Instance Design in Wrath

[Lissa]

I was going to post this in a Terenas only thread, but hey, all thoughts are welcome. The way instances are designed and released in tier 9 has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Ulduar is in a weird place for us now. I'd like to focus on killing hard modes, but half of the incentive to go there is gone now that no one really needs gear from there.

We farm ToC25 in 1.5 hours or less each week, do a 30m Onyxia and a 15m Vault25, and then WTF are we to do for the other 9-10 hours of scheduled raids? We aren't quite strong enough to do even the first heroic mode ToC25 fight, so that leaves Ulduar25 for the sake of achievements and someday seeing Algalon....

Just seems more and more like bad design to me now and I attribute a lot of our low sign-ups these days to it. The TBC model seemed better to me....releasing two big instances simultaneously (SSC & TK, BT & CoT), no hard modes, just bosses that get harder the deeper you go.

The ToC instance design seems fine for elite guilds that make sure only the best players raid with them all the time and are able to jump right from their first full clears of ToC25 normal mode into heroic mode, but any average guild composed of a mix of great, mediocre, and a few poor players had each normal-mode ToC25 boss on farm the first week they killed it and can clear ToC25 in 1.5 hours, but is a light year from killing heroic beasts.

The problem you're seeing isn't with instance design of Wrath instances, it's the fact that Blizzard did not have proper filler between the gap of Ulduar to Icecrown Citadel. Next time you take a fall down to Anub, have someone case levitate or slow fall on you and look to the south. Then when you kill Anub, take a look to the east of his chamber. You'll realize then that TotC wasn't the planned raid instance, there were going to do something with the Nerubians (something that Blizzard has originally talked about before Wrath came out, but scaled back considerably). TotC is something to try and tide people over to Icecrown (probably coming around the end of December, early January), the problem is, it's not even tiding more people over (Avarice's two 10 man teams already have completed Tribute to Mad Skill and will likely see one of the two teams getting Insanity this coming lock or the lock after, the early group has already reached Anub once with 50 attempts remaining), and Avarice is now doing two runs of TotC 25 normal to get everyone decked in 245 gear to make a very serious push at TotGC 25.

Also, the hard mode loot from Ulduar 25 is equal to the TotC 25/TotGC 10 drops. It may show as 6 ilvls lower, but the itemization was well done (another reason why you realize that TotC was rushed out as filler). Many items from the Hard Mode Ulduar 25 are still better than a good number of the 245 pieces from TotC (and there are even some items, like the Pennant Cloak from Sarth +2 25 which takes an insanity cloak or cloak from TotGC 25 to beat it because of it's itemization). In essence, everything about TotC screams rushed while the other intsances have not been.