun as the more skilled people often moved on to better (for lack of a better word) guilds because of our lack of progress. It was an evil spiral to continuously try to get new ppl to raid while losing the experienced people to better progressing guilds.

But before Naxx I have to first ding 80... Anyhow, thanks for the new, casual friendly raid environment. This means we will be able to see a lot more of the content.

I would like to add that the new content is "relatively easy", but not in absolute terms. The level of analysis in this game has skyrocketed over the two expansion cycles. I can't remember much theorycrafting being done when the first guilds entered Molten Core. In those days you would see differences in DPS between same spec players that you would deem absolute inacceptable these days. This game has changed! Naxxramax would not have felt this easy if it would have been the first raid in vanilla.

My guild often takes in new people who have not really spent any time playing video games and have never raided before, and it is a great pleasure to see them "learning" how to raid, albeit there's simply not that much they can learn from us. But it takes time. And Moroes was a very frustrating encounter with 4-5 people who had never raided before.

However, KJ was released without any public testing and Mu'ru was barely touched on PTR - and yet, both of those were perfectly killable. Granted, Mu'ru received some additional tuning, but beyond Soul Flay change, KJ was untouched. Both of those were tuned far more tightly than 'entry level' bosses should ever be, so in theory, those should be even easier to make.

While this is true, I suspect it may not be feasible to implement dungeonwide due to time constraints. Most likely those took VERY long time to tune internally, and thus if blizz were to do this it would delay their release-schedule, pissing off everyone.

Public testing is fine in my book because it technically gives everyone a pretty equal start. Yes the e-peen world first guilds would then be "forced" to all farm the ptr but that would just have to be the necessary evil in my mind. The alternative is likely far worse.

If heroics were "required" to do raids then at least there would be a bit more of a lifespan to wotlk content. When it comes right down to it the entire expansion at release time offers about as much raiding content effortwise as Karazhan (or even less). I'd agree that entry level raids should be easy, even doubly so with recycled content like Naxxramas. Personally I also enjoy heroics somewhat - it's a nice change from raiding (where awfully lots of time is often spent standing still) while still offering at least some challenges. Too bad much of that challenge is flushed away after you get 6-7 new epics the first week just from nax-10 and nax-25 and badges.

There should also be *some* difficult content available (and personally I can't really be satisfied with just an achievement / more difficult kill order) in the game at release time. Instead we got recycled Naxxramas (15 bosses) and two fast one-boss raid instances. We got heroics which are mostly unnecessary, reputations which are mostly undesirable, PvP content which some might enjoy* and a wide battery novelty stuff which is starting to get so common it doesn't feel very novel anymore. The best part about the expansion is once again walking around with dreamwalker shoulders and a "candlestaff" (too bad tree of life form hides them now).

* It's passable but with the current amount of damage going about I can't make myself enjoy PvP. Dying during a stun just plain isn't fun.

I think Blizz is missing a really important point here! (so far)

Difficulty is a way to prolong the life of the expac. If they are truly balance around the fact that everyone has S2 gear at last, (and GC said they are) then they are making a mistake here.

Creating hard encounters make content last. If you take BC Gruul, Mag, Vashj, Kael all were pacing mechanisms that let only the prepared through. (after they were made beatable)Even the sunwell gates were in there for pacing, so noone kills KJ in a month then twiddles fingers till the expac lands.

If they are truly tailor to casuals and the design perspective is "everyone should see everything" they are shooting themselves in the foot. People will go through the content and then they will sit waiting and crying for more just like how it was between BT-SWP. Only this time it wont be 10% of the total playerbase but 50% and that will be a lot of tears on the forums.

Its not _just_ an achievement. You also get your X Protodrake which is worth almost all the e-peen in the world.

Jokes aside though, its not really about the achievement in the sense that world-firsts isn't about Duplicitous Guise. Its about being good enough to achieve this. Heroic: Glory of the raider is difficult content if I ever saw it.

I just wanted to point out that based on what this and the thread quoted within this thread were discussing is basically the amount of gear reset. Any person with a decent amount of sunwell gear is effectively a LvL 70 in 80 level gear (in some ways better than some 80 heroic gear) with obvious consequences.

Blizzard appeared to have a major problem with the large gear reset from 60 to 70 and scaled it back. The difference between these two expansions have interesting contrast. The small gear reset can perfectly explain the fact that the "kara" of 80 got steamrolled so quickly.

To me at least, this is all boils down to exactly that: just an achievement - of course by extension all raiding is that. It's definitely more than nothing but significantly less than having more content. I recognize that some people will find them something worth thriving for, though (being a druid all sorts of flying mounts really are just vanity - flight form is just easier to use).

Perhaps if there was a way to "defeat" bosses easily (less loot and he escapes or something) or "kill" them in a difficult fashion (more loot and it's a real "kill") it would feel a bit less of a crutch (then only the difficult one would be claimed as "world first" making the race a bit more of a race). Of course such mechanisms shouldn't overused. Then again, some might argue that it's all semantics in the end.

I see your point, and blizz does to some extent also (The sartharion encounter). The line is so blurry though and as you pointed out, its basically semantics.

This might not be the most popular (or well thought out) statement ever made on EJ, but to a large degree a lot of the "worth" in endgame epics is basically the same as the achievement-bonuses: E-peen.
Case in point, going from Cursed Vision of Sargeras to Duplicitous Guise will of course be an dps increase, but we are talking marginal levels here. It won't make or break an encounter for your guild, playstyle and execution is much more important then even some hundred personal dps (or X raid dps) coming from item upgrades.