Kudos, Blizzard – Or Was it a Mistake?

I have complained over and over again about how easy raid content in World of Warcraft has become and how I disliked the notion that every player should be able to see all of the content. I also complained about the roll-out scheme for WoW’s newest raid instance Icecrown Citadel and mentioned that all decent guilds would be sitting on their hands immediately after a new instance wing is opened, waiting for the next one to open so that they could finally get to hard modes ages after the release of the instance. It seems that someone at Blizzard heard my prayers, or came to her senses in some other way: The current wing of boss encounters is actually decently difficult.

Professor Putricide (image: worldofwar.de)

Looking at wowprogress.com, only 250 guilds world wide managed to kill Professor Putricide, the final boss of this wing, within the first week of availability. Now, this is clearly related to the fact that each raid only gets ten attempts at killing him before he will de-spawn for the rest of the week. Compared to the bosses in the Crusader’s Coliseum this is still a huge improvement – most of them could be killed without even a single retry. The other bosses in the wing are also quite difficult when compared to the previous raid instance. Festergut required a relatively high amount of damage per second from the raid and Rotface wasn’t very simple in execution. Both of these bosses made my guild wipe a couple of times, even when discounting any wipes that happened due to server issues.

Add to all this that the time for the next wing to open is only 2 weeks this time around and Blizzard may actually have found a level of challenge that I can live with. Clearly, none of these bosses will be huge road blocks on normal mode for the more advanced guilds, but they are difficult enough to give them something to do until hard modes become available. The only question remaining is whether this newfound difficulty is intended or not. If it is, kudos Blizzard! I still don’t like your delaying tactics, but the difficulty level seems to be alright now – and maybe that means that the jump in difficulty between normal and hard modes won’t be as terrible as in the Crusader’s Coliseum.

I still have a blue post ringing in my ears though, claiming that Icecrown Citadel’s difficulty in relation to player gear won’t be higher than what we saw in the previous instance. If that’s indeed their policy then they have failed at implementing it and I’m afraid that they’ll introduce patches to rectify it.

Dear Blizzard, please don’t. Cheers, me.