Good: Ulduar and priests.

I didn’t start playing until Wrath and it’s always so interesting to see what more experienced players think of the expansion ^_^

Who knows, maybe when Cata comes out I can sip a martini and talk about the “good ole Wrath days”

Great post! I am SOOOO excited for all the upcoming ones you mentioned!
-Vih

I also agree with you about the ICC buff. It truly does diminish content and breeds worse and worse players among the community. My guild first killed Sindragosa on Regular with the 5% buff. Much roster changes have happened since then and I find myself as an officer and raid leader having to bring different people each week because of the casual nature of our raiding schedule. I just recently returned to the game and have restarted the raiding scene in my guild a coule of weeks ago and on our first real night we got to Sindragosa with the 30% buff and it stopped us in our tracks. People have gotten used to simply steamrolling the first 10 bosses and when one gets to a boss that is based on mechanics rather than pure output, the end result can be horrendous. Had I been put to the task of taking today’s general population of raiders and putting them up against a fight like Heroic General Vezzax for example, that is entirely based on individual player awareness and mechanics knowledge, I wouldn’t even bother. I stand with you on the hope that Cataclysm brings back some sort of required retard check that the general population has to pass to get into raiding.

However, I can see Blizzard’s point of view also. I am not aware of what the numbers are since the 30% buff but at the 25% buff only 14% of tracked 25 man guilds had killed LK on Regular. That is still a tiny number in comparison to the bigger picture. These instances cost thousands and thousands of dollars to make, code, render, etc etc. Blizzard is not interested in the expense and time involved to create such content if no one got to see it. A sad statistic in and of itself, only 4% of tracked guilds got to see the inside of Sunwell while it was relevant material. Wrath may have been a joke in many ways but the end of BC was an absurdity.

What Blizzard needs is a balance. A guild must be able to progress at a decent level with 3 nights a week. The 25-30 hour raid weeks of Vanilla will never work again if they want to keep a 11+ million subscription population and BC simply failed on its plain difficuly factor rather than time consumption. Wrath struck it right as far as lenght of play but it is debatable what effect the reduced difficulty has had on the population. With Cataclysm I think Blizzard is going to step away from the massive instance model and have smaller 5-6 boss instances. Something like early BC raiding with SSC and Hyjal. Then time management becomes an ease to officers because there ideally will not be such things as continuations. 1 night = 1 instance cleared. If they can strike a proper balance of raid difficulty it will be a beautiful thing.

Sad to say but raid progression is automatically gone in Cataclysm. With relevant gear all becoming purchaseable with the lower level tokens immediately at the release of new raids there simply will not be any use to going back to non-current instances except for achievements/vanity. Sad

P.S. We all know a person’s DPS is GS+2,000 right? lol. Death to GS.

- Who dispelled the abom?! ANNA?
- I call immunity based on the Anna Doctrine.
- What?
- The Anna Doctrine. You know? Blame Derevka?
- …

Now guilds with more limited time might approach it differently, so I’m sure it got used in that case. I really don’t have an opinion about it one way or another, other than I wrecked the Frost Lotus market farming Freya’s room by continuously extending that ID If anyone used them frequently and has an opinion I’m sure we would all love to hear it!

Heroic modes added nothing to lore, sightseeing etc – it’s called Heroic because it requires you to play better. Heroic mode is not required to “finish” the instance – that was done with normal LK. Heroics are optional. As what to do to alleviate peoples’ boredom if they can’t do heroic modes & don’t want to work towards beating them? Well, I don’t know – blizz has to figure that one out. But heroic modes are not about accessibility – they’re about challenge.

Could the argument be made that the bosses be tuned down a tad for more accesibily? Sure, but not to 20-30% levels across the board. But if players get burned out because they can’t or won’t take the steps to learn how to beat heroic encounters, well….stay out of heroics. There is no fun in facerolling bosses, and currently, that’s what it is. Fun in raiding is learning your abilities and working as a team .Would we have gotten heroic Sin & Putricide at 10% instead of 15? Sure – but we would have had to Up Our Game, and it would have taken longer, but it would have been a goal to work for. If people give up because it’s hard, you have to wonder why they’re raiding. And guilds that are just scraping by the heroics now to get to LK are going to be in for a rude awakening – it’s just not right.

And people are have been burning out long before the buff was even half applied…because they’re bored.

I don’t feel like it really cheapened hard mode progression at all because I would wager that in 90% of all cases a guild got a boss within 0-1 buff stacks of the minimum that they were reasonably capable of getting them at- that is to say, most guilds that got Putricide for the first time at 20% would not have gotten him if he was permanently in his 0 or 5% incarnation without drastically upping their game, which would generally mean replacing large chunks of their roster while praying that their existing competent players didn’t bail for higher-ranked guilds.

Additionally, a lot of the hard modes would have either been released at the equivalent of their 5-15% levels or been nerfed to that point or higher post-release if it weren’t for the buff, so if you’re on the bleeding edge then you actually got *more* difficult content out of this system.

Heroic LK being overtuned was bullshit, I’ll agree, but I’m pretty sure that was just because they preferred to have him impossible/borderline impossible at 0% to being too trivial at 30%. Should they do the ‘gradually nerf content’ idea again they should do it as debuffs on bosses that stack up individually. As far as ‘ludicrous mode’ fights in general go, I think Yogg0 nailed the concept by having it feel like an optional extra thing as opposed to a ‘mandatory’ part of progression- it was a hard mode of a boss that already had a hard mode and the rewards were purely vanity stuff, no ‘real’ loot. In comparison, you don’t feel like you can say you’re “done” with ICC until you beat HLK, so him being such a huge jump in difficulty can be pretty demoralizing.

My biggest “issue” is with the ICC Buff… First, I am GLAD its there… for Normal Modes. It lets everyone see all the content (more importantly it lets most people get a chance to see Arthas— afterall he is THE GUY we’ve been chasing since WC3). it doesnt make sense that Heroic LK seemed to be beatable only with the buff. Yes, the big ‘hard core’ guilds like Premo got him down far earlier than most… but still to only see US Top 81 just getting breached with 30%… seems a bit much. (insert QQ that Ava and I’s guild should have had him dead WEEKS ago but I digress….)