“Icecrown Citadel features 10- and 25-player versions of the raid dungeon, and each version has 12 encounters. Each encounter can be fought in either normal or Heroic mode, and players can use a new user interface feature to toggle easily between difficulties.”

When most of us saw this there was a collective sigh of relief.  Thank you Jesus for making Blizzard realise they completely ruined the game with their 4 lockout system for Crusaders Coliseum.  I’m really not a religious person but you can see why I was beginning to think that only the divine would shake the current design team off their self destructive path. Apparently us players of the game weren’t enough to do so before the events of 3.2 so it stood to reason that the thousands of people shouting ‘4 lockouts fucking sucks’ at the top of their forum-voices while 3.2 was on PTR wasn’t enough.  And the many many more that did so after 10 and 25 heroic became unlocked on live, but by then it was too late of course.

If only we had some kind of test realm in which to test whether ideas are total shit or not.  What’s that? We do? Oh yeah the PTR where they ignore any and all player feedback unless it relates to a game breaking bug – and sometimes even just ignore those too.  I often wonder why they even put patches on the PTR, because it certainly isn’t for player feedback.  If it was then the hardmodes in Ulduar 3.1 would have been tuned because the majority of raider feedback was basically ‘easy modes are probably a bit hard for the average player and hard modes are really too easy’.  And yet nothing was done about them, until after some guilds had already killed them on live and the moving of the goalposts had to happen.  I mean does anyone even remember the Hodir hardmode changes?  3 Minutes to kill him at live, which was reasonably easy since all it took was a bit of lucky RNG with clouds and crap and may be some mage stacking and you had it.  So a guild kills it, they instantly nerf it to 2.5 minutes which is still doable and so it gets nerfed again to 2 minutes which was completely impossible without using the flowerpower buff (which also gets hot fixed within a few hours).  So now we have a few guilds who killed the boss on hard and have their sigil and can progress, while the rest of us are sitting around with our dicks hanging out waiting for Blizzard to realise that the fight is actually now completely impossible until they nerf it.  This shows how the design process at Blizzard is completely flawed, they obviously didn’t do much testing on the fights to see if the hardmodes were doable or not – and when people killed them faster than they anticipated they moved the goalposts, thus giving a big fuck you to any guilds who were a few steps behind.  Clearly the timers for Hodir were completely made up on the spot, they were arbitrary time limits not based on any kind of data (which is available even to players…) on even theoretical maximum dps available in that fight, just picked in a meeting as sounding nice with no other reasoning behind them.

Apart from the goalpost moving wrecking the progression in the early days of Ulduar, all in all it was a great dungeon.  A definite step forward as I’ve already said in previous posts on the subject, optional hardmodes within the same lockout is king.  Which brings me back on topic, although I’m not too keen on the idea of some kind of interface to switch between normal and hardmode versions of an encounter (I much preferred the Ulduar way of having an in-game switch such as Mimiron’s button or Flame Lev’s towers), but at least we don’t have the utter raid killing, burnout inducing retardation that was and is the Crusaders Coliseum lockouts.

So far most of my criticism of CC has been based around the lockouts and the snorefest that is clearing 3-4 of them each on 3 different characters every week.  I mean to be honest I’ve even stopped clearing them on my hunter simply because I can’t stand it any more – clearing 3x on my deathknight and 4x on my druid is already enough to make me want to quit, but that’s a different story.  I’ve not really touched on the 50 tries problem much, but of course this contributes just as much to the suck of CC as the lockouts do.  In previous raid instances the main tool for progression has been trial and error, for a bleeding edge guild when you reach a new fight the first thing you do is pull it and see what the fuck happens then keep pulling it until you work out exactly what is happening and how to beat the fight.  This is how WoW has worked since molten core.  But no more, not in cc25 – Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to replace this tried, tested and much loved play-style with a new one.  This new one essentially consists of sitting around and talking about an upcoming pull for around 30-40 minutes beforehand.  Then you pull and hopefully kill the boss, then you need to sit and discuss the next pull for 30 mins while waiting for all your combat rez, soulstone and bloodlust debuff timers to go away.

On top of all of this, they had the shear bare faced cheek to name the achievements you get for clearing the instance with lots of tries left after different levels of Skill.  Skill? Are you sure? Oh right yeah because it’s pretty much a testament to a raid’s skill that they manage to play for 2 hours continuously without 1 disconnect within a fight, or 1 tiny piece of server lag, or 1 computer crashing in all that time.  Two cross-raid healers disconnect on Twins thus there is not enough healing and the raid wipes, the counter ticks down from 50 to 49, “Sorry you are not skilled enough this week!”.

A tribute to skill, mad skill and insanity? More like a tribute to luck.