Having the 3.2 raid be only 5 Bosses (x2 for hardmodes), working in tandem with the badge change allows them to achieve 2 of their design goals: Replayability (Ulduar Hard modes) and ease of access (Icecrown). Having only 5 bosses (plus maybe the first one or two hard modes) to learn before sending your semi-casual guild into Icecrown means less hurdles on their way to the Arthas encounter while still giving the relatively hardcore something to do.

With respect to Ulduar, the staggered starts means that guilds who currently have 12/14 complete will go back and actually do the hard modes while waiting for new bosses to unlock or for Icecrown itself. If they threw a 10ish boss + hardmodes type of instance at us while many were still working on Ulduar, most guilds would work their way to Vezax and then start work on the coliseum, leaving the hard-modes untouched, and most likely Yogg also. (Remember all the guilds that were 5/6 SSC and 3/4 TK but still most of the way through BT).

Avellina, good points, but let's not kid outselves about Yogg. Vashj and Kael, it is not. Is it challenging to learn? Yes. But the amount of fight complexity and the dps/healing requirements (admitted the latter only for Vashj) are small by comparison.

I think you're right that if this new instance serves as a good companion, people will work on Ulduar hard modes / finishing Ulduar. If it were more massive, that would clearly not happen.

I don't think that it will be Yogg that is the break point rather it will be General Vesax. From the little I have seen of things I think the complete upending of mechanics (mana regen) on this fight will be where most of the lesser guilds brickwall because if is so completely different from how you normally play. (on a personal note I think gimmicks like this are bad encounter design as it makes peoples gear and specing completely invalid. It also encourages behaviour that is a real problem in lesser guilds AKA standing in fires.)

Thats a pretty subjective topic. I think Vezax is an example of exceptional encounter design. It makes you think and play different, especially on the hardmode. It doesn't make gear and spec completely invalid, it makes you more aware of the strength/weakness of it, under a slightly different ruleset to normal (capped regen without vapors).

This is a fairly absurd statement. I'd say it encourages proper positioning, which is equally important whether you're standing in something or avoiding something.

That doesn't even remotely match my observations. At the moment on Daggerspine, for instance, of the guilds still working on Ulduar, 2 guilds are up to Vezax - 10 have beaten him and are up to Yogg. Of those 10, all killed Vezax within about a week of downing Mimiron, several of them (my guild included) the same day.

Mimiron and Yogg are the two barriers for average guilds in Ulduar. Not Vezax.

Hasn't Blizzard specifically said that they didn't want to repeat Sunwell and Naxx 1.0 and create encounters that the majority of the playerbase wouldn't ever see?
Their philosophy in WotLK has been to make the content accessible to everyone.
I expect that the "hard mode" bosses will be the exact same, but with different mechanics, like the current Ulduar hard modes.
Ulduar has 13 bosses for everyone to enjoy, and 1 special boss (Algalon) for the bleeding-edge raiders.
They've even been nerfing the existing bosses regularly since their release, to maximise the number of players that will clear the instance.
I don't think that we can expect 5 new bleeding-edge only bosses.
The hard modes will be the same bosses, but they'll "hit harder".

A difference in instance style that I'm noticing is the more bosses you have in a single zone, the more filler style bosses are in there. This has been a rule of thumb since MC with the exclusion of Naxx40 where all the encounters were pretty challenging in comparison to naxx25/10. Ullduar biggest downfall to me was the amount of "filler" bosses that were in there to make it the largest instance. Visual effects are always a plus but does that really bring people back to the instance?

I'd like to think what keeps people coming back is fight design and good loot.


On another note a big topic of discussion is the reintroduction of the old badge system. No more heroism and Valor badges and just conquest badges for all the Hero/Valor badge fights. They didn't like the idea of people running Kara and heroics to get t6 level gear in BC why are they defaulting back to this by allowing people to get t8 gear tokens out of 5 man heroics and up? This feels counter intuitive to their design goal of allowing more people to see the content when they're promoting the skipping of content all together.

The thing with the filler bosses is that it makes it easier for more casual guilds to pace their progression nights. eg. we'll spend a couple of hours wiping on boss-du-jour and then go get a quick kill on Razorscale/filler boss of choice so that people end the night with a few badges and on an upnote.

It's more like a middle way of the TBC System where you could farm heroics for 3 weeks and then buy gear that is almost on par with the best raid drops available. All you had to do is wait for the patch to hit or for a certain vendor to spawn.

In the old wotlk way you could use your badges only to buy gear that is on equal level as the zone the badges dropped from. This basically made heroic 5mans redundant as soon as you could set foot into Naxx25 (Which was pretty early as the gear requirements are quite low).

In 3.2 you will be able to farm heroics for the last raid tear, not the current one (because conquest badges will only buy you T8, not T9). And you will not be able to buy weapons. Also you can't farm heroics now and be ready with 300 conquest badges as soon as as the patch hits.

I feel it is to comply with their new philosophy. That is they want more people to see more content. What better way to let people see Icecrown? Let them get geared to the teeth in 3.2 so they have less trouble in Icecrown.

You cannot really compare tBC and WotLK much, the expansions were designed with two different design philosophies. Blizzard seems to have admitted this by making Naxx10/25 easy compared to what Kara was.

I am at a loss for words with regards for the bolded part. I don't see how it promotes content skipping. Newer players will get t8 level gear and tear through the 3.2 raid and Ulduar, as there will/are many amazing items in both. You cannot fully gear up to a t8 level with just Conquest badges.

3.2 won't be t9 from what I gather. 3.2 will drop Conquest emblems iirc also. You will be able to farm gear for the current raid tier. Though as you said, this will all be going on while 3.2 is live, you can't farm them up now and you can't get geared to the teeth with just Conquest items, they don't fill all of the gear slots.

I guess this change was slipped in late:

So WG is pretty much a battleground now, only not instanced.

Which incidentally also solves* the issue of lower level bots running around WG farming herbs and saronite. Neat.

*Well... goes in the general direction of solving. Helps, at least.

Forgive me, I was incorrect. I had forgotten about the EoT dropping in the new raid. However simply because new emblems drop doesn't make it the next tier of raiding in my opinion. I see the new raid as a filler, something like Sunwell. I don't see how they could put t9 armor drops on the new bosses since there are so few. I see them putting in the off pieces like they did with Sunwell. Though this would admittedly break their mold as Icecrown is suppose be the last last raid of WotLK and the mold is three tiers of tier armor an expansion so far.

What you consider a tier and what I consider a tier probably vary; as does Blizzard's. Its a matter of opinion. Was Sunwell the next full tier of raiding after Black Temple?

With regards to the part I bolded. This wouldn't be the first time. Sunwell didn't introduce a full level of superior loot. It didn't have t7. It had t6 pieces in it. Yes, it did have superior items but not like Ulduar has compared to Naxx/EoE/OS, or Black Temple/Hyjal did to TK/SSC.

ilevel doesn't always mean the items were superior. I am not going to argue over something that can be considered a matter of opinion. As I said, I see 3.2 being similar to Sunwell with regards to tiering and I didn't consider Sunwell a full tier of raiding. Almost all of Naxx/EoE/OS gear was phased out by Udluar, that wasn't the case with Sunwell and Black Temple. Unless 3.2 has a ton of gear I don't see the loot from there phasing out all Ulduar loot. Especially hard mode loot. There is no point in further discussing this issue, its a matter of opinion.

I guess the fact that I already said that what one considers a tier of raiding and what someone else considers a tier of raiding can vary eluded you. Falling back on an item level argument isn't a good basis either. Item level doesn't always equate to a better item. Sunwell didn't make Black Temple gear obsolete. Ulduar did make Naxx/EoE/OS gear obsolete. Again, matter of opinion in what you view as a tier. You can make as many posts as you want, all it does is detract from the thread, which I already asked that it not be discussed further, yet you found a need to continue on.

Sunwell was a tier in itemlevel above BT and Hyjal. BT was 141 for armor / 151 for weapons (while SSC/TK was 128/134) and sunwell started at 154 for armor / 164 for weapons with both Kil'jaeden and Illidan dropping higher ilvl loot. In the end this next instance is a tier above Ulduar even if the set it drops may not be considered tier 9.

You can fold your arms and not consider Sunwell a full tier of raiding but it was, that's a fact, not opinion. The item level jump was consistent with the rest of the raiding in the expansion, as well as the jump in difficulty.

I guess Ulduar is the fist instance that breaks the mold of the last boss dropping significantly better loot. All the 25-man drops are 226 armor/232 weapons, hard mode option encounters are 239 armor/244 weapons. Algalon is auto hard mode for the 239/244 stuff, but you can get that from all of the other bosses in the instance.

Another thing, just because I guild is in full Conquest gear from doing heroics, does not mean that they will be able to do naxx/ulduar/etc. Gear is a large part of the equation, yes, but so is skill and practice. Personally, I couldn't imagine going straight from heroics to Ulduar. Naxx is a good place to learn how a class handles in a raid, especially if someone never raided in either previous expansion.

The Wintergrasp changes are going to blow up in their face. It's like fishing in AB, but oh-so-much worse - a third of the team will be running around farming titanium because no one else can get into the zone.

This can easily be taken care of by disabling/phasing out all nodes in Wintergrasp during a battle, much like they do with the elemental mobs already.

There's a pretty significant penalty for not conducting an offensive battle properly. Namely loss of control of the Vault and access to the much more lucrative/available resources. I don't see dozens of people refusing to fight because they want to find one spawned titanium vein. With the addition of the southern towers and workshops, the south of the map just isn't that peaceful anymore.

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This won't really solve the "bot" issue. I've seen plenty of them and it's an outright teleport hack that's frequently used from below the map. It also takes place when there isn't fighting, as opposed to when there is.

About the new instance(s):

I think its entirely unthinkable that they'll be designing completely seperate versions of the same encounter(s) between 10- and 25-man. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• Its confusing for the players.
• Their track record shows otherwise (I.E: they've never done this).
• They may as well give an encounter a unique boss look. I don't have the impression that a single boss texture / potential add textures are what take time, rather the environment.

Their track record shows that they design the 25-man encounter, and then for the 10-man version they strip away things that depend on: Too many tanks, too many things to think about at once, etc.

I'm also not really sure that having both on seperate timers is much about giving middle-way guilds something to do, as much as it is a way to prevent tiering from removing content playthrough. In other words, these are the two situations:

1) A raid force clears the normal version until they can clear the hardcore version. Then they only clear the hardcore version.
2) A raid force clears the normal version until they can clear the hardcore version. Now they clear both. This means their 'normal' version is still being used.

You have to consider that the whole 'everyone should be able to experience everything' isn't just to make casuals happy. Its to try and further offset the time cost of developing content, which is what they're always racing against. I think realistically the following will happen:

• The guilds who would have not started on the hardcore version until they cleared the normal version, by and large, still won't until they've cleared the normal. They'll still say things like: 'Its useless until we've cleared the normal one', 'We don't have the gear until we've cleared the normal one', etc.
• The guilds that would've gone and tried the hardcore versions anyway still will. Except now they'll be farming the normal version too, for more gear drops per reset. So they have to sit through the same bosses twice, because its what pays off the best.

I'm not sure its a good idea, to be honest. Because I think it adds an element of boredom that they really don't need at this point. Everyone is already well aware that if you do the same encounter enough times, it becomes boring. It pretty much doesn't matter what encounter it is. This way, they're effectively cutting TimeUntilBored in half.

No one knows for sure what the exact nature of the new hierarchy will be until we can get on the PTR, but the different versions argument is the most obvious and natural, otherwise they wouldn't have announced the distinction in the first place.

You underestimate the players. The community adapts to changes almost instantly.

Differing 10- and 25-man mechanics are already present in minor ways. There haven't been any riots from the community over notes on Wowhead boss strategies saying: "The boss does not use this ability on 10-man."

They hadn't done a fight like Sartharion with different modes of difficulty either. Until they did. This really isn't a reason for them not to do it. Also, you're somewhat mistaken. These types of differences are already present in minor ways, and this separation allows to them to go further in that area.

I fail to understand what you're getting at here.

A good theory, but it's more likely they that simply design the core mechanics of the encounter and adjust the numbers for each version. On average the difference between 10- and 25-man encounters is inflation, either of pure damage output, DPS requirements, or the number of mobs and such. 25-man numbers are just as relative as those in 10-mans.

However, you have to realize that this lockout provides them the potential to so introduce new mechanics into harder versions while leaving them out of easier ones. This gives them greater flexibility in encounter design and a better foundation with which to please ALL types of raiders, especially the ever-hungry hardcore raiders that desire unforgiving mechanics and bosses.

I really don't understand what's the issue here for you. A casual guild will spend most of their time clearing the normal mode and dabbling in the hard-modes. A hardcore guild will gear up in the normal mode while focusing the sum of their attention on the hard-modes and down them, at which point they'll never bother with the normal mode version again. The hard mode gear is better and the encounters are more interesting for them.

It's basically the same as it is now, only guilds that want to work on the hard mode version no longer have to (in effect) waste their time on bosses they already have on farm. When all is said and done, this change is simply removing a frustrating aspect of the normal mode/hard mode separation to the benefit of all players involved.