I am hoping Blizzard also releases a new dragon or two in the Obsidian Sanctum along with this arena. 5 bosses in an arena, even with tribute modes, is going to get old really fast.

Well there is the long awaited "Secret Raid / Instance" that has been milling around the community for some time, with the speculation that the announced will be reletively short, the prospect of another aspect opening in Wrymrest is looking pheasable.

I think the focus should be the word 'unlocked'. The way I read that is that in Week 1 you'll have one boss to face, in Week 2 the second will unlock and you'll have two bosses, all the way up to Week 5 when the fifth and final boss unlocks and it will be a 5-boss raid instance from then on. I don't see any sort of rotation implied there.

It looks like just another artificial way of pro-longing the life of content to me.

I like the idea of Normal 10, Hard 10, Normal 25, Hard 25 separate and the idea of limited attempts. But I have worries regarding implementation.

Any instance that is even vaguely linear - if you have to defeat Boss A before you can even reach Boss B - often Boss B hardmode was easier than Boss A.

In example, until it was nerfed a million and one times Flame Leviathan Hard Mode (4 towers) was quite probably harder than many other Hard Modes in Ulduar - most definitely so on the 10man track. If it was a separate lockout and you couldn't access later Hard Mode bosses which you could probably defeat until you defeated a roadblock like FL, that'd be quite rough.

I also worry about RNG failure. Again to flog Flame Levi - imagine a 10man attempt where he chain-chases the same Demo. A couple wipes to that could waste several of your limited supply of attempts. 25man has more people so it's typically possible to survive RNG failure and still prevail, but it still doesn't help.

Not to mention bugs such as Hodir shattering cache during Flash Freeze cast when he should be defeated (fixed), or Flame Leviathan still moving and damaging folk while under shutdown debuff (still randomly occurs).

Another point in support of this vs. a cyclic one-boss instance is the comparison blues have made to a Ring of Blood style series of encounters. This language ("unlocked") and the RoB comparison definitely support a 5-boss Sunwell-style (but possibly no trash) instance.

Something like that would almost certainly be tied to Wyrmest and Chromie, with all the going back in time stuff.

Actually, note that the hard modes here really seem to punish PUGing here, because you're using up a resource you've got a limited amount of, while the normal modes will not be punishing PUGs in that way.

So I think both regular modes are going to come before both heroic modes on the hierarchy. I will not be the least bit surprised if 10-man heroic gives better loot than 25-man regular, and if both of the regular modes are intended to be at least somewhat PUGable.

I think some people said it already, but (unless I missed some obscure Blue comment) we haven't been told that the Crusader Coliseum is the only raid instance we'll be seeing in 3.2.

Who knows? If the PTR comes online today or tomorrow we could find Grim Batol being invaded by Ironforge or something, or Gun'Drak unleashing a random clone army of Trolls or Tiki weapons we have to go fight now.

I agree completely here. You mention that there is often only 1 "correct" choice. That's definitely true but the correct choice doesn't stay the same through a full tier of content. Specifically for DPS warriors the choice between Str and ArP depends largely on your other pieces of gear and was impacted recently with the cap on ArP. If gems are prohibitively expensive it makes it much more difficult to obtain premium set ups. With how frequently the "correct" choice for specific sockets changes I for one am happy to be able to make those switches as they come up instead of investing a huge amount of time/money to get the best setup only to have the best change with the next minor patch.

Come on. I'd put 10:1 internet dollars on there not being a "secret raid instance" which will go unannounced up until (and through?) the PTR phase. Crusaders' Coliseum is the 3.2 raid and the only 3.2 raid.

The evidence will be in changes to certain locations. I know I'll be scouting out a bunch of locales to look for changes -- new assets, different mobs from live, etc.

While I agree with Liebestod that it's highly unlikely that they would keep a raid secret all the way up until the PTR opens, any evidence that can be found without the aid of datamining would be valuable. (And datamined information is valuable too, I just don't know how to do it.)

Out of all possible (however improbable) candidates for additional material, though, I'd say a new Chamber of the Aspects raid is the most likely. Considering how they ninja'd the Obsidian Sanctum into Wrath without any real preamble and the only lore connection in a book that hadn't been released yet, it would be par for the course.

Essentially, they are going back to a model that's almost that of BC. There's still a distinction between "current progression raid emblems" and others, but the addition of the Triumph to the dailies means that you can get those, even if it's only slower.

I was arguing, back when the Heroism/Valor distinction was established that it didn't made any sense, and, at one point, they would need to introduce shortcuts to let people outgear the raid instances and progress thru them, even if they were not "competent" enough to do so. It finally comes to that.

I recommend disabusing yourself of the notion there is some other raid instance happening in 3.2. Speculation mode is that there was always room for one had, say, Ulduar shipped 2 months or so earlier (actually informed speculation, but neither here nor there). There is another expansion coming next year (perhaps as early as August, 21 months after Wrath, or even a tad earlier). While this one-boss-a-week thing is designed to be a content extender, looking at it outside the context of what's going on misleads one into thinking it's design to extend Wrath per se.

Instead, it's designed to buy a reasonable time window to get Icecrown completed and delivered in an epic, expansion-ending cycle with something like a 4-6 window to the next expansion. Ulduar, they surely figure, will get old if it sits there, alone, till January. By adding in the Coliseum -- which really feels like a complement to running Ulduar, rather than a flat-out replacement -- they buy some time to reach toward the end of the year -- Icecrown date not known with precision, but it's out there.

The only difference between TBC and this system is that you can't run heroics for the next 2 months while 3.2 is on the PTR, ignore current raid content if you're too far behind the curve, and load up on best in slot badge items the day the patch comes out (or the day the vendor becomes available like with Sunwell Isle).

Also makes Heroics relevant again. Which they really haven't been at all during WotLK. It was hit 80, do heroics for a week, go to Naxx.

For me one of the biggest changes coming is this:

I have had all-together way to many fights where people played keep-away and didn't even try to cap the flags. If I knew the fight was going to last 20 mins max it will encourage people to stay the length.

I'd wondered earlier if the new 5 man coming in this patch would be similar to Magisters' Terrace in that it'd drop Naxx10 quality loot, but with the recent changes to Emblem of Conquest, I wouldn't be surprised if the drops were more along the line of Ulduar loot. It'd make sense to make the Heroic version drop ilevel 226 loot in order to complement the change to Emblem of Conquest badges in Heroics. This also doesn't seem too far fetched as even the normal dungeon daily will be rewarding an Emblems of Triumph.

The changes to the itemization of Northrend greens is also interesting as they'd been using the linear itemization formula from vanilla, while quest reward greens had been using the newer logarithmic one. That meant that all green drops were inherently inferior to their quest reward counterparts.

Wow... it seems odd to me that this is happening so soon - or rather, to such a large extent.

Two considerations coming out of this:

* What does it mean for Ulduar, and paticularly Ulduar10, post 3.2? It certainly won't be interesting from a badge-earning perspective (Naxx10, Heroics will surely be much faster and easier ways), and badge loot eclipses U10 loot in a fair number of slots. I hope U10-normal doesn't become too unattractive as a result; I'd really like to master all of its normal content and as many of the hard modes as possible in equipment at least approximately on par with what it was designed for.
* Both 10 and 25 man of the cutting edge raid will drop the same badge. I'm going to tentatively consider this a positive change; we'll have to see what the badge rewards look like. It reduces the incentive to PUG through 25 man of the previous tier of content instead of exploring new stuff. On the other hand, it may - again, depending on badge rewards - further reduce that attractiveness of 25 man raids.

EDIT:

... oh, and a third thought:
* This fairly strongly hint against the idea expressed by some, that the collosseum will be run "in parallel" with Ulduar by raiders - or at least, suggests that this is not Blizzard's intention.

Hmm, maybe I'm reading too much into just the badges .o.oO

Looks like I was right, this is indeed what they're doing

# Trial of the Champion


* 5-player (Normal and Heroic mode) dungeon.
* Daily quest added to the Heroic daily dungeon quest giver.


# Trial of the Crusader


* 10 and 25-player (Normal mode) raid dungeon.


# Trial of the Grand Crusader


* 10 and 25-player (Heroic mode) raid dungeon.
* Crusaders' Tribute: Active on Heroic difficulty only, the tribute system will limit players on the number of attempts the raid is allotted each week. Additional rewards can be earned depending on the number of attempts left in the tribute run each week when the final boss is defeated.

As a casual speaking: The changes to emblems are horrible. This is like stripping away all sense of progression there possibly could be. What's the reason of doing Ulduar when I can just do a few heroics to get the same amount of Conquests? It's easier, faster and gears me up in no time. The only reason I see myself playing Ulduar now is doing hard modes to get the drakes, after that, I can just quit the game until 3.2 comes out. Sure it will make it easier for alts, but honestly, who cares about them!?

I was wondering what this would mean for Ulduar as well, but maybe Blizzard isn't planning on nerfing Freya/Mimiron/Algalon/Yogg hardmodes. It's somewhat probable that the gear out of this new instance won't be complete: i.e. there might be 1-2 slots of gear that you'll have to get from Ulduar or before.

Let's just "guess" that the PTR is in the next 8 days. That would put this patch being released in August. With the current state of the game, how many guilds/servers could conceivably down Algalon before then?

They're releasing 1 boss per week for up to 5 weeks. I'll bet that several guilds will resume pushing Algalon after they've run out of hardmode attempts. While the drake might not be there, the server first titles could still be up for grabs on multiple servers.




I wonder how this adjustment in style will impact loot. Right now, you get 1 hardmode piece per hardmode. Are we expecting now 3-5 per hardmode in the Colosseum?

You can't fill all slots with Conquest badge gear. You need drops to fill the other slots, and for some classes Conquest gear is a far cry from BiS gear. If you are intendeding to do the Hard-Mode instance, I can't imagine you'll be able to get by on Naxx 25 gear plus a half-dozen slots from Conquest emblems.

This is also a scaled-down version of the final raid of an expansion release argument. "What's the point of raiding Sunwell when I'll have equivalent dungeon blues in Northrend?" If iLevel is the only reason to play the game, I would suggest ProgressQuest.

On a more positive note: This is a somewhat major shift in tact from Blizz, where they previously said that they didn't want raiders to feel as if they had to grind through Heroics late into the expansion. They seemed to have shifted too far the other direction in WotLK by their own admission, that intro raids were too easy and there was really never a reason to go to Heroics.

This idea that Heroics should be a part of the endgame across the expansion lifespan, combined with what we've seen from 10man Flame Leviathan (Hard Modes give you the option to bump up from one version of the Emblem to the next tier above) I wonder if we'll start seeing that concept used in Heroics, rolled into the Achievements. In WotLK this would look something like.

3.0 - Anub'Rekhan Heroic kill gives a Emblem of Heroism.
3.1 - Heroic kill gives Heroism Emblem, 4 minute kill gives Valor.
3.2 - Heroic kill gives Valor, 4 minute kill gives Conquest.

This would maintain the path of Heroics (and previous tier's raids where applicable) -> Normal current tier -> Hardmode current tier

From patch notes:
•Emblem System Changes
◦The existing achievements to collect 1, 25, 50, etc. Emblems of Heroism, Valor, and Conquest have been converted to Feats of Strength since Heroism and Valor Emblems are no longer attainable.
◦New achievements have been added to collect various amounts of any combination of emblems.