Heenk

That is some poor terminology in that case, considering heroic mode has so far meant '25 player raids'.

 

Ptoleman

Yeah, but Heroic used to only refer to 5-mans. Terminology is subject to the will of Blizzard. :P

 

Jagiya

Sunwell only had 6, and they were all "single difficulty" encounters.
With the introduction of varying "modes" of difficulty, we can expect some tremendous "bang for buck" as we've seen with Ulduar. There's "only" 14 boss encounters within Ulduar, but when you factor all of the alternate / Hard Modes, you end up with like 30 unique encounters.

 

Prinsesa

I believe 10-man normal and 10-man heroic is their way of explicitly differentiating fighting a boss in normal difficulty and hard mode, since the arena setting wouldn't lend itself to a trash-based hard-mode activation ala Sartharion/Freya.

Also, with only 5 bosses, Blizzard might want raiders to be able to tackle both easy and hard mode versions of each of them within the same reset.

EDIT: Having hard mode explicitly separate might also give them the chance to make some really diverse hard modes, instead of simply forcing the raid to kill the boss faster or giving the boss a 50% more damage buff.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Shadout

I dont want to be too netagive about the little information we have. However...

This is a wrong direction to go imo.
We might end up doing normal mode just to get to the 5th boss for some items, while doing hardmode instance on top of it. Reminds me of doing MC just for the ragnaros loot for many many months (or most instances after that up till wotlk pretty much). This time around it will just be the very same instance repeated.
Some might like how you kept doing old instances for a long time pre-wotlk, personally I liked the 'new direction', where it seemed you could safely ignore an old tier of raids when moving to a new (because the new 10man pretty much could replace the old 25man).
This might likely still be the case now, in the sense that you can ignore Uldur after 3.2, but not in the sense that you only have 1 tier of raiding at the same time. You suddenly have both hardmode and normalmode instead of picking one of them for each boss.

Maybe it wont be so bad, after all its a 'small' (read: Sunwell sized) instance with only 5 bosses, but I'm scared of thinking about an Ulduar raid with 14 bosses using the same system.

There are also positive aspects of the system. It likely makes it a lot easier for Blizz to get the hardmodes right, they dont have to come up with endless amounts of 'Don't press the button!" stuff, no 3min and 1 sec Hodir kills etc.

 

Starfire

Eh? Freya-3 feels different from Freya-0. I think they always could, they just took the lazy approach. Flame Leviathan-4 feels dramatically different.

 

Prinsesa

What I'm saying is that if you're facing Freya in a big arena, they might have preferred the raid talking to an NPC to activate Freya-3 or Freya-0 instead of having to spawn the 3 adds.

If you're doing Freya-3, those adds would just be taking up space anyway, which may be an issue with the arena's size.

If you're doing Freya-0, those adds were going to die anyway, and any loot they wanted you to get from them could simply be programmed into Freya-0's drops herself.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Shadout

I dont think each boss needs to feel very different. It seems fine with a mix of Leviathans/Freyas and Hodirs. Different types of hardmodes, different types of challenges. One forces you to rethink your strategy in a whole new way, another just requires you to perfect what you were already doing.
= Varied encounters.
Now with just 5 bosses I can understand the need for most of them to be of the Freya/Leviathan hardmode type, to keep it more challenging, but a mix doesnt seem like a bad thing.

If you make the hardmode too different from the original, its not a hardmode anymore, its another boss (with reused boss model).

 

KrinKer

Understood about Sunwell, but it was never a filler. Sunwell was designed to last a long time and it has. Had it not been for the gates, and appart from the really hardcore guilds, it would have held a long time before people could have killed m'uru and kil'jaedan.

Coloseum feels more like a filler untill Icecrown is revealed. At least to me. In any way, can't wait to see their new content.

 

Kumar

And fillers (especially in terms of Gear) will always work better for the last raid cycle in the expansion.

It will be interesting to see how Blizzard handles a new Tier of gear with a limited number of bosses.

 

Cranberry

Personally, I'm extremely excited for the Ally/Horde set art. They haven't really done that since GM/HWL gear, and the other Tournament gear art was fantastic. I'd like to know whether it's whole sets (for example, horde get a Blood Knight-themed set, while the Alliance get a Vindicator or old-school Silver Hand one), or if it's just a few specific pieces.

 

Lasie

I am doubtful that they will include "hard modes" for the new "normal" settings. Designing 3 different difficulty settings for both normal and heroic would eat up a large amount of development time, and most players would probably end up focusing on the "very easy", "heroic" and "impossible" ends of the spectrum, leaving 3 of those settings largely unused and unseen by the playerbase.

For that reason I suspect we'll see:
Normal
Heroic
Heroic (alternate)

What interests me is how exactly will this pan out in terms of iLevel?

Say normal mode 25man is iLevel 239, and Heroic is iLevel 252, will blizzard add a third iLevel 265 "tier" of items for alternate modes? I doubt that blizzard would add 3 tiers for a 5boss instance when a large instance like Ulduar only had 2.

 

Jagiya

So essentially you're saying FL+2/3, Sartharion+1/2, Freya+1/2 and one of the Iron Council difficulties were a waste of design time? Think about it, you can't just have "Casual" mode and "Hardcore impossible" mode. You need the inbetweens as stepping stones, because you simply cannot place the entire player base in those two categories alone.

Also, Ulduar was 226, 232 (Weapons) and 239 (Hard Modes).

 

LiquidHAL

Blizzard explicitly said in the original post that there will be 4.MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Enter the Crusaders’ Coliseum

I also think your speculative ilevels are a bit high. 10-man Ulduar normal loot only went half a tier up from 25-man Naxx normal loot. If that happens again, 10-man Crusader's Coliseum normal loot will be 232, 10-man heroic loot will be 239, 25-man normal will be 239, and heroic 25-man loot will be 252. Overall the same spread as Ulduar.

 

Tojara

Keep in mind this is mostly just speculation on my part but..

Doesn't this type of raid seem much more likely then any other to be subject to additional bosses being added during minor content patches? If I were Blizzard it seems like the perfect type of instance to add such a thing. From what I understand one of the major factors in instance creation is the actual art of the instance itself as it takes a lot of time to make something like Ulduar. With this raid you would likely have a static environment through all 5 bosses, therefore the possibility of adding a single boss would be simply making a new boss, no instance design needed!

If they find that content is being downed to quickly, Icecrown is a lot farther off then they planned, then throwing us a few bosses in a small in between patch could be easily done. (easily is a relative term, but compared to other raids)

A pipe dream really. I'll reserve full judgment until the instance is actually released, but 5 bosses seems rather 'low'.

 

Benita

A side effect this will have is that it will set a limit to the playtime you can put into this instance, depending on the number of attempts you have. If you really attempt the heroic version, i'd reckon you go through the normal very quickly and then wipe on the heroic till the tribute counter is done for the week. That might leave the guilds with alot of playtime on progress release hanging dry before the weekend.
A counter makes more sense than a timer because of too frustrating disconnects, but generally i like the idea of the pace and focus Algalon/Vael concept raids bring.

One possible outcome would be that the top guilds "force" their members to create alts to do all the versions again for the same week. Another possibility might be to do alot of wiping on the normal modes (depending how different they are) to perfect positioning, timing, build tactics etc. Both possibilities are tricky to counter i guess.

 

Mideci

This sounds a lot like something you run alongside Ulduar for a night, max. Nevermind that I feel like it's a flat-out awful design covering for the incredible delay in releasing Ulduar. The reality is that Icecrown has a date that is associated with the next expansion. Icecrown is not ready. Something had to bridge the content gap -- and offer enough rewards that people care.

Welcome to it. One fewer boss than Sunwell. Probably no trash to speak of, or at most very little. One night to improve your gear and allow you to farm out the rest of the goodies in Ulduar with somewhat greater ease as time passes. Most of us will likely be clearing Ulduar in 4-5 hours by the time it's out. Some guilds will need more, some less. Want to raid 3 nights? Continue. Want to raid 1 night? Also an option.

 

Prinsesa

If the hard mode is different enough, practicing on normal mode may prove to be as useful as acting it out as a skit in Goldshire instead, which further reinforces the idea of making hard modes completely separate, as that may give the devs more power to make hard modes more than just bosses with frenzy buffs.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

klüger

Why are people getting the impression that you only get a set number of tries? I figured it worked like a normal boss in that you can wipe as much as you like, but you only get good loot if you down him in the first X tries.

 

Emeraude

Based off the design model they decided to go with this expansion with a 10-man and a 25-man that are parallel it might be 2 different types of raids with different bosses.

IE:

10-Man->25-Man(A-B-C-D-E Bosses)
10-Man Heroic->25-Man Heroic(F-G-H-I-J Bosses)

As opposed to 4 instances with all of them having the same first boss with 4 different levels of difficulty, of course I could be wrong and the other posters could have it right with the whole 4 difficulties of 1 bosses a la Freya/Flame Leviathan, etc).

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CX81UJZ8
For the lurking Phoenix Wright faithful.
What is the most important thing to you? Won't you grant me the pleasure of taking it away.

 

Vaccine

^^
Because the blue said you are limited to a set number of tries? Read it agan.


Sunwell was only 6, and lasted quite a while. Also they've stated they're always trying to shorten the lifespan of expansions to one per year. This patch may only be intended to last 2-3 months. I find it highly unlikely after how big Ulduar was that they will give us this for the same time period. 3.1 was released middle of April, its been out roughly two months now. If we say this patch hits in 2 months time (generous I know) then the Ulduar lifecycle was 4 months for 14 bosses plus hard modes. I can't see them having the same for this, I'd say half Ulduar's life span would be more realistic.

But who knows, till we see the difficulty or hear their intentions. Hard mode could actually be hard and stay hard this time. I do love the idea of seperating hard mode into another raid ID. You no longer have the issues of whether or not to try a hard mode or finish the instance off like in Ulduar.

For the tribute system I envisage getting a tribute counter set to an arbitrary number. Each wipe diminishes it by 1 and when you have 0 left, a tournament official comes out and says "Thanks for playing, look at the fabulous prizes you could have won!" Then gives you a chest with your items in. Remember we probably won't be killing the NPC's as it is a tournament, not a fight to the death, so looting it off them doesn't make sense. Whether the tribute/loot will be backloaded like that or on a per boss basis I don't know but I suspect it will be a zone counter. You get to the end with 90 out of 100 tribute tokens? Grats, have 4 loots. Oh you wiped 98 times and killed it with 1 tribute left? Heres your Prot pally relic, cya next week.

 

mclem

I'm curious whether this *does* actually mean a Sunwell-style approach; when I first read it it sounded to me more like something more like the Edge of Madness, where the bosses rotate on a weekly basis. I can see how you could read it either way, but I'd personally phrase things differently for a Sunwell gates system.

 

Kirth

I see it as a tie in to the whole arena feel of the instance, your raid has a match verses a competitor each week working you way up the ladder until you can fight the "champion". each week you can (or have to) battle your former oppenients or can fight your new challenger.

 

Strom

What if one of the 5 encounters was a raid vs another computer controlled raid of similar size? For example our 25 man vs a computer controlled 25 man (with 3 tanks, 6 healers, and 16 varied DPS).

That would be very challending and would have a lot of potential. The computer tanks could taunt our DPS off their healers, they could use CC used against us, etc..... just a lot of options for difficulty.

 

Liebestod

There's a PTR status page now, presumably for 3.2? Looks like it might come any hour now.