“Accessible” is a better adjective than “sadistic”.
I’m not really sure why there’s all this fuss over the T11 to T12 transition right now. Most of it will work exactly the same way Wrath tier transitions worked, with the innovation that the badge currency system is more sensible now.
T7 to T8: When Ulduar came out, people stopped raiding Naxx except to farm older badges. Ulduar gear was better.
T8 to T9: When TOC came out, people reluctantly stopped raiding Ulduar, even though they were enjoying it more, because TOC gear was better.
T0 to T10: When ICC came out, people stopped raiding TOC, because ICC gear was better. Heroics & older raids started yielding Triumph badges, and all older gear was available for Triumph.
The badge system was messy for a while there in the middle, but by the end, it worked exactly the way T11 & T12 content is going to work.
The raid weekly was Blizzard’s mechanism to keep people going back to older raids. Achievements also encouraged them to revisit content that was no longer progression. But raiding guilds dropped older tiers from their schedules. This is a game about upgrading your stuff, and the most upgrad-i-est stuff is where raiders will focus their attention.
People were grateful that it worked this way and not the way it worked in BC. In BC, you had to run new alts or players through all the preceeding tiers to get them geared enough to survive the current tier. And to attune them, but thankfully that’s gone from the game nearly completely. Gearing somebody up was miserable, I’m told.
The only new thing patch 4.2 is going to do is nerf the previous tier of content. I don’t get why people are whinging about that, either. If you’re raiding seriously, you’ll be in Firelands. Why do you care that normal-mode T11 will be easier than it used to be?
It should have been easier than it is from the start, if you ask me. After the year of pugging ICC, T11 was a shock to the system. It took what had been an accessible raiding game and slammed the door in people’s faces. T11 has no gentle difficulty curve. It has no Flame Lev to introduce you to the flavor of an instance while not making you grind your teeth. BoT throws Halfus and his mortal-striking dragons at you right away. Magmaw makes your healers weep and curse the lie of the Cata triage healing model. Omnotron teaches you straight off that it’s interrupt or die and if your 10-person raid doesn’t have 2 reliable interrupts, you’ll be enjoying the death option.
Nerfing it should have happened pre-release.
Note well that I write this from the perspective of a guild that had no trouble with normal modes and is now enjoying the difficulty of the heroic modes. Even though we completed T11 normals back in January/early Feb, I can recognize how sadistically unforgiving they are. They were also horribly overtuned for 10s at first, and 10s is what the vast majority of Wow’s population is running. Nerfing’s appropriate.
The ICC ramping buff looks like genius in retrospect. It is secretly why pick-up raids were able to do everything but the end-wing bosses. It’s responsible for ICC’s accessibility.
I like accessible raiding. Accessible raiding is how newcomers get into it and learn that it can be a blast. Accessible raiding is where my guild’s next set of recruits is going to come from. Accessible raiding is what keeps people playing this game instead of wandering off to another one.
I’m happy T11 will be accessible instead of sadistic soon.
