The plus side of this system is that you're back to the Ulduar way of having some choice in which heroic mode to attempt. In ToGC, you can't exactly do Normal Beasts and then Heroic Jarraxus like you can do Normal Flame Leviathan and Hard-Mode XT-002.

And I suspect that (once everything is unlocked) you'll have less issue scheduling hard-modes within a week. If you want to do a non-end-boss Heroic mode, you can clear the Wings on normal that you don't want to try on Heroic, and then all that's left in the instance is your Heroic target, its end-boss, and Arthas. For instance, you can full-clear the instance except for Blood Prince Council, Lana'thel, and Arthas, then take shots at Blood Prince Council for a while. When you down them, you have 12-ish tries on Lana'thel Heroic before you either down her or just do her and Arthas on Normal mode. You can do the same thing for Dreamwalker, Festergut, and Rotface. And when attempting Heroic end-boss, you can clear everything else except Arthas, and then swap to Normal mode with 2 attempts left if you fail to down. This beats the heck out of having to quit Heartbreaker to race to Yogg.

Someone on the official forums made an excellent point regarding limited attempts with regard to the creation of Shadowmourne. Each of the three quests for it involves a presumably DPS character taking hits meant for tanks - or at least it does for two of them, I'm not certain what the Putricide quest involves but I assume it's not done in the normal course of the fight. What happens if your potential Shadowmourner dies? Do you wipe it and lose your week's attempt? Or do you continue and postpone Shadowmourne another week? These seem like questions likely to cause serious internal drama.

It's not as if the classes eligible for Shadowmourne (DK, warrior, Paladin) have no choice to become hard targets (either by gearing for the try appropriately or/and taking the right talents/cooldowns). It is a legendary quest after all. Beats the droppable legendaries (glaives, Thori'dal) any time.

I couldn't agree with you more to be honest I really did enjoy the attempt system in ToGC. Fifty attempts allowed a few raids to learn a fight, but starting off with five attempts will be brutal for a lot of the lower tier guilds. The last paragraph of the ICC gating system post, however, was interesting as it hints towards quite a few more attempts added on as the invasion proceeds (I seem to remember a screen shot of 3000 attempts left but that -had- to be placeholder).

3000 attempts was indeed a placeholder counter that showed up on the PTR a few times during testing.

This is my single biggest gripe with the limited attempt system; it encourages raid leaders to constantly bench players who were not lucky enough to be in the raid group during the first attempt of Boss <X>. It is surprising that Blizzard went ahead with the limited attempt system in addition to gating the content. One would think having one or the other would have been the ideal choice.

As mentioned above, the only part of the announcement that was welcoming for me personally was the removal of the "better rewards" system for a perfect run. But even though there won't be achievements related to the amount of tries you had left when you cleared Icecrown Citadel, progression sites like Wowprogress will still rank guilds based on when they cleared the zone; was it when the maximum attempts were 15 or 25. This will again bring up the benching problem mentioned above, at least till the guild first clears the entire zone (which may be a long time for most of the middle-of-the-road guilds).

This also effectively kills pugging the zone, which is surprising given Blizzard's much talked-about plan to let everyone see and experience the Lich King fight in WotLK.

Limited attempts has no influence on pugs whatsoever, most (if not all) pugs disband after ~5 wipes on a boss.

Gating
ToC all over again and I advice everyone to get used to it - it will most likely happen again. Overall it is not big deal, you just start HM few weeks (months?) later. I buy argument that this is better for game, you can chill and enjoy patch content while waiting, they have more time for internal testing, patch is not delayed due to unfinished instance etc.

Limited attempts
I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about it in ICC. You have will have only 15 tries when HM open but keep in mind that:
- It only affects 4 last bosses, so on other 8 you can wipe 24/7 if you want
- Number of attempts will increase over time
The only thing that sucks about such low amount of tries is server lag etc. Overall it is not as big deal, again, as people make it. I am sure having 8 hard modes without limit won't be boring.

Achievements
While I appreciate removal of "Immortal" and "no wipes bro" achievements I think something like 25/50 and 45/50 should stay - so translating to ICC it would be 5/15 and 10/15. I think better "farm" performance should be rewarded, just it should not go too extreme.

Buff
Something new here, interesting how it will play out. I think, along with gearing up, it can make instance way too easy. However as with all new things we will need to see how it works in practice.

Are those truly "last bosses", or last bosses of their respective wing? Also, can you freely access other 8 bosses while ignoring those 4? I kinda thought those are gateway bosses, not optional ones.

It might not be a big deal for some people but you should not dismiss that this might be the dealbreaker for few. For me personally every pull with limited attempts is more about stress than it is about fun, that's how it was in toc and I don't see a reason why ICC should be any different. I can understand that some people like the challenge and the excitement in limited attempts, good for them.

Additionally the attempt limit greatly slows down the pace. Instead of making pulls, trying different strategies and actually playing the game we'll now (still) be browsing through datamined abilities and watching videos of our previous attempts. In TOC we would have to break off raiding for hours at a time because some people's connection couldn't quite handle Anub'Arak and we could not affort to squander attempts on disconnects. The longest we had between attempts just for strategic discussion was 90 minutes.

I recognize people are different in what they like but I do find it slightly insulting when people say it's not a big deal. For some people it IS a big deal.

In fact all of this is just to extend the time people (casuals, evening raiders, hardcore raiders) spend in the instance over a longer period of time.

Blizzard realized that there is absolutly nothing else (PvP aside) to do in WoW then raiding the last tier of content so they gotta make sure that there is allways a "new" last content available.

I truly wonder why there isnt more disappointment about the oppening of hardmodes like three month after instance release in this thread.
Doesnt it mean three more month of "boredome" for hardcore guilds?
This also means that all the gear obtained in Hardmode Coloseum will be outdated once IC hardmodes are available.

If there is such a thing as "gearing from previous tier for next tier" this now means "gearing from normal modes for hardmodes". Replacing normal t10 with hardmode t10 all over just seems wrong.
Also the "option to choose" is kind of taken away when 95% of all guilds will be so bored of normal IC after 3+ month of opening that just the usual progresion will be to start hardmodes as soon as they are available for most guilds

From a mid-level raider's POV (wouldnt say entirely casual), depending on the actual difficulty of the encounters, I expect that guilds like mine might not even make it to the wing endbosses in time before the next wing is released (and the number of attempts go up). So I'm hoping that particular concern will be more an issue with cutting edge raiding. At least, I'm dreading the idea of wasting attempts on early bosses, and then having to quit ICC for the week because we can't do Arthas anyway.

If I understand the layout of ICC properly, it's linear through Saurfang (with none of the bosses to that point being one of the four attempt-limited bosses). After Saurfang, it forks and you can choose (once more than one is open anyway) whether to go to the Plagueworks (end boss: Putricide), the Crimson Hall (end boss: Lana'thel), or Frostwing Halls (end boss: Sindragosa). You could theoretically go far enough in each to wave at the end boss, then turn around and clear through the others until their respective end bosses. So yes, that strategy of leaving all four attempt-limited bosses to the end of your weekly clear would work in theory. I suspect it won't be the general strategy, though, as those bosses are going to be higher-stress than the unlimited ones, and at least for my own raids, I'd rather spread them out for that reason alone. That said, it does mean that once you do reach your limit of attempts on those bosses, you can still go around and clear up every other non-limited boss in the zone on that reset.

I don't see the limited attempts thing being as big of a deal as some people (not necessarily here) make it out to be. Since there's no tribute reward, a disconnect or two won't kill your week when it's on farm. For people who weren't there for a first kill, they can still come in and learn it in an attempt or two without costing the raid rewards. The 50 attempts in TotGC seemed highly excessive to me; maybe my guild is different in this regard, but once you beat a fight one week, it'll most likely be a 1 to 3 shot (5 at the very most if your group has huge turnover) deal from then on. The limited attempts are there to slow down the speed at which guilds can learn the fights, and that's all it seems like it will do.

Yes once you learn a fight 50 attempts is a lot, but the learning part is tricky. 5 attempts for a fight you know nothing about and is presumably not easy might be too harsh and you have to factor in the hard modes as well.
Someone said it won't be as Ulduar where you had to decide whether to kill XT easy to get to Yogg or not, but it sounds exactly the same here, albeit with only hard modes. Once you kill Arthas-normal, you only have 10-15 attempts (leaving 3-5 for normal kills) to learn 4 hardmodes and you have to choose which one you're going for.
Possibly by the time the hardmodes actually open up the number of attempts will increase, that remains to be seen.

Well, the learning part is supposed to be tricky. That's the whole point of the limited attempts. I think TotGC failed at making learning tricky because the 50 attempt "limit" was hardly limiting--we spent two nights of 2-3 hours each learning Anub the week we got to him and, had we felt like it, we still had enough attempts left for another full night. However, the one hour per week of Algalon attempts seemed to succeed in making it limiting enough that it held groups back from killing him for a little while.

If Blizzard's goal is to limit progression speed, they have to do it by having the number of attempts (or amount of time, as with Algalon) be meaningfully limiting. By definition, it has to be too few attempts at first. Whether 15 attempts spread out over four bosses is the right number, time will tell. As for the 5 attempts at first for Putricide, I hardly think it's a "fight you know nothing about." Normal mode information is already being circulated, so it's not like it'll take a few attempts to discover that there's slime, and exactly what it does. And assuming your guild learns Putricide well enough in the first 2-3 weeks, Lana'thel will effective have 8-10 attempts to learn. Similarly, there will be 13-15 attempts to split between Sindragosa and Arthas when the final gate opens up.

I'd disagree with the opinion that it would have no influence on PUGs whatsoever. In PUGs there is a tendency for players not have as much of a commitment to the PUG group over a guild raid. Having a few players leave the raid for whatever reason on the third attempt makes it harder for replacements.

I run PUGs typically on the weekends for ToC25 and there hasn't been a PUG where even if the group was progressing nicely a player would leave the raid and need to be replaced.

My thinking is even if the PUG is good enough to down the boss and the first three attempts were close, finding a replacement is going to be hard. To convince someone to come in with the risk of being locked out of the ecounter after only two attempts instead of 5. It would be a hard sell.

I think the limited attempts are going to magnify the disadvantages of PUGs especially when trying to replace a raider midway through attempts.

Was this every actually explicitly stated, or is it an assumption by the playerbase?

It was stated. And to be honest it will definitely happen. The thing to remember is that this system is set up to make the content more difficult in the beginning but easier later on. They haven't released how quickly the number of attempts or the raid wide buff will increase (or how powerful the buff will be), but even with a very gradual curve there will be a substantial difference between the initial launch and when the next level of content is released. There will be plenty of attempts to burn and likely a fairly powerful buff.

They said they wanted casual players to be able to kill Arthas. They didn't say it would happen soon after the raid was released.

I don't have any problem with the methods of gating and limited attempts in theory, but I do not like the application of each and the combination of each in this case

Gating
It does help pace content for the vast majority of guilds. I have a problem with the fact that you have to wait until killing Arthas to do hard modes. This forces you to do the same old farming of the same bosses for quite some time. Some guilds need to do the farming, but other guilds do not. It limits the choice of challenging yourself to try to do an encounter undergeared. For those who enjoy the race it dilutes it. For those, like myself, who do a progression/achievement oriented 10-man and a more mid-level 25 man it takes a lot of fun out of the 10-man because we will be vastly overgeared once we have access to hards and have done the same normals for quite some time before being able to really challenge ourselves, and then we get all of the challenge at once. I know people might say you can control your own gearing and just use 10-man gear etc. But that is a pain in the ass that is only created because we have to farm for some time decided by Blizzard instead of us.

A possible solution would be to open up the heroic versions of the wings once you kill the normal boss of that wing. This allows more choice in how you are tackling the instance and the hard modes, and allows you to spread out some of the progression and some of the farming.

Limited attempts
Again, not a terrible concept and it does reward skill over time. However, this forces people to look at the strategy guides, and watch the videos. It kills the ability for people to actually do progression raiding on live. Instead you must go onto the PTR and your must read strats and watch videos. This type of raiding is just not as fun. It also discourages taking in new people, or trying new strategies.

A possible solution would be to have rewards for limited attempts. These rewards could be similar to Tribute to Skill and Mad Skill. You could keep out immortality/perfection rewards but still put in 45/50 and 25/50 type rewards. This would reward good play, but allow bringing in new people or trying new strats after you have exhausted those reward possibilities.


The proposed system just doesn't seem to address the issues. The hardcore want everything open at once and just let people go and get to hard modes as fast as they can. Those hardcore players will be able to get around attempts with alt runs, spending more time waiting on stable connections and certain individuals, adjusting strategies, and doing dry-run type practicing/drilling. The more casual don't want to be limited in the attempts they get, and they won't do those things to get around attempt limits, and instead will just be forced to stop and likely be upset that they can't continue to attempt.

Gating

I still don't buy the idea of gating normal encounters but not the hard modes. If anything, they can always err on the side of easy on the normal modes while it's the hard modes that need to be finely tuned to not be too easy nor too hard. All the advantages of gating the normal modes would also apply to the hard modes. The only reason I can think of is they want to preserve the instance race for the most hardcore guilds.

Buff

I like it. Blizzard has nerfed encounters in the past and sometimes, they go too far and make it a joke. Or they don't go far enough and most guilds still can't get past it. This makes content more and more accessible slowly. A guild who's struggling but almost beating an encounter can get it the next week while a guild that's barely denting it might need a few more. It's a more orderly way of making content more accessible while ranking guilds somewhat based on how they beat the encounter. Guilds who want the challenge can still opt out of it as well.

To get to an attempt-based boss at all you have to kill 5-6 bosses first (6 for Putricide, 5 for Lana'thel and Sindragosa). Once ICC is fully unlocked, you'll be able to down 8 bosses before you run out of non-attempt-limited bosses. Most PUGs are going to have a hard time getting through 8 bosses with the raid falling apart or people going to bed.

I don't think people are going to be more worried about stepping into a raid that's blown 3 attempts than they will be about the fact that the first 5-8 bosses are dead. I mean, stepping into a partially-complete raid already ties you to the success or failure of the raid as it is. The attempt mechanic is superfluous in that regard.

I can understand the limited attempts in Normal mode just fine. Why limit a guild to a mere 5 attempts on Hard Mode when they can practise all they want on Normal mode in terms of positioning or specific boss encounters? Have a go with some unlimited attempts on Normal mode first, then flick the switch to Hard Mode and having your 5 attempts left still just doesn't work.

As we don't even know how fast the number of limits will rise overall, I find it rather hard to tell how big of a 'problem' it'll be for the majority of guilds. That is, pretty much everyone out of, say, the World 100 or so.