Couple posts have touched on this issue but I wanted to make a concise, direct post about it.
TBC needs to launch with only T4 content. In vanilla, the content was inhaled by guilds. Molten core didn’t even last a week. If this isn’t changed in TBC and the game launches with T4 and T5 content, the same thing will happen. Yes, TBC raids are harder but they still aren’t that difficult, especially when you compare them to current raids.
Proposed Content release:
Phase 1: Launch. Kara / Gruul / Mag available. Arena Season 1
Phase 2: TK / SSC. Arena Season 2
Phase 3: Black Temple / Mount Hyjal. Arena Season 3
Phase 4: Zul’Aman
Phase 5: Sunwell. Arena Season 4
T4 / T5 content is about 40-50% of the PvE content in the expansion. When you factor in player experience, addons, technology and just general player ability this will get cleared within a month or two for most guilds. That’s 50% of the content done in 2 months.
Please Blizzard, stagger this content so that we can enjoy TBC the right way.
I agree t5 needs to be staggered. But there’s no way we can have an entire season of nothing but gruul, mag, and Kara for 20 weeks. Unless the season is shortened.
This isn’t something that can be fixed so simply without screwing over one side of the game. T5 on release destroys s1. T5 delayed 20 weeks destroys pve. We need a more reasonable middle ground.
Tl;dr: For anyone from Blizzard that doesn’t know anything about TBC (I doubt they actually do since they haven’t played it probably or haven’t played on any pse*rvers). If you release T4 & T5 at the same time, this can only let us assume warglaives will be out way sooner than intended thus completely ruining arena for anyone that can’t get them and for every class that isn’t a rogue. This also ruins arena since in S1 you won’t even be using any PVP gear since the PVE gear is so much better. S1 with T5 also makes Rogue/Mage by far the best comp in the game no contest since of the way the gear is weighted in T5 in S1.
Also, the guy above compared S1 gear compared to T5 gear… The difference is massive when you understand how important armor values are in TBC. And that’s just the chest piece, the weapons are even better.
ZA is a catchup gear for BT. The gear is in close to T5 equivalent without the hassle of herding 25 people into SSC/TK. You can clear BT wearing nothing but badge and ZA gear. It can and should wait.
Its catch up gear for BT its also content for those that do not raid 25 man rosters… some guilds in TBC went from kara to zul’aman with an extreme content drought.
As classic has shown unless tuning/class adjustments are made the difficulty will be trivial to any guild that it matters blocking this content for anyway.
16 weeks is very reasonable. It’s not much longer than the phases as we got them in Classic, and with the extended attunements and the need to level paladins/shamans slowing down the pack, we probably need the extra time for overall balance between the cutting edge and the average players.
lol. As if Blizzard is actually going to care significantly about the arena seasons of Classic when they won’t be able to monetize the streams and such of them
You have to factor in rep grinding and heroic grinding. Epic mount grinding. Profession grinding. Aldor/Skryer grinding, etc. There is so much to do in TBC compared to Classic. Not to mention the PvP side of things. Not to mention leveling an alt and gearing it.
Agreed, it should be late in the BT/Hyjal phase or its own phase after BT/Hyjal. I don’t remember when Ogri’la and all that came out (BT release maybe?) but if it was later, it would make sense to bundle up a bunch of catch-up stuff along with ZA.
Then with Sunwell we get one more, albeit delayed, badge vendor with even better stuff, a 5man with some fantastically itemized drops, and the final raid.
