I agree with your statements that there needs to be raid content for the rest of us, but even you don't go far enough. There are plenty of raiding guilds that never set foot in Naxx. Remember how many guilds died when BWL came out because the first 2 bosses happened to be some of the most difficult ones?

There needs to be raid content easily doable by the rest of us. And with the rest of us I mean people who have not finished AQ40 and havent killed much/anything in Naxx. Yes that means that its free loot for the hardcore guilds? But so what? Its not like the low end raid loot is such a stellar upgeade.

Ultramax, you, being in a top raiding guild and all that, might not have much empathy for people who struggle with the basics. But there are more of those than there are people like you. So there needs to be content for those people, and the content needs to have the same group size as the endgame content (ie 25) for those people to eventually be able to move up to harder stuff.

AQ40 had its flaws, but the boss difficulty progression was one thing it got right. The first boss in any new instance needs to be trivially easy for anyone who beat most of the prior instance so that people are incentiviced to go and don't get discouraged for wiping on the first pull (and the "recruit better players if yours don't show up for learning attempts", while nice in theory, is not really viable for the rest of us for various reasons).

Clearly it's pretty hard to design an encounter that challenges Nihilum/DnT/EJ, while being doable for guilds that never really did Naxx, let alone all the guilds that never beat BWL or whatever. Even Malguar is a complex encounter. Kara seems perfect to me in difficulty scaling, but that involves all the drama and aggravation of splitting your 25-man raid team in to 2 or 3 balanced groups, which for us at least has been very hard. It's not fun going from curator the first week in Kara to 2 groups and wiping on midnight, trust me.

Pre-BC there was raid content for more than the most hardcore 1%. They even added ZG for the guilds that couldn't get enough people or whatever to do MC, to make raiding even more accessible. Now it seems like only Naxx-level guilds have a shot at doing anything in a group bigger than 10 people. I fail to see how that's an improvement.

In particular I can't see my guild EVER doing the mass consumable farming thing. Going from 3 day MC clears to 3 hour MC clears to 3 hour BWL clears through just gearing up and experience was one of my favorite things about the WoW endgame. It doesn't seem like that's an option at all in the current model.

EDIT: I notice 3 other people said the same thing as I did while I was typing this, so clearly this a pretty common problem. People reading this forum have to be, by definition,among the most hardcore segment of the population.

Major Defense, Ironshield and Flask of Fortification all use Ancient Lichen was my point, and honestly the older pots aren't really any cheaper because no one is farming it, and its not like fishing stonescale eels is fast in my experience.

I doubt you speak for the majority of the raiding population.
Gruul and Magtheridon are entry level raidbosses, if the best guilds in the world spent weeks or months bashing their head on them they would be far, far to hard.

Awake, you need to take your own posts and thoughts with a grain of salt here... especially when you whimsically dismiss thaddius as a trivial encounter.

You're in what is possibly the best guild in the world, and you're talking about not yet having defeated a "low tier raid in Burning Crusade" after what appears to be considerable experience.

To put another way, more than 3/4ths of the raiding population will not be able to kill in 3 months, what you cannot kill in 3 nights. Like I mentioned in my post, the 4 bosses our guild dropped in week 1 in Naxx, many other guilds didn't drop for 1-3 months after.

This might even be okay if Magtheridon was one of the ultra-late stage bosses; but he isn't. The requirements to kill him even with current gear make him significantly "harder" than Kel'Thuzad.

We need extremely hard fights, I think everyone agrees with this right? But those shouldn't be the first 3 fights.

I really try to avoid speculating on encounters that I haven't experienced myself.

Having said that, all I'll say is that he shouldn't be an extremely difficult endgame boss, nor should he be something viewed as relatively easy like Onyxia, given his place in the TBC pyramid.

My only point with my first post was that if the top end guilds are ramming their heads against him, and there's no bugs ala C'Thun 1.0, then yeah, I'd definitely believe he's too hard, because there's no way even middle tier guilds are going to ever get him down.

Brissa,

We spent a few days on Gruul before we killed him.


Quigon,

The reason Magtheridon is still alive (to us) is because we havent spent a lot of time on him, our main focus was Serpentshrine Cavern. A couple of days ago we decided to try Magtheridon and we spent about two days on him - learned the encounter and figured out he was possible. After that we spent another two days and almost killed him. I wouldn't say 4 days is a long time. The reason Magtheridon takes longer is due to the individual player performance. I still rate Magtheridon to be as easy, if not easier then Gruul.


Also, I totally love that the entry level raidbosses are hard. If you played EverQuest and ever did North Temple of Veeshan, you know that the Gatekeeper there was pretty hard. It's like a entry check if you're good enough or not.

NToV was the last zone of the Velious expansion. People were fully expected to do Vindi, KT, Dain, then farm a whole tier of gear in kael/skyshrine/west ToV, then key everyone for Sleepers Tomb to get the weapons from there, and THEN go to NToV.

I don't see why people are so bent out of shape of not having an "easier 25-man raid content". For people who raid quite a bit, wouldn't it be better to take a new person/recruit to Karazhan and wipe with nominal consumables or take them to Grull and watch them bomb the entire raid costing 100's up on 100's of G?

I personally think Kara is exactly what WoW needed in order to allow Blizzard to shrink the scaling they needed to accomidate for between skill/gear/experience. I firmly believe people will be pugging Kara soon enough once they get through a few heroics and get geared near what higher order raiding guilds were doing. Top tier blues pimped out with enchants/gems definately give quite a bit of kara loot a run for its money.

I think what a lot of people might be missing here is the business decision. Sure it is great having hard bosses, but when top end guilds are struggling that means middle tier and lower aren't getting them down or even experiencing.

As a business person this is downright horrible and terrible for monetary reasons. Why design something that maybe took your multitude of designers months costing thousands of dollars so that few people will ever see them?

If you are running a business and lets face it Blizzard is and I go up to one of their executives and say hey guess what I can make dungeon xyz that 70% of the people will see but it might be too easy and we lose 5% of our subscribers or we can make a tough dungeon that 5% of our subscribers will see what do you think he is going to choose every time?

I am aware of that, which is why I said that if the best guilds in the world were bashing their heads it would be far, far to hard.
Since you claim its easy (and seem to want it to be harder) it most certainly isnt for most players.

You cant (or rather shouldnt) tune all content for the top 0.05 or even 5% percentile of players.

While having really hard entry level bosses is cool for the upper echelon of the raiding community it makes absolutely no financial sense and it means that you shut a large portion of the playerbase out of a large portion of the content.
And personally id like to get as much value for my money as possible which means that id prefer to be able to have a shot at killing most of the bosses (which right now doesnt seem feasible, gruul and mag probably in time but doubtful with the bosses past them)

Not really, Sleepers Tomb was the final stop in Velious. While North Temple of Veeshan was the dungeon before that. You could compare NToV with Tempest Keep and Sleepers Tomb with Black Temple.

Or... Plane of Earth/Water/Air/Fire with Tempest Keep/Serpentshrine Cavern and then Plane of Time with Black Temple. Rallos Zek the Warlord was an entry check for the elemental planes. And he was also considered very hard.

Either way, I've always been in favor for entry checks (i.e attunements/flags/keys) which are hard and can't be done by just a group and has to be done by a guild. This is why I loved Planes of Power to EverQuest (see: http://www.graffe.com/quests.php?id=7 ) and it's also why I'm all for Gruul/Magtheridon being challenging.

It's worth restating the obvious: nobody considers Gruul to be in line with the loot that he drops. Even if Mags is on the same level as Gruul as-is he's still tuned too high.

Yes, but what people are saying is NtOV was not the "entry" raid zone..Your raiders were fighting dwarves, giants or other wings well before they went to pony up in NToV.

The first few entry raids should be "laughed" at by anyone who killed up to the 4h..Yet, most of the initial raids are much more difficult then even the last bosses in nax (Not saph/kel/4h)....

What people are saying is "super difficult" should be held for mid serp, not for the first 3-4 25 man raid bosses.

Now, I know you are saying its not "super difficult"...but I would have to say, your perspective is probably a little off just because of the guild your in and the level of dedication to learning encounters.

Tiers are there for a reason..You have to give the community on the whole a taste of what they want to shoot for...I meen, really, the "loot" is a *minor* upgrade from blues, the bosses should be "teaching" encounters if the loot is the way it is, not "gate keepers".

And screw flurry drakes.

Does it? Why?

I always thought/suspected that the point of introducing tons and tons of new content/progression in the form of 5-mans, Kara, PvP, etc., was to allow for elitist raiding to continue as a niche, without it being all there was to do.

When Naxx came out, the so-called "casual" player was justifiably irritated at yet another raid dungeon while he was running Scholo for the 60th time (but now to get his Dungeon 2 set, woo!). Here, you can't really fairly say that TBC is a raid-centric game. So what's the harm in having the raid content be largely inaccessible to most players?

Karazhan, Heroic badges and Doomwalker/Kazzak for the casuals. I also believe EverQuest had 700k at it's peak. Pretty good back then - horrible by todays standards.

There isn't any harm..But it depends on what you define "largely" as. To me, Largely would be 4 out of the 6 raid zones being inaccessible to more casual raid guilds, not all of it.

Serp, Temp, Hy and Black temple should all be tuned to be very very hard, to the point of nail biting impossible. Yet, tuning 100% of your raid content to laugh at any casual raid guild, to me, doesn't seem smart, especially considering the loot on said content.

And your point of saying this is what exactly? I can like more then one game.

The problem with Kara isn't a gameplay one, it's a social one. It's very stressful on guild dynamics to drop from 40 person raids to 10 man raids and running multiple balanced groups. If you're in a guild where progression is the main focus, people will deal. If you're in a guild that was a combination of a 'social' guild an a raiding guild, like many guilds, it's an extreme challenge.

Mostly though, I like raiding with my friends and having shared experiences as a guild ("we" beat Twin Emps! hooray!) Not running separate-and-inevitably unequal 10 mans for the foreseeable future.

I'm not sure Doomwalker is really casual-friendly by any means.

Kazzak basically just Emeriss 2.0, and will be a nonfactor in a few months, I agree.

Heroics and eventually Kara, are basically the PvE casual endgame. That's unarguably an improvement over the pre-TBC situation.

I think his point would probably be summing up your opinion on encounters as:

Tiger Woods says golf is easy.

I thought we finally got over the hardcoreness <-> group size mindset? I know its easier to design a hard 25 man raid than it is to design a truly hard 5 man as more things can go wrong in a 25 man, but that doesn't imply that every 25 man has to be ultra hard.

What about people who like large scale encounters but don't like to farm for consumables or wipe a month on the same boss? Shouldn't there be a room for those people?

I agree that there should be raid content largely inaccessible to most players. I do not agree that *all* raid content should be largely inaccessible to most players. I want to raid. I don't want to spend significant time farming for consumables, as it is not fun. I know plenty of people who think like me. We all fill Blizzard's pockets so it is in their best interest to cater to us.