Literally look at the actual history of raid tier release schedule and you can see that you’re objectively wrong. Average tier length is 6 months with the first raid typically being a skosh shorter since it’s an introductory raid and the final tier getting milked for longer.
Castle nathria went on for over 6 months
Sanctum also went over 6 months
Sepulcher went on for 9 months
Vault went for just about 5 months.
Current raid will likely go for over 6.
You can go back and trace old raid tier lenghts if you want, but the shortest I recall was blackrock foundary to HFC which was a total bungle on their part given HFC then lasted over a year.
Naxx lasted like 3 months or so and they literally said one of their regrets of OG WOTLK was Ulduar being short and then overshadowed by TOGC so they’ve said from day one they intended to let Ulduar breath via having more exposure. A 6 month raid tier is quite literally an average tier.
I love taking a dump on Blizzard when they deserve it, but ya’ll acting like they are dragging out Ulduar to ungodly lengths to milk us for sub money is laughable when the factual data shows anything but that. It’s literally the hardest raid tier we’ve had to date and it’s not even close and I guarantee there were/are plenty of raid teams out there that took their time getting 1 light and Alg down, and may not have ever messed with 0 lights.
TOGC is gonna be raid tier that we blast through. Expect it to be short, and then you can enjoy another 6 month raid tier in ICC plus whenever they decide its time to push out RS.
Yea… Because Blizzard was embroiled in lawsuits and controversy. And also Shadowlands was one of the worst received xpacs in Wow history, largely due to exactly that pacing.
And these arent retail raids. Theyre not as difficult, theyre 15 years old and there isnt anywhere NEAR as much content released alongside them
Feel free to go back even further and check. You’re not gonna find much variance and even in peak WoW the final raid tier from wotlk through WoD was notoriously dragged out.
This is the only relevant argument, but I’ll restate what I said. Ulduar is the hardest raid put out to date and it’s not even close. Plenty of guilds needed the time to get through algalon and 0 lights down.
Could it have been 5 months instead? Maybe. I’d be curious to see the progression data across the game and see where the drop off occurs because that’s where I’d want to drop new content to reinvigorate them.
Probably the only devil’s advocate argument to make is delaying TOGC a few weeks because of D4 release and they wanted people to get that fix in first.
You must not play retail? Patch cadence was literally one of the most cited complaints about shadowlands, especially in relation to one of the best recent expansions (Legion) that had a significantly faster cadence
Emerald nightmare just under 4 months
Nighthold just under 6 months
Sargeras over 5 months
Antorus 9 months
Like I said, not much variance. First raid tends to be short because its introductory, doesn’t have tier. Other raids last around 5 to 6 months and the final raid overstays its welcome, albeit they haven’t had a year long raid since WoD so they got that going for them.
Players always complain about patch cycle length. When one group gets satisfied the other one talks up. Also the game has been dead since release on 2004.
Shadowlands story was absolute hot garbage and they clearly cut a raid tier that they refuse to admit to with the prevailing theory that sepulcher was two raids smashed together as Anduin felt like his own end boss and the final stretch of the tier was massively overtuned likely because they didn’t test it well enough.
Not sure if there is anyway to actually get this right.
Blizzard doesn’t launch raids based on our day 1 clear times, instead they measure out content to make it last long enough to have the next content ready to ship, and even that typically launches with many bugs.
At the same time they’re likely to be working on the next expansion adaptation to the modern engine.
As a result its hard to advance the schedule when they’re not even able to deal with in game bugs from Classic 2019 that are still in place.
And you’re broadly arguing 20 weeks is too long of a tier. For whom? Welcome to world/region/server first raider clearing speeds. First time?
Reality is Vanilla and TBC got fast tracked because it was largely steamrolled. I’d have to go back and look those up, but a lot of them were pretty dang short especially by comparison to the OG length.
Conversely Ulduar, hardest tier we’ve gotten to date, got 5 months to breath which is still shorter than the historical average raid tier length. It definitely needed that time to allow a broad audience time to clear out content others still managed to do much faster despite the increased difficulty.
I’ll be here to upvote your posts if TOGC lasts 20 weeks though. Actually I’m retiring from raiding next week, but despite that I’ll still be there in spirit.
They purposely increased the item level of gear to make Ulduar worth running in P3. They also increased the length of this tier, why double down? We’re going to be running Ulduar during ToGC, why also arbitrarily increase the duration of this current phase?
23 weeks of P2 is absurd. We’re going to still be in there during ToGC and most of us have been doing this place on 10m as well. If you play a single character in a guild concerned with gearing their players out, you’ll have done 40+ clears of Ulduar now. If you raid on a 2nd character, that’s 80 clears. We’re looking at around 100 clears of this place by the time we’re done running it if you play two characters.
I play two characters, I’ve killed Yogg 72 times so far.
And its really all just Billbalong loot. On the plus, raid nights will probably just be a 1 hour Togc Clear into another hour or so for Algalon in P3… So theres that.
The more I think about it, the more I realize how much better it would have been if ToGC released 4 weeks ago. We’d have more loot to farm in Ulduar 25 while clearing ToGC. We’d be spending our 2nd raid day in Ulduar 25 instead of repeating the same fights in Ulduar 10, because Ulduar 10 would be made irrelevant for 25m raiding guilds with the release of ToGC.
The way it is now, we’ve exhausted so much from Ulduar and people are so burned out of it that we’ll be clearing ToGC and ignoring Ulduar once we finish our 3rd Val’anyrs. They should have released ToGC 4 weeks ago. The ilvl bump was a good idea, pairing it with an extended phase was a bad idea.
Devil’s advocate argument is P2 got increased a few weeks because they didn’t want to release TOGC alongside D4. It’s plausible, but unable to be definitively proven. Ignoring that the likely answer is because it was needed.
Phases aren’t released because someone has fulled cleared. It’s released in an effort to keep the general playerbase engaged with the game and when the content has gone stale for the bulk of the playerbase that’s when it makes sense to dump new content. Blizzard has those metrics, not us.
If you speed clear content this is the consequence of it. I have done server first raiding so this experience isn’t my first rodeo and my enjoyment from progression raiding is at an all time low so being able to 1 night raid log is nothing but a joy for me anyways.
For a lot of people doing classic where the general playerbase is clearing faster than what they’re used to clearing…welcome to the club, but ultimately that doesn’t mean every tier is gonna be the same. Ulduar was difficult and it deserved time for people to work through it.
It wasn’t arbitrary. They definitively stated why they were going to let it go longer this time around. They also want Ulduar loot to stay relevant for TOGC. A few pieces stay BiS, but while a lot of it is ultimately overshadowed by TOGC the loot is definitely competitive.
I 100% agree ulduar should get hit with the nerf bat with TOGC release though and it sounds like they aren’t doing that which is big dumb brain move.