Posted by Spooner | 8 Comments
Milking the Lich King
That title sounds pretty fucking gross, but then again I’m sure there’s a fanboy or girl out there fantasizing about having frostbite on their hoo-hoo. This post is actually about a big statement released by Blizzard with all the details for how the Icecrown raid progression is going to work. The short version: You won’t get to fight arthas at all until a couple of months after the patch goes live. Sorry. But after he’s been defeated and the content goes stale, players will get a buff upon entering the raid that makes killing all the bosses easier!
I’m still holding out hope for the raiding community (of which I am no longer a member) that the Arthas fight itself is going to be fucking balls hard and end up being something like the kill count total for Kil’jaden in Sunwell (damn near nothing).
Icecrown Citadel testing has been progressing very well over the last few weeks, and this has been a huge help to the encounter design team. I want to thank everyone who has logged onto the PTR and tried the encounters there.
As we’re now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, I wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point I can’t give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I’ll update the community so they can plan appropriately.
The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks. Then the Plagueworks will open with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide becoming available. After another period of time, the Crimson Hall will open and you can then fight the Blood Princes and Blood-Queen Lana’thel. The final Frostwing Halls unlock then occurs after that, making Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, and the Lich King available. We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.
There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.
The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Furthermore, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless the three aforementioned encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week.
The Ashen Verdict provides reinforcements and material for players to assault Icecrown Citadel, but this support is not endless. Raids will have a limited number of attempts total each week to defeat the four most difficult encounters in Icecrown Citadel: Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. As these boss encounters are unlocked, the number of attempts available per week will increase. The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana’thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses. After a raid has exhausted their attempts for the week, the Ashen Verdict must withdraw their support and the four most difficult bosses all despawn and become unavailable for the week. The limited attempt system is a feature of both Normal and Heroic difficulty.
There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).
In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell’s effect if they so wish.
I had a read about this on mmo earlier, and needless to say as a semi-HC raider im pretty fucking pissed that bliz deems it in their right to tell me, a paying customer, how much i get to raid every week. ITs bad enough that its going to be at least 2 months before we get to arthas, its bad enough that all those weeks leading up to Arthas will be spent grinding the same bosses over and over on easy mode, but the cherry on top of the shit pie is that youll get a limited number of tries per week to defeat arthas and the other 3 “challenging bosses” in the raid instance.
I was looking forward to Icerown being another great instance we could sink our teeth into as a guild, spend a whole week in there wiping, trying tactics, progressing boss after boss… like Ulduar was when it first came out, where progression was based on how far your guild was willing to invest in wiping and learning the fights.
Now what will we get? basically 4 mini-raids, of 4 bosses each, probably dished out each in intervals of 3-4 weeks, all becasue bliz dont like top guilds clearing their raids in the first few nights. you know what? If you dont like that happening, at least make the hard modes super tough, but this “gated” bullshit is a thinly veiled excuse to keep people paying by milking and stretching out the time it takes to clear an isntance as much as possible.
I probably wouldnt mind if it took 1 week for each new section to unlock, but “several weeks” between each tier of icecrown? Give me a fucking break. ._.
It’s starting to sound a lot like the SWP release pre-Wrath. You fought your way through dailies and such to gain reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive and progressively have the raid content sifted out in phases, like the advancements of the battle (sanctum, armory, portal, harbor, anvil, etc.) and the gates opening within the Sunwell. In the end, the Isle of Quel’danas received a zone-wide buff that upped everyone with 79 stamina and 40 intellect.
I want this to be epic, I mean, we’ve waited over a year to get a crack at Arthas and now the time is come. I’d definitely fall under the lore-nerd hard-x-core raider category, so I’d be EXTREMELY pissed if, on patch day, we walk in, one shot everything and down the Lich King with not even as much as an epic wipe-fest. I like how it’s going to start out uber hard and get progressively easier/more tolerant. Gives a sense of progression within the lore as well as via raid.
@Dran
The key thing is to remember there is a pattern and we should expect them to do this, especially on the eve of Cataclysm release.
They did it with the Temple of AQ where the legendary quest line depended on one player and their guild completing objectives to kick off the world event of the opening of the gates to AQ. I’ve seen it happen on several servers; some servers didn’t get AQ to open until, shit, just two years ago (cough, Fenris) which was AFTER the BC release.
Also, look at SWP and how we as a server had to complete dailies to simulate the offensive barrage on the instance itself in order to open the first gate and kick off each phase. We had to fill a quota similar to SERVER EXP POINTS (hmm, interesting idea) in order to hit each phase of the Offensive. Imagine if no one did that on your server, or not enough to bother with, you wouldn’t have any SWP either.
At least with this new time-line phase system it’s guaranteed content on a regular schedule with a fair shake for everyone at world firsts.
I agree that 3 weeks is quite a lot of time to “farm” the same boss over and over waiting for the next gate, but think of this… maybe it’s intended to allow everyone ample opportunity to farm gear from those bosses that is necessary for the next wing or even Arthas himself. The forced grinding of a boss-farm means more gear will get distributed amongst 25 people than if you’d downed LK in the first week. Right?
I’m getting the impression they’ve made IC25 much more difficult than Regular Mode TotC25. And for anyone who’s managed to get any headway in TotGC25, they’d tell you, that content is not easy by a long shot. Top Guilds even struggle on the HM Beasts. Hell, we can’t get through Lord Jaraxxus without half the raid dying (tyvm BR). I’m sure the content will not be faceroll; it’ll be pretty well structured around strategy and situational awareness even more than the Colosseum fights.
As a Pally tank, with the dodge nerf, let me tell you how crucial those 3 weeks will be; it may take that long for me to get the gear I need to face the facemelting Blizz has in store for my plate wearing ass.
…on another note, they need this patch to stretch into 2010 so they don’t have to do much between now and Cataclysm Beta.
Im on the fence about the gated content, What im not very happy about though is the limited trys for what will most likely be the only hard bosses in the instance.
To me it seems like a cheap way to make an encounter harder than it really is. The most fun I had in Ulduar (ill ignore ToC since its.. well not fun) was firefighter and 1 light. These fights actually pressured everyone and the encounter was hard just because it was just hard.
Algalon being on a 1 hour timer each week has screwed us to the point of still not having killed him. With several single digit % wipes happening weeks ago, any time spent re-learning the fight with new people, or having people DC, or anything like that has such a high price in terms of the group progressing. All this, when TBH algalon is a far easier fight than either firefighter or 1 light, which we got months ago.
The same goes for tribute to insanity – 3 weeks in a row of 49 attempt runs, and 3 weeks in a row RNG or other factors outside our control have cost us our capes. Running ZA for bears was far more forgiving than the current tribute runs, and i fear ICC methods of making the encounters challenging will take away the firefighter, ZA bear run, feeling of challenge and teamwork, and replace it with the RNG, 100% attendance, zero mistake type of challenge.
I like it
This will mean that the groups created will go in the web, read strategies like crazy and make each attempt count as they will not have much of them before they have to wait. We will see how this turns out. Usually when something is announced the public’s first reaction is to spit fire and flame. Its the easiest thing to do after all. I know you all want it to be perfect and that is why you disagree with some decisions that Blizzard made, but just understand that you can’t bring vanilla wow back, nor BT raids, or old Onyxia.
The only prblem i see right now is the HUGE amount of good gear for free that you can get. This allows you with little skill to do hard dungeons, because you have so good gear that even if you are a moron, you will still be able to live through a tough fight. Basically gear means almost nithing now. When you see someone with dressed from head to toe with purples, you just think that this lucky bastard has a good guild or he PUGs like crazy. You dont really have the same respect for him like you did in vanilla or even in BC.
@Chipcho Gear does mean something; I’d like to see said morons get down Beasts in TotGC25… If you get the Heroic version of the Vanguard, it means a lot. I’ve seen some pretty fuckin hilarious attempts at regular TotC 25 with a raid of people in full 232 gear and they still couldn’t do it. It takes more than just gear; it takes finness, strategy, dedication, lots of wiping, and an intimate knowledge of what skills your class can offer for raid survivability… oh, and said Moron’s most likely will suck balls on situational awaredness (FIRE BAD MMKHAY).
Problem is, those “casual” people are the ones who pay Blizzard’s bills, so they’re going to cater to them.
On gear – While yes its easy to get a decent set of gear without any skill or idea of what you are doing, its impossible to get a great set, and that’s all I care about. If anything all the free loot has made it easier to bring my alt into the same ball park as my main, but theres no question whos gear is better rounded out etc. All the gear in the world wont make moving out of fire any easier, so who cares.
On limited attempt boss encounters – Not everyone reads up every detail of every fight before they do it, a lot of what has made this game easy and stale is knowing how everything works, and yet while people know this, they still read ahead. For groups that like to figure things out for themselves, maybe dont have the most natural gamers in the world in their group, but as a group can work together to overcome tough encounters, limited try fights are a slap in the face. We can no longer work on a fight, getting familiar with it, observing all the spells, and helping others through it, without burning all our attempts. We will have to like you said, know the fight inside and out before attempting it if we want a real shot (if its actually any challenge in itself) which just seems like a bad way to make as instance harder, and takes away from the game.
I also have no interest in bringing back raiding from 60 or 70, on the whole raiding has evolved a long way since then, for the better.
All im saying is from my own experience with hard fights, and fights made hard by limited attempts/time, the whole concept promotes what I feel is bad for the game. It also makes progression more individual skill based, than group based, you will need everyone on the same page, and able to play flawlessly to learn a boss in 5 attempts without small errors costing a few attempts. This is not the sort of group I run with, we have several levels of understanding, but as a group we can learn a fight from scratch and have fun while we do it. This is not even an option now.