I don't think we will have to worry about the difficulty of Icecrown for one single reason.
Unless people can forward me to the quote where a blue said "We won't do another SWP" I will stand my ground and remember that the quote was "We don't want another M'URU FIGHT where it takes 500 attempts to kill the particular boss.".

Sure, there were guilds that killed M'uru, we didn't but we were really close to, but I think everyone with a normal mind can admit that it was overtuned, not because the fight was hard, it wasn't, but because of the raid stacking and insane DPS requirements (Brutallus was supposed to be the DPS check of SWP, not M'uru, which they failed at.) to finish the fight.

As you saw after 3.0 M'uru became a joke with the 30% hp nerf, and I strongly believe M'uru would be considered a hard boss still but much much more doable for the majority (To the people who say people are terrible of not killing M'uru, I want some of what you are smoking, killing 4 of the 6 bosses isn't enough proof to show that there's enough team work?
A terrible raid group wouldn't get past Kalecgos let alone Bloodboil in BT, so leave that ***@ outside this thread.) if they reduced the health not by 30% but rather 5% of the adds but not on M'uru except Entropius.
The DPS requirements would be much more satisfying, you wouldn't have to stack 5 shamans and you wouldn't have a boss laughing in your face for, what was the medium killing time for M'uru? 2 months? but instead would be considered a hard boss that maybe took 1 week to kill, which I think most raiders are fine with.

I believe Blizz thinks the same way, the rest of SWP was perfectly tuned (Never done KJ pre-nerf but seen friends progress on him.), the curve was about perfect and without being major brickwalls they were still a challenge (don't lie, Kalecgos didn't take 3 hours of learning attempts for the average guild to kill.) and from what I've seen most raiders were pleased with the instance overall, I know I loved it at least, brought back memories from old pre-tbcnaxx when you killed a boss.

Now, my point is, without anyone posting the quote where Blizz right out states that there won't be another raid with the difficulty of SWP and not just M'uru, I don't understand all the whining about FUTURE raiding.
I do understand people aren't pleased atm, I ain't, because there isn't a higher tier for us that are tired of clearing the current raiding scene in 2-3 days, but unless you are Nostradamus, how do you know Icecrown, heck, even the instance that's scheduled for 3.2 will be "we cleared the whole place in 1 day"?

I strongly believe we will have our challenge, believe what you want, but I think nobody, even Bob 12 years who can't play this game for ***@ and is wiping on Anub'rekhan for 5 days, want this game easy, it's the human nature to want something challenging, something you work for and in the end achieve, in which you can pride yourself and say "I finished a hard problem."'

The Lich King: I hope you will steamroll our faces for weeks, not in M'uru style but in KJ-style, with a good challenge but you still never feel out of reach of the current goal.

/Discuss

I wouldn't count on Icecrown being the hardest instance. In TBC, the main raid in the expansion was Black Temple, similarly in WotLK it is Icecrown. I would assume we will see similar difficulty between BT and Icecrown.

SWP was a great instance, and after a lot of wiping, finally killing pre-nerf M'uru was probably the most exciting experience in WoW for me. Despite this, making the main instance and whole focus of the expansion so difficult would be a bad move. Though, hopefully, like with SWP an instance is released later on in the game that is for the few % of raiders who are commited enough to wipe for months on one encounter.

Despite this, I can't imagine they will ever be able to reproduce an encounter that is such a roadblock like M'uru or similar vanilla bosses due to the huge class changes. I know so many of our nights of M'uru wipes were held back or just never happened due to lacking certain classes which, effectively, should never happen now.

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Q u o t e:
I wouldn't count on Icecrown being the hardest instance. In TBC, the main raid in the expansion was Black Temple, similarly in WotLK it is Icecrown. I would assume we will see similar difficulty between BT and Icecrown.

SWP was a great instance, and after a lot of wiping, finally killing pre-nerf M'uru was probably the most exciting experience in WoW for me. Despite this, making the main instance and whole focus of the expansion so difficult would be a bad move. Though, hopefully, like with SWP an instance is released later on in the game that is for the few % of raiders who are commited enough to wipe for months on one encounter.

Despite this, I can't imagine they will ever be able to reproduce an encounter that is such a roadblock like M'uru or similar vanilla bosses due to the huge class changes. I know so many of our nights of M'uru wipes were held back or just never happened due to lacking certain classes which, effectively, should never happen now.

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Indeed, that is why I say we will see really hard bosses, but not M'uru-hard.

I'm afraid I don't agree.

Blizzard has changed it's approach to raiding significantly since TBC. There were just too many people repeating over and over again, how the effort goes for '5% of wow population'.

Problem here is, Blizzard still belives in the 11.5 million subscribers. Just running through an announcement, and I see that merely 4.5 million of those even brought WotLK (I might get it wrong). Yet still, we hear the argument that over 50% players are not lvl 80 yet... well are we talking about 50% of the 11.5, or 50% of the 4.5 million ?

WotLK is, from early design, aimed at a typical Sunday player. Those forums are crawling with people wreaking havoc at anyone even remotely suggesting that the game is too easy now. What those people don't realize, is that if all WoW players are taken into account (as Blizzard states it does), they are all way above the 'target player' line. Give it a few more weeks, and those who were so valiantly defending the new and ridicolously easy content, all the 'you didn't do 3 drakes' faceslappers, will realize, that there's only boredom left now, even for them.

Quick word for you, the 'defender of the new world order': all the people you know in this game are too good players to not be bored before new content is released. You might not be bored now, but you still have around 2.5 months until the next batch of content. That compared to the 1.5 months the expansion is out, in which you managed to level to 80, clear all content (part from an odd archievement), and probably even manage to do some PvP in the process. All of that during the 3 nights you play a week.

The new drive to expierience the game is, obviously, boredom. Boredom will make you do heroics (what other reason might you have for that, apart from Naxxramas normal being a one night stand, dropping better quality loot ?), it will make you do PvP, and last but not least, it will make you go back to Deadmines to get that archievement that somehow didn't show up on your screen even though you had done it several dosen times.

What is the biggest problem here, is that by simplifing the 'top content' (which, when PvE is considered, was and will be raiding), Blizzard also invalidated all the content in between. Here's a few examples:

- professions are a joke. The best items you can craft are easily replacable with Naxx10 gear, which in itself is free for the taking. Jewelcrafting and enchanting are the only professions that still hold ground (coped with the everliving 1k gold/h mining). Gearcrafting is absolutely pointless: no point spending mats on something you replace within days, and no point preparing for something that you can easily do wearing blue/green quest rewards.

- heroics are a joke. Not only are they ridicolously easy on their own (AoE tank, AoE spank... well some bosses are still fun, but that's only the first 3 times you do them). Badge rewards... see comments about crafting.

- reputations... rewards suck (again, too easily replaceable with gear lying on Naxx floor), and the grind... well, with the tabards, the new factions are silly. The daily quest based ones - ok... I really need that fishing pole.

All of this doesn't really matter... the typical player ain't 80 yet, remember ?

All throughout TBC, there was a constant onslaught aimed at 'hardcore' raiders. It bore fruit now, and Blizzard will no longer make content for the '5%'. Now, it will aim at the '70%' of people, who obviously didn't even buy WotLK yet. The problem is, most of the people who attacked raiders here during TBC, and now defend the new easy-mode approach, are bound to realize, it's not them the content is aimed at - and that in their urge to take content from someone else, that had indirectly taken it from themselves as well.

Next expansion, ask for more content for casual players, instead of asking for less content for raiders. In the mean time, level some alts like I do - the World needs healers.

The new content will not be any harder - because it is aimed at people who play 10 hours a week, because the majority of people come here and defend WotLK with all their casual might, because we all pay the same. Blizzard likes to go from one extremum to another - while TBC was, admittedly, too hard, WotLK is, and will be, not a game but a social platform.

I remember certain old quote from GC during beta, when yet another low level alt was complaining about raid difficulty and Arthas being a pushover - something around the lines on "I don't think you have anything to worry about defeating Arthas" and him not being someone your typical AV cave dwellers will ever see(of course not nearly as direct, as that would result in QQing about blues being nasty). Like repeated many times, future content will be more difficult. It was specifically hinted that threat management will be a concern again, that they are worried about AOEing everything, that some DPS might be too high - thus impacting fight difficulty by making them shorter than intented. Of course, it happened quite some time ago and was drowned in thousands of "it's too easy" posts.

The problem is not with T7 content being too easy or Blizzard being incapable of designing hard fights. Triple drakes are perfect proof that even "introductory" content can have something challenging - of course, not everyone might agree with the way it is achieved, it certainly is "lazy" solution, but I can see it being much easier to simply adjust existing encounter that design something from scratch. The problem is that there is nothing else except easy content so far. It's like the time we were farming Illidan waiting for Sunwell, except it happened already after one month of gameplay and there aren't even legendaries to hope for. We had the same complaints back then, that Blizzard cannot design anything hard, since T6 was pretty much a joke, with exception of 1 or 2 bosses. Sunwell proved people wrong. And often quoted "no more Mu'ru" is obviously related to raid stacking, as with "bring the player" it's (supposed to be) impossible to waste yet another raid on boss X because you lacked class Y providing buff Z, so your DPS was too low.

I do hope they don't plan on making achievements the main part of "hard content". If it's something like 3 drakes "achievement", where it's actually altered boss with better rewards - fine, especially since GC did hint that they plan to provide something better than just titles/mounts for it. But if it's something like "tell 5 people to sit so you can do undermanning achievement" - no thank you. Some of them are nice, some are quite retarded.

i think it will be hard because
a= i'm lvl 65
b= its a ultimate bosses home turf
& c=the undead cannot be fully killed cause they can be brought back

---

Q u o t e:
I'm afraid I don't agree.

Blizzard has changed it's approach to raiding significantly since TBC. There were just too many people repeating over and over again, how the effort goes for '5% of wow population'.

Problem here is, Blizzard still belives in the 11.5 million subscribers. Just running through an announcement, and I see that merely 4.5 million of those even brought WotLK (I might get it wrong). Yet still, we hear the argument that over 50% players are not lvl 80 yet... well are we talking about 50% of the 11.5, or 50% of the 4.5 million ?

WotLK is, from early design, aimed at a typical Sunday player. Those forums are crawling with people wreaking havoc at anyone even remotely suggesting that the game is too easy now. What those people don't realize, is that if all WoW players are taken into account (as Blizzard states it does), they are all way above the 'target player' line. Give it a few more weeks, and those who were so valiantly defending the new and ridicolously easy content, all the 'you didn't do 3 drakes' faceslappers, will realize, that there's only boredom left now, even for them.

Quick word for you, the 'defender of the new world order': all the people you know in this game are too good players to not be bored before new content is released. You might not be bored now, but you still have around 2.5 months until the next batch of content. That compared to the 1.5 months the expansion is out, in which you managed to level to 80, clear all content (part from an odd archievement), and probably even manage to do some PvP in the process. All of that during the 3 nights you play a week.

The new drive to expierience the game is, obviously, boredom. Boredom will make you do heroics (what other reason might you have for that, apart from Naxxramas normal being a one night stand, dropping better quality loot ?), it will make you do PvP, and last but not least, it will make you go back to Deadmines to get that archievement that somehow didn't show up on your screen even though you had done it several dosen times.

What is the biggest problem here, is that by simplifing the 'top content' (which, when PvE is considered, was and will be raiding), Blizzard also invalidated all the content in between. Here's a few examples:

- professions are a joke. The best items you can craft are easily replacable with Naxx10 gear, which in itself is free for the taking. Jewelcrafting and enchanting are the only professions that still hold ground (coped with the everliving 1k gold/h mining). Gearcrafting is absolutely pointless: no point spending mats on something you replace within days, and no point preparing for something that you can easily do wearing blue/green quest rewards.

- heroics are a joke. Not only are they ridicolously easy on their own (AoE tank, AoE spank... well some bosses are still fun, but that's only the first 3 times you do them). Badge rewards... see comments about crafting.

- reputations... rewards suck (again, too easily replaceable with gear lying on Naxx floor), and the grind... well, with the tabards, the new factions are silly. The daily quest based ones - ok... I really need that fishing pole.

All of this doesn't really matter... the typical player ain't 80 yet, remember ?

All throughout TBC, there was a constant onslaught aimed at 'hardcore' raiders. It bore fruit now, and Blizzard will no longer make content for the '5%'. Now, it will aim at the '70%' of people, who obviously didn't even buy WotLK yet. The problem is, most of the people who attacked raiders here during TBC, and now defend the new easy-mode approach, are bound to realize, it's not them the content is aimed at - and that in their urge to take content from someone else, that had indirectly taken it from themselves as well.

Next expansion, ask for more content for casual players, instead of asking for less content for raiders. In the mean time, level some alts like I do - the World needs healers.

The new content will not be any harder - because it is aimed at people who play 10 hours a week, because the majority of people come here and defend WotLK with all their casual might, because we all pay the same. Blizzard likes to go from one extremum to another - while TBC was, admittedly, too hard, WotLK is, and will be, not a game but a social platform.

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Last I heard, there's only about 5-6 million players in both EU and US, the rest are in Asia who still haven't gotten WotLK.

I want another boss that will take several weeks before anyone gets the world first.

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Q u o t e:
I want another boss that will take several weeks before anyone gets the world first.

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Seeing that top guilds raided, what, 10+ hours/day when racing for Sunwell firsts, "several weeks" would mean half a year for ordinary people - and by "ordinary" I mean those who did finish Sunwell, but not as top10. No, thanks.
See, Mu'ru, how long did it take for world first? Not much. Was he easy? Hell no, his first version was only killed by, what, 10 guilds? Second wasn't much easier and even 3rd was very challenging. Now you want a boss that would take 10 times longer to kill... get real.

The Lich King should be Muru hard.

I don't want, and with respect, a bunch of casuals killing him. On 10 man I guess yeah, but I couldn't stand 25 casuals easily taking him down. Being casual myself, I'm quite happy to only down him on 10 man. But the Lich King is one of the bosses that you have to be hardcore and a serious raider to take him out on 25 man.

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Q u o t e:
i think it will be hard because
a= i'm lvl 65
b= its a ultimate bosses home turf
& c=the undead cannot be fully killed cause they can be brought back

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Yeah I'd get at least 4 more levels before attempting it.

lets allso asume that blizzard have learned from the insane "it's too east QQ" to at least make the new raids a challenge and even if ulduar wasn't suposed to be really hard it will be for this reason(i guess)

First, its Icecrown Citadel not Glacier.

Second, achievements are the way go for hardcore raiders which was confirmed by GC. Most likely they won't be designing hard content to cater top 25 guilds nor nerfing the content patch wise. It will be achievements, achievements and more achievements.

Personally I think Arthas will be at the same difficulty as KJ but there might be an several achievements like defeat him without taking assistance of some X NPC.

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Q u o t e:
First, its Icecrown Citadel not Glacier.

Second, achievements are the way go for hardcore raiders which was confirmed by GC. Most likely they won't be designing hard content to cater top 25 guilds nor nerfing the content patch wise. It will be achievements, achievements and more achievements.

Personally I think Arthas will be at the same difficulty as KJ but there might be an several achievements like defeat him without taking assistance of some X NPC.

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That entirely depends what achievements GC had in mind - plus, I don't think he's responsible for raid development anyway. If it's something like "kill boss X while benching 5 people" or "outgear him so much that enrage timer is a joke" - screw it. But if it's "hard mode" like drakes with additional *real* rewards - will do... as long as basic encounters aren't made too easy because of it.

Give it a 40-Man. Or at least Yogg'Saron.

Yeah, 40-Mans are a %!%%%, but they're fun and require incredible coordination - it'll put your raiding skills to the test and if you survive, you'll get a Feat of Strength.

However, seeing as some raiding guilds don't have that many, I think it should be like a 10/25/40-player raid.

40 man raid ... with Horde ... and 40 man raid with Alliance.

Joint 80 man effort :-)

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Q u o t e:
The Lich King should be Muru hard.

I don't want, and with respect, a bunch of casuals killing him. On 10 man I guess yeah, but I couldn't stand 25 casuals easily taking him down. Being casual myself, I'm quite happy to only down him on 10 man. But the Lich King is one of the bosses that you have to be hardcore and a serious raider to take him out on 25 man.

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Nothing prevents a fight to be hard in 10 men as well as in 25. Sarth with drakes up is a example. Zul Aman also was, with a couple tweaks to bosses they could have been Sunwell difficulty.

I'd be considerably happy if even 10 men Icecrown will turn out being as hard as 25 men, so any noob (and i say noob, not casual, cause there's nothing wrong with proper casuals) walks in it and gets annihilated by the first trash packs cause they couldnt move out the TERRIFYING FIRE OF DOOM

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Q u o t e:
Second, achievements are the way go for hardcore raiders which was confirmed by GC. Most likely they won't be designing hard content to cater top 25 guilds nor nerfing the content patch wise. It will be achievements, achievements and more achievements.

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If they're putting achievements to fully substitute challenging content I don't think I'll be playing much more unless they're fun achievements like Sarth + 3 drakes.

Letting people out of raids, outgearing the enrage timer or waiting for the RNG to be benevolous isn't exactly what I'd call "challenging".

I have't had the chance to go raiding in SWP, so i only know from some friends who have been there what one could expect there,but i still think that arthas should be a hard as hell!!
I mean, this is one of the last big bad guys in wow, so it should be as hard as SWP and as big as BT!!
for the rest i find the current dungeons quite easy, the 10 men versions are a walk in the park but since i have been doing most of naxx now on heroic setting, i come to the conclusion that it still might take my guild a while to clear it all, only other who is considered more difficuilt is Malygos, but that is only temparary, so we need some more stuff to do, since doing raids just for the achievements just sucks....

I beg and hope, that it won't be us who takes down the Lich King. If that guy is going down, then I'd rather see it in all Blizzard-CGI-glory. I'd rather see a wicked fantastic major cutscene that ends his reign.

But most of all, for the love of god..

Never, ever let Frostmourne fall into the hands of a player.