Those are four most difficult encounters according to Blizzard. Sindragosa, and the Lich King are at the very end so that leaves Professor Putricide and Blood-Queen Lana'thel at the end of two "middle" wings. I am not sure exactly how ICC is structured but I think you should be able to access everything besides Valithria Dreamwalker (which is in last wing) without touching those four. So that leaves us with 7 bosses and assuming they will be pre-Anub difficulty thats almost double content (7 vs 4) compared to ToC and without attempt limit. If you will need to defeat Professor Putricide to access 3rd wing that still leaves us with 6 fights.

Those are valid points but then I like that people can't brute force thru those fights for example. I think I liked more Algalon style. Give like 2 hours per boss and give ability to stop timer (maybe once per day to not abuse it). I think timelimit is better than number of attempts and it stops shit like waiting for cooldowns before next try etc.

You will have several weeks of 5 tries on Putricide, several weeks of 10 tries on Putricide and Lanathel and one week of 15 tries on all four endbosses. If that's not enough for the first two to be played out endlessly in all possible normal mode variations, then i dont know how often it takes.

Getting rid off the 50 attempts reward is a good thing in my opinion. Besides the point of it being lucky or skill based or to what percentage, it felt very frustrating and ruined the fun for alot of people in alot of weeks. If it was achievement only maybe it wouldve been better. Alot of players care less about missing out on achievements than loot and pushing the go for this achievement to the next week in favour of bringing more of your roster into the fight or testing out other tactics would've been less of an issue. As it was, we felt somewhat awkward to change our stance on giving everyone a fair amount of raiding time on something iconic like an endboss for the sake of progress.

The workaround of alt raids to double or even triple the attempts you have on the bosses cannot be prevented. As someone wrote earlier already, alot of guilds do 10mans before 25mans for this reason already. People get familiar with the encounter in a simpler version and this helps progress on the harder versions. If you would limit the attempts or lockouts to accounts then some would buy more accounts, if you would limit it to guild they would create an alt guild. Point is if someone wants to circumvent this mechanic and doesn't mind the extra effort he can. All blizzard can do really is to shift the balance how much more effort you need to spend to gain this advantage.

As far as i know it goes like this. The first 4 are not optional and have to be killed in this order Marrowgar->Deathwhisper->Gunship Battle->Deathbringer

Then you have 3 choices:

• Rotface or Festergut, after those two are down you can kill Putricide

• Blood Princes->Lanathel

• Dreamwalker->Sindragosa

After the 3 wing endbosses are dead you can go and kill Arthas.

Gating is certainly something we have come to accept from Blizzard, but I think in this case they have the potential to take to too far. Having one week between wing unlocks will be "OK" (I would prefer no gating at all, but I digress...), having more than that is likely to kill all interest in the raid before the whole thing is released.

As many have stated - what is stopping people from simply suspending their account or not logging on until Arthas and hardmodes are available? Surely they don't expect the three new 5-mans to satisfy people for weeks. Guilds focused on world firsts only care about what is available after Normal is cleared, and general PuGers will want more attempts on the hard bosses before devoting a signifigant chunk of time to it.

All of the restrictions and gating that Blizzard has mentioned so far makes 100% perfect sense if it applied only to the hard mode ICC (all top guilds would have an equal shot, no need to burn people out in a massive grindfest on release, etc), but since it also applies to normal mode...its harder to swallow.

I know Blizzard wants to stretch ICC out to fill in the gap before 4.0 as much as possible, but I think they are going too far and it is definately way too transparent this time around. Another reason why this proposal is so off-putting is we are still coming off of a very bad taste in our mouths from ToC which was largely seen as a rushed filler raid with an ill-thought out system.

As Benita pointed out above me, and as I mentioned earlier, all bosses but the four attempt-limited bosses can be killed before engaging them. The only sense in which Frostwing Lair is the "last" wing is that it's the last to be released. Once everything is open, all three wings can be attacked in any order; you could go straight for Varlithria and Sindragosa after Saurfang at that point, if you so chose. It's not that Arthas is sitting at the end of Frostwing Lair, like KT was down the hall from Sapphiron--you just have to have cleared all three wings to get to Arthas.

Weeks of gearing in the earlier wings of the instance? I'm sure the hard modes will be tuned around people in ICC normal mode gear.

I believe the ICC 25 normal gear is higher ilvl than 25 man ToC Hard (264 vs 258)
I know thats not a huge jump but it's also not enirely useless either.

For Ulduar (and Sartharion), the hard mode concept seemed to be really working. General Vezax, XT-002 Deconstructor, Flame Leviathan, Mimiron, Yogg-Sarion, Iron Council - the hardmodes were drastically different fights. Each one took a completely different approach to the fight than their corresponding normal modes, and that's what made them unique. The mechanics, mindset, and tactics all changed.

Then came Trial of the Crusader. Hard modes here were just stupid. The fights were almost identical save for maybe 1-2 changes. You approached the fight in the same way and the only thing that changed was the necessity for perfect execution. The standards, however, did not change. The standard for perfect execution in the normal modes are identical to the standard of perfect execution in the hard modes.

Algalon was also a pretty massive flop in a similar way. Most guilds killed Algalon in 5-6 hours of raiding. When I was in Ulduar, my guild spent 7 hours on normal mode Mimiron. We spent 5 hours 51 minutes on Algalon. It seems like the paradigm is way off here... A normal mode fight shouldn't take longer to learn than a gated hard mode fight. While Algalon was hard, the fact that it was so easy to learn is just depressing.

By forcing guilds to use only 5 attemtps per week, they're setting up an idea that the average "good" hard mode raiding guild will down the boss in 25-30 attempts. For many guilds, that's one night of raiding. Now, apply that same standard to the best "hardmode" fights designed in all of raiding - Yogg-Saronx0, Mimiron Hard, M'uru, Kil'Jaeden, even Archimonde. Imagine if these fights had been tuned to be done in 5 weeks with 5 attempts per week. Imagine how much they would need to be nerfed to get to that point.





I think a large reason that Blizzard is moving in this direction is due to their aging core. While we don't have access to the data, Blizzard probably does. It seems likely that their 19-20 year olds that were playing 4 years ago are now turning 23-24, finishing college, starting families, etc. It's likely that the hardmode raiding core in WoW is dying, and so Blizzard is forced to try to compensate. They're keeping players around by reducing the required amount of raiding per week.

It's an interesting question though - how should Blizzard tune the number of hours required to beat a fight? And should they mandate that requirement by limiting attempts.





I think an interesting compromise that someone mentioned on these forums before is to give bosses a buff after each wipe after a certain number. For instance, after your 10th wipe of the week, the boss gets a 2% damage increase that stacks higher with each wipe. After 5 wipes, the boss is doing 10% more damage. Maybe you cap it out at 20%. This would allow the "hardcore" guilds to conceivably keep trying with a hope of completing the encounter, while "casual" raiding guilds could justify their 3 nights/week raiding schedule.

A hard gate with # of attempts or time limit isn't the only way to level the playing field.

I don't think this is where the changes are aimed though. With only a few bosses open at a time and no hard modes, more normal raiding guilds (i.e. those without ToGC25 hard on farm for more cloaks from the end chest since they have regular perfect runs) will have time in their raiding weeks for revisiting older content. You know, finishing up Ulduar hard modes for the drake and downing Alganon, or getting through ToGC25. Obviously they haven't gotten enough guilds through even the Ulduar hard modes (if they had, the drake reward for the achievement would be going away), much less ToGC.

I think this accounts for better than 95% of all guilds out there. This way they (I'll admit it, we) will be able to get new gear from the new instance, but then will have time to kill going back to old content for unfinished business. Then hopefully have the new ICC bosses on farm enough where when the next set come out we can concentrate on learning only a few more new fights. Yes learning, as most of us don't jump on the PTR to see the new content first...we have things to finish up on live servers, farming to do, achievements to get, etc. Or just plain not a lot of time to play outside of raiding.

So, this system, I think, is great for the vast majority of guilds. For those on the cutting edge, with all 258 gear and 270 cloaks even on your alt crew...yeah, you might as well take a 3 month vacation from WoW and try out DAO or Aion. Don't take that as rude...what I mean is, with the way Blizz is releasing content, you have 3 months before you can do the fights you want to do, and if you keep playing WoW you'll just be bored/frustrated. You can come back once Arthas is released, beat him in normal in a single night sometime in that first week, then come back on Tuesday to work on heroic mode and the fights you are looking for.

The system Blizzard has chosen is not optimal for you, and you should let them know your displeasure. I completely see where this isn't going to be fun for you. Frankly, I'm a little saddened that I won't be able to work on 10 man hard modes for a while (doing that has been more fun than our 25 man runs in ToC, which have had no success yet on heroic). But we'll have time to do some old content we haven't finished yet, and I'm happy about that. I think a lot of guilds are.

The T10 upgrade system (once we know the full details) will keep raiders doing normal modes so they can buy the first tier and save for the second (assuming it works similar to T9).

It's not going that way actually. Those "4 years"-ago players aren't the only ones looking forward competitive play. Some people go, some people get in.

Reason behind this, in my opinion, is more or less "quality" and "quantity" of players, who are doing this for the goal, and not just for "filling up time". While overall quality-level raised up drastically since the ages of vanilla and even TBC, amount of dedication from people went down. Mostly because of players themselves. I personally still miss pre 2.1 times when you actually did something to perform better, and not just went inside the instance, did the buffs and pulled the boss.

This will continue, and sadly, it can not be stopped.

One thing that bugs we is how long will heroic gear last. It's either there will be massive gear inflation in Cataclysm or we will raid t11 content in heroic t10.

GC did say we'd freak when we saw gear in Cataclysm, so probably the first one.

The exact Ghostcrawler quote:
"Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too".

You can guess that the original plan was along the following lines:

Nax: ilvl 200 / 213
Ulduar: ilvl 213/226
Mystery raid (ToC): ilvl 226/239
IC: ilvl 239/252

And that's it. We should have entered IC with an average ilvl 235 or so on stuff, and there would have been no need for a Sunwell radiance-type debuff. Instead, we got an additional tier worth at the lower end, where they started adding half a tier between 10man and the previous 25, and an additional tier at the higher end, in the form of "Heroic"-tagged 25 man loot. Basically, we got the equivalent of 2 unplanned raid tiers in this expansion.

And the next expansion is only 5 levels. Hmmmm....

However, by the time that gear inflation became an obvious effect in Wrath, formulas had been set - you were getting X % dodge, Y% crit and z% hit per rating, and we were seveal months into an expansion already. While some things were changed (duch as the avoidance rartings, insufficient as it was), it would have been a massive task to redesign all the ratings, and rebalance all the content for those ratings. And most of the WoW population would have been complaining "FFS Blizz just put Sunwell Radiance back in, stop wasting time rebalancing, and give us more raids".

While it's not impossible that a similar unplanned inflation will happen during Cataclysm, one would assume that it's a lot easier for Blizzard to bump up the ratings gradient in content that isn;t even in Beta yet to compensate for what's going on in Live without the need to rebalace multiple tiers of gear and bosses that players are already using.

The game changed, if your attitude didn't change and you enjoyed the pre 2.1 raiding that much then yeah, sadly the game has changed for the worse for you.

Most top 100 guilds have a rather light schedule by now compared to those times, basically because it just takes less time to get all on a farming status. They only go back to their old schedule on the weeks where theres actually something new to beat. By now i would say that most that need the 12h raids for months have left this game and went to play something more grinding or actually got some help.

Making the raiding game available for more players is a good thing for blizzard and for the game. The only downside is there for people who played this game to gain a feeling of being among the chosen few who have seen content that others did not. And by all means they still try to cater to more than one group of raiders with the different raid sizes and difficulties though granted that system often feels awkward. (Like hearing that stupid gnome fail to control a demon up to 8 times a week.)

Gating is just another method as they have described already to succesfully keep the raiding game in normal measures. You could argue that it's not their job and the people could do that themselves, but the reality is different. If BC has taught us anything it's that a full frontload with hard attunements is the worst possible method and leads to endless waiting time for something really new for the guilds that play that much.

If you'd ask me, i would say releasing a boss every 2 weeks would be the best to organize around and would keep the fun up for the most people, but that obviously has some testing and lore issues like this shoehorned "Ashen Verdict attacks but only up tooooo here." At least having a set week for a frontload gives people some time to keep their RL schedules light during those. Not everyone can go to their boss and ask for a few days off work in a random week like some guy suggested in an interview on WoR. Sadly that is what it takes to get high ranked kills in a pre 2.1 raiding setup (and to some degree even now).

While what you say is true, how does gating content make it more accessible, and is the accessibility caused by "pushing content" really the kind accessibility that ultimately makes a good a game?

Reducing the logistical requirements to form a raid by lowering raid sizes and removing many out-of-raid preparations (weapon oils, resistance suits, attunements, increased money making from raiding itself to pay for repair bills.) were perfectly sensible actions to reduce the time neccesary to raid. The game is closer than it has ever been to a point where the vast majority of people playing can log on and raid if raiding is what they want to do. This is, as you said, both nice for gameplay as well as being a good business move.

But there's a pretty hefty difference between "if you only have three hours to spare on wednesday and you want to raid, you'll be able to spend those three hours raiding" and "if you have three hours to spare, you're still only raiding two." Maybe I'm just being dense, but havn't we sort of passed the apex of the trajectory here? For years the game has moved in a direction where you could log on, and raid if you wanted to rather than doing a bunch of preparations, to a point where we're suddenly going to spend considerable chunks of the time we're customers not raiding, because the raid's gated or attempt limited? How is effectively transfering back the control-over-our-own-time we've been given over the past few years, in order to increase Blizzard's control over the subscription-time each tier of content lasts, increasing accessibility?

I know some people would argue that it would give more time to revisit old content, but I don't buy it, primarly because of Naxxramas, but also from personal experiences with my guilds raiding schedule during ToC. Naxxramas demonstrated that without a tangiable in-game reward, content can easily sit there for more than two years and be so underused it can be reintroduced with minimal changes without making the sky fall down. The replayability of old PvE content, with the current level/gear advancement paradigm, is quite frankly, a persistent myth. If there's loot worth having - which is why the proto-drakes for Ulduar are still there, as well as why we're seeing "raiding dailies" - you can maybe convince people to show up. If there's not that bit of loot, Naxxramas is a burning torch of an example that shows that old, non-loot worthy raid content, cannot serve as a replacement for actual raiding. People just aren't that into it, and Blizzard knows it; Character progression - due to the design of the game, that's primarily but not exclusively gear - is a more powerful motivator to participate in content than anything else in this game. (At this point you could easily slip off on a tangent about Path of the Titans progression system in Cataclysm. Blizzard will be using that system to move a portion of the the character progression motivator to content that doesn't destroy old content quite the way gear advancement does. Which is awesome, but not really within the scope of what I'm getting at here).

And from a strict gameplay perspective, as has previously been pointed out, the attempts limit don't really stop the really competitive, due to alts, PTR. Since it'll be shifting upwards, it's hard to call it part of the encounter difficulty either.


Don't get me wrong, Blizzard is a business, with the goal of making money. When we pay by the month regardless of how much we play each month, it's obviously in Blizzards best interest to keep us playing as little as possible over longer periods of time - it makes them more money. Having people kit themselves in the BiS of this tier and then cancel til the next tier comes out cause they're now Prepared is bad business. If they can do something about that, they obviously should, and this is an excellent, low-cost, high-yield way of doing it.

I suppose the logic they've used here is that while top end guilds will clear the first wing in a week, the really slow progresng ones will clear one boss a week. So, set the gate for 4 weeks and everybody has an equal start at the next wing.

Minor note - they changed the weekly raid quest so that it rewards 5 emblems of frost and 5 of triumph.

Lord Marrowgar Must Die! - Quest - World of Warcraft as an example.

Considering the complete gearing redesign that's hitting with Cataclysm, I suspect we'll be trying to toss our current gear as fast as possible for the new numbers. Most of the pieces I wear to tank with currently possess stats that will no longer exist in game, and there is no WAY a retouch pass on current gear will end up as good as gear built from scratch under the new system, so to speak.

That's technically untrue - faster kills means more kills, which is more loot, which means non-equal footing - and somewhat unrelated? My access to the content represented by <Insert Foe> is very thinly connected to, well, the next guy's access. I can't kill Ragnaros because I physically lack the time to perform the neccesary preparations, but I can string togheter two hours of playtime once a week. The raid content is inaccessible. Those two hours of play time is sufficient to allow me to participate in the glorious battle against the Elemental Lord. I can access the raid content. In what way would this be influenced by the timeline between my first kill and the first kill of Guild of Greater Awesomeness?

My largest concern is one of guild logistics - how to prepare a guild for the jump from normal mode raiding (which could presumably be done in 1-2 nights) to hard mode raiding (a 3-4 night raiding schedule). I've tried to avoid the issue with 3.2 (raiding Ulduar for achievements) but that's going to be abandoned over the holiday season. I was hoping the total time of gating would be around a month - annoying but doable. Seven weeks of gated content is going to be really tough to handle.

I'm worried because I remember the transitions from MH/BT to Sunwell and from Naxx to Ulduar. Once people get in the habit of not going to a raiding day, it's hard to bring them back.