Ok that was funny. Though you should've said "leet" :P

My personal hope, you can make the bosses faceroll in normal if you want to EXCEPT Arthas. For the love of <insert the deity you care about here>, please make him tough even in normal. If anyone complains he's too tough the only response should be "He's the f'in Lich King. What did you expect?"

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Q u o t e:
Secondly, sad to hear that content will come in super easy and really hard. Its great that content is more accessible to the masses, and its great you are trying to provide hard content for the best raiders, but what about the average raider? Are we really going to be doomed to a place where progression is like running into a wall, where normal mode is a face rolling joke? Raids need a medium mode, and maybe even a nightmare mode for the really top end guilds.

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This is where we find ourselves as well. ToC25 was laughably easy to learn and takes all of 1.5 hours to farm each week, at which point we have nothing but outdated Ulduar content to work through for sake of achievements or a single legendary mace.

Makes me very much miss the TBC days when we had both SSC and TK to work through (and then BT and CoT) - enough content to split over our 3 raiding days.

We are laughing at ToC25 since day one, and at the same time we are pretty far away from beating the first (hardest?) heroic mode encounter in ToC25.

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They are harder in an absolute sense because they hit harder and have more health. They are not harder (for the most part) in a relative sense because you probably have better gear now than when you first went into ToC. Our goal is not to let players raid all the up until Icecrown and then throw a gate in front of them that says "Must be this elite to ride this ride."

Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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In most genres of games it is prettty universally accepted that final boss will be the hardest thing in game.

A lot of people I know actually base how good a game is off of how epic the final boss fight is and if the final boss fight say didnt feel as hard as that boss i fought 3 hours ago (in wow time it would be more like 2 months ago) then did they really lead me up to him successfully and your final impression of that game is being let down because that is what final boss fight truly is your last impression of a game.

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They are harder in an absolute sense because they hit harder and have more health. They are not harder (for the most part) in a relative sense because you probably have better gear now than when you first went into ToC. Our goal is not to let players raid all the up until Icecrown and then throw a gate in front of them that says "Must be this elite to ride this ride."

Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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I think you underestimate the predicament most medium guilds are in. Normal ToC isn't just easy. It's so ridiculously easy that you can ignore almost every fight mechanic and still win (this isn't an exaggeration).

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Q u o t e:
Two things I was sorry to hear.

The first was that T10 isn't going to be straight tier tokens. Tier tokens were great for BC, Naxx, and Ulduar, I'm not sure why you are requiring us to use badges to buy tier gear, then get a token to update it. Go back to plain old tier tokens.

Secondly, sad to hear that content will come in super easy and really hard. Its great that content is more accessible to the masses, and its great you are trying to provide hard content for the best raiders, but what about the average raider? Are we really going to be doomed to a place where progression is like running into a wall, where normal mode is a face rolling joke? Raids need a medium mode, and maybe even a nightmare mode for the really top end guilds.

I get that you want better loot for harder modes, and maybe the amount if time needed to make the gear is a roadblock, but maybe just more loot would be acceptable? Easy mode gives normal loot, medium mode gives 1-2 more drops of normal loot per boss, hardmode gives hardmode loot, and nightmare mode gives 2-3 more drops of hardmode loot, and maybe a chance at some rare mounts or other such things.

This way you can offer more options, and the better the group performs the better the rewards.

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What would be a cool idea is have the challenging mode for normal be encounter differentiation like sarth and drakes. Now add the normal and hard raid settings to it upon entering. This way it becomes more "on the fly" manageable like in Ulduar whit the hard mode activation for some bosses.

Take Freya for example. normal mode is likkingthe elders beforehand. Callenge mode would me with a variation of elders remaining standing when boss engagement happens.
Now add the zone in hard mode. She could have more HP and have more waves before final phase as well as add another type of summon that requires a mix of focusing dps as well as aoeing. Think of the Water boss in Violet Hold.
Now add the standard more HP and damage to the encounter and you have a "easy" straight normal encounter.
The challenging would be the current hard mode with a variation of difficulty baised on the number of elders.
Then you get to her on hard mode. its is normal but with the increased HP and damge and a possible new summon.
Then you get to the hardest or nightmare mode where the elders join the fight as well as provide their buffs or something of the like.

Another good example is Mimiron. His hard mode is well very different. Throwing this encounter into hard mode will make it well simply more HP and more damage around. Really cant see adding more or different things to the boss moves aside form phase 2 him grabbing people like the kilogram fight.

Just a few ideas going through my head.

Seeing a go between or have a switch to activate a few preset hard modes will make the encounters more "on the fly" variable and can change the encounter difficulty regardless of what difficulty you entered on.
This will add more of the middle ground raiders breaking away from the pugs that plow through content as well as the actual guilds that have troubles hitting the wall of the first boss like in ToGC and the impales gibing tanks.

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Q u o t e:


They are harder in an absolute sense because they hit harder and have more health. They are not harder (for the most part) in a relative sense because you probably have better gear now than when you first went into ToC. Our goal is not to let players raid all the up until Icecrown and then throw a gate in front of them that says "Must be this elite to ride this ride."

Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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I lol'd @ bolded,

<3 GC

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I think you underestimate the predicament most medium guilds are in. Normal ToC isn't just easy. It's so ridiculously easy that you can ignore almost every fight mechanic and still win (this isn't an exaggeration).

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This is my issue with the content. Any combination of players from my guild that happens to sign-up, with a few added in from a friend guild when short that night, can walk all over ToC25 normal mode and could from the first week each boss was released, but ToC25 Heroic is still beyond us as of yet.

If, as GC suggested, the time could be spent learning "harder" versions of the fights that are easier, that would be one thing, but there are only five fights and one of the hardest (if not the hardest) is the first one.

Filling the other 90% of our raids for the week has become an issue, perhaps largely due to having zero content to fill it with that isn't outdated (no one needs Ulduar25 gear drops and everyone is sick of anything but hard mode work in there).

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Q u o t e:


They are harder in an absolute sense because they hit harder and have more health. They are not harder (for the most part) in a relative sense because you probably have better gear now than when you first went into ToC. Our goal is not to let players raid all the up until Icecrown and then throw a gate in front of them that says "Must be this elite to ride this ride."

Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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This model doesn't work. I know I'm just another schmuck with 15 dollars a month, but I think the raid design team needs to take a good, hard, critical look at the current dungeon designs and ask themselves if that's what is best for the game. There is literally no progression any more in raiding. The bar between normal mode and hard mode is spread so far apart, that the middle of the road guilds have no where to go. Nobody wins except the folks who want gear with the least amount of effort and care about nothing else. Encounter design suffers fiercely because of this model.

I'm afraid that for a lot of people, 3.3 is going to be your last chance to do something amazing (and I know the team is more than capable of something amazing). Please do something amazing.

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Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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Dude better kick some SERIOUS ass.

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Q u o t e:
As other players have pointed out, the "medium" difficulty comes at doing some of the easier bosses in heroic mode.

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This would work if the difficulty curve ramped up somewhat smoothly from Anub normal to Beasts heroic. It does not. As a healer, the difference in difficulty is astonishing: from occasional and very avoidable tank gibs on Anub, to unavoidable tank gibs on the beasts (until your tanks get geared & put together a careful cooldown rotation). Once your guild is good enough to beat Beasts, it's probably good enough to get to Twins fairly shortly (baring a really tough FC comp).

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Q u o t e:
ToC only has 5 encounters, so there isn't a ton of granularity. Icecrown has more (though not 31) so we can provide more granularity.

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Hopefully said granularity includes a difficulty curve, not a difficulty spike.

i cant get over the fact that he is going to be beatable in a 10 man setting with a pug a few months down the road.

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Q u o t e:
i cant get over the fact that he is going to be beatable in a 10 man setting with a pug a few months down the road.

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I can't get over the fact that I am a giant blue goat from space that came here on a crystal spaceship and I have tentacles coming out of my head.

Also, I'm not sure why "graduated difficulty" fights like OS+drakes and FL and Freya are considered a bad idea. Because they're harder to design / balance?

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Q u o t e:
Ok that was funny. Though you should've said "leet" :P

My personal hope, you can make the bosses faceroll in normal if you want to EXCEPT Arthas. For the love of <insert the deity you care about here>, please make him tough even in normal. If anyone complains he's too tough the only response should be "He's the f'in Lich King. What did you expect?"

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I will second this. PLEASE, PLEASE do not have normal mode Arthus be a joke. Arthus is the lich king and I want to beat him, not walk over him.

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Q u o t e:


They are harder in an absolute sense because they hit harder and have more health. They are not harder (for the most part) in a relative sense because you probably have better gear now than when you first went into ToC. Our goal is not to let players raid all the up until Icecrown and then throw a gate in front of them that says "Must be this elite to ride this ride."

Now, if you are that elite, Arthas heroic says hi.

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It doesn't have to be like that though GC. To have the difficulty curve reset each patch seems a bit weird to me, people get better and improve you normal doens't need to be mind boggling hard, but it should feel harder than ToC25normal.

I thought ulduar was done well in this respect, Ulduar 25 was more difficult than naxxramas, and to an extent I feel that most of ulduar is still more difficult than ToGC/

Im not saying make it impossible for everyone but the elite, I jsut want to feel like Im accomplishing harder content each patch isntead of having a step backwards cuz gear is so much better.

edit: Which brings me to the first boss in ICC, I 3shot him wiht a pug on the PTR, for a boss where no mechanics are knwon that jsut seems wrong :(

It wasn't explicitly mentioned, but is it safe to assume that the three tier system (10-man, 25-man/heroic 10-man, heroic 25-man) will also still be in place for the Tier 10 sets? That was probably the best idea that came out of the Tier 9 experiment.

I'm with these folks. Normal modes don't have to be, nor should they be, cake walks. Especially not in Icecrown.. the place we've fought for years to even approach. There has to be a middle-ground between 'snoozefest' and 'murderously difficult'.. and I for one don't think it's wrong to ask players to have even as much coordination and situational awareness as was necessary even in BWL for a normal mode. C'mon. The game's going to get boring for all of us regular players if the only people who can tackle hardmodes are the Ensidias and the normal modes let Ma and Pa Kettle beat 'em.

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Q u o t e:


Dude is in fact the Lich King.

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Dude is the Lich King... WOAH.


Perhaps "Dude" is in fact an obscure reference to "THE" Dude...

In which case perhaps one of the LK's signature attacks will be making White Russians...
Throwing bowling balls...


He might even call us all Nihilists and ask why we defiled his sacred carpet...
Maybe he will remind us that this is NOT Vietnam...