As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.
Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.
The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.
Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.
In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?
Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.
In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else - I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.
I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs - there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.
The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.
Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.
Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.
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Tags: casual, Guilds, Mechanisms, Musings, PvE, Raiding, Sunwell Plateau, wotlkYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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4 Responses to “And thus TBC Ends, both in a Bang and in a Whimper”
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In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?
Time is relative. SK Gaming spent over 40 hours on both Kil’jaeden and Mu’ru. They took vacation time off work in order to get those bosses as fast as they did. 40 hours, if you parcelled it out at 4 hours a week, like a non-hardcore guild does, is 10 weeks, or over 2 months.
As for Naxx, most bosses in Naxx fell as fast or faster than Sunwell. But Naxx was 15 bosses long, two and a half times as many as Sunwell. The one fight in Naxx that took a long time was Four Horsemen, and it’s generally accepted that it took so long because it required 8 warriors in 4-piece T4.
Additionally, the high end is more skilled than they were back then, as you noted.
Good post. I would tend to agree that the high end raiding guilds are just really on their games at this point. If there are no real new “mechanics,” it will always be a matter of how the present mechanics are orchestrated in any given fight. Now, myself personally, I’ve only just recently really began raiding, and my group hasn’t yet progressed beyond Lady Vashj, but even now I can see how much better we all get with time. I can only imagine how good those top raiding guilds are!
40 people = scary to organize. Ten bucks it took longer just from organizing and moving said 40 people.
I have also heard guilds like SK Gaming also raid every night of the week when they are going for a World First. Who has that kind of time? I am sure it takes more casual raiders the near same amount of wipes on the same bosses to get the mechanics down but it is spread over a longer period of RL time. Just a theory.
That aside… I agree with the thought of being glad not to be hardcore and burn through content. My guild is 5/6 in SSC and I feel that we won’t down Illidan till the end of summer or later. This is ideal for me! No waiting around for Wrath as I have plenty to do!
40 people = scary to organize. Ten bucks it took longer just from organizing and moving said 40 people.
I’m not too sure about that. For the average / casual leaning guild, certainly. But for those who, back in the day, were doing, well, BWL and beyond, their raiding cadre was built and recruited around players who would be disciplined enough to sign up for a raid, show up fully ready, stocked and repaired at the instance door at the invite time, and already having joined their class / role chat channel - failing to do that leading to a quick /gkick.
Inviting and assigning group was (is) something which could be done based on the signups and automated through an addon, and with a competent raid leader doing his homework beforehand, the time is essentially the same whether it is for 25 or 40 people. The biggest part is player selection, retention, gearing and training, and that’s mostly done outside of raids.