Blizzard, don't do it.

Let the raiders either put up or shut up.

IT'S TOO EASY WAHWAHWHAHWAWH. Let's see how easy it'll be when they haven't had 2 months prior to release to test it to hell and back.

Use your elite dev team for balancing. Just do it.

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Q u o t e:
Use your elite dev team for balancing. Just do it.

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Because that's worked so well in the past, right?

They should just invite guilds that aren't getting world first kills but can handle content well enough to get things adjusted correctly.

Like mine! I wanna go now!

Anyone else remember the giant cockblock that was 4H in old Naxx?

Releasing Ulduar as an unknown dungeon would kick ass. People would be debating strategies and exploring rather than steamrolling and yawning. There would be a race to kill the last boss, not a race to log in first.

Unfortunately, Blizzard's track record says the instance would end up completely, unplayably broken. I like the idea of using a closed beta to do the bulk of the testing. Then just tweak a few things to make the closed beta strategies backfire, test the tweaks internally, and test the last one or two bosses entirely internally.

Then watch doodad_uldor_2 be an unopenable door that blocks everyone from getting past the first boss until another patch fixes it.

We all know how well untested MC worked and bwl guild tested zg worked.

Blizzard has proven that via their internal testing team they are entirely capable of tuning content flawlessly,
perhaps not for every boss in a zone, but definitely for a couple.

Given what was said in an interview a few months before WOTLK launched regarding 3.1 already being done then, i'm taking the optimistic approach and hoping that they've used a good deal of the time since to get a lot of balance testing on Ulduar.

Given that Naxx didn't really need to be too finely tuned and so shouldn't have required much time, as anything easy-ish woulda been fine, much the same as with Malygos and 0 drake Sarth, it seems reasonable to assume this may be the case.

Blizzards gotten FAR better at balancing raids without players testing them for months.

Four horsemen, Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad (besides his despawning stuff) were all untested in the original Naxx (there may be other bosses, I don't know). M'uru was barely tested and Kil'Jaeden wasn't tested either. All of these encounters (besides very minor issues, and of course you can debate the tuning) were some of the most challenging encounters in this game to date and were never really tested by the WoW player base.

All entry level TBC content (besides Gruul who was re-tuned) was all untested and turned out "fine" for the most part (Kael'Thas, Solarian and Vashj were the exceptions). I put emphasis on fine because while they were do-able they were so vastly over tuned for their level in raiding spectrum.

I for one would love it if they tuned Ulduar internally, released and closely monitored it to make sure that encounter breaking mechanics/bugs were hot fixed/patched quickly, none of this C'Thun bull%@#%. I would however be fine with just the first half of the bosses tested while the other half was internally tested.

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Q u o t e:
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids.

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This is excellent news.

While I don't think it's fair to divulge exactly how many bosses there are going to be in Ulduar, would you mind letting us know if it's going to have a number of bosses similar to Naxx?

Does Ulduar consistenty get tougher the deeper you get into it? Lastly, while I don't think the last boss should be 3 drake difficulty Sartharion, how close to Sartharion with 3 drake difficulty are the last few bosses in Ulduar going to be?

edit: Sorry for the double post ;(

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Q u o t e:
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids.

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Good enough.

Very happy regarding "a LOT."

Bring on the contents.

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Q u o t e:
Blizzard, don't do it.

Let the raiders either put up or shut up.

IT'S TOO EASY WAHWAHWHAHWAWH. Let's see how easy it'll be when they haven't had 2 months prior to release to test it to hell and back.

Use your elite dev team for balancing. Just do it.

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IIRC, the last round of 100% untested content gave us an impossible Ragnaros and superbugged BWL.

When world-firsts are done minutes apart, something is wrong.

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Q u o t e:
Blizzard, don't do it.

Let the raiders either put up or shut up.

IT'S TOO EASY WAHWAHWHAHWAWH. Let's see how easy it'll be when they haven't had 2 months prior to release to test it to hell and back.

Use your elite dev team for balancing. Just do it.

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My guild cleared every 25 man in the first week of trying without playing on the ptr at all. And we're not that good.

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Q u o t e:

IT'S TOO EASY WAHWAHWHAHWAWH. Let's see how easy it'll be when they haven't had 2 months prior to release to test it to hell and back.

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Most high-end raiders consider Naxxramas to be very easy because

1) It was balanced to have a high margin of error for most encounters, both in terms of execution and healing/damage.
2) Most of us that claim that Naxxramas was easy raided it back when it was endgame content. Nearly all of my guild members had already cleared it despite that they had never stepped into Naxxramas on the 3.0 PTR.
3) It was even nerfed down relative to how hard it used to be. Noth summons fewer adds, Heigen doesn't port you to the gauntlet, the Four Horsemen's debuff is far shorter, there are fewer adds on Gothik, Kel'Thuzuad's cooldown on Mind Control was increased, on and on and on.

I don't quite understand why anyone would want to make new raid content unavailable on PTRs, there are a lot of high-caliber guilds that want some actual difficult raid content.

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Q u o t e:
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids.

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This is good news, but can you please look at ways to address scaling of these fights so that while very difficult with 25 people it's not nigh impossible with 10. HP and damage reduction just isnt enough in many cases.

That being said, I think it was and is an excellent idea that just needs a few tweaks next time around.

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Q u o t e:
There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it.

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That's right, all the bad guilds who choose to fail earlier than the good guilds will technically be higher than the good guilds in progression for almost a week!

Kidding...

Limited testing worked out alright for Sunwell, I'm sure it will work out well enough for Ulduar as well. If there is another encounter like Muru in there though I'm probably going to quit the game to go kill people for a living.

Someone DCd, wipe it!