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.

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.

Problem is, those “casual” people are the ones who pay Blizzard’s bills, so they’re going to cater to them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ._.