Maybe it's just me, but I compulsively inspect everyone around me anyways, so I don't see this as an issue at all. You wouldn't believe how many people used to raid with riding crops, carrot on a stick, pvp trinkets, etc.

Or if you know (or even think) that you're going to be in a group that repeatedly does this achievement you wouldn't vendor/DE your old 226 items. Refarming lower ilevel pieces isn't an issue with the achievement, just poor planning on the part of players. Are those 4 or 5 bank bag slots that critical? If so maybe just pass on this achievement? Or do it once, get your title and run off to vendor your epics.

The debuff solution isn't that elegant when you think about how different slots have different effects. For a melee oriented class for example a weapon off Algalon is sure to be a much much larger upgrade in DPS than a cloak off hard mode Hodir. Players don't scale uniformly with gear upgrades.

First, S3D/10 isn't very hard for a 25man raiding guild. Yes, gear makes it easier and easier every reset. But you can't ignore the raid buff stacking that early nightfall groups did to get the achievement done. It'd be logical to think that like their 25man counterpart, a hardcore 10man raid group won't have a roster much larger than 10. Do you think it'd be easy for a 10man guild to build both full caster and a full physical dps team for alagon? What if the encounter is significantly easier if you have a DK tank and a rogue like sarth 3D? On the other hand, it's easy for a 25man guild to field multiple fully stacked teams, with the best set up possible.

Lets not forget that 25man ulduar still drops level 226 gear, providing better gear min-max chances. I admit I haven't fully investigated all the loot, but a glance at the first page of mmo champion tells me that t8.25 and a tank shield Northern Barrier are level 226. Also, a dedicated 25man guild should have all the level 226 loot from t7 already. (A 10man group might too if they have a raiding alliance currently).

However you look at it, even with this restriction, 25man raiding groups still have an edge to this. The only thing to stop 25man groups working hard on this achievement is if ulduar is hard enough to keep 25-groups busy.

This is both true and false. There are certainly guilds that are doing the 10 man achievements only to boost their guilds overall standings but this probably isn't the situation in most guilds doing 25 man raids.

In our 25 man group we don't do "official" 10 man runs for achievements. The ones we have done are done during offtimes by smaller subsets of players that are interested in doing it for their own reasons (challenge, points, whatever). Those people weren't always chosen because they made up the ultimate stacked group. They might have better ilvl gear than many 10 man groups but the raids are designed much in the same way, friends choosing to do achievements with friends and having to work around sometimes wonky group setups to get everyone their credit.

I wouldn't mind skipping the achievement in order to not have to carry around or bank 1-3 extra gear sets, but that would make the other 9 people in the raid kind of disappointed when we reach Algalon and they can't find another healer that wants to gt locked just for 1 boss. The end result would probably be me not getting invited to the run in the first place since i didn't keep a bad gear set around. So no, i'm not "forced" to do the achievement or to keep the gear set, but i would screw up my guild and friends if i don't.

Extremely bad design by Blizzard i must say.

It's probably too late to do anything about the achievement now apart from removing it (which I don't see happening), but I'd imagine that if Blizzard wants to continue along this path they will take into account in future raids, they'll probably take these arguments into account and implement a Shirt of Nerf which works in the opposite way of the Shirt of Uber as suggested previously.

I must say that I don't look forward to having a set dedicated to just one achievement, but if that is the price to pay to get it, I'd gladly do it for now. However, I really hope Blizzard find a more elegant way of handling it for future content.

Personally, I'm all for putting gear level restrictions on achievements. I'd actually like to see level restrictions on them as well (although I doubt that will ever happen).

Is it really an "achievement" when you completely outgear the level that the encounter was intended for (or when you outlevel it)?

Putting restrictions on the achievements makes them mean something. It puts everyone on a level playing field and makes skill the deciding factor in whether you get the achievement - not gear.

Yes, it is slightly annoying if you're a completionist and feel the need to obtain every achievement in the game, because now you need to collect a lower-ilvl gearset (or just keep you gear from the previous tier instead of vendoring it immediately).

As it stands now, 25-man guilds automatically get double the number of achievement points for raiding that 10-man guilds get. All they need to do to collect them is walk into the 10-man raids once after farming 25s for a few weeks, and they'll destroy every 10-man achievement simply by virtue of being overgeared.

Putting gear level restrictions on everything means that 25-man guilds pick up the 25-man achievements, and 10-man guilds pick up the 10-man achievements. Both sets of achievements are meaningful if Blizzard balances the encounters on each path correctly for the gear you obtain there. You only get both sets of achievements if you feel the need to maintain two sets of gear, and I don't think most people care enough to do that (and if they do, they have the option - but at least the 10-man achievements won't be "free").

Level restrictions will work from this point forward but it wouldn't of worked for vanilla content for obvious reasons and putting it in for TBC content would of been silly due to how 3.0 came a little over a month before WotLK's release. Now I could see Blizzard finding a way to use level restrictions on raid instances though for WotLK to actually make the achievements mean something more in the future (although that is kinda the point of the Proto-Drakes).

Now the 10 man achievements for Ulduar are nice but since the highest iLvL gear right now is 226 then 25 man guilds will at the moment have no problem going into the 10 man at release and completing the instance at the gear level needed since they will just need to make sure not to wear anything they get from 25 man Ulduar.

I like this idea, too. Keep in mind, its not a gear restriction on 'everything', its on 1 achievement on 1 boss that already gives you a title for killing it with your Ulduar25 gear.

Most of the people here in 25 man guilds are pretty decked out in 226 loot. After clearing most/all of Ulduar25, you'll probably be fully in 226 loot.

You already (theoratically) have the gear for Algalon-10. If you want the title so bad, power it down in the first couple weeks, then you don't have to worry about it.

Reward: Herald of the Titans (title)
We are looking to replace these 10 player "realm first" feats with a regular achievement that anybody can do but is focused on being the pinnacle of progression for players who focus on 10 player raids while minimizing the advantage that players have in heroic 25 player raids.


Blizzard never promised a precisely even playing field. People who do 25 man stuff are still going to have an advantage of 10 man players. But that advantage is smaller, which is the entire point.

The wow armory provides ilvl data, does it not?

I doubt that very many 'hardcore' players going for this achievement lack some way of checking the ilvl of their loot.

While it's not impossible or even difficult to check your gear, it's a rather awkward mechanic to ask players to tab out of the game to check the ilvl of every piece of gear they have just to get an achievement.

I think the 25 man playerbase has gotten far too nitpicky if they're complaining about an optional mechanic for an optional boss in a non-progression zone that offers no loot that wouldn't otherwise be available.

I suppose they could add a button to the Algalon console that tells you if you're in ilvl specification or not, but any time of 'nerf' shirt is bound to create as many problems as it solves.

Actually I have an addon that adds ilvl to gear numbers called Informant. It also adds things like crit and haste rating>% conversion, that sort of thing. It works on the inspect screen as well. My point is that it's not a terrible bar to set for players, and will not be especially annoying, since you can always bug someone if you don't want to spare the extra CPU cycles or RAM.

I think it's an elegant solution to the problem. My only hope is that they make it for the 'special' achievements rather than the slightly more silly ones (the iron boot flask for instance).

Blizzard likes to experiment. Of course item level restrictions are incredibly awkward. Of course a cap of 226 falls dramatically short of removing any advantage from running 25-mans. I think we've beaten that horse enough over the last few pages.

This was something Blizzard was able to throw together given the current technical limitations. If the achievement proves to be popular I'm confident we will see a better mechanic, designed from the ground up, for 10-man achievements (although personally, I think its more likely they'll just remove the ilevel discrepancy between 10 and 25, making the entire issue moot).

As someone else pointed out, how this shakes out is going to depend entirely on how difficult these achievements are. I'm not too worried about any 10-man achievements becoming the pinnacle of progression, but I've love to be proven wrong.

So is there no 25 man equivalent to this except the realm first? If not, how is this at all supposed to NOT provide an incentive for the 25 man raiders to go do this using whatever means they can? With no equivalent achievement clearly the 25 man raiders will just keep some KT weapons and their new 226 ulduar-25 gear and go try this anyways.

I don't see how this really fixes much besides limit the weapons you can use. Even worse since its 226 gear its even EASIER for the 25 man raiders to get this done before the 10 man raiders since they'll have 10 man hard ulduar AND 25 man EASY ulduar to get gear for this.

If there was an achievement to do Sartharian10+3, which disallowed any loot from 25 man raid instances, I would be very interested to see how many guilds would have got it done. Would people have preferred the "Of The Nightfall" achievement to have been designed like this from the start?

Ironically, this would probably have had the effect that only the hardcore guilds, i.e. the 25-man raiding guilds, would complete it, while the more casual 10-man raiding guilds would not. Keep in mind though, that the equivalent here would be having the cap at 213 which wouldn't have had a very big effect since people tend to have only a few 226 items, especially when the first kills happened.

It would of further showed the problem with Sarth3D on 10 man. At least hopefully they did a good job balancing Ulduar in making the hard modes of the 25 man more difficult than the 10 man versions.

I like the idea of a shirt of Nerf or a toggle that could be used for encounters like that. It would eliminate the Oops factor where one player messes up the ID by wearing an item that does not fit the cap. It would be much easier to check if everyone was wearing the nerf shirt after all. I definitely like the idea of restrictions like this rather than just removing rewards with each new raid instance. My arguments on the whole Glory thing I will leave on the normal WoW boards other than saying I am against the removal of non-Feat of Strength rewards due to a content patch.

It is an achievement meant for 10 man raiders, who do not get any loot from ulduar 25. Requiring to wear some kinda item which lowers stats would utterly bone someone without 25 man gear.

Seeing as how I mostly do 10 mans I quite like this design, gives me even less incentive to do ulduar 25 as well, which is nice. Currently feel a tad guilty over not gearing myself up in naxx25 pugs when others are doing it.

I think the idea of the "Shirt of Nerf" is that it would "nerf" each piece of gear by amount that each piece is over the required item level. It doesn't even need to be a shirt, but instead it could merely be a buff/debuff activated by talking to some npc, or something like that.

Edit: Actually, this is pretty much what Kohta even suggested.

This is the least awkward solution I can think of right now.

Couldnt you just turn on a toggle for the achievment, and if someone was over the ilvl it would tell you. They track it now for granting it, why not allow you to track it while attempting it.